6,637 research outputs found
Revisiting chaos in stimulus-driven spiking networks: signal encoding and discrimination
Highly connected recurrent neural networks often produce chaotic dynamics,
meaning their precise activity is sensitive to small perturbations. What are
the consequences for how such networks encode streams of temporal stimuli? On
the one hand, chaos is a strong source of randomness, suggesting that small
changes in stimuli will be obscured by intrinsically generated variability. On
the other hand, recent work shows that the type of chaos that occurs in spiking
networks can have a surprisingly low-dimensional structure, suggesting that
there may be "room" for fine stimulus features to be precisely resolved. Here
we show that strongly chaotic networks produce patterned spikes that reliably
encode time-dependent stimuli: using a decoder sensitive to spike times on
timescales of 10's of ms, one can easily distinguish responses to very similar
inputs. Moreover, recurrence serves to distribute signals throughout chaotic
networks so that small groups of cells can encode substantial information about
signals arriving elsewhere. A conclusion is that the presence of strong chaos
in recurrent networks does not prohibit precise stimulus encoding.Comment: 8 figure
Using the PALS Architecture to Verify a Distributed Topology Control Protocol for Wireless Multi-Hop Networks in the Presence of Node Failures
The PALS architecture reduces distributed, real-time asynchronous system
design to the design of a synchronous system under reasonable requirements.
Assuming logical synchrony leads to fewer system behaviors and provides a
conceptually simpler paradigm for engineering purposes. One of the current
limitations of the framework is that from a set of independent "synchronous
machines", one must compose the entire synchronous system by hand, which is
tedious and error-prone. We use Maude's meta-level to automatically generate a
synchronous composition from user-provided component machines and a description
of how the machines communicate with each other. We then use the new
capabilities to verify the correctness of a distributed topology control
protocol for wireless networks in the presence of nodes that may fail.Comment: In Proceedings RTRTS 2010, arXiv:1009.398
Functional and structural brain connectivity of young binge drinkers: a follow-up study
Adolescence is a period of ongoing brain maturation characterized by hierarchical changes in the functional and structural networks. For this reason, the young brain is particularly vulnerable to the toxic effects of alcohol. Nowadays, binge drinking is a pattern of alcohol consumption increasingly prevalent among adolescents. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the evolution of the functional and anatomical connectivity of the Default Mode Network (DMN) in young binge drinkers along two years. Magnetoencephalography signal during eyes closed resting state as well as Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) were acquired twice within a 2-year interval from 39 undergraduate students (22 controls, 17 binge drinkers) with neither personal nor family history of alcoholism. The group comparison showed that, after maintaining a binge drinking pattern along at least two years, binge drinkers displayed an increased brain connectivity of the DMN in comparison with the control group. On the other hand, the structural connectivity did not show significant differences neither between groups nor over the time. These findings point out that a continued pattern of binge drinking leads to functional alterations in the normal brain maturation process, even before anatomical changes can be detected.This study was supported by the projects SPI/2010 and SPI/2010/051 from Spanish Ministry of Health and Social Politics (National Plan on Drugs). Funding was also provided from the SFRH/BPD/109750/2015 Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology as well as the Research Center on Psychology (UID/PSI/01662/2013)S
Beautiful and damned. Combined effect of content quality and social ties on user engagement
User participation in online communities is driven by the intertwinement of
the social network structure with the crowd-generated content that flows along
its links. These aspects are rarely explored jointly and at scale. By looking
at how users generate and access pictures of varying beauty on Flickr, we
investigate how the production of quality impacts the dynamics of online social
systems. We develop a deep learning computer vision model to score images
according to their aesthetic value and we validate its output through
crowdsourcing. By applying it to over 15B Flickr photos, we study for the first
time how image beauty is distributed over a large-scale social system.
Beautiful images are evenly distributed in the network, although only a small
core of people get social recognition for them. To study the impact of exposure
to quality on user engagement, we set up matching experiments aimed at
detecting causality from observational data. Exposure to beauty is
double-edged: following people who produce high-quality content increases one's
probability of uploading better photos; however, an excessive imbalance between
the quality generated by a user and the user's neighbors leads to a decline in
engagement. Our analysis has practical implications for improving link
recommender systems.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, final version published in IEEE Transactions on
Knowledge and Data Engineering (Volume: PP, Issue: 99
Dynamic activity patterns and cortico-subcortical interactions in the human brain
openQuesto progetto di tesi si propone di indagare la natura della connettività funzionale dinamica (dFC), con un particolare focus sulle sue basi neurali e sulla sua possibile rilevanza comportamentale. Nello specifico, partendo da uno studio pubblicato nel 2022 da Favaretto e colleghi, valuteremo il ruolo delle comunicazioni cortico-sottocorticali nella modellazione della dFC, nonché l'importanza dei suoi parametri nel predire specifici aspetti demografici e comportamentali.This thesis project aims at broadly investigating the nature of dynamic funtctional connectivity (dFC), with a specific focus on its neural underpinnings and potential behavioral relevance. In particular, leading from a study published in 2022 by Favaretto and collegues, we will assess the role of cortico-subcortical communications in shaping dFC as well as the influence of dFC metrics on demographic traits and individual behavior
Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey
This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh
network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user
privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various
possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for
WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the
security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application
layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols,
user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation
protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the
chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms
and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible
attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with
regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed,
use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved
etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management
approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly
becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open
problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed
before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the
author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are
some text overlaps with the previous submissio
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