7,056 research outputs found
UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024
The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp
An investigation of entorhinal spatial representations in self-localisation behaviours
Spatial-modulated cells of the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) and neighbouring cortices are thought to provide the neural substrate for self-localisation behaviours. These cells include grid cells of the MEC which are thought to compute path integration operations to update self-location estimates. In order to read this grid code, downstream cells are thought to reconstruct a positional estimate as a simple rate-coded representation of space.
Here, I show the coding scheme of grid cell and putative readout cells recorded from mice performing a virtual reality (VR) linear location task which engaged mice in both beaconing and path integration behaviours. I found grid cells can encode two unique coding schemes on the linear track, namely a position code which reflects periodic grid fields anchored to salient features of the track and a distance code which reflects periodic grid fields without this anchoring. Grid cells were found to switch between these coding schemes within sessions. When grid cells were encoding position, mice performed better at trials that required path integration but not on trials that required beaconing. This result provides the first mechanistic evidence linking grid cell activity to path integration-dependent behaviour.
Putative readout cells were found in the form of ramp cells which fire proportionally as a function of location in defined regions of the linear track. This ramping activity was found to be primarily explained by track position rather than other kinematic variables like speed and acceleration. These representations were found to be maintained across both trial types and outcomes indicating they likely result from recall of the track structure.
Together, these results support the functional importance of grid and ramp cells for self-localisation behaviours. Future investigations will look into the coherence between these two neural populations, which may together form a complete neural system for coding and decoding self-location in the brain
Towards A Practical High-Assurance Systems Programming Language
Writing correct and performant low-level systems code is a notoriously demanding job, even for experienced developers. To make the matter worse, formally reasoning about their correctness properties introduces yet another level of complexity to the task. It requires considerable expertise in both systems programming and formal verification. The development can be extremely costly due to the sheer complexity of the systems and the nuances in them, if not assisted with appropriate tools that provide abstraction and automation.
Cogent is designed to alleviate the burden on developers when writing and verifying systems code. It is a high-level functional language with a certifying compiler, which automatically proves the correctness of the compiled code and also provides a purely functional abstraction of the low-level program to the developer. Equational reasoning techniques can then be used to prove functional correctness properties of the program on top of this abstract semantics, which is notably less laborious than directly verifying the C code.
To make Cogent a more approachable and effective tool for developing real-world systems, we further strengthen the framework by extending the core language and its ecosystem. Specifically, we enrich the language to allow users to control the memory representation of algebraic data types, while retaining the automatic proof with a data layout refinement calculus. We repurpose existing tools in a novel way and develop an intuitive foreign function interface, which provides users a seamless experience when using Cogent in conjunction with native C. We augment the Cogent ecosystem with a property-based testing framework, which helps developers better understand the impact formal verification has on their programs and enables a progressive approach to producing high-assurance systems. Finally we explore refinement type systems, which we plan to incorporate into Cogent for more expressiveness and better integration of systems programmers with the verification process
Secure Short-Packet Communications via UAV-Enabled Mobile Relaying: Joint Resource Optimization and 3D Trajectory Design
Short-packet communication (SPC) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are
anticipated to play crucial roles in the development of 5G-and-beyond wireless
networks and the Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we propose a secure
SPC system, where a UAV serves as a mobile decode-and-forward (DF) relay,
periodically receiving and relaying small data packets from a remote IoT device
to its receiver in two hops with strict latency requirements, in the presence
of an eavesdropper. This system requires careful optimization of important
design parameters, such as the coding blocklengths of both hops, transmit
powers, and UAV's trajectory. While the overall optimization problem is
nonconvex, we tackle it by applying a block successive convex approximation
(BSCA) approach to divide the original problem into three subproblems and solve
them separately. Then, an overall iterative algorithm is proposed to obtain the
final design with guaranteed convergence. Our proposed low-complexity algorithm
incorporates 3D trajectory design and resource management to optimize the
effective average secrecy throughput of the communication system over the
course of UAV-relay's mission. Simulation results demonstrate significant
performance improvements compared to various benchmark schemes and provide
useful design insights on the coding blocklengths and transmit powers along the
trajectory of the UAV
SWIPT aided Cooperative Communications with Energy Harvesting based Selective-Decode-and-Forward Protocol: Benefiting from Channel Aging Effect
Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in radio-frequency (RF) bands enables flexible deployment of battery-powered relays for extending communication coverage. Relays receive downlink RF signals emitted by a source for information decoding and energy harvesting, while the harvested energy is consumed for both information decoding and information forwarding to a destination. An energy harvesting based selective-decode-and-forward (EH-SDF) protocol is proposed, where only the relays having information correctly decoded are activated for information forwarding, while others harvest and store energy for the future use. By considering the channel aging effect, we propose a joint relay selection, power allocation, transmit beamforming and signal splitting design in order to maximise the end-to-end (e2e) throughput of this EH-SDF aided cooperative communication system. Two scenarios with/without direct link between the source and the destination are studied, respectively. The original formulated non-convex optimisation problems with coupled variables are decoupled into three subproblems which are solved by an iterative optimisation algorithm. Numerical results demonstrate that our design with the EH-SDF protocol achieves a higher e2e throughput than the traditional decode-and-forward (DF) counterpart. Moreover, the impact of the channel aging effect on the e2e throughput is also evaluated
Modeling and Simulation in Engineering
The Special Issue Modeling and Simulation in Engineering, belonging to the section Engineering Mathematics of the Journal Mathematics, publishes original research papers dealing with advanced simulation and modeling techniques. The present book, “Modeling and Simulation in Engineering I, 2022”, contains 14 papers accepted after peer review by recognized specialists in the field. The papers address different topics occurring in engineering, such as ferrofluid transport in magnetic fields, non-fractal signal analysis, fractional derivatives, applications of swarm algorithms and evolutionary algorithms (genetic algorithms), inverse methods for inverse problems, numerical analysis of heat and mass transfer, numerical solutions for fractional differential equations, Kriging modelling, theory of the modelling methodology, and artificial neural networks for fault diagnosis in electric circuits. It is hoped that the papers selected for this issue will attract a significant audience in the scientific community and will further stimulate research involving modelling and simulation in mathematical physics and in engineering
Redesigning Multi-Scale Neural Network for Crowd Counting
Perspective distortions and crowd variations make crowd counting a
challenging task in computer vision. To tackle it, many previous works have
used multi-scale architecture in deep neural networks (DNNs). Multi-scale
branches can be either directly merged (e.g. by concatenation) or merged
through the guidance of proxies (e.g. attentions) in the DNNs. Despite their
prevalence, these combination methods are not sophisticated enough to deal with
the per-pixel performance discrepancy over multi-scale density maps. In this
work, we redesign the multi-scale neural network by introducing a hierarchical
mixture of density experts, which hierarchically merges multi-scale density
maps for crowd counting. Within the hierarchical structure, an expert
competition and collaboration scheme is presented to encourage contributions
from all scales; pixel-wise soft gating nets are introduced to provide
pixel-wise soft weights for scale combinations in different hierarchies. The
network is optimized using both the crowd density map and the local counting
map, where the latter is obtained by local integration on the former.
Optimizing both can be problematic because of their potential conflicts. We
introduce a new relative local counting loss based on relative count
differences among hard-predicted local regions in an image, which proves to be
complementary to the conventional absolute error loss on the density map.
Experiments show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on
five public datasets, i.e. ShanghaiTech, UCF_CC_50, JHU-CROWD++, NWPU-Crowd and
Trancos.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Image Processin
Efficient Covariance Matrix Reconstruction with Iterative Spatial Spectrum Sampling
This work presents a cost-effective technique for designing robust adaptive
beamforming algorithms based on efficient covariance matrix reconstruction with
iterative spatial power spectrum (CMR-ISPS). The proposed CMR-ISPS approach
reconstructs the interference-plus-noise covariance (INC) matrix based on a
simplified maximum entropy power spectral density function that can be used to
shape the directional response of the beamformer. Firstly, we estimate the
directions of arrival (DoAs) of the interfering sources with the available
snapshots. We then develop an algorithm to reconstruct the INC matrix using a
weighted sum of outer products of steering vectors whose coefficients can be
estimated in the vicinity of the DoAs of the interferences which lie in a small
angular sector. We also devise a cost-effective adaptive algorithm based on
conjugate gradient techniques to update the beamforming weights and a method to
obtain estimates of the signal of interest (SOI) steering vector from the
spatial power spectrum. The proposed CMR-ISPS beamformer can suppress
interferers close to the direction of the SOI by producing notches in the
directional response of the array with sufficient depths. Simulation results
are provided to confirm the validity of the proposed method and make a
comparison to existing approachesComment: 14 pages, 8 figure
2023-2024 Boise State University Undergraduate Catalog
This catalog is primarily for and directed at students. However, it serves many audiences, such as high school counselors, academic advisors, and the public. In this catalog you will find an overview of Boise State University and information on admission, registration, grades, tuition and fees, financial aid, housing, student services, and other important policies and procedures. However, most of this catalog is devoted to describing the various programs and courses offered at Boise State
Brain Computations and Connectivity [2nd edition]
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
Brain Computations and Connectivity is about how the brain works. In order to understand this, it is essential to know what is computed by different brain systems; and how the computations are performed.
The aim of this book is to elucidate what is computed in different brain systems; and to describe current biologically plausible computational approaches and models of how each of these brain systems computes.
Understanding the brain in this way has enormous potential for understanding ourselves better in health and in disease. Potential applications of this understanding are to the treatment of the brain in disease; and to artificial intelligence which will benefit from knowledge of how the brain performs many of its extraordinarily impressive functions.
This book is pioneering in taking this approach to brain function: to consider what is computed by many of our brain systems; and how it is computed, and updates by much new evidence including the connectivity of the human brain the earlier book: Rolls (2021) Brain Computations: What and How, Oxford University Press.
Brain Computations and Connectivity will be of interest to all scientists interested in brain function and how the brain works, whether they are from neuroscience, or from medical sciences including neurology and psychiatry, or from the area of computational science including machine learning and artificial intelligence, or from areas such as theoretical physics
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