Virtual Site as an aid to first-year learning

Courses run by the School of the Built Environment have a range of entry requirements that enable diverse students and those with lower academic qualifications to gain entry. This results in a particular challenge for the Documentation & Estimating module, which is a very practical, skillsand competence-based module. It is delivered to large tutorial cohorts of mixed courses, abilities, ages and experience. Many students need one-toone guidance to understand what, practically, they have to do. They are given the theory first in a lecture and then have practical tutorials to carry out assessed exercises with limited tutor contact time. The module includes some basic surveying techniques and a levelling exercise which involves the transfer of a level from an assumed benchmark to establish a temporary benchmark some distance away. Many students have problems with computation of results. In spite of a careful introduction and explanation of the use of the instruments and techniques, many students find it difficult to visualise what is happening

Fast formulas for computing cryptographic pairings

The most powerful known primitive in public-key cryptography is undoubtedly elliptic curve pairings. Upon their introduction just over ten years ago the computation of pairings was far too slow for them to be considered a practical option. This resulted in a vast amount of research from many mathematicians and computer scientists around the globe aiming to improve this computation speed. From the use of modern results in algebraic and arithmetic geometry to the application of foundational number theory that dates back to the days of Gauss and Euler, cryptographic pairings have since experienced a great deal of improvement. As a result, what was an extremely expensive computation that took several minutes is now a high-speed operation that takes less than a millisecond. This thesis presents a range of optimisations to the state-of-the-art in cryptographic pairing computation. Both through extending prior techniques, and introducing several novel ideas of our own, our work has contributed to recordbreaking pairing implementations

A FPGA system for QRS complex detection based on Integer Wavelet Transform

Due to complexity of their mathematical computation, many QRS detectors are implemented in software and cannot operate in real time. The paper presents a real-time hardware based solution for this task. To filter ECG signal and to extract QRS complex it employs the Integer Wavelet Transform. The system includes several components and is incorporated in a single FPGA chip what makes it suitable for direct embedding in medical instruments or wearable health care devices. It has sufficient accuracy (about 95%), showing remarkable noise immunity and low cost. Additionally, each system component is composed of several identical blocks/cells what makes the design highly generic. The capacity of today existing FPGAs allows even dozens of detectors to be placed in a single chip. After the theoretical introduction of wavelets and the review of their application in QRS detection, it will be shown how some basic wavelets can be optimized for easy hardware implementation. For this purpose the migration to the integer arithmetic and additional simplifications in calculations has to be done. Further, the system architecture will be presented with the demonstrations in both, software simulation and real testing. At the end, the working performances and preliminary results will be outlined and discussed. The same principle can be applied with other signals where the hardware implementation of wavelet transform can be of benefit

The Brown-York mass of black holes in Warped Anti-de Sitter space

We give a direct computation of the mass of black holes in Warped Anti-de Sitter space (WAdS) in terms of the Brown-York stress-tensor at the boundary. This permits to explore to what extent the holographic renormalization techniques can be applied to such type of deformation of AdS. We show that, despite some components of the boundary stress-tensor diverge and resist to be regularized by the introduction of local counterterms, the precise combination that gives the quasilocal energy density yields a finite integral. The result turns out to be in agreement with previous computations of the black hole mass obtained with different approaches. This is seen to happen both in the case of Topologically Massive Gravity and of the so-called New Massive Gravity. Here, we focus our attention on the latter. We observe that, despite other conserved charges diverge in the near boundary limit, the finite part in the large radius expansion captures the physically relevant contribution. We compute the black hole angular momentum in this way and we obtain a result that is in perfect agreement with previous calculations.Comment: 8 pages. v2 discussion and appendix added, references added. To appear in JHE

Relational Expressions for Data Transformation and Computation

Separate programming models for data transformation (declarative) and computation (procedural) impact programmer ergonomics, code reusability and database efficiency. To eliminate the necessity for two models or paradigms, we propose a small but high-leverage innovation: the introduction of complete relations into the relational database. Complete relations and the discipline of constraint programming, which concerns them, are founded on the same algebra as relational databases. We claim that by synthesising the relational database of Codd and Date, with the results of the constraint programming community, the relational model holistically offers programmers a single declarative paradigm for both data transformation and computation, reusable code with computations that are indifferent to what is input and what is output, and efficient applications with the query engine optimising and parallelising all levels of data transformation and computation.Comment: 12 pages, 4 tables. To be published in the proceedings of the Shepherding Track of the 2023 Australasian Database Conference Melbourne (Nov 1-3

Optimization of supply diversity for the self-assembly of simple objects in two and three dimensions

The field of algorithmic self-assembly is concerned with the design and analysis of self-assembly systems from a computational perspective, that is, from the perspective of mathematical problems whose study may give insight into the natural processes through which elementary objects self-assemble into more complex ones. One of the main problems of algorithmic self-assembly is the minimum tile set problem (MTSP), which asks for a collection of types of elementary objects (called tiles) to be found for the self-assembly of an object having a pre-established shape. Such a collection is to be as concise as possible, thus minimizing supply diversity, while satisfying a set of stringent constraints having to do with the termination and other properties of the self-assembly process from its tile types. We present a study of what we think is the first practical approach to MTSP. Our study starts with the introduction of an evolutionary heuristic to tackle MTSP and includes results from extensive experimentation with the heuristic on the self-assembly of simple objects in two and three dimensions. The heuristic we introduce combines classic elements from the field of evolutionary computation with a problem-specific variant of Pareto dominance into a multi-objective approach to MTSP.Comment: Minor typos correcte

A supersymmetric exotic field theory in (1+1) dimensions. One loop soliton quantum mass corrections

We consider one loop quantum corrections to soliton mass for the ${\cal N}=1$ supersymmetric extension of the (1+1)-dimensional scalar field theory with the potential $U(\phi) = \phi^2 \cos^2\left(\ln \phi^2\right)$. First, we compute the one loop quantum soliton mass correction of the bosonic sector. To do that, we regularize implicitly such quantity by subtracting and adding its corresponding tadpole graph contribution, and use the renormalization prescription that the added term vanishes with the corresponding counterterms. As a result we get a finite unambiguous formula for the soliton quantum mass corrections up to one loop order. Afterwards, the computation for the supersymmetric case is extended straightforwardly and we obtain for the one loop quantum correction of the SUSY kink mass the expected value previously derived for the SUSY sine-Gordon and $\phi^4$ models. However, we also have found that for a particular value of the parameters, contrary to what was expected, the introduction of supersymmetry in this model worsens ultraviolet divergences rather than improving them.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures; Major modifications included to match version published in JHE

Output privacy in secure multiparty computation

Abstract. In secure multiparty computation, a set of mutually mistrusting players engage in a protocol to compute an arbitrary, publicly known polynomial-sized function of the party’s private inputs, in a way that does not reveal (to an adversary controlling some of the players) any knowledge about the remaining inputs, beyond what can be deduced from the obtained output(s). Since its introduction by Yao [39], and Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson [29], this powerful paradigm has received a lot of attention. All throughout, however, very little attention has been given to the privacy of the players ’ outputs. Yet, disclosure of (part of) the output(s) may have serious consequences for the overall security of the application e.g., when the computed output is a secret key; or when the evaluation of the function is part of a larger computation, so that the function’s output(s) will be used as input(s) in the next phase. In this work, we define the notion of private-output multiparty computation. This newly revised notion encompasses (as a particular case) the classical definition and allows a set of players to jointly compute the output of a common function in such a way that the execution of the protocol reveals no information (to an adversary controlling some of the players) about (some part of) the outputs (other than what follows from the description of the function itself). Next, we formall