Non-abelian Eikonals

A functional formulation and partial solution is given of the non-abelian eikonal problem associated with the exchange of non-interacting, charged or colored bosons between a pair of fermions, in the large $s$/small $t$ limit. A simple, functional ``contiguity" prescription is devised for extracting those terms which exponentiate, and appear to generate the leading, high-energy behavior of each perturbative order of this simplest non-abelian eikonal function; the lowest non-trivial order agrees with the corresponding SU(N) perturbative amplitude, while higher-order contributions to this eikonal generate an ``effective Reggeization" of the exchanged bosons, resembling previous results for the perturbative amplitude. One exact and several approximate examples are given, including an application to self-energy radiative corrections. In particular, for this class of graphs and to all orders in the coupling, we calculate the leading-log eikonal for SU(2). Based on this result, we conjecture the form of the eikonal scattering amplitude for SU(N).Comment: 19 pages, late

Gravity-induced segregation of cohesionless granular mixtures

Working with the context of a theory proposed recently by Fried et al. (2001), we consider a one-dimensional problem involving granular mixture of K > 2 discrete sizes bounded below by an impermeable base, above by an evolving free surface, and subject to gravity. We demonstrate the existence of a solution in which the medium segregates by particle size. For a mixture of small and large particles (K = 2), we use methods of Smoller (1994) to show that the segregated solution is unique. Further, for a mixture of small, medium, and large particles (K = 3), we use LeVeque's (1994) CLAWPACK to construct numerical solutions and find that these compare favorably with analytical predictions.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Healthcare Event and Activity Logging.

The health of patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) can change frequently and inexplicably. Crucial events and activities responsible for these changes often go unnoticed. This paper introduces healthcare event and action logging (HEAL) which automatically and unobtrusively monitors and reports on events and activities that occur in a medical ICU room. HEAL uses a multimodal distributed camera network to monitor and identify ICU activities and estimate sanitation-event qualifiers. At the core is a novel approach to infer person roles based on semantic interactions, a critical requirement in many healthcare settings where individuals' identities must not be identified. The proposed approach for activity representation identifies contextual aspects basis and estimates aspect weights for proper action representation and reconstruction. The flexibility of the proposed algorithms enables the identification of people roles by associating them with inferred interactions and detected activities. A fully working prototype system is developed, tested in a mock ICU room and then deployed in two ICU rooms at a community hospital, thus offering unique capabilities for data gathering and analytics. The proposed method achieves a role identification accuracy of 84% and a backtracking role identification of 79% for obscured roles using interaction and appearance features on real ICU data. Detailed experimental results are provided in the context of four event-sanitation qualifiers: clean, transmission, contamination, and unclean

Robust Forecasting of Non-Stationary Time Series

This paper proposes a robust forecasting method for non-stationary time series. The time series is modelled using non-parametric heteroscedastic regression, and fitted by a localized MM-estimator, combining high robustness and large efficiency. The proposed method is shown to produce reliable forecasts in the presence of outliers, non-linearity, and heteroscedasticity. In the absence of outliers, the forecasts are only slightly less precise than those based on a localized Least Squares estimator. An additional advantage of the MM-estimator is that it provides a robust estimate of the local variability of the time series.Heteroscedasticity;Non-parametric regression;Prediction;Outliers;Robustness

About the morphology of dwarf spheroidal galaxies and their dark matter content

The morphological properties of the Carina, Sculptor and Fornax dwarfs are investigated using new wide field data with a total area of 29 square degrees. The stellar density maps are derived, hinting that Sculptor possesses tidal tails indicating interaction with the Milky Way. Contrary to previous studies we cannot find any sign of breaks in the density profiles for the Carina and Fornax dwarfs. The possible existence of tidal tails in Sculptor and of King limiting radii in Fornax and Carina are used to derive global M/L ratios, without using kinematic data. By matching those M/L ratios to kinematically derived values we are able to constrain the orbital parameters of the three dwarfs. Fornax cannot have M/L smaller than 3 and must be close to its perigalacticon now. The other extreme is Sculptor that needs to be on an orbit with an eccentricity bigger than 0.5 to be able to form tidal tails despite its kinematic M/L.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, accepted by A&

Eye-CU: Sleep Pose Classification for Healthcare using Multimodal Multiview Data

Manual analysis of body poses of bed-ridden patients requires staff to continuously track and record patient poses. Two limitations in the dissemination of pose-related therapies are scarce human resources and unreliable automated systems. This work addresses these issues by introducing a new method and a new system for robust automated classification of sleep poses in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) environment. The new method, coupled-constrained Least-Squares (cc-LS), uses multimodal and multiview (MM) data and finds the set of modality trust values that minimizes the difference between expected and estimated labels. The new system, Eye-CU, is an affordable multi-sensor modular system for unobtrusive data collection and analysis in healthcare. Experimental results indicate that the performance of cc-LS matches the performance of existing methods in ideal scenarios. This method outperforms the latest techniques in challenging scenarios by 13% for those with poor illumination and by 70% for those with both poor illumination and occlusions. Results also show that a reduced Eye-CU configuration can classify poses without pressure information with only a slight drop in its performance.Comment: Ten-page manuscript including references and ten figure

Detection of phase singularities with a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor

While adaptive optical systems are able to remove moderate wavefront distortions in scintillated optical beams, phase singularities that appear in strongly scintillated beams can severely degrade the performance of such an adaptive optical system. Therefore, the detection of these phase singularities is an important aspect of strong scintillation adaptive optics. We investigate the detection of phase singularities with the aid of a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor and show that, in spite of some systematical deficiencies inherent to the Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor, it can be used for the reliable detection of phase singularities, irrespective of their morphologies. We provide full analytical results, together with numerical simulations of the detection process.Comment: 23 pages, 9 figure

Microwave Tube Research

Contains reports on three research projects

Theory of the cold collision frequency shift in 1S--2S spectroscopy of Bose-Einstein-condensed and non-condensed hydrogen

We show that a correct formulation of the cold collision frequency shift for two photon spectroscopy of Bose-condensed and cold non-Bose-condensed hydrogen is consistent with experimental data. Our treatment includes transport and inhomogeneity into the theory of a non-condensed gas, which causes substantial changes in the cold collision frequency shift for the ordinary thermal gas, as a result of the very high frequency (3.9kHz) of transverse trap mode. For the condensed gas, we find substantial corrections arise from the inclusion of quasiparticles, whose number is very large because of the very low frequency (10.2Hz) of the longitudinal trap mode. These two effects together account for the apparent absence of a "factor of two" between the two possibilities. Our treatment considers only the Doppler-free measurements, but could be extended to Doppler-sensitive measurements. For Bose-condensed hydrogen, we predict a characteristic "foot" extending into higher detunings than can arise from the condensate alone, as a result of a correct treatment of the statistics of thermal quasiparticles.Comment: 16 page J Phys B format plus 6 postscript figure