149 research outputs found
Online approximations for wind-field models
We study online approximations to Gaussian process models for spatially distributed systems. We apply our method to the prediction of wind fields over the ocean surface from scatterometer data. Our approach combines a sequential update of a Gaussian approximation to the posterior with a sparse representation that allows to treat problems with a large number of observations
Rational design of biosafe crop resistance to a range of nematodes using RNA interference
Double stranded RNA (dsRNA) molecules targeting two genes have been identified that suppress economically important parasitic nematode species of banana. Proteasomal Alpha Subunit 4 (pas-4) and Actin-4 (act-4) were identified from a survey of sequence databases and cloned sequences for genes conserved across four pests of banana, Radopholus similis, Pratylenchus coffeae, Meloidogyne incognita and Helicotylenchus multicinctus. These four species were targeted with dsRNAs containing exact 21 nucleotide matches to the conserved regions. Potential off-target effects were limited by comparison to Caenorhabditis, Drosophila, rat, rice and Arabidopsis genomes. In vitro act-4 dsRNA treatment of R. similis suppressed target gene expression by 2.3 fold, nematode locomotion by 66 ± 4% and nematode multiplication on carrot discs by 49 ± 5%. The best transgenic carrot hairy root lines expressing act-4 or pas-4 dsRNA reduced transcript message abundance of target genes in R. similis by 7.9 fold and 4 fold and nematode multiplication by 94 ± 2% and 69 ± 3%, respectively. The same act-4 and pas-4 lines reduced P. coffeae target transcripts by 1.7 and 2 fold and multiplication by 50 ± 6% and 73 ± 8%. Multiplication of M. incognita on the pas-4 lines was reduced by 97 ± 1% and 99 ± 1% while target transcript abundance was suppressed 4.9 and 5.6 fold. There was no detectable RNAi effect on non-target nematodes exposed to dsRNAs targeting parasitic nematodes. This work defines a framework for development of a range of non-protein defences to provide broad resistance to pests and pathogens of crops
Expression and trans-specific polymorphism of self-incompatibility RNases in Coffea (Rubiaceae)
Self-incompatibility (SI) is widespread in the angiosperms, but identifying the biochemical components of SI mechanisms has proven to be difficult in most lineages. Coffea (coffee; Rubiaceae) is a genus of old-world tropical understory trees in which the vast majority of diploid species utilize a mechanism of gametophytic self-incompatibility (GSI). The S-RNase GSI system was one of the first SI mechanisms to be biochemically characterized, and likely represents the ancestral Eudicot condition as evidenced by its functional characterization in both asterid (Solanaceae, Plantaginaceae) and rosid (Rosaceae) lineages. The S-RNase GSI mechanism employs the activity of class III RNase T2 proteins to terminate the growth of "self" pollen tubes. Here, we investigate the mechanism of Coffea GSI and specifically examine the potential for homology to S-RNase GSI by sequencing class III RNase T2 genes in populations of 14 African and Madagascan Coffea species and the closely related self-compatible species Psilanthus ebracteolatus. Phylogenetic analyses of these sequences aligned to a diverse sample of plant RNase T2 genes show that the Coffea genome contains at least three class III RNase T2 genes. Patterns of tissue-specific gene expression identify one of these RNase T2 genes as the putative Coffea S-RNase gene. We show that populations of SI Coffea are remarkably polymorphic for putative S-RNase alleles, and exhibit a persistent pattern of trans-specific polymorphism characteristic of all S-RNase genes previously isolated from GSI Eudicot lineages. We thus conclude that Coffea GSI is most likely homologous to the classic Eudicot S-RNase system, which was retained since the divergence of the Rubiaceae lineage from an ancient SI Eudicot ancestor, nearly 90 million years ago.United States National Science Foundation [0849186]; Society of Systematic Biologists; American Society of Plant Taxonomists; Duke University Graduate Schoolinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Tornado: Automatic Generation of Probing-Secure Masked Bitsliced Implementations
International audienceCryptographic implementations deployed in real world devices often aim at (provable) security against the powerful class of side-channel attacks while keeping reasonable performances. Last year at Asiacrypt, a new formal verification tool named tightPROVE was put forward to exactly determine whether a masked implementation is secure in the well-deployed probing security model for any given security order t. Also recently, a compiler named Usuba was proposed to automatically generate bitsliced implementations of cryptographic primitives.This paper goes one step further in the security and performances achievements with a new automatic tool named Tornado. In a nutshell, from the high-level description of a cryptographic primitive, Tornado produces a functionally equivalent bitsliced masked implementation at any desired order proven secure in the probing model, but additionally in the so-called register probing model which much better fits the reality of software implementations. This framework is obtained by the integration of Usuba with tightPROVE+, which extends tightPROVE with the ability to verify the security of implementations in the register probing model and to fix them with inserting refresh gadgets at carefully chosen locations accordingly.We demonstrate Tornado on the lightweight cryptographic primitives selected to the second round of the NIST competition and which somehow claimed to be masking friendly. It advantageously displays performances of the resulting masked implementations for several masking orders and prove their security in the register probing model
Distal radius fractures in children: substantial difference in stability between buckle and greenstick fractures
Background and purpose Numerous follow-up visits for wrist fractures in children are performed without therapeutic consequences. We investigated the degree to which the follow-up visits reveal complications and lead to change in management. The stability of greenstick and buckle fractures of the distal radius was assessed by comparing the lateral angulation radiographically
Calibration of Traffic Simulation Models using SPSA
Εθνικό Μετσόβιο Πολυτεχνείο--Μεταπτυχιακή Εργασία. Διεπιστημονικό-Διατμηματικό Πρόγραμμα Μεταπτυχιακών Σπουδών (Δ.Π.Μ.Σ.) “Γεωπληροφορική
Changing of the Guards: a simple and efficient method for achieving uniformity in threshold sharing
Since they were first proposed as a countermeasure against differential power analysis (DPA) in 2006, threshold schemes have attracted a lot of attention from the community concentrating on cryptographic implementations. What makes threshold schemes so attractive from an academic point of view is that they come with an information-theoretic proof of resistance against a specific subset of side-channel attacks: first-order DPA. From an industrial point of view they are attractive as a careful threshold implementation forces adversaries to DPA of higher order, with all its problems such a noise amplification. A threshold scheme that offers the mentioned provable security must exhibit three properties: correctness, incompleteness and uniformity. A threshold scheme becomes more expensive with the number of shares that must be implemented and the required number of shares is lower bound by the algebraic degree of the function being shared plus 1. Defining a correct and incomplete sharing of a function of degree d in d+1 shares is straightforward. However, up to now there is no generic method to achieve uniformity and finding uniform sharings of degree-d functions with d+1 shares is an active research area. In this paper we present a simple and relatively cheap method to find a correct, incomplete and uniform d+1-share threshold scheme for any S-box layer consisting of degree-d invertible S-boxes. The uniformity is not implemented in the sharings of the individual S-boxes but rather at the S-box layer level by the use of feed-forward and some expansion of shares. When applied to the Keccak-p nonlinear step Chi, its cost is very small
More results on Shortest Linear Programs
At the FSE conference of ToSC 2018, Kranz et al. presented their results on shortest linear programs for the linear layers of
several well known block ciphers in literature. Shortest linear programs are essentially the minimum number of 2-input xor gates required to completely describe a linear system of equations. In the above paper the authors showed that the commonly used metrics like d-xor/s-xor count that are used to judge the ``lightweightedness\u27\u27 do not represent the minimum number of xor gates required to describe a given MDS matrix. In fact they used heuristic based algorithms of Boyar/Peralta and Paar to find implementations of MDS matrices with even fewer xor gates than was previously known. They proved that the AES mixcolumn matrix can be implemented with as little as 97 xor gates. In this paper we show that the values reported in the above paper
are not optimal. By suitably including random bits in the instances of the above algorithms we can achieve implementations of almost all matrices with lesser number of gates than were reported in the above paper. As a result we report an implementation of the AES mixcolumn matrix that uses only 95 xor gates.
In the second part of the paper, we observe that most standard cell libraries contain both 2 and 3-input xor gates, with the silicon area of the 3-input xor gate being smaller than the sum of the areas of two 2-input xor gates. Hence when linear circuits are synthesized by logic compilers (with specific instructions to optimize for area), most of them would return a solution circuit containing both 2 and 3-input xor gates. Thus from a practical point of view, reducing circuit size in presence of these gates is no longer equivalent to solving the shortest linear program. In this paper we show that by adopting a graph based heuristic it is possible to convert a circuit constructed with 2-input xor gates to another functionally equivalent circuit that utilizes both 2 and 3-input xor gates and occupies less hardware area. As a result we obtain more lightweight implementations of all the matrices listed in the ToSC paper
- …