Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In this talk, i shall provide some optimal PIR bounds, which confirmed a conjecture on optimal RIP bound. Furtheremore, i shall also investigate some results on signals recovery with redundant dictionaries, which are also related to statistics and sparse representation.

In this talk we discuss how to find probabilities of extreme events in stochastic differential equations. One approach to calculation would be to perform a large number of simulations and gather statistics, but an efficient alternative is to minimize Freidlin-Wentzell action. As a consequence of the analysis one also determines the most likely trajectory that gave rise to the extreme event. We apply this approach to stochastic systems whose deterministic behavior exhibit chaos (Lorenz and Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equations), comment on the observed behavior, and discuss.

This talk addresses an important problem in arctic engineering due to interesting dynamic phenomena in a forced linear system. The nonautonomous system considered is representative of a whole class of engineering problems that are not approachable by standard techniques from dynamical system theory.The background are ice-induced vibrations of structures (e.g. wind turbines or measurement masts) in regions with active sea ice. Ice is a complex material and the mechanism for ice-induced vibrations is not fully clear at present. In particular, the conditions under which the observed, qualitatively different vibration regimes are active cannot be predicted accurately so far. A recent mathematical model developed by Delft University of Technology assumes that a number of parallel ice strips are pushing with a constant velocity against a flexible structure. The structure is modelled as a single degree of freedom harmonic oscillator. The contact force acts on the structure, but at the same time slows down the advancement of the ice, thereby introducing a dynamic nonlinearity in the otherwise linear system. When the local contact force becomes large enough, the ice crushes and the corresponding strip is reset to a random offset in front of the structure.This is the first mathematical model that exhibits all three different dynamic regimes that are observed in reality: for slow ice velocities the structure undergoes quasi-static sawtooth responses where all ice strips fail at the same time (a kind of synchronization phenomenon), for large ice velocities the structure response appears random, and for intermediate ice velocities the system exhibits vibrations at the structure eigenfrequency, commonly called frequency lock-in behavior. The latter type of vibrations causes a lot of damage to the structure and poses a safety and economic risk, so its occurrence needs to be predicted accurately.As I will show in this talk, the descriptive terms for the three vibration regimes are slightly misleading, as the mechanisms behind the observed behaviors are somewhat different than intuition suggests. I will present first results in analyzing the system and offer some explanations of the observed behaviors, as well as some simple criteria for the switch between the different vibration regimes.

Two-photon photoacoustic tomography (TP-PAT) is a non-invasive optical molecular imaging modality that aims at inferring two-photon absorption property of heterogeneous media from photoacoustic measurements. In this work, we analyze an inverse problem in quantitative TP-PAT where we intend to reconstruct optical coefficients in a semilinear elliptic PDE, the mathematical model for the propagation of near infra-red photons in tissue-like optical media, from the internal absorbed energy data. We derive uniqueness and stability results on the reconstructions of single and multiple coefficients, and perform numerical simulations based on synthetic data to validate the theoretical analysis.