Verifiable Classroom Voting in Practice

Classroom voting is an important pedagogical technique in which students learn by voting on the answers to questions. The same voting platform is also often used for exercises such as rating lecturer performance and voting for prizes. In this paper, we present VCV, an end-to-end (E2E) verifiable classroom voting system built based on the DRE-i protocol. Our system provides E2E verifiability without tallying authorities; it supports voting through mobile phones with constrained computing resources; it reports the tallying results instantly after voting is finished along with cryptographic proofs that enable the public to verify the tallying integrity. Since 2013, the VCV system has been used regularly in real classroom teaching, as well as academic prize competitions, in Newcastle University with positive user feedback. Our experience suggests that E2E verifiable voting through the internet and using mobile phones is feasible for daily routine activities such as classroom voting

Seeking Anonymity in an Internet Panopticon

Obtaining and maintaining anonymity on the Internet is challenging. The state of the art in deployed tools, such as Tor, uses onion routing (OR) to relay encrypted connections on a detour passing through randomly chosen relays scattered around the Internet. Unfortunately, OR is known to be vulnerable at least in principle to several classes of attacks for which no solution is known or believed to be forthcoming soon. Current approaches to anonymity also appear unable to offer accurate, principled measurement of the level or quality of anonymity a user might obtain. Toward this end, we offer a high-level view of the Dissent project, the first systematic effort to build a practical anonymity system based purely on foundations that offer measurable and formally provable anonymity properties. Dissent builds on two key pre-existing primitives - verifiable shuffles and dining cryptographers - but for the first time shows how to scale such techniques to offer measurable anonymity guarantees to thousands of participants. Further, Dissent represents the first anonymity system designed from the ground up to incorporate some systematic countermeasure for each of the major classes of known vulnerabilities in existing approaches, including global traffic analysis, active attacks, and intersection attacks. Finally, because no anonymity protocol alone can address risks such as software exploits or accidental self-identification, we introduce WiNon, an experimental operating system architecture to harden the uses of anonymity tools such as Tor and Dissent against such attacks.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figure

Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse

The goal of argumentation mining, an evolving research field in computational linguistics, is to design methods capable of analyzing people's argumentation. In this article, we go beyond the state of the art in several ways. (i) We deal with actual Web data and take up the challenges given by the variety of registers, multiple domains, and unrestricted noisy user-generated Web discourse. (ii) We bridge the gap between normative argumentation theories and argumentation phenomena encountered in actual data by adapting an argumentation model tested in an extensive annotation study. (iii) We create a new gold standard corpus (90k tokens in 340 documents) and experiment with several machine learning methods to identify argument components. We offer the data, source codes, and annotation guidelines to the community under free licenses. Our findings show that argumentation mining in user-generated Web discourse is a feasible but challenging task.Comment: Cite as: Habernal, I. & Gurevych, I. (2017). Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse. Computational Linguistics 43(1), pp. 125-17

On Choosing Games And What Counts as a “Good” Game

Before researchers can perform studies using commercial games, they must choose which game or games to study. The manner in which that choice is made and justified is the focus of this paper

Spartan Daily November 6, 2012

Volume 139, Issue 38https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1354/thumbnail.jp

A decentralized consensus application using blockchain ecosystem

The consensus is a critical operation of any decision-making process. It involves a set of eligible members; whose decision need to be honored by taking their acknowledgment before making any decision. The traditional consensus process follows centralized architecture, the members need to rely on and trust this architecture. The proposed system aims to develop a secure decentralized consensus application in the untrusted environment by making use of blockchain technology along with smart contract and interplanetary file system (IPFS)

On Secure E-Voting over Blockchain

This article discusses secure methods to conduct e-voting over a blockchain in three different settings: decentralized voting, centralized remote voting, and centralized polling station voting. These settings cover almost all voting scenarios that occur in practice. A proof-of-concept implementation for decentralized voting over Ethereum's blockchain is presented. This work demonstrates the suitable use of a blockchain not just as a public bulletin board but, more importantly, as a trustworthy computing platform that enforces the correct execution of the voting protocol in a publicly verifiable manner. We also discuss scaling up a blockchain-based voting application for national elections. We show that for national-scale elections the major verifiability problems can be addressed without having to depend on any blockchain. However, a blockchain remains a viable option to realize a public bulletin board, which has the advantage of being a "preventive"measure to stop retrospective changes on previously published records as opposed to a "detective"measure like the use of mirror websites. CCS Concepts: • Security and privacy