4,177 research outputs found
Tighter Relations Between Sensitivity and Other Complexity Measures
Sensitivity conjecture is a longstanding and fundamental open problem in the
area of complexity measures of Boolean functions and decision tree complexity.
The conjecture postulates that the maximum sensitivity of a Boolean function is
polynomially related to other major complexity measures. Despite much attention
to the problem and major advances in analysis of Boolean functions in the past
decade, the problem remains wide open with no positive result toward the
conjecture since the work of Kenyon and Kutin from 2004.
In this work, we present new upper bounds for various complexity measures in
terms of sensitivity improving the bounds provided by Kenyon and Kutin.
Specifically, we show that deg(f)^{1-o(1)}=O(2^{s(f)}) and C(f) < 2^{s(f)-1}
s(f); these in turn imply various corollaries regarding the relation between
sensitivity and other complexity measures, such as block sensitivity, via known
results. The gap between sensitivity and other complexity measures remains
exponential but these results are the first improvement for this difficult
problem that has been achieved in a decade.Comment: This is the merged form of arXiv submission 1306.4466 with another
work. Appeared in ICALP 2014, 14 page
Shear flow effects on phase separation of entangled polymer blends
We introduce an entanglement model mixing rule for stress relaxation in a polymer blend to a modified Cahn-Hilliard equation of motion for concentration fluctuations in the presence of shear flow. Such an approach predicts both shear-induced mixing and demixing, depending on the relative relaxation times and plateau moduli of the two components
Spatial and spectral properties of the pulsed second-harmonic generation in a PP-KTP waveguide
Spatial and spectral properties of the pulsed second harmonic generation in a
periodically-poled KTP waveguide exploiting simultaneously the first, second,
and third harmonics of periodic nonlinear modulation are analyzed. Experimental
results are interpreted using a model based on finite elements method.
Correlations between spatial and spectral properties of the fundamental and
second-harmonic fields are revealed. Individual nonlinear processes can be
exploited combining spatial and spectral filtering. Also the influence of
waveguide parameters to the second-harmonic spectra is addressed.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figure
Anomalous temperature behavior of resistivity in lightly doped manganites around a metal-insulator phase transition
An unusual temperature and concentration behavior of resistivity in
has been observed at slight doping
(). Namely, introduction of copper results in a splitting of
the resistivity maximum around a metal-insulator transition temperature
into two differently evolving peaks. Unlike the original -free
maximum which steadily increases with doping, the second (satellite) peak
remains virtually unchanged for , increases for and finally
disappears at with . The observed phenomenon
is thought to arise from competition between substitution induced strengthening
of potential barriers (which hamper the charge hopping between neighboring
sites) and weakening of carrier's kinetic energy. The data are well fitted
assuming a nonthermal tunneling conductivity theory with randomly distributed
hopping sites.Comment: 10 REVTEX pages, 2 PostScript figures (epsf.sty); to be published in
JETP Letter
Static and dynamic friction in sliding colloidal monolayers
In a pioneer experiment, Bohlein et al. realized the controlled sliding of
two-dimensional colloidal crystals over laser-generated periodic or
quasi-periodic potentials. Here we present realistic simulations and arguments
which besides reproducing the main experimentally observed features, give a
first theoretical demonstration of the potential impact of colloid sliding in
nanotribology. The free motion of solitons and antisolitons in the sliding of
hard incommensurate crystals is contrasted with the soliton-antisoliton pair
nucleation at the large static friction threshold Fs when the two lattices are
commensurate and pinned. The frictional work directly extracted from particles'
velocities can be analysed as a function of classic tribological parameters,
including speed, spacing and amplitude of the periodic potential (representing
respectively the mismatch of the sliding interface, and the corrugation, or
"load"). These and other features suggestive of further experiments and
insights promote colloid sliding to a novel friction study instrument.Comment: in print in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
U.S.A. This v2 is identical to v1, but includes ancillary material. A few
figures were undersampled due to size limits: those in v1 are far sharpe
Packing Returning Secretaries
We study online secretary problems with returns in combinatorial packing
domains with candidates that arrive sequentially over time in random order.
The goal is to accept a feasible packing of candidates of maximum total value.
In the first variant, each candidate arrives exactly twice. All arrivals
occur in random order. We propose a simple 0.5-competitive algorithm that can
be combined with arbitrary approximation algorithms for the packing domain,
even when the total value of candidates is a subadditive function. For
bipartite matching, we obtain an algorithm with competitive ratio at least
for growing , and an algorithm with ratio at least
for all . We extend all algorithms and ratios to arrivals
per candidate.
In the second variant, there is a pool of undecided candidates. In each
round, a random candidate from the pool arrives. Upon arrival a candidate can
be either decided (accept/reject) or postponed (returned into the pool). We
mainly focus on minimizing the expected number of postponements when computing
an optimal solution. An expected number of is always
sufficient. For matroids, we show that the expected number can be reduced to
, where is the minimum of the ranks of matroid and
dual matroid. For bipartite matching, we show a bound of , where
is the size of the optimum matching. For general packing, we show a lower
bound of , even when the size of the optimum is .Comment: 23 pages, 5 figure
Role of friction-induced torque in stick-slip motion
We present a minimal quasistatic 1D model describing the kinematics of the
transition from static friction to stick-slip motion of a linear elastic block
on a rigid plane. We show how the kinematics of both the precursors to
frictional sliding and the periodic stick-slip motion are controlled by the
amount of friction-induced torque at the interface. Our model provides a
general framework to understand and relate a series of recent experimental
observations, in particular the nucleation location of micro-slip instabilities
and the build up of an asymmetric field of real contact area.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure
Information Leakage Games
We consider a game-theoretic setting to model the interplay between attacker
and defender in the context of information flow, and to reason about their
optimal strategies. In contrast with standard game theory, in our games the
utility of a mixed strategy is a convex function of the distribution on the
defender's pure actions, rather than the expected value of their utilities.
Nevertheless, the important properties of game theory, notably the existence of
a Nash equilibrium, still hold for our (zero-sum) leakage games, and we provide
algorithms to compute the corresponding optimal strategies. As typical in
(simultaneous) game theory, the optimal strategy is usually mixed, i.e.,
probabilistic, for both the attacker and the defender. From the point of view
of information flow, this was to be expected in the case of the defender, since
it is well known that randomization at the level of the system design may help
to reduce information leaks. Regarding the attacker, however, this seems the
first work (w.r.t. the literature in information flow) proving formally that in
certain cases the optimal attack strategy is necessarily probabilistic
Generating multimedia presentations: from plain text to screenplay
In many Natural Language Generation (NLG) applications, the output is limited to plain text – i.e., a string of words with punctuation and paragraph breaks, but no indications for layout, or pictures, or dialogue. In several projects, we have begun to explore NLG applications in which these extra media are brought into play. This paper gives an informal account of what we have learned. For coherence, we focus on the domain of patient information leaflets, and follow an example in which the same content is expressed first in plain text, then in formatted text, then in text with pictures, and finally in a dialogue script that can be performed by two animated agents. We show how the same meaning can be mapped to realisation patterns in different media, and how the expanded options for expressing meaning are related to the perceived style and tone of the presentation. Throughout, we stress that the extra media are not simple added to plain text, but integrated with it: thus the use of formatting, or pictures, or dialogue, may require radical rewording of the text itself
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