Publishing Microdata with a Robust Privacy Guarantee

Today, the publication of microdata poses a privacy threat. Vast research has striven to define the privacy condition that microdata should satisfy before it is released, and devise algorithms to anonymize the data so as to achieve this condition. Yet, no method proposed to date explicitly bounds the percentage of information an adversary gains after seeing the published data for each sensitive value therein. This paper introduces beta-likeness, an appropriately robust privacy model for microdata anonymization, along with two anonymization schemes designed therefor, the one based on generalization, and the other based on perturbation. Our model postulates that an adversary's confidence on the likelihood of a certain sensitive-attribute (SA) value should not increase, in relative difference terms, by more than a predefined threshold. Our techniques aim to satisfy a given beta threshold with little information loss. We experimentally demonstrate that (i) our model provides an effective privacy guarantee in a way that predecessor models cannot, (ii) our generalization scheme is more effective and efficient in its task than methods adapting algorithms for the k-anonymity model, and (iii) our perturbation method outperforms a baseline approach. Moreover, we discuss in detail the resistance of our model and methods to attacks proposed in previous research.Comment: VLDB201

Dual detection system for AIMP PFM data processing

Dual detection system for processing AIMP satellite pulse frequency modulated telemetry dat

A quality control monitoring system for satellite telemetry data information systems

Quality control monitoring system for satellite telemetry data information system

Tax Design in the OECD: A test of the Hines-Summers Hypothesis

This paper investigates the effects of economic size and trade openness on tax design in the OECD. Using data for thirty OECD countries over the 1965-2007 period, we test the recently proposed Hines-Summers [2009] Hypothesis, according to which the smaller the size and the greater the openness of the economy, the more it will rely on expenditure taxes and the less on income taxes. Our findings show that the Hines-Summers Hypothesis can claim broad, statistically significant, and robust empirical support in the OECD data sets we examined.Income tax; Consumption tax; Country size; Trade openness

Average tax rate cyclicality in OECD countries: A test of three fiscal policy theories

This paper investigates the cyclical properties of the average effective tax rate in 26 OECD countries over 1965-2003 in order to test the validity of three theories of fiscal policy: (i) the standard Keynesian theory which recommends that tax policy should be counter-cyclical, (ii) the Tax Smoothing hypothesis, which implies that changes in GDP should be uncorrelated with tax rates, and (iii) the positive theory of Battaglini and Coate (2008) which predicts that the average tax rate should be negatively correlated with GDP. Our main finding is that the correlations of tax rates with cyclical GDP are generally quite small and statistically indistinguishable from zero. This finding is quite robust and is more consistent with the implications of the Tax Smoothing hypothesis than either the recommendations of the standard Keynesian model or the predictions of Battaglini and Coate’s theory.Fiscal Policy; Tax Rates; Business Cycle

A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks

We propose an alternative generator architecture for generative adversarial networks, borrowing from style transfer literature. The new architecture leads to an automatically learned, unsupervised separation of high-level attributes (e.g., pose and identity when trained on human faces) and stochastic variation in the generated images (e.g., freckles, hair), and it enables intuitive, scale-specific control of the synthesis. The new generator improves the state-of-the-art in terms of traditional distribution quality metrics, leads to demonstrably better interpolation properties, and also better disentangles the latent factors of variation. To quantify interpolation quality and disentanglement, we propose two new, automated methods that are applicable to any generator architecture. Finally, we introduce a new, highly varied and high-quality dataset of human faces.Comment: CVPR 2019 final versio

Business cycle volatility and country zize :evidence for a sample of OECD countries

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between business cycle volatility and country size using quarterly data for a sample of OECD countries over 1960-2000. The results suggest very strongly that the relationship between country size and business cycle volatility is negative and statistically significant. This finding is very robust, suggesting that country size does matter, at least for the severity of cyclical fluctuations.Country Size

An improved multi-agent simulation methodology for modelling and evaluating wireless communication systems resource allocation algorithms

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) constitute a well known approach in modelling dynamical real world systems. Recently, this technology has been applied to Wireless Communication Systems (WCS), where efficient resource allocation is a primary goal, for modelling the physical entities involved, like Base Stations (BS), service providers and network operators. This paper presents a novel approach in applying MAS methodology to WCS resource allocation by modelling more abstract entities involved in WCS operation, and especially the concurrent network procedures (services). Due to the concurrent nature of a WCS, MAS technology presents a suitable modelling solution. Services such as new call admission, handoff, user movement and call termination are independent to one another and may occur at the same time for many different users in the network. Thus, the required network procedures for supporting the above services act autonomously, interact with the network environment (gather information such as interference conditions), take decisions (e.g. call establishment), etc, and can be modelled as agents. Based on this novel simulation approach, the agent cooperation in terms of negotiation and agreement becomes a critical issue. To this end, two negotiation strategies are presented and evaluated in this research effort and among them the distributed negotiation and communication scheme between network agents is presented to be highly efficient in terms of network performance. The multi-agent concept adapted to the concurrent nature of large scale WCS is, also, discussed in this paper