We present a new perspective on graph-based methods for collaborative ranking for recommender systems. Unlike user-based or itembased methods that compute a weighted average of ratings given by the nearest neighbors, or lowrank approximation methods using convex optimization and the nuclear norm, we formulate matrix completion as a series of semi-supervised learning problems, and propagate the known ratings to the missing ones on the user-user or itemitem graph globally. The semi-supervised learning problems are expressed as Laplace-Beltrami equations on a manifold, or namely, harmonic extension, and can be discretized by a point integral method. We show that our approach does not impose a low-rank Euclidean subspace on the data points, but instead minimizes the dimension of the underlying manifold. Our method, named LDM (low dimensional manifold), turns out to be particularly effective in generating rankings of items, showing decent computational efficiency and robust ranking quality compared to state-ofthe- art methods.

Solitary waves bifurcated from edges of Bloch bands in two-dimensional periodic media are determined both analytically and numerically in the context of a two-dimensional nonlinear Schrödinger equation with a periodic potential. Using multiscale perturbation methods, the envelope equations of solitary waves near Bloch bands are analytically derived. These envelope equations reveal that solitary waves can bifurcate from edges of Bloch bands under either focusing or defocusing nonlinearity, depending on the signs of the second-order dispersion coefficients at the edge points. Interestingly, at edge points with two linearly independent Bloch modes, the envelope equations lead to a host of solitary wave structures, including reduced-symmetry solitons, dipole-array solitons, vortex-cell solitons, and so on—many of which have not been reported before to our knowledge. It is also shown analytically that the centers of envelope solutions can be positioned at only four possible locations at or between potential peaks. Numerically, families of these solitary waves are directly computed both near and far away from the band edges. Near the band edges, the numerical solutions spread over many lattice sites, and they fully agree with the analytical solutions obtained from the envelope equations. Far away from the band edges, solitary waves are strongly localized, with intensity and phase profiles characteristic of individual families.

Previous work has shown that in a two-dimensional periodic medium under focusing or defocusing cubic nonlinearities, gap solitons in the form of low-amplitude and slowly modulated single-Bloch-wave packets can bifurcate out from the edges of Bloch bands. In this paper, linear stability properties of these gap solitons near band edges are determined both analytically and numerically. Through asymptotic analysis, it is shown that these gap solitons are linearly unstable if the slope of their power curve at the band edge has the opposite sign of nonlinearity
here focusing nonlinearity is said to have a positive sign, and defocusing nonlinearity to have a negative sign. An equivalent condition for linear instability is that the power of the gap solitons near the band edge is lower than the limit power value on the band edge. Through numerical computations of the power curves, it is found that this condition is always satisfied, thus two-dimensional gap solitons near band edges are linearly unstable. The analytical formula for the unstable eigenvalue of gap solitons near band edges is also asymptotically derived. It is shown that this unstable eigenvalue is proportional to the cubic power of the soliton’s amplitude, and it induces width instabilities of gap solitons. A comparison between this analytical eigenvalue formula and numerically computed eigenvalues shows excellent agreement.

The immersed boundary method has evolved into one of the most useful computational methods in studying fluid structure interaction. On the other hand, the immersed boundary method is also known to suffer from a severe timestep stability restriction when using an explicit time discretization. In this paper, we propose several efficient semi-implicit schemes to remove this stiffness from the immersed boundary method for the two-dimensional Stokes flow. First, we obtain a novel unconditionally stable semi-implicit discretization for the immersed boundary problem. Using this unconditionally stable discretization as a building block, we derive several efficient semi-implicit schemes for the immersed boundary problem by applying the small scale decomposition to this unconditionally stable discretization. Our stability analysis and extensive numerical experiments show that our semi-implicit schemes offer much better stability property than the explicit scheme. Unlike other implicit or semi-implicit schemes proposed in the literature, our semi-implicit schemes can be solved explicitly in the spectral space. Thus the computational cost of our semi-implicit schemes is comparable to that of an explicit scheme, but with a much better stability property.

The immersed boundary method is one of the most useful computational methods in studying fluid structure interaction. On the other hand, the Immersed Boundary method is also known to require small time steps to maintain stability when solved with an explicit method. Many implicit or approximately implicit methods have been proposed in the literature to remove this severe time step stability constraint, but none of them give satisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient semi-implicit scheme to remove this stiffness from the immersed boundary method for the Navier–Stokes equations. The construction of our semi-implicit scheme consists of two steps. First, we obtain a semiimplicit discretization which is proved to be unconditionally stable. This unconditionally stable semi-implicit scheme is still quite expensive to implement in practice. Next, we apply the small scale decomposition to the unconditionally stable semi-implicit scheme to construct our efficient semi-implicit scheme. Unlike other implicit or semi-implicit schemes proposed in the literature, our semi-implicit scheme can be solved explicitly in the spectral space. Thus the computational cost of our semi-implicit schemes is comparable to that of an explicit scheme. Our extensive numerical experiments show that our semiimplicit scheme has much better stability property than an explicit scheme. This offers a substantial computational saving in using the immersed boundary method.