19,170 research outputs found
On the effects of firing memory in the dynamics of conjunctive networks
Boolean networks are one of the most studied discrete models in the context
of the study of gene expression. In order to define the dynamics associated to
a Boolean network, there are several \emph{update schemes} that range from
parallel or \emph{synchronous} to \emph{asynchronous.} However, studying each
possible dynamics defined by different update schemes might not be efficient.
In this context, considering some type of temporal delay in the dynamics of
Boolean networks emerges as an alternative approach. In this paper, we focus in
studying the effect of a particular type of delay called \emph{firing memory}
in the dynamics of Boolean networks. Particularly, we focus in symmetric
(non-directed) conjunctive networks and we show that there exist examples that
exhibit attractors of non-polynomial period. In addition, we study the
prediction problem consisting in determinate if some vertex will eventually
change its state, given an initial condition. We prove that this problem is
{\bf PSPACE}-complete
Symmetric and Synchronous Communication in Peer-to-Peer Networks
Motivated by distributed implementations of game-theoretical algorithms, we
study symmetric process systems and the problem of attaining common knowledge
between processes. We formalize our setting by defining a notion of
peer-to-peer networks(*) and appropriate symmetry concepts in the context of
Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), due to the common knowledge creating
effects of its synchronous communication primitives. We then prove that CSP
with input and output guards makes common knowledge in symmetric peer-to-peer
networks possible, but not the restricted version which disallows output
statements in guards and is commonly implemented.
(*) Please note that we are not dealing with fashionable incarnations such as
file-sharing networks, but merely use this name for a mathematical notion of a
network consisting of directly connected peers "treated on an equal footing",
i.e. not having a client-server structure or otherwise pre-determined roles.)Comment: polished, modernized references; incorporated referee feedback from
MPC'0
Chameleon: A Hybrid Secure Computation Framework for Machine Learning Applications
We present Chameleon, a novel hybrid (mixed-protocol) framework for secure
function evaluation (SFE) which enables two parties to jointly compute a
function without disclosing their private inputs. Chameleon combines the best
aspects of generic SFE protocols with the ones that are based upon additive
secret sharing. In particular, the framework performs linear operations in the
ring using additively secret shared values and nonlinear
operations using Yao's Garbled Circuits or the Goldreich-Micali-Wigderson
protocol. Chameleon departs from the common assumption of additive or linear
secret sharing models where three or more parties need to communicate in the
online phase: the framework allows two parties with private inputs to
communicate in the online phase under the assumption of a third node generating
correlated randomness in an offline phase. Almost all of the heavy
cryptographic operations are precomputed in an offline phase which
substantially reduces the communication overhead. Chameleon is both scalable
and significantly more efficient than the ABY framework (NDSS'15) it is based
on. Our framework supports signed fixed-point numbers. In particular,
Chameleon's vector dot product of signed fixed-point numbers improves the
efficiency of mining and classification of encrypted data for algorithms based
upon heavy matrix multiplications. Our evaluation of Chameleon on a 5 layer
convolutional deep neural network shows 133x and 4.2x faster executions than
Microsoft CryptoNets (ICML'16) and MiniONN (CCS'17), respectively
Scalable Facility Location for Massive Graphs on Pregel-like Systems
We propose a new scalable algorithm for facility location. Facility location
is a classic problem, where the goal is to select a subset of facilities to
open, from a set of candidate facilities F , in order to serve a set of clients
C. The objective is to minimize the total cost of opening facilities plus the
cost of serving each client from the facility it is assigned to. In this work,
we are interested in the graph setting, where the cost of serving a client from
a facility is represented by the shortest-path distance on the graph. This
setting allows to model natural problems arising in the Web and in social media
applications. It also allows to leverage the inherent sparsity of such graphs,
as the input is much smaller than the full pairwise distances between all
vertices.
To obtain truly scalable performance, we design a parallel algorithm that
operates on clusters of shared-nothing machines. In particular, we target
modern Pregel-like architectures, and we implement our algorithm on Apache
Giraph. Our solution makes use of a recent result to build sketches for massive
graphs, and of a fast parallel algorithm to find maximal independent sets, as
building blocks. In so doing, we show how these problems can be solved on a
Pregel-like architecture, and we investigate the properties of these
algorithms. Extensive experimental results show that our algorithm scales
gracefully to graphs with billions of edges, while obtaining values of the
objective function that are competitive with a state-of-the-art sequential
algorithm
Complexity, parallel computation and statistical physics
The intuition that a long history is required for the emergence of complexity
in natural systems is formalized using the notion of depth. The depth of a
system is defined in terms of the number of parallel computational steps needed
to simulate it. Depth provides an objective, irreducible measure of history
applicable to systems of the kind studied in statistical physics. It is argued
that physical complexity cannot occur in the absence of substantial depth and
that depth is a useful proxy for physical complexity. The ideas are illustrated
for a variety of systems in statistical physics.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figure
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