Poster: Accountable Processing of Reported Street Problems

Municipalities increasingly depend on citizens to file digital reports about issues such as potholes or illegal trash dumps to improve their response time. However, the responsible authorities may be incentivized to ignore certain reports, e.g., when addressing them inflicts high costs. In this work, we explore the applicability of blockchain technology to hold authorities accountable regarding filed reports. Our initial assessment indicates that our approach can be extended to benefit citizens and authorities in the future.Comment: Accepted as a poster abstract to CCS'2

Hi Doppelgänger: Towards Detecting Manipulation in News Comments

Public opinion manipulation is a serious threat to society, potentially influencing elections and the political situation even in established democracies. The prevalence of online media and the opportunity for users to express opinions in comments magnifies the problem. Governments, organizations, and companies can exploit this situation for biasing opinions. Typically, they deploy a large number of pseudonyms to create an impression of a crowd that supports specific opinions. Side channel information (such as IP addresses or identities of browsers) often allows a reliable detection of pseudonyms managed by a single person. However, while spoofing and anonymizing data that links these accounts is simple, a linking without is very challenging. In this paper, we evaluate whether stylometric features allow a detection of such doppelgängers within comment sections on news articles. To this end, we adapt a state-of-the-art doppelgänger detector to work on small texts (such as comments) and apply it on three popular news sites in two languages. Our results reveal that detecting potential doppelgängers based on linguistics is a promising approach even when no reliable side channel information is available. Preliminary results following an application in the wild shows indications for doppelgängers in real world data sets

Reputation Systems for Supply Chains: The Challenge of Achieving Privacy Preservation

Consumers frequently interact with reputation systems to rate products, services, and deliveries. While past research extensively studied different conceptual approaches to realize such systems securely and privacy-preservingly, these concepts are not yet in use in business-to-business environments. In this paper, (1) we thus outline which specific challenges privacy-cautious stakeholders in volatile supply chain networks introduce, (2) give an overview of the diverse landscape of privacy-preserving reputation systems and their properties, and (3) based on well-established concepts from supply chain information systems and cryptography, we further propose an initial concept that accounts for the aforementioned challenges by utilizing fully homomorphic encryption. For future work, we identify the need of evaluating whether novel systems address the supply chain-specific privacy and confidentiality needs

BLOOM: BLoom filter based oblivious outsourced matchings

Whole genome sequencing has become fast, accurate, and cheap, paving the way towards the large-scale collection and processing of human genome data. Unfortunately, this dawning genome era does not only promise tremendous advances in biomedical research but also causes unprecedented privacy risks for the many. Handling storage and processing of large genome datasets through cloud services greatly aggravates these concerns. Current research efforts thus investigate the use of strong cryptographic methods and protocols to implement privacy-preserving genomic computations

Innseiling til Borg havn – modellering av mudrings- og deponeringsoperasjoner - Spredning av finpartikulært materiale

Rapporten viser resultatene av en diagnostisk modellering av mudring og deponering ved en utdypning av innseilingen til Borg havn. I den pågående designfasen er det gjennomført modellering av turbiditet for å forutsi virkningen og omfanget av operasjonene. Turbiditetssimuleringene er gjort ved hjelp av SINTEFs partikkelbaserte DREAM-modell. DREAM-modellen bruker et detaljert datasett for strøm generert av SINTEFs numeriske 3D-modell SINMOD. Datasettet dekker de hydrodynamiske forholdene i innseilingen til Borg havn fra 1. april til 8. oktober 2013. Borg havneområde inneholder både forurenset og ikke-forurenset sediment og stein. Basert på omfattende feltmålinger ble lokalitetene av de forskjellige bunnmaterialene bestemt for to usikkerhetsnivåer (konfidensintervall). På grunn av de sensitive forholdene i Borg havneområde og den planlagte store mudringen, ble egnede og validerte mudringsteknikker brukt i simuleringen. Turbiditetsverdier ble tatt fra internasjonal litteratur, felt- og laboratoriemålinger og tilpasset DREAM-modellen. Forventede effekter er bestemt med et akseptabelt nøyaktighetsnivå. En indikasjon på innvirkningen på sårbare områder er gitt. Det er lagt vekt på at en god og miljørettet ledelse av mudringsarbeidene krever et grundig operativt overvåkingsprogram under utførelsen av arbeidene.publishedVersio

Формування конкурентних переваг підприємства в умовах зовнішньоекономічної діяльності

Abstract Background Whole genome sequencing has become fast, accurate, and cheap, paving the way towards the large-scale collection and processing of human genome data. Unfortunately, this dawning genome era does not only promise tremendous advances in biomedical research but also causes unprecedented privacy risks for the many. Handling storage and processing of large genome datasets through cloud services greatly aggravates these concerns. Current research efforts thus investigate the use of strong cryptographic methods and protocols to implement privacy-preserving genomic computations. Methods We propose Fhe-Bloom and Phe-Bloom, two efficient approaches for genetic disease testing using homomorphically encrypted Bloom filters. Both approaches allow the data owner to securely outsource storage and computation to an untrusted cloud. Fhe-Bloom is fully secure in the semi-honest model while Phe-Bloom slightly relaxes security guarantees in a trade-off for highly improved performance. Results We implement and evaluate both approaches on a large dataset of up to 50 patient genomes each with up to 1000000 variations (single nucleotide polymorphisms). For both implementations, overheads scale linearly in the number of patients and variations, while Phe-Bloom is faster by at least three orders of magnitude. For example, testing disease susceptibility of 50 patients with 100000 variations requires only a total of 308.31 s (σ=8.73 s) with our first approach and a mere 0.07 s (σ=0.00 s) with the second. We additionally discuss security guarantees of both approaches and their limitations as well as possible extensions towards more complex query types, e.g., fuzzy or range queries. Conclusions Both approaches handle practical problem sizes efficiently and are easily parallelized to scale with the elastic resources available in the cloud. The fully homomorphic scheme, Fhe-Bloom, realizes a comprehensive outsourcing to the cloud, while the partially homomorphic scheme, Phe-Bloom, trades a slight relaxation of security guarantees against performance improvements by at least three orders of magnitude

ZMYND10 Is Mutated in Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia and Interacts with LRRC6

Defects of motile cilia cause primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD), characterized by recurrent respiratory infections and male infertility. Using whole-exome resequencing and high-throughput mutation analysis, we identified recessive biallelic mutations in ZMYND10 in 14 families and mutations in the recently identified LRRC6 in 13 families. We show that ZMYND10 and LRRC6 interact and that certain ZMYND10 and LRRC6 mutations abrogate the interaction between the LRRC6 CS domain and the ZMYND10 C-terminal domain. Additionally, ZMYND10 and LRRC6 colocalize with the centriole markers SAS6 and PCM1. Mutations in ZMYND10 result in the absence of the axonemal protein components DNAH5 and DNALI1 from respiratory cilia. Animal models support the association between ZMYND10 and human PCD, given that zmynd10 knockdown in zebrafish caused ciliary paralysis leading to cystic kidneys and otolith defects and that knockdown in Xenopus interfered with ciliogenesis. Our findings suggest that a cytoplasmic protein complex containing ZMYND10 and LRRC6 is necessary for motile ciliary function

Mutations in SPAG1 Cause Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia Associated with Defective Outer and Inner Dynein Arms

Primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) is a genetically heterogeneous, autosomal-recessive disorder, characterized by oto-sino-pulmonary disease and situs abnormalities. PCD-causing mutations have been identified in 20 genes, but collectively they account for only ∼65% of all PCDs. To identify mutations in additional genes that cause PCD, we performed exome sequencing on three unrelated probands with ciliary outer and inner dynein arm (ODA+IDA) defects. Mutations in SPAG1 were identified in one family with three affected siblings. Further screening of SPAG1 in 98 unrelated affected individuals (62 with ODA+IDA defects, 35 with ODA defects, 1 without available ciliary ultrastructure) revealed biallelic loss-of-function mutations in 11 additional individuals (including one sib-pair). All 14 affected individuals with SPAG1 mutations had a characteristic PCD phenotype, including 8 with situs abnormalities. Additionally, all individuals with mutations who had defined ciliary ultrastructure had ODA+IDA defects. SPAG1 was present in human airway epithelial cell lysates but was not present in isolated axonemes, and immunofluorescence staining showed an absence of ODA and IDA proteins in cilia from an affected individual, thus indicating that SPAG1 probably plays a role in the cytoplasmic assembly and/or trafficking of the axonemal dynein arms. Zebrafish morpholino studies of spag1 produced cilia-related phenotypes previously reported for PCD-causing mutations in genes encoding cytoplasmic proteins. Together, these results demonstrate that mutations in SPAG1 cause PCD with ciliary ODA+IDA defects and that exome sequencing is useful to identify genetic causes of heterogeneous recessive disorders

Mutations in SPAG1 Cause Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia Associated with Defective Outer and Inner Dynein Arms

Primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD) is a genetically heterogeneous, autosomal-recessive disorder, characterized by oto-sino-pulmonary disease and situs abnormalities. PCD-causing mutations have been identified in 20 genes, but collectively they account for only ∼65% of all PCDs. To identify mutations in additional genes that cause PCD, we performed exome sequencing on three unrelated probands with ciliary outer and inner dynein arm (ODA+IDA) defects. Mutations in SPAG1 were identified in one family with three affected siblings. Further screening of SPAG1 in 98 unrelated affected individuals (62 with ODA+IDA defects, 35 with ODA defects, 1 without available ciliary ultrastructure) revealed biallelic loss-of-function mutations in 11 additional individuals (including one sib-pair). All 14 affected individuals with SPAG1 mutations had a characteristic PCD phenotype, including 8 with situs abnormalities. Additionally, all individuals with mutations who had defined ciliary ultrastructure had ODA+IDA defects. SPAG1 was present in human airway epithelial cell lysates but was not present in isolated axonemes, and immunofluorescence staining showed an absence of ODA and IDA proteins in cilia from an affected individual, thus indicating that SPAG1 probably plays a role in the cytoplasmic assembly and/or trafficking of the axonemal dynein arms. Zebrafish morpholino studies of spag1 produced cilia-related phenotypes previously reported for PCD-causing mutations in genes encoding cytoplasmic proteins. Together, these results demonstrate that mutations in SPAG1 cause PCD with ciliary ODA+IDA defects and that exome sequencing is useful to identify genetic causes of heterogeneous recessive disorders