799 research outputs found

    Multidisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the law

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    This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

    Auditable and performant Byzantine consensus for permissioned ledgers

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    Permissioned ledgers allow users to execute transactions against a data store, and retain proof of their execution in a replicated ledger. Each replica verifies the transactions’ execution and ensures that, in perpetuity, a committed transaction cannot be removed from the ledger. Unfortunately, this is not guaranteed by today’s permissioned ledgers, which can be re-written if an arbitrary number of replicas collude. In addition, the transaction throughput of permissioned ledgers is low, hampering real-world deployments, by not taking advantage of multi-core CPUs and hardware accelerators. This thesis explores how permissioned ledgers and their consensus protocols can be made auditable in perpetuity; even when all replicas collude and re-write the ledger. It also addresses how Byzantine consensus protocols can be changed to increase the execution throughput of complex transactions. This thesis makes the following contributions: 1. Always auditable Byzantine consensus protocols. We present a permissioned ledger system that can assign blame to individual replicas regardless of how many of them misbehave. This is achieved by signing and storing consensus protocol messages in the ledger and providing clients with signed, universally-verifiable receipts. 2. Performant transaction execution with hardware accelerators. Next, we describe a cloud-based ML inference service that provides strong integrity guarantees, while staying compatible with current inference APIs. We change the Byzantine consensus protocol to execute machine learning (ML) inference computation on GPUs to optimize throughput and latency of ML inference computation. 3. Parallel transactions execution on multi-core CPUs. Finally, we introduce a permissioned ledger that executes transactions, in parallel, on multi-core CPUs. We separate the execution of transactions between the primary and secondary replicas. The primary replica executes transactions on multiple CPU cores and creates a dependency graph of the transactions that the backup replicas utilize to execute transactions in parallel.Open Acces

    Towards Sybil Resilience in Decentralized Learning

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    Federated learning is a privacy-enforcing machine learning technology but suffers from limited scalability. This limitation mostly originates from the internet connection and memory capacity of the central parameter server, and the complexity of the model aggregation function. Decentralized learning has recently been emerging as a promising alternative to federated learning. This novel technology eliminates the need for a central parameter server by decentralizing the model aggregation across all participating nodes. Numerous studies have been conducted on improving the resilience of federated learning against poisoning and Sybil attacks, whereas the resilience of decentralized learning remains largely unstudied. This research gap serves as the main motivator for this study, in which our objective is to improve the Sybil poisoning resilience of decentralized learning. We present SybilWall, an innovative algorithm focused on increasing the resilience of decentralized learning against targeted Sybil poisoning attacks. By combining a Sybil-resistant aggregation function based on similarity between Sybils with a novel probabilistic gossiping mechanism, we establish a new benchmark for scalable, Sybil-resilient decentralized learning. A comprehensive empirical evaluation demonstrated that SybilWall outperforms existing state-of-the-art solutions designed for federated learning scenarios and is the only algorithm to obtain consistent accuracy over a range of adversarial attack scenarios. We also found SybilWall to diminish the utility of creating many Sybils, as our evaluations demonstrate a higher success rate among adversaries employing fewer Sybils. Finally, we suggest a number of possible improvements to SybilWall and highlight promising future research directions

    A Novel Two-Layer DAG-based Reactive Protocol for IoT Data Reliability in Metaverse

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    Many applications, e.g., digital twins, rely on sensing data from Internet of Things (IoT) networks, which is used to infer event(s) and initiate actions to affect an environment. This gives rise to concerns relating to data integrity and provenance. One possible solution to address these concerns is to employ blockchain. However, blockchain has high resource requirements, thereby making it unsuitable for use on resource-constrained IoT devices. To this end, this paper proposes a novel approach, called two-layer directed acyclic graph (2LDAG), whereby IoT devices only store a digital fingerprint of data generated by their neighbors. Further, it proposes a novel proof-of-path (PoP) protocol that allows an operator or digital twin to verify data in an on-demand manner. The simulation results show 2LDAG has storage and communication cost that is respectively two and three orders of magnitude lower than traditional blockchain and also blockchains that use a DAG structure. Moreover, 2LDAG achieves consensus even when 49\% of nodes are malicious

    Trustworthy Decentralized Last Mile Delivery Framework Using Blockchain

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    The fierce competition and rapidly growing eCommerce market are painful headaches for logistics companies. In 2021, Canada Post’s parcel volume peaked at 361 million units with a minimum charge of $10 per each. The Last-Mile Delivery (LMD) is the final leg of the supply chain that ends with the package at the customer’s doorstep. LMD involves moving small shipments to geographically dispersed locations with high expectations on service levels and precise time windows. Therefore, it is the most complex and costly logistics process, accounting for more than 50% of the overall supply chain cost. Innovations like Crowdshipping, such as Uber and Amazon Flex, help overcome this inefficiency and provide an outstanding delivery experience by enabling freelancers willing to deliver packages if they are around. However, apartfrom the centralized nature of the Crowdshipping platforms, retailers pay a fee for outsourcing the delivery process, which is rising. Besides, they lack transparency, and most of them, if not all, are platform monopolies in the making. New technologies such as blockchain recently introduced an opportunity to improve logistics and LMD operations. Several papers in the literature suggested employing blockchain and other cryptographic techniques for parcel delivery. Hence,this thesis presents a blockchain-based free-intermediaries crowd-logistics model and investigates the challenges that could harbor adopting this solution, such as user trust, data safety, security of transactions, and tracking service quality. Our framework combines a security assessment that examines the possible vulnerabilities of the proposed design and suggestions for mitigation and protection. Besides, it encourages couriers to act honestly by using a decentralized reputation model for couriers’ ratings based on their past behavior. A security analysis of our proposed system hasbeen provided, and the complete code of the smart contract has been publicly made available on GitHub

    Blockchain-Coordinated Frameworks for Scalable and Secure Supply Chain Networks

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    Supply chains have progressed through time from being limited to a few regional traders to becoming complicated business networks. As a result, supply chain management systems now rely significantly on the digital revolution for the privacy and security of data. Due to key qualities of blockchain, such as transparency, immutability and decentralization, it has recently gained a lot of interest as a way to solve security, privacy and scalability problems in supply chains. However conventional blockchains are not appropriate for supply chain ecosystems because they are computationally costly, have a limited potential to scale and fail to provide trust. Consequently, due to limitations with a lack of trust and coordination, supply chains tend to fail to foster trust among the network’s participants. Assuring data privacy in a supply chain ecosystem is another challenge. If information is being shared with a large number of participants without establishing data privacy, access control risks arise in the network. Protecting data privacy is a concern when sending corporate data, including locations, manufacturing supplies and demand information. The third challenge in supply chain management is scalability, which continues to be a significant barrier to adoption. As the amount of transactions in a supply chain tends to increase along with the number of nodes in a network. So scalability is essential for blockchain adoption in supply chain networks. This thesis seeks to address the challenges of privacy, scalability and trust by providing frameworks for how to effectively combine blockchains with supply chains. This thesis makes four novel contributions. It first develops a blockchain-based framework with Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) model to assure data privacy by adopting a distributed framework to enable fine grained, dynamic access control management for supply chain management. To solve the data privacy challenge, AccessChain is developed. This proposed AccessChain model has two types of ledgers in the system: local and global. Local ledgers are used to store business contracts between stakeholders and the ABAC model management, whereas the global ledger is used to record transaction data. AccessChain can enable decentralized, fine-grained and dynamic access control management in SCM when combined with the ABAC model and blockchain technology (BCT). The framework enables a systematic approach that advantages the supply chain, and the experiments yield convincing results. Furthermore, the results of performance monitoring shows that AccessChain’s response time with four local ledgers is acceptable, and therefore it provides significantly greater scalability. Next, a framework for reducing the bullwhip effect (BWE) in SCM is proposed. The framework also focuses on combining data visibility with trust. BWE is first observed in SC and then a blockchain architecture design is used to minimize it. Full sharing of demand data has been shown to help improve the robustness of overall performance in a multiechelon SC environment, especially for BWE mitigation and cumulative cost reduction. It is observed that when it comes to providing access to data, information sharing using a blockchain has some obvious benefits in a supply chain. Furthermore, when data sharing is distributed, parties in the supply chain will have fair access to other parties’ data, even though they are farther downstream. Sharing customer demand is important in a supply chain to enhance decision-making, reduce costs and promote the final end product. This work also explores the ability of BCT as a solution in a distributed ledger approach to create a trust-enhanced environment where trust is established so that stakeholders can share their information effectively. To provide visibility and coordination along with a blockchain consensus process, a new consensus algorithm, namely Reputation-based proof-of cooperation (RPoC), is proposed for blockchain-based SCM, which does not involve validators to solve any mathematical puzzle before storing a new block. The RPoC algorithm is an efficient and scalable consensus algorithm that selects the consensus node dynamically and permits a large number of nodes to participate in the consensus process. The algorithm decreases the workload on individual nodes while increasing consensus performance by allocating the transaction verification process to specific nodes. Through extensive theoretical analyses and experimentation, the suitability of the proposed algorithm is well grounded in terms of scalability and efficiency. The thesis concludes with a blockchain-enabled framework that addresses the issue of preserving privacy and security for an open-bid auction system. This work implements a bid management system in a private BC environment to provide a secure bidding scheme. The novelty of this framework derives from an enhanced approach for integrating BC structures by replacing the original chain structure with a tree structure. Throughout the online world, user privacy is a primary concern, because the electronic environment enables the collection of personal data. Hence a suitable cryptographic protocol for an open-bid auction atop BC is proposed. Here the primary aim is to achieve security and privacy with greater efficiency, which largely depends on the effectiveness of the encryption algorithms used by BC. Essentially this work considers Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and a dynamic cryptographic accumulator encryption algorithm to enhance security between auctioneer and bidder. The proposed e-bidding scheme and the findings from this study should foster the further growth of BC strategies

    A Study of the Multi-Faceted Impact of the Second Vatican Council upon Catholicism and Beyond

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    The Topic The research analyzes the development of Catholicism in the 20th century. After the First Vatican Council (1868-1870) and the promulgation of the dogma of papal infallibility and papal primacy, the Roman Catholic Church lost much credibility and influence with Christianity, becoming increasingly isolated from the developing modern world. In this situation, Catholicism needs a revival, a reconfirmation of its long-lost authority. On the other hand, knowing that the Roman Catholic Church fulfills a very important role in biblical prophecies, we will observe, in this study, an adaptation of Catholicism to the modern world precisely to regain its credibility. In this way we will see how the papacy fulfills its prophesied role! The Purpose The purpose of the research is to follow the integration of Catholicism in the modern world through the Second Vatican Council, to analyze the updates that Catholicism makes at the level of dogma and mission and the multiple impact that Vatican II has on Catholicism and beyond, thus unfolding the biblical prophecy. The Source The research required both the consultation of specialized literature (historical documents, official statements, etc.), as well as biographical materials (for details on the lives of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, the two emblematic figures on whom the life of the Second Vatican Council depended). At the same time, regarding the work of Catholicism and the place it occupies in biblical prophecy, I consulted the Bible and testimonies of the writings of Ellen G. White. Conclusions The promulgation of the dogma of papal primacy and papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council produced discontent in the religious world, leading to the spiritual and political isolation of the Roman Catholic Church. Bible prophecy says, however, that Catholicism will have a very important role in the unfolding of the final events, but not anyway, but only if it regains its credibility and authority before the world. And the Second Vatican Council did just that: it changed the image of Catholicism by restoring it to a position of honor in the religious world. Vatican II becomes a landmark in the life of Catholicism, dividing time into two: before Vatican II and after Vatican II. Spiritually, things will move in a direction thought by God, the papacy having a well-defined role, and the Seventh-day Adventist Church knows this... What will happen, we will soon see

    Forecasting the Past and Recalling the Future: Lemniscate Narratives in the Work of Richard Powers

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    Richard Powers’s multifaceted accounts of individuals navigating turbulent histories are relayed via nonlinear timelines, situating the future in relation to an imminent past. The characters’ reassembly of pre-existing compositions, patterns, and traditions in self-styled configurations, engages with interlocking legacies whilst asserting their individual perspective on reality. Multiple analyses of Powers’s texts have focused on the permeable borders between interconnected genres, eras, and disciplines in relation to spliced or stereoscopic images of society. The six texts analysed in this comparative study depict twofold timelines intersecting in the present, creating a lemniscate form with a seemingly endless course of expansion. This comparative approach assesses the converging and diverging lemniscate narrative form and content of six texts written at different stages in Powers’s career. The thesis explores the purpose of each text’s proposed lemniscate temporal frame in relation to the reoccurring depictions of transmedial utopian fictions and a neocolonial US history. This synthesis of pre-existing forms, modernist, and postmodernist world views resembles a metamodernist or transglossic literary style. The tensions between individual and hegemonic ideologies are explored within the three comparative chapters, evaluating the similarities and differences between Powers’s treatment of music and science, innovation and neocolonialism, and individual and collective responses to autonomy in the Atomic Age US
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