10,390 research outputs found
Proof Theory, Transformations, and Logic Programming for Debugging Security Protocols
We define a sequent calculus to formally specify, simulate, debug and verify security protocols. In our sequents we distinguish between the current knowledge of principals and the current global state of the session. Hereby, we can describe the operational semantics of principals and of an intruder in a simple and modular way. Furthermore, using proof theoretic tools like the analysis of permutability of rules, we are able to find efficient proof strategies that we prove complete for special classes of security protocols including Needham-Schroeder. Based on the results of this preliminary analysis, we have implemented a Prolog meta-interpreter which allows for rapid prototyping and for checking safety properties of security protocols, and we have applied it for finding error traces and proving correctness of practical examples
Substitution of antibodies and receptors with molecularly imprinted polymers in enzyme-linked and fluorescent assays
A new technique for coating microtitre plates with molecularly imprinted
polymers (MIP), specific for low-molecular weight analytes (epinephrine,
atrazine) and proteins is presented. Oxidative polymerization was performed in
the presence of template; monomers: 3-aminophenylboronic acid, 3-
thiopheneboronic acid and aniline were polymerized in water and the polymers
were grafted onto the polystyrene surface of the microplates. It was found that
this process results in the creation of synthetic materials with antibody-like
binding properties. It was shown that the MIP-coated microplates are
particularly useful for assay development. The high stability of the polymers
and good reproducibility of the measurements make MIP coating an attractive
alternative to conventional antibodies or receptors used in ELISA
Re-identification of c. 15 700 cal yr BP tephra bed at Kaipo Bog, eastern North Island: implications for dispersal of Rotorua and Puketarata tephra beds.
A 10 mm thick, c. 15 700 calendar yr BP (c. 13 100 14C yr BP) rhyolitic tephra bed in the well-studied montane Kaipo Bog sequence of eastern North Island was previously correlated with Maroa-derived Puketarata Tephra. We revise this correlation to Okataina-derived Rotorua Tephra based on new compositional data from biotite phenocrysts and glass. The new correlation limits the known dispersal of Puketarata Tephra (sensu stricto, c. 16 800 cal yr BP) and eliminates requirements to either reassess its age or to invoke dual Puketarata eruptive events. Our data show that Rotorua Tephra comprises two glass-shard types: an early-erupted low-K2O type that was dispersed mostly to the northwest, and a high-K2O type dispersed mostly to the south and southeast, contemporary with late-stage lava extrusion. Late-stage Rotorua eruptives contain biotite that is enriched in FeO compared with biotite from Puketarata pyroclastics. The occurrence of Rotorua Tephra in Kaipo Bog (100 km from the source) substantially extends its known distribution to the southeast. Our analyses demonstrate that unrecognised syn-eruption compositional and dispersal changes can cause errors in fingerprinting tephra deposits. However, the compositional complexity, once recognised, provides additional fingerprinting criteria, and also documents magmatic and dispersal processes
A comparative evaluation of interest point detectors and local descriptors for visual SLAM
Abstract In this paper we compare the behavior of different interest points detectors and descriptors under the
conditions needed to be used as landmarks in vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM).
We evaluate the repeatability of the detectors, as well as the invariance and distinctiveness of the descriptors,
under different perceptual conditions using sequences of images representing planar objects as well as 3D scenes.
We believe that this information will be useful when selecting an appropriat
Modeling the functional genomics of autism using human neurons.
Human neural progenitors from a variety of sources present new opportunities to model aspects of human neuropsychiatric disease in vitro. Such in vitro models provide the advantages of a human genetic background combined with rapid and easy manipulation, making them highly useful adjuncts to animal models. Here, we examined whether a human neuronal culture system could be utilized to assess the transcriptional program involved in human neural differentiation and to model some of the molecular features of a neurodevelopmental disorder, such as autism. Primary normal human neuronal progenitors (NHNPs) were differentiated into a post-mitotic neuronal state through addition of specific growth factors and whole-genome gene expression was examined throughout a time course of neuronal differentiation. After 4 weeks of differentiation, a significant number of genes associated with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are either induced or repressed. This includes the ASD susceptibility gene neurexin 1, which showed a distinct pattern from neurexin 3 in vitro, and which we validated in vivo in fetal human brain. Using weighted gene co-expression network analysis, we visualized the network structure of transcriptional regulation, demonstrating via this unbiased analysis that a significant number of ASD candidate genes are coordinately regulated during the differentiation process. As NHNPs are genetically tractable and manipulable, they can be used to study both the effects of mutations in multiple ASD candidate genes on neuronal differentiation and gene expression in combination with the effects of potential therapeutic molecules. These data also provide a step towards better understanding of the signaling pathways disrupted in ASD
Extracting Spooky-activation-at-a-distance from Considerations of Entanglement
Following an early claim by Nelson & McEvoy \cite{Nelson:McEvoy:2007}
suggesting that word associations can display `spooky action at a distance
behaviour', a serious investigation of the potentially quantum nature of such
associations is currently underway. This paper presents a simple quantum model
of a word association system. It is shown that a quantum model of word
entanglement can recover aspects of both the Spreading Activation equation and
the Spooky-activation-at-a-distance equation, both of which are used to model
the activation level of words in human memory.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures; To appear in Proceedings of the Third Quantum
Interaction Symposium, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, vol 5494,
Springer, 200
Nanoflows through disordered media: a joint Lattice Boltzmann and Molecular Dynamics investigation
We investigate nanoflows through dilute disordered media by means of joint
lattice Boltzmann (LB) and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations -- when the size
of the obstacles is comparable to the size of the flowing particles -- for
randomly located spheres and for a correlated particle-gel. In both cases at
sufficiently low solid fraction, , LB and MD provide similar values
of the permeability. However, for , MD shows that molecular size
effects lead to a decrease of the permeability, as compared to the
Navier-Stokes predictions. For gels, the simulations highlights a surplus of
permeability, which can be accommodated within a rescaling of the effective
radius of the gel monomers.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
An investigation into linearity with cumulative emissions of the climate and carbon cycle response in HadCM3LC
We investigate the extent to which global mean temperature, precipitation, and the carbon cycle are constrained by cumulative carbon emissions throughout four experiments with a fully coupled climate-carbon cycle model. The two paired experiments adopt contrasting, idealised approaches to climate change mitigation at different action points this century, with total emissions exceeding two trillion tonnes of carbon in the later pair. Their initially diverging cumulative emissions trajectories cross after several decades, before diverging again. We find that their global mean temperatures are, to first order, linear with cumulative emissions, though regional differences in temperature of up to 1.5K exist when cumulative emissions of each pair coincide. Interestingly, although the oceanic precipitation response scales with cumulative emissions, the global precipitation response does not, due to a decrease in precipitation over land above cumulative emissions of around one trillion tonnes of carbon (TtC). Most carbon fluxes and stores are less well constrained by cumulative emissions as they reach two trillion tonnes. The opposing mitigation approaches have different consequences for the Amazon rainforest, which affects the linearity with which the carbon cycle responds to cumulative emissions. Averaged over the two fixed-emissions experiments, the transient response to cumulative carbon emissions (TCRE) is 1.95 K TtC-1, at the upper end of the IPCC’s range of 0.8-2.5 K TtC-1
Joint Optical Flow and Temporally Consistent Semantic Segmentation
The importance and demands of visual scene understanding have been steadily
increasing along with the active development of autonomous systems.
Consequently, there has been a large amount of research dedicated to semantic
segmentation and dense motion estimation. In this paper, we propose a method
for jointly estimating optical flow and temporally consistent semantic
segmentation, which closely connects these two problem domains and leverages
each other. Semantic segmentation provides information on plausible physical
motion to its associated pixels, and accurate pixel-level temporal
correspondences enhance the accuracy of semantic segmentation in the temporal
domain. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on the KITTI benchmark,
where we observe performance gains for flow and segmentation. We achieve
state-of-the-art optical flow results, and outperform all published algorithms
by a large margin on challenging, but crucial dynamic objects.Comment: 14 pages, Accepted for CVRSUAD workshop at ECCV 201
- …