A temporal logic approach to modular design of synthetic biological circuits

We present a new approach for the design of a synthetic biological circuit whose behaviour is specified in terms of signal temporal logic (STL) formulae. We first show how to characterise with STL formulae the input/output behaviour of biological modules miming the classical logical gates (AND, NOT, OR). Hence, we provide the regions of the parameter space for which these specifications are satisfied. Given a STL specification of the target circuit to be designed and the networks of its constituent components, we propose a methodology to constrain the behaviour of each module, then identifying the subset of the parameter space in which those constraints are satisfied, providing also a measure of the robustness for the target circuit design. This approach, which leverages recent results on the quantitative semantics of Signal Temporal Logic, is illustrated by synthesising a biological implementation of an half-adder

Encountering the World: Kawai Tsugunosuke's 1859 Journey to Yokohama and Nagasaki

Describes Kawai Tsugunosuke's journey in 1859 via his travel diaries, the people he encountered, his intellectual growth and especially his eagerness to make contact with foreigners trading with Japan.Early Modern Japan Networ

Specifying and Monitoring Properties of Stochastic Spatio-Temporal Systems in Signal Temporal Logic

We present an extension of the linear time, time-bounded, Signal Temporal Logic to describe spatio-temporal properties. We consider a discrete location/ patch-based representation of space, with a population of interacting agents evolving in each location and with agents migrating from one patch to another one. We provide both a boolean and a quantitative semantics to this logic. We then present monitoring algorithms to check the validity of a formula, or to compute its satisfaction (robustness) score, over a spatio-temporal trace, exploiting these routines to do statistical model checking of stochastic models. We illustrate the logic at work on an epidemic example, looking at the diffusion of a cholera infection among communities living along a river

THE EFFECT OF KARATE STANCE ON ATTACK-TIME: PART I - JAB

This report presents an empirical study of the effect of stance on attack-time during the movement of a jab in a simulated karate contest. A t-test and linear regression method are used to analyze the data collected from 24 elite karate competitors. The results show the larger the impulse generated by lower extremities, the shorter the attack-time in a jab movement. Comparing with 5:5 stance, 7:3 stance exhibits significant shorter attack-time in the Hest and randomized paired comparison analysis. It can be concluded that the impulse generated in a jab movement contributes to the body CG and hand-movement speeds. And the training in strengthening the impulse-generated leg and the duration of net GRF should be examined with the aid of a force plate. Similar analysis for various stances can also be applied when hand-movement is the key factor in some sports

Nanostructured porous materials form Micro- and nano-electronics applications

This thesis work presents new research on porous silicon technologies for the heterogeneous integration on silicon platforms, as a key enabling technology for future 3D integrated systems. Porous silicon can be obtained with CMOS compatible processes on localized area on silicon wafer and, due to its tunable electrical, mechanical and thermal characteristics is an effective buffer material. Moreover, macroporous morphologies of porous silicon can can be exploited for the realization of “bed-of-nails” type through wafer interconnects, paving the way to high density, low-cost, through silicon vias. This work is divided in three parts: the first part introduces porous silicon, summarizes the available literature and presents process characterization for the porous layers obtained in this work and their properties; the second part describes the layer transfer technology and the buried cavities technologies developed in this work using the porous layers presented in the previous part; the last part introduces two applications of the layer transfer technology: compliant contacts and integrated physically small antennas

WebMonitor: Verification of Web User Interfaces

Application development for the modern Web involves sophisticated engineering workflows which include user interface aspects. Those involve Web elements typically created with HTML/CSS markup and JavaScript-like languages, yielding Web documents. WebMonitor leverages requirements formally specified in a logic able to capture both the layout of visual components as well as how they change over time, as a user interacts with them. Then, requirements are verified upon arbitrary web pages, allowing for automated support for a wide set of use cases in interaction testing and simulation. We position WebMonitor within a developer workflow, where in case of a negative result, a visual counterexample is returned. The monitoring framework we present follows a black-box approach, and as such is independent of the underlying technologies a Web application may be developed with, as well as the browser and operating system used. WebMonitoris available as open source software: https://github.com/ennioVisco/webmonitor Video demonstration of WebMonitor: https://youtu.be/hqVw0JU3k9

One-Shot Learning of Ensembles of Temporal Logic Formulas for Anomaly Detection in Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are prevalent in critical infrastructures and a prime target for cyber-attacks. Multivariate time series data generated by sensors and actuators of a CPS can be monitored for detecting cyber-attacks that introduce anomalies in those data. We use Signal Temporal Logic (STL) formulas to tightly describe the normal behavior of a CPS, identifying data instances that do not satisfy the formulas as anomalies. We learn an ensemble of STL formulas based on observed data, without any specific knowledge of the CPS being monitored. We propose an algorithm based on Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming (G3P) that learns the ensemble automatically in a single evolutionary run. We test the effectiveness of our data-driven proposal on two real-world datasets, finding that the proposed one-shot algorithm provides good detection performance