A Data Transformation System for Biological Data Sources

Scientific data of importance to biologists in the Human Genome Project resides not only in conventional databases, but in structured files maintained in a number of different formats (e.g. ASN.1 and ACE) as well a.s sequence analysis packages (e.g. BLAST and FASTA). These formats and packages contain a number of data types not found in conventional databases, such as lists and variants, and may be deeply nested. We present in this paper techniques for querying and transforming such data, and illustrate their use in a prototype system developed in conjunction with the Human Genome Center for Chromosome 22. We also describe optimizations performed by the system, a crucial issue for bulk data

Investigating the Impact of Inclusion in Face Recognition Training Data

Modern face recognition systems leverage datasets containing im-ages of hundreds of thousands of individuals’ faces. Recently, therehas been significant public scrutiny into the privacy implications oflarge-scale training datasets such as MS-Celeb-1M, as many peo-ple are uncomfortable with their face being used to train dual-usetechnologies that can enable mass surveillance. However, the im-pact of an individual’s inclusion in training data on a derived sys-tem’s ability to recognize them has not previously been studied. Inthis work, we audit ArcFace, a state-of-the-art, open-source facerecognition system, in a large-scale face identification experiment.We find Rank-1 identification accuracy of 79.71% for individualspresent in training data and 75.73% for those not present. These re-sults demonstrate that modern face recognition systems work bet-ter for individuals they are trained on, which has serious privacyimplications as all large-scale, open-source training datasets do notgather informed consent from individuals during their collection

The sextet gauge model, light Higgs, and the dilaton

The frequently discussed strongly interacting gauge theory with a fermion flavor doublet in the two-index symmetric (sextet) representation of the SU(3) color gauge group is investigated \cite{Fodor:2012ty}. The chiral condensate and the mass spectrum are consistent with chiral symmetry breaking at vanishing fermion mass. In contrast, sextet fermion mass deformations of spectral properties are not consistent with leading conformal scaling behavior near the critical surface of a conformal theory. A recent paper \cite{DeGrand:2012yq} which could not resolve the conformal fixed point of the gauge coupling from the slowly walking scenario of a very small nearly vanishing \beta -function is not in conflict with chiral symmetry breaking reported here. A light Higgs impostor could emerge as the dilaton from spontaneous symmetry breaking of scale invariance or, without the dilaton mechanism, as a composite state.Comment: 7 pages, Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, June 24 - 29, 2012, Cairns, Australi

Conformal finite size scaling of twelve fermion flavors

Extended simulation results and their analysis are reported in a strongly coupled gauge theory with twelve fermion flavors in the fundamental SU(3) color representation. The conformality of the model is probed using mass deformed conformal finite size scaling (FSS) theory driven by the fermion mass anomalous dimension. Two independent conformal FSS fitting procedures are used in the analysis. The first one deploys physics motivated scaling functions, complemented by a second fitting procedure with spline based general B-forms for the scaling functions. The results at fixed gauge coupling show unresolved problems with the conformal hypothesis.Comment: 7 pages, Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, June 24 - 29, 2012, Cairns, Australi

Confining force and running coupling with twelve fundamental and two sextet fermions

We investigate two models of much recent interest in lattice Beyond Standard Model studies: N_f=2 fermions in the 2-index symmetric (sextet) representation, and N_f=12 fermions in the fundamental representation, both with SU(3) gauge symmetry. We present results at fixed lattice spacing for the static fermion potential and force as measured via lattice simulations. We show indications that both models are confining in the chiral limit and that neither theory is conformal. This is consistent with our findings for the mass spectrum, which indicate that chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken in both theories.Comment: 7 pages, Proceedings of the 30th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, June 24 - 29, 2012, Cairns, Australi