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We report the pinching of an elongated liquid droplet that is confined in a rectangular microchannel. The droplet pinching is induced by a local variation of the channel topography and can lead to its break-up. The modification of the channel topography is either induced by a reversible local dilation of the channel bottom wall or by a confinement gradient that is irreversibly modelled in the channel. Interestingly, in both cases, a few micrometres contraction of the channel height leads to the pinching of the droplet in the direction of the channel width. If this pinching is such that the droplet is no longer confined at the level of its deformation, {\it i.e.} the liquid thread becomes 3D, the droplet splits in two. By minimizing the surface energy of the droplet under the channel confinement gradient, we are able to predict its pinching or its break-up, if any. The dynamic of the droplet deformation is then captured by a semi-analytical model, assuming that most of the viscous dissipation is located in the gutters at the four corners of the channel. Conversely, we show that this kinetic model can be used to extract the average topographic variation of the channel, down to few micrometers, by measuring the droplet pinching dynamics under a classical optical microscope.

Multimodal/vision language models (VLMs) are increasingly being deployed in healthcare settings worldwide, necessitating robust benchmarks to ensure their safety, efficacy, and fairness. Multiple-choice question and answer (QA) datasets derived from national medical examinations have long served as valuable evaluation tools, but existing datasets are largely text-only and available in a limited subset of languages and countries. To address these challenges, we present WorldMedQA-V, an updated multilingual, multimodal benchmarking dataset designed to evaluate VLMs in healthcare. WorldMedQA-V includes 568 labeled multiple-choice QAs paired with 568 medical images from four countries (Brazil, Israel, Japan, and Spain), covering original languages and validated English translations by native clinicians, respectively. Baseline performance for common open- and closed-source models are provided in the local language and English translations, and with and without images provided to the model. The WorldMedQA-V benchmark aims to better match AI systems to the diverse healthcare environments in which they are deployed, fostering more equitable, effective, and representative applications., Comment: submitted for review, total of 14 pages

With the rapid development and early industrialization of quantum technologies, it is of great interest to analyze their overall energy consumption before planning for their wide-scale deployments. The evaluation of the total energy requirements of quantum networks is a challenging task: different networks require very disparate techniques to create, distribute, manipulate, detect, and process quantum signals. This paper aims to lay the foundations of a framework to model the energy requirements of different quantum technologies and protocols applied to near-term quantum networks. Different figures of merit are discussed and a benchmark on the energy consumption of bipartite and multipartite network protocols is presented. An open-source software to estimate the energy consumption of photonic setups is also provided.

This work describes the rescue and enhancement of several thousand spectrophotometric plates from the La Plata Observatory. These plates and their attached handwritten documents, date from the beginning of the 20th century and contain information on observations made at different observatories around the world. Due to their fragility and the inevitable deterioration produced by the passage of time, they are being cleaned up, recovered and digitized. The information contained in the plates has a high scientific value and, based on a comparison of an old spectrum with a current one, part of the history of the star can be reconstructed. Through the ReTrOH project, we seek to translate the document into an appropriate format, preserve and disseminate that knowledge, and also recover the scientific project and the historical and personal context of the observers. The digitized spectra are available in the virtual repository (SEDICI) of the UNLP., Comment: in Spanish language. https://ffyh.unc.edu.ar/publicaciones/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2023/04/HistoriadelaAstronomia_compressed.pdf

Simulation of stochastic spatially-extended systems is a challenging problem. The fundamental quantities in these models are individual entities such as molecules, cells, or animals, which move and react in a random manner. In big systems, accounting for each individual is inefficient. If the number of entities is large enough, random effects are negligible, and often partial differential equations (PDEs) are used in which the fluctuations are neglected. When the system is heterogeneous, so that the number of individuals is large in certain regions and small in others, the PDE description becomes inaccurate in certain regions. To overcome this problem, the so-called hybrid schemes have been proposed that couple a stochastic description in parts of the domain with its mean field limit in the others. In this chapter, we review the different formulations of this approach and our recent contributions to overcome several of the limitations of previous schemes, including the extension of the concept to multiscale models of cell populations., Comment: 40 pages, 9 figures

Speech restoration aims at restoring full-band speech with high quality and intelligibility, considering a diverse set of distortions. MaskSR is a recently proposed generative model for this task. As other models of its kind, MaskSR attains high quality but, as we show, intelligibility can be substantially improved. We do so by boosting the speech encoder component of MaskSR with predictions of semantic representations of the target speech, using a pre-trained self-supervised teacher model. Then, a masked language model is conditioned on the learned semantic features to predict acoustic tokens that encode low level spectral details of the target speech. We show that, with the same MaskSR model capacity and inference time, the proposed model, MaskSR2, significantly reduces the word error rate, a typical metric for intelligibility. MaskSR2 also achieves competitive word error rate among other models, while providing superior quality. An ablation study shows the effectiveness of various semantic representations., Comment: Demo link https://masksr.github.io/MaskSR2/

This work focuses on the study of the AME, an important emission mechanism between 10 and 60 GHz whose polarization properties are not yet fully understood, and is therefore a potential contaminant for future CMB polarization observations. We use new QUIJOTE-MFI maps 11, 13, 17 and 19 GHz, together with other public ancillary data including WMAP and Planck, to study the polarization properties of the AME in three Galactic regions: rho-Ophiuchi, Perseus and W43. We have obtained the SEDs for those three regions over the frequency range 0.4-3000 GHz, both in intensity and polarization. The intensity SEDs are well described by a combination of free-free emission, thermal dust, AME and CMB anisotropies. In polarization, we extracted the flux densities using all available data between 11 and 353 GHz. We implemented an improved intensity-to-polarization leakage correction that has allowed for the first time to derive reliable polarization constraints well below the 1% level from Planck-LFI data. A frequency stacking of maps in the range 10-60 GHz has allowed us to reduce the statistical noise and to push the upper limits on the AME polarization level. We have obtained upper limits on the AME polarization fraction of order <1% (95% confidence level) for the three regions. In particular we get Pi_AME < 1.1% (at 28.4 GHz), Pi_AME < 1.1% (at 22.8 GHz) and Pi_AME < 0.28% (at 33 GHz) in rho-Ophiuchi, Perseus and W43 respectively. At the QUIJOTE 17 GHz frequency band, we get Pi_AME< 5.1% for rho-Ophiuchi, Pi_AME< 3.5% for Perseus and Pi_AME< 0.85% for W43. Our final upper limits derived using the stacking procedure are Pi_AME < 0.58% for rho-Ophiuchi, Pi_AME < 1.64% for Perseus and Pi_AME < 0.31% for W43. Altogether, these are the most stringent constraints to date on the AME polarization fraction of these three star-forming regions., Comment: 26 pages. 15 figures. Submitted to A&A. Comments welcome

Magnetic adatoms on s-wave superconductors induce bound states inside the superconducting gap, called Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states (YSR). The anisotropy of the Fermi surface determines the spatial extension of bound states in a quasi-two-dimensional superconductor. This is especially important in the diluted impurity limit since the orbital overlap determines the coupling of YSR states of neighboring atoms and the formation of the collective YSR system. Here, we build diluted arrays of Mn atoms with different dimensionalities on the surface of $\beta$-Bi$_2$Pd, and we measure the evolution of their YSR spectra with the structure. We detect the coupling as a split of YSR peaks in subgap spectra and find that the split size increases with the number of atoms. The orientation of the structures along different directions of the \bipd substrate modulates the split and particle-hole asymmetry of the YSR states due to the anisotropic character of the Fermi surface, captured by the Green function model. With the aid of the model, we found multiple YSR excitations in an extended 2D array of 25 Mn atoms, and we identified that their spatial distribution reflects a chiral LDOS., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures

Photovoltaics (PV) are widely used to harvest solar energy, an important form of renewable energy. Photovoltaic arrays consist of multiple solar panels constructed from solar cells. Solar cells in the field are vulnerable to various defects, and electroluminescence (EL) imaging provides effective and non-destructive diagnostics to detect those defects. We use multiple traditional machine learning and modern deep learning models to classify EL solar cell images into different functional/defective categories. Because of the asymmetry in the number of functional vs. defective cells, an imbalanced label problem arises in the EL image data. The current literature lacks insights on which methods and metrics to use for model training and prediction. In this paper, we comprehensively compare different machine learning and deep learning methods under different performance metrics on the classification of solar cell EL images from monocrystalline and polycrystalline modules. We provide a comprehensive discussion on different metrics. Our results provide insights and guidelines for practitioners in selecting prediction methods and performance metrics., Comment: 30 pages, 14 figures

In the pooled data problem, the goal is to identify the categories associated with a large collection of items via a sequence of pooled tests. Each pooled test reveals the number of items in the pool belonging to each category. A prominent special case is quantitative group testing (QGT), which is the case of pooled data with two categories. We consider these problems in the non-adaptive and linear regime, where the fraction of items in each category is of constant order. We propose a scheme with a spatially coupled Bernoulli test matrix and an efficient approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm for recovery. We rigorously characterize its asymptotic performance in both the noiseless and noisy settings, and prove that in the noiseless case, the AMP algorithm achieves almost-exact recovery with a number of tests sublinear in the number of items. For both QGT and pooled data, this is the first efficient scheme that provably achieves recovery in the linear regime with a sublinear number of tests, with performance degrading gracefully in the presence of noise. Numerical simulations illustrate the benefits of the spatially coupled scheme at finite dimensions, showing that it outperforms i.i.d. test designs as well as other recovery algorithms based on convex programming., Comment: 49 pages, 6 figures

One of the key issues regarding classification problems in Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence is ensuring Fairness in the prediction of different classes when protected (sensitive) features are present. Data quality is critical in these cases, as biases in training data can be reflected in machine learning, impacting human lives and failing to comply with current regulations. One strategy to improve data quality and avoid these problems is preprocessing the dataset. Instance selection via undersampling can foster balanced learning of classes and protected feature values. Performing undersampling in class overlap areas close to the decision boundary should bolster the impact on the classifier. This work proposes Fair Overlap Number of Balls (Fair-ONB), an undersampling method that harnesses the data morphology of the different data groups (obtained from the combination of classes and protected feature values) to perform guided undersampling in overlap areas. It employs attributes of the ball coverage of the groups, such as the radius, number of covered instances and density, to select the most suitable areas for undersampling and reduce bias. Results show that the Fair-ONB method improves model Fairness with low impact on the classifier's predictive performance., Comment: 14 pages, 5 tables, 8 figures

Video-to-audio (V2A) generation leverages visual-only video features to render plausible sounds that match the scene. Importantly, the generated sound onsets should match the visual actions that are aligned with them, otherwise unnatural synchronization artifacts arise. Recent works have explored the progression of conditioning sound generators on still images and then video features, focusing on quality and semantic matching while ignoring synchronization, or by sacrificing some amount of quality to focus on improving synchronization only. In this work, we propose a V2A generative model, named MaskVAT, that interconnects a full-band high-quality general audio codec with a sequence-to-sequence masked generative model. This combination allows modeling both high audio quality, semantic matching, and temporal synchronicity at the same time. Our results show that, by combining a high-quality codec with the proper pre-trained audio-visual features and a sequence-to-sequence parallel structure, we are able to yield highly synchronized results on one hand, whilst being competitive with the state of the art of non-codec generative audio models. Sample videos and generated audios are available at https://maskvat.github.io ., Comment: Accepted to ECCV 2024

Recent advances have improved autonomous navigation and mapping under payload constraints, but current multi-robot inspection algorithms are unsuitable for nano-drones due to their need for heavy sensors and high computational resources. To address these challenges, we introduce ExploreBug, a novel hybrid frontier range bug algorithm designed to handle limited sensing capabilities for a swarm of nano-drones. This system includes three primary components: a mapping subsystem, an exploration subsystem, and a navigation subsystem. Additionally, an intra-swarm collision avoidance system is integrated to prevent collisions between drones. We validate the efficacy of our approach through extensive simulations and real-world exploration experiments involving up to seven drones in simulations and three in real-world settings, across various obstacle configurations and with a maximum navigation speed of 0.75 m/s. Our tests demonstrate that the algorithm efficiently completes exploration tasks, even with minimal sensing, across different swarm sizes and obstacle densities. Furthermore, our frontier allocation heuristic ensures an equal distribution of explored areas and paths traveled by each drone in the swarm. We publicly release the source code of the proposed system to foster further developments in mapping and exploration using autonomous nano drones., Comment: Submitted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

Contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful technique in audio-visual representation learning, leveraging the natural co-occurrence of audio and visual modalities in extensive web-scale video datasets to achieve significant advancements. However, conventional contrastive audio-visual learning methodologies often rely on aggregated representations derived through temporal aggregation, which neglects the intrinsic sequential nature of the data. This oversight raises concerns regarding the ability of standard approaches to capture and utilize fine-grained information within sequences, information that is vital for distinguishing between semantically similar yet distinct examples. In response to this limitation, we propose sequential contrastive audio-visual learning (SCAV), which contrasts examples based on their non-aggregated representation space using sequential distances. Retrieval experiments with the VGGSound and Music datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SCAV, showing 2-3x relative improvements against traditional aggregation-based contrastive learning and other methods from the literature. We also show that models trained with SCAV exhibit a high degree of flexibility regarding the metric employed for retrieval, allowing them to operate on a spectrum of efficiency-accuracy trade-offs, potentially making them applicable in multiple scenarios, from small- to large-scale retrieval.

In a previous publication, we introduced an abstract logic via an abstract notion of quantifier. Drawing upon concepts from categorical logic, this abstract logic interprets formulas from context as subobjects in a specific category, e.g., Cartesian, regular, or coherent categories, Grothendieck, or elementary toposes. We proposed an entailment system formulated as a sequent calculus which we proved complete. Building on this foundation, our current work explores model theory within abstract logic. More precisely, we generalize one of the most important and powerful classical model theory methods, namely the ultraproduct method, and show its fundamental theorem, i.e., Los's theorem. The result is shown as independently as possible of a given quantifier.

Continuous variable quantum key distribution (CVQKD) with discrete modulation combines advantages of CVQKD, such as the implementability using readily available technologies, with advantages of discrete variable quantum key distribution, such as easier error correction procedures. We consider a prepare-and-measure CVQKD protocol, where Alice chooses from a set of four coherent states and Bob performs a heterodyne measurement, the result of which is discretised in both key and test rounds. We provide a security proof against coherent attacks in the finite-size regime, and compute the achievable key rate. To this end, we employ the generalised entropy accumulation theorem, as well as recent advances in conic optimisation, yielding improved key rates compared to previous works. At metropolitan distances, our method can provide positive key rates for the order of $10^8$ rounds., Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures

Building upon the Chatterjee correlation (2021: J. Am. Stat. Assoc. 116, p2009) for two real-valued variables, this study introduces a generalized measure of directed association between two vector variables, real or complex-valued, and of possibly different dimensions. The new measure is denoted as the "distance-based Chatterjee correlation", owing to the use here of the "distance transformed data" defined in Szekely et al (2007: Ann. Statist. 35, p2769) for the distance correlation. A main property of the new measure, inherited from the original Chatterjee correlation, is its predictive and asymmetric nature: it measures how well one variable can be predicted by the other, asymmetrically. This allows for inferring the causal direction of the association, by using the method of Blobaum et al (2019: PeerJ Comput. Sci. 1, e169). Since the original Chatterjee correlation is based on ranks, it is not available for complex variables, nor for general multivariate data. The novelty of our work is the extension to multivariate real and complex-valued pairs of vectors, offering a robust measure of directed association in a completely non-parametric setting. Informally, the intuitive assumption used here is that distance correlation is mathematically equivalent to Pearson's correlation when applied to "distance transformed" data. The next logical step is to compute Chatterjee's correlation on the same "distance transformed" data, thereby extending the analysis to multivariate vectors of real and complex valued data. As a bonus, the new measure here is robust to outliers, which is not true for the distance correlation of Szekely et al. Additionally, this approach allows for inference regarding the causal direction of the association between the variables., Comment: program code (pascal language) and executables at https://osf.io/ty6sc/ ; version2: updated header with DOI link to paper

Ocean mesoscale variability, a key component of the climate system, influences ocean circulation and heat, gas, carbon and nutrient distribution. Trends on Eddy Kinetic Energy (EKE), a metric measuring its intensity, are investigated using two products constructed from 30 years of altimetric observations. Statistically significant positive trends in globally-averaged EKE reveal a strengthening of 1-3% per decade. Regions of intense mesoscale activity become more energetic than other areas. Robust positive EKE trends are observed in the Kuroshio Extension and the Gulf Stream, with remarkable EKE increases of ~50% and ~20%, respectively, over the last decade. Our study opens a new question into how the observed Gulf Stream strengthening impacts the AMOC, and challenges existing climate models emphasizing the necessity for improved small-scale ocean process representation.

PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) is ESA's M3 mission designed to detect and characterise extrasolar planets and perform asteroseismic monitoring of a large number of stars. PLATO will detect small planets (down to <2 R_(Earth)) around bright stars (<11 mag), including terrestrial planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars. With the complement of radial velocity observations from the ground, planets will be characterised for their radius, mass, and age with high accuracy (5 %, 10 %, 10 % for an Earth-Sun combination respectively). PLATO will provide us with a large-scale catalogue of well-characterised small planets up to intermediate orbital periods, relevant for a meaningful comparison to planet formation theories and to better understand planet evolution. It will make possible comparative exoplanetology to place our Solar System planets in a broader context. In parallel, PLATO will study (host) stars using asteroseismology, allowing us to determine the stellar properties with high accuracy, substantially enhancing our knowledge of stellar structure and evolution. The payload instrument consists of 26 cameras with 12cm aperture each. For at least four years, the mission will perform high-precision photometric measurements. Here we review the science objectives, present PLATO's target samples and fields, provide an overview of expected core science performance as well as a description of the instrument and the mission profile at the beginning of the serial production of the flight cameras. PLATO is scheduled for a launch date end 2026. This overview therefore provides a summary of the mission to the community in preparation of the upcoming operational phases.

Graphene nanostructures are a promising platform for engineering electronic states with tailored magnetic and quantum properties. Synthesis strategies on metallic substrates have made it possible to manufacture atomically precise nanographenes with controlled size, shape and edge geometry. In these nanographenes, finite spin magnetic moment can arise as a result of many-body interactions in molecular orbitals with $\pi$-conjugated character and subject to strong spatial confinement, for example at the zig-zag edges. However, owing to the mixing of the molecular orbitals and metallic states from the catalysing substrate, most of their expected quantum phenomenology is severely hindered. The use of in-situ ultra-thin decoupling layers can impede nanographene-metal hybridization and facilitate the expression of predicted properties. Here we show that the edges of narrow chiral graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) over MgO monolayers on Ag(001) can host integer charge and spin-1/2 frontier states. The electron occupation varies with the GNR length, which alternates even or odd number of electrons, thus resulting correspondingly in a non-magnetic closed-shell state or an open-shell paramagnetic system. For the latter, we found the spectral fingerprint of a narrow Coulomb correlation gap. Charged states, up to 19 additional electrons, were identified by comparing mean-field Hubbard (MFH) simulations of the density of states with experimental maps of the discretized molecular orbitals acquired with a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM). In consideration of the length-dependent magnetic moment and the discrete nature of the electronic structure, we envisage that GNRs supported by thin insulating films can be used as tailor-made active elements in quantum sensing and quantum information processing.

Although printed transistors have a wide range of applications, the limited resolution of printing techniques (10-30 um) has been a barrier to advancement and scaling, particularly down to submicron dimensions. While previous works have shown creative approaches to realizing submicron channel lengths with printing, reliance on chemical processes unique to specific inks or tedious post-processing limit their applicability. Here, we report the use of capillary flow printing (CFP) to repeatably create fully printed submicron carbon nanotube thin-film transistors (CNT-TFTs) without chemical modification or physical manipulation post-printing. The versatility of this printing technique is demonstrated by printing conducting, semiconducting, and insulating inks on several types of substrates (SiO2, Kapton, and paper) and through the fabrication of various TFT device (contacting/gating) architectures. Notably, CFP of these CNT-TFTs yielded on-currents of 1.12 mA/mm when back gated on Si/SiO2, and 490 uA/mm when side gated through ion gel on Kapton, demonstrating the strong transistor performance achievable with CFP. Mechanical bending and sweep rate resilience of devices printed on Kapton show the wide utility of CFP-fabricated devices for flexible applications. This work highlights the ability of CFP as a viable fabrication method for submicron electronics through cleanroom-free printing techniques., Comment: 47 pages, 4 main text figures, 11 supporting info figures

LiteBIRD, the next-generation cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment, aims for a launch in Japan's fiscal year 2032, marking a major advancement in the exploration of primordial cosmology and fundamental physics. Orbiting the Sun-Earth Lagrangian point L2, this JAXA-led strategic L-class mission will conduct a comprehensive mapping of the CMB polarization across the entire sky. During its 3-year mission, LiteBIRD will employ three telescopes within 15 unique frequency bands (ranging from 34 through 448 GHz), targeting a sensitivity of 2.2\,$\mu$K-arcmin and a resolution of 0.5$^\circ$ at 100\,GHz. Its primary goal is to measure the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ with an uncertainty $\delta r = 0.001$, including systematic errors and margin. If $r \geq 0.01$, LiteBIRD expects to achieve a $>5\sigma$ detection in the $\ell=$2-10 and $\ell=$11-200 ranges separately, providing crucial insight into the early Universe. We describe LiteBIRD's scientific objectives, the application of systems engineering to mission requirements, the anticipated scientific impact, and the operations and scanning strategies vital to minimizing systematic effects. We will also highlight LiteBIRD's synergies with concurrent CMB projects., Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures, 1 table, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2024

We describe the notion of stability of coherent systems as a framework to deal with redundancy. We define stable coherent systems and show how this notion can help the design of reliable systems. We demonstrate that the reliability of stable systems can be efficiently computed using the algebraic versions of improved inclusion-exclusion formulas and sum of disjoint products.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is a pivotal research domain aimed at understanding the operational mechanisms of AI systems, particularly those considered ``black boxes'' due to their complex, opaque nature. XAI seeks to make these AI systems more understandable and trustworthy, providing insight into their decision-making processes. By producing clear and comprehensible explanations, XAI enables users, practitioners, and stakeholders to trust a model's decisions. This work analyses the value of data morphology strategies in generating counterfactual explanations. It introduces the Overlap Number of Balls Model-Agnostic CounterFactuals (ONB-MACF) method, a model-agnostic counterfactual generator that leverages data morphology to estimate a model's decision boundaries. The ONB-MACF method constructs hyperspheres in the data space whose covered points share a class, mapping the decision boundary. Counterfactuals are then generated by incrementally adjusting an instance's attributes towards the nearest alternate-class hypersphere, crossing the decision boundary with minimal modifications. By design, the ONB-MACF method generates feasible and sparse counterfactuals that follow the data distribution. Our comprehensive benchmark from a double perspective (quantitative and qualitative) shows that the ONB-MACF method outperforms existing state-of-the-art counterfactual generation methods across multiple quality metrics on diverse tabular datasets. This supports our hypothesis, showcasing the potential of data-morphology-based explainability strategies for trustworthy AI., Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to Information Sciences

The optical spectroscopic classification of active galactic nuclei (AGN) into type 1 and type 2 can be understood in the frame of the AGN unification models. However, it remains unclear which physical properties are driving the classification into intermediate sub-types (1.0,1.2,1.5,1.8,1.9). To shed light on this issue, we present an analysis of the effect of extinction and AGN and host galaxy luminosities on sub-type determination for a sample of 159 X-ray selected AGN with a complete and robust optical spectroscopic classification. The sample spans a rest-frame 2 - 10 keV X-ray luminosity range of $10^{42}-10^{46}$ erg s$^{-1}$ and redshifts between 0.05 and 0.75. From the fitting of their UV-to-mid-infrared spectral energy distributions, we extracted the observed AGN over total AGN+galaxy contrast, optical/UV line-of-sight extinction as well as host galaxy and AGN luminosities. The observed contrast exhibits a clear decline with sub-type, distinguishing two main groups: 1.0-5 and 1.8-9/2. This difference is partly driven by an increase in extinction following the same trend. Nevertheless, 50% of 1.9s and 2s lack sufficient extinction to explain the lack of detection of broad emission lines, unveiling the necessity of an additional effect. Our findings show that 1.8-9/2s preferentially live in host galaxies with higher luminosities while displaying similar intrinsic AGN luminosities to 1.0-5s. Consequently, the AGN to host galaxy luminosity ratio diminishes, hindering the detection of the emission of the broad emission lines, resulting in the 1.8-9/2 classification of those with insufficient extinction. Thus, the combination of increasing extinction and decreasing AGN/galaxy luminosity ratio, mainly driven by an increasing host galaxy luminosity, constitutes the main reasons behind the sub-type classification into 1.0-5 and 1.8-9/2., Comment: Accepted to Astronomy & Astrophysics. 15 pages, 21 figures

Rubrics are a commonly used tool for labeling voice corpora in speech quality assessment, although their application in the context of pathological speech remains relatively limited. In this study, we introduce a comprehensive rubric based on various dimensions of speech quality, including phonetics, fluency, and prosody. The objective is to establish standardized criteria for identifying errors within the speech of individuals with Down syndrome, thereby enabling the development of automated assessment systems. To achieve this objective, we utilized the Prautocal corpus. To assess the quality of annotations using our rubric, two experiments were conducted, focusing on phonetics and fluency. For phonetic evaluation, we employed the Goodness of Pronunciation (GoP) metric, utilizing automatic segmentation systems and correlating the results with evaluations conducted by a specialized speech therapist. While the obtained correlation values were not notably high, a positive trend was observed. In terms of fluency assessment, deep learning models like wav2vec were used to extract audio features, and we employed an SVM classifier trained on a corpus focused on identifying fluency issues to categorize Prautocal corpus samples. The outcomes highlight the complexities of evaluating such phenomena, with variability depending on the specific type of disfluency detected., Comment: Submitted to LREC-Coling 2024

Many superconducting on-chip filter-banks suffer from poor coupling to the detectors behind each filter. This is a problem intrinsic to the commonly used half wavelength filter, which has a maximum theoretical coupling of 50 %. In this paper we introduce a phase coherent filter, called a directional filter, which has a theoretical coupling of 100 %. In order to to study and compare different types of filter-banks, we first analyze the measured filter frequency scatter, losses, and spectral resolution of a DESHIMA 2.0 filter-bank chip. Based on measured fabrication tolerances and losses, we adapt the input parameters for our circuit simulations, quantitatively reproducing the measurements. We find that the frequency scatter is caused by nanometer-scale line-width variations and that variances in the spectral resolution is caused by losses in the dielectric only. Finally, we include these realistic parameters in a full filter-bank model and simulate a wide range of spectral resolutions and oversampling values. For all cases the directional filter-bank has significantly higher coupling to the detectors than the half-wave resonator filter-bank. The directional filter eliminates the need to use oversampling as a method to improve the total efficiency, instead capturing nearly all the power remaining after dielectric losses., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication by JLTP

This work presents a methodological approach to generate realistic $\gamma$-ray light curves of pulsars, resembling reasonably well the observational ones observed by the Fermi-Large Area Telescope instrument, fitting at the same time their high-energy spectra. The theoretical light curves are obtained from a spectral and geometrical model of the synchro-curvature emission. Despite our model relies on a few effective physical parameters, the synthetic light curves present the same main features observed in the observational $\gamma$-ray light curve zoo, such as the different shapes, variety in the number of peaks, and a diversity of peak widths. The morphological features of the light curves allows us to statistically compare the observed properties. In particular, we find that the proportion on the number of peaks found in our synthetic light curves is in agreement with the observational one provided by the third Fermi-LAT pulsar catalog. We also found that the detection probability due to beaming is much higher for orthogonal rotators (approaching 100%) than for small inclination angles (less than 20%).The small variation on the synthetic skymaps generated for different pulsars indicates that the geometry dominates over timing and spectral properties in shaping the gamma-ray light curves. This means that geometrical parameters like the inclination angle can be in principle constrained by gamma-ray data alone independently on the specific properties of a pulsar. At the same time, we find that $\gamma$-ray spectra seen by different observers can slightly differ, opening the door to constraining the viewing angle of a particular pulsar., Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures. Accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

We study the collective schedules problem, which consists in computing a one machine schedule of a set of tasks, knowing that a set of individuals (also called voters) have preferences regarding the order of the execution of the tasks. Our aim is to return a consensus schedule. We consider the setting in which all tasks have the same length -- such a schedule can therefore also be viewed as a ranking. We study two rules, one based on a distance criterion, and another one based one a binary criterion, and we show that these rules extend classic scheduling criteria. We also consider time constraints and precedence constraints between the tasks, and focus on two cases: the preferences of the voters fulfill these constraints, or they do not fulfill these constraints (but the collective schedule should fulfill them). In each case, either we show that the problem is NP-hard, or we provide a polynomial time algorithm which solves it. We also provide an analysis of a heuristic, which appears to be a 2 approximation of the Spearman's rule.

The aim of this paper is to introduce models and algorithms for the Participatory Budgeting problem when projects can interact with each other. In this problem, the objective is to select a set of projects that fits in a given budget. Voters express their preferences over the projects and the goal is then to find a consensus set of projects that does not exceed the budget. Our goal is to detect such interactions thanks to the preferences expressed by the voters. Through the projects selected by the voters, we detect positive and negative interactions between the projects by identifying projects that are consistently chosen together. In presence of project interactions, it is preferable to select projects that interact positively rather than negatively, all other things being equal. We introduce desirable properties that utility functions should have in presence of project interactions and we build a utility function which fulfills the desirable properties introduced. We then give axiomatic properties of aggregation rules, and we study three classical aggregation rules: the maximization of the sum of the utilities, of the product of the utilities, or of the minimal utility. We show that in the three cases the problems solved by these rules are NP-hard, and we propose a branch and bound algorithm to solve them. We conclude the paper by experiments.

The collective schedules problem consists in computing a schedule of tasks shared between individuals. Tasks may have different duration, and individuals have preferences over the order of the shared tasks. This problem has numerous applications since tasks may model public infrastructure projects, events taking place in a shared room, or work done by co-workers. Our aim is, given the preferred schedules of individuals (voters), to return a consensus schedule. We propose an axiomatic study of the collective schedule problem, by using classic axioms in computational social choice and new axioms that take into account the duration of the tasks. We show that some axioms are incompatible, and we study the axioms fulfilled by three rules: one which has been studied in the seminal paper on collective schedules (Pascual et al. 2018), one which generalizes the Kemeny rule, and one which generalizes Spearman's footrule. From an algorithmic point of view, we show that these rules solve NP-hard problems, but that it is possible to solve optimally these problems for small but realistic size instances, and we give an efficient heuristic for large instances. We conclude this paper with experiments.

We present detailed forecasts for the constraints on primordial magnetic fields (PMFs) that will be obtained with the LiteBIRD satellite. The constraints are driven by the effects of PMFs on the CMB anisotropies: the gravitational effects of magnetically-induced perturbations; the effects on the thermal and ionization history of the Universe; the Faraday rotation imprint on the CMB polarization; and the non-Gaussianities induced in polarization anisotropies. LiteBIRD represents a sensitive probe for PMFs and by exploiting all the physical effects, it will be able to improve the current limit coming from Planck. In particular, thanks to its accurate $B$-mode polarization measurement, LiteBIRD will improve the constraints on infrared configurations for the gravitational effect, giving $B_{\rm 1\,Mpc}^{n_{\rm B} =-2.9} < 0.8$ nG at 95% C.L., potentially opening the possibility to detect nanogauss fields with high significance. We also observe a significant improvement in the limits when marginalized over the spectral index, $B_{1\,{\rm Mpc}}^{\rm marg}< 2.2$ nG at 95% C.L. From the thermal history effect, which relies mainly on $E$-mode polarization data, we obtain a significant improvement for all PMF configurations, with the marginalized case, $\sqrt{\langle B^2\rangle}^{\rm marg}<0.50$ nG at 95% C.L. Faraday rotation constraints will take advantage of the wide frequency coverage of LiteBIRD and the high sensitivity in $B$ modes, improving the limits by orders of magnitude with respect to current results, $B_{1\,{\rm Mpc}}^{n_{\rm B} =-2.9} < 3.2$ nG at 95% C.L. Finally, non-Gaussianities of the $B$-mode polarization can probe PMFs at the level of 1 nG, again significantly improving the current bounds from Planck. Altogether our forecasts represent a broad collection of complementary probes, providing conservative limits on PMF characteristics that will be achieved with LiteBIRD., Comment: 51 pages, 24 figures, abstract shortened

Unimolecular current rectifiers are fundamental building blocks in organic electronics. Rectifying behavior has been identified in numerous organic systems due to electron-hole asymmetries of orbital levels interfaced by a metal electrode. As a consequence, the rectifying ratio (RR) determining the diode efficiency remains fixed for a chosen molecule-metal interface. Here, we present a mechanically tunable molecular diode exhibiting an exceptionally large rectification ratio (>10^5) and reversible direction. The molecular system comprises a 7-armchair graphene nanoribbon (GNR) doped with a single unit of substitutional diboron within its structure, synthesized with atomic precision on a gold substrate by on-surface synthesis. The diboron unit creates half-populated in-gap bound states and splits the GNR frontier bands into two segments, localizing the bound state in a double barrier configuration. By suspending these GNRs freely between the tip of a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope and the substrate, we demonstrate unipolar hole transport through the boron in-gap state's resonance. Strong current rectification is observed, associated with the varying widths of the two barriers, which can be tuned by altering the distance between tip and substrate. This study introduces an innovative approach for the precise manipulation of molecular electronic functionalities, opening new avenues for advanced applications in organic electronics., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures; SI: 7 pages, 6 figures