Reliability of voting in fault-tolerant software systems for small output spaces

Under a voting strategy in a fault-tolerant software system there is a difference between correctness and agreement. An independent N-version programming reliability model is proposed for treating small output spaces which distinguishes between correctness and agreement. System reliability is investigated using analytical relationships and simulation. A consensus majority voting strategy is proposed and its performance is analyzed and compared with other voting strategies. Consensus majority strategy automatically adapts the voting to different component reliability and output space cardinality characteristics. It is shown that absolute majority voting strategy provides a lower bound on the reliability provided by the consensus majority, and 2-of-n voting strategy an upper bound. If r is the cardinality of the output space it is proved the 1/r is a lower bound on the average reliability of fault-tolerant system components below which the system reliability begins to deteriorate as more versions are added

MixFairFace: Towards Ultimate Fairness via MixFair Adapter in Face Recognition

Although significant progress has been made in face recognition, demographic bias still exists in face recognition systems. For instance, it usually happens that the face recognition performance for a certain demographic group is lower than the others. In this paper, we propose MixFairFace framework to improve the fairness in face recognition models. First of all, we argue that the commonly used attribute-based fairness metric is not appropriate for face recognition. A face recognition system can only be considered fair while every person has a close performance. Hence, we propose a new evaluation protocol to fairly evaluate the fairness performance of different approaches. Different from previous approaches that require sensitive attribute labels such as race and gender for reducing the demographic bias, we aim at addressing the identity bias in face representation, i.e., the performance inconsistency between different identities, without the need for sensitive attribute labels. To this end, we propose MixFair Adapter to determine and reduce the identity bias of training samples. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our MixFairFace approach achieves state-of-the-art fairness performance on all benchmark datasets.Comment: Accepted in AAAI-23; Code: https://github.com/fuenwang/MixFairFac

On the Improvement of Wiener Attack on RSA with Small Private Exponent

RSA system is based on the hardness of the integer factorization problem (IFP). Given an RSA modulus N=pq, it is difficult to determine the prime factors p and q efficiently. One of the most famous short exponent attacks on RSA is the Wiener attack. In 1997, Verheul and van Tilborg use an exhaustive search to extend the boundary of the Wiener attack. Their result shows that the cost of exhaustive search is 2r+8 bits when extending the Weiner's boundary r bits. In this paper, we first reduce the cost of exhaustive search from 2r+8 bits to 2r+2 bits. Then, we propose a method named EPF. With EPF, the cost of exhaustive search is further reduced to 2r-6 bits when we extend Weiner's boundary r bits. It means that our result is 214 times faster than Verheul and van Tilborg's result. Besides, the security boundary is extended 7 bits

Immobilization of enzyme and antibody on ALD-HfO2-EIS structure by NH3 plasma treatment

Thin hafnium oxide layers deposited by an atomic layer deposition system were investigated as the sensing membrane of the electrolyte-insulator-semiconductor structure. Moreover, a post-remote NH3 plasma treatment was proposed to replace the complicated silanization procedure for enzyme immobilization. Compared to conventional methods using chemical procedures, remote NH3 plasma treatment reduces the processing steps and time. The results exhibited that urea and antigen can be successfully detected, which indicated that the immobilization process is correct

Electromagnetic Wave Theory and Applications

Contains table of contents for Section 3, reports on nine research projects and a list of publications.National Aeronautics and Space Administration Contract 958461U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-92-J-1616University of California/Jet Propulsion Laboratory Contract 960408U.S. Army - Corps of Engineers/Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory Contract DACA89-95-K-0014Mitsubishi CorporationU.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Agreement N00014-92-J-4098Federal Aviation AdministrationDEMACOJoint Services Electronics Program Grant DAAHO4-95-1-003

Electromagnetic Wave Theory and Applications

Contains table of contents for Section 3, reports on ten research projects and a list of publications.National Aeronautics and Space Administration Contract 958461U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-92-J-1616U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-89-J-1019U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-90-J-1002U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory Contract PACA89-95-K-0014Mitsubishi Corporation Agreement Dated 8/31/95U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-92-J-4098U.S. Federal Aviation Administration Grant 94-G-007DEMACO Corporation Contract DEM-95-MIT-55Joint Services Electronics Program Contract DAAH04-95-1-003

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

Cancer is driven by genetic change, and the advent of massively parallel sequencing has enabled systematic documentation of this variation at the whole-genome scale(1-3). Here we report the integrative analysis of 2,658 whole-cancer genomes and their matching normal tissues across 38 tumour types from the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We describe the generation of the PCAWG resource, facilitated by international data sharing using compute clouds. On average, cancer genomes contained 4-5 driver mutations when combining coding and non-coding genomic elements; however, in around 5% of cases no drivers were identified, suggesting that cancer driver discovery is not yet complete. Chromothripsis, in which many clustered structural variants arise in a single catastrophic event, is frequently an early event in tumour evolution; in acral melanoma, for example, these events precede most somatic point mutations and affect several cancer-associated genes simultaneously. Cancers with abnormal telomere maintenance often originate from tissues with low replicative activity and show several mechanisms of preventing telomere attrition to critical levels. Common and rare germline variants affect patterns of somatic mutation, including point mutations, structural variants and somatic retrotransposition. A collection of papers from the PCAWG Consortium describes non-coding mutations that drive cancer beyond those in the TERT promoter(4); identifies new signatures of mutational processes that cause base substitutions, small insertions and deletions and structural variation(5,6); analyses timings and patterns of tumour evolution(7); describes the diverse transcriptional consequences of somatic mutation on splicing, expression levels, fusion genes and promoter activity(8,9); and evaluates a range of more-specialized features of cancer genomes(8,10-18).Peer reviewe