Concept Validation for Selective Heating and Press Hardening of Automotive Safety Components with Tailored Properties

© (2014) Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland.A new strategy termed selective heating and press hardening, for hot stamping of boron steel parts with tailored properties is proposed in this paper. Feasibility studies were carried out through a specially designed experimental programme. The main aim was to validate the strategy and demonstrate its potential for structural optimisation. In the work, a lab-scale demonstrator part was designed, and relevant manufacturing and property-assessment processes were defined. A heating technique and selective-heating rigs were designed to enable certain microstructural distributions in blanks to be obtained. A hot stamping tool set was designed for forming and quenching the parts. Demonstrator parts of full martensite phase, full initial phase, and differentially graded microstructures have been formed with high dimensional quality. Hardness testing and three point bending tests were conducted to assess the microstructure distribution and load bearing performance of the as-formed parts, respectively. The feasibility of the concept has been validated by the testing results

Two-Source Condensers with Low Error and Small Entropy Gap via Entropy-Resilient Functions

In their seminal work, Chattopadhyay and Zuckerman (STOC\u2716) constructed a two-source extractor with error epsilon for n-bit sources having min-entropy {polylog}(n/epsilon). Unfortunately, the construction\u27s running-time is {poly}(n/epsilon), which means that with polynomial-time constructions, only polynomially-small errors are possible. Our main result is a {poly}(n,log(1/epsilon))-time computable two-source condenser. For any k >= {polylog}(n/epsilon), our condenser transforms two independent (n,k)-sources to a distribution over m = k-O(log(1/epsilon)) bits that is epsilon-close to having min-entropy m - o(log(1/epsilon)). Hence, achieving entropy gap of o(log(1/epsilon)). The bottleneck for obtaining low error in recent constructions of two-source extractors lies in the use of resilient functions. Informally, this is a function that receives input bits from r players with the property that the function\u27s output has small bias even if a bounded number of corrupted players feed adversarial inputs after seeing the inputs of the other players. The drawback of using resilient functions is that the error cannot be smaller than ln r/r. This, in return, forces the running time of the construction to be polynomial in 1/epsilon. A key component in our construction is a variant of resilient functions which we call entropy-resilient functions. This variant can be seen as playing the above game for several rounds, each round outputting one bit. The goal of the corrupted players is to reduce, with as high probability as they can, the min-entropy accumulated throughout the rounds. We show that while the bias decreases only polynomially with the number of players in a one-round game, their success probability decreases exponentially in the entropy gap they are attempting to incur in a repeated game

Probabilistic Logarithmic-Space Algorithms for Laplacian Solvers

A recent series of breakthroughs initiated by Spielman and Teng culminated in the construction of nearly linear time Laplacian solvers, approximating the solution of a linear system Lx=b, where L is the normalized Laplacian of an undirected graph. In this paper we study the space complexity of the problem. Surprisingly we are able to show a probabilistic, logspace algorithm solving the problem. We further extend the algorithm to other families of graphs like Eulerian graphs (and directed regular graphs) and graphs that mix in polynomial time. Our approach is to pseudo-invert the Laplacian, by first "peeling-off" the problematic kernel of the operator, and then to approximate the inverse of the remaining part by using a Taylor series. We approximate the Taylor series using a previous work and the special structure of the problem. For directed graphs we exploit in the analysis the Jordan normal form and results from matrix functions

Towards Vulnerability Discovery Using Staged Program Analysis

Eliminating vulnerabilities from low-level code is vital for securing software. Static analysis is a promising approach for discovering vulnerabilities since it can provide developers early feedback on the code they write. But, it presents multiple challenges not the least of which is understanding what makes a bug exploitable and conveying this information to the developer. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a practical vulnerability assessment framework, called Melange. Melange performs data and control flow analysis to diagnose potential security bugs, and outputs well-formatted bug reports that help developers understand and fix security bugs. Based on the intuition that real-world vulnerabilities manifest themselves across multiple parts of a program, Melange performs both local and global analyses. To scale up to large programs, global analysis is demand-driven. Our prototype detects multiple vulnerability classes in C and C++ code including type confusion, and garbage memory reads. We have evaluated Melange extensively. Our case studies show that Melange scales up to large codebases such as Chromium, is easy-to-use, and most importantly, capable of discovering vulnerabilities in real-world code. Our findings indicate that static analysis is a viable reinforcement to the software testing tool set.Comment: A revised version to appear in the proceedings of the 13th conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA), July 201

Asymptotic behaviour of the posterior distribution in approximate Bayesian computation

Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a popular technique for approximating likelihoods and is often used in parameter estimation when the likelihood functions are analytically intractable. In the context of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), we analyse the asymptotic behaviour of the posterior distribution in ABC based Bayesian parameter estimation. In particular we show that Bernstein-von Mises type results still hold but that the resulting posterior is biased in the sense that it concentrates around a point in parameter space that differs from the true parameter value. Furthermore we obtain precise rates for the size of this bias with respect to a natural accuracy parameter of the ABC method. Finally we discuss, via a numerical example, the implications of our results for the practical implementation of ABC

On Hitting-Set Generators for Polynomials That Vanish Rarely

The problem of constructing hitting-set generators for polynomials of low degree is fundamental in complexity theory and has numerous well-known applications. We study the following question, which is a relaxation of this problem: Is it easier to construct a hitting-set generator for polynomials p: ?? ? ? of degree d if we are guaranteed that the polynomial vanishes on at most an ? > 0 fraction of its inputs? We will specifically be interested in tiny values of ?? d/|?|. This question was first considered by Goldreich and Wigderson (STOC 2014), who studied a specific setting geared for a particular application, and another specific setting was later studied by the third author (CCC 2017). In this work our main interest is a systematic study of the relaxed problem, in its general form, and we prove results that significantly improve and extend the two previously-known results. Our contributions are of two types: - Over fields of size 2 ? |?| ? poly(n), we show that the seed length of any hitting-set generator for polynomials of degree d ? n^{.49} that vanish on at most ? = |?|^{-t} of their inputs is at least ?((d/t)?log(n)). - Over ??, we show that there exists a (non-explicit) hitting-set generator for polynomials of degree d ? n^{.99} that vanish on at most ? = |?|^{-t} of their inputs with seed length O((d-t)?log(n)). We also show a polynomial-time computable hitting-set generator with seed length O((d-t)?(2^{d-t}+log(n))). In addition, we prove that the problem we study is closely related to the following question: "Does there exist a small set S ? ?? whose degree-d closure is very large?", where the degree-d closure of S is the variety induced by the set of degree-d polynomials that vanish on S