An Embedded Domain-Specific Language for Logical Circuit Descriptions with Applications to Garbled Circuits

Contemporary libraries and frameworks that make it possible to incorporate secure multi-party computation protocols and capabilities into production software systems and applications must sometimes deliver underlying capabilities (such as logical circuit synthesis) to new kinds of environments (such as web browsers or serverless cloud computing platforms). In order to illustrate some of the benefits of addressing this challenge by building a solution from the ground up that leverages the features of a contemporary and widely used programming language, we present an embedded domain-specific language that allows programmers to describe and synthesize logical circuits. Notably, this approach allows programmers to employ many of the language features and any of the programming paradigms supported by the host language. We illustrate this flexibility by considering two use cases: synthesizing circuits for relational operations and synthesizing circuits corresponding to the SHA-256 cryptographic hash function

Asynchronous Delegated Private Set Intersection with Hiding of Intersection Size

Integrating private set intersection (PSI) protocols within real-world data workflows, software applications, or web services can be challenging. This can occur because data contributors and result recipients do not have the technical expertise, information technology infrastructure, or other resources to participate throughout the execution of a protocol and/or to incur all the communication costs associated with participation. Furthermore, contemporary workflows, applications, and services are often designed around RESTful APIs that might not require contributors or recipients to remain online or to maintain state. Asynchronous delegated PSI protocol variants can better match the expectations of software engineers by (1) allowing data contributors to contribute their inputs and then to depart permanently, and (2) allowing result recipients to request their result only once they are ready to do so. However, such protocols usually accomplish this by introducing an additional party that learns some information about the size of the intersection. This work presents an asynchronous delegated PSI protocol variant that does not reveal the intersection size to the additional party. It is shown that such a protocol can have, on average, linear time and space complexity

Training compliance control yields improvements in drawing as a function of beery scores

Many children have difficulty producing movements well enough to improve in sensori-motor learning. Previously, we developed a training method that supports active movement generation to allow improvement at a 3D tracing task requiring good compliance control. Here, we tested 7–8 year old children from several 2nd grade classrooms to determine whether 3D tracing performance could be predicted using the Beery VMI. We also examined whether 3D tracing training lead to improvements in drawing. Baseline testing included Beery, a drawing task on a tablet computer, and 3D tracing. We found that baseline performance in 3D tracing and drawing co-varied with the visual perception (VP) component of the Beery. Differences in 3D tracing between children scoring low versus high on the Beery VP replicated differences previously found between children with and without motor impairments, as did post-training performance that eliminated these differences. Drawing improved as a result of training in the 3D tracing task. The training method improved drawing and reduced differences predicted by Beery scores

Epidemiology of Syncope in Hospitalized Patients

OBJECTIVE: To describe the etiologies of syncope in hospitalized patients and determine the factors that influence survival after discharge. DESIGN: Observational retrospective cohort. SETTING: Department of Veterans Affairs hospital, group-model HMO, and Medicare population in Oregon. PATIENTS: Hospitalized individuals (n = 1,516; mean age ± SD, 73.0 ± 13.4 years) with an admission or discharge diagnosis of syncope (ICD-9-CM 780.2) during 1992, 1993, or 1994. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: During a median hospital stay of 3 days, most individuals received an electrocardiogram (97%) and prolonged electrocardiographic monitoring (90%), but few underwent electrophysiology testing (2%) or tilt-table testing (0.7%). The treating clinicians identified cardiovascular causes of syncope in 19% of individuals and noncardiovascular causes in 40%. The remaining 42% of individuals were discharged with unexplained syncope. Complete heart block (2.4%) and ventricular tachycardia (2.3%) were rarely identified as the cause of syncope. Pacemakers were implanted in 28% of the patients with cardiovascular syncope and 0.4% of the others. No patient received an implantable defibrillator. All-cause mortality ± SE was 1.1%± 0.3% during the admission, 13%± 1% at 1 year, and 41%± 2% at 4 years. The adjusted relative risk (RR) of dying for individuals with cardiovascular syncope (RR 1.18; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.92, 1.50) did not differ from that for unexplained syncope (RR 1.0) and noncardiovascular syncope (RR 0.94; 95% CI 0.77, 1.16). CONCLUSIONS: Among these elderly patients hospitalized with syncope, noncardiovascular causes were twice as common as cardiovascular causes. Because survival was not related to the cause of syncope, clinicians cannot be reassured that hospitalized elderly patients with noncardiovascular and unexplained syncope will have excellent outcomes