An SMP Soft Classification Algorithm for Remote Sensing

This work introduces a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) version of the continuous iterative guided spectral class rejection (CIGSCR) algorithm, a semiautomated classiï¬cation algorithm for remote sensing (multispectral) images. The algorithm uses soft data clusters to produce a soft classiï¬cation containing inherently more information than a comparable hard classiï¬cation at an increased computational cost. Previous work suggests that similar algorithms achieve good parallel scalability, motivating the parallel algorithm development work here. Experimental results of applying parallel CIGSCR to an image with approximately 10^8 pixels and six bands demonstrate superlinear speedup. A soft two class classiï¬cation is generated in just over four minutes using 32 processors

Data Leak Detection As a Service: Challenges and Solutions

We describe a network-based data-leak detection (DLD) technique, the main feature of which is that the detection does not require the data owner to reveal the content of the sensitive data. Instead, only a small amount of specialized digests are needed. Our technique – referred to as the fuzzy fingerprint – can be used to detect accidental data leaks due to human errors or application flaws. The privacy-preserving feature of our algorithms minimizes the exposure of sensitive data and enables the data owner to safely delegate the detection to others.We describe how cloud providers can offer their customers data-leak detection as an add-on service with strong privacy guarantees. We perform extensive experimental evaluation on the privacy, efficiency, accuracy and noise tolerance of our techniques. Our evaluation results under various data-leak scenarios and setups show that our method can support accurate detection with very small number of false alarms, even when the presentation of the data has been transformed. It also indicates that the detection accuracy does not degrade when partial digests are used. We further provide a quantifiable method to measure the privacy guarantee offered by our fuzzy fingerprint framework

A class of implicit-explicit two-step Runge-Kutta methods

This work develops implicit-explicit time integrators based on two-step Runge-Kutta methods. The class of schemes of interest is characterized by linear invariant preservation and high stage orders. Theoretical consistency and stability analyses are performed to reveal the properties of these methods. The new framework offers extreme flexibility in the construction of partitioned integrators, since no coupling conditions are necessary. Moreover, the methods are not plagued by severe order reduction, due to their high stage orders. Two practical schemes of orders four and six are constructed, and are used to solve several test problems. Numerical results confirm the theoretical findings

Device-Based Isolation for Securing Cryptographic Keys

In this work, we describe an eective device-based isolation approach for achieving data security. Device-based isolation leverages the proliferation of personal computing devices to provide strong run-time guarantees for the condentiality of secrets. To demonstrate our isolation approach, we show its use in protecting the secrecy of highly sensitive data that is crucial to security operations, such as cryptographic keys used for decrypting ciphertext or signing digital signatures. Private key is usually encrypted when not used, however, when being used, the plaintext key is loaded into the memory of the host for access. In our threat model, the host may be compromised by attackers, and thus the condentiality of the host memory cannot be preserved. We present a novel and practical solution and its prototype called DataGuard to protect the secrecy of the highly sensitive data through the storage isolation and secure tunneling enabled by a mobile handheld device. DataGuard can be deployed for the key protection of individuals or organizations

A fully discrete framework for the adaptive solution of inverse problems

We investigate and contrast the differences between the discretize-then-differentiate and differentiate-then-discretize approaches to the numerical solution of parameter estimation problems. The former approach is attractive in practice due to the use of automatic differentiation for the generation of the dual and optimality equations in the first-order KKT system. The latter strategy is more versatile, in that it allows one to formulate efficient mesh-independent algorithms over suitably chosen function spaces. However, it is significantly more difficult to implement, since automatic code generation is no longer an option. The starting point is a classical elliptic inverse problem. An a priori error analysis for the discrete optimality equation shows consistency and stability are not inherited automatically from the primal discretization. Similar to the concept of dual consistency, We introduce the concept of optimality consistency. However, the convergence properties can be restored through suitable consistent modifications of the target functional. Numerical tests confirm the theoretical convergence order for the optimal solution. We then derive a posteriori error estimates for the infinite dimensional optimal solution error, through a suitably chosen error functional. This estimates are constructed using second order derivative information for the target functional. For computational efficiency, the Hessian is replaced by a low order BFGS approximation. The efficiency of the error estimator is confirmed by a numerical experiment with multigrid optimization

Towards Energy-Proportional Computing for Enterprise-Class Server Workloads

Massive data centers housing thousands of computing nodes have become commonplace in enterprise computing, and the power consumption of such data centers is growing at an unprecedented rate. Adding to the problem is the inability of the servers to exhibit energy proportionality, i.e., provide energy-ecient execution under all levels of utilization, which diminishes the overall energy eciency of the data center. It is imperative that we realize eective strategies to control the power consumption of the server and improve the energy eciency of data centers. With the advent of Intel Sandy Bridge processors, we have the ability to specify a limit on power consumption during runtime, which creates opportunities to design new power-management techniques for enterprise workloads and make the systems that they run on more energy-proportional. In this paper, we investigate whether it is possible to achieve energy proportionality for an enterprise-class server workload, namely SPECpower ssj2008 benchmark, by using Intel's Running Average Power Limit (RAPL) interfaces. First, we analyze the power consumption and characterize the instantaneous power prole of the SPECpower benchmark at a subsystem-level using the on-chip energy meters exposed via the RAPL interfaces. We then analyze the impact of RAPL power limiting on the performance, per-transaction response time, power consumption, and energy eciency of the benchmark under dierent load levels. Our observations and results shed light on the ecacy of the RAPL interfaces and provide guidance for designing power-management techniques for enterprise-class workloads

A Practical Method to Estimate Information Content in the Context of 4D-Var Data Assimilation. I: Methodology

Data assimilation obtains improved estimates of the state of a physical system by combining imperfect model results with sparse and noisy observations of reality. all observations used in data assimilation are equally valuable. The ability to characterize the usefulness of different data points is important for analyzing the effectiveness of the assimilation system, for data pruning, and for the design of future sensor systems. This paper focuses on the four dimensional variational (4D-Var) data assimilation framework. Metrics from information theory are used to quantify the contribution of observations to decreasing the uncertainty with which the system state is known. We establish an interesting relationship between different information-theoretic metrics and the variational cost function/gradient under Gaussian linear assumptions. Based on this insight we derive an ensemble-based computational procedure to estimate the information content of various observations in the context of 4D-Var. The approach is illustrated on a nonlinear test problem. In the companion paper (Singh et al., 2012a) the methodology is applied to a global chemical data assimilation experiment

Adaptive Key Protection in Complex Cryptosystems with Attributes

In the attribute-based encryption (ABE) model, attributes (as opposed to identities) are used to encrypt messages, and all the receivers with qualifying attributes can decrypt the ciphertext. However, compromised attribute keys may affect the communications of many users who share the same access control policies. We present the notion of forward-secure attribute-based encryption (fs-ABE) and give a concrete construction based on bilinear map and decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption. Forward security means that a compromised private key by an adversary at time t does not break the confidentiality of the communication that took place prior to t. We describe how to achieve both forward security and encryption with attributes, and formally prove our security against the adaptive chosen-ciphertext adversaries. Our scheme is non-trivial, and the key size only grows polynomially with logN (where N is the number of time periods). We further generalize our scheme to support the individualized key-updating schedule for each attribute, which provides a finer granularity for key management. Our insights on the required properties that an ABE scheme needs to possess in order to be forward-secure compatible are useful beyond the specific fs-ABE construction given. We raise an open question at the end of the paper on the escrow problem of the master key in ABE schemes

Nonreciprocating Sharing Methods in Cooperative Q-Learning Environments

Past research on multiagent simulation with cooperative reinforcement learning (RL) focuses on developing sharing strategies that are adopted and used by all agents in the environment. In this paper, we target situations where this assumption of a single sharing strategy that is employed by all agents is not valid. We seek to address how agents with no predetermined sharing partners can exploit groups of cooperatively learning agents to improve learning performance when compared to independent learning. Specifically, we propose three intra-agent methods that do not assume a reciprocating sharing relationship and leverage the pre-existing agent interface associated with Q-Learning to expedite learning

Cross-Platform Presentation of Interactive Volumetric Imagery

Volume data is useful across many disciplines, not just medicine. Thus, it is very important that researchers have a simple and lightweight method of sharing and reproducing such volumetric data. In this paper, we explore some of the challenges associated with volume rendering, both from a classical sense and from the context of Web3D technologies. We describe and evaluate the pro- posed X3D Volume Rendering Component and its associated styles for their suitability in the visualization of several types of image data. Additionally, we examine the ability for a minimal X3D node set to capture provenance and semantic information from outside ontologies in metadata and integrate it with the scene graph