OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Lattice-Based Ring Signature Scheme under the Random Oracle Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2014
Year: 2014

On the basis of the signatures scheme without trapdoors from lattice, which is proposed by Vadim Lyubashevsky in 2012, we present a new ring signature scheme from lattice. The proposed ring signature scheme is an extension of the signatures scheme without trapdoors. We proved that our scheme is strongly unforgeable against adaptive chosen message in the random oracle model, and proved that the security of our scheme can be reduced to the hardness of the small integer solution (SIS) problem by rejection samplings. Compared with the existing lattice-based ring signature schemes, our new scheme is more efficient and with shorter signature length.
An Adaptive Watermarking Process in Hadamard Transform
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2014
Year: 2014

An adaptive visible/invisible watermarking scheme is done to prevent the privacy and preserving copyright protection of digital data using Hadamard transform based on the scaling factor of the image. The value of scaling factor depends on the control parameter. The scaling factor is calculated to embedded the watermark. Depend upon the control parameter the visible and invisible watermarking is determined. The proposed Hadamard transform domain method is more robust again image/signal processing attacks. Furthermore, it also shows that the proposed method confirm the efficiency through various performance analysis and experimental results.
Beta Reduction is Invariant, Indeed (Long Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2014
Year: 2014

Slot and van Emde Boas' weak invariance thesis states that reasonable machines can simulate each other within a polynomially overhead in time. Is $λ$-calculus a reasonable machine? Is there a way to measure the computational complexity of a $λ$-term? This paper presents the first complete positive answer to this long-standing problem. Moreover, our answer is completely machine-independent and based over a standard notion in the theory of $λ$-calculus: the length of a leftmost-outermost derivation to normal form is an invariant cost model. Such a theorem cannot be proved by directly relating $λ$-calculus with Turing machines or random access machines, because of the size explosion problem: there are terms that in a linear number of steps produce an exponentially long output. The first step towards the solution is to shift to a notion of evaluation for which the length and the size of the output are linearly related. This is done by adopting the linear substitution calculus (LSC), a calculus of explicit substitutions modelled after linear logic and proof-nets and admitting a decomposition of leftmost-outermost derivations with the desired property. Thus, the LSC is invariant with respect to, say, random access machines. The second step is to show that LSC is invariant with respect to the $λ$-calculus. The size explosion problem seems to imply that this is not possible: having the same notions of normal form, evaluation in the LSC is exponentially longer than in the $λ$-calculus. We solve such an impasse by introducing a new form of shared normal form and shared reduction, deemed useful. Useful evaluation avoids those steps that only unshare the output without contributing to $β$-redexes, i.e., the steps that cause the blow-up in size.
Large Code Base Change Ripple Management in C++: My thoughts on how a new Boost C++ Library could help
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2014
Year: 2014

C++ 98/03 already has a reputation for overwhelming complexity compared to other programming languages. The raft of new features in C++ 11/14 suggests that the complexity in the next generation of C++ code bases will overwhelm still further. The planned C++ 17 will probably worsen matters in ways difficult to presently imagine. Countervailing against this rise in software complexity is the hard de-exponentialisation of computer hardware capacity growth expected no later than 2020, and which will have even harder to imagine consequences on all computer software. WG21 C++ 17 study groups SG2 (Modules), SG7 (Reflection), SG8 (Concepts), and to a lesser extent SG10 (Feature Test) and SG12 (Undefined Behaviour), are all fundamentally about significantly improving complexity management in C++ 17, yet WG21's significant work on improving C++ complexity management is rarely mentioned explicitly. This presentation pitches a novel implementation solution for some of these complexity scaling problems, tying together SG2 and SG7 with parts of SG3 (Filesystem): a standardised but very lightweight transactional graph database based on Boost.ASIO, Boost.AFIO and Boost.Graph at the very core of the C++ runtime, making future C++ codebases considerably more tractable and affordable to all users of C++.
An Agent-based Modeling Framework for Sociotechnical Simulation of Water Distribution Contamination Events
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

In the event that a bacteriological or chemical toxin is intro- duced to a water distribution network, a large population of consumers may become exposed to the contaminant. A contamination event may be poorly predictable dynamic process due to the interactions of consumers and utility managers during an event. Consumers that become aware of a threat may select protective actions that change their water demands from typical demand patterns, and new hydraulic conditions can arise that differ from conditions that are predicted when demands are considered as exogenous inputs. Consequently, the movement of the contaminant plume in the pipe network may shift from its expected trajectory. A sociotechnical model is developed here to integrate agent-based models of consumers with an engineering water distribution system model and capture the dynamics between consumer behaviors and the water distribution system for predicting contaminant transport and public exposure. Consumers are simulated as agents with behaviors defined for water use activities, mobility, word-of-mouth communication, and demand reduction, based on a set of rules representing an agents autonomy and reaction to health impacts, the environment, and the actions of other agents. As consumers decrease their water use, the demand exerted on the water distribution system is updated; as the flow directions and volumes shift in response, the location of the contaminant plume is updated and the amount of contaminant consumed by each agent is calculated. The framework is tested through simulating realistic contamination scenarios for a virtual city and water distribution system.
On Termination, Confluence and Consistent CHR-based Type Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2014
Year: 2014

We consider the application of Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) for the specification of type inference systems, such as that used by Haskell. Confluence of CHR guarantees that the answer provided by type inference is correct and consistent. The standard method for establishing confluence relies on an assumption that the CHR program is terminating. However, many examples in practice give rise to non-terminating CHR programs, rendering this method inapplicable. Despite no guarantee of termination or confluence, the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) supports options that allow the user to proceed with type inference anyway, e.g. via the use of the UndecidableInstances flag. In this paper we formally identify and verify a set of relaxed criteria, namely range-restrictedness, local confluence, and ground termination, that ensure the consistency of CHR-based type inference that maps to potentially non-terminating CHR programs.
A Case Study on Job Scheduling Policy for Workload Characterization and Power Efficiency
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2014
Year: 2014

With the increasing popularity of cloud computing, datacenters are becoming more important than ever before. A typical datacenter typically consists of a large number of homogeneous or heterogeneous servers connected by networks. Unfortunately, these servers and network equipment are often under-utilized and power hungry. To improve the utilization of hardware resources and make them power efficiency in datacenters, workload characterization and analysis is at the foundation. In this paper, we characterize and analyze the job arriving rate, arriving time, job length, power consumption, and temperature dissipation in a real world datacenter by using statistical methods. From the characterization, we find unique features in the workload can be used to optimize the resource utilization and power consumption of datacenters
ESmodels: An Epistemic Specification Solver
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

(To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)) ESmodels is designed and implemented as an experiment platform to investigate the semantics, language, related reasoning algorithms, and possible applications of epistemic specifications.We first give the epistemic specification language of ESmodels and its semantics. The language employs only one modal operator K but we prove that it is able to represent luxuriant modal operators by presenting transformation rules. Then, we describe basic algorithms and optimization approaches used in ESmodels. After that, we discuss possible applications of ESmodels in conformant planning and constraint satisfaction. Finally, we conclude with perspectives.
COCOpf: An Algorithm Portfolio Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

Algorithm portfolios represent a strategy of composing multiple heuristic algorithms, each suited to a different class of problems, within a single general solver that will choose the best suited algorithm for each input. This approach recently gained popularity especially for solving combinatoric problems, but optimization applications are still emerging. The COCO platform of the BBOB workshop series is the current standard way to measure performance of continuous black-box optimization algorithms. As an extension to the COCO platform, we present the Python-based COCOpf framework that allows composing portfolios of optimization algorithms and running experiments with different selection strategies. In our framework, we focus on black-box algorithm portfolio and online adaptive selection. As a demonstration, we measure the performance of stock SciPy optimization algorithms and the popular CMA algorithm alone and in a portfolio with two simple selection strategies. We confirm that even a naive selection strategy can provide improved performance across problem classes.
Offloading Cellular Traffic through Opportunistic Communications: Analysis and Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2014
Year: 2014

Offloading traffic through opportunistic communications has been recently proposed as a way to relieve the current overload of cellular networks. Opportunistic communication can occur when mobile device users are (temporarily) in each other's proximity, such that the devices can establish a local peer-to-peer connection (e.g., via Bluetooth). Since opportunistic communication is based on the spontaneous mobility of the participants, it is inherently unreliable. This poses a serious challenge to the design of any cellular offloading solutions, that must meet the applications' requirements. In this paper, we address this challenge from an optimization analysis perspective, in contrast to the existing heuristic solutions. We first model the dissemination of content (injected through the cellular interface) in an opportunistic network with heterogeneous node mobility. Then, based on this model, we derive the optimal content injection strategy, which minimizes the load of the cellular network while meeting the applications' constraints. Finally, we propose an adaptive algorithm based on control theory that implements this optimal strategy without requiring any data on the mobility patterns or the mobile nodes' contact rates. The proposed approach is extensively evaluated with both a heterogeneous mobility model as well as real-world contact traces, showing that it substantially outperforms previous approaches proposed in the literature.
The Interestingness Tool for Search in the Web
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2014
Year: 2014

Interestingness,as the composition of Relevance and Unexpectedness, has been tested by means of Web search cases studies and led to promising results. But for thorough investigation and routine practical application one needs a flexible and robust tool. This work describes such an Interestingness based search tool, its software architecture and actual implementation. One of its flexibility traits is the choice of Interestingness functions: it may work with Match-Mismatch and Tf-Idf, among other functions. The tool has been experimentally verified by application to various domains of interest. It has been validated by comparison of results with those of commercial search engines and results from differing Interestingness functions.
Global disease monitoring and forecasting with Wikipedia
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2014
Year: 2014

Infectious disease is a leading threat to public health, economic stability, and other key social structures. Efforts to mitigate these impacts depend on accurate and timely monitoring to measure the risk and progress of disease. Traditional, biologically-focused monitoring techniques are accurate but costly and slow; in response, new techniques based on social internet data such as social media and search queries are emerging. These efforts are promising, but important challenges in the areas of scientific peer review, breadth of diseases and countries, and forecasting hamper their operational usefulness. We examine a freely available, open data source for this use: access logs from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Using linear models, language as a proxy for location, and a systematic yet simple article selection procedure, we tested 14 location-disease combinations and demonstrate that these data feasibly support an approach that overcomes these challenges. Specifically, our proof-of-concept yields models with $r^2$ up to 0.92, forecasting value up to the 28 days tested, and several pairs of models similar enough to suggest that transferring models from one location to another without re-training is feasible. Based on these preliminary results, we close with a research agenda designed to overcome these challenges and produce a disease monitoring and forecasting system that is significantly more effective, robust, and globally comprehensive than the current state of the art.
MicroCast: Cooperative Video Streaming using Cellular and D2D Connections
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2014
Year: 2014

We consider a group of mobile users, within proximity of each other, who are interested in watching the same online video at roughly the same time. The common practice today is that each user downloads the video independently on her mobile device using her own cellular connection, which wastes access bandwidth and may also lead to poor video quality. We propose a novel cooperative system where each mobile device uses simultaneously two network interfaces: (i) the cellular to connect to the video server and download parts of the video and (ii) WiFi to connect locally to all other devices in the group and exchange those parts. Devices cooperate to efficiently utilize all network resources and are able to adapt to varying wireless network conditions. In the local WiFi network, we exploit overhearing, and we further combine it with network coding. The end result is savings in cellular bandwidth and improved user experience (faster download) by a factor on the order up to the group size. We follow a complete approach, from theory to practice. First, we formulate the problem using a network utility maximization (NUM) framework, decompose the problem, and provide a distributed solution. Then, based on the structure of the NUM solution, we design a modular system called MicroCast and we implement it as an Android application. We provide both simulation results of the NUM solution and experimental evaluation of MicroCast on a testbed consisting of Android phones. We demonstrate that the proposed approach brings significant performance benefits without battery penalty.
The Design of the Fifth Answer Set Programming Competition
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-established paradigm of declarative programming that has been developed in the field of logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning. Advances in ASP solving technology are customarily assessed in competition events, as it happens for other closely-related problem-solving technologies like SAT/SMT, QBF, Planning and Scheduling. ASP Competitions are (usually) biennial events; however, the Fifth ASP Competition departs from tradition, in order to join the FLoC Olympic Games at the Vienna Summer of Logic 2014, which is expected to be the largest event in the history of logic. This edition of the ASP Competition series is jointly organized by the University of Calabria (Italy), the Aalto University (Finland), and the University of Genova (Italy), and is affiliated with the 30th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2014). It features a completely re-designed setup, with novelties involving the design of tracks, the scoring schema, and the adherence to a fixed modeling language in order to push the adoption of the ASP-Core-2 standard. Benchmark domains are taken from past editions, and best system packages submitted in 2013 are compared with new versions and solvers. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).
Contextual Abductive Reasoning with Side-Effects
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

The belief bias effect is a phenomenon which occurs when we think that we judge an argument based on our reasoning, but are actually influenced by our beliefs and prior knowledge. Evans, Barston and Pollard carried out a psychological syllogistic reasoning task to prove this effect. Participants were asked whether they would accept or reject a given syllogism. We discuss one specific case which is commonly assumed to be believable but which is actually not logically valid. By introducing abnormalities, abduction and background knowledge, we adequately model this case under the weak completion semantics. Our formalization reveals new questions about possible extensions in abductive reasoning. For instance, observations and their explanations might include some relevant prior abductive contextual information concerning some side-effect or leading to a contestable or refutable side-effect. A weaker notion indicates the support of some relevant consequences by a prior abductive context. Yet another definition describes jointly supported relevant consequences, which captures the idea of two observations containing mutually supportive side-effects. Though motivated with and exemplified by the running psychology application, the various new general abductive context definitions are introduced here and given a declarative semantics for the first time, and have a much wider scope of application. Inspection points, a concept introduced by Pereira and Pinto, allows us to express these definitions syntactically and intertwine them into an operational semantics.
Integration of Inter-Connectivity of Information System (i3) using Web Services
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2014
Year: 2014

The growth and development of institutions day by day especially universities are increasing very large number of peoples including employees as well as students, working on different domain in distance between multiple integrated institutes, and degrading the overall efficiency of system that cannot facilitate better interoperability and automated integration. In many universities, exist system does not have yet set of connections, in spite of the fact they have different systems running on different platforms in different administrative units or departments. University of Sindh (UoS) is the one of them. In this paper we discuss about Integration of Inter-Connectivity of Information System (i3) in the UoS which is based on Service Oriented Architecture with web services. The proposed system (i3) can monitor and exchange students information in support of verification along heterogeneous and decentralized nature, and provide capability of interoperability in the place of already deployed system in the UoS using different Languages as well as Databases.
PIN Skimming: Exploiting the Ambient-Light Sensor in Mobile Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper, we propose a new type of side channel which is based on the ambient-light sensor employed in today's mobile devices. The pervasive usage of mobile devices, i.e., smartphones and tablet computers and their vast amount of sensors represent a plethora of side channels posing a serious threat to the user's privacy and security. While recent advances in this area of research focused on the employed motion sensors and the camera as well as the sound, we investigate a less obvious source of information leakage, namely the ambient light. We successfully demonstrate that minor tilts and turns of mobile devices cause variations of the ambient-light sensor information. Thus, we are the first to show that this sensor leaks sensitive information. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these variations leak enough information to infer a user's personal identification number (PIN) input based on a set of known PINs. Our results show that we are able to determine the correct PIN---out of a set of 50 random PINs---within the first ten guesses about 80% of the time. In contrast, the chance of finding the right PIN by randomly guessing ten PINs would be 20%. Since the data required to perform such an attack can be gathered without any specific permissions or privileges, the presented side channel seriously jeopardizes the security and privacy of mobile-device owners.
Quasi Cyclic LDPC Codes Based on Finite Set Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2014
Year: 2014

A finite set system (FSS) is a pair (V; B) where V is a finite set whose members are called points, equipped with a finite collection of its subsets B whose members are called blocks. In this paper, finite set systems are used to define a class of Quasi-cyclic low- density parity-check (LDPC) codes, called FSS codes, such that the constructed codes possess large girth and arbitrary column-weight distributions. Especially, the constructed column weight-2 FSS codes have higher rates than the column weight-2 geometric and cylinder-type codes with the same girths. To find the maximum girth of FSS codes based on (V; B), inevitable walks are defined in B such that the maximum girth is determined by the smallest length of the inevitable walks in B. Simulation results show that the constructed FSS codes have very good performance over the AWGN channel with iterative decoding and achieve significantly large coding gains compared to the random-like LDPC codes of the same lengths and rates.
Multi-Criteria Optimal Planning for Energy Policies in CLP
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2014
Year: 2014

In the policy making process a number of disparate and diverse issues such as economic development, environmental aspects, as well as the social acceptance of the policy, need to be considered. A single person might not have all the required expertises, and decision support systems featuring optimization components can help to assess policies. Leveraging on previous work on Strategic Environmental Assessment, we developed a fully-fledged system that is able to provide optimal plans with respect to a given objective, to perform multi-objective optimization and provide sets of Pareto optimal plans, and to visually compare them. Each plan is environmentally assessed and its footprint is evaluated. The heart of the system is an application developed in a popular Constraint Logic Programming system on the Reals sort. It has been equipped with a web service module that can be queried through standard interfaces, and an intuitive graphic user interface.