Quantum entropic security and approximate quantum encryption

We present full generalisations of entropic security and entropic indistinguishability to the quantum world where no assumption but a limit on the knowledge of the adversary is made. This limit is quantified using the quantum conditional min-entropy as introduced by Renato Renner. A proof of the equivalence between the two security definitions is presented. We also provide proofs of security for two different cyphers in this model and a proof for a lower bound on the key length required by any such cypher. These cyphers generalise existing schemes for approximate quantum encryption to the entropic security model.Comment: Corrected mistakes in the proofs of Theorems 3 and 6; results unchanged. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

"Agglomeration Economies within IT-Producing and IT-Consuming Industries in U.S. Regions"

This paper deals with the effects of the geographic concentration of economic activity on productivity through agglomeration economies in the U.S. economy. Our empirical study extends the literature on agglomeration economies in two directions. First we measure and compare the effects on productivity of geographic concentration in either information technology related activity (the IT sector) or in all other economic activities (the non-IT sector). Second we follow Jorgenson’s (2002) reasoning regarding the significance of the differences between IT-producing sectors and IT-using sectors and assess the differential effects of concentration in IT-producing sectors and concentration in IT-using sectors on productivity. We utilize four measures of agglomeration and analyze effects at two levels of geographic disaggregation: U.S. states and U.S. counties. We perform the analysis using a model drawn from the growth accounting literature in which total labor productivity in a region is the dependent variable. It is modeled as a function of the region’s capital-output ratio, the quality of the region’s labor supply as measured by the level of education, and an agglomeration variable measured by concentration in the IT or non-IT sectors or in the IT-producing or IT-using sectors. The cross section estimates for a single year yield mixed results. We find weak evidence in favor of an effect of concentration of IT activity on productivity at the state level. We find stronger effects on productivity at the county level from concentration in IT-producing sectors.Agglomeration Economies, Information Technology, Productivity

Combining Visual and Textual Features for Semantic Segmentation of Historical Newspapers

The massive amounts of digitized historical documents acquired over the last decades naturally lend themselves to automatic processing and exploration. Research work seeking to automatically process facsimiles and extract information thereby are multiplying with, as a first essential step, document layout analysis. If the identification and categorization of segments of interest in document images have seen significant progress over the last years thanks to deep learning techniques, many challenges remain with, among others, the use of finer-grained segmentation typologies and the consideration of complex, heterogeneous documents such as historical newspapers. Besides, most approaches consider visual features only, ignoring textual signal. In this context, we introduce a multimodal approach for the semantic segmentation of historical newspapers that combines visual and textual features. Based on a series of experiments on diachronic Swiss and Luxembourgish newspapers, we investigate, among others, the predictive power of visual and textual features and their capacity to generalize across time and sources. Results show consistent improvement of multimodal models in comparison to a strong visual baseline, as well as better robustness to high material variance

Maisnil-lès-Ruitz – Rue des Hêtres

L’opération de diagnostic située « rue des Hêtres et rue de Nancy » sur la commune de Maisnil-lès-Ruitz, conduite sur 1,8 ha n’a pas permis la mise au jour de structures archéologiques sur la surface prescrite. Deux opérations se situant au sud de cette dernière ont révélé des vestiges de La Tène ancienne. Ces sites pourraient former une seule et même occupation se localisant en bas de pente au sud de notre emprise proche de l’emplacement actuel de la R. D. 301. Certains lieux-dits de l’autre..

Formal Verification of a Memory Allocation Module of Contiki with Frama-C: a Case Study

International audienceFormal verification is still rarely applied to the IoT (InternetofThings)software, whereas IoT applications tend to become increasingly popular and critical.This short paper promotes the usage of formal verification to ensure safetyand security of software in this domain. We present a successful case study ondeductive verification of a memory allocation module of Contiki, a popular open-source operating system for IoT. We present the target module, describe how thecode has been specified and proven using Frama-C, a software analysis platformfor C code, and discuss lessons learned