Probing Charged Higgs Boson Couplings at the FCC-hh Collider

Many of the new physics models predicts a light Higgs boson similar to the Higgs boson of the Standard Model (SM) and also extra scalar bosons. Beyond the search channels for a SM Higgs boson, the future collider experiments will explore additional channels that are specific to extended Higgs sectors. We study the charged Higgs boson production within the framework of two Higgs doublet models (THDM) in the proton-proton collisions at the FCC-hh collider. With an integrated luminosity of 500 fb$^{-1}$ at very high energy frontier, we obtain a significant coverage of the parameter space and distinguish the charged Higgs-top-bottom interaction within the THDM or other new physics models with charged Higgs boson mass up to 1 TeV.Comment: 22 pages, 26 figures, 6 table

EEG theta and Mu oscillations during perception of human and robot actions.

The perception of others' actions supports important skills such as communication, intention understanding, and empathy. Are mechanisms of action processing in the human brain specifically tuned to process biological agents? Humanoid robots can perform recognizable actions, but can look and move differently from humans, and as such, can be used in experiments to address such questions. Here, we recorded EEG as participants viewed actions performed by three agents. In the Human condition, the agent had biological appearance and motion. The other two conditions featured a state-of-the-art robot in two different appearances: Android, which had biological appearance but mechanical motion, and Robot, which had mechanical appearance and motion. We explored whether sensorimotor mu (8-13 Hz) and frontal theta (4-8 Hz) activity exhibited selectivity for biological entities, in particular for whether the visual appearance and/or the motion of the observed agent was biological. Sensorimotor mu suppression has been linked to the motor simulation aspect of action processing (and the human mirror neuron system, MNS), and frontal theta to semantic and memory-related aspects. For all three agents, action observation induced significant attenuation in the power of mu oscillations, with no difference between agents. Thus, mu suppression, considered an index of MNS activity, does not appear to be selective for biological agents. Observation of the Robot resulted in greater frontal theta activity compared to the Android and the Human, whereas the latter two did not differ from each other. Frontal theta thus appears to be sensitive to visual appearance, suggesting agents that are not sufficiently biological in appearance may result in greater memory processing demands for the observer. Studies combining robotics and neuroscience such as this one can allow us to explore neural basis of action processing on the one hand, and inform the design of social robots on the other

Processing count queries over event streams at multiple time granularities

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Management and analysis of streaming data has become crucial with its applications to web, sensor data, network traffic data, and stock market. Data streams consist of mostly numeric data but what is more interesting are the events derived from the numerical data that need to be monitored. The events obtained from streaming data form event streams. Event streams have similar properties to data streams, i.e., they are seen only once in a fixed order as a continuous stream. Events appearing in the event stream have time stamps associated with them at a certain time granularity, such as second, minute, or hour. One type of frequently asked queries over event streams are count queries, i.e., the frequency of an event occurrence over time. Count queries can be answered over event streams easily, however, users may ask queries over different time granularities as well. For example, a broker may ask how many times a stock increased in the same time frame, where the time frames specified could be an hour, day, or both. Such types of queries are challenging especially in the case of event streams where only a window of an event stream is available at a certain time instead of the whole stream. In this paper, we propose a technique for predicting the frequencies of event occurrences in event streams at multiple time granularities. The proposed approximation method efficiently estimates the count of events with a high accuracy in an event stream at any time granularity by examining the distance distributions of event occurrences. The proposed method has been implemented and tested on different real data sets including daily price changes in two different stock exchange markets. The obtained results show its effectiveness. (C) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Evaluation metrics for measuring bias in search engine results

Search engines decide what we see for a given search query. Since many people are exposed to information through search engines, it is fair to expect that search engines are neutral. However, search engine results do not necessarily cover all the viewpoints of a search query topic, and they can be biased towards a specific view since search engine results are returned based on relevance, which is calculated using many features and sophisticated algorithms where search neutrality is not necessarily the focal point. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the search engine results with respect to bias. In this work we propose novel web search bias evaluation measures which take into account the rank and relevance. We also propose a framework to evaluate web search bias using the proposed measures and test our framework on two popular search engines based on 57 controversial query topics such as abortion, medical marijuana, and gay marriage. We measure the stance bias (in support or against), as well as the ideological bias (conservative or liberal). We observe that the stance does not necessarily correlate with the ideological leaning, e.g. a positive stance on abortion indicates a liberal leaning but a positive stance on Cuba embargo indicates a conservative leaning. Our experiments show that neither of the search engines suffers from stance bias. However, both search engines suffer from ideological bias, both favouring one ideological leaning to the other, which is more significant from the perspective of polarisation in our society

Unaffected perceptual thresholds for biological and non-biological form-from-motion perception in autism spectrum conditions

Background: Perception of biological motion is linked to the action perception system in the human brain, abnormalities within which have been suggested to underlie impairments in social domains observed in autism spectrum conditions (ASC). However, the literature on biological motion perception in ASC is heterogeneous and it is unclear whether deficits are specific to biological motion, or might generalize to form-from-motion perception. Methodology and Principal Findings: We compared psychophysical thresholds for both biological and non-biological form-from-motion perception in adults with ASC and controls. Participants viewed point-light displays depicting a walking person (Biological Motion), a translating rectangle (Structured Object) or a translating unfamiliar shape (Unstructured Object). The figures were embedded in noise dots that moved similarly and the task was to determine direction of movement. The number of noise dots varied on each trial and perceptual thresholds were estimated adaptively. We found no evidence for an impairment in biological or non-biological object motion perception in individuals with ASC. Perceptual thresholds in the three conditions were almost identical between the ASC and control groups. Discussion and Conclusions: Impairments in biological motion and non-biological form-from-motion perception are not across the board in ASC, and are only found for some stimuli and tasks. We discuss our results in relation to other findings in the literature, the heterogeneity of which likely relates to the different tasks performed. It appears that individuals with ASC are unaffected in perceptual processing of form-from-motion, but may exhibit impairments in higher order judgments such as emotion processing. It is important to identify more specifically which processes of motion perception are impacted in ASC before a link can be made between perceptual deficits and the higher-level features of the disorder

Observation and imitation of actions performed by humans, androids, and robots : an EMG study

Understanding others’ actions is essential for functioning in the physical and social world. In the past two decades research has shown that action perception involves the motor system, supporting theories that we understand others’ behavior via embodied motor simulation. Recently, empirical approach to action perception has been facilitated by using well-controlled artificial stimuli, such as robots. One broad question this approach can address is what aspects of similarity between the observer and the observed agent facilitate motor simulation. Since humans have evolved among other humans and animals, using artificial stimuli such as robots allows us to probe whether our social perceptual systems are specifically tuned to process other biological entities. In this study, we used humanoid robots with different degrees of human-likeness in appearance and motion along with electromyography (EMG) to measure muscle activity in participants’ arms while they either observed or imitated videos of three agents produce actions with their right arm. The agents were a Human (biological appearance and motion), a Robot (mechanical appearance and motion), and an Android (biological appearance and mechanical motion). Right arm muscle activity increased when participants imitated all agents. Increased muscle activation was found also in the stationary arm both during imitation and observation. Furthermore, muscle activity was sensitive to motion dynamics: activity was significantly stronger for imitation of the human than both mechanical agents. There was also a relationship between the dynamics of the muscle activity and motion dynamics in stimuli. Overall our data indicate that motor simulation is not limited to observation and imitation of agents with a biological appearance, but is also found for robots. However we also found sensitivity to human motion in the EMG responses. Combining data from multiple methods allows us to obtain a more complete picture of action understanding and the underlying neural computations