Big Ramsey degrees in universal inverse limit structures

We build a collection of topological Ramsey spaces of trees giving rise to universal inverse limit structures, extending Zheng's work for the profinite graph to the setting of Fra\"{\i}ss\'{e} classes of finite ordered binary relational structures with the Ramsey property. This work is based on the Halpern-L\"{a}uchli theorem, but different from the Milliken space of strong subtrees. Based on these topological Ramsey spaces and the work of Huber-Geschke-Kojman on inverse limits of finite ordered graphs, we prove that for each such Fra\"{\i}ss\'{e} class, its universal inverse limit structures has finite big Ramsey degrees under finite Baire-measurable colourings. For finite ordered graphs, finite ordered $k$-clique free graphs ($k\geq 3$), finite ordered oriented graphs, and finite ordered tournaments, we characterize the exact big Ramsey degrees.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure

Effects of transglutaminase pre-crosslinking on salt-induced gelation of soy protein isolate emulsion

peer-reviewedThe salt-induced gelation behavior of soy protein isolate (SPI) emulsions was markedly influenced by microbial transglutaminase (TGase) pre-crosslinking. Rheological data showed that when SPI emulsions were incubated with TGase at low concentrations (1 and 3 U/g protein) at 50 °C for 30 min prior to gelation, no change in storage modulus (G′), but enhanced resistance to deformation of the gels was observed. Extensive crosslinking by TGase (5 U/g protein) resulted in severe decreases in gel firmness and fracture properties (yielding stress and strain), likely due to the impairment of hydrophobic bonds and the formation of coarse networks. The water-holding capacity of the gels was significantly enhanced by increased concentrations of TGase. Interactive force analysis indicated that non-covalent interactions and disulfide bonds are the primary forces involved in CaSO4-induced SPI emulsion gel, but TGase treatment may limit hydrophobic interactions within the gel network. These results are of great potential value for the application of TGase in the food industry

Effects of mechanical processing on the physicochemical properties of oat β-glucan and its in vitro fermentation

Objective: To evaluate the effects of mechanical processing on the physicochemical properties of oat β-glucan and its in vitro fermentation. Methods: Oat coarse grains, oat flakes, and oat flour were respectively produced through mechanical progressing methods such as steel cutting, table pressing, and grinding. Then, scanning electron microscopy was used to observe the microstructure, the content, dissolution rate and relative molecular weight of oat β-glucan were determined, and the colon environment was simulated in vitro for fermentation. Results: The total β-glucan content and dissolution rate of steel-cutting oat were higher than those of untreated sample. The total β-glucan content of oat flake and oat flour were lower than untreated oat, but the dissolution rate was higher than it. Untreated oat showed a lower fermentation rate, with a significantly lower acid and gas production rate than those of steel-cutting oat, oat flake, and oat flour. The total short chain fatty acid content of untreated oat produced by fermentation was the lowest, but the content of propionic acid and butyric acid was significantly higher than the other three groups. Conclusion: Mechanical progressing can affect the in vitro fermentation characteristics of oats by altering the integrity of their cell wall structure, as well as the content and dissolution rate of β-glucan. Moderate processing can contribute to the health benefits of oats

Nonlinear dynamic responses of locomotive excited by rail corrugation and gear time-varying mesh stiffness

Rail corrugation is usually generated in modern railway transportations, such as high-speed railway, urban railway, and heavy-haul railway. It is one of the major excitations to the wheel–rail dynamic interaction, which will cause extra vibration and noise, failures, or even risk of derailment to the vehicle and its components. A dynamics model of a heavy-haul locomotive considering the traction power from the electric motor to the wheelset through gear transmission is employed to investigate the nonlinear dynamic responses of the locomotive. This dynamics model couples the motions of the vehicle, the track, and the gear transmission together. In this dynamics model, excitations from the rail corrugation, the nonlinear wheel–rail contact, the time-varying mesh stiffness, and the nonlinear gear backlash are considered. Then, numerical simulations are performed to reveal the dynamic responses of the locomotive. The calculated results indicate that different nonlinear phenomenon can be observed under the excitation of the rail corrugation with different amplitude and wavelength. The high frequency vibrations excited by the time-varying mesh stiffness are usually modulated by the low frequency vibrations caused by the rail corrugation. However, this is likely to vanish under the chaotic conditions with some corrugation wavelength. The vibration level of the vehicle and the gear transmission increases generally with the corrugation amplitude. However, some corrugation lengths have been found to be more responsible for the vibration of the dynamics system, which should be concerned greatly during the locomotive operation. Meanwhile, involvement of gear transmission systems will cause different dynamic responses between the wheelsets under rail corrugation and gear mesh excitations. First published online 17 January 202

Meteor: Improved Secure 3-Party Neural Network Inference with Reducing Online Communication Costs

Secure neural network inference has been a promising solution to private Deep-Learning-as-a-Service, which enables the service provider and user to execute neural network inference without revealing their private inputs. However, the expensive overhead of current schemes is still an obstacle when applied in real applications. In this work, we present \textsc{Meteor}, an online communication-efficient and fast secure 3-party computation neural network inference system aginst semi-honest adversary in honest-majority. The main contributions of \textsc{Meteor} are two-fold: \romannumeral1) We propose a new and improved 3-party secret sharing scheme stemming from the \textit{linearity} of replicated secret sharing, and design efficient protocols for the basic cryptographic primitives, including linear operations, multiplication, most significant bit extraction, and multiplexer. \romannumeral2) Furthermore, we build efficient and secure blocks for the widely used neural network operators such as Matrix Multiplication, ReLU, and Maxpool, along with exploiting several specific optimizations for better efficiency. Our total communication with the setup phase is a little larger than SecureNN (PoPETs\u2719) and \textsc{Falcon} (PoPETs\u2721), two state-of-the-art solutions, but the gap is not significant when the online phase must be optimized as a priority. Using \textsc{Meteor}, we perform extensive evaluations on various neural networks. Compared to SecureNN and \textsc{Falcon}, we reduce the online communication costs by up to $25.6\times$ and $1.5\times$, and improve the running-time by at most $9.8\times$ (resp. $8.1\times$) and $1.5\times$ (resp. $2.1\times$) in LAN (resp. WAN) for the online inference

FLOD: Oblivious Defender for Private Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning with Dishonest-Majority

\textit{Privacy} and \textit{Byzantine-robustness} are two major concerns of federated learning (FL), but mitigating both threats simultaneously is highly challenging: privacy-preserving strategies prohibit access to individual model updates to avoid leakage, while Byzantine-robust methods require access for comprehensive mathematical analysis. Besides, most Byzantine-robust methods only work in the \textit{honest-majority} setting. We present $\mathsf{FLOD}$, a novel oblivious defender for private Byzantine-robust FL in dishonest-majority setting. Basically, we propose a novel Hamming distance-based aggregation method to resist $>1/2$ Byzantine attacks using a small \textit{root-dataset} and \textit{server-model} for bootstrapping trust. Furthermore, we employ two non-colluding servers and use additive homomorphic encryption ($\mathsf{AHE}$) and secure two-party computation (2PC) primitives to construct efficient privacy-preserving building blocks for secure aggregation, in which we propose two novel in-depth variants of Beaver Multiplication triples (MT) to reduce the overhead of Bit to Arithmetic ($\mathsf{Bit2A}$) conversion and vector weighted sum aggregation ($\mathsf{VSWA}$) significantly. Experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate our effectiveness and efficiency: (\romannumeral1) $\mathsf{FLOD}$ defeats known Byzantine attacks with a negligible effect on accuracy and convergence, (\romannumeral2) achieves a reduction of $\approx 2\times$ for offline (resp. online) overhead of $\mathsf{Bit2A}$ and $\mathsf{VSWA}$ compared to $\mathsf{ABY}$-$\mathsf{AHE}$ (resp. $\mathsf{ABY}$-$\mathsf{MT}$) based methods (NDSS\u2715), (\romannumeral3) and reduces total online communication and run-time by $167$-$1416\times$ and $3.1$-$7.4\times$ compared to $\mathsf{FLGUARD}$ (Crypto Eprint 2021/025)

Isolation and Characterization of Microsatellite Loci for Hibiscus aridicola (Malvaceae), an Endangered Plant Endemic to the Dry-Hot Valleys of Jinsha River in Southwest China

Hibiscus aridicola (Malvaceae) is an endangered ornamental shrub endemic to the dry-hot valleys of Jinsha River in southwest China. Only four natural populations of H. aridicola exist in the wild according to our field investigation. It can be inferred that H. aridicola is facing a very high risk of extinction in the wild and an urgent conservation strategy is required. By using a modified biotin-streptavidin capture method, a total of 40 microsatellite markers were developed and characterized in H. aridicola for the first time. Polymorphisms were evaluated in 39 individuals from four natural populations. Fifteen of the markers showed polymorphisms with two to six alleles per locus; the observed heterozygosity ranged from 0.19 to 0.72. These microsatellite loci would be useful tools for population genetics studies on H. aridicola and other con-generic species which are important to the conservation and development of endangered species

Experimental investigation on dynamic behaviour of heavy-haul railway track induced by heavy axle load

The damage to the track structure and the influence to the line deformation have greatly deteriorated with the increase of the axle load compared with that of the ordinary trains. However, there is a paucity of experimental research on the dynamic influence of the heavier haul freight trains on the railway tracks. The objective of this study is to investigate the dynamic behaviour of heavy-haul railway track induced by heavy axle load by field experimental tests. The wheel–rail dynamic force, the track structure dynamic deformation and the track vibration behaviour are measured and analysed when the train operates in the speed range from 10 to 75 km/h and the axle load of vehicles varies from 21 to 30 t. Comparisons between the results for the axle conditions of 25 and 30 t are made in this paper to reveal the axle load effects. It is demonstrated that part of the indicators reflecting the dynamic behaviour of the railway track increases approximately linearly with the train running speed and axle load, while others are influenced negligibly

Experimental Determination of Effective Minority Carrier Lifetime in HgCdTe Photovoltaic Detectors Using Optical and Electrical Methods

This paper presents experiment measurements of minority carrier lifetime using three different methods including modified open-circuit voltage decay (PIOCVD) method, small parallel resistance (SPR) method, and pulse recovery technique (PRT) on pn junction photodiode of the HgCdTe photodetector array. The measurements are done at the temperature of operation near 77 K. A saturation constant background light and a small resistance paralleled with the photodiode are used to minimize the influence of the effect of junction capacitance and resistance on the minority carrier lifetime extraction in the PIOCVD and SPR measurements, respectively. The minority carrier lifetime obtained using the two methods is distributed from 18 to 407 ns and from 0.7 to 110 ns for the different Cd compositions. The minority carrier lifetime extracted from the traditional PRT measurement is found in the range of 4 to 20 ns for x=0.231–0.4186. From the results, it can be concluded that the minority carrier lifetime becomes longer with the increase of Cd composition and the pixels dimensional area