arXiv subjects

Meng Wu

Publications and source records attributed to Meng Wu.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Optimal Participation of Price-Maker Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESSs) in Energy, Reserve and Pay as Performance Regulation Markets

Motivated by the need of assessing the optimal allocation of battery energy storage services across various markets and the corresponding impact on market operations, an optimization framework is proposed in this work to coordinate the operation of an independent utility-scale price-maker battery energy storage system (BESS) in the energy, spinning reserve and performance-based regulation markets. The entire problem is formulated as a bi-level optimization process, where the structure of all markets is modeled considering the joint operation limits. The strategic bidding behavior of a price-maker BESS in a pay as performance regulation market is investigated. Additionally, a specific approach is introduced for modeling automatic generation control (AGC) signals in the optimization. Although the formulated problem is non-linear, it is converted to mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) to find the optimum solution. The proposed framework is evaluated using test case scenarios created from real-world market data. Case study results show the impact of BESS's price-making behavior on the joint operation of energy, reserve, and regulation markets.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2020

SpecuSym: Speculative Symbolic Execution for Cache Timing Leak Detection

CPU cache is a limited but crucial storage component in modern processors, whereas the cache timing side-channel may inadvertently leak information through the physically measurable timing variance. Speculative execution, an essential processor optimization, and a source of such variances, can cause severe detriment on deliberate branch mispredictions. Despite static analysis could qualitatively verify the timing-leakage-free property under speculative execution, it is incapable of producing endorsements including inputs and speculated flows to diagnose leaks in depth. This work proposes a new symbolic execution based method, SpecuSym, for precisely detecting cache timing leaks introduced by speculative execution. Given a program (leakage-free in non-speculative execution), SpecuSymsystematically explores the program state space, models speculative behavior at conditional branches, and accumulates the cache side effects along with subsequent path explorations. During the dynamic execution, SpecuSymconstructs leak predicates for memory visits according to the specified cache model and conducts a constraint-solving based cache behavior analysis to inspect the new cache behaviors. We have implementedSpecuSymatop KLEE and evaluated it against 15 open-source benchmarks. Experimental results show thatSpecuSymsuccessfully detected from 2 to 61 leaks in 6 programs under 3 different cache settings and identified false positives in 2 programs reported by recent work.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

Abstract Interpretation under Speculative Execution

Analyzing the behavior of a program running on a processor that supports speculative execution is crucial for applications such as execution time estimation and side channel detection. Unfortunately, existing static analysis techniques based on abstract interpretation do not model speculative execution since they focus on functional properties of a program while speculative execution does not change the functionality. To fill the gap, we propose a method to make abstract interpretation sound under speculative execution. There are two contributions. First, we introduce the notion of virtual control flow to augment instructions that may be speculatively executed and thus affect subsequent instructions. Second, to make the analysis efficient, we propose optimizations to handle merges and loops and to safely bound the speculative execution depth. We have implemented and evaluated the proposed method in a static cache analysis for execution time estimation and side channel detection. Our experiments show that the new method, while guaranteed to be sound under speculative execution, outperforms state-of-the-art abstract interpretation techniques that may be unsound.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2019

Shield Synthesis for Real: Enforcing Safety in Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems are often safety-critical in that violations of safety properties may lead to catastrophes. We propose a method to enforce the safety of systems with real-valued signals by synthesizing a runtime enforcer called the shield. Whenever the system violates a property, the shield, composed with the system, makes correction instantaneously to ensure that no erroneous output is generated by the combined system. While techniques for synthesizing Boolean shields are well understood, they do not handle real-valued signals ubiquitous in cyber-physical systems, meaning corrections may be either unrealizable or inefficient to compute in the real domain. We solve the realizability and efficiency problems by statically analyzing the compatibility of predicates defined over real-valued signals, and using the analysis result to constrain a two-player safety game used to synthesize the shield. We have implemented the method and demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency on a variety of applications, including an automotive powertrain control system.

cs.LO↗

arXiv2019

K-margin-based Residual-Convolution-Recurrent Neural Network for Atrial Fibrillation Detection

Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is an abnormal heart rhythm which can trigger cardiac arrest and sudden death. Nevertheless, its interpretation is mostly done by medical experts due to high error rates of computerized interpretation. One study found that only about 66% of AF were correctly recognized from noisy ECGs. This is in part due to insufficient training data, class skewness, as well as semantical ambiguities caused by noisy segments in an ECG record. In this paper, we propose a K-margin-based Residual-Convolution-Recurrent neural network (K-margin-based RCR-net) for AF detection from noisy ECGs. In detail, a skewness-driven dynamic augmentation method is employed to handle the problems of data inadequacy and class imbalance. A novel RCR-net is proposed to automatically extract both long-term rhythm-level and local heartbeat-level characters. Finally, we present a K-margin-based diagnosis model to automatically focus on the most important parts of an ECG record and handle noise by naturally exploiting expected consistency among the segments associated for each record. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method with 0.8125 F1NAOP score outperforms all state-of-the-art deep learning methods for AF detection task by 6.8%.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

G-flocking: Flocking Model Optimization based on Genetic Framework

Flocking model has been widely used to control robotic swarm. However, with the increasing scalability, there exist complex conflicts for robotic swarm in autonomous navigation, brought by internal pattern maintenance, external environment changes, and target area orientation, which results in poor stability and adaptability. Hence, optimizing the flocking model for robotic swarm in autonomous navigation is an important and meaningful research domain.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2019

Physical origin of giant excitonic and magneto-optical responses in two-dimensional ferromagnetic insulators

The recent discovery of magnetism in atomically thin layers of van der Waals crystals has created great opportunities for exploring light-matter interactions and magneto-optical phenomena in the two-dimensional limit. Optical and magneto-optical experiments have provided insights into these topics, revealing strong magnetic circular dichroism and giant Kerr signals in atomically thin ferromagnetic insulators. However, the nature of the giant magneto-optical responses and their microscopic mechanism remain unclear. Here, by performing first-principles GW and Bethe-Salpeter equation calculations, we show that excitonic effects dominate the optical and magneto-optical responses in the prototypical two-dimensional ferromagnetic insulator, CrI$_3$. We simulate the Kerr and Faraday effects in realistic experimental setups, and based on which we predict the sensitive frequency- and substrate-dependence of magneto-optical responses. These findings provide physical understanding of the phenomena as well as potential design principles for engineering magneto-optical and optoelectronic devices using two-dimensional magnets.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2019

Visualizing Exotic Orbital Texture in the Single-Layer Mott Insulator 1T-TaSe2

Mott insulating behavior is induced by strong electron correlation and can lead to exotic states of matter such as unconventional superconductivity and quantum spin liquids. Recent advances in van der Waals material synthesis enable the exploration of novel Mott systems in the two-dimensional limit. Here we report characterization of the local electronic properties of single- and few-layer 1T-TaSe2 via spatial- and momentum-resolved spectroscopy involving scanning tunneling microscopy and angle-resolved photoemission. Our combined experimental and theoretical study indicates that electron correlation induces a robust Mott insulator state in single-layer 1T-TaSe2 that is accompanied by novel orbital texture. Inclusion of interlayer coupling weakens the insulating phase in 1T-TaSe2, as seen by strong reduction of its energy gap and quenching of its correlation-driven orbital texture in bilayer and trilayer 1T-TaSe2. Our results establish single-layer 1T-TaSe2 as a useful new platform for investigating strong correlation physics in two dimensions.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2019

Electron-Phonon Coupling from $\textit{Ab Initio}$ Linear-Response Theory within the $GW$ Method: Correlation-Enhanced Interactions and Superconductivity in Ba$_{1-x}$K$_x$BiO$_3$

We present a new first-principles linear-response theory of changes due to perturbations in the quasiparticle self-energy operator within the $GW$ method. This approach, named $GW$ perturbation theory ($GW$PT), is applied to calculate the electron-phonon ($e$-ph) interactions with the full inclusion of the $GW$ non-local, energy-dependent self-energy effects, going beyond density-functional perturbation theory. Avoiding limitations of the frozen-phonon technique, $GW$PT gives access to $e$-ph matrix elements at the $GW$ level for all phonons and scattering processes, and the computational cost scales linearly with the number of phonon modes (wavevectors and branches) investigated. We demonstrate the capabilities of $GW$PT by studying the $e$-ph coupling and superconductivity in Ba$_{0.6}$K$_{0.4}$BiO$_3$. We show that many-electron correlations significantly enhance the $e$-ph interactions for states near the Fermi surface, and explain the observed high superconductivity transition temperature of Ba$_{0.6}$K$_{0.4}$BiO$_3$ as well as its doping dependence.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2019

A proof of Furstenberg's conjecture on the intersections of $\times p$ and $\times q$-invariant sets

We prove the following conjecture of Furstenberg (1969): if $A,B\subset [0,1]$ are closed and invariant under $\times p \mod 1$ and $\times q \mod 1$, respectively, and if $\log p/\log q\notin \mathbb{Q}$, then for all real numbers $u$ and $v$, $$\dim_{\rm H}(uA+v)\cap B\le \max\{0,\dim_{\rm H}A+\dim_{\rm H}B-1\}.$$ We obtain this result as a consequence of our study on the intersections of incommensurable self-similar sets on $\mathbb{R}$. Our methods also allow us to give upper bounds for dimensions of arbitrary slices of planar self-similar sets satisfying SSC and certain natural irreducible conditions.

math.DS↗

arXiv2018

Two-dimensional InSe/WS$_2$ heterostructure with enhanced optoelectronic performance in the visible region

Two-dimensional (2D) InSe and WS$_2$ exhibit promising characteristics for optoelectronic and photoelectrochemical applications, e.g. photodetection and photocatalytic water splitting. However, both of them have poor absorption of visible light due to wide band gaps. 2D InSe has high electron mobility but low hole mobility, while 2D WS$_2$ is on the opposite. Here, we design a 2D heterostructure composed of their monolayers and study its optoelectronic properties by first-principles calculations. Our results show that the heterostructure has a direct band gap of 2.19 eV, which is much smaller than those of the monolayers mainly due to a type-II band alignment: the valence band maximum and the conduction band minimum of monolayer InSe are lower than those of monolayer WS$_2$, respectively. The visible-light absorption is enhanced considerably, e.g. about fivefold (threefold) increase at the wavelength of 490 nm in comparison to monolayer InSe (WS$_2$). The type-II band alignment also facilitates the spatial separation of photogenerated electron-hole pairs, i.e., electrons (holes) reside preferably in the InSe (WS$_2$) layer. The two layers complement each other in carrier mobilities of the heterostructure: the photogenerated electrons and holes inherit the large mobilities from the InSe and WS$_2$ monolayers, respectively.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2018

Eliminating Timing Side-Channel Leaks using Program Repair

We propose a method, based on program analysis and transformation, for eliminating timing side channels in software code that implements security-critical applications. Our method takes as input the original program together with a list of secret variables (e.g., cryptographic keys, security tokens, or passwords) and returns the transformed program as output. The transformed program is guaranteed to be functionally equivalent to the original program and free of both instruction- and cache-timing side channels. Specifically, we ensure that the number of CPU cycles taken to execute any path is independent of the secret data, and the cache behavior of memory accesses, in terms of hits and misses, is independent of the secret data. We have implemented our method in LLVM and validated its effectiveness on a large set of applications, which are cryptographic libraries with 19,708 lines of C/C++ code in total. Our experiments show the method is both scalable for real applications and effective in eliminating timing side channels.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2018

Adversarial Symbolic Execution for Detecting Concurrency-Related Cache Timing Leaks

The timing characteristics of cache, a high-speed storage between the fast CPU and the slowmemory, may reveal sensitive information of a program, thus allowing an adversary to conduct side-channel attacks. Existing methods for detecting timing leaks either ignore cache all together or focus only on passive leaks generated by the program itself, without considering leaks that are made possible by concurrently running some other threads. In this work, we show that timing-leak-freedom is not a compositional property: a program that is not leaky when running alone may become leaky when interleaved with other threads. Thus, we develop a new method, named adversarial symbolic execution, to detect such leaks. It systematically explores both the feasible program paths and their interleavings while modeling the cache, and leverages an SMT solver to decide if there are timing leaks. We have implemented our method in LLVM and evaluated it on a set of real-world ciphers with 14,455 lines of C code in total. Our experiments demonstrate both the efficiency of our method and its effectiveness in detecting side-channel leaks.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2018

Building a Controlled Vocabulary for Standardizing Precision Medicine Terms

Rapid advances of technology and development of research in precision medicine domain have led to the production of different types of biomedical data. Standard medical vocabularies were shown to be limited in dealing with such heterogeneous data and consequently, new controlled vocabulary for data integration and normalization has been proposed. In this study, the precision medicine vocabulary (PMV), which is a controlled vocabulary for terms used in precision medicine, is built based on the method of data integration in Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). It now covers ten top semantic types of disease, drug, gene, gene variation and so on. In total of 1,372,967 concepts and 4,567,208 terms have been integrated from widely used databases related with precision medicine.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2017

Band Topology, Orbital Phase Winding, and Selection Rules in Excitonic Physics in Two Dimensions

We show that band topology can dramatically change the photophysics of two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors. For systems in which states near the band extrema are of multiple orbitals character and the spinors describing the orbital components (pseudospins) pick up nonzero winding numbers (topological invariants) around the extremal k-point, the optical strength and nature (i.e., helicity) of the excitonic states are dictated by the optical matrix element winding number, a unique and heretofore unrecognized characteristic. We illustrate these findings in three gapped graphene systems - monolayer graphene with inequivalent sublattices and biased bi- and tri-layer graphene, where the pseudospin textures manifest into a unique optical matrix element winding pattern associated with different valley and photon circular polarization. This winding-number physics leads to novel exciton series and optical selection rules, with each valley hosting multiple bright excitons coupled to light of different helicity. This valley-exciton selective circular dichroism can be unambiguously detected using optical spectroscopy.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2016

Generation of Anisotropic Massless Dirac Fermions and Asymmetric Klein Tunneling in Few-Layer Black Phosphorus Superlattices

Artificial lattices have been employed in many two-dimensional systems, including those of electrons, atoms and photons, in a quest for massless Dirac particles with flexibility and controllability. Periodically patterned molecule assembly and electrostatic gating as well as moiré pattern induced by substrate, have produced electronic states with linear dispersions from isotropic two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG). Here we demonstrate that massless Dirac fermions with tunable anisotropic characteristics can, in general, be generated in highly anisotropic 2DEG under slowly varying external periodic potentials. For patterned few-layer black phosphorus superlattices, the new chiral quasiparticles exist exclusively in an isolated energy window and inherit the strong anisotropic properties of pristine black phosphorus. These states exhibit asymmetric Klein tunneling with the direction of incidence for wave packet with perfect transmission deviating from normal incidence by more than 50° under an appropriate barrier orientation.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2016

Random cutout sets with spatially inhomogeneous intensities

We study the Hausdorff dimension of Poissonian cutout sets defined via inhomogeneous intensity measures on Ahlfors-regular metric spaces. We obtain formulas for the Hausdorff dimension of such cutouts in self-similar and self-conformal spaces using the multifractal decomposition of the average densities for the natural measures.

math.DS↗

arXiv2016

Accessible values of Assouad and the lower dimensions of subsets

Let $E$ be a subset of a doubling metric space $(X,d)$. We prove that for any $s\in [0, \dim_{A}E]$, where $\dim_{A}$ denotes the Assouad dimension, there exists a subset $F$ of $E$ such that $\dim_{A}F=s$. We also show that the same statement holds for the lower dimension $\dim_L$.

math.MG↗