Renegotiating the Food Aid Convention: Background, context, and issues

"The current global agreement governing food aid—the Food Aid Convention (FAC)—will expire in 2007. It has come under heavy criticism as has the diffuse set of broader food aid governance institutions that has emerged in the last 50 years. These institutions are characterized by overlapping mandates, differing degrees of authority and legitimacy, varied levels of transparency in decisionmaking, and problematic representation of the major stakeholders. A number of issues are likely to arise during the course of negotiations over a new FAC. These include its objectives; the nature of commitments—whether to express them in tonnage, value, or nutritional terms; the level of commitments and their distribution among donor countries; monitoring and enforcement of commitments; representation on the FAC governing body among food aid donor- and recipient-country governments and civil society organizations; and the institutional “home” of the FAC. More specifically, there is debate over such questions as whether the new FAC should have an “instrument focus”—food aid—or a “problem focus” such as “food security” or “hunger.” If the focus is on addressing hunger, should food aid under the FAC be restricted to emergencies only or should it pertain to broader food security issues? Should the FAC be a low-key forum for exchange of information or should it have some meaningful ways of monitoring commitments and encouraging compliance by both donors and recipients? Debates such as these will reflect views on the purposes of food aid itself. Conversely, debates regarding these broader questions carry consequences for the formation of views on the issues involved in the FAC negotiations. This paper's purpose is solely to outline issues and options; hence it does not advocate for particular positions." Authors' AbstractFood aid, International agreements, International organizations, Humanitarian assistance, Human rights, Local purchase, Triangular transaction, Development assistance, Trade agreements, Grain trade, Code of conduct, Needs assessment,

ALL-MASK: A Reconfigurable Logic Locking Method for Multicore Architecture with Sequential-Instruction-Oriented Key

Intellectual property (IP) piracy has become a non-negligible problem as the integrated circuit (IC) production supply chain is becoming increasingly globalized and separated that enables attacks by potentially untrusted attackers. Logic locking is a widely adopted method to lock the circuit module with a key and prevent hackers from cracking it. The key is the critical aspect of logic locking, but the existing works have overlooked three possible challenges of the key: safety of key storage, easy key-attempt from interface and key-related overheads, bringing the further challenges of low error rate and small state space. In this work, the key is dynamically generated by utilizing the huge space of a CPU core, and the unlocking is performed implicitly through the interconnection inside the chip. A novel low-cost logic reconfigurable gate is together proposed with ferroelectric FET (FeFET) to mitigate the reverse engineering and removal attack. Compared to the common logic locking methods, our proposed approach is 19,945 times more time consuming to traverse all the possible combinations in only 9-bit-key condition. Furthermore, our technique let key length increases this complexity exponentially and ensure the logic obfuscation effect.Comment: 15 pages, 17 figure

Harnessing Flexible and Reliable Demand Response Under Customer Uncertainties

Demand response (DR) is a cost-effective and environmentally friendly approach for mitigating the uncertainties in renewable energy integration by taking advantage of the flexibility of customers' demands. However, existing DR programs suffer from either low participation due to strict commitment requirements or not being reliable in voluntary programs. In addition, the capacity planning for energy storage/reserves is traditionally done separately from the demand response program design, which incurs inefficiencies. Moreover, customers often face high uncertainties in their costs in providing demand response, which is not well studied in literature. This paper first models the problem of joint capacity planning and demand response program design by a stochastic optimization problem, which incorporates the uncertainties from renewable energy generation, customer power demands, as well as the customers' costs in providing DR. We propose online DR control policies based on the optimal structures of the offline solution. A distributed algorithm is then developed for implementing the control policies without efficiency loss. We further offer enhanced policy design by allowing flexibilities into the commitment level. We perform real world trace based numerical simulations. Results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can achieve near optimal social costs, and significant social cost savings compared to baseline methods

Autonomous Volterra algorithm for steady-state analysis of nonlinear circuits

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A practical regularization technique for modified nodal analysis in large-scale time-domain circuit simulation

Fast full-chip time-domain simulation calls for advanced numerical integration techniques with capability to handle the systems with (tens of) millions of variables resulting from the modified nodal analysis (MNA). General MNA formulation, however, leads to a differential algebraic equation (DAE) system with singular coefficient matrix, for which most of explicit methods, which usually offer better scalability than implicit methods, are not readily available. In this paper, we develop a practical two-stage strategy to remove the singularity in MNA equations of large-scale circuit networks. A topological index reduction is first applied to reduce the DAE index of the MNA equation to one. The index-1 system is then fed into a systematic process to eliminate excess variables in one run, which leads to a nonsingular system. The whole regularization process is devised with emphasis on exact equivalence, low complexity, and sparsity preservation, and is thus well suited to handle extremely large circuits. © 2012 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Fast scaling in the residue number system

Copyright © 2009 IEEEA new scheme for precisely scaling numbers in the residue number system (RNS) is presented. The scale factor K can be any number coprime to the RNS moduli. Lookup table implementations are used as a basis for comparisons between the new scheme and scaling schemes from the literature. It is shown that new scheme decreases hardware complexity compared to previous schemes without affecting time complexity.Yinan Kong and Braden Phillip