9,840 research outputs found
On the adhesion of particles to a cell layer under flow
The non-specific adhesion of spherical particles to a cell substrate is
analyzed in a parallel plate flow chamber, addressing the effect of the
particle size. Differently from other experiments, the total volume of the
injected particles has been fixed, rather than the total number of particles,
as the diameter d of the particles is changed from 500 nm up to 10 m. From
the analysis of the experimental data, simple and instructive scaling adhesion
laws have been derived showing that (i) the number of particles adherent to the
cell layer per unit surface decreases with the size of the particle as d^(-1.7)
; and consequently (ii) the volume of the particles adherent per unit surface
increases with the size of the particles as d^(+1.3). These results are of
importance in the "rational design" of nanoparticles for drug delivery and
biomedical imaging.Comment: Submitted on behalf of TIMA Editions
(http://irevues.inist.fr/tima-editions
Learning Contextual Bandits in a Non-stationary Environment
Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling
the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important
real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms
usually assume a stationary reward distribution, which hardly holds in practice
as users' preferences are dynamic. This inevitably costs a recommender system
consistent suboptimal performance. In this paper, we consider the situation
where the underlying distribution of reward remains unchanged over (possibly
short) epochs and shifts at unknown time instants. In accordance, we propose a
contextual bandit algorithm that detects possible changes of environment based
on its reward estimation confidence and updates its arm selection strategy
respectively. Rigorous upper regret bound analysis of the proposed algorithm
demonstrates its learning effectiveness in such a non-trivial environment.
Extensive empirical evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets for
recommendation confirm its practical utility in a changing environment.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, To appear on ACM Special Interest Group on
Information Retrieval (SIGIR) 201
Pervasive Displays Research: What's Next?
Reports on the 7th ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays that took place from June 6-8 in Munich, Germany
Fermionic Corrections to Fluid Dynamics from BTZ Black Hole
We reconstruct the complete fermionic orbit of the non-extremal BTZ black
hole by acting with finite supersymmetry transformations. The solution
satisfies the exact supergravity equations of motion to all orders in the
fermonic expansion and the final result is given in terms of fermionic
bilinears. By fluid/gravity correspondence, we derive linearized Navier-Stokes
equations and a set of new differential equations from Rarita-Schwinger
equation. We compute the boundary energy-momentum tensor and we interpret the
result as a perfect fluid with a modified definition of fluid velocity.
Finally, we derive the modified expression for the entropy of the black hole in
terms of the fermionic bilinears.Comment: 21 pages, Latex2e, no figure
Fermionic Wigs for BTZ Black Holes
We compute the wig for the BTZ black hole, namely the complete non-linear
solution of supergravity equations with all fermionic zero modes. We use a
"gauge completion" method starting from AdS_3 Killing spinors to generate the
gravitinos fields associated to the BH and we compute the back-reaction on the
metric. Due to the anticommutative properties of the fermionic hairs the
resummation of these effects truncates at some order. We illustrate the
technique proposed in a precedent paper in a very explicit and analytical form.
We also compute the mass, the angular momentum and other charges with their
corrections.Comment: 11 pages, no figure
Autologous cellular method using micrografts of human adipose tissue derived follicle stem cells in androgenic alopecia
Hair bio-engineering has risen at the crossing point of various manipulations to meet a clinical requirement for innovations to advance hair growth. The authors reported the microscopic and trichoscopic results of an autologous cell biological technique to compare, through histological, immunocytochemistry, and cytospin analysis, hair re-growth obtained by micro-grafts from scalp tissue containing Human Intra- and Extra-Dermal Adipose Tissue-Derived Hair Follicle Stem Cells (HD-AFSCs) versus placebo (saline solution). An autologous solution of micro-grafts was obtained from mechanical fragmentation and centrifugation of scalp biopsy's (2 x 2 mm) using "Gentile protocol". The micro-grafts solution was mechanically infiltrated on half of the selected patients' scalps with Androgenic Alopecia (Norwood Hamilton 2-5 and Ludwig 1-2). The other half was infiltrated with saline solution. Three injections were performed to each patient at 45-day intervals. Of the 35 patients who were enrolled, 1 was excluded and 1 was rejected. 23 and 44 weeks after the last micro graft's injections, the patients displayed a hair density improvement, with a mean increment of 33% 7.5% and 27% 3.5% respectively, contrasted with baseline values, for the treated region. Microscopic assessment appeared, in scalp biopsies, to show an expansion in the number of hair follicles per mm2 following 11 months from the last micro-grafts application compared with baseline (1.4 + 0.27 versus 0.46 + 0.15, respectively; p < 0.05). HD-AFSCs contained in micro-grafts may represent a safe and effective alternative therapy option against hair loss
Control of magnetism in singlet-triplet superconducting heterostructures
We analyze the magnetization at the interface between singlet and triplet
superconductors and show that its direction and dependence on the phase
difference across the junction are strongly tied to the structure of the
triplet order parameter as well as to the pairing interactions. We consider
equal spin helical, opposite spin chiral, and mixed symmetry pairing on the
triplet side and show that the magnetization vanishes at only in the
first case, follows approximately a behavior for the second, and
shows higher harmonics for the last configuration. We trace the origin of the
magnetization to the magnetic structure of the Andreev bound states near the
interface, and provide a symmetry-based explanation of the results. Our
findings can be used to control the magnetization in superconducting
heterostructures and to test symmetries of spin-triplet superconductors.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure
Comment on "Scalar-tensor gravity coupled to a global monopole and flat rotation curves" by Lee and Lee
The recent paper by Lee and Lee (2004) may strongly leave the impression that
astronomers have established that the rotation curves of spiral galaxies are
flat. We show that the old paradigm of Flat Rotation Curves lacks, today, any
observational support and following it at face value leads to intrinsically
flawed alternatives to the Standard Dark Matter Scenario. On the other side, we
claim that the rich systematics of spiral galaxy rotation curves, that reveals,
in the standard Newtonian Gravity framework, the phenomenon of dark matter, in
alternative scenarios, works as a unique benchmark.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, accepted in Phys. Rev.
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