ICARUS: Intelligent coupon allocation for retailers using search

Many retailers run loyalty card schemes for their customers offering incentives in the form of money off coupons. The total value of the coupons depends on how much the customer has spent. This paper deals with the problem of finding the smallest set of coupons such that each possible total can be represented as the sum of a pre-defined number of coupons. A mathematical analysis of the problem leads to the development of a genetic algorithm solution. The algorithm is applied to real world data using several crossover operators and compared to well known straw-person methods. Results are promising showing that considerable time can be saved by using this method, reducing a few days worth of consultancy time to a few minutes of computation

A committee machine gas identification system based on dynamically reconfigurable FPGA

This paper proposes a gas identification system based on the committee machine (CM) classifier, which combines various gas identification algorithms, to obtain a unified decision with improved accuracy. The CM combines five different classifiers: K nearest neighbors (KNNs), multilayer perceptron (MLP), radial basis function (RBF), Gaussian mixture model (GMM), and probabilistic principal component analysis (PPCA). Experiments on real sensors' data proved the effectiveness of our system with an improved accuracy over individual classifiers. Due to the computationally intensive nature of CM, its implementation requires significant hardware resources. In order to overcome this problem, we propose a novel time multiplexing hardware implementation using a dynamically reconfigurable field programmable gate array (FPGA) platform. The processing is divided into three stages: sampling and preprocessing, pattern recognition, and decision stage. Dynamically reconfigurable FPGA technique is used to implement the system in a sequential manner, thus using limited hardware resources of the FPGA chip. The system is successfully tested for combustible gas identification application using our in-house tin-oxide gas sensors

Charge Transfer Fluctuations as a QGP Signal

In this study, we analyze the recently proposed charge transfer fluctuations within a finite pseudo-rapidity space. As the charge transfer fluctuation is a measure of the local charge correlation length, it is capable of detecting inhomogeneity in the hot and dense matter created by heavy ion collisions. We predict that going from peripheral to central collisions, the charge transfer fluctuations at midrapidity should decrease substantially while the charge transfer fluctuations at the edges of the observation window should decrease by a small amount. These are consequences of having a strongly inhomogeneous matter where the QGP component is concentrated around midrapidity. We also show how to constrain the values of the charge correlations lengths in both the hadronic phase and the QGP phase using the charge transfer fluctuations. Current manuscript is based on the preprints hep-ph/0503085 (to appear in Physical Review C) and nucl-th/0506025.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of 18th International Conference on Ultrarelativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions: Quark Matter 2005 (QM 2005), Budapest, Hungary, 4-9 Aug 200

Tensor Norms and the Classical Communication Complexity of Nonlocal Quantum Measurement

We initiate the study of quantifying nonlocalness of a bipartite measurement by the minimum amount of classical communication required to simulate the measurement. We derive general upper bounds, which are expressed in terms of certain tensor norms of the measurement operator. As applications, we show that (a) If the amount of communication is constant, quantum and classical communication protocols with unlimited amount of shared entanglement or shared randomness compute the same set of functions; (b) A local hidden variable model needs only a constant amount of communication to create, within an arbitrarily small statistical distance, a distribution resulted from local measurements of an entangled quantum state, as long as the number of measurement outcomes is constant.Comment: A preliminary version of this paper appears as part of an article in Proceedings of the the 37th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2005), 460--467, 200

The Droplet State and the Compressibility Anomaly in Dilute 2D Electron Systems

We investigate the space distribution of carrier density and the compressibility of two-dimensional (2D) electron systems by using the local density approximation. The strong correlation is simulated by the local exchange and correlation energies. A slowly varied disorder potential is applied to simulate the disorder effect. We show that the compressibility anomaly observed in 2D systems which accompanies the metal-insulator transition can be attributed to the formation of the droplet state due to disorder effect at low carrier densities.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Food Safety Knowledge and Practice Among Community in Sg. Pelek, Sepang, Selangor Darul Ehsan

Food safety is a basic requirement of food quality. It is an increasingly important public health issue to prevent and control food borne illnesses. A cross-sectional study was designed to determine level of knowledge and practice on food safety, to determine the association between knowledge and practice, and also to identify the association between socio-demographic factors and practice score of the population studied. This study was conducted among adult population in Taman Bahagia, Sungai Pelek, Sepang, Selangor Darul Ehsan. Data were collected using an interviewed structured questionnaire. A stratified random sampling was performed to obtain houses, followed by simple random sampling to select sample in the house. A total of 115 data sets were analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20.0. Analysis showed that 35% of respondents have poor level of knowledge on food safety, whereas 27% of the respondents have poor level of practices on food safety. Multiple linear regression revealed that there are a significant association between education level (p<0.001), Adj b=2.57 (95% CI: 1.15, 3.99) and gender (p=0.048), Adj b=1.15 (95% CI: 0.01, 2.29) with practice score on food safety. Therefore, health promotion and education on the importance of practicing food safety at home should be focused to prevent further unwanted health effects

The I^G J^{PC}=1^- 1^{-+} Tetraquark States

We study the tetraquark states with I^G J^{PC}=1^- 1^{-+} in the QCD sum rule. After exhausting all possible flavor structures, we analyses both the SVZ and finite energy sum rules. Both approaches lead to a mass around 1.6 GeV for the state with the quark contents q q q_bar q_bar, and around 2.0 GeV for the state with the quark contents q s q_bar s_bar. The flavor structure 3_bar * 6_bar + 6 * 3 is preferred. Our analysis strongly indicates that both pi1(1600) and pi1(2015) are also compatible with the exotic tetraquark interpretation, which are sometimes labeled as candidates of the 1^{-+} hybrid mesons. Moreover one of their dominant decay modes is a pair of axial-vector and pseudoscalar mesons such as b1(1235) pi, which is sometimes considered as the characteristic decay mode of the hybrid mesons.Comment: 18 pages, 14 figures, revised version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Local vertical measurements and violation of Bell inequality

For two qubits belonging to Alice and Bob, we derive an approach to setup the bound of Bell operator in the condition that Alice and Bob continue to perform local vertical measurements. For pure states we find that if the entanglement of the two qubits is less than 0.2644 (measured with von Neumann entropy) the violation of the Bell inequality will never be realized, and only when the entanglement is equal to 1 the maximal violation ($2\sqrt{2}$) can occur. For specific form of mixed states, we prove that the bound of the Bell inequality depends on the concurrence. Only when the concurrence is greater than 0.6 the violation of the Bell inequality can occur, and the maximal violation can never be achieved. We suggest that the bound of the Bell operator in the condition of local vertical measurements may be used as a measure of the entanglement.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure