Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar

Desiccation-induced cracking in compacted clayey soils remains a key concern in the long-term resilience of transportation and geotechnical infrastructure. This study investigates the mechanistic role of soil plasticity in controlling crack initiation, propagation and strain localisation under controlled drying conditions. By leveraging a combined Digital Image Analysis (DIA) and Digital Image Correlation (DIC) workflow, real-time quantitative tracking of crack evolution and strain fields was achieved across a suite of low, intermediate, and high plasticity soils. The results revealed that low plasticity soils exhibited sparse, isolated cracking with limited strain localisation, while intermediate plasticity soils developed dense, highly connected crack networks with pronounced strain accumulation. In contrast, high plasticity soils produced fewer but markedly wider cracks due to concentrated deformation. The integrated DIA-DIC approach yielded consistent, physically meaningful performance zones linking soil plasticity with both morphological and strain localisation responses. The insights from this study provide a framework for optimal clayey soil selection in embankments, liners, and engineered barriers where drying-induced damage is a critical design consideration.

PLAS provides a forum for exploring and evaluating the use of programming language and program analysis techniques for promoting security in the complete range of software systems, from compilers to machine-learned models and smart contracts. The workshop encourages proposals of new, speculative ideas, evaluations of new or known techniques in practical settings, and discussions of emerging threats and problems. It also host position papers that are radical, forward-looking, and lead to lively and insightful discussions influential to the future research at the intersection of programming languages and security. This year will mark the 20th edition of PLAS, which was first held in 2007 in San Diego. The workshop will host 2 keynote talks, by Limin Jia and Jan Reineke, and 5 paper presentations.

The Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm offers a biologically plausible alternative to backpropagation, enabling neural networks to learn through local updates. However, FF's efficacy relies heavily on the definition of "goodness", which is a scalar measure of neural activity. While current implementations predominantly utilize a simple sum-of-squares metric, it remains unclear if this default choice is optimal. To address this, we benchmarked 21 distinct goodness functions across four standard image datasets (MNIST, FashionMNIST, CIFAR-10, STL-10), evaluating classification accuracy, energy consumption, and carbon footprint. We found that certain alternative goodness functions inspired from various domains significantly outperform the standard baseline. Specifically, \texttt{game\_theoretic\_local} achieved 97.15\% accuracy on MNIST, \texttt{softmax\_energy\_margin\_local} reached 82.84\% on FashionMNIST, and \texttt{triplet\_margin\_local} attained 37.69\% on STL-10. Furthermore, we observed substantial variability in computational efficiency, highlighting a critical trade-off between predictive performance and environmental cost. These findings demonstrate that the goodness function is a pivotal hyperparameter in FF design. We release our code on \href{this https URL}{Github} for reference and reproducibility.

Oligodendrocyte maturation and myelination are essential for neurodevelopment, and theirdysregulation results in numerous neurological disorders. While model organisms haveprovided insights into these processes, human-specific regulatory mechanisms remain poorlyunderstood. Our study investigates the role of THAP9, a Drosophila P-element transposasehomolog, in oligodendrocyte development. We analysed RNA-sequencing [1] and H3K27acChIP-sequencing data [1], which revealed significant upregulation of THAP9 (Figure 1a) duringoligodendrocyte maturation with H3K27ac enrichment, showing higher transcriptional activity inmature oligodendrocytes (MOs) compared to OPCs. Further co-expression analysis revealedthat THAP9 expression correlates with oligodendrocyte differentiation markers, including myelin-associated genes (MOG, MBP) and developmental regulators (PDGFRA, SOX5, SOX6,SOX11) (Figure 1b). Notably, THAP9 has no known mouse or zebrafish homologs, pointing topotential species-specific aspects of oligodendrocyte maturation. Transcriptomic analysiscomparing natural oligodendrocytes with those derived from reprogrammed fibroblasts [2]showed contrasting results. While THAP9 expression increases during native oligodendrocytematuration, it decreases in reprogrammed cells, mirroring MBP expression, a late-stage marker(Figure 2). This discrepancy between natural and reprogrammed cells suggests that currentreprogramming protocols may not fully replicate the normal developmental process. Our resultsidentify THAP9 as a novel human-specific regulator of oligodendrocyte maturation, emphasisingthe importance of studying species-specific factors in neurodevelopment. This work opens newavenues for understanding myelination disorders and highlights the need for human-specificmodels to bridge gaps in neurogenetic research.Glia, 2025 E249