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A mass congestion of people always represents a potential danger and threat for their lives. In addition, every year in the world a very large number of people die because of the crush, the main cause of which is mass panic. Therefore, the study of the phenomenon of mass panic in view of her extreme social danger is an important scientific task. Available information, about the processes of her occurrence and spread refers to the category inaccurate. Therefore, the theory of fuzzy sets has been chosen as a tool for developing a mathematical model of the mechanism of transmitting panic state among people with various temperament species.

When developing an fuzzy model, it was assumed that panic, from the epicenter of the shocking stimulus, spreads among people according to the wave principle, passing at different frequencies through different environments (types of human temperament), and is determined by the speed and intensity of the circular reaction of the mechanism of transmitting panic state among people. Therefore, the developed fuzzy model, along with two inputs, has two outputs — the speed and intensity of the circular reaction. In the block «Fuzzyfication», the degrees of membership of the numerical values of the input parameters to fuzzy sets are calculated. The «Inference» block at the input receives degrees of belonging for each input parameter and at the output determines the resulting function of belonging the speed of the circular reaction and her derivative, which is a function of belonging for the intensity of the circular reaction. In the «Defuzzyfication» block, using the center of gravity method, a quantitative value is determined for each output parameter. The quality assessment of the developed fuzzy model, carried out by calculating of the determination coefficient, showed that the developed mathematical model belongs to the category of good quality models.

The result obtained in the form of quantitative assessments of the circular reaction makes it possible to improve the quality of understanding of the mental processes occurring during the transmission of the panic state among people. In addition, this makes it possible to improve existing and develop new models of chaotic humans behaviors. Which are designed to develop effective solutions in crisis situations, aimed at full or partial prevention of the spread of mass panic, leading to the emergence of panic flight and the appearance of human casualties.

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.

Distributed saddle point problems (SPPs) have numerous applications in optimization, matrix games and machine learning. For example, the training of generated adversarial networks is represented as a min-max optimization problem, and training regularized linear models can be reformulated as an SPP as well. This paper studies distributed nonsmooth SPPs with Lipschitz-continuous objective functions. The objective function is represented as a sum of several components that are distributed between groups of computational nodes. The nodes, or agents, exchange information through some communication network that may be centralized or decentralized. A centralized network has a universal information aggregator (a server, or master node) that directly communicates to each of the agents and therefore can coordinate the optimization process. In a decentralized network, all the nodes are equal, the server node is not present, and each agent only communicates to its immediate neighbors.

We assume that each of the nodes locally holds its objective and can compute its value at given points, i. e. has access to zero-order oracle. Zero-order information is used when the gradient of the function is costly, not possible to compute or when the function is not differentiable. For example, in reinforcement learning one needs to generate a trajectory to evaluate the current policy. This policy evaluation process can be interpreted as the computation of the function value. We propose an approach that uses a smoothing technique, i. e., applies a first-order method to the smoothed version of the initial function. It can be shown that the stochastic gradient of the smoothed function can be viewed as a random two-point gradient approximation of the initial function. Smoothing approaches have been studied for distributed zero-order minimization, and our paper generalizes the smoothing technique on SPPs.

The paper proposes a set of fairly simple analysis algorithms that can be used to analyze a wide range of protein-protein interactions. In this work, we jointly use the methods of Brownian and molecular dynamics to describe the process of formation of a complex of plastocyanin and cytochrome f proteins in higher plants. In the diffusion-collision complex, two clusters of structures were revealed, the transition between which is possible with the preservation of the position of the center of mass of the molecules and is accompanied only by a rotation of plastocyanin by 134 degrees. The first and second clusters of structures of collisional complexes differ in that in the first cluster with a positively charged region near the small domain of cytochrome f, only the “lower” plastocyanin region contacts, while in the second cluster, both negatively charged regions. The “upper” negatively charged region of plastocyanin in the first cluster is in contact with the amino acid residue of lysine K122. When the final complex is formed, the plastocyanin molecule rotates by 69 degrees around an axis passing through both areas of electrostatic contact. With this rotation, water is displaced from the regions located near the cofactors of the molecules and formed by hydrophobic amino acid residues. This leads to the appearance of hydrophobic contacts, a decrease in the distance between the cofactors to a distance of less than 1.5 nm, and further stabilization of the complex in a position suitable for electron transfer. Characteristics such as contact matrices, rotation axes during the transition between states, and graphs of changes in the number of contacts during the modeling process make it possible to determine the key amino acid residues involved in the formation of the complex and to reveal the physicochemical mechanisms underlying this process.

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.

The paper presents the results of research on the creation of a mathematical model of moral choice based on the development of the approach proposed by V. A. Lefebvre. Unlike V. A. Lefebvre, who considered a very speculative situation of a subject’s moral choice between abstract “good” and “evil” under pressure from the outside world, taking into account the subjective perception of this pressure by the subject, our study considers a more mundane and practically significant situation. The case is considered when the subject, when making decisions, is guided by his individual perception of the outside world (which may be distorted, for example, due to external purposeful informational influence on the subject and manipulation of his consciousness), and “good” and “evil” are not abstract, but are conditioned by a value system adopted in a particular society under consideration and tied to a specific ideology/religion, which may be different for different societies.

As a result of the conducted research, a basic mathematical model has been developed, and special cases of its application have been considered. Some patterns related to moral choice are revealed, and their formal description is given. In particular, the situation of manipulation of consciousness is considered in the language of the model, the law of reducing the “morality” of a society consisting of so-called free subjects (that is, those who strive to act in accordance with their intentions and correspond in their actions to the image of their “I”) is formulated.

The paper addresses the problem of modeling the formation and propagation of panic states in social groups with relatively stable structures of interpersonal interactions. Panic is interpreted as a nonlinear process of emotional contagion arising from the interaction between individual psychological characteristics and collective effects within a social environment. In contrast to models focused on the spatial dynamics of moving crowds, the proposed approach concentrates on quasi-stationary interaction networks that reflect informational and emotional contacts among individuals.

The developed discrete network dynamical system integrates individual temperament parameters (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic), the structure of social connections, and nonlinear mechanisms of collective behavior. The individual dynamics of panic are described using an S-shaped growth function, which ensures boundedness of the emotional arousal level and captures the stages of its formation and saturation. Social influence is modeled on a graph of interpersonal interactions (an Erdos –Renyi random network) through local contacts between individuals.

Additionally, the model incorporates the effects of collective contagion and avalanche-like amplification driven by the average panic level in the group, as well as a baseline stress factor depending on group size. Numerical simulation is implemented in a discrete iterative form, allowing for the analysis of both individual and group panic trajectories. A quantitative indicator of the panic propagation rate is introduced, defined by the time required for the group to reach a state close to full panic.

A comparative analysis of heterogeneous and homogeneous groups is conducted, demonstrating that group heterogeneity significantly accelerates panic propagation due to inter-temperament interactions: highly excitable individuals act as initiators of emotional contagion, while more stable individuals partially dampen its dynamics. The evaluation of the model quality using the coefficient of determination shows a high degree of consistency within the simulation data.

The practical significance of the work lies in the potential application of the model for analyzing the resilience of social groups to panic states, assessing risks at mass events, and developing intelligent systems for monitoring collective behavior. Future research directions include extending the model to account for directed and dynamic networks, as well as its calibration based on empirical data.

In neuroscience, the study of odor coding mechanisms requires the analysis of spatial activation patterns of olfactory structures (glomeruli) reconstructed from multiphoton microscopy data. However, the lack of a formal statistical framework for analyzing population-level summary maps limits result reproducibility and hinders the development of predictive models. To address these limitations, we developed a novel methodology for the analysis of olfactory activity maps aggregated across multiple animals, based on the theory of unmarked spatial point processes. The methodology includes a data preprocessing procedure and a numerical analysis algorithm implemented in the R environment using the spatstat package.

The proposed approach enables: (1) transformation of raw glomerular activity maps into point patterns while preserving information about glomerular sizes (replacing size information with local point density is a methodological compromise reflecting the “functional weight” of glomerular input); (2) analysis of point patterns based on spatial morphometric characteristics of domains — regions of stable glomerular activation in the olfactory bulb, each approximated by an ellipse, with ellipse parameters (center coordinates in stereotaxic space, major and minor axis lengths, orientation angles), areas, and intra-ellipse point densities reflecting odorant-specific response signatures; (3) statistical hypothesis testing for spatial randomness (Complete Spatial Randomness) using Ripley’s $K$-function, the nearest-neighbor G-function, and Monte Carlo simulations; (4) synthesis of a parametric pairwise interaction model (Strauss process), whose parameters $(r_{PI}, \gamma)$ have a clear biological interpretation — the spatial interaction scale of glomeruli and the strength of response comodulation, respectively.

The methodology was validated using experimental data obtained from 24 laboratory rats: 10 animals stimulated with camphor and 14 with methyl benzoate. The fitted Strauss models yielded close but odorant-specific parameters: interaction radii $r_{PI}$ of 150 $\mu$m (camphor) and 120 μm (methyl benzoate); interaction parameters $gamma$ of 0.95 and 0.89, respectively. The total domain areas (0.60 mm² and 0.73 mm²) and point densities (38 and 43 points/mm²) calculated at the first stage of analysis are fully consistent with the parametric signatures $(r_{PI}, \gamma)$ of the Strauss model. Model validation using $Q$-$Q$ plots of smoothed residuals confirmed their adequacy.

Our results are consistent with data previously obtained using genetic labeling and functional mapping techniques, demonstrating the correctness of the proposed methodology and the effectiveness of multiphoton laser scanning microscopy for such applications. The proposed framework provides reproducible quantitative assessment of glomerular domains within a unified stereotaxic coordinate system and can be extended to other odorants and biological species. All findings were obtained under anesthesia; extrapolation to active olfactory strategies in awake animals requires further investigation.

Non-smooth optimization often arises in many applied problems. The issues of developing efficient computational procedures for such problems in high-dimensional spaces are very topical. First-order methods (subgradient methods) are well applicable here, but in fairly general situations they lead to low speed guarantees for large-scale problems. One of the approaches to this type of problem can be to identify a subclass of non-smooth problems that allow relatively optimistic results on the rate of convergence. For example, one of the options for additional assumptions can be the condition of a sharp minimum, proposed in the late 1960s by B. T. Polyak. In the case of the availability of information about the minimal value of the function for Lipschitz-continuous problems with a sharp minimum, it turned out to be possible to propose a subgradient method with a Polyak step-size, which guarantees a linear rate of convergence in the argument. This approach made it possible to cover a number of important applied problems (for example, the problem of projecting onto a convex compact set). However, both the condition of the availability of the minimal value of the function and the condition of a sharp minimum itself look rather restrictive. In this regard, in this paper, we propose a generalized condition for a sharp minimum, somewhat similar to the inexact oracle proposed recently by Devolder – Glineur – Nesterov. The proposed approach makes it possible to extend the class of applicability of subgradient methods with the Polyak step-size, to the situation of inexact information about the value of the minimum, as well as the unknown Lipschitz constant of the objective function. Moreover, the use of local analogs of the global characteristics of the objective function makes it possible to apply the results of this type to wider classes of problems. We show the possibility of applying the proposed approach to strongly convex nonsmooth problems, also, we make an experimental comparison with the known optimal subgradient method for such a class of problems. Moreover, there were obtained some results connected to the applicability of the proposed technique to some types of problems with convexity relaxations: the recently proposed notion of weak $\beta$-quasi-convexity and ordinary quasiconvexity. Also in the paper, we study a generalization of the described technique to the situation with the assumption that the $\delta$-subgradient of the objective function is available instead of the usual subgradient. For one of the considered methods, conditions are found under which, in practice, it is possible to escape the projection of the considered iterative sequence onto the feasible set of the problem.

Detecting controversy in online discussions is critical for managing public relations, as it helps inform various processes from policymaking to business. This work aims to expand approaches to online controversy detection based on the expressed emotions. Controversy was defined as an online content phenomenon of provoking disagreements and conflict. This study builds upon prior semantic methods by analyzing estimates of emotional connotations of messages. Modern language models for emotion recognition and named entity recognition are explored as tools of controversy detection. The outputs of these models were aggregated by entity to estimate the entity’s emotional connotation. The emotional divergence score based on the dispersion of emotions was proposed to quantify controversy in user content. Then, entities with sufficiently high emotional divergence relative to the domain of discussions were selected as markers of controversy. A case study of Reddit data related to Sri-Lankan 2022 political crisis was conducted, showing the capabilities of emotional divergence score in controversy detection. A total of two datasets were collected with different methodologies: one aimed at collecting earlier messages and another aimed at collecting more recent ones. The collected data contained discussions of policy, public figures, organizations and locations tied to the crisis. When measured on manually annotated data samples, the proposed method achieved a recall value of 0.705 and a precision value close to 0.496 for the first dataset, while recall of 0.716 and precision of 0.436 were recorded for the second dataset. The main factors that limit the precision were found to be the quality of underlying models and false positives: highly discussed non-controversial markers. Lastly, it was identified that a study of regular emotional distribution of social media content may be helpful for improving controversy detection quality.