Time-Series Surveys and Pulsating Stars: The Near-Infrared Perspective

The purpose of this review is to discuss the advantages and problems of near-infrared surveys in observing pulsating stars in the Milky Way. One of the advantages of near-infrared surveys, when compared to optical counterparts, is that the interstellar extinction is significantly smaller. As we see in this review, a significant volume of the Galactic disk can be reached by infrared surveys but not by optical ones. Towards highly obscured regions in the Galactic mid-plane, however, the interstellar extinction causes serious problems even with near-infrared data in understanding the observational results. After a review on previous and current near-infrared surveys, we discuss the effects of the interstellar extinction in optical (including {\it Gaia}) to near-infrared broad bands based on a simple calculation using synthetic spectral energy distribution. We then review the recent results on classical Cepheids towards the Galactic center and the bulge, as a case study, to see the impact of the uncertainty in the extinction law. The extinction law, i.e. the wavelength dependency of the extinction, is not fully characterized, and its uncertainty makes it hard to make the correction. Its characterization is an urgent task in order to exploit the outcomes of ongoing large-scale surveys of pulsating stars, e.g. for drawing a map of pulsating stars across the Galactic disk.Comment: Conference on wide field variability surveys: a 21st-century perspective, 8 pages with 6 figures in pres

Notes on the Wess-Zumino-Witten-like structure: L∞L_{\infty } triplet and NS-NS superstring field theory

In the NS-NS sector of superstring field theory, there potentially exist three nilpotent generators of gauge transformations and two constraint equations: It makes the gauge algebra of type II theory somewhat complicated. In this paper, we show that every NS-NS actions have their WZW-like forms, and that a triplet of mutually commutative $L_{\infty }$ products completely determines the gauge structure of NS-NS superstring field theory via its WZW-like structure. We give detailed analysis about it and present its characteristic properties by focusing on two NS-NS actions proposed by arXiv:1512.03379 and arXiv:1403.0940.Comment: 23+3 pages; Published ve

Image processing for the extraction of nutritional information from food labels

Current techniques for tracking nutritional data require undesirable amounts of either time or man-power. People must choose between tediously recording and updating dietary information or depending on unreliable crowd-sourced or costly maintained databases. Our project looks to overcome these pitfalls by providing a programming interface for image analysis that will read and report the information present on a nutrition label directly. Our solution involves a C++ library that combines image pre-processing, optical character recognition, and post-processing techniques to pull the relevant information from an image of a nutrition label. We apply an understanding of a nutrition label\u27s content and data organization to approach the accuracy of traditional data-entry methods. Our system currently provides around 80% accuracy for most label images, and we will continue to work to improve our accuracy