Data supporting the occurrence of adaptive trait transfer (i.e. the transfer of genes and thus the phenotype of an adaptive trait through viral recombination, lateral gene transfer or introgressive hybridization) are provided in this review. Specifically, we discuss examples of lateral gene transfer and introgressive hybridization that have resulted in the transfer or de novo origin of adaptati...

Oblivious Transfer (OT) protocols were introduced in the seminal paper of Rabin, and allow a user to retrieve a given number of lines (usually one) in a database, without revealing which ones to the server. The server is ensured that only this given number of lines can be accessed per interaction, and so the others are protected; while the user is ensured that the server does not learn the numb...

We provide protocols for the following two-party problem: One party, the sender, has N values and the other party, the receiver, would like to learn k of them, deciding which ones in an adaptive manner (i.e. the ith value may depend on the first i− 1 values). The sender does not want the receiver to obtain more than k values. This is a variant of the well known Oblivious Transfer (OT) problem a...

In an oblivious transfer (OT) protocol, a Sender with messages M1, . . . ,MN and a Receiver with indices σ1, . . . , σk ∈ [1, N ] interact in such a way that at the end the Receiver obtains Mσ1 , . . . ,Mσk without learning anything about the other messages and the Sender does not learn anything about σ1, . . . , σk. In an adaptive protocol, the Receiver may obtain Mσi−1 before deciding on σi. ...

The success of regularized risk minimization approaches to classification with linear models depends crucially on the selection of a regularization term that matches with the learning task at hand. If the necessary domain expertise is rare or hard to formalize, it may be difficult to find a good regularizer. On the other hand, if plenty of related or similar data is available, it is a natural a...

The evolution of the flower is commonly thought to have spurred angiosperm diversification. Similarly, particular floral traits might have promoted diversification within specific angiosperm clades. We hypothesize that traits promoting the precise positional transfer of pollen between flowers might promote diversification. In particular, precise pollen transfer might produce partial reproductiv...

A few of the well established methods of adaptive signal processing are modified and extended for application to adaptive control. An unknown plant will track an input command signal if the plant is preceded by a controller whose transfer function approximates the inverse of the plant transfer function. An adaptive inverse modeling process can be used to obtain a stable controller, whether the ...