Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Super-Perfect Zero-Knowledge Proofs

We initiate a study of super-perfect zero-knowledge proof systems. Loosely speaking, these are proof systems for which the interaction can be perfectly simulated in strict probabilistic polynomial-time. In contrast, the standard definition of perfect zero-knowledge only requires that the interaction can be perfectly simulated by a strict probabilistic polynomial-time that is allowed to fail with probability at most one half. We show that two types of perfect zero-knowledge proof systems can be transformed into super-perfect ones. The first type includes the perfect zero-knowledge interactive proof system for Graph Isomorphism and other systems of the same form, including perfect zero-knowledge arguments for NP. The second type refers to perfect non-interactive zero-knowledge proof systems. We also present a super-perfect non-interactive zero-knowledge proof system for the set of Blum integers.
A Note on Perfect Correctness by Derandomization

Abstract We show a general compiler that transforms a large class of erroneous cryptographic schemes (such as public-key encryption, indistinguishability obfuscation, and secure multiparty computation schemes) into perfectly correct ones. The transformation works for schemes that are correct on all inputs with probability noticeably larger than half , and are secure under parallel repetition. We assume the existence of one-way functions and of functions with deterministic (uniform) time complexity $$2^{O(n)}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:msup><mml:mn>2</mml:mn><mml:mrow><mml:mi>O</mml:mi><mml:mo>(</mml:mo><mml:mi>n</mml:mi><mml:mo>)</mml:mo></mml:mrow></mml:msup></mml:math> and non-deterministic circuit complexity $$2^{\Omega (n)}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:msup><mml:mn>2</mml:mn><mml:mrow><mml:mi>Ω</mml:mi><mml:mo>(</mml:mo><mml:mi>n</mml:mi><mml:mo>)</mml:mo></mml:mrow></mml:msup></mml:math> . Our transformation complements previous results that showed how public-key encryption and indistinguishability obfuscation that err on a noticeable fraction of inputs can be turned into ones that for all inputs are often correct, showing that they can be made perfectly correct. The technique relies on the idea of “reverse randomization” [Naor, Crypto 1989] and on Nisan–Wigderson style derandomization, previously used in cryptography to remove interaction from witness-indistinguishable proofs and commitment schemes [Barak, Ong and Vadhan, Crypto 2003].
FURISC: FHE Encrypted URISC Design

As stated by Gosser, “ Securing a computer system has traditionally been a battle of wits: the penetrator tries to find the holes, and the designer tries to close them”. Hence, for any secure program execution, the instruction flow should also be encrypted. However, finding suitable solution to determine the termination point of any encrypted program is still an open challenge. Encrypted termination requires handling of encrypted condition, which is infeasible by existing unencrypted processors. Thus, for outsourcing computations and achieving privacy, designs of processors which operate on encrypted data as well as address are extremely important. This chapter provides some insight on this issue.
It Is All about Control

The security professional and the auditor come together around one topic: control. The two professionals may not agree with the methods used to establish control, but their concerns are related. The security professional is there to evaluate the situation, identify the risks and exposures, recommend solutions, and implement corrective actions to reduce the risk. The auditor also evaluates risk, but the primary role is to evaluate the controls implemented by the security professional. This role often puts the security professional and the auditor at odds, but this does not need to be the case. This chapter discusses controls in the context of the Common Body of Knowledge of the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), but it also introduces the language and definitions used by the audit profession. This approach will ease some of the concept misconceptions and terminology differences between the security and audit professions. Because both professions are concerned with control, albeit from different perspectives, the security and audit communities should have close interaction and cooperate extensively. Before discussing controls, it is necessary to define some parameters. Audit does not mean security. Think of it this way: the security professional does not often think in control terms. Rather, the security professional is focused on what measures or controls should be put into operation to protect the organization from a variety of threats. The goal of the auditor is not to secure the organization but to evaluate the controls to ensure risk is managed to the satisfaction of management. Two perspectives of the same thing—control.
Overview of Cloud Computing

Abstract With the development and operation of the Internet, the amount of data generated every day growing bigger, and the demand for data processing capacity is increasing. Cloud computing has become a hot research topic. The core problem of cloud computing is cloud resource scheduling. Current scholars have studied cloud resource scheduling problems from various aspects. This article mainly describes and analyzes cloud resource scheduling based on QoS performance constraints, cloud resource scheduling based on load balancing, and forecasting based on cloud resource scheduling, which provides a useful reference for cloud computing research.
The Boltzmann Selection Procedure 1

This chapter investigates Boltzmann selection, a tool for controlling the selective pressure in optimizations using genetic algorithms. An implementation of variable selective pressure, modeled after the use of temperature as a parameter in simulated annealing approaches, is described. The convergence behavior of 112optimization runs is illustrated as a function of selective pressure; the method is compared to a genetic algorithm lacking this control feature and is shown to exhibit superior convergence properties on a small set of test problems. An empirical analysis is presented that compares the selective pressure of this algorithm to a standard selection procedure. Then, in order to understand these results in a broader context, an analytical discussion of selection procedures used in genetic algorithms is presented. A unified framework for discussing and comparing procedures is developed and used to compare proportional, Boltzmann, power law, and sigma truncation selection procedures. Two properties, translation and scale invariance, are defined and studied for each of these procedures. Selective pressure is investigated for proportional and Boltzmann selection. It is proven that, for a normal distribution of individuals in the optimization space, proportional scaling decreases selective pressure during the course of an optimization run.
A Requirement-Driven Mechanism for the Management of Distributed Infrastructures

The emergence of new service oriented distributed models has raised a number of challenges particularly in relation to the management of distributed infrastructures in dynamic environments, such as the Cloud with changing availability of resources, services and quality of services. In such an environment it is very important that users and applications have some level of assurance that their requirements can be satisfied while trying to optimize the usage of the available resources. This paper presents a new requirement-driven decision making mechanism that is based on a quality assured load balancer for distributed computing systems. We evaluate the approach and demonstrate how it can adapt to user requirements and to the capacity of available resources.
Generating candidate busy beaver machines (or how to build the zany zoo)

The busy beaver problem is a well-known example of a non-computable function. In order to determine a particular value of this function, it is necessary to generate and classify a large number of Turing machines. The advent of cloud computing provides unparallelled opportunities to explore this problem, but also to develop infrastructures that support distributed investigations and relevant computational evidence for all results obtained, such as a list of all machines of a given size together with their classifications. This list can then be used for variants of the problem or related ones such as the placid platypus problem. We investigate how to generate classes of machines to be considered for the busy beaver problem, which involves separating the generation of machines from their analysis. We discuss the relationship between quadruple and quintuple variants of Turing machines, and show that the latter are more general than the former. We give some formal results to justify our strategy for minimising the number of machines generated, and define a process reflecting this strategy for generating machines. We describe our implementation, and the results of generating various classes of machines with up to 5 states or up to 5 symbols, all of which (together with our code) are available on the author's website.
Three-dimensional simulations of sound propagation in a trumpet with accurate mouthpiece shank geometry

The length and bore geometry of musical instruments directly influences the quality of sound that can be produced. In brass instruments, nonlinear effects from finite-amplitude wave propagation can lead to wave distortion giving sounds a brassy timbre [3], [5], [16], [22], [29]. In this paper, we propose a three-dimensional model to describe nonlinear wave propagation in a trumpet and investigate the importance of the mouthpiece shank geometry. The time pressure waveforms corresponding to B3b and B4b notes at the mouthpiece were recorded at the mouthpiece shank are recorded and used as inputs for our model. To incorporate compressibility and nonlinear effects, the compressible Euler equations are used to describe the evolution of the nonlinear waves. The system was solved numerically using the discontinuous Galerkin method. The numerical results were compared with the waveforms of the musical notes, which were also measured outside the bell of the trumpet, to validate our approach. Simulations were run for both notes in computational trumpets where different bore geometries were modelled. Our results demonstrate that the shape of the narrow region near the mouthpiece greatly influences the wave propagation and must be considered in a trumpet model.
LANDING ASSISTANCE AND EVALUATION USING IMAGE PROCESSING

Most of the landing systems are based on GPS and radar altimeter, sonar, infrared. But in urban environments buildings and other obstacles disturb the GPS signal and can even cause loss of signal. In such case it will be beneficial to have independent control of navigation and landing assistance system. So the main aim is to design a software system that will assist helicopter or Unmanned Aerial Vehicle accurately under all-weather. The software system takes height parameter and images from helicopter or Unmanned Aerial Vehicle as an input. After applying number of processing techniques like edge detection, RGB to Gray scale on the image, the image is compared with the HSV dataset to find the free space. For edge detection Canny edge detection algorithm is used. From the number of free spaces nearest patch is selected by taking vehicle dimension and landing orientation of the vehicle into consideration. Performance of the system depends on the accuracy and the speed of the system. This system also resolves the potentially dangerous problem of GPS denial.
A derivational model of discontinuous parsing

The notion of latent-variable probabilistic context-free derivation of syntactic structures is enhanced to allow heads and unrestricted discontinuities. The chosen formalization covers both constituency parsing and dependency parsing. By the new framework, one obtains a probability distribution over the space of all discontinuous parses. This lends itself to intrinsic evaluation in terms of cross-entropy. The derivational model is accompanied by an equivalent automaton model, which can be used for deterministic parsing.
Resilience Management of Critical Cyber-Physical Systems: A Multiple Case Study Analysis

Modern societies are highly dependent on different critical cyber-physical systems (CPS). The growth of software (= cyber) layer, in size and percentage of the overall system is a future trend. Our society’s critical CPS — cyber, energy, water, transportation and communication — lacks of resilience, typically losing essential functionality following adverse events. This multiple case study research analyses five prior research projects from the safety and security field. The target of the paper is to research how resilience management of critical cyber-physical systems can be understood.
Improving ECE Education in Sub-Saharan African Countries Using the Mobile Studio Technology and Pedagogy

Abstract Improving ECE Education in Sub-Saharan African Countries Using the Mobile Studio Technology and PedagogyAbstractFour choices for session topics : 1. Engineering Education in Sub-Saharan Africa 2. U.S./Africa Engineering Education Partnership 3. Needs, Opportunities, and Challenges for Global Engineering Education 4. Techniques in Web-based and Technology Enhanced Education around the Globe Developing nations, especially those located in Sub-Saharan Africa have realized thathigher education is critical for their future economic development. For the past 5 years, theUniversity Capacity Building Program (UCBP) of Ethiopia has undertaken a large-scale capacitydevelopment and construction project of 13 universities at 15 different sites throughout thecountry, mostly in rural locations. Expanding science, technology, engineering, and mathematics(STEM) education in colleges and universities is very challenging because it requires additionallaboratories and specialized equipment that are very expensive to purchase and maintain. STEMeducation is also minimized and sometimes compromised when the ratio between the availableequipment and the number of students becomes high. The solution to such a problem is to eitherdecrease the studio/laboratory equipment ratio, or increase the number of laboratory equipment.Although achieving both goals seems unattainable, the development and availability of new stateof the art teaching/training laboratory equipment has started making this vision a reality. The Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department of Morgan State University(MSU), in collaboration with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and other partner institutionshas been testing a new state of the art ECE laboratory equipment called the Mobile Studio I/OBoardTM to conduct and teach ECE laboratory experiments from anywhere at any time. It is asmall and inexpensive ($150) hardware platform that duplicates a large amount of ECElaboratory hardware valued at around $5,000 when coupled with a laptop that runs the MobileStudio DesktopTM software. This paper will discuss the results of a three year internationalcollaboration between MSU and two universities in Ethiopia that used the Mobile Studio I/OBoardTM technology and pedagogy to enhance their ECE curriculum. Initial results indicate thatthe use of the new technology has allowed the students of the two participating Ethiopianuniversities to finally be able to conduct more hands-on laboratory experiments and design moreadvanced circuits for their senior projects. The use of inexpensive and portable ECE laboratoryequipment such as the Mobile Studio I/O BoardTM , or Analog DiscoveryTM has the potential torevolutionize ECE education in developing countries world-wide.
A Bayesian Computer Model Analysis of Robust Bayesian Analyses

We harness the power of Bayesian emulation techniques, designed to aid the analysis of complex computer models, to examine the structure of complex Bayesian analyses themselves. These techniques facilitate robust Bayesian analyses and/or sensitivity analyses of complex problems, and hence allow global exploration of the impacts of choices made in both the likelihood and prior specification. We show how previously intractable problems in robustness studies can be overcome using emulation techniques, and how these methods allow other scientists to quickly extract approximations to posterior results corresponding to their own particular subjective specification. The utility and flexibility of our method is demonstrated on a reanalysis of a real application where Bayesian methods were employed to capture beliefs about river flow. We discuss the obvious extensions and directions of future research that such an approach opens up.
Quasifree Stochastic Cocycles and Quantum Random Walks

The theory of quasifree quantum stochastic calculus for infinite-dimensional noise is developed within the framework of Hudson–Parthasarathy quantum stochastic calculus. The question of uniqueness for the covariance amplitude with respect to which a given unitary quantum stochastic cocycle is quasifree is addressed, and related to the minimality of the corresponding stochastic dilation. The theory is applied to the identification of a wide class of quantum random walks whose limit processes are driven by quasifree noises.
Secrecy and performance models for query processing on outsourced graph data

Abstract Database outsourcing is a challenge concerning data secrecy. Even if an adversary, including the service provider, accesses the data, she should not be able to learn any information from the accessed data. In this paper, we address this problem for graph-structured data. First, we define a secrecy notion for graph-structured data based on the concepts of indistinguishability and searchable encryption. To address this problem, we propose an approach based on bucketization. Next to bucketization, it makes use of obfuscated indexes and encryption. We show that finding an optimal bucketization tailored to graph-structured data is NP-hard; therefore, we come up with a heuristic. We prove that the proposed bucketization approach fulfills our secrecy notion. In addition, we present a performance model for scale-free networks which consists of (1) a number-of-buckets model that estimates the number of buckets obtained after applying our bucketization approach and (2) a query-cost model. Finally, we demonstrate with a set of experiments the accuracy of our number-of-buckets model and the efficiency of our approach with respect to query processing.
Local Density Matrices of Many-Body States in the Constant Weight Subspaces

Let $V=\bigotimes_{k=1}^{N} V_{k}$ be the $N$ spin-$j$ Hilbert space with $d=2j+1$-dimensional single particle space. We fix an orthonormal basis $\{|m_i\rangle\}$ for each $V_{k}$, with weight $m_i\in \{-j,\ldots j\}$. Let $V_{(w)}$ be the subspace of $V$ with a constant weight $w$, with an orthonormal basis $\{|m_1,\ldots,m_N\rangle\}$ subject to $\sum_k m_k=w$. We show that the combinatorial properties of the constant weight condition imposes strong constraints on the reduced density matrices for any vector $|\psi\rangle$ in the constant weight subspace, which limits the possible entanglement structures of $|\psi\rangle$. Our results find applications in the overlapping quantum marginal problems, quantum error-correcting codes, and the spin-network structures in quantum gravity.
Introduction to Finite Mixtures

Mixture models have been around for over 150 years, as an intuitively simple and practical tool for enriching the collection of probability distributions available for modelling data. In this chapter we describe the basic ideas of the subject, present several alternative representations and perspectives on these models, and discuss some of the elements of inference about the unknowns in the models. Our focus is on the simplest set-up, of finite mixture models, but we discuss also how various simplifying assumptions can be relaxed to generate the rich landscape of modelling and inference ideas traversed in the rest of this book.
Automated model integration at source code level: An approach to implementing models into the NASA Land Information System

This paper presents an approach to automated model integration into the NASA Land Information System (LIS). LIS defines interfaces for integrating models, which do not often have standardized coupling interfaces. Additional software development is needed when implementing models. The automated approach simplifies these barriers. LIS standardized modeling interface (LSMI) is proposed as a prerequisite Fortran subroutine, which is directly callable by LIS and calls model physics. Data communication between LIS and a model can be connected through an LSMI. The LSMI arguments can be functionally categorized. Taking their specifications, implementation code can be generated based on code templates with programming logic and language elements incorporated. An Excel/VBA-based tool (LIS-MIT) has been developed for automating LIS model implementation. Since the development of LSMI requires basic skills, LIS-MIT can significantly lower the development difficulties and efforts. The proposed approach can be generalized and applied for integrating models into other modeling environments.
‘Driving-as-Event’: re-thinking the car journey

This article explores the possibility of ‘measuring’ the individual car journey in terms of the quality of the cognitive distance travelled by the car’s occupants. Literary texts constitute an invaluable resource in this regard since their focus on the interiority of the driving experience is of great help in the theorisation of what I refer to here as ‘automotive consciousness.’ In the discussion that follows, I propose that each and every car journey may be thought of as a unique and non-reproducible event in the lives of the drivers and passengers concerned on account of the variable psychological and situational factors involved.
Power of uninitialized qubits in shallow quantum circuits

We study uninitialized qubits, whose initial state is arbitrary and unknown, in relation to the computational power of shallow quantum circuits. To do this, we consider uniform families of shallow quantum circuits with n input qubits, O(log⁡n) initialized ancillary qubits, and nO(1) uninitialized ancillary qubits, where the input qubits only act as control qubits. We show that such a circuit with depth O((log⁡n)2) can compute any symmetric Boolean function on n bits that is computable by a uniform family of polynomial-size classical circuits. Since it is unlikely that this can be done with only O(log⁡n) initialized ancillary qubits, our result provides evidence that the presence of uninitialized ancillary qubits increases the computational power of shallow quantum circuits with only O(log⁡n) initialized ancillary qubits. On the other hand, to understand the limitations of uninitialized qubits, we focus on sub-logarithmic-depth quantum circuits and show the impossibility of computing the parity function on n bits.