Voyager uplink planning in the interstellar mission era

The Voyager Project has entered its last phase of discovery--the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM). Because of the reduced scope of the project and a lower budget, new ways had to be developed to program two spacecraft with fewer people and to allow for some sequence development flexibility without additional risk. In the previous cruise era, it took a seven-person sequence team 12 weeks to develop a nominal eight week cruise sequence. Today it takes a three-person team six weeks to develop a 13 week sequence load. This paper will describe in detail the sequencing strategy which reduces the volume and frequency of sequence loads, and the new tools and processes developed which reduce the manual effort required to generate these sequences without adding risk

History, architecture and the challenge of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-93).As this nation's first and largest immigration station Ellis Island not only processed millions of immigrants, but also functioned to develop mechanisms of control and procedures for inspecting thousands of immigrants on a daily basis. Ellis Island operated at the intersection of conflicting cultural paradigms as economic concerns exacerbated by the influx of unskilled laborers before the turn of the century shifted to fears that the large numbers of "new" immigrants from southern and eastern Europe would degrade the gene pool of "old" American stock. The persistent perception of immigrants as vectors of disease that lay behind these fears did not disappear after the turn of the century. Rather, that perception evolved to embrace the belief that science would clearly demonstrate that some people, because of their racial or national constitution, were less capable of becoming 100% Americanized than others. The Ellis Island Immigration Museum, housed in the restored main building on Ellis Island, presently ignores the presence and narrative potential of the traces of immigrant processing and the many remarkable structures which would bring Ellis Island's unique role in the history of immigration to light. My purpose in this thesis is to foreground the role of the United States government at Ellis Island, and offer a critique of the manner in which the success of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum frustrates a full consideration of the complex historical processes it is meant to commemorate.by Linda R. Weld.S.M

Quantifying and Controlling Prethermal Nonergodicity in Interacting Floquet Matter

The use of periodic driving for synthesizing many-body quantum states depends crucially on the existence of a prethermal regime, which exhibits drive-tunable properties while forestalling the effects of heating. This dependence motivates the search for direct experimental probes of the underlying localized nonergodic nature of the wave function in this metastable regime. We report experiments on a many-body Floquet system consisting of atoms in an optical lattice subjected to ultrastrong sign-changing amplitude modulation. Using a double-quench protocol, we measure an inverse participation ratio quantifying the degree of prethermal localization as a function of tunable drive parameters and interactions. We obtain a complete prethermal map of the drive-dependent properties of Floquet matter spanning four square decades of parameter space. Following the full time evolution, we observe sequential formation of two prethermal plateaux, interaction-driven ergodicity, and strongly frequency-dependent dynamics of long-time thermalization. The quantitative characterization of the prethermal Floquet matter realized in these experiments, along with the demonstration of control of its properties by variation of drive parameters and interactions, opens a new frontier for probing far-from-equilibrium quantum statistical mechanics and new possibilities for dynamical quantum engineering

Controlling Narrative Generation with Planning Trajectories: The Role of Constraints

Abstract. AI planning has featured in a number of Interactive Storytelling prototypes: since narratives can be naturally modelled as a sequence of actions it has been possible to exploit state of the art planners in the task of narrative generation. However the characteristics of a “good ” plan, such as optimality, aren’t necessarily the same as those of a “good ” narrative, where errors and convoluted sequences may offer more reader interest, so some narrative structuring is required. In our work we have looked at injecting narrative control into plan generation through the use of PDDL3.0 state trajectory constraints which enable us to express narrative control information within the planning representation. As part of this we have developed an approach to planning with such trajectory constraints. The approach decomposes the problem into a set of smaller subproblems using the temporal orderings described by the constraints and then solves these subproblems incrementally. In this paper we outline our method and present results that illustrate the potential of the approach.

A flexible coupling approach to multi-agent planning under incomplete information

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10115-012-0569-7Multi-agent planning (MAP) approaches are typically oriented at solving loosely coupled problems, being ineffective to deal with more complex, strongly related problems. In most cases, agents work under complete information, building complete knowledge bases. The present article introduces a general-purpose MAP framework designed to tackle problems of any coupling levels under incomplete information. Agents in our MAP model are partially unaware of the information managed by the rest of agents and share only the critical information that affects other agents, thus maintaining a distributed vision of the task. Agents solve MAP tasks through the adoption of an iterative refinement planning procedure that uses single-agent planning technology. In particular, agents will devise refinements through the partial-order planning paradigm, a flexible framework to build refinement plans leaving unsolved details that will be gradually completed by means of new refinements. Our proposal is supported with the implementation of a fully operative MAP system and we show various experiments when running our system over different types of MAP problems, from the most strongly related to the most loosely coupled.This work has been partly supported by the Spanish MICINN under projects Consolider Ingenio 2010 CSD2007-00022 and TIN2011-27652-C03-01, and the Valencian Prometeo project 2008/051.Torreño Lerma, A.; Onaindia De La Rivaherrera, E.; Sapena Vercher, O. (2014). A flexible coupling approach to multi-agent planning under incomplete information. 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Interaction and filling induced quantum phases of dual Mott insulators of bosons and fermions

Many-body effects are at the very heart of diverse phenomena found in condensed-matter physics. One striking example is the Mott insulator phase where conductivity is suppressed as a result of a strong repulsive interaction. Advances in cold atom physics have led to the realization of the Mott insulating phases of atoms in an optical lattice, mimicking the corresponding condensed matter systems. Here, we explore an exotic strongly-correlated system of Interacting Dual Mott Insulators of bosons and fermions. We reveal that an inter-species interaction between bosons and fermions drastically modifies each Mott insulator, causing effects that include melting, generation of composite particles, an anti-correlated phase, and complete phase-separation. Comparisons between the experimental results and numerical simulations indicate intrinsic adiabatic heating and cooling for the attractively and repulsively interacting dual Mott Insulators, respectively

Quantum Simulation of Antiferromagnetic Spin Chains in an Optical Lattice

Understanding exotic forms of magnetism in quantum mechanical systems is a central goal of modern condensed matter physics, with implications from high temperature superconductors to spintronic devices. Simulating magnetic materials in the vicinity of a quantum phase transition is computationally intractable on classical computers due to the extreme complexity arising from quantum entanglement between the constituent magnetic spins. Here we employ a degenerate Bose gas confined in an optical lattice to simulate a chain of interacting quantum Ising spins as they undergo a phase transition. Strong spin interactions are achieved through a site-occupation to pseudo-spin mapping. As we vary an applied field, quantum fluctuations drive a phase transition from a paramagnetic phase into an antiferromagnetic phase. In the paramagnetic phase the interaction between the spins is overwhelmed by the applied field which aligns the spins. In the antiferromagnetic phase the interaction dominates and produces staggered magnetic ordering. Magnetic domain formation is observed through both in-situ site-resolved imaging and noise correlation measurements. By demonstrating a route to quantum magnetism in an optical lattice, this work should facilitate further investigations of magnetic models using ultracold atoms, improving our understanding of real magnetic materials.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure

The influence of the mode of administration in the dissemination of three coliphages in chickens

Escherichia coli can cause severe respiratory and systemic infections in chickens, and it is often associated with significant economic losses in the poultry industry. Bacteriophages (phages) have been shown to be potential alternatives to the antibiotics in the treatment of bacterial infections. To accomplish that, phage particles must be able to reach and remain active in the infected organs. The present work aims at evaluating the effect of the route of administration and the dosage in the dissemination of 3 coliphages in the chicken’s organs. In vivo trials were conducted by infecting chickens orally, spray, and i.m. with 106, 107, and 108 plaque-forming units/mL suspensions of 3 lytic phages: phi F78E (Myoviridae), phi F258E (Siphoviridae), and phi F61E (Myoviridae). Birds were killed 3, 10, and 24 h after challenge and the phage titer was measured in lungs and air sacs membranes, liver, duodenum, and spleen. When administered by spray, the 3 phages reached the respiratory tract within 3 h. Oral administration also allowed all phages to be recovered in lungs, but only phi F78E was recovered from the duodenum, the liver, and the spleen. These differences can be explained by the possible replication of phi F78E in commensal E. coli strains present in the chicken gut, thus leading to a higher concentration of this phage in the intestines that resulted in systemic circulation of phage with consequent phage in organs. When phages were administered i.m., they were found in all of the collected organs. Despite this better response, i.m. administration is a nonpracticable way of protecting a large number of birds in a poultry unit. In general, the results suggest that oral administration and spray allowed phages to reach and to remain active in the respiratory tract and can, therefore, be considered promising administration routes to treat respiratory E. coli infections in the poultry industry.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - SFRH/BDE/15508/200

A New Species of Saphonecrus (Hymenoptera, Cynipoidea) Associated With Plant Galls on Castanopsis (Fagaceae) in China

A new cynipid species, Saphonecrus hupingshanensis Liu, Yang, et Zhu, sp. nov. (Hymenoptera: Cynipidae: Synergini), is described from China. This is the first species of the inquilinous tribe Synergini ever known to have an association with chinquapins (Fagaceae: Castanopsis). The biology and implication to species diversity of Cynipidae in eastern and southeast Asia are discussed