Reflections on the indigenous health adaptation to climate change (IHACC) project

The Indigenous Health Adaptation to Climate Change (IHACC) project is a multi-year, trans-disciplinary, community-based initiative working with remote Indigenous populations in the Peruvian Amazon, Canadian Arctic and Uganda to examine vulnerabilities to the health effects of climate change, and to develop an evidentiary base for adaptation. The presentation provides an evaluation of aims and accomplishments to date in terms of: training; shaping policies and practice; advancing knowledge; challenges; and maintaining partnerships

Quantifying and mitigating privacy risks in biomedical data

Die stetig sinkenden Kosten für molekulares Profiling haben der Biomedizin zahlreiche neue Arten biomedizinischer Daten geliefert und den Durchbruch für eine präzisere und personalisierte Medizin ermöglicht. Die Veröffentlichung dieser inhärent hochsensiblen und miteinander verbundenen Daten stellt jedoch eine neue Bedrohung für unsere Privatsphäre dar. Während die IT-Sicherheitsforschung sich bisher hauptsächlich auf die Auswirkung genetischer Daten auf die Privatsphäre konzentriert hat, wurden die vielfältigen Risiken durch andere Arten biomedizinischer Daten – epigenetischer Daten im Speziellen – größtenteils außer Acht gelassen. Diese Dissertation stellt Verfahren zur Messung und Abwehr solcher Privatsphärerisiken vor. Neben dem Genom konzentrieren wir uns auf zwei der wichtigsten gesundheitsrelevanten epigenetischen Elemente: microRNAs und DNA-Methylierung. Wir quantifizieren die Privatsphäre für die folgenden realistischen Angriffe: (1) Verknüpfung von Profilen über die Zeit, Verknüpfung verschiedener Datentypen und verwandter Personen, (2) Feststellung der Studienteilnahme und (3) Inferenz von Attributen. Unsere Resultate bekräftigen, dass die Privatsphärerisiken solcher Daten ernst genommen werden müssen. Zudem präsentieren und evaluieren wir Lösungen zum Schutz der Privatsphäre. Sie reichen von der Anwendung von Differential Privacy unter Berücksichtigung des Nutzwertes bis zu kryptographischen Protokollen zur sicheren Auswertung eines Random Forests.The decreasing costs of molecular profiling have fueled the biomedical research community with a plethora of new types of biomedical data, allowing for a breakthrough towards a more precise and personalized medicine. However, the release of these intrinsically highly sensitive, interdependent data poses a new severe privacy threat. So far, the security community has mostly focused on privacy risks arising from genomic data. However, the manifold privacy risks stemming from other types of biomedical data – and epigenetic data in particular – have been largely overlooked. In this thesis, we provide means to quantify and protect the privacy of individuals’ biomedical data. Besides the genome, we specifically focus on two of the most important epigenetic elements influencing human health: microRNAs and DNA methylation. We quantify the privacy for multiple realistic attack scenarios, namely, (1) linkability attacks along the temporal dimension, between different types of data, and between related individuals, (2) membership attacks, and (3) inference attacks. Our results underline that the privacy risks inherent to biomedical data have to be taken seriously. Moreover, we present and evaluate solutions to preserve the privacy of individuals. Our mitigation techniques stretch from the differentially private release of epigenetic data, considering its utility, up to cryptographic constructions to securely, and privately evaluate a random forest on a patient’s data

Authorship in IPCC AR5 and its implications for content: climate change and Indigenous populations in WGII

This essay examines the extent to which we can expect Indigenous Knowledge, understanding, and voices on climate change (‘Indigenous content’) to be captured in WGII of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), based on an analysis of chapter authorship. Reviewing the publishing history of 309 chapter authors (CAs) to WGII, we document 9 (2.9%) to have published on climate change and Indigenous populations and involved as authors in 6/30 chapters. Drawing upon recent scholarship highlighting how authorship affect structure and content of assessment reports, we argue that, unaddressed, this will affect the extent to which Indigenous content is examined and assessed. While it is too late to alter the structure of AR5, there are opportunities to prioritize the recruitment of contributing authors and reviewers with expertise on Indigenous issues, raise awareness among CAs on the characteristics of impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability faced by Indigenous peoples, and highlight how Indigenous perspectives can help broaden our understanding of climate change and policy interventions. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10584-011-0350-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Albatross: An optimistic consensus algorithm

The area of distributed ledgers is a vast and quickly developing landscape. At the heart of most distributed ledgers is their consensus protocol. The consensus protocol describes the way participants in a distributed network interact with each other to obtain and agree on a shared state. While classical consensus Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) algorithms are designed to work in closed, size-limited networks only, modern distributed ledgers -- and blockchains in particular -- often focus on open, permissionless networks. In this paper, we present a novel blockchain consensus algorithm, called Albatross, inspired by speculative BFT algorithms. Transactions in Albatross benefit from strong probabilistic finality. We describe the technical specification of Albatross in detail and analyse its security and performance. We conclude that the protocol is secure under regular PBFT security assumptions and has a performance close to the theoretical maximum for single-chain Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithms

What we learned from the Dust Bowl: lessons in science, policy, and adaptation

This article provides a review and synthesis of scholarly knowledge of Depression-era droughts on the North American Great Plains, a time and place known colloquially as the Dust Bowl era or the Dirty Thirties. Recent events, including the 2008 financial crisis, severe droughts in the US corn belt, and the release of a popular documentary film, have spawned a resurgence in public interest in the Dust Bowl. Events of the Dust Bowl era have also proven in recent years to be of considerable interest to scholars researching phenomena related to global environmental change, including atmospheric circulation, drought modeling, land management, institutional behavior, adaptation processes, and human migration. In this review, we draw out common themes in terms of not only what natural and social scientists have learned about the Dust Bowl era itself, but also how insights gained from the study of that period are helping to enhance our understanding of climate–human relations more generally