In this paper, we describe fast implementations of optical flow and geometric active contours to reliably track flying vehicles. Given the position of the vehicle at time t -1, optical flow information is used to initially place an active contour in the basin of attraction of a region of interest in a given dynamical image at time t. For real-time tracking, fast convergence of the active contour as wen as rapid computation of the optical flow are crucial. In this note, we will describe algorithms that make fast tracking possible in this framework using only standard computing platforms.

Distributed beamforming using multiple relay nodes is an effective means to provide power efficient trans mission with diversity gain. Various approaches have been proposed to decide relay weights for each relay so that they can cooperatively relay signals. The maximum signal-to-noise ratio (MSNR) has been widely adopted as a performance measure in deciding relay weights. In this paper, we adopt the minimum mean square error (MMSE) to decide relay weights as the MMSE criterion can easily allow distributed implementation.

Intrahepatic cholangiocarcinomas (ICC) are neoplasms that originate from cholangiocytes and can occur at any level of the biliary tree. Surgical resection is the current therapy of choice for this highly aggressive cancer. However, the 5-year survival still is poor, with high recurrence rates. Due to the intrahepatic growth a significant proportion of patients present with advanced disease and are not candidates for curative surgery or transplantation. The existing palliative options are of limited benefit and there is a great necessity for novel therapeutic options. In this article we review the role of the phosphoinositide 3-kinase(PI3K)/ AKT and extracellular regulated kinase (ERK) signaling pathways in ICC and present new data on the prognostic value of these protein kinases. Finally, we discuss future upcoming therapeutic options based on targeting these signaling pathways.

This paper concerns throughput-constrained parallel execution of synchronous data flow graphs. This paper assumes static mapping and dynamic scheduling of nodes, which has several benefits over static scheduling approaches. We determine the buffer size of all arcs to minimize the total buffer size while satisfying a throughput constraint. Dynamic scheduling is able to achieve the similar throughput performance as the static scheduling does by unfolding the given SDF graph. A key issue of dynamic scheduling is how to assign the priority to each node invocation, which is also discussed in this paper. Since the problem is NP-hard, we present a heuristic based on a genetic algorithm. The experimental results confirm the viability of the proposed technique.

This thesis describes a study of a cavity QED microlaser in which many atoms are present simultaneously and atom-cavity interaction is well-defined. The microlaser is found to display multiple thresholds analogous to first-order phase transitions of the cavity field. Hysteresis is observed as a function of atom-cavity detuning and number of atoms. Data is compared with a rate equation model and fully quantized treatment based on micromaser theory. Good agreement between theory and experiment is found when the cavity is resonant with atoms of the most probable velocity, but long lifetimes of metastable states preclude the observation of true steady-state transition points. For nonzero atom-cavity detuning the microlaser displays broadenings and shifts which are not yet well-understood. Quantum trajectory simulations are performed to investigate many-atom and finite transit time effects in the microlaser. We show that over a wide range of parameters the many-atom microlaser scales with the single-atom theory, with a perturbation in the photon statistics due to cavity decay during the atom transit time.