271,109 research outputs found
PNAEQ - 13 years of post-analytical EQAS in Portugal
In the last 13 years, PNAEQ provided a specific program on post-analytical phase. In order to raise the offer of schemes in areas like Thrombosis/ Haemostasis, PNAEQ has established a consortium with ECAT Foundation distributing two more schemes: Post- Analytical Platelet Function and Pre- and Post-Analytical in Haemostasis. Furthermore, five of the analytical schemes organized by PNAEQ include a post-analytical interpretation, such as Blood Morphology, Hemoglobinopathies, Hydatidose, Rubella and Toxoplasmosis. The main objective of implementing specific and integrated programs on post-analytical phase is to evaluate the performance of laboratories on these matters in order to improve their quality service. The specific program on post-analytical phase provided by PNAEQ comprises 6 types of surveys: audits (vertical and presential), case simulation, case-study, document evaluation, quality indicators and questionnaires. Each survey represents a different tool to evaluate several items of the post-analytical process (Table 1), as well as the laboratory collaborators involved in each task (Figure 1). The items in evaluation are annually selected in the PNAEQ Working Group on Pre- and Post-Analytical Phase (created in 2015) and in compliance with the Portuguese Legislation and the ISO 15189:2012(E). Since 2007 PNAEQ has distributed 6 types of tools in the Post-Analytical Phase EQA, stabilizing in 3 of them in the last five years: Audits, Case Simulation and Quality Indicators. The participation rate has been increasing since 2015, which can be due to the multiple actions performed by PNAEQ Working Group on Pre- and Post-Analytical Phase. In addition, the Case Simulation surveys are the most participated (74% average) since the participation depends on PNAEQ.
For the future, PNAEQ and the Working Group will work on the continuous update of the tools content distributed in each survey according to international references and the experience of other EQA organizers.N/
A comparison of various quasi-newton schemes for partitioned fluid-structure interaction
During the last 5 years, quasi-Newton schemes have proven to be a robust and efficient way to couple partitioned fluid-structure interaction. We showed in previous work that they also allow to perform a parallel coupling. Bogaers et al. introduced a new variant based on a multi-vector update [14]. This variant renders a tuning of the reuse of old information unnecessary as all old iterations are implicitly covered in a Jacobian update. In this work, we compare this multi-vector variant in an inverse formulation to the classical IQN-ILS algorithm for serial as well as parallel coupling
Secure Federated Learning against Model Poisoning Attacks via Client Filtering
Given the distributed nature, detecting and defending against the backdoor
attack under federated learning (FL) systems is challenging. In this paper, we
observe that the cosine similarity of the last layer's weight between the
global model and each local update could be used effectively as an indicator of
malicious model updates. Therefore, we propose CosDefense, a
cosine-similarity-based attacker detection algorithm. Specifically, under
CosDefense, the server calculates the cosine similarity score of the last
layer's weight between the global model and each client update, labels
malicious clients whose score is much higher than the average, and filters them
out of the model aggregation in each round. Compared to existing defense
schemes, CosDefense does not require any extra information besides the received
model updates to operate and is compatible with client sampling. Experiment
results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that CosDefense could provide
robust performance under the state-of-the-art FL poisoning attack
Automatised full one-loop renormalisation of the MSSM I: The Higgs sector, the issue of tan(beta) and gauge invariance
We give an extensive description of the renormalisation of the Higgs sector
of the minimal supersymmetric model in SloopS. SloopS is an automatised code
for the computation of one-loop processes in the MSSM. In this paper, the first
in a series, we study in detail the non gauge invariance of some definitions of
tan(beta). We rely on a general non-linear gauge fixing constraint to make the
gauge parameter dependence of different schemes for tan(beta) at one-loop
explicit. In so doing, we update, within these general gauges, an important
Ward-Slavnov-Taylor identity on the mixing between the pseudo-scalar Higgs,
A^0, and the Z^0. We then compare the tan(beta) scheme dependence of a few
observables. We find that the best tan(beta) scheme is the one based on the
decay A^0 -> tau^+ tau^- because of its gauge invariance, being unambiguously
defined from a physical observable, and because it is numerically stable. The
oft used DRbar scheme performs almost as well on the last count, but is usually
defined from non-gauge invariant quantities in the Higgs sector. The use of the
heavier scalar Higgs mass in lieu of tan(beta) though related to a physical
parameter induces too large radiative corrections in many instances and is
therefore not recommended.Comment: 34 pages, 1 figure, typos corrected, accepted for publication in
Phys. Rev.
Asymmetric contrarians in opinion dynamics
Asymmetry in contrarian behavior is investigated within the Galam model of
opinion dynamics using update groups of size 3 with two competing opinions A
and B. Denoting and the respective proportions of A and B contrarians,
four schemes of implementations are studied. First scheme activates contrarians
after each series of updates with probabilities and for agents holding
respectively opinion A and B. Second scheme activates contrarians within the
update groups only against global majority with probability when A is
majority and when B is majority. Third scheme considers in-group
contrarians acting prior to the local majority update against both local
majority and minority opinions. Last scheme activates in-group contrarians
prior to the local majority update but only against the local majority. The
main result is the loss of the fifty-fifty attractor produced by symmetric
contrarians. Producing a bit less contrarians on its own side than the other
side becomes the key to win a public debate, which in turn can guarantee an
election victory. The associated phase diagram of opinion dynamics is found to
exhibit a rich variety of counterintuitive results.Comment: 13 pages LaTeX with numerous figs; ver 2 updated with new
bibliographic refeernces and corrections to figure reference
Forward Private Searchable Symmetric Encryption with Optimized I/O Efficiency
Recently, several practical attacks raised serious concerns over the security
of searchable encryption. The attacks have brought emphasis on forward privacy,
which is the key concept behind solutions to the adaptive leakage-exploiting
attacks, and will very likely to become mandatory in the design of new
searchable encryption schemes. For a long time, forward privacy implies
inefficiency and thus most existing searchable encryption schemes do not
support it. Very recently, Bost (CCS 2016) showed that forward privacy can be
obtained without inducing a large communication overhead. However, Bost's
scheme is constructed with a relatively inefficient public key cryptographic
primitive, and has a poor I/O performance. Both of the deficiencies
significantly hinder the practical efficiency of the scheme, and prevent it
from scaling to large data settings. To address the problems, we first present
FAST, which achieves forward privacy and the same communication efficiency as
Bost's scheme, but uses only symmetric cryptographic primitives. We then
present FASTIO, which retains all good properties of FAST, and further improves
I/O efficiency. We implemented the two schemes and compared their performance
with Bost's scheme. The experiment results show that both our schemes are
highly efficient, and FASTIO achieves a much better scalability due to its
optimized I/O
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