Remote Oblivious Storage: Making Oblivious RAM Practical

Remote storage of data has become an increasingly attractive and advantageous option, especially due to cloud systems. While encryption protects the data, it does not hide the access pattern to the data. A natural solution is to access remote storage using an Oblivious RAM (ORAM) which provably hides all access patterns. While ORAM is asymptotically efficient, the best existing scheme (Pinkas and Reinman, Crypto'10) still has considerable overhead for a practical implementation: for M stored items, it stores 4 times and sometimes 6 times more items remotely, requires O(log2 M) round trips to storage server per request, and periodically blocks all data requests to shuffle all storage (which is a lengthy process). In this paper, we first define a related notion to ORAM, oblivious storage (OS), which captures more accurately and naturally the security setting of remote storage. Then, we propose a new ORAM/OS construction that solves the practicality issues just outlined: it has a storage constant of ~ 1, achieves O(1) round trips to the storage server per request, and allows requests to happen concurrently with shuffle without jeopardizing security. Our construction consists of a new organization of server memory into a flat main part and a hierarchical shelter, a client-side index for rapidly locating identifiers at the server, a new shelter serving requests concurrent with the shuffle, and a data structure for locating items efficiently in a partially shuffled storage

Insuring Against Hunger? The Long-Term Political Consequences of Exposure to the Dutch Famine

Does experiencing a shock alter one's voting behavior? We explore how a specific shock to individuals’ health and human capital accumulation -- in-utero malnutrition -- prompted by the sudden onset of the 1944/45 Dutch Famine affected insurance demand and voting behavior later in life. Given similar socialization patterns, we find conglomerations of affected individuals to be associated with higher support for Left parties more than 50 years after the exposure. Relying on rich administrative data and leveraging the Dutch Famine as a natural experiment, this paper represents an initial effort to investigate and confirm the long-term effects of shocks on political behavior

Simulation of Micro-Electronic FlowFET Systems

A microelectronic fluidic system has been investigated by modeling and 3D simulation of fluid flow controlled by an applied gate voltage. The simulations have helped to characterize a novel FlowFET (a fluidic Field Effect Transistor) device under fault-free conditions. The FlowFET operates by applying a voltage field from a gate electrode in the insulated side wall of a microchannel to modulate the ␣-potential at the shear plane [1]. The change in ␣-potential can be used to control both the magnitude and direction of the electroosmotic flow in the microchannel

MAGE: Nearly Zero-Cost Virtual Memory for Secure Computation

Secure Computation (SC) is a family of cryptographic primitives for computing on encrypted data in single-party and multi-party settings. SC is being increasingly adopted by industry for a variety of applications. A significant obstacle to using SC for practical applications is the memory overhead of the underlying cryptography. We develop MAGE, an execution engine for SC that efficiently runs SC computations that do not fit in memory. We observe that, due to their intended security guarantees, SC schemes are inherently oblivious -- their memory access patterns are independent of the input data. Using this property, MAGE calculates the memory access pattern ahead of time and uses it to produce a memory management plan. This formulation of memory management, which we call memory programming, is a generalization of paging that allows MAGE to provide a highly efficient virtual memory abstraction for SC. MAGE outperforms the OS virtual memory system by up to an order of magnitude, and in many cases, runs SC computations that do not fit in memory at nearly the same speed as if the underlying machines had unbounded physical memory to fit the entire computation.Comment: 19 pages; Accepted to OSDI 202

MOLECULAR DETECTION OF PROSTATE CANCER USING A PANEL OF DNA METHYLATION BIOMARKERS

Introduction: The diagnostic of prostate cancer (PCa) using serumbasedprostate specific antigen (PSA) has some limitations due to falsepositiveand negative results. The purpose of our study was to analyse thehypermethylation of three genes from plasma samples and to determine the feasibility of these genes to aid as biomarkers in detecting PCa in plasma by noninvasive methods.Materials and Methods: Genomic DNA was extracted from the peripheralblood plasma of 74 patients with localized PCa. All the samples wereexamined for aberrant hypermethylation in retinoic acid receptor β variant 2 (RARβ2), glutathione S-transferase P1 (GSTP1) and Ras association domain family 1 isoform A(RASSF1A) genes, using methylation-specific PCR (MSP), and the results were correlated with the clinicopathologicalparameters.Results: The percent of methylation of the analyzed genes was as follows: RARβ2 was found methylated in 54 cases (73 %), GSTP1 in 58 cases (78.4%), and RASSF1A was found methylated in all 74 cases (100%).Conclusion: Our study demonstrates that, using a panel of DNA methylated biomarkers aids the identification of PCa patients and with minimally invasive techniques , may yield information independent of serum PSA or the TNM stage

The hyperbolic Anderson model: Moment estimates of the Malliavin derivatives and applications

In this article, we study the hyperbolic Anderson model driven by a space-time \emph{colored} Gaussian homogeneous noise with spatial dimension $d=1,2$. Under mild assumptions, we provide $L^p$-estimates of the iterated Malliavin derivative of the solution in terms of the fundamental solution of the wave solution. To achieve this goal, we rely heavily on the \emph{Wiener chaos expansion} of the solution. Our first application are \emph{quantitative central limit theorems} for spatial averages of the solution to the hyperbolic Anderson model, where the rates of convergence are described by the total variation distance. These quantitative results have been elusive so far due to the temporal correlation of the noise blocking us from using the It\^o calculus. A \emph{novel} ingredient to overcome this difficulty is the \emph{second-order Gaussian Poincar\'e inequality} coupled with the application of the aforementioned $L^p$-estimates of the first two Malliavin derivatives. Besides, we provide the corresponding functional central limit theorems. As a second application, we establish the absolute continuity of the law for the hyperbolic Anderson model. The $L^p$-estimates of Malliavin derivatives are crucial ingredients to verify a local version of Bouleau-Hirsch criterion for absolute continuity. Our approach substantially simplifies the arguments for the one-dimensional case, which has been studied in the recent work by Balan, Quer-Sardanyons and Song (2019).Comment: Version 1: 55 page

The hyperbolic Anderson model: moment estimates of the Malliavin derivatives and applications

In this article, we study the hyperbolic Anderson model driven by a space-time colored Gaussian homogeneous noise with spatial dimension d=1,2. Under mild assumptions, we provide Lp-estimates of the iterated Malliavin derivative of the solution in terms of the fundamental solution of the wave solution. To achieve this goal, we rely heavily on the Wiener chaos expansion of the solution. Our first application are quantitative central limit theorems for spatial averages of the solution to the hyperbolic Anderson model, where the rates of convergence are described by the total variation distance. These quantitative results have been elusive so far due to the temporal correlation of the noise blocking us from using the Itô calculus. A novel ingredient to overcome this difficulty is the second-order Gaussian Poincaré inequality coupled with the application of the aforementioned Lp-estimates of the first two Malliavin derivatives. Besides, we provide the corresponding functional central limit theorems. As a second application, we establish the absolute continuity of the law for the hyperbolic Anderson model. The Lp-estimates of Malliavin derivatives are crucial ingredients to verify a local version of Bouleau-Hirsch criterion for absolute continuity. Our approach substantially simplifies the arguments for the one-dimensional case, which has been studied in the recent work by [2]

No need for the needle. A qualitative analysis of the antivax movement in Romania

The antivax movement is now a constant phenomenon with increasing social implications. This study explores how the antivax movement is articulated in Romania on the basis of qualitative analysis applied to interviews. Our pilot study focuses on the opinions of 100 persons who oppose vaccination interviewed between 2017 and 2020. We conducted both face-to-face and online semistructured interviews to trace the factors determining attitudes against vaccination. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first such extended study to target individuals rather than groups or media discourse. We strive to provide a multifaceted view on how the antivax phenomenon is taking shape. Responses varied in style and length, so we needed to systematize the narratives. We filtered the answers using the interpretive net described by Entman (1993), thereby grouping the main narratives into four sections. We then reconstructed the implicit frames used by individuals in interpreting their position. We consider content quality analysis to be a relevant method to reveal the facets and depth of the antivax phenomenon, thereby enabling more complex explanations. We compare the results of this study with rationales stemming from similar investigations conducted around the world and then highlight opinions specific to the Romanian public

Toward an Integrated Online Learning Environment

We are building in LON-CAPA an integrated learning environment that will enable the development, dissemination and evaluation of PER-based material. This environment features a collection of multi-level research-based homework sets organized by topic and cognitive complexity. These sets are associated with learning modules that contain very short exposition of the content supplemented by integrated open-access videos, worked examples, simulations, and tutorials (some from ANDES). To assess students' performance accurately with respect to a system-wide standard, we plan to implement Item Response Theory. Together with other PER assessments and purposeful solicitation of student feedback, this will allow us to measure and improve the efficacy of various research-based materials, while getting insights into teaching and learning.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 0757931)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant # 1RC1RR028302-01