ROTed: Random Oblivious Transfer for embedded devices

Oblivious Transfer (OT) is a fundamental primitive in cryptography, supporting protocols such as Multi-Party Computation and Private Set Intersection (PSI), that are used in applications like contact discovery, remote diagnosis and contact tracing. Due to its fundamental nature, it is utterly important that its execution is secure even if arbitrarily composed with other instances of the same, or other protocols. This property can be guaranteed by proving its security under the Universal Composability model. Herein, a 3-round Random Oblivious Transfer (ROT) protocol is proposed, which achieves high computational efficiency, in the Random Oracle Model. The security of the protocol is based on the Ring Learning With Errors assumption (for which no quantum solver is known). ROT is the basis for OT extensions and, thus, achieves wide applicability, without the overhead of compiling ROTs from OTs. Finally, the protocol is implemented in a server-class Intel processor and four application-class ARM processors, all with different architectures. The usage of vector instructions provides on average a 40% speedup. The implementation shows that our proposal is at least one order of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art, and is suitable for a wide range of applications in embedded systems, IoT, desktop, and servers. From a memory footprint perspective, there is a small increase (16%) when compared to the state-of-the-art. This increase is marginal and should not prevent the usage of the proposed protocol in a multitude of devices. In sum, the proposal achieves up to 37k ROTs/s in an Intel server-class processor and up to 5k ROTs/s in an ARM application-class processor. A PSI application, using the proposed ROT, is up to 6.6 times faster than related art.

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Density Guarantee on Finding Multiple Subgraphs and Subtensors

ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data ◽

10.1145/3446668 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 15 (5) ◽

pp. 1-32

Author(s):

Quang-huy Duong ◽

Heri Ramampiaro ◽

Kjetil Nørvåg ◽

Thu-lan Dam

Keyword(s):

Lower Bound ◽

State Of The Art ◽

The State ◽

The Other ◽

Exact Methods ◽

Practical Solution ◽

Novel Approach ◽

Wide Range ◽

Real World Datasets ◽

Tensor Data

Dense subregion (subgraph & subtensor) detection is a well-studied area, with a wide range of applications, and numerous efficient approaches and algorithms have been proposed. Approximation approaches are commonly used for detecting dense subregions due to the complexity of the exact methods. Existing algorithms are generally efficient for dense subtensor and subgraph detection, and can perform well in many applications. However, most of the existing works utilize the state-or-the-art greedy 2-approximation algorithm to capably provide solutions with a loose theoretical density guarantee. The main drawback of most of these algorithms is that they can estimate only one subtensor, or subgraph, at a time, with a low guarantee on its density. While some methods can, on the other hand, estimate multiple subtensors, they can give a guarantee on the density with respect to the input tensor for the first estimated subsensor only. We address these drawbacks by providing both theoretical and practical solution for estimating multiple dense subtensors in tensor data and giving a higher lower bound of the density. In particular, we guarantee and prove a higher bound of the lower-bound density of the estimated subgraph and subtensors. We also propose a novel approach to show that there are multiple dense subtensors with a guarantee on its density that is greater than the lower bound used in the state-of-the-art algorithms. We evaluate our approach with extensive experiments on several real-world datasets, which demonstrates its efficiency and feasibility.

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The State of the Art of Rubber-Seal Technology

Rubber Chemistry and Technology ◽

10.5254/1.3536136 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 60 (3) ◽

pp. 381-416 ◽

Cited By ~ 20

Author(s):

B. S. Nau

Keyword(s):

State Of The Art ◽

Test Procedure ◽

Working Party ◽

The State ◽

Supporting Evidence ◽

Wide Range ◽

Lip Seals ◽

Alternative Hypotheses ◽

Series Of Experiments ◽

Range Of Values

Abstract The understanding of the engineering fundamentals of rubber seals of all the various types has been developing gradually over the past two or three decades, but there is still much to understand, Tables V–VII summarize the state of the art. In the case of rubber-based gaskets, the field of high-temperature applications has scarcely been touched, although there are plans to initiate work in this area both in the U.S.A. at PVRC, and in the U.K., at BHRA. In the case of reciprocating rubber seals, a broad basis of theory and experiment has been developed, yet it still is not possible to design such a seal from first principles. Indeed, in a comparative series of experiments run recently on seals from a single batch, tested in different laboratories round the world to the same test procedure, under the aegis of an ISO working party, a very wide range of values was reported for leakage and friction. The explanation for this has still to be ascertained. In the case of rotary lip seals, theories and supporting evidence have been brought forward to support alternative hypotheses for lubrication and sealing mechanisms. None can be said to have become generally accepted, and it remains to crystallize a unified theory.

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The Embeddedness of Social Sciences and Economics in Research on Resources

Resources ◽

10.3390/resources9020015 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 9 (2) ◽

pp. 15

Author(s):

Juan Uribe-Toril ◽

José Luis Ruiz-Real ◽

Jaime de Pablo Valenciano

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Local Development ◽

The State ◽

Special Issue ◽

Continuous Review ◽

The Past ◽

Research Fields ◽

Wide Range ◽

Knowledge Area

Sustainability, local development, and ecology are keywords that cover a wide range of research fields in both experimental and social sciences. The transversal nature of this knowledge area creates synergies but also divergences, making a continuous review of the existing literature necessary in order to facilitate research. There has been an increasing number of articles that have analyzed trends in the literature and the state-of-the-art in many subjects. In this Special Issue of Resources, the most prestigious researchers analyzed the past and future of Social Sciences in Resources from an economic, social, and environmental perspective.

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Hardware Trojans in Chips: A Survey for Detection and Prevention

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s20185165 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 20 (18) ◽

pp. 5165

Author(s):

Chen Dong ◽

Yi Xu ◽

Ximeng Liu ◽

Fan Zhang ◽

Guorong He ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Integrated Circuits ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Academic Community ◽

The State ◽

Third Party ◽

Hardware Trojans ◽

Advantages And Disadvantages ◽

Wide Range ◽

Ip Cores ◽

Comprehensive Classification

Diverse and wide-range applications of integrated circuits (ICs) and the development of Cyber Physical System (CPS), more and more third-party manufacturers are involved in the manufacturing of ICs. Unfortunately, like software, hardware can also be subjected to malicious attacks. Untrusted outsourced manufacturing tools and intellectual property (IP) cores may bring enormous risks from highly integrated. Attributed to this manufacturing model, the malicious circuits (known as Hardware Trojans, HTs) can be implanted during the most designing and manufacturing stages of the ICs, causing a change of functionality, leakage of information, even a denial of services (DoS), and so on. In this paper, a survey of HTs is presented, which shows the threatens of chips, and the state-of-the-art preventing and detecting techniques. Starting from the introduction of HT structures, the recent researches in the academic community about HTs is compiled and comprehensive classification of HTs is proposed. The state-of-the-art HT protection techniques with their advantages and disadvantages are further analyzed. Finally, the development trends in hardware security are highlighted.

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Variable-order reference-free variant discovery with the Burrows-Wheeler Transform

BMC Bioinformatics ◽

10.1186/s12859-020-03586-3 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 21 (S8) ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Nicola Prezza ◽

Nadia Pisanti ◽

Marinella Sciortino ◽

Giovanna Rosone

Keyword(s):

State Of The Art ◽

The State ◽

Chromosome 1 ◽

Variable Order ◽

De Bruijn Graphs ◽

Simple Strategy ◽

Working Space ◽

Order Of Magnitude ◽

De Bruijn ◽

Burrows Wheeler Transform

Abstract Background In [Prezza et al., AMB 2019], a new reference-free and alignment-free framework for the detection of SNPs was suggested and tested. The framework, based on the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT), significantly improves sensitivity and precision of previous de Bruijn graphs based tools by overcoming several of their limitations, namely: (i) the need to establish a fixed value, usually small, for the order k, (ii) the loss of important information such as k-mer coverage and adjacency of k-mers within the same read, and (iii) bad performance in repeated regions longer than k bases. The preliminary tool, however, was able to identify only SNPs and it was too slow and memory consuming due to the use of additional heavy data structures (namely, the Suffix and LCP arrays), besides the BWT. Results In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm and the corresponding tool ebwt2InDel that (i) extend the framework of [Prezza et al., AMB 2019] to detect also INDELs, and (ii) implements recent algorithmic findings that allow to perform the whole analysis using just the BWT, thus reducing the working space by one order of magnitude and allowing the analysis of full genomes. Finally, we describe a simple strategy for effectively parallelizing our tool for SNP detection only. On a 24-cores machine, the parallel version of our tool is one order of magnitude faster than the sequential one. The tool ebwt2InDel is available at github.com/nicolaprezza/ebwt2InDel. Conclusions Results on a synthetic dataset covered at 30x (Human chromosome 1) show that our tool is indeed able to find up to 83% of the SNPs and 72% of the existing INDELs. These percentages considerably improve the 71% of SNPs and 51% of INDELs found by the state-of-the art tool based on de Bruijn graphs. We furthermore report results on larger (real) Human whole-genome sequencing experiments. Also in these cases, our tool exhibits a much higher sensitivity than the state-of-the art tool.

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Assuring the Machine Learning Lifecycle

ACM Computing Surveys ◽

10.1145/3453444 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 54 (5) ◽

pp. 1-39

Author(s):

Rob Ashmore ◽

Radu Calinescu ◽

Colin Paterson

Keyword(s):

Machine Learning ◽

Iterative Process ◽

State Of The Art ◽

The State ◽

Enabling Technology ◽

Safety Critical ◽

Wide Range ◽

Comprehensive Survey ◽

Intended Use

Machine learning has evolved into an enabling technology for a wide range of highly successful applications. The potential for this success to continue and accelerate has placed machine learning (ML) at the top of research, economic, and political agendas. Such unprecedented interest is fuelled by a vision of ML applicability extending to healthcare, transportation, defence, and other domains of great societal importance. Achieving this vision requires the use of ML in safety-critical applications that demand levels of assurance beyond those needed for current ML applications. Our article provides a comprehensive survey of the state of the art in the assurance of ML , i.e., in the generation of evidence that ML is sufficiently safe for its intended use. The survey covers the methods capable of providing such evidence at different stages of the machine learning lifecycle , i.e., of the complex, iterative process that starts with the collection of the data used to train an ML component for a system, and ends with the deployment of that component within the system. The article begins with a systematic presentation of the ML lifecycle and its stages. We then define assurance desiderata for each stage, review existing methods that contribute to achieving these desiderata, and identify open challenges that require further research.

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Efficient Portfolio Construction with the Use of Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithms: Best Practices and Performance Metrics

International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making ◽

10.1142/s0219622015300013 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 14 (03) ◽

pp. 535-564 ◽

Cited By ~ 25

Author(s):

K. Liagkouras ◽

K. Metaxiotis

Keyword(s):

Best Practices ◽

Evolutionary Algorithms ◽

Portfolio Optimization ◽

Optimization Problem ◽

Performance Metrics ◽

State Of The Art ◽

The State ◽

Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithms ◽

Wide Range ◽

Portfolio Optimization Problem

This paper provides a systematic study of the technologies and algorithms associated with the implementation of multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) for the solution of the portfolio optimization problem. Based on the examination of the state-of-the art we provide the best practices for dealing with the complexities of the constrained portfolio optimization problem (CPOP). In particular, rigorous algorithmic and technical treatment is provided for the efficient incorporation of a wide range of real-world constraints into the MOEAs. Moreover, we address special configuration issues related to the application of MOEAs for solving the CPOP. Finally, by examining the state-of-the-art we identify the most appropriate performance metrics for the evaluation of the relevant results from the implementation of the MOEAs to the solution of the CPOP.

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Reviews

Journal for Research in Mathematics Education ◽

10.5951/jresematheduc.13.1.0075 ◽

1982 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 75-78

Author(s):

Thomas J. Cooney

Keyword(s):

Mathematics Education ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Research Area ◽

The State ◽

National Society ◽

Wide Range ◽

Good Reading ◽

Research In Mathematics Education

I found the book Selected Issues in Mathematics Education, jointly published with the National Society for the Study of Education, to be a worthy candidate for one's library. It provides interesting perspectives on a wide range of centrally important topics without getting bogged down in “disease of the week” issues that are parochial in nature. The book is not issue oriented in the sense of presenting various positions for the reader to consider and judge. Many of the chapters convey the authors' views of the state of the art in a particular research area. In some sense, the book could be a companion volume to NCTM's professional reference, Research in Mathematics Education. Still, if one is willing to look beyond what the title suggests, Selected Issues generally makes for good reading, as several authors are willing to share their insights into some rather knotty problems that are likely to be with our profession for some time.

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TasselNetv2: in-field counting of wheat spikes with context-augmented local regression networks

Plant Methods ◽

10.1186/s13007-019-0537-2 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Haipeng Xiong ◽

Zhiguo Cao ◽

Hao Lu ◽

Simon Madec ◽

Liang Liu ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Computer Vision ◽

Large Scale ◽

State Of The Art ◽

The State ◽

Local Regression ◽

Real Time System ◽

Counting Problem ◽

Spike Number ◽

Order Of Magnitude ◽

High Resolution Images

Abstract Background Grain yield of wheat is greatly associated with the population of wheat spikes, i.e., $$spike~number~\text {m}^{-2}$$spikenumberm-2. To obtain this index in a reliable and efficient way, it is necessary to count wheat spikes accurately and automatically. Currently computer vision technologies have shown great potential to automate this task effectively in a low-end manner. In particular, counting wheat spikes is a typical visual counting problem, which is substantially studied under the name of object counting in Computer Vision. TasselNet, which represents one of the state-of-the-art counting approaches, is a convolutional neural network-based local regression model, and currently benchmarks the best record on counting maize tassels. However, when applying TasselNet to wheat spikes, it cannot predict accurate counts when spikes partially present. Results In this paper, we make an important observation that the counting performance of local regression networks can be significantly improved via adding visual context to the local patches. Meanwhile, such context can be treated as part of the receptive field without increasing the model capacity. We thus propose a simple yet effective contextual extension of TasselNet—TasselNetv2. If implementing TasselNetv2 in a fully convolutional form, both training and inference can be greatly sped up by reducing redundant computations. In particular, we collected and labeled a large-scale wheat spikes counting (WSC) dataset, with 1764 high-resolution images and 675,322 manually-annotated instances. Extensive experiments show that, TasselNetv2 not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on the WSC dataset ($$91.01\%$$91.01% counting accuracy) but also is more than an order of magnitude faster than TasselNet (13.82 fps on $$912\times 1216$$912×1216 images). The generality of TasselNetv2 is further demonstrated by advancing the state of the art on both the Maize Tassels Counting and ShanghaiTech Crowd Counting datasets. Conclusions This paper describes TasselNetv2 for counting wheat spikes, which simultaneously addresses two important use cases in plant counting: improving the counting accuracy without increasing model capacity, and improving efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. It is promising to be deployed in a real-time system with high-throughput demand. In particular, TasselNetv2 can achieve sufficiently accurate results when training from scratch with small networks, and adopting larger pre-trained networks can further boost accuracy. In practice, one can trade off the performance and efficiency according to certain application scenarios. Code and models are made available at: https://tinyurl.com/TasselNetv2.

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Introductory remarks

Biochemical Society Transactions ◽

10.1042/bst0310971 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 31 (5) ◽

pp. 971-972 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

S.E. Harding ◽

P. O'Shea

Keyword(s):

Aqueous Solution ◽

Molecular Interactions ◽

State Of The Art ◽

Wide Spectrum ◽

The State ◽

Wide Range ◽

Biophysical Society ◽

Introductory Paper ◽

The University

An overview is given of a stimulating Meeting held at the University of Nottingham in June 2003 focusing on molecular interactions occurring in membranes or ‘2D’ and those occurring in aqueous solution or ‘3D’. It was held jointly between the Biochemical Society and the British Biophysical Society. The 80 or so delegates who attended benefitted from an exciting exchange of ideas between researchers from a wide spectrum of backgrounds. It is hoped the collection of papers which follow this Introductory paper will provide a useful summary of the state of the art and help stimulate collaboration across the wide range of disciplines represented.

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