A proposal for founding mistrustful quantum cryptography on coin tossing

A significant branch of classical cryptography deals with the problems which arise when mistrustful parties need to generate, process or exchange information. As Kilian showed a while ago, mistrustful classical cryptography can be founded on a single protocol, oblivious transfer, from which general secure multi-party computations can be built. The scope of mistrustful quantum cryptography is limited by no-go theorems, which rule out, inter alia, unconditionally secure quantum protocols for oblivious transfer or general secure two-party computations. These theorems apply even to protocols which take relativistic signalling constraints into account. The best that can be hoped for, in general, are quantum protocols computationally secure against quantum attack. I describe here a method for building a classically certified bit commitment, and hence every other mistrustful cryptographic task, from a secure coin tossing protocol. No security proof is attempted, but I sketch reasons why these protocols might resist quantum computational attack.Comment: Title altered in deference to Physical Review's fear of question marks. Published version; references update

Adaptive Markets and the New World Order

In the adaptive markets hypothesis (AMH) intelligent but fallible investors learn from and adapt to changing economic environments. This implies that markets are not always efficient but are usually competitive and adaptive, varying in their degree of efficiency as the environment and investor population change over time. The AMH has several implications, including the possibility of negative risk premiums, alpha converging to beta, and the importance of macro factors and risk budgeting in asset allocation policies

Non-Blocking Signature of very large SOAP Messages

Data transfer and staging services are common components in Grid-based, or more generally, in service-oriented applications. Security mechanisms play a central role in such services, especially when they are deployed in sensitive application fields like e-health. The adoption of WS-Security and related standards to SOAP-based transfer services is, however, problematic as a straightforward adoption of SOAP with MTOM introduces considerable inefficiencies in the signature generation process when large data sets are involved. This paper proposes a non-blocking, signature generation approach enabling a stream-like processing with considerable performance enhancements.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

Non-Blocking Signature of very large SOAP Messages

Data transfer and staging services are common components in Grid-based, or more generally, in service-oriented applications. Security mechanisms play a central role in such services, especially when they are deployed in sensitive application fields like e-health. The adoption of WS-Security and related standards to SOAP-based transfer services is, however, problematic as a straightforward adoption of SOAP with MTOM introduces considerable inefficiencies in the signature generation process when large data sets are involved. This paper proposes a non-blocking, signature generation approach enabling a stream-like processing with considerable performance enhancements.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

Food volume estimation for quantifying dietary intake with a wearable camera

A novel food volume measurement technique is proposed in this paper for accurate quantification of the daily dietary intake of the user. The technique is based on simul- taneous localisation and mapping (SLAM), a modified version of convex hull algorithm, and a 3D mesh object reconstruction technique. This paper explores the feasibility of applying SLAM techniques for continuous food volume measurement with a monocular wearable camera. A sparse map will be generated by SLAM after capturing the images of the food item with the camera and the multiple convex hull algorithm is applied to form a 3D mesh object. The volume of the target object can then be computed based on the mesh object. Compared to previous volume measurement techniques, the proposed method can measure the food volume continuously with no prior information such as pre-defined food shape model. Experiments have been carried out to evaluate this new technique and showed the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed algorithm in measuring food volume

Dynamical Screening of Atom Confined by Finite-Width Fullerene

This is an investigation on the dynamical screening of an atom confined within a fullerene of finite width. The two surfaces of the fullerene lead to the presence of two surface plasmon eigenmodes. It is shown that, in the vicinity of these two eigenfrequencies, there is a large enhancement of the confined atom's photoabsorption rate.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures correction of figure 2 and equation 1

Leading large-x logarithms of the quark-gluon contributions to inclusive Higgs-boson and lepton-pair production

We present all-order expressions for the leading double-logarithmic threshold contributions to the quark-gluon coefficient functions for inclusive Higgs-boson production in the heavy top-quark limit and for Drell-Yan lepton-pair production. These results have been derived using the structure of the unfactorized cross sections in dimensional regularization and the large-x resummation of the gluon-quark and quark-gluon splitting functions. The resummed coefficient functions, which are identical up to colour factor replacements, are similar to their counterparts in deep-inelastic scattering but slightly more complicated.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX, 1 figure (.eps). DESY address until 31 August 201

Benets of tight coupled architectures for the integration of GNSS receiver and Vanet transceiver

Vehicular adhoc networks (VANETs) are one emerging type of networks that will enable a broad range of applications such as public safety, traffic management, traveler information support and entertain ment. Whether wireless access may be asynchronous or synchronous (respectively as in the upcoming IEEE 8021.11p standard or in some alternative emerging solutions), a synchronization among nodes is required. Moreover, the information on position is needed to let vehicular services work and to correctly forward the messages. As a result, timing and positioning are a strong prerequisite of VANETs. Also the diffusion of enhanced GNSS Navigators paves the way to the integration between GNSS receivers and VANET transceiv ers. This position paper presents an analysis on potential benefits coming from a tightcoupling between the two: the dissertation is meant to show to what extent Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) services could benefit from the proposed architectur