How to pair with a human

We introduce a protocol, that we call Human Key Agreement, that allows pairs of humans to establish a key in a (seemingly hopeless) case where no public-key infrastructure is available, the users do not share any common secret, and have never been connected by any physically-secure channel. Our key agreement scheme, while vulnerable to the human-in-the middle attacks, is secure against any malicious machine-in-the middle. The only assumption that we make is that the attacker is a machine that is not able to break the Captcha puzzles (introduced by von Ahn et al., EUROCRYPT 2003). Our main tool is a primitive that we call a Simultaneous Turing Test, which is a protocol that allows two users to verify if they are both human, in such a way that if one of them is not a human, then he does not learn whether the other one is human, or not. To construct this tool we use a Universally-Composable Password Authenticated Key Agreement of Canetti et al. (EUROCRYPT 2005)

Future Tense

Nature - Humans - Past - Future - Presence - Absence These familiar terms are the stepping stones of thought that went into my thesis work. While some may pair these words together as dichotomies, I concentrate on the balancing act that exists between them. Since the first Industrial Revolution beginning in the mid-18th century, human activities have significantly altered the rest of the natural world. Other species have evolved in reaction to circumstances produced by human actions. Through my own observations of nature and research into how humans have impacted nature’s evolution, speculation began to swell as to what does the future look like? My thesis work presents found objects from human life intermingled with my own ceramic pieces that are inspired by nature but have elements of peculiarity. The relics represent a human existence and the ceramic components act as a symbol of other forms of life. These familiar, yet odd growth forms imply futurity, a continued existence. This futurity is stemming from a human element that is clearly from the past, combined with this altered view of nature. Are humans of the past too? Are these growths something of the future? At a fundamental level, the work I make as an artist is intended to imply that life will continue in some form, with or without us. My work evokes a glimpse of how things may evolve in the future in order to stress the importance of mindful consideration of how the decisions we make impact the environment

Toward Explainable Fashion Recommendation

Many studies have been conducted so far to build systems for recommending fashion items and outfits. Although they achieve good performances in their respective tasks, most of them cannot explain their judgments to the users, which compromises their usefulness. Toward explainable fashion recommendation, this study proposes a system that is able not only to provide a goodness score for an outfit but also to explain the score by providing reason behind it. For this purpose, we propose a method for quantifying how influential each feature of each item is to the score. Using this influence value, we can identify which item and what feature make the outfit good or bad. We represent the image of each item with a combination of human-interpretable features, and thereby the identification of the most influential item-feature pair gives useful explanation of the output score. To evaluate the performance of this approach, we design an experiment that can be performed without human annotation; we replace a single item-feature pair in an outfit so that the score will decrease, and then we test if the proposed method can detect the replaced item correctly using the above influence values. The experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately detect bad items in outfits lowering their scores

Turning it inside out: The organization of human septin heterooligomers.

Septin family proteins are quite similar to each other both within and between eukaryotic species. Typically, multiple discrete septins co-assemble into linear heterooligomers (usually hexameric or octameric rods) with a variety of cellular functions. We know little about how incorporation of different septins confers different properties to such complexes. This issue is especially acute in human cells where 13 separate septin gene products (often produced in multiple forms arising from alternative start codons and differential splicing) are expressed in a tissue-specific manner. Based on sequence alignments and phylogenetic criteria, human septins fall into four distinct groups predictive of their interactions, that is, members of the same group appear to occupy the same position within oligomeric septin protomers, which are "palindromic" (have twofold rotational symmetry about a central homodimeric pair). Many such protomers are capable of end-to-end polymerization, generating filaments. Over a decade ago, a study using X-ray crystallography and single-particle electron microscopy deduced the arrangement within recombinant heterohexamers comprising representatives of three human septin groups-SEPT2, SEPT6, and SEPT7. This model greatly influenced subsequent studies of human and other septin complexes, including how incorporating a septin from a fourth group forms heterooctamers, as first observed in budding yeast. Two recent studies, including one in this issue of Cytoskeleton, provide clear evidence that, in fact, the organization of subunits within human septin heterohexamers and heterooctamers is inverted relative to the original model. These findings are discussed here in a broader context, including possible causes for the initial confusion