135 research outputs found
An Interactive Tool to Explore and Improve the Ply Number of Drawings
Given a straight-line drawing of a graph , for every vertex
the ply disk is defined as a disk centered at where the radius of
the disk is half the length of the longest edge incident to . The ply number
of a given drawing is defined as the maximum number of overlapping disks at
some point in . Here we present a tool to explore and evaluate
the ply number for graphs with instant visual feedback for the user. We
evaluate our methods in comparison to an existing ply computation by De Luca et
al. [WALCOM'17]. We are able to reduce the computation time from seconds to
milliseconds for given drawings and thereby contribute to further research on
the ply topic by providing an efficient tool to examine graphs extensively by
user interaction as well as some automatic features to reduce the ply number.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on
Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017
Arcula: A Secure Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet for Multi-asset Blockchains
This work presents Arcula, a new design for hierarchical deterministic
wallets that brings identity-based addresses to the blockchain. Arcula is built
on top of provably secure cryptographic primitives. It generates all its
cryptographic secrets from a user-provided seed and enables the derivation of
new public keys based on the identities of users, without requiring any secret
information. Unlike other wallets, it achieves all these properties while being
secure against privilege escalation. We formalize the security model of
hierarchical deterministic wallets and prove that an attacker compromising an
arbitrary number of users within an Arcula wallet cannot escalate his
privileges and compromise users higher in the access hierarchy. Our design
works out-of-the-box with any blockchain that enables the verification of
signatures on arbitrary messages. We evaluate its usage in a real-world
scenario on the Bitcoin Cash network
Cryptographic enforcement of information flow policies without public information via tree partitions
We may enforce an information flow policy by encrypting a protected resource
and ensuring that only users authorized by the policy are able to decrypt the
resource. In most schemes in the literature that use symmetric cryptographic
primitives, each user is assigned a single secret and derives decryption keys
using this secret and publicly available information. Recent work has
challenged this approach by developing schemes, based on a chain partition of
the information flow policy, that do not require public information for key
derivation, the trade-off being that a user may need to be assigned more than
one secret. In general, many different chain partitions exist for the same
policy and, until now, it was not known how to compute an appropriate one.
In this paper, we introduce the notion of a tree partition, of which chain
partitions are a special case. We show how a tree partition may be used to
define a cryptographic enforcement scheme and prove that such schemes can be
instantiated in such a way as to preserve the strongest security properties
known for cryptographic enforcement schemes. We establish a number of results
linking the amount of secret material that needs to be distributed to users
with a weighted acyclic graph derived from the tree partition. These results
enable us to develop efficient algorithms for deriving tree and chain
partitions that minimize the amount of secret material that needs to be
distributed.Comment: Extended version of conference papers from ACNS 2015 and DBSec 201
Evidence for Two Modes of Synergistic Induction of Apoptosis by Mapatumumab and Oxaliplatin in Combination with Hyperthermia in Human Colon Cancer Cells
Colorectal cancer is the third leading cause of cancer-related mortality in the world-- the main cause of death from colorectal cancer is hepatic metastases, which can be treated with isolated hepatic perfusion (IHP). Searching for the most clinically relevant approaches for treating colorectal metastatic disease by isolated hepatic perfusion (IHP), we developed the application of oxaliplatin concomitantly with hyperthermia and humanized death receptor 4 (DR4) antibody mapatumumab (Mapa), and investigated the molecular mechanisms of this multimodality treatment in human colon cancer cell lines CX-1 and HCT116 as well as human colon cancer stem cells Tu-12, Tu-21 and Tu-22. We showed here, in this study, that the synergistic effect of the multimodality treatment-induced apoptosis was caspase dependent and activated death signaling via both the extrinsic apoptotic pathway and the intrinsic pathway. Death signaling was activated by c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) signaling which led to Bcl-xL phosphorylation at serine 62, decreasing the anti-apoptotic activity of Bcl-xL, which contributed to the intrinsic pathway. The downregulation of cellular FLICE inhibitory protein long isoform (c-FLIPL) in the extrinsic pathway was accomplished through ubiquitination at lysine residue (K) 195 and protein synthesis inhibition. Overexpression of c-FLIPL mutant (K195R) and Bcl-xL mutant (S62A) completely abrogated the synergistic effect. The successful outcome of this study supports the application of multimodality strategy to patients with colorectal hepatic metastases who fail to respond to standard chemoradiotherapy that predominantly targets the mitochondrial apoptotic pathway. © 2013 Song et al
Quantum Computation with Coherent Spin States and the Close Hadamard Problem
We study a model of quantum computation based on the
continuously-parameterized yet finite-dimensional Hilbert space of a spin
system. We explore the computational powers of this model by analyzing a pilot
problem we refer to as the close Hadamard problem. We prove that the close
Hadamard problem can be solved in the spin system model with arbitrarily small
error probability in a constant number of oracle queries. We conclude that this
model of quantum computation is suitable for solving certain types of problems.
The model is effective for problems where symmetries between the structure of
the information associated with the problem and the structure of the unitary
operators employed in the quantum algorithm can be exploited.Comment: RevTeX4, 13 pages with 8 figures. Accepted for publication in Quantum
Information Processing. Article number: s11128-015-1229-
Improved Adaptive Group Testing Algorithms with Applications to Multiple Access Channels and Dead Sensor Diagnosis
We study group-testing algorithms for resolving broadcast conflicts on a
multiple access channel (MAC) and for identifying the dead sensors in a mobile
ad hoc wireless network. In group-testing algorithms, we are asked to identify
all the defective items in a set of items when we can test arbitrary subsets of
items. In the standard group-testing problem, the result of a test is
binary--the tested subset either contains defective items or not. In the more
generalized versions we study in this paper, the result of each test is
non-binary. For example, it may indicate whether the number of defective items
contained in the tested subset is zero, one, or at least two. We give adaptive
algorithms that are provably more efficient than previous group testing
algorithms. We also show how our algorithms can be applied to solve conflict
resolution on a MAC and dead sensor diagnosis. Dead sensor diagnosis poses an
interesting challenge compared to MAC resolution, because dead sensors are not
locally detectable, nor are they themselves active participants.Comment: Expanded version of a paper appearing in ACM Symposium on Parallelism
in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), and preliminary version of paper
appearing in Journal of Combinatorial Optimizatio
Predicting Individuals' Learning Success from Patterns of Pre-Learning MRI Activity
Performance in most complex cognitive and psychomotor tasks improves with training, yet the extent of improvement varies among individuals. Is it possible to forecast the benefit that a person might reap from training? Several behavioral measures have been used to predict individual differences in task improvement, but their predictive power is limited. Here we show that individual differences in patterns of time-averaged T2*-weighted MRI images in the dorsal striatum recorded at the initial stage of training predict subsequent learning success in a complex video game with high accuracy. These predictions explained more than half of the variance in learning success among individuals, suggesting that individual differences in neuroanatomy or persistent physiology predict whether and to what extent people will benefit from training in a complex task. Surprisingly, predictions from white matter were highly accurate, while voxels in the gray matter of the dorsal striatum did not contain any information about future training success. Prediction accuracy was higher in the anterior than the posterior half of the dorsal striatum. The link between trainability and the time-averaged T2*-weighted signal in the dorsal striatum reaffirms the role of this part of the basal ganglia in learning and executive functions, such as task-switching and task coordination processes. The ability to predict who will benefit from training by using neuroimaging data collected in the early training phase may have far-reaching implications for the assessment of candidates for specific training programs as well as the study of populations that show deficiencies in learning new skills
Privacy-preserving biometric-based remote user authentication with leakage resilience
National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapor
Spatiotemporal neural characterization of prediction error valence and surprise during reward learning in humans
Reward learning depends on accurate reward associations with potential choices. These associations can be attained with reinforcement learning mechanisms using a reward prediction error (RPE) signal (the difference between actual and expected rewards) for updating future reward expectations. Despite an extensive body of literature on the influence of RPE on learning, little has been done to investigate the potentially separate contributions of RPE valence (positive or negative) and surprise (absolute degree of deviation from expectations). Here, we coupled single-trial electroencephalography with simultaneously acquired fMRI, during a probabilistic reversal-learning task, to offer evidence of temporally overlapping but largely distinct spatial representations of RPE valence and surprise. Electrophysiological variability in RPE valence correlated with activity in regions of the human reward network promoting approach or avoidance learning. Electrophysiological variability in RPE surprise correlated primarily with activity in regions of the human attentional network controlling the speed of learning. Crucially, despite the largely separate spatial extend of these representations our EEG-informed fMRI approach uniquely revealed a linear superposition of the two RPE components in a smaller network encompassing visuo mnemonic and reward areas. Activity in this network was further predictive of stimulus value updating indicating a comparable contribution of both signals to reward learning
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