Not All Hard Work Leads to Learning

On Composition of Authenticated Byzantine Generals Or Should Not Hard Work Always Pay in All Environments?

Consider a player who diligently executes (only) the delegated protocol but the adversary steals some private information from him. Should such a player be considered faulty? In a stand alone execution model, the answer can be either yes or no depending on the context/settings. However, with respect to composition of protocols, we show that the answer has to be no even though the literature ans...

Learning nonadjacent dependencies in thought, language, and action: Not so hard after all

Learning to represent hierarchical structure and its nonadjacent dependencies (NDs) is thought to be difficult. I present three simulations of ND learning using a simple recurrent network (SRN). In Simulation 1, I show that the model can learn distance-invariant representations of nonadjacent dependencies. In Simulation 2, I show that purely localist SRNs can learn abstract rule-like relationsh...

Human walking isn't all hard work: evidence of soft tissue contributions to energy dissipation and return.

The muscles and tendons of the lower extremity are generally considered the dominant producers of positive and negative work during gait. However, soft-tissue deformations not captured by joint rotations might also dissipate, store and even return substantial energy to the body. A key locomotion event is the collision of the leg with the ground, which deforms soft tissues appreciably in running...

Passive distributional learning of non-native vowel contrasts does not work for all listeners

Distributional learning studies investigating the acquisition of the Dutch contrast /ɑ/-/a:/ by nonnative Dutch learners have reported mixed results. The present study extends the literature by examining whether (i) naïve listeners are able to extract the distribution structure of a sequence of/ɑ//aː/ tokens drawn from a continuum,; and (ii) differential effects exist between naturalistic vs. e...

To work or not to work?