Wave propagation in two-dimensional generalized honeycomb lattices is studied. By employing the tight-binding (TB) approximation, the linear dispersion relation and associated discrete envelope equations are derived for the lowest band. In the TB limit, the Bloch modes are localized at the minima of the potential wells and can analytically be constructed in terms of local orbitals. Bloch-mode relations are converted into integrals over orbitals. With this methodology, the linear dispersion relation is derived analytically in the TB limit. The nonlinear envelope dynamics are found to be governed by a unified nonlinear discrete wave system. The lowest Bloch band has two branches that touch at the Dirac points. In the neighborhood of these points, the unified system leads to a coupled nonlinear discrete Dirac system. In the continuous limit, the leading-order evolution is governed by a continuous nonlinear Dirac system. This system exhibits conical diffraction, a phenomenon observed in experiments. Coupled nonlinear Dirac systems are also obtained. Away from the Dirac points, the continuous limit of the discrete equation leads to coupled nonlinear Schrödinger equations when the underlying group velocities are nearly zero. With semiclassical approximations, all the parameters are estimated analytically.

The need for highly scalable and accurate detection and filtering of misbehaving users and obscene content in online video chat services has grown as the popularity of these services has exploded in popularity. This is a challenging problem because processing large amounts of video is compute intensive, decisions about whether a user is misbehaving or not must be made online and quickly, and moreover these video chats are characterized by low quality video, poorly lit scenes, diversity of users and their behaviors, diversity of the content, and typically short sessions. This paper presents EMeralD, a highly scalable system for accurately detecting and filtering misbehaving users in online video chat applications. EMeralD substantially improves upon the state-of-the-art filtering mechanisms by achieving much lower computational cost and higher accuracy. We demonstrate EMeralD's improvement via experimental evaluations on real-world data sets obtained from Chatroulette.com.

The linear spectrum and corresponding Bloch modes of shallow honeycomb lattices near Dirac points are investigated. Via perturbation theory, the dispersion relation is found to have threefold degeneracy at leading order with eigenvalue splitting at the following two orders; i.e., the threefold eigenvalue splits into single and double values. Multiscale perturbation methods are employed to describe the nonlinear dynamics of the associated wave envelopes. The dynamics of the envelope depends on different asymptotic balances whereupon a three-level nonlinear Dirac-type equation or a two-level nonlinear Dirac equation is derived. The analysis agrees well with direct numerical simulations.

Nonlinear dynamics of wave packets in parity-time-symmetric optical lattices near the phase-transition point is analytically studied. A nonlinear Klein–Gordon equation is derived for the envelope of these wave packets. A variety of phenomena known to exist in this envelope equation are shown to also exist in the full equation, including wave blowup, periodic bound states, and solitary wave solutions.

Two-dimensional localized edge modes in optical honeycomb lattices are found and analyzed analytically and computationally. Weak nonlinearity and transverse modulation are found to introduce self-phase modulation in the phase and create internal nonlinear interactions as the electromagnetic field propagates through the lattice. Even with relatively strong nonlinearity localization and persistence of modes along the edge are found.