This is an expository thesis which addresses the requirements for an operator algebra to be similar to a <em>C</em>*-algebra. It has been conjectured that this similarity condition is equivalent to either amenability or total reductivity; however, the problem has only been solved for specific types of operators. <br /><br /> We define amenability and total reductivity, as well as present some of the implications of these properties. For the purpose of establishing the desired result in specific cases, we describe the properties of two well-known types of operators, namely the compact operators and quasitriangular operators. Finally, we show that if A is an algebra of compact operators or of triangular operators then A is similar to a <em>C</em>* algebra if and only if it has the total reduction property.

The measure-multiplicity-invariant for masas in II_1 factors was introduced by Dykema, Smith and Sinclair to distinguish masas that have the same Pukanszky invariant. In this dissertation, the measure class (left-right-measure) in the measuremultiplicity- invariant is studied, which equivalent to studying the structure of the standard Hilbert space as an associated bimodule. The focal point of this analysis is: To what extent the associated bimodule remembers properties of the masa. The structure of normaliser of any masa is characterized depending on this measure class, by using Baire category methods (Selection principle of Jankov and von Neumann). Measure theoretic proofs of Chifan's normaliser formula and the equivalence of weak asymptotic homomorphism property (WAHP) and singularity is presented. Stronger notions of singularity is also investigated. Analytical conditions based on Fourier coefficients of certain measures are discussed, that partially characterize strongly mixing masas and masas with nontrivial centralizing sequences. The analysis also provide conditions in terms of operators and L2 vectors that characterize masas whose left-right-measure belongs to the class of product measure. An example of a simple masa in the hyperfinite II1 factor whose left-right-measure is the class of product measure is exhibited. An example of a masa in the hyperfinite II1 factor whose leftright- measure is singular to the product measure is also presented. Unitary conjugacy of masas is studied by providing examples of non unitary conjugate masas. Finally, it is shown that for k greater than/equal to 2 and for each subset S \subseteq N, there exist uncountably many non conjugate singular masas in L(Fk) whose Pukanszky invariant is S u {1}.

In 2 ¡Ñ2 case,we discuss the uniqueness of the u-invariant measure on projective space.Under the condition that |detM|=1 for any M in Gu and Gu is not compact,we have the followings: (1) For any x in P(R^2),if #{M¡Dx|M belongs Gu}>2, then the u-invariant measure is unique. (2) For some x in P(R^2),there exists x1,x2 such that {M¡Dx|M belongs Gu} is contained in {x1,x2},if x1 and x2 are both fixed,then the u-invariant measure v is not unique;otherwise,if u has mass only on x1 and x2,then the u-invariant measure is unique.

A mixture experiment is an experiments in which the q-ingredients are nonnegative and subject to the simplex restriction on the (q-1)-dimentional probability simplex. In this work , we investigate the robust A-optimal designs for mixture experiments with uncertainty on the linear, quadratic models considered by Scheffe' (1958). In Chan (2000), a review on the optimal designs including A-optimal designs are presented for each of the Scheffe's linear and quadratic models. We will use these results to find the robust A-optimal design for the linear and quadratic models under some robust A-criteria. It is shown with the two types of robust A-criteria defined here, there exists a convex combination of the individual A-optimal designs for linear and quadratic models respectively to be robust A-optimal. In the end, we compare efficiencies of these optimal designs with respect to different A-criteria.

Traditional computer vision algorithms depend on information taken by visible-light cameras. But there are inherent limitations of this data source, e.g. they are sensitive to illumination changes, occlusions and background clutter. Range sensors give us 3D structural information of the scene and it’s robust to the change of color and illumination. In this thesis, we present a series of approaches which are developed using the depth information by Kinect to address the issues regarding human detection and action recognition. Taking the depth information, the basic problem we consider is to detect humans in the scene. We propose a model based approach, which is comprised of a 2D head contour detector and a 3D head surface detector. We propose a segmentation scheme to segment the human from the surroundings based on the detection point and extract the whole body of the subject. We also explore the tracking algorithm based on our detection result. The methods are tested on a dataset we collected and present superior results over the existing algorithms. With the detection result, we further studied on recognizing their actions. We present a novel approach for human action recognition with histograms of 3D joint locations (HOJ3D) as a compact representation of postures. We extract the 3D skeletal joint locations from Kinect depth maps using Shotton et al.’s method. The HOJ3D computed from the action depth sequences are reprojected using LDA and then clustered into k posture visual words, which represent the prototypical poses of actions. The temporal evolutions of those visual words are modeled by discrete hidden Markov models (HMMs). In addition, due to the design of our spherical coordinate system and the robust 3D skeleton estimation from Kinect, our method demonstrates significant view invariance on our 3D action dataset. Our dataset is composed of 200 3D sequences of 10 indoor activities performed by 10 individuals in varied views. Our method is real-time and achieves superior results on the challenging 3D action dataset. We also tested our algorithm on the MSR Action3D dataset and our algorithm outperforms existing algorithm on most of the cases. / text

In this thesis we study three different problems: convex ancient solutions to the power-of-mean curvature flow; Sharp inequalities; regularity results in some applications of optimal transportation. The second chapter is devoted to the power-of-mean curvature flow; We prove some estimates for convex ancient solutions (the existence time for the solution starts from -\infty) to the power-of-mean curvature flow, when the power is strictly greater than \frac{1}{2}. As an application, we prove that in two dimension, the blow-down of an entire convex translating solution, namely u_{h}=\frac{1}{h}u(h^{\frac{1}{1+\alpha}}x), locally uniformly converges to \frac{1}{1+\alpha}|x|^{1+\alpha} as h\rightarrow\infty. The second application is that for generalized curve shortening flow (convex curve evolving in its normal direction with speed equal to a power of its curvature), if the convex compact ancient solution sweeps the whole space \mathbb{R}^{2}, it must be a shrinking circle. Otherwise the solution must be defined in a strip region. In the first section of the third chapter, we prove a one-parameter family of sharp conformally invariant integral inequalities for functions on the $n$-dimensional unit ball. As a limiting case, we obtain an inequality that generalizes Carleman's inequality for harmonic functions in the plane to poly-harmonic functions in higher dimensions. The second section represents joint work with Tobias Weth and Rupert Frank; the main result is that, one can always put a sharp remainder term on the righthand side of the sharp fractional sobolev inequality. In the first section of the final chapter, under some suitable condition, we prove that the solution to the principal-agent problem must be C^{1}. The proof is based on a perturbation argument. The second section represents joint work with Emanuel Indrei; the main result is that, under (A3S) condition on the cost and c-convexity condition on the domains, the free boundary in the optimal partial transport problem is C^{1,\alpha}.

In this thesis we study three different problems: convex ancient solutions to the power-of-mean curvature flow; Sharp inequalities; regularity results in some applications of optimal transportation. The second chapter is devoted to the power-of-mean curvature flow; We prove some estimates for convex ancient solutions (the existence time for the solution starts from -\infty) to the power-of-mean curvature flow, when the power is strictly greater than \frac{1}{2}. As an application, we prove that in two dimension, the blow-down of an entire convex translating solution, namely u_{h}=\frac{1}{h}u(h^{\frac{1}{1+\alpha}}x), locally uniformly converges to \frac{1}{1+\alpha}|x|^{1+\alpha} as h\rightarrow\infty. The second application is that for generalized curve shortening flow (convex curve evolving in its normal direction with speed equal to a power of its curvature), if the convex compact ancient solution sweeps the whole space \mathbb{R}^{2}, it must be a shrinking circle. Otherwise the solution must be defined in a strip region. In the first section of the third chapter, we prove a one-parameter family of sharp conformally invariant integral inequalities for functions on the $n$-dimensional unit ball. As a limiting case, we obtain an inequality that generalizes Carleman's inequality for harmonic functions in the plane to poly-harmonic functions in higher dimensions. The second section represents joint work with Tobias Weth and Rupert Frank; the main result is that, one can always put a sharp remainder term on the righthand side of the sharp fractional sobolev inequality. In the first section of the final chapter, under some suitable condition, we prove that the solution to the principal-agent problem must be C^{1}. The proof is based on a perturbation argument. The second section represents joint work with Emanuel Indrei; the main result is that, under (A3S) condition on the cost and c-convexity condition on the domains, the free boundary in the optimal partial transport problem is C^{1,\alpha}.

We studied invariant measures and invariant densities for dynamical systems with random switching (switching systems, in short). These switching systems can be described by a two-component Markov process whose first component is a stochastic process on a finite-dimensional smooth manifold and whose second component is a stochastic process on a finite collection of smooth vector fields that are defined on the manifold. We identified sufficient conditions for uniqueness and absolute continuity of the invariant measure associated to this Markov process. These conditions consist of a Hoermander-type hypoellipticity condition and a recurrence condition. In the case where the manifold is the real line or a subset of the real line, we studied regularity properties of the invariant densities of absolutely continuous invariant measures. We showed that invariant densities are smooth away from critical points of the vector fields. Assuming in addition that the vector fields are analytic, we derived the asymptotically dominant term for invariant densities at critical points.

The invariant subspace problem is the long-standing question whether every operator on a Hilbert space of dimension greater than one has a non-trivial invariant subspace. Although the problem is unsolved in the Hilbert space case, there are counter-examples for operators acting on certain well-known non-reflexive Banach spaces. These counter-examples are constructed by considering a single orbit and then extending continuously to a hounded linear map on the entire space. Based on this process, we introduce an operator which has properties closely linked with an orbit. We call this operator the orbit operator. In the first part of the thesis, examples and basic properties of the orbit operator are discussed. Next, properties linking invariant subspaces to properties of the orbit operator are presented. Topics include the kernel and range of the orbit operator, compact operators, dilation theory, and Rotas theorem. Finally, we extend results obtained for strict contractions to contractions.

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