BUSM News and Notes

Monthly newsletter providing updates of interest to the Boston University School of Medicine community

Automating Access Control Logics in Simple Type Theory with LEO-II

Garg and Abadi recently proved that prominent access control logics can be translated in a sound and complete way into modal logic S4. We have previously outlined how normal multimodal logics, including monomodal logics K and S4, can be embedded in simple type theory (which is also known as higher-order logic) and we have demonstrated that the higher-order theorem prover LEO-II can automate reasoning in and about them. In this paper we combine these results and describe a sound and complete embedding of different access control logics in simple type theory. Employing this framework we show that the off the shelf theorem prover LEO-II can be applied to automate reasoning in prominent access control logics.Comment: ii + 20 page

Review of NLRB on Election Campaigns, 1979

Includes consideration of the NLRB standards for representation elections, 101 LRR pp.170-172

Chaos in dynamical systems by the Poincaré-Melnikov-Arnold method

Methods proving the existence of chaos in the sense of Poincaré-Birkhoff-Smale horseshoes are presented. We shall concentrate on explicitly verifiable results that apply to specific examples such as the ordinary differential equations for a forced pendulum, and for superfluid He and the partial differential equation describing the oscillations off a beam. Some discussion of the difficulties the method encounters near an elliptic fixed point is given

A Formal Proof of the Expressiveness of Deep Learning

International audienceDeep learning has had a profound impact on computer science in recent years, with applications to image recognition, language processing, bioinformatics, and more. Recently , Cohen et al. provided theoretical evidence for the superiority of deep learning over shallow learning. We formalized their mathematical proof using Isabelle/HOL. The Isabelle development simplifies and generalizes the original proof, while working around the limitations of the HOL type system. To support the formalization, we developed reusable libraries of formalized mathematics, including results about the matrix rank, the Borel measure, and multivariate polynomials as well as a library for tensor analysis

In-context Example Selection with Influences

In-context learning (ICL) is a powerful paradigm emerged from large language models (LLMs). Despite its promises, ICL performance is known to be highly sensitive to input examples. In this work, we use $\textit{in-context influences}$ to analyze few-shot ICL performance directly from the in-context examples. Our proposed influence-based example selection method can identify both positive and negative examples, outperforming several baselines when evaluated on 9 SuperGLUE tasks. Our analysis uncovers up to a $16.3\%$ performance gap between using the most negative in-context examples compared to the most positive. In a case study, we apply our influence-based framework to quantify the phenomena of recency bias in example ordering for few-shot ICL

Novel Insights into the Bovine Polled Phenotype and Horn Ontogenesis in Bovidae

Despite massive research efforts, the molecular etiology of bovine polledness and the developmental pathways involved in horn ontogenesis are still poorly understood. In a recent article, we provided evidence for the existence of at least two different alleles at the Polled locus and identified candidate mutations for each of them. None of these mutations was located in known coding or regulatory regions, thus adding to the complexity of understanding the molecular basis of polledness. We confirm previous results here and exhaustively identify the causative mutation for the Celtic allele (PC) and four candidate mutations for the Friesian allele (PF). We describe a previously unreported eyelash-and-eyelid phenotype associated with regular polledness, and present unique histological and gene expression data on bovine horn bud differentiation in fetuses affected by three different horn defect syndromes, as well as in wild-type controls. We propose the ectopic expression of a lincRNA in PC/p horn buds as a probable cause of horn bud agenesis. In addition, we provide evidence for an involvement of OLIG2, FOXL2 and RXFP2 in horn bud differentiation, and draw a first link between bovine, ovine and caprine Polled loci. Our results represent a first and important step in understanding the genetic pathways and key process involved in horn bud differentiation in Bovidae

STUDY OF FULLY-INTEGRATED LOW-DROPOUT REGULATORS

Department of Electrical EngineeringThis thesis focuses on the introduction of fully-integrated low-dropout regulators (LDOs). Recently, for the mobile and internet-of-things applications, the level of integration is getting higher. LDOs get popular in integrated circuit design including functions such as reducing switching ripples from high-efficiency regulators, cancelling spurs from other loads, and giving different supply voltages to loads. In accordance with load applications, choosing proper LDOs is important. LDOs can be classified by the types of power MOSEFT, the topologies of error amplifier, and the locations of dominant pole. Analog loads such as voltage-controlled oscillators and analog-to-digital converters need LDOs that have high power-supply-rejection-ratio (PSRR), high accuracy, and low noise. Digital loads such as DRAM and CPU need fast transient response, a wide range of load current providable LDOs. As an example, we present the design procedure of a fully-integrated LDO that obtains the desired PSRR. In analog LDOs, we discuss advanced techniques such as local positive feedback loop and zero path that can improve stability and PSRR performance. In digital LDOs, the techniques to improve transient response are introduced. In analog-digital hybrid LDOs, to achieve both fast transient and high PSRR performance in a fully-integrated chip, how to optimally combine analog and digital LDOs is considered based on the characteristics of each LDO type. The future work is extracted from the considerations and limitations of conventional techniques.clos