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Recent advancements in specialized large-scale architectures for training image and language have profoundly impacted the field of computer vision and natural language processing (NLP). Language models, such as the recent ChatGPT and GPT4 have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in processing, translating, and generating human languages. These breakthroughs have also been reflected in protein research, leading to the rapid development of numerous new methods in a short time, with unprecedented performance. Language models, in particular, have seen widespread use in protein research, as they have been utilized to embed proteins, generate novel ones, and predict tertiary structures. In this book chapter, we provide an overview of the use of protein generative models, reviewing 1) language models for the design of novel artificial proteins, 2) works that use non-Transformer architectures, and 3) applications in directed evolution approaches., Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables

This study investigates the effectiveness of multifactor authentication (MFA) in protecting commercial accounts from unauthorized access, with an additional focus on accounts with known credential leaks. We employ the benchmark-multiplier method, coupled with manual account review, to evaluate the security performance of various MFA methods in a large dataset of Microsoft Azure Active Directory users exhibiting suspicious activity. Our findings reveal that MFA implementation offers outstanding protection, with over 99.99% of MFA-enabled accounts remaining secure during the investigation period. Moreover, MFA reduces the risk of compromise by 99.22% across the entire population and by 98.56% in cases of leaked credentials. We further demonstrate that dedicated MFA applications, such as Microsoft Authenticator, outperform SMS-based authentication, though both methods provide significantly enhanced security compared to not using MFA. Based on these results, we strongly advocate for the default implementation of MFA in commercial accounts to increase security and mitigate unauthorized access risks.

Audio or visual data analysis tasks usually have to deal with high-dimensional and nonnegative signals. However, most data analysis methods suffer from overfitting and numerical problems when data have more than a few dimensions needing a dimensionality reduction preprocessing. Moreover, interpretability about how and why filters work for audio or visual applications is a desired property, especially when energy or spectral signals are involved. In these cases, due to the nature of these signals, the nonnegativity of the filter weights is a desired property to better understand its working. Because of these two necessities, we propose different methods to reduce the dimensionality of data while the nonnegativity and interpretability of the solution are assured. In particular, we propose a generalized methodology to design filter banks in a supervised way for applications dealing with nonnegative data, and we explore different ways of solving the proposed objective function consisting of a nonnegative version of the orthonormalized partial least-squares method. We analyze the discriminative power of the features obtained with the proposed methods for two different and widely studied applications: texture and music genre classification. Furthermore, we compare the filter banks achieved by our methods with other state-of-the-art methods specifically designed for feature extraction.

Multivariate Analysis (MVA) comprises a family of well-known methods for feature extraction which exploit correlations among input variables representing the data. One important property that is enjoyed by most such methods is uncorrelation among the extracted features. Recently, regularized versions of MVA methods have appeared in the literature, mainly with the goal to gain interpretability of the solution. In these cases, the solutions can no longer be obtained in a closed manner, and more complex optimization methods that rely on the iteration of two steps are frequently used. This paper recurs to an alternative approach to solve efficiently this iterative problem. The main novelty of this approach lies in preserving several properties of the original methods, most notably the uncorrelation of the extracted features. Under this framework, we propose a novel method that takes advantage of the l-21 norm to perform variable selection during the feature extraction process. Experimental results over different problems corroborate the advantages of the proposed formulation in comparison to state of the art formulations.