Incorporating livability benefits into the Federal Transit Administration New Starts project evaluation process through accessibility-based modeling

Thesis (S.M. in Transportation)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 153-156).The Department of Transportation's announcement of the "Livability initiative" for major transit projects in January 2010 has prompted the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to reassess the criteria used in the evaluation of New Starts projects. There is concern that the evaluation criteria for transit project benefits are too limiting and that not all project benefits are accounted for in the best way. Specifically, the FTA New Starts Program is beginning to shift away from the current measure of user benefits, a calculation of changes in mobility measured by hours of travel time saved, towards criterion based on the concept of livability. As of this writing, the FTA has yet to define livability and establish metrics that will be adopted in the next rulemaking process. This thesis evaluates the current FTA New Starts framework and presents an improved approach for measuring some of the livability benefits of transit projects through accessibility-based modeling. It is argued in this thesis that accessibility to essential services, such as employment, education, health care, and recreation, is a key component of livability. Furthermore, the concept of accessibility is both understandable and can be measured from existing data sources, and thus is an ideal building block from which to reconsider how transit project benefits should be evaluated in the New Starts process. Two transportation modeling software packages, TransCAD and Cube Voyager, are used to analyze the accessibility benefits of the MBTA Green Line Extension Project to illustrate the potential of accessibility measures in the project evaluation process. Findings suggest that gravity measures are more appropriate than isochrone measures when evaluating the accessibility benefits of proposed projects. The positive relationship between accessibility and mode share suggests that accessibility measures can serve as a valuable tool in the preliminary planning stages to quickly evaluate alternatives prior to the completion of a conventional four-step travel demand model and further justifies the use of accessibility measures in a livability-based project evaluation process.by Caroline R. Ducas.S.M.in Transportatio

Provably weak instances of ring-LWE revisited

In CRYPTO 2015, Elias, Lauter, Ozman and Stange described an attack on the non-dual decision version of the ring learning with errors problem (RLWE) for two special families of defining polynomials, whose construction depends on the modulus q that is being used. For particularly chosen error parameters, they managed to solve non-dual decision RLWE given 20 samples, with a success rate ranging from 10% to 80%. In this paper we show how to solve the search version for the same families and error parameters, using only 7 samples with a success rate of 100%. Moreover our attack works for every modulus q instead of the q that was used to construct the defining polynomial. The attack is based on the observation that the RLWE error distribution for these families of polynomials is very skewed in the directions of the polynomial basis. For the parameters chosen by Elias et al. the smallest errors are negligible and simple linear algebra suffices to recover the secret. But enlarging the error paremeters makes the largest errors wrap around, thereby turning the RLWE problem unsuitable for cryptographic applications. These observations also apply to dual RLWE, but do not contradict the seminal work by Lyubashevsky, Peikert and Regev

Behavioral and Enhanced Perinatal Intervention (B-EPIC): A Randomized Trial Targeting Tobacco Use among Opioid Dependent Pregnant Women

Background Opioid use during pregnancy is a significant public health issue. The standard of care for treating opioid use disorder during pregnancy includes medications for opioid disorder (MOUD). However, tobacco use often goes unaddressed among pregnant women on MOUD. In 2018, our team received a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funded R34 to conduct a three year-randomized trial to test the feasibility of a novel tobacco intervention for pregnant women receiving MOUD. Aims The aims of this study are: (1) to determine the impact of the B-EPIC intervention on maternal tobacco use and stage of change; (2) to determine the impact of B-EPIC on tobacco-related maternal and infant health outcomes including gestational age at birth, birthweight, NAS diagnosis and severity, and number of ear and respiratory infections during the first six months; (3) to compare healthcare utilization and costs incurred by pregnant patients that receive the B-EPIC intervention versus TAU. Methods We plan to enroll 100 pregnant women on MOUD for this randomized controlled trial (B-EPIC intervention n = 50 and treatment as usual n = 50). A major strength of this study is its wide range of health and economic outcomes assessed on mother, neonate and the infant. Conclusions Despite the very high rates of smoking among pregnant women with OUD, there are few tobacco treatment interventions that have been tailored for this high - risk population. The overall goal of this study is to move towards a tobacco treatment standard for pregnant women receiving treatment for OUD

Large FHE Gates from tensored homomorphic accumulator

The main bottleneck of all known Fully Homomorphic Encryption schemes lies in the bootstrapping procedure invented by Gentry (STOC’09). The cost of this procedure can be mitigated either using Homomorphic SIMD techniques, or by performing larger computation per bootstrapping procedure.In this work, we propose new techniques allowing to perform more operations per bootstrapping in FHEW-type schemes (EUROCRYPT’13). While maintaining the quasi-quadratic Õ(n2) complexity of the whole cycle, our new scheme allows to evaluate gates with Ω(log n) input bits, which constitutes a quasi-linear speed-up. Our scheme is also very well adapted to large threshold gates, natively admitting up to Ω(n) inputs. This could be helpful for homomorphic evaluation of neural networks.Our theoretical contribution is backed by a preliminary prototype implementation, which can perform 6-to-6 bit gates in less than 10s on a single core, as well as threshold gates over 63 input bits even faster.<p

On the Quantum Complexity of the Continuous Hidden Subgroup Problem

The Hidden Subgroup Problem (HSP) aims at capturing all problems that are susceptible to be solvable in quantum polynomial time following the blueprints of Shor's celebrated algorithm. Successful solutions to this problems over various commutative groups allow to efficiently perform number-theoretic tasks such as factoring or finding discrete logarithms. The latest successful generalization (Eisentrager et al. STOC 2014) considers the problem of finding a full-rank lattice as the hidden subgroup of the continuous vector space Rm , even for large dimensions m . It unlocked new cryptanalytic algorithms (Biasse-Song SODA 2016, Cramer et al. EUROCRYPT 2016 and 2017), in particular to find mildly short vectors in ideal lattices. The cryptanalytic relevance of such a problem raises the question of a more refined and quantitative complexity analysis. In the light of the increasing physical difficulty of maintaining a large entanglement of qubits, the degree of concern may be different whether the above algorithm requires only linearly many qubits or a much larger polynomial amount of qubits. This is the question we start addressing with this work. We propose a detailed analysis of (a variation of) the aforementioned HSP algorithm, and conclude on its complexity as a function of all the relevant parameters. Incidentally, our work clarifies certain claims from the extended abstract of Eisentrager et al

Lattice Reduction for Modules, or How to Reduce ModuleSVP to ModuleSVP

We show how to generalize lattice reduction algorithms to module lattices. Specifically, we reduce $\gamma$-approximate ModuleSVP over module lattices with rank $k \geq2$ to $\gamma\u27$-approximate ModuleSVP over module lattices with rank $2 \leq \beta \leq k$. To do so, we modify the celebrated slide-reduction algorithm of Gama and Nguyen to work with module filtrations, a high-dimensional generalization of the ($\Z$-)basis of a lattice. The particular value of $\gamma$ that we achieve depends on the underlying number field $K$, the order $R \subseteq \mathcal{O}_K$, and the embedding (as well as, of course, $k$, $\beta$, and $\gamma\u27$). However, for reasonable choices of these parameters, the resulting value of $\gamma$ is surprisingly close to the one achieved by ``plain\u27\u27 lattice reduction algorithms, which require an arbitrary SVP oracle in the same dimension. In other words, we show that ModuleSVP oracles are nearly as useful as SVP oracles for solving higher-rank instances of approximate ModuleSVP. Our result generalizes the recent independent result of Lee, Pellet-Mary, Stehlé, and Wallet, which works in the important special case when $\beta = 2$ and $R = \mathcal{O}_K$ is the ring of integers of $K$ under the canonical embedding. Our reduction works for any $\beta$ dividing $k$, as well as arbitrary orders $R \subseteq \mathcal{O}_K$ and a larger class of embeddings. Indeed, at a high level our reduction can be thought of as a generalization of theirs in roughly the same way that block reduction generalizes LLL reduction

Slowing and cooling molecules and neutral atoms by time-varying electric field gradients

A method of slowing, accelerating, cooling, and bunching molecules and neutral atoms using time-varying electric field gradients is demonstrated with cesium atoms in a fountain. The effects are measured and found to be in agreement with calculation. Time-varying electric field gradient slowing and cooling is applicable to atoms that have large dipole polarizabilities, including atoms that are not amenable to laser slowing and cooling, to Rydberg atoms, and to molecules, especially polar molecules with large electric dipole moments. The possible applications of this method include slowing and cooling thermal beams of atoms and molecules, launching cold atoms from a trap into a fountain, and measuring atomic dipole polarizabilities.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures. Scheduled for publication in Nov. 1 Phys. Rev.

Atomic Resonance and Scattering

Contains research objectives and summary of research on eight research projects.National Science Foundation (Grant PHY75-15421-A01)U. S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research (Grant AFOSR 76-2972)Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAB07-76-C-1400)U. S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research (Contract F44620-72-C-0057

Theoretical study of the absorption spectra of the sodium dimer

Absorption of radiation from the sodium dimer molecular states correlating to Na(3s)-Na(3s) is investigated theoretically. Vibrational bound and continuum transitions from the singlet X Sigma-g+ state to the first excited singlet A Sigma-u+ and singlet B Pi-u states and from the triplet a Sigma-u+ state to the first excited triplet b Sigma-g+ and triplet c Pi-g states are studied quantum-mechanically. Theoretical and experimental data are used to characterize the molecular properties taking advantage of knowledge recently obtained from ab initio calculations, spectroscopy, and ultra-cold atom collision studies. The quantum-mechanical calculations are carried out for temperatures in the range from 500 to 3000 K and are compared with previous calculations and measurements where available.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures, revtex, eps

Atomic Resonance and Scattering

Contains reports on four research projects.U. S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Contract F44620-72-C-0057)Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAB07-74-C-0630