Formal Definition Research Articles

A Privacy-Preserving Data Mining Through Comprehensive GNIPP Approach in Sensitive Data Sets

The quick growth of methods for analyzing data and the availability of easily available datasets have made it possible to build a thorough analytics model that can help with support decision-making. In the meantime, protecting personal privacy is crucial. A popular technique for medical evaluation and prediction, decision trees are easy to comprehend and interpret. However, the decision tree construction procedure may reveal personal information about an individual. By keeping the statistical properties intact and limiting the chance of privacy leaking within a reasonable bound, differential privacy offers a formal mathematical definition of privacy. To construct a boosting random forest that preserves privacy, we propose a Gaussian Noise Integrated Privacy Preservation (GNIPP) in this study. To address the issue of personal information breaches, we have designed a unique Gaussian distribution mechanism in GNIPP that enables the nodes with deeper depth to obtain more privacy during the decision tree construction process. We propose a comprehensive boosting technique based on the decision forest's prediction accuracy for assembling multiple decision trees into a forest. Furthermore, we propose an iterative technique to accelerate the assembly of decision trees. After all, we demonstrate through experimentation that the suggested GNIPP outperforms alternative algorithms on two real-world datasets.

“Neurohospitalist Core Competencies: Development and Methodology”

Background and Purpose Neurohospitalists specialize in the care of hospitalized patients with neurological conditions. As the neurohospitalist model of patient care has grown rapidly and in diverse ways, there has been increasing demand for a formal definition of the field, particularly to support curriculum development for learners at multiple levels. Methods The Neurohospitalist Society (NHS) formed a Core Competencies Committee in 2021. This committee defined the scope of the Neurohospitalist Core Competencies and organized the competency topics into chapters. This chapter list was approved by the members of the NHS. An open invitation was made to the general membership of the NHS to write chapters on a first-come, first-served basis, using a standardized chapter template developed by the Committee. A three-step editing process was completed, with members of the Committee serving as editors. A dissemination strategy was designed, including drafting of 2 manuscripts (the Core Competencies themselves, and this accompanying manuscript) and outreach to the general membership of the NHS. Results The Neurohospitalist Core Competencies include 27 chapters divided into 3 sections: neurological conditions; clinical interventions and interpretations of ancillary studies; and neurohospitalist role in the health care system. The complete version of the Neurohospitalist Core Competencies is published as a separate manuscript in this issue of The Neurohospitalist. Conclusions The creation of the Neurohospitalist Core Competencies was a multi-year initiative intended to support practicing neurohospitalists, trainees interested in pursuing careers in the field, medical education leaders, and administrative leaders of hospitals and departments.

Definite four-manifolds with exotic smooth structures

Abstract In this paper, we study smooth structures on closed, oriented four-manifolds with fundamental group Z / 2 ⁢ Z \mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z} and definite intersection form. We construct infinitely many irreducible, oriented, closed, definite, smooth four-manifolds with π 1 = Z / 2 ⁢ Z \pi_{1}=\mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z} and b 2 = 1 b_{2}=1 , and b 2 = 2 b_{2}=2 . As an application, we prove that, when the second Betti number b 2 b_{2} of a definite four-manifold with π 1 = Z / 2 ⁢ Z \pi_{1}=\mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z} is positive and it admits a smooth structure, then it admits infinitely many smooth structures.

Public Authentic-Replica Sampling Mechanism in Distributed Storage Environments

With the rapid development of wireless communication and big data analysis technologies, the storage of massive amounts of data relies on third-party trusted storage, such as cloud storage. However, once data are stored on third-party servers, data owners lose physical control over their data, making it challenging to ensure data integrity and security. To address this issue, researchers have proposed integrity auditing mechanisms that allow for the auditing of data integrity on cloud servers without retrieving all the data. To further enhance the availability of data stored on cloud servers, multiple replicas of the original data are stored on the server. However, in existing multi-replica auditing schemes, there is a problem of server fraud, where the server does not actually store the corresponding data replicas. To tackle this issue, this paper presents a formal definition of authentic replicas along with a security model for the authentic-replica sampling mechanism. Based on time-lock puzzles, identity-based encryption (IBE) mechanisms, and succinct proof techniques, we design an authentic replica auditing mechanism. This mechanism ensures the authenticity of replicas and can resist outsourcing attacks and generation attacks. Additionally, our schemes replace the combination of random numbers and replica correspondence tables with Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSRs), optimizing the original client-side generation and uploading of replica parameters from being linearly related to the number of replicas to a constant level. Furthermore, our schemes allow for the public recovery of replica parameters, enabling any third party to verify the replicas through these parameters. As a result, the schemes achieve public verifiability and meet the efficiency requirements for authentic-replica sampling in multi-cloud environments. This makes our scheme more suitable for distributed storage environments. The experiments show that our scheme makes the time for generating copy parameters negligible while also greatly optimizing the time required for replica generation. As the amount of replica data increases, the time spent does not grow linearly. Due to the multi-party aggregation design, the verification time is also optimal. Compared to the latest schemes, the verification time is reduced by approximately 30%.

Teaching practice aimed at promoting student engagement with metarules of defining

By viewing students’ learning to define as learning about meta-discursive rules about defining and how to engage with them in their activity of defining, we investigated teaching practices that aim to promote such learning by analyzing a teaching experiment in which Calculus II students reinvented a formal definition of a limit. The teaching practices we identified addressed how students view defining tasks by providing a method to check whether their narratives satisfied the metarules that they aimed to follow and also provided guidance about how to revise their definitions to satisfy those metarules. Our results provide an example for the teaching practice that promotes student learning about and engagement with new meta-discursive rules that existing literature called for in general, especially in their reinvention of a formal definition of a mathematical object.

Critical Mass and Mature Equilibria for Two-Sided Platforms, and the Strength of the Externalities Between the Sides

Abstract Critical mass is central to the development of two-sided platforms. It is the level of participation on both sides that is required to have the platform grow on its own force to a mature equilibrium. Despite this commonly understood dynamic, a formal definition of critical mass is missing in the literature on two-sided platforms, except for a proposal by Evans and Schmalensee (2010. “Failure to Launch: Critical Mass in Platform Businesses.” Review of Network Economics 9 (4)) who defined critical mass not as a single combination of platform sizes, but as a frontier in the two-dimensional space of those levels. We set out a demand model for two-sided platforms, propose a measure for the strength of the externalities between the sides and define critical mass in terms of this externality parameter. Our definition is more in line with the way critical mass is defined for one-sided networks. We also set out the conditions that must be met for the occurrence of critical mass.

A distributed end-to-end fair bandwidth allocation algorithm for multi-path networks

Multi-path transmission significantly improves network performance, yet it complicates the problem of fair resource allocation. While traditional fair bandwidth allocation schemes thrive in single-path settings, they often falter when applied to multi-path environments, highlighting the challenge of achieving fair bandwidth sharing in such networks. To tackle this issue, the concept of "max-min similarity" of queuing delays has been introduced based on insight into the intrinsic interactions between queuing packets, delays, and bandwidth allocation, which leads to a formal definition of max-min fair bandwidth allocation for multi-path environments. Theoretical analysis shows that the max-min similarity of queuing delays is a sufficient condition for max-min fair bandwidth allocation in single bottleneck environments. A novel distributed end-to-end fair bandwidth allocation algorithm, named DMFBA, is then proposed, which separates the control into flow-level and transmission path-level. In achieving max-min similarity in queuing delays by dynamically adjusting the distribution of flows’ queuing packet quotas across paths it achieves the goal of max-min fair bandwidth allocation. Two sets of numerical simulation experiments were conducted and the results show that DMFBA has less overhead and faster convergence than the traditional utility fair algorithms.

Concluding remarks.

The Faraday Discussion on Correlated electronic structure took place from the 17th to the 19th of July 2024 in London, UK. The Discussion encompassed various facets of electron correlation, ranging from its formal definition and quantification to emerging frontiers in electronic structure theory, with applications in the solid state, integration with machine learning, and quantum computing.

Smart-KG: Partition-Based Linked Data Fragments for querying knowledge graphs

RDF and SPARQL provide a uniform way to publish and query billions of triples in open knowledge graphs (KGs) on the Web. Yet, provisioning of a fast, reliable, and responsive live querying solution for open KGs is still hardly possible through SPARQL endpoints alone: while such endpoints provide a remarkable performance for single queries, they typically can not cope with highly concurrent query workloads by multiple clients. To mitigate this, the Linked Data Fragments (LDF) framework sparked the design of different alternative low-cost interfaces such as Triple Pattern Fragments (TPF), that partially offload the query processing workload to the client side. On the downside, such interfaces still come with the expense of unnecessarily high network load due to the necessary transfer of intermediate results to the client, leading to query performance degradation compared with endpoints. To address this problem, in the present work, we investigate alternative interfaces, refining and extending the original TPF idea, which also aims at reducing server-resource consumption, by shipping query-relevant partitions of KGs from the server to the client. To this end, first, we align formal definitions and notations of the original LDF framework to uniformly present existing LDF implements and such “partition-based” LDF approaches. These novel LDF interfaces retrieve, instead of the exact triples matching a particular query pattern, a subset of pre-materialized, compressed, partitions of the original graph, containing all answers to a query pattern, to be further evaluated on the client side. As a concrete representative of partition-based LDF, we present smart-KG+, extending and refining our prior work (In WWW ’20: The Web Conference 2020 (2020) 984–994 ACM / IW3C2) in several respects. Our proposed approach is a step forward towards a better-balanced share of the query processing load between clients and servers by shipping graph partitions driven by the structure of RDF graphs to group entities described with the same sets of properties and classes, resulting in significant data transfer reduction. Our experiments demonstrate that the smart-KG+ significantly outperforms existing Web SPARQL interfaces on both pre-existing benchmarks for highly concurrent query execution as well as an accustomed query workload inspired by query logs of existing SPARQL endpoints.

Towards autonomous supply chains: Definition, characteristics, conceptual framework, and autonomy levels

Recent global disruptions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing geopolitical conflicts, have profoundly exposed vulnerabilities in traditional supply chains, requiring exploration of more resilient alternatives. Among various solution offerings, Autonomous supply chains (ASCs) have emerged as key enablers of increased integration and visibility, enhancing flexibility and resilience in turbulent trade environments through the widespread automation of low level decision making. Although ASC solutions have been discussed and trialled over several years, they still lack well-established theoretical foundations. This paper addresses this research gap by presenting a formal definition of ASC along with its defining characteristics and auxiliary concepts. We propose a layered conceptual framework, called the MIISI model. An illustrative case study focusing on the meat supply chain demonstrates an initial ASC implementation based on this conceptual model. Furthermore, we introduce a seven-level supply chain autonomy reference model, delineating a trajectory towards achieving full supply chain autonomy. Recognising that this work represents an initial endeavour, we emphasise the need for continued exploration in this emerging domain. This work is designed to stimulate further research, both theoretical and technical, and contribute to the continual evolution of ASCs.

On the set of values of a positive ternary quadratic form

It is shown that the set of values of an integer positive definite quadratic form in three variables contains an infinite arithmetic progression.

Curvature in plants

Curvatures are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom - the spiral shell of the nautilus and the corkscrew horns of the blackbuck being iconic examples. Dynamic changes in curvature (i.e., curving) are most striking in the locomotion of some animal species - swimming in fishes and mollusks, looping in leeches, undulatory locomotion in snakes and lampreys, and also sperm motility through flagellum beating. When it comes to plants, which are sessile organisms with a rigid body, the terms 'curvature' and 'curving' evoke very different images - leaves of grass swaying in the breeze, a trunk dangerously bent by a powerful gust of wind, a branch sagging under the weight of its own fruits, as well as the frail arabesques of twining plants like the morning glory and the ivy, which were so influential in the Art Nouveau movement and many other artistic traditions. These various vegetal curves not only prompt creative inspiration in the mind of the beholder, they also initiate signaling cascades leading to developmental responses of the plant. Conversely, curvature can result from a biologically active process in response to an internal or external stimulus. Active curving or decurving are indeed important aspects of the plastic interplay of the developmental program of plants and their environment. Although easily accessible to observation, curvature and curving have only recently become the focus of active research in plant development. Lying at the nexus of biology, physics and mathematics, they require an interdisciplinary approach. The aim of this primer is to give readers an intuitive but accurate understanding of what curvature and curving are, as observed in the plant kingdom, then a more formal definition. We will discuss their role in plant development, both as a signal and as a response, and finally the practical issues and solutions involved in measuring plant curvatures.

Além da costa: o papel da Seenemar na economia azul do Rio de Janeiro

This study analyzes the strategy of the State Secretary of Energy and Sea Economy (SEENEMAR) in promoting the blue economy in the State of Rio de Janeiro (ERJ), focusing on environmental and social sustainability. The analysis of projects, such as the Fishery Naval Hub and offshore wind energy, reveals significant contributions to economic growth, environmental sustainability, and social inclusion. SEENEMAR has shown effectiveness in job creation, attracting investments, and decarbonization, as well as promoting social inclusion through training programs and valuing sea gastronomy. However, the lack of a formal blue economy definition at the federal level may limit the expansion of these initiatives. This study suggests that the continuity and success of SEENEMAR’s policies depend on constant monitoring and adjustments based on empirical data.

Attribute-Based Designated Combiner Transitive Signature Scheme

Transitive signatures allow any entity to obtain a valid signature of (i,k) by combining signatures of (i,j) and (j,k). However, the traditional transitive signature scheme does not offer fine-grained control over the combiner. To address this issue, we propose a formal definition of the attribute-based designated combiner transitive signature (ABDCTS) and its security model, where only entities whose inherent attributes meet the access policy can combine signatures. By introducing the fine-grained access control structure, control over the combiner is achieved. To demonstrate the feasibility of our primitive, this paper presents the first attribute-based designated combiner transitive signature scheme. Under an adaptive chosen-message attack, we prove its security based on the one-more CDH problem and the co-CDH problem, and that its algorithms have robustness.

Text VS Discourse: Reformulating the Definition, Integrating Different Perceptions

There have long been different perceptions on what text and discourse are. Some experts in linguistics view these two objects as the same thing whereas others see them as two different forms. Occasionally, text and discourse are parallel to each other but often the former is seen as the subordinate of the latter and vice versa. This paper aimed at formulating new definitions of text and discourse in order to clarify the nature of each as well as the relations that may exist between them. The method applied in this study was by collecting as many as definitions of text and discourse as stated by linguistic experts and quoted in references. These data were then compared and contrasted to find out the similarities and the differences between the objects for drawing a conclusion in the form of definitions and descriptions that precisely represent the characteristics of each. The result shows that, text and discourse share both similarities and differences. At certain level, they can be seen as the same entity but in other conditions one may take position as part of the other.

A dinâmica da experiência crente

Commemorating the 60th anniversary of Unitatis Redintegratio, a text expressing the ecumenical dimension of the entire Second Vatican Council, we propose a rereading of Paul Tillich's work, Dynamics of Faith. Although relatively unknown, this work remains inspiring and pertinent to the theme of restoring Christian unity, as well as to the ecclesial and social challenges of ecumenical dialogue and practice in the contemporary world. Firstly, we present Tillich's formal definition of faith as the "ultimate concern" of existence, aiming to embrace the constitutive aspects of the act of believing and thus allow for a greater scope and macro-ecumenical dialogue. Secondly, we highlight how Tillich defends the symbolic nature of faith before characterizing specific religious symbols. Thirdly, we show that the Lutheran theologian proposes a typology of faith, positioned between presence and becoming. Fourthly, we tackle the question of the truth of faith and its criteria. Finally, we conclude with Tillich reaffirming the experience of faith in its relation to life.

Proven Distributed Memory Parallelization of Particle Methods

We provide a mathematically proven parallelization scheme for particle methods on distributed-memory computer systems. Particle methods are a versatile and widely used class of algorithms for computer simulations and numerical predictions in various applications, ranging from continuum fluid dynamics to discrete granular flows and molecular dynamics simulations. Particle methods naturally lend themselves to implementation on parallel computing systems. So far, however, a mathematical proof of correctness and equivalence to sequential implementations was only available for shared-memory parallelism. Here, we leverage a formal definition of the algorithmic class of particle methods to provide a proven parallelization scheme for distributed-memory computers. We prove that thus parallelized particle methods on distributed-memory computers are formally equivalent to their sequential counterpart for a well-defined class of particle methods, and we provide analytical expressions for the speed-up and scalability bounds of this class of algorithms in function of their parameters. The parallelization scheme analyzed here is the basis of many real-world software designs for parallel particle methods. The present analysis is, therefore, of direct relevance to existing and new parallel implementations of particle methods and places them on solid theoretical grounds, rationalizing best practices and providing useful scalability and speedup bounds for benchmarking.

Can we define global collective action problems away?

AbstractThe adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals has rejuvenated an old debate: Can foreign aid be used to finance global public goods (GPGs)? There are those who see aid exclusively as a source of development funding for poor countries. And there are others who are open to answering the question in the affirmative. I put forward five arguments why the latter position is reasonable. Firstly, the formal definition of official development assistance (ODA) cannot be said to exclude its use in financing GPGs as these goods by definition benefit developing countries. Secondly, the amount of ODA provided has never been the gold standard of rich country effort envisaged by some. In particular, the level is boosted by the self‐interests of donors. Thirdly, there is ample precedent for following the benefit principle when it comes to multilateral organisations, which are often seen as GPGs. Fourthly, distinguishing between national public goods and GPGs is not always straightforward as the former are in many cases inputs into the production of the latter, and in such cases, the dividing line between ‘traditional aid’ and ‘funding for GPGs’ is blurred. Finally, it is not obvious in practice that aid as country finance always generates greater welfare gains for developing countries than the provision of GPGs. In sum, being overly normative with respect to what ODA is distracts us from the real problem, namely, that collective action problems result in too little spending on all international public goods, including poverty alleviation in poor countries.

From whole-slide image to biomarker prediction: end-to-end weakly supervised deep learning in computational pathology.

Hematoxylin- and eosin-stained whole-slide images (WSIs) are the foundation of diagnosis of cancer. In recent years, development of deep learning-based methods in computational pathology has enabled the prediction of biomarkers directly from WSIs. However, accurately linking tissue phenotype to biomarkers at scale remains a crucial challenge for democratizing complex biomarkers in precision oncology. This protocol describes a practical workflow for solid tumor associative modeling in pathology (STAMP), enabling prediction of biomarkers directly from WSIs by using deep learning. The STAMP workflow is biomarker agnostic and allows for genetic and clinicopathologic tabular data to be included as an additional input, together with histopathology images. The protocol consists of five main stages that have been successfully applied to various research problems: formal problem definition, data preprocessing, modeling, evaluation and clinical translation. The STAMP workflow differentiates itself through its focus on serving as a collaborative framework that can be used by clinicians and engineers alike for setting up research projects in the field of computational pathology. As an example task, we applied STAMP to the prediction of microsatellite instability (MSI) status in colorectal cancer, showing accurate performance for the identification of tumors high in MSI. Moreover, we provide an open-source code base, which has been deployed at several hospitals across the globe to set up computational pathology workflows. The STAMP workflow requires one workday of hands-on computational execution and basic command line knowledge.

Quantifying theory in politics: Identification, interpretation, and the role of structural methods

The best empirical research in political science clearly defines substantive parameters of interest, presents a set of assumptions that guarantees their identification, and uses an appropriate estimator. We argue for the importance of explicitly integrating rigorous theory into this process and focus on the advantages of doing so. By integrating a theoretical structure into one’s empirical strategy, researchers can quantify the effects of competing mechanisms, consider the ex-ante effects of new policies, extrapolate findings to new environments, estimate model-specific theoretical parameters, evaluate the fit of a theoretical model, and test competing models that aim to explain the same phenomena. As a guide to such a methodology, we provide an overview of structural estimation, including formal definitions, implementation suggestions, examples, and comparisons to other methods.