Articles — Thesis

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.

Microscopic spatial defects (inhomogeneities) in solar cells have a detrimental impact on the overall performance of the solar cells. These defects can be due to the polycrystalline nature of the photovoltaic absorber (general case) or on the other hand, the characterization method itself can induce such inhomogeneities (ex: local excitation with confocal system). Photoluminescence imaging in particular is the most attractive type of experimental character- ization technique which has been studied by many research groups. Since it is contactless, it allows a complete analysis of the photovoltaic material and it can actually be performed at each step of the solar cell fabrication process. To properly analyze the recorded images, one has to model the transport properties. In this work we model the transport properties in 2D using both a numerical and analytic approach. First,we model the global illumination of the sample, we then analyze the effects of grains and surface recombination. Second, we study lateral transport that can be influenced by recombination at the surface (passivation issues), grain boundaries (polycrystalline cells) or local artifacts (shunts, defects...). At the same time we are able to extract the lifetime knowing the generation rate and solving the excess carrier density from our model. And finally we implement our model to extract some cell parameters like the diffusion length from experimental data through data fitting.

My dissertation for my Astrophysics MPhys degree at the University of Liverpool compiles research, simulations and calculations to come to concise conclusions about the feasibility of a human mission as stated in the project title.

Template for honours theses

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).

Chapters 1-3 of my PhD dissertation.

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.