A Vexing Question in Motor Control: The Degrees of Freedom Problem

The human “marionette” is extremely complex and multi-articulated: anatomical redundancy (in terms of Degrees of Freedom: DoFs), kinematic redundancy (movements can have different trajectories, velocities, and accelerations and yet achieve the same goal, according to the principle of Motor Equivalence), and neurophysiological redundancy (many more muscles than DoFs and multiple motor units for each muscle). Although it is quite obvious that such abundance is not noxious at all because, in contrast, it is instrumental for motor learning, allowing the nervous system to “explore” the space of feasible actions before settling on an elegant and possibly optimal solution, the crucial question then boils down to figure out how the nervous system “chooses/selects/recruits/modulates” task-dependent subsets of countless assemblies of DoFs as functional motor synergies. Despite this daunting conceptual riddle, human purposive behavior in daily life activities is a proof of concept that solutions can be found easily and quickly by the embodied brain of the human cognitive agent. The point of view suggested in this essay is to frame the question above in the old-fashioned but still seminal observation by Marr and Poggio that cognitive agents should be regarded as Generalized Information Processing Systems (GIPS) and should be investigated according to three nearly independent but complementary levels of analysis: 1) the computational level, 2) the algorithmic level, and 3) the implementation level. In this framework, we attempt to discriminate as well as aggregate the different hypotheses and solutions proposed so far: the optimal control hypothesis, the muscle synergy hypothesis, the equilibrium point hypothesis, or the uncontrolled manifold hypothesis, to mention the most popular ones. The proposed GIPS follows the strategy of factoring out shaping and timing by adopting a force-field based approach (the Passive Motion Paradigm) that is inspired by the Equilibrium Point Hypothesis, extended in such a way to represent covert as well overt actions. In particular, it is shown how this approach can explain spatio-temporal invariances and, at the same time, solve the Degrees of Freedom Problem.

Manifestation of Energy and Entropy of Particles in a Box

The energy and entropy, expressed in free energy, determine the behavior of a system. Therefore, infinite knowledge of these two quantities leads to precise prediction of the system's trajectories. Here, we study how the energy and entropy affect the distribution of a two-component system in a box. First, using a model, we intuitively show that large particles prefer to position at contact with the wall as it accompanies an increase of the system's entropy. We intuitively show that this is a consequence of maximizing the accessible states for fluctuating degrees of freedom as a portion of excluded volumes reside outside of the box when they locate near the wall. Then we employ molecular dynamics simulations to extract the effect of entropy and energy on the binary mixture distribution and how they compete with each other to determine the system's configuration. While particle-particle and particle-wall attraction energies affect the distribution of particles, we show that the emergent entropic forces --- quasi-gravitational --- have a significant contribution to the configuration of the system. This system is realized clearly for a binary mixture of hard spheres in a box with reflective walls.

Tree Inference: Response Time and Other Measures in a Binary Multinomial Processing Tree, Representation and Uniqueness of Parameters

A Multinomial Processing Tree (MPT) is a directed tree with a probability associated with each arc and partitioned terminal vertices. We consider an additional parameter for each arc, a measure such as time. Each vertex represents a process. An arc descending from a vertex represents selection of a process outcome. A source vertex represents processing beginning with stimulus presentation and a terminal vertex represents a response. An experimental factor selectively influences a vertex if changing the factor level changes parameter values on arcs descending from that vertex and no others. Earlier work shows that if each of two factors selectively influences a different vertex in an arbitrary MPT it is equivalent to one of two simple MPTs. Which applies depends on whether the two selectively influenced vertices are ordered by the factors or not. A special case, the Standard Binary Tree for Ordered Processes, arises if the vertices are ordered and the factor selectively influencing the first vertex changes parameter values on only two arcs. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions, testable by bootstrapping, for this case. Parameter values are not unique. We give admissible transformations for them. We calculate degrees of freedom needed for goodness of fit tests.

Ferroelectricity Modulates Polaronic Coupling at Multiferroic Interfaces

Physics of the multiferroic interfaces is currently understood mostly within a phenomenological framework including screening of the polarization field and depolarizing charges. Largely unexplored still remains the band dependence of the interfacial charge modulation, as well as the associated changes of the electron-phonon interaction, coupling the charge and lattice degrees of freedom. Here, multiferroic heterostructures of the colossal-magnetoresistance manganite La1-xSrxMnO3 buried under ferroelectric BaTiO3 and PbZrxTi1-xO3 are explored using soft-X-ray angle-resolved photoemission. The experimental band dispersions from the buried La1-xSrxMnO3 identify coexisting two-dimensional hole and three-dimensional electron charge carriers. The ferroelectric polarization modulates their charge density, changing the band filling and orbital occupation in the interfacial region. Furthermore, these changes in the carrier density affect the coupling of the 2D holes and 3D electrons with the lattice which forms large Froelich polarons inherently reducing mobility of the charge carriers. We find that the fast dynamic response of electrons makes them much more efficient in screening of the electron-lattice interaction compared to the holes. Our k-resolved results on the orbital occupancy, band filling and electron-lattice interaction in multiferroic oxide heterostructures modulated by the ferroelectric polarization disclose most fundamental physics of these systems needed for further progress of beyond-CMOS ferro-functional electronics.

Assessing the robustness and scalability of the accelerated pseudo-transient method towards exascale computing

The development of highly efficient, robust and scalable numerical algorithms lags behind the rapid increase in massive parallelism of modern hardware. We address this challenge with the accelerated pseudo-transient iterative method and present here a physically motivated derivation. We analytically determine optimal iteration parameters for a variety of basic physical processes and confirm the validity of theoretical predictions with numerical experiments. We provide an efficient numerical implementation of pseudo-transient solvers on graphical processing units (GPUs) using the Julia language. We achieve a parallel efficiency over 96 % on 2197 GPUs in distributed memory parallelisation weak scaling benchmarks. 2197 GPUs allow for unprecedented terascale solutions of 3D variable viscosity Stokes flow on 49953 grid cells involving over 1.2 trillion degrees of freedom. We verify the robustness of the method by handling contrasts up to 9 orders of magnitude in material parameters such as viscosity, and arbitrary distribution of viscous inclusions for different flow configurations. Moreover, we show that this method is well suited to tackle strongly nonlinear problems such as shear-banding in a visco-elasto-plastic medium. A GPU-based implementation can outperform CPU-based direct-iterative solvers in terms of wall-time even at relatively low resolution. We additionally motivate the accessibility of the method by its conciseness, flexibility, physically motivated derivation and ease of implementation. This solution strategy has thus a great potential for future high-performance computing applications, and for paving the road to exascale in the geosciences and beyond.

Recent developments on the magnetic and electrical transport properties of FeRh- and Rh-based heterostructures

It is fascinating how the binary alloy FeRh has been the subject of a vast number of studies almost solely for a single-phase transition. This is, however, reasonable, considering how various degrees of freedom are intertwined around this phase transition. Furthermore, the tunability of this phase transition—the large response to tuning parameters, such as electric field and strain—endows FeRh huge potential in applications. Compared to the bulk counterpart, FeRh in the thin-film form is superior in many aspects: Materials in thin-film form are often more technologically relevant in the first place; in addition, the substrates add extra dimensions to the tunability, especially when the substrate itself is multiferroic. Here we review recent developments on the magnetic and transport properties of heterostructures based on FeRh and its end-member Rh, with the latter providing a new route to exploiting spin-orbit interactions in functional spintronic heterostructures other than the more often employed 5d metals. The methods utilized in the investigation of the physical properties in these systems, and the design principles employed in the engineering thereof may conceivably be extended to similar phase transitions to other magnetic materials.