480 research outputs found
Advances in imaging THGEM-based detectors
The thick GEM (THGEM) [1] is an "expanded" GEM, economically produced in the
PCB industry by simple drilling and etching in G-10 or other insulating
materials (fig. 1). Similar to GEM, its operation is based on electron gas
avalanche multiplication in sub-mm holes, resulting in very high gain and fast
signals. Due to its large hole size, the THGEM is particularly efficient in
transporting the electrons into and from the holes, leading to efficient
single-electron detection and effective cascaded operation. The THGEM provides
true pixilated radiation localization, ns signals, high gain and high rate
capability. For a comprehensive summary of the THGEM properties, the reader is
referred to [2, 3]. In this article we present a summary of our recent study on
THGEM-based imaging, carried out with a 10x10 cm^2 double-THGEM detector.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures. Presented at the 10th Pisa Meeting on Advanced
Detectors; ELBA-Italy; May 21-27 200
Vertex Fault Tolerant Additive Spanners
A {\em fault-tolerant} structure for a network is required to continue
functioning following the failure of some of the network's edges or vertices.
In this paper, we address the problem of designing a {\em fault-tolerant}
additive spanner, namely, a subgraph of the network such that
subsequent to the failure of a single vertex, the surviving part of still
contains an \emph{additive} spanner for (the surviving part of) , satisfying
for every
. Recently, the problem of constructing fault-tolerant additive
spanners resilient to the failure of up to \emph{edges} has been considered
by Braunschvig et. al. The problem of handling \emph{vertex} failures was left
open therein. In this paper we develop new techniques for constructing additive
FT-spanners overcoming the failure of a single vertex in the graph. Our first
result is an FT-spanner with additive stretch and
edges. Our second result is an FT-spanner with additive stretch and
edges. The construction algorithm consists of two main
components: (a) constructing an FT-clustering graph and (b) applying a modified
path-buying procedure suitably adopted to failure prone settings. Finally, we
also describe two constructions for {\em fault-tolerant multi-source additive
spanners}, aiming to guarantee a bounded additive stretch following a vertex
failure, for every pair of vertices in for a given subset of
sources . The additive stretch bounds of our constructions are 4
and 8 (using a different number of edges)
A latent variable ranking model for content-based retrieval
34th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2012, Barcelona, Spain, April 1-5, 2012. ProceedingsSince their introduction, ranking SVM models [11] have become a powerful tool for training content-based retrieval systems. All we need for training a model are retrieval examples in the form of triplet constraints, i.e. examples specifying that relative to some query, a database item a should be ranked higher than database item b. These types of constraints could be obtained from feedback of users of the retrieval system. Most previous ranking models learn either a global combination of elementary similarity functions or a combination defined with respect to a single database item. Instead, we propose a âcoarse to fineâ ranking model where given a query we first compute a distribution over âcoarseâ classes and then use the linear combination that has been optimized for queries of that class. These coarse classes are hidden and need to be induced by the training algorithm. We propose a latent variable ranking model that induces both the latent classes and the weights of the linear combination for each class from ranking triplets. Our experiments over two large image datasets and a text retrieval dataset show the advantages of our model over learning a global combination as well as a combination for each test point (i.e. transductive setting). Furthermore, compared to the transductive approach our model has a clear computational advantages since it does not need to be retrained for each test query.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (JCI-2009-04240)EU PASCAL2 Network of Excellence (FP7-ICT-216886
THGEM operation in Ne and Ne/CH4
The operation of Thick Gaseous Electron Multipliers (THGEM) in Ne and Ne/CH4
mixtures, features high multiplication factors at relatively low operation
potentials, in both single- and double-THGEM configurations. We present some
systematic data measured with UV-photons and soft x-rays, in various Ne
mixtures. It includes gain dependence on hole diameter and gas purity,
photoelectron extraction efficiency from CsI photocathodes into the gas,
long-term gain stability and pulse rise-time. Position resolution of a 100x100
mm^2 X-rays imaging detector is presented. Possible applications are discussed.Comment: Submitted to JINST, 25 pages, 33 figure
The color of smiling: computational synaesthesia of facial expressions
This note gives a preliminary account of the transcoding or rechanneling
problem between different stimuli as it is of interest for the natural
interaction or affective computing fields. By the consideration of a simple
example, namely the color response of an affective lamp to a sensed facial
expression, we frame the problem within an information- theoretic perspective.
A full justification in terms of the Information Bottleneck principle promotes
a latent affective space, hitherto surmised as an appealing and intuitive
solution, as a suitable mediator between the different stimuli.Comment: Submitted to: 18th International Conference on Image Analysis and
Processing (ICIAP 2015), 7-11 September 2015, Genova, Ital
DeltaPhish: Detecting Phishing Webpages in Compromised Websites
The large-scale deployment of modern phishing attacks relies on the automatic
exploitation of vulnerable websites in the wild, to maximize profit while
hindering attack traceability, detection and blacklisting. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first work that specifically leverages this adversarial
behavior for detection purposes. We show that phishing webpages can be
accurately detected by highlighting HTML code and visual differences with
respect to other (legitimate) pages hosted within a compromised website. Our
system, named DeltaPhish, can be installed as part of a web application
firewall, to detect the presence of anomalous content on a website after
compromise, and eventually prevent access to it. DeltaPhish is also robust
against adversarial attempts in which the HTML code of the phishing page is
carefully manipulated to evade detection. We empirically evaluate it on more
than 5,500 webpages collected in the wild from compromised websites, showing
that it is capable of detecting more than 99% of phishing webpages, while only
misclassifying less than 1% of legitimate pages. We further show that the
detection rate remains higher than 70% even under very sophisticated attacks
carefully designed to evade our system.Comment: Preprint version of the work accepted at ESORICS 201
Connecting Dualities and Machine Learning
Dualities are widely used in quantum field theories and string theory to obtain correlation functions at high accuracy. Here we present examples where dual data representations are useful in supervised classification, linking machine learning and typical tasks in theoretical physics. We then discuss how such beneficial representations can be enforced in the latent dimension of neural networks. We find that additional contributions to the loss based on feature separation, feature matching with respect to desired representations, and a good performance on a âsimpleâ correlation function can lead to known and unknown dual representations. This is the first proof of concept that computers can find dualities. We discuss how our examples, based on discrete Fourier transformation and Ising models, connect to other dualities in theoretical physics, for instance Seiberg duality
Computational analysis of the synergy among multiple interacting genes
Diseases such as cancer are often related to collaborative effects involving interactions of multiple genes within complex pathways, or to combinations of multiple SNPs. To understand the structure of such mechanisms, it is helpful to analyze genes in terms of the purely cooperative, as opposed to independent, nature of their contributions towards a phenotype. Here, we present an information-theoretic analysis that provides a quantitative measure of the multivariate synergy and decomposes sets of genes into submodules each of which contains synergistically interacting genes. When the resulting computational tools are used for the analysis of gene expression or SNP data, this systems-based methodology provides insight into the biological mechanisms responsible for disease
- âŠ