Personal rights management (PRM) : enabling privacy rights in digital online media content

With ubiquitous use of digital camera devices, especially in mobile phones, privacy is no longer threatened by governments and companies only. The new technology creates a new threat by ordinary people, who now have the means to take and distribute pictures of one’s face at no risk and little cost in any situation in public and private spaces. Fast distribution via web based photo albums, online communities and web pages expose an individual’s private life to the public in unpreceeded ways. Social and legal measures are increasingly taken to deal with this problem. In practice however, they lack efficiency, as they are hard to enforce in practice. In this paper, we discuss a supportive infrastructure aiming for the distribution channel; as soon as the picture is publicly available, the exposed individual has a chance to find it and take proper action.Wir stellen ein System zur Wahrnehmung des Rechts am eigenen Bild bei der Veröffentlichung digitaler Fotos, zum Beispiel von Handykameras, im Internet vor. Zur Entdeckung der Veröffentlichung schlagen wir ein Watermarking-Verfahren vor, welches das Auffinden der Bilder durch die potentiell abgebildeten Personen ermöglicht, ohne die Rechte des Fotografen einzuschränken

Wendy, the Good Little Fairness Widget

The advent of decentralized trading markets introduces a number of new challenges for consensus protocols. In addition to the `usual' attacks -- a subset of the validators trying to prevent disagreement -- there is now the possibility of financial fraud, which can abuse properties not normally considered critical in consensus protocols. We investigate the issues of attackers manipulating or exploiting the order in which transactions are scheduled in the blockchain. More concretely, we look into relative order fairness, i.e., ways we can assure that the relative order of transactions is fair. We show that one of the more intuitive definitions of fairness is impossible to achieve. We then present Wendy, a group of low overhead protocols that can implement different concepts of fairness. Wendy acts as an additional widget for an existing blockchain, and is largely agnostic to the underlying blockchain and its security assumptions. Furthermore, it is possible to apply a the protocol only for a subset of the transactions, and thus run several independent fair markets on the same chain

Impact of implementation choices on quantitative predictions of cell-based computational models

‘Cell-based’ models provide a powerful computational tool for studying the mechanisms underlying the growth and dynamics of biological tissues in health and disease. An increasing amount of quantitative data with cellular resolution has paved the way for the quantitative parameterisation and validation of such models. However, the numerical implementation of cell-based models remains challenging, and little work has been done to understand to what extent implementation choices may influence model predictions. Here, we consider the numerical implementation of a popular class of cell-based models called vertex models, which are often used to study epithelial tissues. In two-dimensional vertex models, a tissue is approximated as a tessellation of polygons and the vertices of these polygons move due to mechanical forces originating from the cells. Such models have been used extensively to study the mechanical regulation of tissue topology in the literature. Here, we analyse how the model predictions may be affected by numerical parameters, such as the size of the time step, and non-physical model parameters, such as length thresholds for cell rearrangement. We find that vertex positions and summary statistics are sensitive to several of these implementation parameters. For example, the predicted tissue size decreases with decreasing cell cycle durations, and cell rearrangement may be suppressed by large time steps. These findings are counter-intuitive and illustrate that model predictions need to be thoroughly analysed and implementation details carefully considered when applying cell-based computational models in a quantitative setting

On Natural Life's Tricks to Survive and Evolve

Which are the fundamental principles of life? This is the main question to be addressed if one tries to create artifcial life on computers. Though it has been answered only partially, evolutionary algorithms are substantially contributing already to many kinds of human problem solving by means of virtual organisms. Besides looking back on that success story and extrapolating it a bit into the future - both endeavors obviously being subjective -, a new result will be presented in the following showing the importance of multicellularity, which helps to self-adapt the error rates of the replication step to what is needed for eficacious and efficient optimum seeking without individual learning

Rights management technologies: A good choice for securing electronic healthrecords?

Advances in healthcare IT bring new concerns with respect to privacy and security. Security critical patient data no longer resides on mainframes physically isolated within an organization, where physical security measures can be taken to defend the data and the system. Modern solutions are heading towards open, interconnected environments where storage outsourcing and operations on untrusted servers happen frequently. In order to allow secure sharing of health records between different healthcare providers, Rights Management Techniques facilitating a datacentric protection model can be employed: data is cryptographically protected and allowed to be outsourced or even freely float on the network. Rather than relying on different networks to provide confidentiality, integrity and authenticity, data is protected at the end points of the communication. In this paper we compare Enterprise/Digital Rights Management with traditional security techniques and discuss how Rights Management can be applied to secure Electronic Health Records

Diversity-oriented staff management in libraries: national and international examples

Das Thema „Diversity Management“ nimmt immer mehr an Bedeutung zu. Dies liegt vor allem daran, dass die Gesellschaft immer vielfältiger wird. Auch Bibliotheken können einen Nutzen aus Diversity Management ziehen und sich darum bemühen, dass ihr Personal die Vielfältigkeit der Gesellschaft, der sie dienen, widerspiegelt. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht, inwieweit Diversity Management in Bibliotheken vorhanden ist und zeigt Beispiele aus dem In- und Ausland, die einen Eindruck davon vermitteln, wie man ein Diversity-orientiertes Personalmanagement in Bibliotheken integrieren kann.“Diversity Management” is becoming an important issue as the community is getting diverse more and more. Libraries can benefit from Diversity Manage-ment, too, and they can try to reflect the diverse community, which they are serving. The presented thesis reviews how Diversity Management is being used in libraries and shows national and international examples that give an impression about how to integrate a Diversity-oriented staff management in libraries

Charakterisierung des Spike Proteins des Schweren Akutenatemnotsyndrom Coronavirus

Charakterisierung des Spike Proteins des Schweren Akutenatemnotsyndrom Coronavirus

Grundlegende empirische Untersuchungen der Parameter von Evolutionsstrategien - Metastrategien

Evolutionsstrategien (ES) ahmen Prinzipien der biologischen Evolution nach, um iterativ immer bessere Lösungen eines Optimierproblems zu erzeugen. Mangels umfassender theoretischer Ergebnisse untersucht diese Arbeit empirisch die externen Parameter von Evolutionsstrategien wie Rekombinationsart, Schrittweitenlernraten, Populationsgröße und Selektionsart anhand verschiedener Beispiel--Zielfunktionen. Eine erste systematische Untersuchung aller Rekombinationsarten und Schrittweitenlernraten zeigt, daß die Parameter nicht getrennt voneinander betrachtet werden können. Um den Abhängigkeiten dieser Parameter voneinander Rechnung zu tragen, wird eine Meta--Evolutionsstrategie entworfen, die mit dem Ziel einer möglichst großen Konvergenzgeschwindigkeit alle 8 möglichen Parameter gleichzeitig variiert. Die so parametrisierten Evolutionsstrategien konvergieren z.T. erheblich schneller als jene, die gemäß Literaturempfehlungen parametrisiert werden. Bei multimodalen Zielfunktionen war die resultierende Konvergenz nicht nur schneller, sondern sogar sicherer