183,248 research outputs found
Dwarna : a blockchain solution for dynamic consent in biobanking
Dynamic consent aims to empower research partners and facilitate active participation in the research process. Used within
the context of biobanking, it gives individuals access to information and control to determine how and where their
biospecimens and data should be used. We present Dwarna—a web portal for ‘dynamic consent’ that acts as a hub
connecting the different stakeholders of the Malta Biobank: biobank managers, researchers, research partners, and the
general public. The portal stores research partners’ consent in a blockchain to create an immutable audit trail of research
partners’ consent changes. Dwarna’s structure also presents a solution to the European Union’s General Data Protection
Regulation’s right to erasure—a right that is seemingly incompatible with the blockchain model. Dwarna’s transparent
structure increases trustworthiness in the biobanking process by giving research partners more control over which research
studies they participate in, by facilitating the withdrawal of consent and by making it possible to request that the biospecimen
and associated data are destroyed.peer-reviewe
Secure and Trustable Electronic Medical Records Sharing using Blockchain
Electronic medical records (EMRs) are critical, highly sensitive private
information in healthcare, and need to be frequently shared among peers.
Blockchain provides a shared, immutable and transparent history of all the
transactions to build applications with trust, accountability and transparency.
This provides a unique opportunity to develop a secure and trustable EMR data
management and sharing system using blockchain. In this paper, we present our
perspectives on blockchain based healthcare data management, in particular, for
EMR data sharing between healthcare providers and for research studies. We
propose a framework on managing and sharing EMR data for cancer patient care.
In collaboration with Stony Brook University Hospital, we implemented our
framework in a prototype that ensures privacy, security, availability, and
fine-grained access control over EMR data. The proposed work can significantly
reduce the turnaround time for EMR sharing, improve decision making for medical
care, and reduce the overall costComment: AMIA 2017 Annual Symposium Proceeding
Bitcoin over Tor isn't a good idea
Bitcoin is a decentralized P2P digital currency in which coins are generated
by a distributed set of miners and transaction are broadcasted via a
peer-to-peer network. While Bitcoin provides some level of anonymity (or rather
pseudonymity) by encouraging the users to have any number of random-looking
Bitcoin addresses, recent research shows that this level of anonymity is rather
low. This encourages users to connect to the Bitcoin network through
anonymizers like Tor and motivates development of default Tor functionality for
popular mobile SPV clients. In this paper we show that combining Tor and
Bitcoin creates an attack vector for the deterministic and stealthy
man-in-the-middle attacks. A low-resource attacker can gain full control of
information flows between all users who chose to use Bitcoin over Tor. In
particular the attacker can link together user's transactions regardless of
pseudonyms used, control which Bitcoin blocks and transactions are relayed to
the user and can \ delay or discard user's transactions and blocks. In
collusion with a powerful miner double-spending attacks become possible and a
totally virtual Bitcoin reality can be created for such set of users. Moreover,
we show how an attacker can fingerprint users and then recognize them and learn
their IP address when they decide to connect to the Bitcoin network directly.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 4 table
Quantifying Facial Age by Posterior of Age Comparisons
We introduce a novel approach for annotating large quantity of in-the-wild
facial images with high-quality posterior age distribution as labels. Each
posterior provides a probability distribution of estimated ages for a face. Our
approach is motivated by observations that it is easier to distinguish who is
the older of two people than to determine the person's actual age. Given a
reference database with samples of known ages and a dataset to label, we can
transfer reliable annotations from the former to the latter via
human-in-the-loop comparisons. We show an effective way to transform such
comparisons to posterior via fully-connected and SoftMax layers, so as to
permit end-to-end training in a deep network. Thanks to the efficient and
effective annotation approach, we collect a new large-scale facial age dataset,
dubbed `MegaAge', which consists of 41,941 images. Data can be downloaded from
our project page mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/projects/MegaAge and
github.com/zyx2012/Age_estimation_BMVC2017. With the dataset, we train a
network that jointly performs ordinal hyperplane classification and posterior
distribution learning. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on
popular benchmarks such as MORPH2, Adience, and the newly proposed MegaAge.Comment: To appear on BMVC 2017 (oral) revised versio
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