Chosen IV Statistical Analysis for Key Recovery Attacks on Stream Ciphers
A recent framework for chosen IV statistical distinguishing analysis of stream ciphers is exploited and formalized to provide new methods for key recovery attacks. As an application, a key recovery attack on simplified versions of two eSTREAM Phase 3 candidates is given: For Grain-128 with IV initialization reduced to up to 180 of its 256 iterations, and for Trivium with IV initialization reduced to up to 672 of its 1152 iterations, it is experimentally demonstrated how to deduce a few key bits. Evidence is given that the present analysis is not applicable on Grain-128 or Trivium with full IV initialization.

title: Non-randomness in eSTREAM Candidates Salsa20 and TSC-4
abstract: Stream cipher initialisation should ensure that the initial state or keystream is not detectably related to the key and initialisation vector. In this paper we analyse the key/IV setup of the eSTREAM Phase 2 candidates Salsa20 and TSC-4. In the case of Salsa20 we demonstrate a key recovery attack on six rounds and observe non-randomness after seven. For TSC-4, non-randomness over the full eight-round initialisation phase is detected, but would also persist for more rounds.

title: Expert Conciliation for Multi Modal Person Authentication Systems by Bayesian Statistics
abstract: We present an algorithm functioning as a supervisor module in a multi expert decision making machine. It uses the Bayes theory in order to estimate the biases of individual expert opinions. These are then used to calibrate and conciliate expert opinions to one opinion. We present a framework for simulating decision strategies using expert opinions whose properties are easily modifiable. By using real data coming from a person authentication system using image and speech data we were able to confirm that the proposed supervisor improves the quality of individual expert decisions by reaching success rates of 99.5 %.

title: Experiences with an Emotional Sales Agent
abstract: With COSIMAB2B we demonstrate a prototype of a complex and visionary e-procurement application. The embodied character agent named COSIMA is able to respect a customer’s preferences and deals with him or her via natural speech. She expresses various emotions via mimic, gesture, combined with speech synthesis, and COSIMA is even able to consider the customer’s emotions via mimic recognition. As first observations show, this is a very promising approach to improve the bargaining with the customer or the recommendation of products.

title: How well does charge reparametrisation account for solvent screening in molecular mechanics calculations? The example of myosin
abstract: The rate constant of an enzyme-catalysed reaction is one of the major target properties to understand protein function. Atomic-detail computer simulations can in principle be used to estimate rate constants from the energy profile along the reaction coordinate. For such simulations, molecular mechanics is combined with a quantum description of the reaction process. In molecular mechanics calculations, the electrostatic field is represented by the Coulomb potential of partial atomic charges which have been parametrised for small building blocks in vacuum and transferred to the macromolecule. In aqueous solution, however, the electrostatic interactions are affected by the solvent polarization. While this can be described by numerically solving the Poisson-Boltzmann equation, it is computationally expensive. A simple approximation to this is to optimally reproduce the electrostatic potential in solution by reparametrising the partial atomic charges in such a way that a simple Coulomb potential can still be used. Such a procedure would allow to perform fast calculations of reaction processes in proteins while accounting for the solvent screening effect. Here, this method is tested on myosin, a motor protein that is both an enzyme and exists in very different conformations.

title: Face authentication with Gabor information on deformable graphs
abstract: Elastic graph matching has been proposed as a practical implementation of dynamic link matching, which is a neural network with dynamically evolving links between a reference model and an input image. Each node of the graph contains features that characterize the neighborhood of its location in the image. The elastic graph matching usually consists of two consecutive steps, namely a matching with a rigid grid, followed by a deformation of the grid, which is actually the elastic part. The deformation step is introduced in order to allow for some deformation, rotation, and scaling of the object to be matched. This method is applied here to the authentication of human faces where candidates claim an identity that is to be checked. The matching error as originally suggested is not powerful enough to provide satisfying results in this case. We introduce an automatic weighting of the nodes according to their significance. We also explore the significance of the elastic deformation for an application of face-based person authentication. We compare performance results obtained with and without the second matching step. Results show that the deformation step slightly increases the performance, but has lower influence than the weighting of the nodes. The best results are obtained with the combination of both aspects. The results provided by the proposed method compare favorably with two methods that require a prior geometric face normalization, namely the synergetic and eigenface approaches.

title: COSIMA- your smart, speaking E-salesperson
abstract: We present a new cooperative user interface for e-shopping. COSIMA is an intelligent Internet avatar with dynamic voice output that assists customers through their e-shopping tours and advises them like a real salesperson. COSIMA uses a meta search engine based on Preference SQL, computing best matching results to the customer's wishes. COSIMA can qualify these results and generates proper voice output. Our presentation shows COSIMA in action for comparison shopping.