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The article analyzes empirical data on the long-term demographic and economic dynamics of the countries of the world for the period from the beginning of the 19th century to the present. Population and GDP of a number of countries of the world for the period 1500–2016 were selected as indicators characterizing the long-term demographic and economic dynamics of the countries of the world. Countries were chosen in such a way that they included representatives with different levels of development (developed and developing countries), as well as countries from different regions of the world (North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa). A specially developed mathematical model was used for modeling and data processing. The presented model is an autonomous system of differential equations that describes the processes of socio-economic modernization, including the process of transition from an agrarian society to an industrial and post-industrial one. The model contains the idea that the process of modernization begins with the emergence of an innovative sector in a traditional society, developing on the basis of new technologies. The population is gradually moving from the traditional sector to the innovation sector. Modernization is completed when most of the population moves to the innovation sector.

Statistical methods of data processing and Big Data methods, including hierarchical clustering were used. Using the developed algorithm based on the random descent method, the parameters of the model were identified and verified on the basis of empirical series, and the model was tested using statistical data reflecting the changes observed in developed and developing countries during the period of modernization taking place over the past centuries. Testing the model has demonstrated its high quality — the deviations of the calculated curves from statistical data are usually small and occur during periods of wars and economic crises. Thus, the analysis of statistical data on the long-term demographic and economic dynamics of the countries of the world made it possible to determine general patterns and formalize them in the form of a mathematical model. The model will be used to forecast demographic and economic dynamics in different countries of the world.

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.

The article is devoted to first-order adaptive methods for optimization problems with relatively strongly convex functionals. The concept of relatively strong convexity significantly extends the classical concept of convexity by replacing the Euclidean norm in the definition by the distance in a more general sense (more precisely, by Bregman’s divergence). An important feature of the considered classes of problems is the reduced requirements concerting the level of smoothness of objective functionals. More precisely, we consider relatively smooth and relatively Lipschitz-continuous objective functionals, which allows us to apply the proposed techniques for solving many applied problems, such as the intersection of the ellipsoids problem (IEP), the Support Vector Machine (SVM) for a binary classification problem, etc. If the objective functional is convex, the condition of relatively strong convexity can be satisfied using the problem regularization. In this work, we propose adaptive gradient-type methods for optimization problems with relatively strongly convex and relatively Lipschitzcontinuous functionals for the first time. Further, we propose universal methods for relatively strongly convex optimization problems. This technique is based on introducing an artificial inaccuracy into the optimization model, so the proposed methods can be applied both to the case of relatively smooth and relatively Lipschitz-continuous functionals. Additionally, we demonstrate the optimality of the proposed universal gradient-type methods up to the multiplication by a constant for both classes of relatively strongly convex problems. Also, we show how to apply the technique of restarts of the mirror descent algorithm to solve relatively Lipschitz-continuous optimization problems. Moreover, we prove the optimal estimate of the rate of convergence of such a technique. Also, we present the results of numerical experiments to compare the performance of the proposed methods.

The paper considers the problem of transverse impact on a thin preloaded fiber. The commonly accepted theory of transverse impact on a thin fiber is based on the classical works of Rakhmatulin and Smith. The simple relations obtained from the Rakhmatulin – Smith theory are widely used in engineering practice. However, there are numerous evidences that experimental results may differ significantly from estimations based on these relations. A brief overview of the factors that cause the differences is given in this article.

This paper focuses on the shear wave velocity, as it is the only feature that can be directly observed and measured using high-speed cameras or similar methods. The influence of the fiber preload on the wave speed is considered. This factor is important, since it inevitably arises in the experimental results. The reliable fastening and precise positioning of the fiber during the experiments requires its preload. This work shows that the preload significantly affects the shear wave velocity in the impacted fiber.

Numerical calculations were performed for Kevlar 29 and Spectra 1000 yarns. Shear wave velocities are obtained for different levels of initial tension. A direct comparison of numerical results and analytical estimations with experimental data is presented. The speed of the transverse wave in free and preloaded fibers differed by a factor of two for the setup parameters considered. This fact demonstrates that measurements based on high-speed imaging and analysis of the observed shear waves should take into account the preload of the fibers.

This paper proposes a formula for a quick estimation of the shear wave velocity in preloaded fibers. The formula is obtained from the basic relations of the Rakhmatulin – Smith theory under the assumption of a large initial deformation of the fiber. The formula can give significantly better results than the classical approximation, this fact is demonstrated using the data for preloaded Kevlar 29 and Spectra 1000. The paper also shows that direct numerical calculation has better corresponding with the experimental data than any of the considered analytical estimations.

The paper describes a method for recognizing authors of literary texts by the proximity of fragments into which a separate text is divided to the standard of the author. The standard is the empirical frequency distribution of letter combinations, built on a training sample, which included expertly selected reliably known works of this author. A set of standards of different authors forms a library, within which the problem of identifying the author of an unknown text is solved. The proximity between texts is understood in the sense of the norm in L1 for the frequency vector of letter combinations, which is constructed for each fragment and for the text as a whole. The author of an unknown text is assigned the one whose standard is most often chosen as the closest for the set of fragments into which the text is divided. The length of the fragment is optimized based on the principle of the maximum difference in distances from fragments to standards in the problem of recognition of «friend–foe». The method was tested on the corpus of domestic and foreign (translated) authors. 1783 texts of 100 authors with a total volume of about 700 million characters were collected. In order to exclude the bias in the selection of authors, authors whose surnames began with the same letter were considered. In particular, for the letter L, the identification error was 12%. Along with a fairly high accuracy, this method has another important property: it allows you to estimate the probability that the standard of the author of the text in question is missing in the library. This probability can be estimated based on the results of the statistics of the nearest standards for small fragments of text. The paper also examines statistical digital portraits of writers: these are joint empirical distributions of the probability that a certain proportion of the text is identified at a given level of trust. The practical importance of these statistics is that the carriers of the corresponding distributions practically do not overlap for their own and other people’s standards, which makes it possible to recognize the reference distribution of letter combinations at a high level of confidence.

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 is devoted to one approach to constructing subgradient methods for strongly convex programming problems with several functional constraints. More precisely, the strongly convex minimization problem with several strongly convex (inequality-type) constraints is considered, and first-order optimization methods for this class of problems are proposed. The special feature of the proposed methods is the possibility of using the strong convexity parameters of the violated functional constraints at nonproductive iterations, in theoretical estimates of the quality of the produced solution by the methods. The main task, to solve the considered problem, is to propose a subgradient method with adaptive rules for selecting steps and stopping rule of the method. The key idea of the proposed methods in this paper is to combine two approaches: a scheme with switching on productive and nonproductive steps and recently proposed modifications of mirror descent for convex programming problems, allowing to ignore some of the functional constraints on nonproductive steps of the algorithms. In the paper, it was described a subgradient method with switching by productive and nonproductive steps for strongly convex programming problems in the case where the objective function and functional constraints satisfy the Lipschitz condition. An analog of the proposed subgradient method, a mirror descent scheme for problems with relatively Lipschitz and relatively strongly convex objective functions and constraints is also considered. For the proposed methods, it obtained theoretical estimates of the quality of the solution, they indicate the optimality of these methods from the point of view of lower oracle estimates. In addition, since in many problems, the operation of finding the exact subgradient vector is quite expensive, then for the class of problems under consideration, analogs of the mentioned above methods with the replacement of the usual subgradient of the objective function or functional constraints by the $\delta$-subgradient were investigated. The noted approach can save computational costs of the method by refusing to require the availability of the exact value of the subgradient at the current point. It is shown that the quality estimates of the solution change by $O(\delta)$. The results of numerical experiments illustrating the advantages of the proposed methods in comparison with some previously known ones are also presented.