Vacuum Stability and the Higgs Boson

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC, and especially the determination of its mass around 125 GeV, together with the absence of any trace of new physics make it conceivable that we live in a metastable (but long-lived) electroweak vacuum. I will describe the state-of-the-art calculation that leads to this conclusion, elaborate on possible implications as well as cures of this instability of the Higgs potential and discuss some possible lines of attack for lattice studies of such metastability.Comment: 15 pages. Proceedings of the 31st International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory - LATTICE 201

General highlight detection in sport videos

Attention is a psychological measurement of human reflection against stimulus. We propose a general framework of highlight detection by comparing attention intensity during the watching of sports videos. Three steps are involved: adaptive selection on salient features, unified attention estimation and highlight identification. Adaptive selection computes feature correlation to decide an optimal set of salient features. Unified estimation combines these features by the technique of multi-resolution autoregressive (MAR) and thus creates a temporal curve of attention intensity. We rank the intensity of attention to discriminate boundaries of highlights. Such a framework alleviates semantic uncertainty around sport highlights and leads to an efficient and effective highlight detection. The advantages are as follows: (1) the capability of using data at coarse temporal resolutions; (2) the robustness against noise caused by modality asynchronism, perception uncertainty and feature mismatch; (3) the employment of Markovian constrains on content presentation, and (4) multi-resolution estimation on attention intensity, which enables the precise allocation of event boundaries

Query generation from multiple media examples

This paper exploits an unified media document representation called feature terms for query generation from multiple media examples, e.g. images. A feature term refers to a value interval of a media feature. A media document is therefore represented by a frequency vector about feature term appearance. This approach (1) facilitates feature accumulation from multiple examples; (2) enables the exploration of text-based retrieval models for multimedia retrieval. Three statistical criteria, minimised chi-squared, minimised AC/DC rate and maximised entropy, are proposed to extract feature terms from a given media document collection. Two textual ranking functions, KL divergence and a BM25-like retrieval model, are adapted to estimate media document relevance. Experiments on the Corel photo collection and the TRECVid 2006 collection show the effectiveness of feature term based query in image and video retrieval

QCD contributions to the thermal history of the early Universe

We discuss the deviations from the ideal relativistic thermal bath. These deviations are dominated from quantum chromodynamic (QCD) corrections in the most part of the parameter space of the Standard Model (SM) and the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). These effects are relevant for astrophysical precision measurements and dynamics of scalar tensor theories (SST).Comment: To appear in the AIP proceedings of "Quark Confinement and Hadron Spectrum IX" (QCHSIX), Madrid 30th August-3rd September 2010. 3 page