Nicholas J. Higham

Nicholas J. Higham, Peter Kandolf

We derive a new algorithm for computing the action $f(A)V$ of the cosine, sine, hyperbolic cosine, and hyperbolic sine of a matrix $A$ on a matrix $V$, without first computing $f(A)$. The algorithm can compute $\cos(A)V$ and $\sin(A)V$ simultaneously, and likewise for $\cosh(A)V$ and $\sinh(A)V$, and it uses only real arithmetic when $A$ is real. The algorithm exploits an existing algorithm \texttt{expmv} of Al-Mohy and Higham for $\mathrm{e}^AV$ and its underlying backward error analysis. Our experiments show that the new algorithm performs in a forward stable manner and is generally significantly faster than alternatives based on multiple invocations of \texttt{expmv} through formulas such as $\cos(A)V = (\mathrm{e}^{\mathrm{i}A}V + \mathrm{e}^{\mathrm{-i}A}V)/2$.

Andrii Dmytryshyn, Massimiliano Fasi, Nicholas J. Higham et al.

We consider the solution of the Sylvester equation $AX+XB=C$ in mixed precision. We derive a new iterative refinement scheme to solve perturbed quasi-triangular Sylvester equations; our rounding error analysis provides sufficient conditions for convergence and a bound on the attainable relative residual. We leverage this iterative scheme to solve the general Sylvester equation. The new algorithms compute the Schur decomposition of the coefficient matrices $A$ and $B$ in lower than working precision, use the low-precision Schur factors to obtain an approximate solution to the perturbed quasi-triangular equation, and iteratively refine it to obtain a working-precision solution. In order to solve the original equation to working precision, the unitary Schur factors of the coefficient matrices must be unitary to working precision, but this is not the case if the Schur decomposition is computed in low precision. We propose two effective approaches to address this: one is based on re-orthonormalization in working precision, and the other on explicit inversion of the almost-unitary factors. The two mixed-precision algorithms thus obtained are tested on various Sylvester and Lyapunov equations from the literature. Our numerical experiments show that, for both types of equations, the new algorithms are at least as accurate as existing ones. Our cost analysis, on the other hand, suggests that they would typically be faster than mono-precision alternatives if implemented on hardware that natively supports low precision.

Weijian Zhang, Jonathan Deakin, Nicholas J. Higham et al.

We present Etymo (https://etymo.io), a discovery engine to facilitate artificial intelligence (AI) research and development. It aims to help readers navigate a large number of AI-related papers published every week by using a novel form of search that finds relevant papers and displays related papers in a graphical interface. Etymo constructs and maintains an adaptive similarity-based network of research papers as an all-purpose knowledge graph for ranking, recommendation, and visualisation. The network is constantly evolving and can learn from user feedback to adjust itself.