An Adaptive Application Framework with Customizable Quality Metrics

Many embedded environments require applications to produce outcomes under different, potentially changing, resource constraints. Relaxing application semantics through approximations enables trading off resource usage for outcome quality. Although quality is a highly subjective notion, previous work assumes given, fixed low-level quality metrics that often lack a strong correlation to a user’s higher-level quality experience. Users may also change their minds with respect to their quality expectations depending on the resource budgets they are willing to dedicate to an execution. This motivates the need for an adaptive application framework where users provide execution budgets and a customized quality notion. This article presents a novel adaptive program graph representation that enables user-level, customizable quality based on basic quality aspects defined by application developers. Developers also define application configuration spaces, with possible customization to eliminate undesirable configurations. At runtime, the graph enables the dynamic selection of the configuration with maximal customized quality within the user-provided resource budget. An adaptive application framework based on our novel graph representation has been implemented on Android and Linux platforms and evaluated on eight benchmark programs, four with fully customizable quality. Using custom quality instead of the default quality, users may improve their subjective quality experience value by up to 3.59×, with 1.76× on average under different resource constraints. Developers are able to exploit their application structure knowledge to define configuration spaces that are on average 68.7% smaller as compared to existing, structure-oblivious approaches. The overhead of dynamic reconfiguration averages less than 1.84% of the overall application execution time.

On pion mass and decay constant from theory

We calculate the pion mass from Goldstone modes in the Higgs mechanism related to the neutron decay. The Goldstone pion modes acquire mass by a vacuum misalignment of the Higgs field. The size of the misalignment is controlled by the ratio between the electronic and the nucleonic energy scales. The nucleonic energy scale is involved in the neutron to proton transformation and the electronic scale is involved in the related creation of the electronic state in the course of the electroweak neutron decay. The respective scales influence the mapping of the intrinsic configuration spaces used in our description. The configuration spaces are the Lie groups U(3) for the nucleonic sector and U(2) for the electronic sector. These spaces are both compact and lead to periodic potentials in the Hamiltonians in coordinate space. The periodicity and strengths of these potentials control the vacuum misalignment and leads to a pion mass of 135.2(1.5) MeV with an uncertainty mainly from the fine structure coupling at pionic energies. The pion decay constant 92 MeV results from comparing the fourth order self-coupling in an effective pion field theory with the corresponding fourth order term in the Higgs potential. We suggest analogies with the Goldberger-Treiman relation.

General null asymptotics and superrotation-compatible configuration spaces in d ≥ 4

We address the problem of consistent Campiglia-Laddha superrotations in d > 4 by solving Bondi-Sachs gauge vacuum Einstein equations at the non-linear level with the most general boundary conditions preserving the null nature of infinity. We discuss how to generalise the boundary structure to make the configuration space compatible with supertanslation-like and superrotation-like transformations. One possibility requires the time-independent boundary metric on the cuts of "Image missing" to be non-Einstein, while the other sticks to Einstein but time-dependent metrics. Both are novel features with respect to the four dimensional case, where time-dependence of the two-dimensional cross-sectional metric is not required and the Einstein condition is trivially satisfied. Other cases are also discussed. These conditions imply that the configuration spaces are not asymptotically flat in the standard sense. We discuss the implications on the construction of the phase space and the relationship with soft scattering theorems. We show that in even spacetime dimensions, the initial data compatible with such asymptotic symmetries produce maximally polyhomogeneous expansions of the metric and we advance a potential interpretation of this structure in terms of AdS/CFT and realizations of Ricci-flat holography.

Potential Energy Surfaces for Conceptual Design and Analysis of Mechanical Systems

Current computational Design Synthesis approaches have had trouble generating components with higher kinematic pairs and have instead relied on libraries of predefined components. However, higher kinematic pairs are ubiquitous in many mechanical devices such as ratchets, latches, locks, trigger mechanisms, clock escapements, and materials handling systems. In many cases there is a need to synthesize new higher kinematic pair devices. To address this problem, we develop a new representation for mechanical systems that extends the capabilities of configuration spaces to consider arbitrary energy storing mechanical devices. The key idea underlying this representation is the use of potential energy surfaces as a generalization of configuration spaces. This generalization enables modelling of mechanical systems in a physics independent manner and captures behaviors such as dynamics. By modeling a device through the lens of a potential energy surface, we demonstrate that differentiable simulation is possible. Differentiable simulation enables efficient calculation of gradients of potential energy surface parameters with respect to an objective function that depends on trajectories taken on the potential energy surface. This allows synthesis of mechanical devices with desired kinematic and dynamic behavior through gradient descent. We demonstrate this through several synthesis examples including positioning devices (e.g., a funnel) and timing devices (e.g., an oscillator).