Gravitoelectromagnetism and Dark Energy in Superconductors

A gravitomagnetic analogue of the London moment in superconductors can explain the anomalous Cooper pair mass excess reported by Janet Tate. Ultimately the gravitomagnetic London moment is attributed to the breaking of the principle of general covariance in superconductors. This naturally implies non-conservation of classical energy-momentum. Possible relation with the manifestation of dark energy in superconductors is questioned.Comment: 10 pages. Poster presented at "From Quantum to Cosmos - Fundamental Physics Research in Space" 22-24 May 2006, To Appear in Int. J. Mod. Phys.

Generation of Closed Timelike Curves with Rotating Superconductors

The spacetime metric around a rotating SuperConductive Ring (SCR) is deduced from the gravitomagnetic London moment in rotating superconductors. It is shown that theoretically it is possible to generate Closed Timelike Curves (CTC) with rotating SCRs. The possibility to use these CTC's to travel in time as initially idealized by G\"{o}del is investigated. It is shown however, that from a technology and experimental point of view these ideas are impossible to implement in the present context.Comment: 9 pages. Submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravit

Identification of geometrical models of interface evolution for dendritic crystal growth

This paper introduces a method for identifying geometrical models of interface evolution, directly from experimental imaging data. These local growth models relate normal growth velocity to curvature and its derivatives estimated along the growing interface. Such models can reproduce many qualitative features of dendritic crystal growth as well as predict quantitatively its early stages of evolution. Numerical simulations and experimental crystal growth data are used to demonstrate the applicability of this approach

Identification of radius-vector functions of interface evolution for star-shaped crystal growth

This paper introduces a new method based on a radius-vector function for identifying the spatio-temporal transition rule of star-shaped crystal growth directly from experimental crystal growth imaging data. From the morphology point of view, the growth is decomposed as initial conditions, uniform growth and directional growth, which is represented by a static polynomial model based on the Fourier expansion. A recursive model is also introduced to help understand the dynamic characteristics of the observed systems. The applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated using data from a simulation and from a real crystal growth experiment

Identification of a temperature dependent FitzHugh-Nagumo model for the Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction

This paper describes the identification of a temperature dependent FitzHugh-Nagumo model directly from experimental observations with controlled inputs. By studying the steady states and the trajectory of the phase of the variables, the stability of the model is analysed and a rule to generate oscillation waves is proposed. The dependence of the oscillation frequency and propagation speed on the model parameters is then investigated to seek the appropriate control variables, which then become functions of temperature in the identified model. The results show that the proposed approach can provide a good representation of the dynamics of the oscillatory behaviour of a BZ reaction

Mixed-source multi-document speech-to-text summarization

Speech-to-text summarization systems usually take as input the output of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system that is affected by issues like speech recognition errors, disfluencies, or difficulties in the accurate identification of sentence boundaries. We propose the inclusion of related, solid background information to cope with the difficulties of summarizing spoken language and the use of multi-document summarization techniques in single document speech- to-text summarization. In this work, we explore the possibilities offered by pho- netic information to select the background information and conduct a perceptual evaluation to better assess the relevance of the inclusion of that information. Results show that summaries generated using this approach are considerably better than those produced by an up-to-date latent semantic analysis (LSA) summarization method and suggest that humans prefer summaries restricted to the information conveyed in the input source.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Characterisation of crack tip fields under non-uniform fatigue loading

The paper analyses previously reported work, which uses digital image correlation to measure fatigue crack closure. As well as determining crack opening loads, the information on crack shape may be used to estimate the stress intensity factor, as well as other parameters in more complex models of crack tip fields. A number of specimens were subjected to single overload cycles, which produced a significant retardation in crack growth rate. The method previously applied to the analysis of constant amplitude loading is here used to analyse the single overload case. The stress intensity factor history is found to be very different in the two cases and the consequences of this observation for analysis of fatigue crack propagation are discussed

Higher-Power Coherent and Squeezed States

A closed form expression for the higher-power coherent states (eigenstates of $a^{j}$) is given. The cases j=3,4 are discussed in detail, including the time-evolution of the probability densities. These are compared to the case j=2, the even- and odd-coherent states. We give the extensions to the "effective" displacement-operator, higher-power squeezed states and to the ladder-operator/minimum-uncertainty, higher-power squeezed states. The properties of all these states are discussed.Comment: 23 pages including 9 figures. To be published in Optics Communication

Mapping the dialog act annotations of the LEGO corpus into ISO 24617-2 communicative functions

ISO 24617-2, the ISO standard for dialog act annotation, sets the ground for more comparable research in the area. However, the amount of data annotated according to it is still reduced, which impairs the development of approaches for automatic recognition. In this paper, we describe a mapping of the original dialog act labels of the LEGO corpus, which have been neglected, into the communicative functions of the standard. Although this does not lead to a complete annotation according to the standard, the 347 dialogs provide a relevant amount of data that can be used in the development of automatic communicative function recognition approaches, which may lead to a wider adoption of the standard. Using the 17 English dialogs of the DialogBank as gold standard, our preliminary experiments have shown that including the mapped dialogs during the training phase leads to improved performance while recognizing communicative functions in the Task dimension.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Automatic recognition of the general-purpose communicative functions defined by the ISO 24617-2 standard for dialog act annotation

From the perspective of a dialog system, it is important to identify the intention behind the segments in a dialog, since it provides an important cue regarding the information that is present in the segments and how they should be interpreted. ISO 24617-2, the standard for dialog act annotation, defines a hierarchically organized set of general-purpose communicative functions which correspond to different intentions that are relevant in the context of a dialog. We explore the automatic recognition of these communicative functions in the DialogBank, which is a reference set of dialogs annotated according to this standard. To do so, we propose adaptations of existing approaches to flat dialog act recognition that allow them to deal with the hierarchical classification problem. More specifically, we propose the use of an end-to-end hierarchical network with cascading outputs and maximum a posteriori path estimation to predict the communicative function at each level of the hierarchy, preserve the dependencies between the functions in the path, and decide at which level to stop. Furthermore, since the amount of dialogs in the DialogBank is small, we rely on transfer learning processes to reduce overfitting and improve performance. The results of our experiments show that our approach outperforms both a flat one and hierarchical approaches based on multiple classifiers and that each of its components plays an important role towards the recognition of general-purpose communicative functions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio