Robustness Verification for Classifier Ensembles

We give a formal verification procedure that decides whether a classifier ensemble is robust against arbitrary randomized attacks. Such attacks consist of a set of deterministic attacks and a distribution over this set. The robustness-checking problem consists of assessing, given a set of classifiers and a labelled data set, whether there exists a randomized attack that induces a certain expected loss against all classifiers. We show the NP-hardness of the problem and provide an upper bound on the number of attacks that is sufficient to form an optimal randomized attack. These results provide an effective way to reason about the robustness of a classifier ensemble. We provide SMT and MILP encodings to compute optimal randomized attacks or prove that there is no attack inducing a certain expected loss. In the latter case, the classifier ensemble is provably robust. Our prototype implementation verifies multiple neural-network ensembles trained for image-classification tasks. The experimental results using the MILP encoding are promising both in terms of scalability and the general applicability of our verification procedure

On the eve of the 100th anniversary of IAU Commission 19/A2 “Rotation of the Earth”

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.IAU Commission 19 began in 1919 with the birth of the IAU at the Brussels Conference, where Standing Committee 19 on Latitude Variations was established as one of 32 standing committees. At the first IAU General Assembly in 1922, Standing Committee 19 became Commission 19 “Variation of Latitude”. In the beginning, the main topic of the Commission was the investigation of polar motion. Later, its activities included observations and theory of Earth rotation and connections between Earth orientation variations and geophysical phenomena. As a result, in 1964 at the XII IAU General Assembly, the Commission was renamed “Rotation of the Earth”. The investigation of Earth orientation variations is primarily based on observations of natural and artificial celestial objects. Therefore, maintenance of the international terrestrial and celestial reference frames, as well as the coordinate transformation between the frames and the improvement of the model of precession/nutation, have always been among the primary Commission topics. In 1987, the IAU through Commissions 19 and 31 “Time” established, jointly with the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, what is now known as the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service. Commission 19 continued to work to develop methods to improve the accuracy and understanding of Earth orientation variations and related reference systems and frames as well as theoretical studies of Earth rotation. In 2015, Commission 19 was renewed as Commission A2 “Rotation of the Earth” continuing Commission 19’s functions and linking the astronomical community to other scientific organizations such as the International Association of Geodesy, International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry, International GNSS Service, International Laser Ranging Service and International DORIS Service. During its entire history, IAU Commission 19/A2 has always worked in close cooperation with these and other related services to improve the accuracy and consistency of the Earth orientation parameters and celestial and terrestrial reference frames

Targeted Adversarial Attacks on Deep Reinforcement Learning Policies via Model Checking

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are susceptible to adversarial noise in their observations that can mislead their policies and decrease their performance. However, an adversary may be interested not only in decreasing the reward, but also in modifying specific temporal logic properties of the policy. This paper presents a metric that measures the exact impact of adversarial attacks against such properties. We use this metric to craft optimal adversarial attacks. Furthermore, we introduce a model checking method that allows us to verify the robustness of RL policies against adversarial attacks. Our empirical analysis confirms (1) the quality of our metric to craft adversarial attacks against temporal logic properties, and (2) that we are able to concisely assess a system's robustness against attacks.Comment: ICAART 2023 Paper (Technical Report

Accountability, Cost-Effectiveness, and Program Performance: Progress Since 1998

The authors summarize the progress made in the past decade toward making homeless assistance programs more accountable to funders, consumers, and the public. They observe that research on the costs of homelessness and cost offsets associated with intervention programs has been limited to people who are homeless with severe mental illness. But this research has raised awareness of the value of this approach, such that dozens of new studies in this area are underway, mostly focused on chronic homelessness. Less progress has been made in using cost and performance data to systematically assess interventions for families, youth, and transitionally homeless adults. The authors present case studies of promising practices from the State of Arizona and Columbus, Ohio, demonstrating innovative uses of client and program data to measure performance and improve program management toward state policy goals, such as increased housing placement rates, reduced lengths of homelessness, and improved housing stability

Developmental Transcriptomic Analysis of the Cave-Dwelling Crustacean, Asellus aquaticus

Cave animals are a fascinating group of species often demonstrating characteristics including reduced eyes and pigmentation, metabolic efficiency, and enhanced sensory systems. Asellus aquaticus, an isopod crustacean, is an emerging model for cave biology. Cave and surface forms of this species differ in many characteristics, including eye size, pigmentation, and antennal length. Existing resources for this species include a linkage map, mapped regions responsible for eye and pigmentation traits, sequenced adult transcriptomes, and comparative embryological descriptions of the surface and cave forms. Our ultimate goal is to identify genes and mutations responsible for the differences between the cave and surface forms. To advance this goal, we decided to use a transcriptomic approach. Because many of these changes first appear during embryonic development, we sequenced embryonic transcriptomes of cave, surface, and hybrid individuals at the stage when eyes and pigment become evident in the surface form. We generated a cave, a surface, a hybrid, and an integrated transcriptome to identify differentially expressed genes in the cave and surface forms. Additionally, we identified genes with allele-specific expression in hybrid individuals. These embryonic transcriptomes are an important resource to assist in our ultimate goal of determining the genetic underpinnings of the divergence between the cave and surface forms

University of Massachusetts Amherst Campus Master Plan 2012

This is an institutional master plan outlining capacity development for the University of Massachusetts going forward to 2020 and beyond to 2050. The plan establishes a shared vision for future development that features new open spaces; transportation and pedestrian safety; parking decks built on the edge of campus; new bike-ways; new circulation systems including pathways with striking views of the Pioneer Valley; improvements to utilities; and a strategy for reuse of historic buildings. The administration held more than 90 events in the past year with key stakeholders, including students, faculty, staff, host communities and regional representatives and that was complemented by web-based surveys and applications to encourage participation. To meet the university’s current academic and research mission, the plan locates more than 1 million gross square feet of facilities. In an effort to position the university for an unknown future, the plan also illustrates approximately 7 million additional gross square feet, creating a compact, environmentally sensitive and efficient campus. The plan adopts an approach that mixes traditional land uses around a core of facilities adjacent to the campus lawns and pond. This new pattern will encourage a creative environment that will support collaboration, co-curricular learning and research, and will help create a vibrant environment all day and throughout the year. The more compact/urban environment in the campus core will also support the campus’s sustainability agenda by promoting shared resources, walking and the careful use of land

Gluons, tadpoles, and color neutrality in a two-flavor color superconductor

Considering cold, dense quark matter with two massless quark flavors, we demonstrate how, in a self-consistent calculation in the framework of QCD, the condensation of Cooper pairs induces a non-vanishing background color field. This background color field has precisely the right magnitude to cancel tadpole contributions and thus ensures overall color neutrality of the two-flavor color superconductor.Comment: 10 pages, contribution to the proceedings of the Erice school "Heavy-Ion Collisions from Nuclear to Quark Matter" 200

A Head Start in Science: Parent-child interactions and children’s science process skills

Supporting early STEM learning in children is important in formal and informal settings, especially for underrepresented families. Head Start partnered with the Sciencenter to engage parents and children in STEM related activities once a month during free Family Engagement Night. It was hypothesized that children’s school readiness was related to the amount of science-process language used between parents and children. Children’s school readiness scores were evaluated throughout the academic year. Science process language was categorized into observations, predictions, categorization, math and measurements, and spatial. It was found that school readiness scores were correlated with math related conversation but not science and technology, rs\u3e .53, ps\u3c .05. Gender differences were also found in overall STEM related conversation, F(1,21)=13.27, p\u3c .05, ��2=.43. Future studies will evaluate the significance between gender differences on STEM related assessments and parent-child interactions during Family Engagement Night.https://orb.binghamton.edu/research_days_posters_spring2020/1037/thumbnail.jp

Visualizing thickness-dependent magnetic textures in few-layer Cr2Ge2Te6\text{Cr}_2\text{Ge}_2\text{Te}_6

Magnetic ordering in two-dimensional (2D) materials has recently emerged as a promising platform for data storage, computing, and sensing. To advance these developments, it is vital to gain a detailed understanding of how the magnetic order evolves on the nanometer-scale as a function of the number of atomic layers and applied magnetic field. Here, we image few-layer $\text{Cr}_2\text{Ge}_2\text{Te}_6$ using a combined scanning superconducting quantum interference device and atomic force microscopy probe. Maps of the material's stray magnetic field as a function of applied magnetic field reveal its magnetization per layer as well as the thickness-dependent magnetic texture. Using a micromagnetic model, we correlate measured stray-field patterns with the underlying magnetization configurations, including labyrinth domains and skyrmionic bubbles. Comparison between real-space images and simulations demonstrates that the layer dependence of the material's magnetic texture is a result of the thickness-dependent balance between crystalline and shape anisotropy. These findings represent an important step towards 2D spintronic devices with engineered spin configurations and controlled dependence on external magnetic fields.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, and supplementary informatio