SARS-CoV-2, a Threat to Privacy?

The global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is currently putting a massive strain on the world's critical infrastructures. With healthcare systems and internet service providers already struggling to provide reliable service, some operators may, intentionally or unintentionally, lever out privacy-protecting measures to increase their system's efficiency in fighting the virus. Moreover, though it may seem all encouraging to see the effectiveness of authoritarian states in battling the crisis, we, the authors of this paper, would like to raise the community's awareness towards developing more effective means in battling the crisis without the need to limit fundamental human rights. To analyze the current situation, we are discussing and evaluating the steps corporations and governments are taking to condemn the virus by applying established privacy research

A procedural approach to automate the manual design process in analog integrated circuit design

This paper presents a novel approach to automating the design of analog integrated circuits: (1) the Expert Design Plan (EDP), a procedural generator, and (2) the EDP Language, a high-level description language for writing an EDP. An EDP is a parameterizable, executable script, which reproduces a designer’s course of action when designing a circuit. Thus, an EDP formalizes the design expert’s knowledge-based strategy and makes it reusable. Since it is essential that an EDP represents a circuit designers’ way of thinking and working as close as possible, the designers themselves should be enabled to create the EDP. Therefore, our approach provides a input method through a domain-specific language called EDP Language (EDPL). Using this language is intuitive and requires no special training. In an exemplary implementation of our approach, a common-source amplifier is automatically sized using a set of only 10 instructions. Even in the first usage our EDP approach has appeared to be more efficient than the manual sizing process

Dynamic Biomechanical Analysis of Vocal Folds Using Pipette Aspiration Technique

The voice producing process is a complex interplay between glottal pressure, vocal folds, their elasticity and tension. The material properties of vocal folds are still insufficiently studied, because the determination of material properties in soft tissues is often difficult and connected to extensive experimental setups. To shed light on this less researched area, in this work, a dynamic pipette aspiration technique is utilized to measure the elasticity in a frequency range of 100–1000 Hz. The complex elasticity could be assessed with the phase shift between exciting pressure and tissue movement. The dynamic pipette aspiration setup has been miniaturized with regard to a future in-vivo application. The techniques were applied on 3 different porcine larynges 4 h and 1 d postmortem, in order to investigate the deterioration of the tissue over time and analyze correlation in elasticity values between vocal fold pairs. It was found that vocal fold pairs do have different absolute elasticity values but similar trends. This leads to the assumption that those trends are more important for phonation than having same absolute values

A generic procedural generator for sizing of analog integrated circuits

In this paper, we address the novel EDP (Expert Design Plan) principle for procedural design automation of analog integrated circuits, which captures the knowledge-based design strategy of human circuit designers in an executable script, making it reusable. We present the EDP Player, which enables the creation and execution of EDPs for arbitrary circuits in the Cadence® Virtuoso® Design Environment. The tool provides a generic version of an instruction set, called EDPL (EDPLanguage), enabling emulation of a typical manual analog sizing flow. To automate the design of a Miller Operational Amplifier and to create variants of a Smart Power IC, several EDPs were implemented using this tool. Employing these EDPs leads to a strong reduction of design time without compromising design quality or reliability

A Graph-Theoretic Algorithm for Automatic Extension of Translation Lexicons

This paper presents a graph-theoretic approach to the identification of yetunknown word translations. The proposed algorithm is based on the recursive Sim-Rank algorithm and relies on the intuition that two words are similar if they establish similar grammatical relationships with similar other words. We also present a formulation of SimRank in matrix form and extensions for edge weights, edge labels and multiple graphs.

Visual pattern discovery in timed event data

Business processes have tremendously changed the way large companies conduct their business: The integration of information systems into the workflows of their employees ensures a high service level and thus high customer satisfaction. One core aspect of business process engineering are events that steer the workflows and trigger internal processes. Strict requirements on interval-scaled temporal patterns, which are common in time series, are thereby released through the ordinal character of such events. It is this additional degree of freedom that opens unexplored possibilities for visualizing event data. In this paper, we present a flexible and novel system to find significant events, event clusters and event patterns. Each event is represented as a small rectangle, which is colored according to categorical, ordinal or intervalscaled metadata. Depending on the analysis task, different layout functions are used to highlight either the ordinal character of the data or temporal correlations. The system has built-in features for ordering customers or event groups according to the similarity of their event sequences, temporal gap alignment and stacking of co-occurring events. Two characteristically different case studies dealing with business process events and news articles demonstrate the capabilities of our system to explore event data