8,969 research outputs found
Avatars:the other side of Proteus's mirror : a study into avatar choice regarding perception
The trend for online interactions, can be regarded as being ‘anti-so-cially social’, meaning that a great deal of time is spent playing, working and socializing with the internet serving as the communication conduit. Within that Virtual Social Environment very deep relationships are formed and maintained without the parties ever having met each other face-to-face. Raising the question how much does the physical appearance of an avatar influence the perception of the person behind it? Are relationships informed by appearance even in the vir-tual world and what implications does that have for second language acquisition? This paper leads to a small-scale research project where a selection of avatars with various racially identifiable characteristics were used to identify which av-atars a second language speaker would feel more at ease interacting with in the target language. The resultant research aims to test three hypotheses regarding preferred avatar choice for second language users based solely on perceptions
Cryo-EM of full-length α-synuclein reveals fibril polymorphs with a common structural kernel.
α-Synuclein (aSyn) fibrillar polymorphs have distinct in vitro and in vivo seeding activities, contributing differently to synucleinopathies. Despite numerous prior attempts, how polymorphic aSyn fibrils differ in atomic structure remains elusive. Here, we present fibril polymorphs from the full-length recombinant human aSyn and their seeding capacity and cytotoxicity in vitro. By cryo-electron microscopy helical reconstruction, we determine the structures of the two predominant species, a rod and a twister, both at 3.7 Å resolution. Our atomic models reveal that both polymorphs share a kernel structure of a bent β-arch, but differ in their inter-protofilament interfaces. Thus, different packing of the same kernel structure gives rise to distinct fibril polymorphs. Analyses of disease-related familial mutations suggest their potential contribution to the pathogenesis of synucleinopathies by altering population distribution of the fibril polymorphs. Drug design targeting amyloid fibrils in neurodegenerative diseases should consider the formation and distribution of concurrent fibril polymorphs
FLEET: Butterfly Estimation from a Bipartite Graph Stream
We consider space-efficient single-pass estimation of the number of
butterflies, a fundamental bipartite graph motif, from a massive bipartite
graph stream where each edge represents a connection between entities in two
different partitions. We present a space lower bound for any streaming
algorithm that can estimate the number of butterflies accurately, as well as
FLEET, a suite of algorithms for accurately estimating the number of
butterflies in the graph stream. Estimates returned by the algorithms come with
provable guarantees on the approximation error, and experiments show good
tradeoffs between the space used and the accuracy of approximation. We also
present space-efficient algorithms for estimating the number of butterflies
within a sliding window of the most recent elements in the stream. While there
is a significant body of work on counting subgraphs such as triangles in a
unipartite graph stream, our work seems to be one of the few to tackle the case
of bipartite graph streams.Comment: This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by
permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The
definitive version was published in Seyed-Vahid Sanei-Mehri, Yu Zhang, Ahmet
Erdem Sariyuce and Srikanta Tirthapura. "FLEET: Butterfly Estimation from a
Bipartite Graph Stream". The 28th ACM International Conference on Information
and Knowledge Managemen
REAM intensity modulator-enabled 10Gb/s colorless upstream transmission of real-time optical OFDM signals in a single-fiber-based bidirectional PON architecture
Reflective electro-absorption modulation-intensity modulators (REAM-IMs) are utilized, for the first time, to experimentally demonstrate colorless ONUs in single-fiber-based, bidirectional, intensity-modulation and direct-detection (IMDD), optical OFDM PONs (OOFDM-PONs) incorporating 25km SSMFs and OLT-side-seeded CW optical signals. The colorlessness of the REAM-IMs is characterized, based on which optimum REAM-IM operating conditions are identified. In the aforementioned PON architecture, 10Gb/s colorless upstream transmissions of end-to-end realtime OOFDM signals are successfully achieved for various wavelengths within the entire C-band. Over such a wavelength window, corresponding minimum received optical powers at the FEC limit vary in a range as small as <0.5dB. In addition, experimental measurements also indicate that Rayleigh backscattering imposes a 2.8dB optical power penalty on the 10Gb/s over 25km upstream OOFDM signal transmission. Furthermore, making use of on-line adaptive bit and power loading, a linear trade-off between aggregated signal line rate and optical power budget is observed, which shows that, for the present PON system, a 10% reduction in signal line rate can improve the optical power budget by 2.6dB. © 2012 Optical Society of America
Surface electronic structure of a topological Kondo insulator candidate SmB6: insights from high-resolution ARPES
The Kondo insulator SmB6 has long been known to exhibit low temperature (T <
10K) transport anomaly and has recently attracted attention as a new
topological insulator candidate. By combining low-temperature and high
energy-momentum resolution of the laser-based ARPES technique, for the first
time, we probe the surface electronic structure of the anomalous conductivity
regime. We observe that the bulk bands exhibit a Kondo gap of 14 meV and
identify in-gap low-lying states within a 4 meV window of the Fermi level on
the (001)-surface of this material. The low-lying states are found to form
electron-like Fermi surface pockets that enclose the X and the Gamma points of
the surface Brillouin zone. These states disappear as temperature is raised
above 15K in correspondence with the complete disappearance of the 2D
conductivity channels in SmB6. While the topological nature of the in-gap
metallic states cannot be ascertained without spin (spin-texture) measurements
our bulk and surface measurements carried out in the
transport-anomaly-temperature regime (T < 10K) are consistent with the
first-principle predicted Fermi surface behavior of a topological Kondo
insulator phase in this material.Comment: 4 Figures, 6 Page
Ubik: efficient cache sharing with strict qos for latency-critical workloads
Chip-multiprocessors (CMPs) must often execute workload mixes with different performance requirements. On one hand, user-facing, latency-critical applications (e.g., web search) need low tail (i.e., worst-case) latencies, often in the millisecond range, and have inherently low utilization. On the other hand, compute-intensive batch applications (e.g., MapReduce) only need high long-term average performance. In current CMPs, latency-critical and batch applications cannot run concurrently due to interference on shared resources. Unfortunately, prior work on quality of service (QoS) in CMPs has focused on guaranteeing average performance, not tail latency.
In this work, we analyze several latency-critical workloads, and show that guaranteeing average performance is insufficient to maintain low tail latency, because microarchitectural resources with state, such as caches or cores, exert inertia on instantaneous workload performance. Last-level caches impart the highest inertia, as workloads take tens of milliseconds to warm them up. When left unmanaged, or when managed with conventional QoS frameworks, shared last-level caches degrade tail latency significantly. Instead, we propose Ubik, a dynamic partitioning technique that predicts and exploits the transient behavior of latency-critical workloads to maintain their tail latency while maximizing the cache space available to batch applications. Using extensive simulations, we show that, while conventional QoS frameworks degrade tail latency by up to 2.3x, Ubik simultaneously maintains the tail latency of latency-critical workloads and significantly improves the performance of batch applications.United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Power Efficiency Revolution For Embedded Computing Technologies Contract HR0011-13-2-0005)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CCF-1318384
Initiation and evolution of phase separation in heteroepitaxial InAlAs films
We have investigated the initiation and evolution of phase separation in heteroepitaxial InAlAs films. In misfit-free InAlAs layers, cross-sectional scanning tunneling microscopy (XSTM) reveals the presence of isotropic nanometer-sized clusters. For lattice-mismatched InAlAs layers with 1.2% misfit, quasiperiodic contrast modulations perpendicular to the growth direction are apparent. Interestingly, these lateral modulations are apparently initiated within the first few bilayers of film growth, and both the amplitude and wavelength of the modulations increase with film thickness. The saturation value of the modulation wavelength determined from XSTM coincides with the lateral superlattice period determined from (002) x-ray reciprocal space maps, suggesting that the lateral modulation wavelength represents a periodic composition variation. Together, these results suggest that phase separation in the heteroepitaxial InAlAs thin-film system is a misfit-driven kinetic process initiated by random compositional nonuniformities, which later develop into coupled compositional and surface morphological variations. © 2002 American Institute of Physics.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/69359/2/APPLAB-80-18-3292-1.pd
Submillisecond response variable optical attenuator based on sheared polymer network liquid crystal
We demonstrate a variable optical attenuator (VOA) at lambda = 1.55 mum using a sheared polymer network liquid crystal (SPNLC). The SPNLC exhibits a fast response time and weak wavelength dependency. Comparing with other polymer-stabilized liquid crystals, the SPNLC has lower driving voltage and negligible light scattering loss when the wavelength exceeds 700 nm. A reflection type VOA with similar to0.24 ms response time and -32 dB dynamic range is demonstrated at room temperature and 35 V-rms voltage
Drawing Trees with Perfect Angular Resolution and Polynomial Area
We study methods for drawing trees with perfect angular resolution, i.e.,
with angles at each node v equal to 2{\pi}/d(v). We show:
1. Any unordered tree has a crossing-free straight-line drawing with perfect
angular resolution and polynomial area.
2. There are ordered trees that require exponential area for any
crossing-free straight-line drawing having perfect angular resolution.
3. Any ordered tree has a crossing-free Lombardi-style drawing (where each
edge is represented by a circular arc) with perfect angular resolution and
polynomial area. Thus, our results explore what is achievable with
straight-line drawings and what more is achievable with Lombardi-style
drawings, with respect to drawings of trees with perfect angular resolution.Comment: 30 pages, 17 figure
The Fourth Element: Characteristics, Modelling, and Electromagnetic Theory of the Memristor
In 2008, researchers at HP Labs published a paper in {\it Nature} reporting
the realisation of a new basic circuit element that completes the missing link
between charge and flux-linkage, which was postulated by Leon Chua in 1971. The
HP memristor is based on a nanometer scale TiO thin-film, containing a
doped region and an undoped region. Further to proposed applications of
memristors in artificial biological systems and nonvolatile RAM (NVRAM), they
also enable reconfigurable nanoelectronics. Moreover, memristors provide new
paradigms in application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and field
programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). A significant reduction in area with an
unprecedented memory capacity and device density are the potential advantages
of memristors for Integrated Circuits (ICs). This work reviews the memristor
and provides mathematical and SPICE models for memristors. Insight into the
memristor device is given via recalling the quasi-static expansion of Maxwell's
equations. We also review Chua's arguments based on electromagnetic theory.Comment: 28 pages, 14 figures, Accepted as a regular paper - the Proceedings
of Royal Society
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