SRI International

About: SRI International is a nonprofit organization based out in Menlo Park, California, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Ionosphere & Laser. The organization has 7222 authors who have published 13102 publications receiving 660724 citations. The organization is also known as: Stanford Research Institute & SRI.

Heritability of lobar brain volumes in twins supports genetic models of cerebral laterality and handedness

Abstract: Although the left and right human cerebral hemispheres differ both functionally and anatomically, little is known about the environmental or genetic factors that govern central nervous system asymmetry. Nevertheless, cerebral asymmetry is strongly correlated with handedness, and handedness does have a significant genetic component. To explore the relative contribution of environmental and genetic influences on cerebral asymmetry, we examined the volumes of left and right cerebral cortex in a large cohort of aging identical and fraternal twins and explored their relationship to handedness. Cerebral lobar volumes had a major genetic component, indicating that genes play a large role in changes in brain volume that occur with aging. Shared environment, which likely represents in utero events, had about twice the effect on the left hemisphere as on the right, consistent with less genetic control over the left hemisphere. To test the major genetic models of handedness and cerebral asymmetry, twin pairs were divided into those with two right handers and those with at least one left hander (nonright handers). Genetic factors contributed twice the influence to left and right cerebral hemispheric volumes in right-handed twin pairs, suggesting a large decrement in genetic control of cerebral volumes in the nonright-handed twin pairs. This loss of genetic determination of the left and right cerebral hemispheres in the nonright-handed twin pairs is consistent with models postulating a right-hand/left-hemisphere-biasing genetic influence, a “right-shift” genotype that is lost in nonright handers, resulting in decreased cerebral asymmetry.

Cerebellar volume decline in normal aging, alcoholism, and Korsakoff's syndrome: relation to ataxia.

Abstract: The authors used magnetic resonance imaging to measure gray and white matter volumes in cerebellar hemispheres and 4 vermian regions in 61 normal control (NC) men aged 23-72 years, 25 men with uncomplicated alcoholism (ALC), and 8 men and 1 woman with alcoholic Korsakoff s syndrome (KS). NC and ALC took quantitative gait and balance tests. Gray but not white matter volume declined with normal age in both hemispheres and anterior-superior vermis. ALC had gray but not white matter cerebellar hemisphere volume deficits, whereas KS had deficits in both tissue types. ALC and KS had gray and white matter volume deficits in anterior superior but not posterior inferior vermis. ALC had a 1 SD ataxia deficit, significantly and selectively correlated with white matter volume in anterior superior vermis. Regional distribution but not severity of cerebellar volume deficits is similar in alcoholic individuals whether or not complicated by KS and relates to ataxia.

SWIFFT: A Modest Proposal for FFT Hashing

Abstract: We propose SWIFFT, a collection of compression functions that are highly parallelizable and admit very efficient implementations on modern microprocessors. The main technique underlying our functions is a novel use of the Fast Fourier Transform(FFT) to achieve "diffusion," together with a linear combination to achieve compression and "confusion." We provide a detailed security analysis of concrete instantiations, and give a high-performance software implementation that exploits the inherent parallelism of the FFT algorithm. The throughput of our implementation is competitive with that of SHA-256, with additional parallelism yet to be exploited. Our functions are set apart from prior proposals (having comparable efficiency) by a supporting asymptotic security proof: it can be formally proved that finding a collision in a randomly-chosen function from the family (with noticeable probability) is at least as hard as finding short vectors in cyclic/ideal lattices in the worst case.

Microelectrochemical sensor and sensor array

Abstract: The invention relates to a microelectrochemical electrode structure (10) comprising a monolithic substrate (12) having a front surface (14) and a back surface (16) facing generally away from one another, a first well (18) extending into the substrate from the front surface towards the back surface and ending in a first well bottom (20), and a first passage (22) extending into the substrate from the back surface to the first well bottom. A first electrode (24) is located wholly within the first well. A first conductor (26) in the first passage serves for electrically communicating the first electrode (24) to adjacent the back surface (16). A plurality of such electrode structures can be provided on a single substrate. The use of semiconductor processing technology allows the entire sensor to be extremely small. If desired, an integrated circuit (48) can be provided on the back surface of the substrate for amplifying or otherwise processing signals from the first electrode. Analysis can be carried out for vapors or dissolved species (ionic or non-ionic).

Finding consensus among words : Lattice-based word error minimization

Abstract: We describe a new algorithm for finding the hypothesis in a recognition lattice that is expected to minimize the word error rate (WER). Our approach thus overcomes the mismatch between the word-based performance metric and the standard MAP scoring paradigm that is sentence-based, and that can lead to sub-optimal recognition results. To this end we first find a complete alignment of all words in the recognition lattice, identifying mutually supporting and competing word hypotheses. Finally, a new sentence hypothesis is formed by concatenating the words with maximal posterior probabilities. Experimentally, this approach leads to a significant WER reduction in a large vocabulary recognition task.