3,656 research outputs found
Reliability demonstration for safety-critical systems
This paper suggests a new model for reliability demonstration of safety-critical systems, based on the TRW Software Reliability Theory. The paper describes the model; the test equipment required and test strategies based on the various constraints occurring during software development. The paper also compares a new testing method, Single Risk Sequential Testing (SRST), with the standard Probability Ratio Sequential Testing method (PRST), and concludes that: • SRST provides higher chances of success than PRST • SRST takes less time to complete than PRST • SRST satisfies the consumer risk criterion, whereas PRST provides a much smaller consumer risk than the requirement
Pinpointing the massive black hole in the Galactic Center with gravitationally lensed stars
A new statistical method for pinpointing the massive black hole (BH) in the
Galactic Center on the IR grid is presented and applied to astrometric IR
observations of stars close to the BH. This is of interest for measuring the IR
emission from the BH, in order to constrain accretion models; for solving the
orbits of stars near the BH, in order to measure the BH mass and to search for
general relativistic effects; and for detecting the fluctuations of the BH away
from the dynamical center of the stellar cluster, in order to study the stellar
potential. The BH lies on the line connecting the two images of any background
source it gravitationally lenses, and so the intersection of these lines fixes
its position. A combined search for a lensing signal and for the BH shows that
the most likely point of intersection coincides with the center of acceleration
of stars orbiting the BH. This statistical detection of lensing by the BH has a
random probability of ~0.01. It can be verified by deep IR stellar
spectroscopy, which will determine whether the most likely lensed image pair
candidates (listed here) have identical spectra.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, submitted to ApJ
Spectroscopic Binary Mass Determination using Relativity
High-precision radial-velocity techniques, which enabled the detection of
extrasolar planets are now sensitive to relativistic effects in the data of
spectroscopic binary stars (SBs). We show how these effects can be used to
derive the absolute masses of the components of eclipsing single-lined SBs and
double-lined SBs from Doppler measurements alone. High-precision stellar
spectroscopy can thus substantially increase the number of measured stellar
masses, thereby improving the mass-radius and mass-luminosity calibrations.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication by the Astrophysical
Journal Letter
Wavelength-independent coupler from fiber to an on-chip cavity, demonstrated over an 850nm span
A robust wide band (850 nm) fiber coupler to a whispering-gallery cavity with ultra-high quality factor is experimentally demonstrated. The device trades off ideality for broad-band, efficient input coupling. Output coupling efficiency can remain high enough for practical applications wherein pumping and power extraction must occur over very broad wavelength spans
Non-Entailed Subsequences as a Challenge for Natural Language Inference
Neural network models have shown great success at natural language inference
(NLI), the task of determining whether a premise entails a hypothesis. However,
recent studies suggest that these models may rely on fallible heuristics rather
than deep language understanding. We introduce a challenge set to test whether
NLI systems adopt one such heuristic: assuming that a sentence entails all of
its subsequences, such as assuming that "Alice believes Mary is lying" entails
"Alice believes Mary." We evaluate several competitive NLI models on this
challenge set and find strong evidence that they do rely on the subsequence
heuristic.Comment: Accepted as an abstract for SCiL 2019; added acknowledgment
On the existence of 0/1 polytopes with high semidefinite extension complexity
In Rothvo\ss{} it was shown that there exists a 0/1 polytope (a polytope
whose vertices are in \{0,1\}^{n}) such that any higher-dimensional polytope
projecting to it must have 2^{\Omega(n)} facets, i.e., its linear extension
complexity is exponential. The question whether there exists a 0/1 polytope
with high PSD extension complexity was left open. We answer this question in
the affirmative by showing that there is a 0/1 polytope such that any
spectrahedron projecting to it must be the intersection of a semidefinite cone
of dimension~2^{\Omega(n)} and an affine space. Our proof relies on a new
technique to rescale semidefinite factorizations
Caffeine-Induced Global Reductions in Resting-State BOLD Connectivity Reflect Widespread Decreases in MEG Connectivity.
In resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the temporal correlation between spontaneous fluctuations of the blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal from different brain regions is used to assess functional connectivity. However, because the BOLD signal is an indirect measure of neuronal activity, its complex hemodynamic nature can complicate the interpretation of differences in connectivity that are observed across conditions or subjects. For example, prior studies have shown that caffeine leads to widespread reductions in BOLD connectivity but were not able to determine if neural or vascular factors were primarily responsible for the observed decrease. In this study, we used source-localized magnetoencephalography (MEG) in conjunction with fMRI to further examine the origins of the caffeine-induced changes in BOLD connectivity. We observed widespread and significant (p < 0.01) reductions in both MEG and fMRI connectivity measures, suggesting that decreases in the connectivity of resting-state neuro-electric power fluctuations were primarily responsible for the observed BOLD connectivity changes. The MEG connectivity decreases were most pronounced in the beta band. By demonstrating the similarity in MEG and fMRI based connectivity changes, these results provide evidence for the neural basis of resting-state fMRI networks and further support the potential of MEG as a tool to characterize resting-state connectivity
- …