"If You Can't Beat them, Join them": A Usability Approach to Interdependent Privacy in Cloud Apps

Cloud storage services, like Dropbox and Google Drive, have growing ecosystems of 3rd party apps that are designed to work with users' cloud files. Such apps often request full access to users' files, including files shared with collaborators. Hence, whenever a user grants access to a new vendor, she is inflicting a privacy loss on herself and on her collaborators too. Based on analyzing a real dataset of 183 Google Drive users and 131 third party apps, we discover that collaborators inflict a privacy loss which is at least 39% higher than what users themselves cause. We take a step toward minimizing this loss by introducing the concept of History-based decisions. Simply put, users are informed at decision time about the vendors which have been previously granted access to their data. Thus, they can reduce their privacy loss by not installing apps from new vendors whenever possible. Next, we realize this concept by introducing a new privacy indicator, which can be integrated within the cloud apps' authorization interface. Via a web experiment with 141 participants recruited from CrowdFlower, we show that our privacy indicator can significantly increase the user's likelihood of choosing the app that minimizes her privacy loss. Finally, we explore the network effect of History-based decisions via a simulation on top of large collaboration networks. We demonstrate that adopting such a decision-making process is capable of reducing the growth of users' privacy loss by 70% in a Google Drive-based network and by 40% in an author collaboration network. This is despite the fact that we neither assume that users cooperate nor that they exhibit altruistic behavior. To our knowledge, our work is the first to provide quantifiable evidence of the privacy risk that collaborators pose in cloud apps. We are also the first to mitigate this problem via a usable privacy approach.Comment: Authors' extended version of the paper published at CODASPY 201

Coherent population trapping and dynamical instability in the nonlinearly coupled atom-molecule system

We study the possibility of creating a coherent population trapping (CPT) state, involving free atomic and ground molecular condensates, during the process of associating atomic condensate into molecular condensate. We generalize the Bogoliubov approach to this multi-component system and study the collective excitations of the CPT state in the homogeneous limit. We develop a set of analytical criteria based on the relationship among collisions involving atoms and ground molecules, which are found to strongly affect the stability properties of the CPT state, and use it to find the stability diagram and to systematically classify various instabilities in the long-wavelength limit.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Fermionic R-operator approach for the small-polaron model with open boundary condition

Exact integrability and algebraic Bethe ansatz of the small-polaron model with the open boundary condition are discussed in the framework of the quantum inverse scattering method (QISM). We employ a new approach where the fermionic R-operator which consists of fermion operators is a key object. It satisfies the Yang-Baxter equation and the reflection equation with its corresponding K-operator. Two kinds of 'super-transposition' for the fermion operators are defined and the dual reflection equation is obtained. These equations prove the integrability and the Bethe ansatz equation which agrees with the one obtained from the graded Yang-Baxter equation and the graded reflection equations.Comment: 10 page

Interactions of energetic electrons with ULF waves triggered by interplanetary shock: Van Allen Probes observations in the magnetotail

Abstract We present in situ observations of a shock-induced substorm-like event on 13 April 2013 observed by the newly launched Van Allen twin probes. Substorm-like electron injections with energy of 30-500 keV were observed in the region from L∼5.2 to 5.5 immediately after the shock arrival (followed by energetic electron drift echoes). Meanwhile, the electron flux was clearly and strongly varying on the ULF wave time scale. It is found that both toroidal and poloidal mode ULF waves with a period of 150 s emerged following the magnetotail magnetic field reconfiguration after the interplanetary (IP) shock passage. The poloidal mode is more intense than the toroidal mode. The 90 phase shift between the poloidal mode Br and Ea suggests the standing poloidal waves in the Northern Hemisphere. Furthermore, the energetic electron flux modulations indicate that the azimuthal wave number is ∼14. Direct evidence of drift resonance between the injected electrons and the excited poloidal ULF wave has been obtained. The resonant energy is estimated to be between 150 keV and 230 keV. Two possible scenaria on ULF wave triggering are discussed: vortex-like flow structure-driven field line resonance and ULF wave growth through drift resonance. It is found that the IP shock may trigger intense ULF wave and energetic electron behavior at L∼3 to 6 on the nightside, while the time profile of the wave is different from dayside cases

Flashing color on the performance of SSVEP-based brain-computer Interfaces

A critical problem in using steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) for clinical and commercial use is the visual fatigue the user may suffer when staring at flashing stimuli. Aiming at the design of user-friendly BCIs with satisfactory performance, this work is to preliminarily investigate how different colors influence the SSVEP (i.e. frequency or phase) and system performance. The results show that white stimuli can lead to the highest performance, followed by gray, red, green and blue stimuli.published_or_final_versio

The Influence of Molecular Adsorption on Elongating Gold Nanowires

Using molecular dynamics simulations, we study the impact of physisorbing adsorbates on the structural and mechanical evolution of gold nanowires (AuNWs) undergoing elongation. We used various adsorbate models in our simulations, with each model giving rise to a different surface coverage and mobility of the adsorbed phase. We find that the local structure and mobility of the adsorbed phase remains relatively uniform across all segments of an elongating AuNW, except for the thinning region of the wire where the high mobility of Au atoms disrupts the monolayer structure, giving rise to higher solvent mobility. We analyzed the AuNW trajectories by measuring the ductile elongation of the wires and detecting the presence of characteristic structural motifs that appeared during elongation. Our findings indicate that adsorbates facilitate the formation of high-energy structural motifs and lead to significantly higher ductile elongations. In particular, our simulations result in a large number of monatomic chains and helical structures possessing mechanical stability in excess of what we observe in vacuum. Conversely, we find that a molecular species that interacts weakly (i.e., does not adsorb) with AuNWs worsens the mechanical stability of monatomic chains.Comment: To appear in Journal of Physical Chemistry