The Jacobian of a Sixth-Root-of-Unity Matroid

The Jacobian group (also called the sandpile group, Picard group, or critical group) of a graph or, more generally, of a regular matroid has been well studied. Sixth-root-of-unity matroids, also called complex unimodular matroids, are generalizations of regular matroids. This paper provides a definition, and establishes some basic properties, of the Jacobian group of a sixth-root-of-unity matroid

COMPUTATIONAL FOUNDATIONS FOR COMPUTER AIDED CONCEPTUAL DESIGN OF MULTIPLE INTERACTION-STATE MECHATRONIC DEVICES

Increasing autonomy and intelligence in mechatronic devices requires them to be multiple interaction-state devices. Different modes of operations and different types of interactions with the use-environment require the device to have multiple interaction-states, each state capable of producing a different behavior to meet its intended requirements. For multiple interaction-state mechatronic devices, a satisfactory framework does not exist for representing, evaluating, and synthesizing design concepts. Hence, majority of mechatronic designers currently use informal methods for representing and evaluating design concepts during the conceptual design. This leads to the following problems. First, informal representation of design concepts hinders information exchange and reuse. Second, in absence of a validation methodology, it is not clear how to determine if a proposed design concept is consistent with the requirements. Finally, designers cannot perform computer aided evaluation during the conceptual design stage. This dissertation focuses in the area of computational foundations for representing, validating, evaluating, and synthesizing design concepts of multiple interaction-state mechatronic devices. A modeling and simulation framework has been developed for representing design concepts behind multiple interaction-state mechatronic devices. The problem of consistency-checking of interaction-states has been studied and an algorithm has been developed for solving the interaction consistency-checking problem. The problem of determining the presence of unsafe parameter values has been studied and an algorithm has been developed to determine whether an interaction-state in the proposed design concept can attain unsafe parameter values. Algorithms have been developed for evaluating design concepts based on the maximum power consumption and sharability of components. Finally, algorithms have been developed for automatically synthesizing transition diagrams for meeting the desired behavior specifications, given a components library. We believe that the results reported in this dissertation will provide the underlying foundations for constructing the next generation computer aided design tools for conceptual design of mechatronic devices. We expect that these tools would streamline the product development process, facilitate information reuse, and reduce product development time

Are you informed?: State information management and autonomy in local China

Thesis advisor: Gerald M. EasterDoes the emergence of these newly informatics practices by the Chinese state indicate a future abolishment of the Xinfang mechanism? In order to answer these questions and foster an understanding of today’s state information management in China, this thesis first employs the method of historical analysis. The thesis provides an initial effort in English literature to answer how and why societal petitioning was gradually translated into state-dominated action and whether or not informational engagement impacted state autonomy. The thesis then moves on to field work conducted in S Province since 2014 through 2017 that counted approximately 20 weeks altogether. With such first-hand empirical evidence, the thesis develops three main arguments as below: First and foremost, I find that there exist an increasing number of information seekers among petitioners from the background databases of both Governor’s Mailbox and the Provincial Bureau for Letters and Calls’ online complaint system. Such informational needs of today’s Chinese public may be in need of higher attention from policy makers and scholars. Second, the leadership, whether at central or any local level, have sought to establish various apparatuses, and charged them with building information channels and providing an information stream for policy making. the apparatuses hereby develop two strategies to draw more societal actors to their offices and guarantee their informational supplies to above. Such competition eventually results in a champion among all the informatics offices in the arena. Last but not least, apparatus autonomy cannot be equated with individual official autonomy. While an office is assigned with increased autonomy, the very officials’ individual autonomy may fall down to a lesser degree.Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2018.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Political Science

Fault Diagnosis of Rotating Equipment Bearing Based on EEMD and Improved Sparse Representation Algorithm

Aiming at the problem that the vibration signals of rolling bearings working in a harsh environment are mixed with many harmonic components and noise signals, while the traditional sparse representation algorithm takes a long time to calculate and has a limited accuracy, a bearing fault feature extraction method based on the ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) algorithm and improved sparse representation is proposed. Firstly, an improved orthogonal matching pursuit (adapOMP) algorithm is used to separate the harmonic components in the signal to obtain the filtered signal. The processed signal is decomposed by EEMD, and the signal with a kurtosis greater than three is reconstructed. Then, Hankel matrix transformation is carried out to construct the learning dictionary. The K-singular value decomposition (K-SVD) algorithm using the improved termination criterion makes the algorithm have a certain adaptability, and the reconstructed signal is constructed by processing the EEMD results. Through the comparative analysis of the three methods under strong noise, although the K-SVD algorithm can produce good results after being processed by the adapOMP algorithm, the effect of the algorithm is not obvious in the low-frequency range. The method proposed in this paper can effectively extract the impact component from the signal. This will have a positive effect on the extraction of rotating machinery impact features in complex noise environments

HR-Pro: Point-supervised Temporal Action Localization via Hierarchical Reliability Propagation

Point-supervised Temporal Action Localization (PSTAL) is an emerging research direction for label-efficient learning. However, current methods mainly focus on optimizing the network either at the snippet-level or the instance-level, neglecting the inherent reliability of point annotations at both levels. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Reliability Propagation (HR-Pro) framework, which consists of two reliability-aware stages: Snippet-level Discrimination Learning and Instance-level Completeness Learning, both stages explore the efficient propagation of high-confidence cues in point annotations. For snippet-level learning, we introduce an online-updated memory to store reliable snippet prototypes for each class. We then employ a Reliability-aware Attention Block to capture both intra-video and inter-video dependencies of snippets, resulting in more discriminative and robust snippet representation. For instance-level learning, we propose a point-based proposal generation approach as a means of connecting snippets and instances, which produces high-confidence proposals for further optimization at the instance level. Through multi-level reliability-aware learning, we obtain more reliable confidence scores and more accurate temporal boundaries of predicted proposals. Our HR-Pro achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple challenging benchmarks, including an impressive average mAP of 60.3% on THUMOS14. Notably, our HR-Pro largely surpasses all previous point-supervised methods, and even outperforms several competitive fully supervised methods. Code will be available at https://github.com/pipixin321/HR-Pro.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figure

Towards General Low-Light Raw Noise Synthesis and Modeling

Modeling and synthesizing low-light raw noise is a fundamental problem for computational photography and image processing applications. Although most recent works have adopted physics-based models to synthesize noise, the signal-independent noise in low-light conditions is far more complicated and varies dramatically across camera sensors, which is beyond the description of these models. To address this issue, we introduce a new perspective to synthesize the signal-independent noise by a generative model. Specifically, we synthesize the signal-dependent and signal-independent noise in a physics- and learning-based manner, respectively. In this way, our method can be considered as a general model, that is, it can simultaneously learn different noise characteristics for different ISO levels and generalize to various sensors. Subsequently, we present an effective multi-scale discriminator termed Fourier transformer discriminator (FTD) to distinguish the noise distribution accurately. Additionally, we collect a new low-light raw denoising (LRD) dataset for training and benchmarking. Qualitative validation shows that the noise generated by our proposed noise model can be highly similar to the real noise in terms of distribution. Furthermore, extensive denoising experiments demonstrate that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on different sensors.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures. Accepted by ICCV 202

Quarter-wave Resonator Based Tunable Coupler for Xmon Qubits

We propose a scheme of tunable coupler based on quarter-wave resonator for scalable quantum integrated circuits. The open end of the T-type resonator is capacitively coupled to two Xmon qubits, while another end is an asymmetric dc-SQUID which dominates the inductive energy of coupler resonator. The dc-Current applied through the flux bias line could change the magnetic flux inside the dc-SQUID, so the frequency of coupler resonator can be effectively tuned and the qubit-qubit coupling can be totally switched off. As the increase of junction asymmetry for the dc-SQUID, the coupling of SQUID's effective phase difference and cavity modes become smaller at required working frequency regime of coupler resonator, and this could reduce the descent of the resonator's quality factor. The separation between two cross-capacitor can be larger with help of transverses width of the T-shape resonator, and then the ZZ crosstalk coupling can be effectively suppressed. The asymmetric dc-SQUID is about 5 millimeters away from the Xmon qubits and only needs a small current on the flux bias line, which in principle creates less flux noises to superconducting Xmon qubits.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

DETC2002/CIE-34462 WEB-BASED INNOVATION ALERT SERVICES TO SUPPORT PRODUCT DESIGN EVOLUTION

ABSTRACT Technological innovations provide an opportunity to improve product performance and reduce cost. Therefore, design organizations are interested in monitoring technological innovations. A large number of innovations are announced every year. Monitoring them manually is very time consuming. We are developing web-based innovation-alert services that can be used to monitor and communicate information about innovations relevant to a particular product design. In this paper, we discuss the required infrastructure, relevant design issues, and our approach to developing web-based innovation alert services to support product design evolution. We also describe a prototype innovation monitoring service for computer components and an interactive tool to transform semi-structured web contents into semantic representations in XML

The Fish-Specific Protein Kinase (PKZ) Initiates Innate Immune Responses via IRF3- and ISGF3-Like Mediated Pathways

PKZ is a fish-specific protein kinase containing Zα domains. PKZ is known to induce apoptosis through phosphorylating eukaryotic initiation factor 2α kinase (eIF2α) in the same way as double-stranded RNA-dependent protein kinase (PKR), but its exact role in detecting pathogens remains to be fully elucidated. Herein, we have found that PKZ acts as a fish-specific DNA sensor by initiating IFN expression through IRF3- or ISGF3-like mediated pathways. The expression pattern of PKZ is similar to those of innate immunity mediators stimulated by poly (dA:dT) and poly (dG:dC). DNA-PKZ interaction can enhance PKZ phosphorylation and dimerization in vitro. These findings indicate that PKZ participates in cytoplasmic DNA-mediated signaling. Subcellular localization assays have also shown that PKZ is located in the cytoplasm, which suggests that PKZ acts as a cytoplasmic PRR. Meanwhile, co-IP assays have shown that PKZ can separately interact with IRF3, STING, ZDHHC1, eIF2α, IRF9, and STAT2. Further investigations have revealed that PKZ can activate IRF3 and STAT2; and that IRF3-dependent and ISGF3-like dependent mediators are critical for PKZ-induced IFN expression. These results demonstrate that PKZ acts as a special DNA pattern-recognition receptor, and that PKZ can trigger immune responses through IRF3-mediated or ISGF3-like mediated pathways in fish