Using a gamified monitoring app to change adolescents' snack intake : the development of the REWARD app and evaluation design

Background: As the snacking pattern of European adolescents is of great concern, effective interventions are necessary. Till now health promotion efforts in children and adolescents have had only limited success in changing adolescents' eating patterns and anthropometrics. Therefore, the present study proposes an innovative approach to influence dietary behaviors in youth based on new insights on effective behavior change strategies and attractive intervention channels to engage adolescents. This article describes the rationale, the development, and evaluation design of the 'Snack Track School' app. The aim of the app is to improve the snacking patterns of Flemish 14- to 16-year olds. Methods: The development of the app was informed by the systematic, stepwise, iterative, and collaborative principles of the Intervention Mapping protocol. A four week mHealth intervention was developed based on the dual-system model with behavioral change strategies targeting both the reflective (i.e., active learning, advance organizers, mere exposure, goal-setting, monitoring, and feedback) and automatic processes (i.e., rewards and positive reinforcement). This intervention will be evaluated via a controlled pre-post design in Flemish schools among 1400 adolescents. Discussion: When this intervention including strategies focused on both the reflective and automatic pathway proves to be effective, it will offer a new scientifically-based vision, guidelines and practical tools for public health and health promotion (i.e., incorporation of learning theories in intervention programs)

CSIDH on the surface

For primes p≡3mod4, we show that setting up CSIDH on the surface, i.e., using supersingular elliptic curves with endomorphism ring Z[(1+−p−−−√)/2], amounts to just a few sign switches in the underlying arithmetic. If p≡7mod8 then horizontal 2-isogenies can be used to help compute the class group action. The formulas we derive for these 2-isogenies are very efficient (they basically amount to a single exponentiation in Fp) and allow for a noticeable speed-up, e.g., our resulting CSURF-512 protocol runs about 5.68% faster than CSIDH-512. This improvement is completely orthogonal to all previous speed-ups, constant-time measures and construction of cryptographic primitives that have appeared in the literature so far. At the same time, moving to the surface gets rid of the redundant factor Z3 of the acting ideal-class group, which is present in the case of CSIDH and offers no extra security

Nibbling MAYO: Optimized Implementations for AVX2 and Cortex-M4

MAYO is a popular high-calorie condiment as well as an auspicious candidate in the ongoing NIST competition for additional post-quantum signature schemes achieving competitive signature and public key sizes. In this work, we present high-speed implementations of MAYO using the AVX2 and Armv7E-M instruction sets targeting recent x86 platforms and the Arm Cortex-M4. Moreover, the main contribution of our work is showing that MAYO can be even faster when switching from a bitsliced representation of keys to a nibble-sliced representation. While the bitsliced representation was primarily motivated by faster arithmetic on microcontrollers, we show that it is not necessary for achieving high performance on Cortex-M4. On Cortex-M4, we instead propose to implement the large matrix multiplications of MAYO using the Method of the Four Russians (M4R), which allows us to achieve better performance than when using the bitsliced approach. This results in up to 21% faster signing. For AVX2, the change in representation allows us to implement the arithmetic much faster using shuffle instructions. Signing takes up to 3.2x fewer cycles and key generation and verification enjoy similar speedups. This shows that MAYO is competitive with lattice-based signature schemes on x86 CPUs, and a factor of 2-6 slower than lattice-based signature schemes on Cortex-M4 (which can still be considered competitive)

Nibbling MAYO: Optimized Implementations for AVX2 and Cortex-M4

MAYO is a popular high-calorie condiment as well as an auspicious candidate in the ongoing NIST competition for additional post-quantum signature schemes achieving competitive signature and public key sizes. In this work, we present high-speed implementations of MAYO using the AVX2 and Armv7E-M instruction sets targeting recent x86 platforms and the Arm Cortex-M4. Moreover, the main contribution of our work is showing that MAYO can be even faster when switching from a bitsliced representation of keys to a nibble-sliced representation. While the bitsliced representation was primarily motivated by faster arithmetic on microcontrollers, we show that it is not necessary for achieving high performance on Cortex-M4. On Cortex-M4, we instead propose to implement the large matrix multiplications of MAYO using the Method of the Four Russians (M4R), which allows us to achieve better performance than when using the bitsliced approach. This results in up to 21% faster signing. For AVX2, the change in representation allows us to implement the arithmetic much faster using shuffle instructions. Signing takes up to 3.2x fewer cycles and key generation and verification enjoy similar speedups. This shows that MAYO is competitive with lattice-based signature schemes on x86 CPUs, and a factor of 2-6 slower than lattice-based signature schemes on Cortex-M4 (which can still be considered competitive)

Development of a 3D dynamic flood web GIS visualisation tool

Low elevation coastal areas are vulnerable to the effects of sea level rise and to an increase in the frequency and severity of storm surge events due to climate change.Coastal urban areas are at risk because coastal flooding causes extensive damage to energy and transportation infrastructure, disruptions to the delivery of services, devastating tolls on the public’s health and,occasionally, significant loss of life. Although scientists widely stress the compelling need to mitigate and adapt to climate change, public awareness lags behind. Because WebGIS maps (web-based geographic information systems) quickly convey strong messages, condense complex information, engage people on issues of environmental change, and motivate personal actions, this paper focuses on searching the ideal flood assessment WebGIS method to encourage people to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Surveys demonstrated that 3D visualisations have an enormous added value because they are more vivid and therefore more understandable and make it easier to imagine the consequences of a flood than2D visualisations. In this research, the WebGIS will be created using Ol3-Cesium and openlayers to visualise a flood event by dynamic layers in a 2D/3D environment

Block-Anti-Circulant Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar

We introduce a new technique for compressing the public keys of the UOV signature scheme that makes use of block-anti-circulant matrices. These matrices admit a compact representation as for every block, the remaining elements can be inferred from the first row. This space saving translates to the public key, which as a result of this technique can be shrunk by a small integer factor. We propose parameters sets that take into account several important attacks