GAF: A General Auction Framework for Secure Combinatorial Auctions

<p>Auctions are an economic mechanism for allocating goods to interested parties. There are many methods, each of which is an Auction Protocol. Some protocols are relatively simple such as English and Dutch auctions, but there are also more complicated auctions, for example combinatorial auctions which sell multiple goods at a time, and secure auctions which incorporate security solutions. Corresponding to the large number of protocols, there is a variety of purposes for which protocols are used. Each protocol has different properties and they differ between how applicable they are to a particular domain. In this thesis, the protocols explored are privacy preserving secure combinatorial auctions which are particularly well suited to our target domain of computational grid system resource allocation. In grid resource allocation systems, goods are best sold in sets as bidders value different sets of goods differently. For example, when purchasing CPU cycles, memory is also required but a bidder may additionally require network bandwidth. In untrusted distributed systems such as a publicly accessible grid, security properties are paramount. The type of secure combinatorial auction protocols explored in this thesis are privacy preserving protocols which hide the bid values of losing bidder’s bids. These protocols allow bidders to place bids without fear of private information being leaked. With the large number of permutations of different protocols and configurations, it is difficult to manage the idiosyncrasies of many different protocol implementations within an individual application. This thesis proposes a specification, design, and implementation for a General Auction Framework (GAF). GAF provides a consistent method of implementing different types of auction protocols from the standard English auction through to the more complicated combinatorial and secure auctions. The benefit of using GAF is the ability to easily leverage multiple protocols within a single application due to the consistent specification of protocol construction. The framework has be tested with three different protocols: the Secure Polynomial auction protocol, the Secure Homomorphic auction protocol and the Secure Garbled Circuits auction protocol. These three protocols and a statistics collecting application is a proof of concept for the framework and provides the beginning of an analysis designed at determining suitable protocol candidates for grid systems.</p>

GAF: A General Auction Framework for Secure Combinatorial Auctions

<p>Auctions are an economic mechanism for allocating goods to interested parties. There are many methods, each of which is an Auction Protocol. Some protocols are relatively simple such as English and Dutch auctions, but there are also more complicated auctions, for example combinatorial auctions which sell multiple goods at a time, and secure auctions which incorporate security solutions. Corresponding to the large number of protocols, there is a variety of purposes for which protocols are used. Each protocol has different properties and they differ between how applicable they are to a particular domain. In this thesis, the protocols explored are privacy preserving secure combinatorial auctions which are particularly well suited to our target domain of computational grid system resource allocation. In grid resource allocation systems, goods are best sold in sets as bidders value different sets of goods differently. For example, when purchasing CPU cycles, memory is also required but a bidder may additionally require network bandwidth. In untrusted distributed systems such as a publicly accessible grid, security properties are paramount. The type of secure combinatorial auction protocols explored in this thesis are privacy preserving protocols which hide the bid values of losing bidder’s bids. These protocols allow bidders to place bids without fear of private information being leaked. With the large number of permutations of different protocols and configurations, it is difficult to manage the idiosyncrasies of many different protocol implementations within an individual application. This thesis proposes a specification, design, and implementation for a General Auction Framework (GAF). GAF provides a consistent method of implementing different types of auction protocols from the standard English auction through to the more complicated combinatorial and secure auctions. The benefit of using GAF is the ability to easily leverage multiple protocols within a single application due to the consistent specification of protocol construction. The framework has be tested with three different protocols: the Secure Polynomial auction protocol, the Secure Homomorphic auction protocol and the Secure Garbled Circuits auction protocol. These three protocols and a statistics collecting application is a proof of concept for the framework and provides the beginning of an analysis designed at determining suitable protocol candidates for grid systems.</p>

Internationalization of Higher Education Institutions: perceptions of scholars

This study aims to contribute to Brazilian Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) within an international perspective. Our main argument is that when HEIs value international research and students’/academics’ international mobility, such institutions contribute to enlarge the view of internationalization throughout Brazil and push HEIs far beyond political, economic and commercialization processes considered to be, today, key drivers for Higher Education changes in terms of internationalization. To achieve this aim, the most recent tendencies in literature concerning the concepts of HEIs and International Management (IM) were gauged to realize the extent to which they may contribute to alternative perceptions in global Higher Education in Brazil. The theoretical framework was based on the articulation of such concepts, and data were connected to the interviews held with highly skilled scholars of three different public Brazilian HEIs using the methodology of oral histories. Data pointed traits and suggestions toward expanding internationalization in Brazilian HEIs, among which fostering international researchers and resource allocation systems for international research funding.

Entangled N-photon states for fair and optimal social decision making

Situations involving competition for resources among entities can be modeled by the competitive multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problem, which relates to social issues such as maximizing the total outcome and achieving the fairest resource repartition among individuals. In these respects, the intrinsic randomness and global properties of quantum states provide ideal tools for obtaining optimal solutions to this problem. Based on the previous study of the CMAB problem in the two-arm, two-player case, this paper presents the theoretical principles necessary to find polarization-entangled N-photon states that can optimize the total resource output while ensuring equality among players. These principles were applied to two-, three-, four-, and five-player cases by using numerical simulations to reproduce realistic configurations and find the best strategies to overcome potential misalignment between the polarization measurement systems of the players. Although a general formula for the N-player case is not presented here, general derivation rules and a verification algorithm are proposed. This report demonstrates the potential usability of quantum states in collective decision making with limited, probabilistic resources, which could serve as a first step toward quantum-based resource allocation systems.