Identifying the Benefits from Home Ownership:A Swedish Experiment

Scientific Conference (2016, December)

Design Strategies for ARX with Provable Bounds: SPARX and LAX

in Cheon, Jung Hee; Takagi, Tsuyoshi (Eds.) Advances in Cryptology --- ASIACRYPT 2016, 22nd International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, Hanoi, Vietnam, December 4-8, 2016, Proceedings, Part I (2016, December)

We present, for the first time, a general strategy for designing ARX symmetric-key primitives with provable resistance against single-trail differential and linear cryptanalysis. The latter has been a ... [more ▼]

We present, for the first time, a general strategy for designing ARX symmetric-key primitives with provable resistance against single-trail differential and linear cryptanalysis. The latter has been a long standing open problem in the area of ARX design. The Wide-Trail design Strategy (WTS), that is at the basis of many S-box based ciphers, including the AES, is not suitable for ARX designs due to the lack of S-boxes in the latter. In this paper we address the mentioned limitation by proposing the Long-Trail design Strategy (LTS) -- a dual of the WTS that is applicable (but not limited) to ARX constructions. In contrast to the WTS, that prescribes the use of small and efficient S-boxes at the expense of heavy linear layers with strong mixing properties, the LTS advocates the use of large (ARX-based) S-Boxes together with sparse linear layers. With the help of the so-called long-trail argument, a designer can bound the maximum differential and linear probabilities for any number of rounds of a cipher built according to the LTS. To illustrate the effectiveness of the new strategy, we propose Sparx -- a family of ARX-based block ciphers designed according to the LTS. Sparx has 32-bit ARX-based S-boxes and has provable bounds against differential and linear cryptanalysis. In addition, Sparx is very efficient on a number of embedded platforms. Its optimized software implementation ranks in the top-6 of the most software-efficient ciphers along with Simon, Speck, Chaskey, LEA and RECTANGLE. As a second contribution we propose another strategy for designing ARX ciphers with provable properties, that is completely independent of the LTS. It is motivated by a challenge proposed earlier by Wallen and uses the differential properties of modular addition to minimize the maximum differential probability across multiple rounds of a cipher. A new primitive, called LAX is designed following those principles. LAX partly solves the Wallen challenge. [less ▲]

Analysis of the impact of ROS in networks describing neurodegenerative diseases

Doctoral thesis (2016)

In the current thesis the model of the ROS management network is built using the domino principle. The model offers insight into the design principles underlying the ROS management network and enlightens ... [more ▼]

In the current thesis the model of the ROS management network is built using the domino principle. The model offers insight into the design principles underlying the ROS management network and enlightens its functionality in the diseases such as cancer and Parkinson’s disease (PD). It is validated using experimental data. The model is used for in silico study of the ROS management dynamics under the stress conditions (oxidative stress). This highlights the phenomena of both adaptation to stress and the stress accumulation effect in case of repeated stress. This study also helps to discover the potential ways to a personalized treatment of the insufficient ROS management. The different ways of a control of the ROS management network are shown using the optimal control approach. Obtained results could be used for a seeking of the treatment strategies to fix the ROS management failures caused by an oxidative stress, neurodegenerative diseases, etc. Or, in vice versa, to develop the ways of a controllable cell death that might be used in cancer research. [less ▲]

Graph-based Software Knowledge: Storage and Semantic Querying of Domain Models for Run-Time Adaptation

in IEEE International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots SIMPAR, San Francisco, Dec 2016 (2016, December)

Software development for robots is a knowledge intensive exercise. To capture this knowledge explicitly and formally in the form of various domain models, roboticists have recently employed model-driven ... [more ▼]

Software development for robots is a knowledge intensive exercise. To capture this knowledge explicitly and formally in the form of various domain models, roboticists have recently employed model-driven engineering (MDE) approaches. However, these models are merely seen as a way to support humans during the robot's software design process. We argue that the robots themselves should be first-class consumers of this knowledge to autonomously adapt their software to the various and changing run-time requirements induced, for instance, by the robot's tasks or environment. Motivated by knowledge-enabled approaches, we address this problem by employing a graph-based knowledge representation that allows us not only to persistently store domain models, but also to formulate powerful queries for the sake of run time adaptation. We have evaluated our approach in an integrated, real-world system using the neo4j graph database and we report some lessons learned. Further, we show that the graph database imposes only little overhead on the system's overall performance. [less ▲]

Linear identification of nonlinear systems: A lifting technique based on the Koopman operator

in Proceedings of the 55th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (2016, December)

We exploit the key idea that nonlinear system identification is equivalent to linear identification of the socalled Koopman operator. Instead of considering nonlinear system identification in the state ... [more ▼]

We exploit the key idea that nonlinear system identification is equivalent to linear identification of the socalled Koopman operator. Instead of considering nonlinear system identification in the state space, we obtain a novel linear identification technique by recasting the problem in the infinite-dimensional space of observables. This technique can be described in two main steps. In the first step, similar to a component of the Extended Dynamic Mode Decomposition algorithm, the data are lifted to the infinite-dimensional space and used for linear identification of the Koopman operator. In the second step, the obtained Koopman operator is “projected back” to the finite-dimensional state space, and identified to the nonlinear vector field through a linear least squares problem. The proposed technique is efficient to recover (polynomial) vector fields of different classes of systems, including unstable, chaotic, and open systems. In addition, it is robust to noise, well-suited to model low sampling rate datasets, and able to infer network topology and dynamics. [less ▲]

Uncertainty quantification for soft tissue biomechanics

Poster (2016, December)

Reliability problems and Pareto-optimality in cognitive radar (Invited paper)

in Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), 2016 24th European (2016, December)

Cognitive radar refers to an adaptive sensing system exhibiting high degree of waveform adaptivity and diversity enabled by intelligent processing and exploitation of information from the environment. The ... [more ▼]

Cognitive radar refers to an adaptive sensing system exhibiting high degree of waveform adaptivity and diversity enabled by intelligent processing and exploitation of information from the environment. The next generation of radar systems are characterized by their application to scenarios exhibiting non-stationary scenes as well as interference caused by use of shared spectrum. Cognitive radar systems, by their inherent adaptivity, seem to be the natural choice for such applications. However, adaptivity opens up reliability issues due to uncertainties induced in the information gathering and processing. This paper lists some of the reliability aspects foreseen for cognitive radar systems and motivates the need for waveform designs satisfying different metrics simultaneously towards enhancing the reliability. An iterative framework based on multi-objective optimization is proposed to provide Pareto-optimal waveform designs. [less ▲]

Tutorial Reproducible Research at the Cloud Era: Overview, Hands-on and Open challenges

Learning material (2016)

The term Reproducible Research (RR) refers to “the idea that the ultimate product of academic research is the paper along with the full computational environment used to produce the results in the paper ... [more ▼]

The term Reproducible Research (RR) refers to “the idea that the ultimate product of academic research is the paper along with the full computational environment used to produce the results in the paper such as the code, data, etc. that can be used to reproduce the results and create new work based on the research.” Source: Wikipedia. The need for reproducibility is increasing dramatically as data analyses become more complex, involving larger datasets and more sophisticated computations. Obviously, the advent of the Cloud Computing paradigm is expected to provide the appropriate means for RR. This tutorial is meant to provide an overview of sensible tools every researcher (in computer science but not only) should be aware of to enable RR in its own work. In particular, and after a general talk presenting RR and the existing associated tools and workflow, this tutorial will propose several practical exercises and hands-on meant to be performed on each attendee’s laptop, to cover the management of sharable Development environment using Vagrant. Resources of this tutorial will be available on Github. [less ▲]

Proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (ClouCom 2016)

Book published by IEEE Computer Society (2016)

CloudCom is the premier conference on Cloud Computing worldwide, attracting researchers, developers, users, students and practitioners from the fields of big data, systems architecture, services research ... [more ▼]

CloudCom is the premier conference on Cloud Computing worldwide, attracting researchers, developers, users, students and practitioners from the fields of big data, systems architecture, services research, virtualization, security and privacy, high performance computing, always with an emphasis on how to build cloud computing platforms with real impact. The conference is co-sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), is steered by the Cloud Computing Association, and draws on the excellence of its world-class Program Committee and its participants. The 8th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom 2016) was held in the city of Luxembourg on 12-15 December 2016 [less ▲]

On the Insecurity of a Method for Providing Secure and Private Fine-Grained Access to Outsourced Data

in Abstract book of 2016 IEEE 8th International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom) (2016, December)

The protection of sensitive data stored in the cloud is paramount. Among the techniques proposed to provide protection, attribute-based access control, which frequently uses ciphertext-policy attribute ... [more ▼]

The protection of sensitive data stored in the cloud is paramount. Among the techniques proposed to provide protection, attribute-based access control, which frequently uses ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CPABE), has received a lot of attention in the last years. Recently, Jahan et al.~(IEEE 40th Conference on Local Computer Networks, 2015) propose a scheme based on CPABE where users have reading and writing access to the outsourced data. We analyze the scheme by Jahan et al.\ and we show that it has several security vulnerabilities. For instance, the cloud server can get information about encrypted messages by using a stored ciphertext and an update of that ciphertext. As another example, users with writing access are able to decrypt all the messages regardless of their attributes. We discuss the security claims made by Jahan et al.\ and point out the reasons why they do not hold. We also explain that existing schemes can already provide the advantages claimed by Jahan et al. [less ▲]