On Differential Privacy and Traffic State Estimation Problem for Connected Vehicles

This letter focuses on the problem of traffic state estimation for highway networks with junctions in the form of on- and off-ramps while maintaining differential privacy of traffic data. Two types of sensors are considered, fixed sensors such as inductive loop detectors and connected vehicles which provide traffic density and speed data. The celebrated nonlinear second-order Aw-Rascle- Zhang (ARZ) model is utilized to model the traffic dynamics. The model is formulated as a nonlinear state-space difference equation. Sensitivity relations are derived for the given data which are then used to formulate a differentially private mechanism which adds a Gaussian noise to the data to make it differentially private. A Moving Horizon Estimation (MHE) approach is implemented for traffic state estimation using a linearized ARZ model. MHE is compared with Kalman Filter variants namely Extended Kalman Filter, Ensemble Kalman Filter and Unscented Kalman Filter. Several research and engineering questions are formulated and analysis is performed to find corresponding answers.Comment: TO APPEAR IN THE 61ST IEEE CONFERENCE ON DECISION AND CONTROL (CDC), CANCUN, MEXICO, DECEMBER 2022. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2209.0284

Where Should Traffic Sensors Be Placed on Highways?

This paper investigates the practical engineering problem of traffic sensors placement on stretched highways with ramps. Since it is virtually impossible to install bulky traffic sensors on each highway segment, it is crucial to find placements that result in optimized network-wide, traffic observability. Consequently, this results in accurate traffic density estimates on segments where sensors are not installed. The substantial contribution of this paper is the utilization of control-theoretic observability analysis -- jointly with integer programming -- to determine traffic sensor locations based on the nonlinear dynamics and parameters of traffic networks. In particular, the celebrated asymmetric cell transmission model is used to guide the placement strategy jointly with observability analysis of nonlinear dynamic systems through Gramians. Thorough numerical case studies are presented to corroborate the proposed theoretical methods and various computational research questions are posed and addressed. The presented approach can also be extended to other models of traffic dynamics

Initial Filling of Tehri Reservoir — Analysis of Seepage Data

Initial Filling of reservoirs in dams, particularly the embankment type, is a very important phase as unusual behaviour / accidents of many dams have been reported during this period. A regular observation / analysis of quantum of seepage vis-à-vis the reservoir level is a significant activity so that any serious development inside the body of dam and foundation / abutments rocks are revealed in advance and remedial measures are taken up timely to prevent catastrophic failures. At Tehri, a 260.5m high earth & rockfill dam has been constructed across river Bhagirathi, a tributary of mighty river Ganga in India. Seepage discharge data of first two years of Initial Filling of Tehri reservoir has been analysed, which has led to a few important conclusions. The Analysis of Seepage data for the Initial Filling of Tehri reservoir is presented in the paper

Initial Filling of Tehri Reservoir — Analysis of Seepage Data

Initial Filling of reservoirs in dams, particularly the embankment type, is a very important phase as unusual behaviour / accidents of many dams have been reported during this period. A regular observation / analysis of quantum of seepage vis-à-vis the reservoir level is a significant activity so that any serious development inside the body of dam and foundation / abutments rocks are revealed in advance and remedial measures are taken up timely to prevent catastrophic failures. At Tehri, a 260.5m high earth & rockfill dam has been constructed across river Bhagirathi, a tributary of mighty river Ganga in India. Seepage discharge data of first two years of Initial Filling of Tehri reservoir has been analysed, which has led to a few important conclusions. The Analysis of Seepage data for the Initial Filling of Tehri reservoir is presented in the paper

Integrated Approach for Stabilisation of Varunavat Parvat Landslide – A Case Study

Uttarkashi Township, located on the toe of the Varunavat Parvat, in the State of Uttarakhand in North India is known for having a history of a number of natural disasters. One of such disaster was a major landslide on the slopes of the Varunavat Parvat, in the year 2003. There had been huge loss of property of residential complexes, office buildings, hotels and many other business apartments. The risk of further such slides continuously hovered over the town which was the serious concern of District and State Authorities. An integrated approach of long term stabilization measures with flattening of slopes with suitable berms, effective drainage arrangement (surface & sub-surface), suitable erosion control measures , multistage protection measures by providing catch pits, wide platforms, retaining walls and construction of tunnel on the national highway for mitigating the rock fall hazards are being adopted, to minimize the impact of disaster in future so that people of Uttarkashi Town can live safely without fear. The paper highlights the description of the problem, probable causes of the Landslide, Geology of the area, stability analysis, measures adopted for averting future landslide and subsequent rock fall hazard

In-situ local phase-transitioned MoSe2 in La0.5Sr0.5CoO3-?? heterostructure and stable overall water electrolysis over 1000 hours

Developing efficient bifunctional catalysts for overall water splitting that are earth-abundant, cost-effective, and durable is of considerable importance from the practical perspective to mitigate the issues associated with precious metal-based catalysts. Herein, we introduce a heterostructure comprising perovskite oxides (La0.5Sr0.5CoO3?????) and molybdenum diselenide (MoSe2) as an electrochemical catalyst for overall water electrolysis. Interestingly, formation of the heterostructure of La0.5Sr0.5CoO3????? and MoSe2 induces a local phase transition in MoSe2, 2???H to 1???T phase, and more electrophilic La0.5Sr0.5CoO3????? with partial oxidation of the Co cation owing to electron transfer from Co to Mo. Together with these synergistic effects, the electrochemical activities are significantly improved for both hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions. In the overall water splitting operation, the heterostructure showed excellent stability at the high current density of 100???mA???cm???2 over 1,000???h, which is exceptionally better than the stability of the state-of-the-art platinum and iridium oxide couple

ProteinHistorian: Tools for the Comparative Analysis of Eukaryote Protein Origin

The evolutionary history of a protein reflects the functional history of its ancestors. Recent phylogenetic studies identified distinct evolutionary signatures that characterize proteins involved in cancer, Mendelian disease, and different ontogenic stages. Despite the potential to yield insight into the cellular functions and interactions of proteins, such comparative phylogenetic analyses are rarely performed, because they require custom algorithms. We developed ProteinHistorian to make tools for performing analyses of protein origins widely available. Given a list of proteins of interest, ProteinHistorian estimates the phylogenetic age of each protein, quantifies enrichment for proteins of specific ages, and compares variation in protein age with other protein attributes. ProteinHistorian allows flexibility in the definition of protein age by including several algorithms for estimating ages from different databases of evolutionary relationships. We illustrate the use of ProteinHistorian with three example analyses. First, we demonstrate that proteins with high expression in human, compared to chimpanzee and rhesus macaque, are significantly younger than those with human-specific low expression. Next, we show that human proteins with annotated regulatory functions are significantly younger than proteins with catalytic functions. Finally, we compare protein length and age in many eukaryotic species and, as expected from previous studies, find a positive, though often weak, correlation between protein age and length. ProteinHistorian is available through a web server with an intuitive interface and as a set of command line tools; this allows biologists and bioinformaticians alike to integrate these approaches into their analysis pipelines. ProteinHistorian's modular, extensible design facilitates the integration of new datasets and algorithms. The ProteinHistorian web server, source code, and pre-computed ages for 32 eukaryotic genomes are freely available under the GNU public license at http://lighthouse.ucsf.edu/ProteinHistorian/

MycoRRdb: A Database of Computationally Identified Regulatory Regions within Intergenic Sequences in Mycobacterial Genomes

The identification of regulatory regions for a gene is an important step towards deciphering the gene regulation. Regulatory regions tend to be conserved under evolution that facilitates the application of comparative genomics to identify such regions. The present study is an attempt to make use of this attribute to identify regulatory regions in the Mycobacterium species followed by the development of a database, MycoRRdb. It consist the regulatory regions identified within the intergenic distances of 25 mycobacterial species. MycoRRdb allows to retrieve the identified intergenic regulatory elements in the mycobacterial genomes. In addition to the predicted motifs, it also allows user to retrieve the Reciprocal Best BLAST Hits across the mycobacterial genomes. It is a useful resource to understand the transcriptional regulatory mechanism of mycobacterial species. This database is first of its kind which specifically addresses cis-regulatory regions and also comprehensive to the mycobacterial species. Database URL: http://mycorrdb.uohbif.in

Synonymous Codon Ordering: A Subtle but Prevalent Strategy of Bacteria to Improve Translational Efficiency

Background: In yeast coding sequences, once a particular codon has been used, subsequent occurrence of the same amino acid tends to use codons sharing the same tRNA. Such a phenomenon of co-tRNA codons pairing bias (CTCPB) is also found in some other eukaryotes but it is not known whether it occurs in prokaryotes. Methodology/Principal Findings: In this study, we focused on a total of 773 bacterial genomes to investigate their synonymous codon pairing preferences. After calculating the actual frequencies of synonymous codon pairs and comparing them with their expected values, we detected an obvious pairing bias towards identical codon pairs. This seems consistent with the previously reported CTCPB phenomenon, since identical codons are certainly read by the same tRNA. However, among co-tRNA but non-identical codon pairs, only 22 were often found overrepresented, suggesting that many co-tRNA codons actually do not preferentially pair together in prokaryotes. Therefore, the previously reported co-tRNA codons pairing rule needs to be more rigorously defined. The affinity differences between a tRNA anticodon and its readable codons should be taken into account. Moreover, both within-gene-shuffling tests and phylogenetic analyses support the idea that translational selection played an important role in shaping the observed synonymous codon pairing pattern in prokaryotes. Conclusions: Overall, a high level of synonymous codon pairing bias was detected in 73 % investigated bacterial species