Articles — Thesis

The Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) is a NASA long-duration balloon experiment with the primary goal of detecting ultra-high-energy (\(> 10^{18}\)eV) neutrinos via the Askaryan Effect. In the fourth ANITA mission, the Tunable Universal Filter Frontend (TUFF) boards were deployed for mitigation of narrow-band, anthropogenic noise with tunable, switchable notch filters. They contributed to a factor of 2.8 higher total instrument livetime in ANITA-4 compared to ANITA-3. A search for a diffuse flux of ultra-high-energy neutrinos was conducted using the data collected during the ANITA-3 flight with a new approach where the Antarctic ice area is sectioned off into bins and a search is performed with different thresholds in different bins. The binned analysis methods were extended to the development of a search for neutrinos from Gamma Ray Bursts, implementing constraints in time, and for the first time, in direction. Lower analysis thresholds were achieved in a feasibility search even when extending the search to include longer afterglow periods. Authored with osudiss-2.cls (v0.9.1)

General Game Playing (GGP) is the playing of a wide variety games you may have never seen before, by being told nothing but the rules of the game at run time. This sets it apart from traditional specific game players, like the famous chess player Deep Blue. Deep Blue can beat the world chess champion at chess however, it has absolutely no idea how to play checkers. It is designed for one particular game and cannot adapt to rule changes, and certainly cannot play entirely different games. The goal of this project is to create a program that will play a wide variety of 2d games given descriptions of their rules without the creator of the program having ever known of the games. This report will cover the design and implementation of this project, as well as the background research performed and reflections on the outcome of the project.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the ability of cardiovascular biomarkers calculated from peripheral pulse waveforms to estimate central properties of the cardiovascular system (e.g. aortic stiffness) using nonlinear one-dimensional (1-D) modelling of pulse wave propagation in the arterial network. To test these biomarkers, I have produced novel 1-D models of pulse wave propagation under normal and pathological conditions. In the first part of my thesis, I extended the modelling capabilities of the existing 1-D/0-D code to represent arterial blood flow under diabetes, hypertension, and combined diabetes and hypertension. Cardiac and vascular parameters of the 1-D model were tailored to best match data available in the literature to produce generalised hypertensive, diabetic, and combined diabetic and hypertensive population models. Using these models, I have shown that the pulse waveform at the finger is strongly affected by the aortic flow wave and the muscular artery stiffness and diameter. Furthermore the peak to peak time measured from the pulse waveform at the finger can identify hypertensive from diabetic patients. In the second part, I developed a new methodology for optimising the number of arterial segments in 1-D modelling required to simulate precisely the blood pressure and flow waveforms at an arbitrary arterial location. This is achieved by systematically lumping peripheral 1-D model branches into 0-D models that preserve the net resistance and total compliance of the original model. The methodology is important to simplify the computational domain while maintaining the precision of the numerical predictions — an important step to translate 1-D modelling to the clinic. This thesis provides novel computational tools of blood flow modelling and waveform analysis for the design, development and testing of pulse wave biomarkers. These tools may help bridge the gap between clinical and computational approaches.

Contains the thesis template using memoir class, which is mainly based on book class but permits better control of chapter styles for example. This template is an adaptation and modification of Oscar's. Memoir is a flexible class for typesetting poetry, fiction, non-fiction and mathematical works as books, reports, articles or manuscripts. UoB guidelines: The dissertation must be printed on A4 white paper. Paper up to A3 may be used for maps, plans, diagrams and illustrative material. Pages (apart from the preliminary pages) should normally be double-sided. Memoir class loads useful packages by default (see manual).

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) will have a long shut down in the years of 2019 and 2020, referred to as LS2. During this stop the LHC injector complex will be upgraded to increase the luminosities, which will be the first step of the high luminosity LHC program (which will be realized during LS3 that takes place in 2024-2026). The LHCb experiment, whose main purpose is to study the CP-violation, will during this long stop be upgraded in order to withstand a higher radiation dose, and to be able to read out the detector at a rate of 40MHz,compared to 1MHz at present. This change will improve the trigger efficiency significantly. One of the LHCb sub-detectors the Trigger Tracker (TT), will be replaced by a new sub-detector called UT. This report presents the early stage design (preparation for mock-up building) of the box that will be isolating the new UT detector from the surroundings and to ensure optimal detector operation. Methods to fulfill requirements such as light and gas tightness, Faraday-cage behavior and condensation free temperatures, without breaking the fragile beryllium beam pipe, are established.

A dissertation submitted to the Southeast University on Mad Dash Car Crash 3D Car Racing Video Games.

AKARI and Spinning Dust: A look at microwave dust emission via the Infrared Aaron C. Bell's Master's Course Thesis ABSTRACT: Rapidly spinning dust particles having a permanent electric dipole moment have been shown to be a likely carrier of the anomalous microwave emission (AME), a continuous excess of microwave flux in the 10 to 90 GHz range. Small grains, possibly polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), are a leading suspect. In the absence of a definitive answer on the presence of PAHs or their role as an AME carrier, some predictions have been made as to the implications of spinning PAH emission. Due to the overlap between the CMB and the galactic foreground, this topic is requiring cosmologists to consider the ISM with more care. ISM astronomers are also needing to consider the contribution of cosmological radiation to large-scale dust investigations. We present data from AKARI/Infrared Camera (IRC) due to the effective PAH band coverage of its 9 micron survey to investigate their role within the 98 AME candidate regions identified by Planck Collaboration et al. (2014). We supplement AKARI data with the four Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) all-sky maps and complement with the Planck High Frequency Instrument (HFI) bands at 857 and 545 GHz to constrain the full dust thermal spectral energy distribution (SED). We sample the average spectral energy distributions (SEDs) all 98 regions. We utilize all 7 AKARI photometric bands, as well as the 4 IRAS bands and 2 HFI. We carry out a modified blackbody fitting, and estimate the optical depth of thermal dust at 250 micron, and compare this to AME parameters. We also show plots of each band's average intensity for all 98 regions vs. AME parameters. We find a positive trend between the optical depth and AME. In the band-by-band comparison the AKARI 9 micron intensity shows a weaker trend with AME. In general, the MIR correlates less strongly with AME than the FIR. The optical depth vs. AME trend improves slightly when looking only at significant AME regions. Scaling the IR intensities by the ISRF strength G0 does not improve the correlations. A slightly positive trend found previously among 10 AME regions vs. AME significance is revisited, using the larger sample of 98. However the trend does not hold up to the full data set. We cannot offer strong support of a spinning dust model. The results highlight the need for full dust SED modelling, and for a better understanding of the role that magnetic dipole emission from dust grains could play in producing the AME.

Kvantno Izračunavanje(Quantum Computing) je, kao grana Prirodnog Izračunavanje(Natural Computing), jedna od najmlađih znanosti Teorijske Kompjuterske Nauke koja koristi stanje superpozicije kvantnog sistema i preplitanje(entanglement) kao gradivne elemente izračunljivosti. Zašto Kvantno Izračunavanje? Naime, već na kraju ovog rada u kome ćemo dati generalni pregled osnova Kvantnog Izračunavanja, ćemo uvidjeti velike prednosti spram klasičnog izračunavanja. Rad je struktuiran tako da uvede čitaoca u osnove ove teorije koja se u mnogome razlikuje od ostalih metoda izračunavanja. Tako ćemo najprije uvesti gradivni element informacije u Kvantom Izračunavanju(Kvantni bit), zatim ćemo se upoznati sa jednim od načina manipulacije informacije na kvantom nivou(Kvantna kola). Nakon toga prelazimo na dva primjera primjene kvantih kola pri formiranju kvantnih algoritama i na kraju ćemo navesti neke prednosti i zanimljivosti Kvantnog Izračunavanja. Čitalac će na kraju imati generalni uvid u ovu znanost i poznavati njene osnovne osobine.

There are several voice communication systems that are used nowadays which are capable of maintain voice calls between two users in real time. Telephones are widely used all around the world in an unlimited kind of situations. All of these situations expose the microphone (or microphones) of the phones to different and unpredictable noises, as street noise, sea noise, rain noise, wind noise, unwanted voices, car motors, etc. As microphones capture all the sounds around it, including the wanted voice and the unwanted noises, it is necessary to implement digital real time filters capable of attenuate as much as possible all the surrounding noises. It exists a large quantity of noise reduction methods that have been used in the calling algorithms of phones. Even if these methods have had, in general, a good performance, there is still a research being done in this area in order to improve the current results. Because of this, the multichannel methods were created (using multiple microphones) as well as new algorithms that pretend to have a better noise reduction than the single channel methods. Most of these methods require a speech presence probability (SPP) method to achieve the noise reduction. The following document presents a research about different SPP methods as well as a comparison between these. This includes an explanation on how theses algorithm work, a Matlab implementation using real voice and noise recordings and objective tests of the filter.