Impossibility of Growing Quantum Bit Commitments

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is often, more correctly, called key growing. Given a short key as a seed, QKD enables two parties, connected by an insecure quantum channel, to generate a secret key of arbitrary length. Conversely, no key agreement is possible without access to an initial key. Here, we consider another fundamental cryptographic task, commitments. While, similar to key agreement, commitments cannot be realized from scratch, we ask whether they may be grown. That is, given the ability to commit to a fixed number of bits, is there a way to augment this to commitments to strings of arbitrary length? Using recently developed information-theoretic techniques, we answer this question to the negative.Comment: 10 pages, minor change

Detecting Rainfall Onset Using Sky Images

Ground-based sky cameras (popularly known as Whole Sky Imagers) are increasingly used now-a-days for continuous monitoring of the atmosphere. These imagers have higher temporal and spatial resolutions compared to conventional satellite images. In this paper, we use ground-based sky cameras to detect the onset of rainfall. These images contain additional information about cloud coverage and movement and are therefore useful for accurate rainfall nowcast. We validate our results using rain gauge measurement recordings and achieve an accuracy of 89% for correct detection of rainfall onset.Comment: Accepted in Proc. TENCON 2016 - 2016 IEEE Region 10 Conferenc