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Data hiding in digital images is a promising direction of cybersecurity. Digital steganography methods provide imperceptible transmission of secret data over an open communication channel. The information embedding efficiency depends on the embedding imperceptibility, capacity, and robustness. These quality criteria are mutually inverse, and the improvement of one indicator usually leads to the deterioration of the others. A balance between them can be achieved using metaheuristic optimization. Metaheuristics are a class of optimization algorithms that find an optimal, or close to an optimal solution for a variety of problems, including those that are difficult to formalize, by simulating various natural processes, for example, the evolution of species or the behavior of animals. In this study, we propose an approach to data hiding in the hybrid spatial-frequency domain of digital images based on metaheuristic optimization. Changing a block of image pixels according to some change matrix is considered as an embedding operation. We select the change matrix adaptively for each block using metaheuristic optimization algorithms. In this study, we compare the performance of three metaheuristics such as genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization, and differential evolution to find the best change matrix. Experimental results showed that the proposed approach provides high imperceptibility of embedding, high capacity, and error-free extraction of embedded information. At the same time, storage of change matrices for each block is not required for further data extraction. This improves user experience and reduces the chance of an attacker discovering the steganographic attachment. Metaheuristics provided an increase in imperceptibility indicator, estimated by the PSNR metric, and the capacity of the previous algorithm for embedding information into the coefficients of the discrete cosine transform using the QIM method [Evsutin, Melman, Meshcheryakov, 2021] by 26.02% and 30.18%, respectively, for the genetic algorithm, 26.01% and 19.39% for particle swarm optimization, 27.30% and 28.73% for differential evolution.

A numerical simulation of fluid flow in a blood pump was performed using the FlowVision software package. This test problem, provided by the Center for Devices and Radiological Health of the US. Food and Drug Administration, involved considering fluid flow according to several design modes. At the same time for each case of calculation a certain value of liquid flow rate and rotor speed was set. Necessary data for calculations in the form of exact geometry, flow conditions and fluid characteristics were provided to all research participants, who used different software packages for modeling. Numerical simulations were performed in FlowVision for six calculation modes with the Newtonian fluid and standard $k-\varepsilon$ turbulence model, in addition, the fifth mode with the $k-\omega$ SST turbulence model and with the Caro rheological fluid model were performed. In the first stage of the numerical simulation, the convergence over the mesh was investigated, on the basis of which a final mesh with a number of cells of the order of 6 million was chosen. Due to the large number of cells, in order to accelerate the study, part of the calculations was performed on the Lomonosov-2 cluster. As a result of numerical simulation, we obtained and analyzed values of pressure difference between inlet and outlet of the pump, velocity between rotor blades and in the area of diffuser, and also, we carried out visualization of velocity distribution in certain cross-sections. For all design modes there was compared the pressure difference received numerically with the experimental data, and for the fifth calculation mode there was also compared with the experiment by speed distribution between rotor blades and in the area of diffuser. Data analysis has shown good correlation of calculation results in FlowVision with experimental results and numerical simulation in other software packages. The results obtained in FlowVision for solving the US FDA test suggest that FlowVision software package can be used for solving a wide range of hemodynamic problems.

Despite the widespread use of cancer chemotherapy drugs, the molecular mechanisms of action of many of them remain unclear. Some of these drugs, such as taxol, are known to affect the dynamics of microtubule assembly and stop the process of cell division in prophase-prometaphase. Recently, new spatial structures of microtubules and individual tubulin oligomers have emerged associated with various regulatory proteins and cancer chemotherapy drugs. However, knowledge of the spatial structure in itself does not provide information about the mechanism of action of drugs.

In this work, we applied the molecular dynamics method to study the behavior of taxol-bound tubulin oligomers and used our previously developed method for analyzing the conformation of tubulin protofilaments, based on the calculation of modified Euler angles. Recent structures of microtubule fragments have demonstrated that tubulin protofilaments bend not in the radial direction, as many researchers assume, but at an angle of approximately 45◦ from the radial direction. However, in the presence of taxol, the bending direction shifts closer to the radial direction. There was no significant difference between the mean bending and torsion angles of the studied tubulin structures when bound to the various natural regulatory ligands, guanosine triphosphate and guanosine diphosphate. The intra-dimer bending angle was found to be greater than the interdimer bending angle in all analyzed trajectories. This indicates that the bulk of the deformation energy is stored within the dimeric tubulin subunits and not between them. Analysis of the structures of the latest generation of tubulins indicated that the presence of taxol in the tubulin beta subunit pocket allosterically reduces the torsional rigidity of the tubulin oligomer, which could explain the underlying mechanism of taxol’s effect on microtubule dynamics. Indeed, a decrease in torsional rigidity makes it possible to maintain lateral connections between protofilaments, and therefore should lead to the stabilization of microtubules, which is what is observed in experiments. The results of the work shed light on the phenomenon of dynamic instability of microtubules and allow to come closer to understanding the molecular mechanisms of cell division.

Algorithms of wireless sensor networks operation based on modified ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4 protocol stack and problems of energy saving with simultaneous decrease of network latency are studied. Theoretical computations are given. Roles distribution and routers schedule assignment algorithms are described. Both results of experiments carried out with real devices and results of simulations with ns-2 (open-source network simulator) are given and analyzed.

The grid-characteristic method is successfully used for solving hyperbolic systems of partial differential equations (for example, transport / acoustic / elastic equations). It allows to construct correctly algorithms on contact boundaries and boundaries of the integration domain, to a certain extent to take into account the physics of the problem (propagation of discontinuities along characteristic curves), and has the property of monotonicity, which is important for considered problems. In the cases of two-dimensional and three-dimensional problems the method makes use of a coordinate splitting technique, which enables us to solve the original equations by solving several one-dimensional ones consecutively. It is common to use up to 3-rd order one-dimensional schemes with simple splitting techniques which do not allow for the convergence order to be higher than two (with respect to time). Significant achievements in the operator splitting theory were done, the existence of higher-order schemes was proved. Its peculiarity is the need to perform a step in the opposite direction in time, which gives rise to difficulties, for example, for parabolic problems.

In this work coordinate splitting of the 3-rd and 4-th order were used for the two-dimensional hyperbolic problem of the linear elasticity. This made it possible to increase the final convergence order of the computational algorithm. The paper empirically estimates the convergence in L1 and L∞ norms using analytical solutions of the system with the sufficient degree of smoothness. To obtain objective results, we considered the cases of longitudinal and transverse plane waves propagating both along the diagonal of the computational cell and not along it. Numerical experiments demonstrated the improved accuracy and convergence order of constructed schemes. These improvements are achieved with the cost of three- or fourfold increase of the computational time (for the 3-rd and 4-th order respectively) and no additional memory requirements. The proposed improvement of the computational algorithm preserves the simplicity of its parallel implementation based on the spatial decomposition of the computational grid.

The method for mapping of intermediate representations (IR) set of C, C++ programs to vector embedding space is considered to create an empirical estimation framework for static performance prediction using LLVM compiler infrastructure. The usage of embeddings makes programs easier to compare due to avoiding Control Flow Graphs (CFG) and Data Flow Graphs (DFG) direct comparison. This method is based on transformation series of the initial IR such as: instrumentation — injection of artificial instructions in an instrumentation compiler’s pass depending on load offset delta in the current instruction compared to the previous one, mapping of instrumented IR into multidimensional vector with IR2Vec and dimension reduction with t-SNE (t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding) method. The D1 cache miss ratio measured with perf stat tool is considered as performance metric. A heuristic criterion of programs having more or less cache miss ratio is given. This criterion is based on embeddings of programs in 2D-space. The instrumentation compiler’s pass developed in this work is described: how it generates and injects artificial instructions into IR within the used memory model. The software pipeline that implements the performance estimation based on LLVM compiler infrastructure is given. Computational experiments are performed on synthetic tests which are the sets of programs with the same CFGs but with different sequences of offsets used when accessing the one-dimensional array of a given size. The correlation coefficient between performance metric and distance to the worst program’s embedding is measured and proved to be negative regardless of t-SNE initialization. This fact proves the heuristic criterion to be true. The process of such synthetic tests generation is also considered. Moreover, the variety of performance metric in programs set in such a test is proposed as a metric to be improved with exploration of more tests generators.

Virtual machines are usually associated with an ability to create them on demand by calling web services, then these machines are used to deliver resident services to their clients; however, providing clients with an ability to run an arbitrary programme on the newly created machines is beyond their power. Such kind of usage is useful in a high performance computing environment where most of the resources are consumed by batch programmes and not by daemons or services. In this case a cluster of virtual machines is created on demand to run a distributed or parallel programme and to save its output to a network attached storage. Upon completion this cluster is destroyed and resources are released. With certain modifications this approach can be extended to interactively deliver computational resources to the user thus providing virtual desktop as a service. Experiments show that the process of creating virtual clusters on demand can be made efficient in both cases.

The probabilistic topic model of a text document collection finds two matrices: a matrix of conditional probabilities of topics in documents and a matrix of conditional probabilities of words in topics. Each document is represented by a multiset of words also called the “bag of words”, thus assuming that the order of words is not important for revealing the latent topics of the document. Under this assumption, the problem is reduced to a low-rank non-negative matrix factorization governed by likelihood maximization. In general, this problem is ill-posed having an infinite set of solutions. In order to regularize the solution, a weighted sum of optimization criteria is added to the log-likelihood. When modeling large text collections, storing the first matrix seems to be impractical, since its size is proportional to the number of documents in the collection. At the same time, the topical vector representation (embedding) of documents is necessary for solving many text analysis tasks, such as information retrieval, clustering, classification, and summarization of texts. In practice, the topical embedding is calculated for a document “on-the-fly”, which may require dozens of iterations over all the words of the document. In this paper, we propose a way to calculate a topical embedding quickly, by one pass over document words. For this, an additional constraint is introduced into the model in the form of an equation, which calculates the first matrix from the second one in linear time. Although formally this constraint is not an optimization criterion, in fact it plays the role of a regularizer and can be used in combination with other regularizers within the additive regularization framework ARTM. Experiments on three text collections have shown that the proposed method improves the model in terms of sparseness, difference, logLift and coherence measures of topic quality. The open source libraries BigARTM and TopicNet were used for the experiments.

In the first part of the paper we present convergence analysis of AGMsDR method on a new class of functions — in general non-convex with $M$-Lipschitz-continuous gradients that satisfy Polyak – Lojasiewicz condition. Method does not need the value of $\mu^{PL}>0$ in the condition and converges linearly with a scale factor $\left(1 - \frac{\mu^{PL}}{M}\right)$. It was previously proved that method converges as $O\left(\frac1{k^2}\right)$ if a function is convex and has $M$-Lipschitz-continuous gradient and converges linearly with a~scale factor $\left(1 - \sqrt{\frac{\mu^{SC}}{M}}\right)$ if the value of strong convexity parameter $\mu^{SC}>0$ is known. The novelty is that one can save linear convergence if $\frac{\mu^{PL}}{\mu^{SC}}$ is not known, but without square root in the scale factor.

The second part presents modification of AGMsDR method for solving problems that allow alternating minimization (Alternating AGMsDR). The similar results are proved.

As the result, we present adaptive accelerated methods that converge as $O\left(\min\left\lbrace\frac{M}{k^2},\,\left(1-{\frac{\mu^{PL}}{M}}\right)^{(k-1)}\right\rbrace\right)$ on a class of convex functions with $M$-Lipschitz-continuous gradient that satisfy Polyak – Lojasiewicz condition. Algorithms do not need values of $M$ and $\mu^{PL}$. If Polyak – Lojasiewicz condition does not hold, the convergence is $O\left(\frac1{k^2}\right)$, but no tuning needed.

We also consider the adaptive catalyst envelope of non-accelerated gradient methods. The envelope allows acceleration up to $O\left(\frac1{k^2}\right)$. We present numerical comparison of non-accelerated adaptive gradient descent which is accelerated using adaptive catalyst envelope with AGMsDR, Alternating AGMsDR, APDAGD (Adaptive Primal-Dual Accelerated Gradient Descent) and Sinkhorn's algorithm on the problem dual to the optimal transport problem.

Conducted experiments show faster convergence of alternating AGMsDR in comparison with described catalyst approach and AGMsDR, despite the same asymptotic rate $O\left(\frac1{k^2}\right)$. Such behavior can be explained by linear convergence of AGMsDR method and was tested on quadratic functions. Alternating AGMsDR demonstrated better performance in comparison with AGMsDR.

We propose a four-component model of a plankton community with discrete time. The model considers the competitive relationships of phytoplankton groups exhibited between each other and the trophic characteristics zooplankton displays: it considers the division of zooplankton into predatory and non-predatory components. The model explicitly represents the consumption of non-predatory zooplankton by predatory. Non-predatory zooplankton feeds on phytoplankton, which includes two competing components: toxic and non-toxic types, with the latter being suitable for zooplankton food. A model of two coupled Ricker equations, focused on describing the dynamics of a competitive community, describes the interaction of two phytoplanktons and allows implicitly taking into account the limitation of each of the competing components of biomass growth by the availability of external resources. The model describes the prey consumption by their predators using a Holling type II trophic function, considering predator saturation.

The analysis of scenarios for the transition from stationary dynamics to fluctuations in the population size of community members showed that the community loses the stability of the non-trivial equilibrium corresponding to the coexistence of the complete community both through a cascade of period-doubling bifurcations and through a Neimark – Sacker bifurcation leading to the emergence of quasi-periodic oscillations. Although quite simple, the model proposed in this work demonstrates dynamics of comunity similar to that natural systems and experiments observe: with a lag of predator oscillations relative to the prey by about a quarter of the period, long-period antiphase cycles of predator and prey, as well as hidden cycles in which the prey density remains almost constant, and the predator density fluctuates, demonstrating the influence fast evolution exhibits that masks the trophic interaction. At the same time, the variation of intra-population parameters of phytoplankton or zooplankton can lead to pronounced changes the community experiences in the dynamic mode: sharp transitions from regular to quasi-periodic dynamics and further to exact cycles with a small period or even stationary dynamics. Quasi-periodic dynamics can arise at sufficiently small phytoplankton growth rates corresponding to stable or regular community dynamics. The change of the dynamic mode in this area (the transition from stable dynamics to quasi-periodic and vice versa) can occur due to the variation of initial conditions or external influence that changes the current abundances of components and shifts the system to the basin of attraction of another dynamic mode.