144 research outputs found
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Adding Carbon to the Equation in Online Flight Search
This study explores the potential to promote lower-emissions air travel by providing consumers with information about the carbon emissions of alternative flight choices in the context of online flight search and booking. Researchers surveyed over 450 UC Davis faculty, researchers, and staff, asking them to choose among hypothetical flight options for university-related business trips. Emissions estimates for flight alternatives were prominently displayed alongside cost, layovers and airport, and the lowest-emissions flight was labeled “Greenest Flight”. The researchers found an impressive rate of willingness to pay for lower-emissions flights: around 56,000 reduction in airfare costs, due to an increased willingness of travelers to take advantage of cheaper (often nonstop) flight options out of SFO. Broader university policies encouraging lower-emissions flights and enhanced public transportation within the multi-airport mega-region would likely support much greater carbon savings. Institutionalizing this “nudge” within organizations with large travel budgets, like the UC system, could have an industry-wide impact in aviation.View the NCST Project Webpag
Normal variation for adaptive feature size
The change in the normal between any two nearby points on a closed, smooth
surface is bounded with respect to the local feature size (distance to the
medial axis). An incorrect proof of this lemma appeared as part of the analysis
of the "crust" algorithm of Amenta and Bern
Regression Depth and Center Points
We show that, for any set of n points in d dimensions, there exists a
hyperplane with regression depth at least ceiling(n/(d+1)). as had been
conjectured by Rousseeuw and Hubert. Dually, for any arrangement of n
hyperplanes in d dimensions there exists a point that cannot escape to infinity
without crossing at least ceiling(n/(d+1)) hyperplanes. We also apply our
approach to related questions on the existence of partitions of the data into
subsets such that a common plane has nonzero regression depth in each subset,
and to the computational complexity of regression depth problems.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure
GPU LSM: A Dynamic Dictionary Data Structure for the GPU
We develop a dynamic dictionary data structure for the GPU, supporting fast
insertions and deletions, based on the Log Structured Merge tree (LSM). Our
implementation on an NVIDIA K40c GPU has an average update (insertion or
deletion) rate of 225 M elements/s, 13.5x faster than merging items into a
sorted array. The GPU LSM supports the retrieval operations of lookup, count,
and range query operations with an average rate of 75 M, 32 M and 23 M
queries/s respectively. The trade-off for the dynamic updates is that the
sorted array is almost twice as fast on retrievals. We believe that our GPU LSM
is the first dynamic general-purpose dictionary data structure for the GPU.Comment: 11 pages, accepted to appear on the Proceedings of IEEE International
Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'18
Largest Placement of One Convex Polygon Inside Another
Our aim was to detect tau tangles and beta amyloid plaques in retina for the early diagnosis of Alzheimers Disease (AD)
Surface Reconstruction from Noisy Point Clouds
We show that a simple modification of the power crust algorithm for surface reconstruction produces correct outputs in presence of noise. This is proved using a fairly realistic noise model. Our theoretical results are related to the problem of computing a stable subset of the medial axis. We demostrate the effectiveness of our algorithm with a number of experimental results
Sampling the conformation of protein surface residues for flexible protein docking
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The problem of determining the physical conformation of a protein dimer, given the structures of the two interacting proteins in their unbound state, is a difficult one. The location of the docking interface is determined largely by geometric complementarity, but finding complementary geometry is complicated by the flexibility of the backbone and side-chains of both proteins. We seek to generate candidates for docking that approximate the bound state well, even in cases where there is backbone and/or side-chain difference from unbound to bound states.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We divide the surfaces of each protein into local patches and describe the effect of side-chain flexibility on each patch by sampling the space of conformations of its side-chains. Likely positions of individual side-chains are given by a rotamer library; this library is used to derive a sample of possible mutual conformations within the patch. We enforce broad coverage of torsion space. We control the size of the sample by using energy criteria to eliminate unlikely configurations, and by clustering similar configurations, resulting in 50 candidates for a patch, a manageable number for docking.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Using a database of protein dimers for which the bound and unbound structures of the monomers are known, we show that from the unbound patch we are able to generate candidates for docking that approximate the bound structure. In patches where backbone change is small (within 1 Å RMSD of bound), we are able to account for flexibility and generate candidates that are good approximations of the bound state (82% are within 1 Å and 98% are within 1.4 Å RMSD of the bound conformation). We also find that even in cases of moderate backbone flexibility our candidates are able to capture some of the overall shape change. Overall, in 650 of 700 test patches we produce a candidate that is either within 1 Å RMSD of the bound conformation or is closer to the bound state than the unbound is.</p
Optimal Point Placement for Mesh Smoothing
We study the problem of moving a vertex in an unstructured mesh of
triangular, quadrilateral, or tetrahedral elements to optimize the shapes of
adjacent elements. We show that many such problems can be solved in linear time
using generalized linear programming. We also give efficient algorithms for
some mesh smoothing problems that do not fit into the generalized linear
programming paradigm.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures. A preliminary version of this paper was
presented at the 8th ACM/SIAM Symp. on Discrete Algorithms (SODA '97). This
is the final version, and will appear in a special issue of J. Algorithms for
papers from SODA '9
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