4,470 research outputs found
SoK: Privacy-Enhancing Technologies in Finance
Recent years have seen the emergence of practical advanced cryptographic tools that not only protect data privacy and authenticity, but also allow for jointly processing data from different institutions without sacrificing privacy. The ability to do so has enabled implementations a number of traditional and decentralized financial applications that would have required sacrificing privacy or trusting a third party. The main catalyst of this revolution was the advent of decentralized cryptocurrencies that use public ledgers to register financial transactions, which must be verifiable by any third party, while keeping sensitive data private. Zero Knowledge (ZK) proofs rose to prominence as a solution to this challenge, allowing for the owner of sensitive data (e.g. the identities of users involved in an operation) to convince a third party verifier that a certain operation has been correctly executed without revealing said data. It quickly became clear that performing arbitrary computation on private data from multiple sources by means of secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) and related techniques allows for more powerful financial applications, also in traditional finance.
In this SoK, we categorize the main traditional and decentralized financial applications that can benefit from state-of-the-art Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) and identify design patterns commonly used when applying PETs in the context of these applications. In particular, we consider the following classes of applications: 1. Identity Management, KYC & AML; and 2. Markets & Settlement; 3. Legal; and 4. Digital Asset Custody. We examine how ZK proofs, MPC and related PETs have been used to tackle the main security challenges in each of these applications. Moreover, we provide an assessment of the technological readiness of each PET in the context of different financial applications according to the availability of: theoretical feasibility results, preliminary benchmarks (in scientific papers) or benchmarks achieving real-world performance (in commercially deployed solutions). Finally, we propose future applications of PETs as Fintech solutions to currently unsolved issues. While we systematize financial applications of PETs at large, we focus mainly on those applications that require privacy preserving computation on data from multiple parties
Alexander Dallas Bache: Building the American Nation through Science and Education in the Nineteenth Century
Alexander Dallas Bache was the key leader of antebellum American scientists. Presuming his profession to be a herald of an integrated U.S. nation-state, Bache guided organizations such as the United States Coast Survey, then the country's largest scientific enterprise. In this analytical biography, Axel Jansen explains Bache's efforts to build and shape public institutions as a national foundation for a universalistic culture - efforts that culminated during the Civil War when Bache helped found the National Academy of Sciences as a symbol for the continued viability of an American nation
Expectations and expertise in artificial intelligence: specialist views and historical perspectives on conceptualisation, promise, and funding
Artificial intelligence’s (AI) distinctiveness as a technoscientific field that imitates the ability to think went through a resurgence of interest post-2010, attracting a flood of scientific and popular expectations as to its utopian or dystopian transformative consequences. This thesis offers observations about the formation and dynamics of expectations based on documentary material from the previous periods of perceived AI hype (1960-1975 and 1980-1990, including in-between periods of perceived dormancy), and 25 interviews with UK-based AI specialists, directly involved with its development, who commented on the issues during the crucial period of uncertainty (2017-2019) and intense negotiation through which AI gained momentum prior to its regulation and relatively stabilised new rounds of long-term investment (2020-2021). This examination applies and contributes to longitudinal studies in the sociology of expectations (SoE) and studies of experience and expertise (SEE) frameworks, proposing a historical sociology of expertise and expectations framework. The research questions, focusing on the interplay between hype mobilisation and governance, are: (1) What is the relationship between AI practical development and the broader expectational environment, in terms of funding and conceptualisation of AI? (2) To what extent does informal and non-developer assessment of expectations influence formal articulations of foresight? (3) What can historical examinations of AI’s conceptual and promissory settings tell about the current rebranding of AI?
The following contributions are made: (1) I extend SEE by paying greater attention to the interplay between technoscientific experts and wider collective arenas of discourse amongst non-specialists and showing how AI’s contemporary research cultures are overwhelmingly influenced by the hype environment but also contribute to it. This further highlights the interaction between competing rationales focusing on exploratory, curiosity-driven scientific research against exploitation-oriented strategies at formal and informal levels. (2) I suggest benefits of examining promissory environments in AI and related technoscientific fields longitudinally, treating contemporary expectations as historical products of sociotechnical trajectories through an authoritative historical reading of AI’s shifting conceptualisation and attached expectations as a response to availability of funding and broader national imaginaries. This comes with the benefit of better perceiving technological hype as migrating from social group to social group instead of fading through reductionist cycles of disillusionment; either by rebranding of technical operations, or by the investigation of a given field by non-technical practitioners. It also sensitises to critically examine broader social expectations as factors for shifts in perception about theoretical/basic science research transforming into applied technological fields. Finally, (3) I offer a model for understanding the significance of interplay between conceptualisations, promising, and motivations across groups within competing dynamics of collective and individual expectations and diverse sources of expertise
SoK: The Ghost Trilemma
Trolls, bots, and sybils distort online discourse and compromise the security
of networked platforms. User identity is central to the vectors of attack and
manipulation employed in these contexts. However it has long seemed that, try
as it might, the security community has been unable to stem the rising tide of
such problems. We posit the Ghost Trilemma, that there are three key properties
of identity -- sentience, location, and uniqueness -- that cannot be
simultaneously verified in a fully-decentralized setting. Many
fully-decentralized systems -- whether for communication or social coordination
-- grapple with this trilemma in some way, perhaps unknowingly. We examine the
design space, use cases, problems with prior approaches, and possible paths
forward. We sketch a proof of this trilemma and outline options for practical,
incrementally deployable schemes to achieve an acceptable tradeoff of trust in
centralized trust anchors, decentralized operation, and an ability to withstand
a range of attacks, while protecting user privacy.Comment: 22 pages with 1 figure and 8 table
The Entrenched Political Limitations of Australian Refugee Policy: A Case Study of the Australian Labor Party (2007-2013)
This thesis deconstructs Australia’s asylum and refugee policy trajectory under the Labor government between 2007 and 2013. For a short time after the 2007 election, in accordance with its promise to abolish the LNP’s Pacific Solution, Labor began to unwind certain policy structures of externalisation and deterrence that had been in place since the introduction of mandatory detention in 1992. By 2013 however, the ALP had declared that asylum seekers arriving by boat had no prospect of resettlement in Australia. This thesis analyses the political strategy of the ALP in rhetoric, policy choices and policy justifications to derive lessons from Labor’s mitigated challenge to the deterrence/externalisation paradigm. Critical Discourse Analysis is used to examine the political strategies of lead actors, particularly the ALP and the LNP, and to reconcile these strategies with policy outcomes such as irregular arrivals, detention figures, deaths at sea and compliance with obligations under international law. A central argument of this thesis is that Labor’s attempt to sustainably depart from the dominant externalisation paradigm was impaired, not by a lack of commitment to its stated program of reform, but rather by entrenched political limitations of the Australian context. These limitations include the LNP’s rigid partisanship and lack of policy compromise, the deep-rooted nature of mandatory detention, and the Australian public’s historical and continued support for controlled migration. A precise and detailed analysis of the impact of these limitations on Labor’s proposed reform fills a gap in academic knowledge about the political influences on policy action in Australian asylum and refugee policy. I contend that these limitations must be effectively engaged with in any attempt to reform the Australian asylum and refugee policy space
Enduring Displacement, Enduring Violence: Camps, Closure, and Exile In/After Return (Experiences of Burundian Refugees in Tanzania)
“Return home” was the joint message by the Burundian and Tanzanian presidents in 2017, just two years after hundreds of thousands Burundians were recognized as refugees in neighbouring countries, and as more continued to seek refuge or asylum each month. In Tanzania, where refugees are subject to strict encampment, the vast majority of Burundian refugees had previously been refugees at least once before. Many returned to Tanzania less than three years after their prior return to Burundi, which, as camps were closed, had been framed as a “durable solution” to their displacement. This thesis explores the interrelated dynamics of enduring displacement, encampment, and closure, by drawing on life history research with Burundian refugees in two camps in Tanzania (2017-8), as well as semi-structured interviews with government and humanitarian staff, and ethnographic methods. Empirically, this dissertation contributes to knowledge by tracing the diverse prior trajectories of current Burundian refugees, both within and beyond camp boundaries, challenging there-and-back-again geographical imaginary of refuge management. It highlights an understudied but constitutive aspect of camps—their ultimate closures—by recounting refugees’ memories of the violent closure of Mtabila camp, as well as its fearful afterlives and present-presence. The violence of past camp closure is part of the violence of current encampment due to its evocation as a a disciplinary dispositif to “encourage” return, threatening and anticipating future violence. State and humanitarian practices “close” and harden space for those deemed “undesirable,” through forced encampment, camp closures, and coerced or forced return. In so doing, they produce and prolong displacement, in which varied spatio-temporalities of violence endure. Burundian refugees’ life histories thus trace the ways displacement endures, and is endured
Peace made, peace built?: Participation, countryside, and politics in the 2010s Colombian peace process
This thesis argues that the pursuit of participation and inclusion of all the society and inform
well the citizenry about the terms of the accord is vital to achieving peacemaking on the one
hand; and, a rural restructure, changing political parties’ informal coercive institutions and
shifting the social norm of war towards peacebuilding on the other, are crucial coordinates so
as to a routing a genuine development for Colombia. A nation that during the 2010s faced the
challenge to end its long-standing civil war between the government and the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia − People's Army (FARC-EP) rebels. I advance the argument in two
parts: first, peacemaking is divided in two chapters. One examines participation and inclusion
in the 2016 peace settlement based on democratic innovation and the ladder of citizen
participation, arguing in a constructivist way, and applying hermeneutics that inclusion does
not necessarily mean a civil society's control over the peacemaking process, being the
participation of the political society and insurgency a precondition. The second chapter of this
section focuses on the 2016 peace plebiscite, conceptually argues that personal, relational,
cultural, and structural causes are intimately related to voters’ attitudes. And quantitatively
discloses from municipal data that spaces with rural poverty, coca crops, victims, remote from
the centre and an intense presence of the rebels had positive associations with the yes vote, a
heterogeneous influence of the warring parties, and that the vote for no won at higher population
and high abstention. The second part of this thesis addresses peacebuilding through three
chapters. The first, argues that civil war has been encouraged by the grievance to reduce rural
poverty, so, based upon Latin American Structuralism and original data empirically finds a
paradox of land redistribution, intense positive effects of technical progress to defeat rural
poverty, a dependency that undermines the better rural standard of living, ditches that become
greater between centre-periphery, and the egregious effects of forced displacement for the
countryside. The second chapter of this section examines the brutality, narcotics trafficking,
and corruption enforced by active Colombian political parties (19 parties and one social
movement) from 2011 to 2020. To do so, I addressed historical contingencies of the party
politics and build a novel panel data set where the brutality composite indicator, the corruption
indicator and coca crops are response variables for the explanatory matrix of political parties
elected to executive branch positions. The findings unmask political parties who enforced or
rejected these three coercive and violent informal institutions beside divergent causes. Lastly,
in chapter five, the third part of section two, posits eight individual political preferences
(kinship, funding, perpetuation, ideology, decision-making, religion, military, and media) that
cement the norm of civil war. Hence, I carry out an experiment with all members of the 2018-
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2022 Colombian Congress cohort (102 subjects in the Senate and 170 in the House of
Representatives). The results indicate that the population is dominated by a selfish adapted
community with heterogeneous preferences according to subjects’ chamber or the experimental
groups (i.e., self-enforcers, dodgers, and scofflaws).A tese argumenta que a procura da participação e inclusão da sociedade, e informar bem à
cidadania sobre os termos do acordo é vital para a formulação da paz, por um lado; e a
reestruturação rural, mudar as instituições informais coercitivas dos partidos políticos, e virar a
norma social da guerra orientando-a à construção de paz, de outro lado, são coordenadas
cruciais para o roteamento de um desenvolvimento genuíno para Colômbia. Uma nação que
durante a década dos 2010 defrontou o desafio de concluir sua guerra civil de longa duração
entre o governo e a guerrilha das Forças Armadas Revolucionarias da Colômbia – Exército do
Povo (FARC-EP). Levo a cabo o argumento em duas partes: A primeira, pacificação, é dividida
em dois capítulos. Um examina a participação e inclusão no acordo de paz de 2016 baseado na
inovação democrática e a escada da participação cidadã, a discutir de uma forma construtivista
e aplicando hermenêutica que a inclusão não necessariamente significa um controle da
sociedade civil no processo de pacificação, sendo a participação da sociedade política e da
insurgência uma precondição. O segundo capítulo desta secção foca-se no plebiscito de paz de
2016, conceitualmente trata que causas pessoais, relacionais, culturais e estruturais estão
intimamente conexas com as atitudes dos votantes. E quantitativamente revela a partir de data
municipal que espaços com pobreza rural, culturas de coca, vítimas, distantes do centro e com
uma intensa presença de rebeldes têm associações positivas com o voto sim, uma influência
heterogênea das partes em conflito, e que o voto pelo não ganhou em lugares de alta densidade
demográfica e de elevada abstenção. A segunda parte da tese aborda a construção de paz
mediante três capítulos, por tanto, o primeiro fundamentado no estruturalismo latino-americano
e data original, empiricamente descobre um paradoxo na distribuição da terra, efeitos
positivamente intensos do progresso técnico a fim de vencer à pobreza rural, uma dependência
que abate um melhor standard de vida no campo, fossos que se engrandecem entre o centro e a
periferia, e os atrozes efeitos do deslocamento forçado para o campo. O segundo capítulo da
segunda parte examina a brutalidade, o narcotráfico, e corrupção reforçada pelos partidos
políticos colombianos ativos (19 partidos e um movimento social) de 2011 até 2020, para fazê lo, abordei contingências históricas da política partidária e construo um conjunto de dados
painel onde o indicador composto de brutalidade, o indicador de corrupção e as culturas de coca
são variáveis de resposta para a matriz de partidos políticos eleitos em cargos do ramo
executivo. As descobertas desmascaram partidos políticos que reforçam ou rejeitam essas três
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instituições informais coercitivas e violentas além de causas divergentes. Por fim, no capítulo
cinco, a terceira secção da parte dois da tese, postula oito preferências políticas individuais
(parentesco, financiamento, perpetuamento, ideologia, tomada de decisões, religião, militares e
média) que cimentam a norma de guerra civil. Assim sendo, levo a cabo um experimento com
todos os integrantes do Congresso de Colômbia da coorte 2018-2022 (102 sujeitos no Senado
e 170 na Câmara de Representantes). Os resultados indicam que a população é dominada por
uma comunidade egoísta adaptada com preferências heterogêneas segundo à câmara e grupo
experimental (i.e., auto executores, trapaceiros, e burla leis) dos sujeitos
Constitutional Human Duties
Constitutional human duties are simultaneously present and absent. Though many human duties are set forth in many constitutions throughout the entire world, modern scholarship has almost entirely excluded them from legal conceptualization. Liberalism shifted the spotlight to the individual, as an autonomous independent unit, while abandoning society. Furthermore, there is a tendency to frame constitutional human duties as “constitutional interests.” This Article suggests an innovative comparative analysis of constitutional human duties. Founded on that analysis, this Article develops a novel typology through which the characteristics of constitutional human duties are examined. The implications of various constitutional duties are explored in accordance with the proposed typology. This Article further argues that, notwithstanding the differences between various constitutional human duties, all the duties share core characteristics and implications. Finally, this Article proposes that the constitutionalization of human duties is justified as long as their inclusion in the Constitution is essential for protecting fundamental constitutional values
Between Ethical Oversight and State Neutrality: Introducing Controversial Technologies into the Public Healthcare Systems of Germany, Italy and England
Introducing ethically controversial (bio)technologies into the public healthcare system inevitably provokes societal and legal conflict. While it is often argued that these choices ought to comply with moral standards, the consideration of ethical and religious concerns raises a serious problem of legitimacy. By adopting the position that the state must act in an ethically neutral manner this book provides a critical legal analysis of the relationship between ethics and law and its implications for the public healthcare system. The ensuing examination combines a comparative, legal-constitutional perspective with the investigation of two case studies: preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT).Nach welchen Kriterien dürfen ethisch umstrittene (Bio-)Technologien in das öffentliche Gesundheitswesen aufgenommen werden? Zwar wird vertreten, dass diese Entscheidung moralischen Vorgaben entsprechen sollte, doch hat die Berücksichtigung ethischer oder religiöser Bedenken aufgrund des staatlichen Neutralitätsgebots ein Legitimitätsproblem zur Folge. Diese rechtsvergleichende Arbeit untersucht daher kritisch das Verhältnis zwischen Ethik und Recht sowie seine Auswirkungen auf das öffentliche Gesundheitswesen. Insbesondere kombiniert die Analyse rechtsethische und verfassungsrechtliche Ansätze und wendet diese auf zwei Fallbeispiele an, die Präimplantationsdiagnostik (PID) und den nicht-invasiven Pränatalen Test (NIPT)
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