Distribution matching for transduction

Many transductive inference algorithms assume that distributions over training and test estimates should be related, e.g. by providing a large margin of separation on both sets. We use this idea to design a transduction algorithm which can be used without modification for classification, regression, and structured estimation. At its heart we exploit the fact that for a good learner the distributions over the outputs on training and test sets should match. This is a classical two-sample problem which can be solved efficiently in its most general form by using distance measures in Hilbert Space. It turns out that a number of existing heuristics can be viewed as special cases of our approach.

The Effect of Inlet Guide Vanes on Inlet Flow Distortion Transfer and Transonic Fan Stability

An investigation was carried out into the effects of variable inlet guide vanes (VIGVs) on the performance and stability margin of a transonic fan in the presence of inlet flow distortion. The study was carried out using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and validated with experimental data. The capability of CFD to predict the changes in performance with or without VIGVs in the presence of an inlet flow distortion is assessed. Results show that the VIGVs improve the performance and stability margin and do so by reducing the amount of swirl at inlet to the rotor component of the fan.

Cross-comparison of fast reactor concepts with various coolants

Four fast reactor concepts using lead (LFR), liquid salt, NaCl-KCl-MgCl2 (LSFR), sodium (SFR), and supercritical CO2 (GFR) coolants are compared. Since economy of scale and power conversion system compactness are the same by virtue of the consistent 2400 MWt rating and use of the S-CO2 power conversion system, the achievable plant thermal efficiency, core power density and core specific powers become the dominant factors. The potential to achieve the highest efficiency among the four reactor concepts can be ranked from highest to lowest as follows: (1) GFR, (2) LFR and LSFR, and (3) SFR. Both the lead- and salt-cooled designs achieve about 30% higher power density than the gas-cooled reactor, but attain power density 3 times smaller than that of the sodium-cooled reactor. Fuel cycle costs are favored for the sodium reactor by virtue of its high specific power of 65 kW/kgHM compared to the lead, salt and gas reactor values of 45, 35, and 21 kW/kgHM, respectively. In terms of safety, all concepts can be designed to accommodate the unprotected limiting accidents through passive means in a self-controllable manner. However, it does not seem to be a preferable option for the GFR where the active or semi-passive approach will likely result in a more economic and reliable plant. Lead coolant with its superior neutronic characteristics and the smallest coolant temperature reactivity coefficient is easiest to design for self-controllability, while the LSFR requires special reactivity devices to overcome its large positive coolant temperature coefficient. The GFR required a special core design using BeO diluent and a supercritical CO2 reflector to achieve negative coolant void worth-one of the conditions necessary for inherent shutdown following large LOCA. Protected accidents need to be given special attention in the LSFR and LFR due to the small margin to freezing of their coolants, and to a lesser extent in the SFR. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Constructive Nonlinear Control

In this book several streams of nonlinear control theory are merged and di- rected towards a constructive solution of the feedback stabilization problem. Analytic, geometric and asymptotic concepts are assembled as design tools for a wide variety of nonlinear phenomena and structures. Di®erential-geometric concepts reveal important structural properties of nonlinear systems, but al- low no margin for modeling errors. To overcome this de¯ciency, we combine them with analytic concepts of passivity, optimality and Lyapunov stability. In this way geometry serves as a guide for construction of design procedures, while analysis provides robustness tools which geometry lacks.

Bayesian Structured Prediction Using Gaussian Processes

We introduce a conceptually novel structured prediction model, GPstruct, which is kernelized, non-parametric and Bayesian, by design. We motivate the model with respect to existing approaches, among others, conditional random fields (CRFs), maximum margin Markov networks (M3N), and structured support vector machines (SVMstruct), which embody only a subset of its properties. We present an inference procedure based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo. The framework can be instantiated for a wide range of structured objects such as linear chains, trees, grids, and other general graphs. As a proof of concept, the model is benchmarked on several natural language processing tasks and a video gesture segmentation task involving a linear chain structure. We show prediction accuracies for GPstruct which are comparable to or exceeding those of CRFs and SVMstruct.

100 Gigabit Ethernet transmission enabled by carrierless amplitude and phase modulation using QAM receivers

Simulations have investigated single laser 100G Ethernet links enabled by CAP-16 using QAM receivers that not only lower significantly system timing jitter sensitivity but also outperform PAM and standard CAP in terms of power margin. © 2013 OSA.

FEC-free 50 m 1.5 Gb/s plastic optical fibre link using CAP modulation for home networks

LED-based carrierless amplitude and phase modulation is investigated for a multi-gigabit plastic optical fibre link. An FPGA-based 1.5 Gbit/s error free transmission over 50 m standard SI-POF using CAP64 is achieved, providing 2.9 dB power margin without forward error correction. © 2012 OSA.

100 Gigabit ethernet transmission enabled by carrierless amplitude and phase modulation using QAM receivers

Simulations have investigated single laser 100G Ethernet links enabled by CAP-16 using QAM receivers that not only lower significantly system timing jitter sensitivity but also outperform PAM and standard CAP in terms of power margin. © 2013 OSA.

Onychostoma virgulatum, a new species of cyprinid fish (Pisces: Teleostei) from southern Anhui Province, South China

Onychostoma virgulatum, new species, is described from the Qiupu River, a tributary on the Southern bank of the lower Yangtze River at Shitai County, southern Anhui Province, South China. It shares with O. fusiforme and O. meridionale the presence of a longitudinal dark brown stripe extending along the lateral line, a character separating them from all other congeners of the moderate-mouth group diagnosed by having a slightly arched or nearly transverse mouth opening (with the extremities slightly curved posteriorly), its width being equal to or slightly less than the width of head at this same point, and a short postlabial groove extending along half of the length of the lateral margin of the lower jaw. Onychostoma virgulatum differs from both in the presence of two pairs of barbels in adults, from O. fusiforme in the body depth, caudal-peduncle depth, and position of pelvic and anal fins, and from O. meridionale in the structure of the last simple dorsal-fin ray.

Otolith microstructure of Oxygymnocypris stewartii (Cypriniformes, Cyprinidae, Schizothoracinae) in the Lhasa River in Tibet, China

Otolith microstructure of Oxygymnocypris stewartii collected from the Lhasa River was examined and described with regards to the early life history events. The monthly changes in the number of microincrements on the margin of the otolith were examined to validate the approximately daily periodicity of otolith increment formation. The microstructure of otoliths was used to detect changes in microincrement deposition patterns corresponding with events during early life. The annuli, microincrements and checks including the hatch check, yolk absorption check and several recurrent patterns in the otolith were described. Periodicity of the recurrent patterns was weekly, fortnightly and monthly. Through counting the number of the microincrements, it was confirmed that the primary growth of O. stewartii was in a period of 7 or 8 months from late March to October; it was estimated that O. stewartii might hatch between April and May.

Molecular characterization and expression pattern of AFPIV during embryogenesis in gibel carp(Carassiu auratus gibelio)

As a new type of AFPs, AFPIV has been firstly identified in longhorn sculpin (Myoxocephalus octodecimspinosus), and in recent years, its cDNA and amino acid sequence have been reported, and its pancreatic synthesis has been firstly reported in polar fish. However, its expression patterns during fish embryogenesis have not been elucidated yet. By differential screening, we cloned the CagAFPIV in gibel carp, Carassius auratus gibelio, demonstrated its predominant expression during embryogenesis. RT-PCR detection revealed that CagAFPIV was first transcribed from blastula stage and kept a high level during embryogenesis and declined remarkably in hatched larva. In situ hybridization revealed that CagAFPIV transcripts were firstly distributed over the margin and marginal blastomere in blastula stage embryos, at the early-gastrula stage the positive signals distributed in the marginal cells and the internalization cells, and later restricted to the cells the yolk syncytial layer (YSL) from later gastrula stage to larva stage. Consistently, the CagAFPIV protein also kept a high level during embryogenesis, and the high protein level retained some days after the larva hatched. Our work, for the first time, revealed the dynamic expression and distribution of CagAFPIV during embryogenesis.

Pseudobagrus fui Miao, a valid bagrid species from the Yangtze River drainage, South China (Teleostei: Bagridae)

Pseudobagrus fui Miao is a valid bagrid species that can be separated from all its congeners in having 27-33 anal-fin rays. Among the species of Pseudobagrus, it forms part of a group of approximately 20 species putatively characterized by having a smooth anterior margin of the pectoral-fin spine and short maxillary barbels not extending to the base of the pectoral-fin spine. Pseudobagrus fui, together with P. nitidus and P. vachelli, can be differentiated from all other fork-tailed species of this group by having no fewer than 20 branched anal-fin rays, the posterior end of the anal-fin base posterior to the vertical through the posterior end of the adipose-fin base, and anal-fin base longer than the adipose-fin base. It further differs from P. nitidus in having a gas bladder without beaded lateral and posterior margins, and from P. vachelli in having short maxillary barbels not extending to the base of the pectoral-fin spine. Pseudobagrus fui is currently known from the main stream of the upper Yangtze River and its tributaries, the Min River, Jialing River, Tuo River, Wu River and Chishui River in Sichuan Province, Guizhou Province, and the Chongqing City. The identity and nomenclature of Pseudobagrus nitidus is also discussed.

Kernelized log linear models for continuous speech recognition

Large margin criteria and discriminative models are two effective improvements for HMM-based speech recognition. This paper proposed a large margin trained log linear model with kernels for CSR. To avoid explicitly computing in the high dimensional feature space and to achieve the nonlinear decision boundaries, a kernel based training and decoding framework is proposed in this work. To make the system robust to noise a kernel adaptation scheme is also presented. Previous work in this area is extended in two directions. First, most kernels for CSR focus on measuring the similarity between two observation sequences. The proposed joint kernels defined a similarity between two observation-label sequence pairs on the sentence level. Second, this paper addresses how to efficiently employ kernels in large margin training and decoding with lattices. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at using large margin kernel-based log linear models for CSR. The model is evaluated on a noise corrupted continuous digit task: AURORA 2.0. © 2013 IEEE.

Validation of a method of estimating age, modelling growth, and describing the age composition of Coilia mystus from the Yangtze Estuary, China

A collection of 577 Coilia mystus was made during April 2006 and 2007 from China's Yangtze Estuary to estimate the age structure and growth patterns of the population. Examination of sectioned sagittal otoliths revealed a periodic straight/curved growth pattern. The straight zone was from April to November, and the curved zone from October to May, indicating annual periodicity. Annual periodicity was also verified by margin zone analysis. The shift from a curved-zone to the next straight-zone stanza was defined as an annulus. The fish from which the otoliths were taken were 0-5 years old. The von Bertalanffy growth function was fitted to standard length (LS)-at-age data as L-S = 215.16 (1 - e(-0.53(t+0.30))) (n = 577, r(2) = 0.81, p < 0.05). The mature females included five age classes, ages 1 and 2 accounting for 74.3% of the population. The mature males included fish aged 1 and 2, those at age 1 accounting for 86.4% of the population. Mean length was smaller, and annual growth less, for mature males than for females of comparable age. The study demonstrated that the Yangtze population of C. mystus consists of more age classes than previously thought and that the age structure of the population needs to be considered in management decisions.

FEC-free 50 m 1.5 Gb/s plastic optical fibre link using CAP modulation for home networks

LED-based carrierless amplitude and phase modulation is investigated for a multi-gigabit plastic optical fibre link. An FPGA-based 1.5 Gbit/s error free transmission over 50 m standard SI-POF using CAP64 is achieved, providing 2.9 dB power margin without forward error correction. © 2012 Optical Society of America.