1,721,073 research outputs found
Two Party Distribution Testing: Communication and Security
We study the problem of discrete distribution testing in the two-party setting. For example, in the standard closeness testing problem, Alice and Bob each have t samples from, respectively, distributions a and b over [n], and they need to test whether a=b or a,b are epsilon-far (in the l_1 distance). This is in contrast to the well-studied one-party case, where the tester has unrestricted access to samples of both distributions. Despite being a natural constraint in applications, the two-party setting has previously evaded attention.
We address two fundamental aspects of the two-party setting: 1) what is the communication complexity, and 2) can it be accomplished securely, without Alice and Bob learning extra information about each other’s input. Besides closeness testing, we also study the independence testing problem, where Alice and Bob have t samples from distributions a and b respectively, which may be correlated; the question is whether a,b are independent or epsilon-far from being independent. Our contribution is three-fold: 1) We show how to gain communication efficiency given more samples, beyond the information-theoretic bound on t. The gain is polynomially better than what one would obtain via adapting one-party algorithms. 2) We prove tightness of our trade-off for the closeness testing, as well as that the independence testing requires tight Omega(sqrt{m}) communication for unbounded number of samples. These lower bounds are of independent interest as, to the best of our knowledge, these are the first 2-party communication lower bounds for testing problems, where the inputs are a set of i.i.d. samples. 3) We define the concept of secure distribution testing, and provide secure versions of the above protocols with an overhead that is only polynomial in the security parameter
Limits to Non-Malleability
There have been many successes in constructing explicit non-malleable codes for various classes of tampering functions in recent years, and strong existential results are also known. In this work we ask the following question:
When can we rule out the existence of a non-malleable code for a tampering class ℱ?
First, we start with some classes where positive results are well-known, and show that when these classes are extended in a natural way, non-malleable codes are no longer possible. Specifically, we show that no non-malleable codes exist for any of the following tampering classes:
- Functions that change d/2 symbols, where d is the distance of the code;
- Functions where each input symbol affects only a single output symbol;
- Functions where each of the n output bits is a function of n-log n input bits.
Furthermore, we rule out constructions of non-malleable codes for certain classes ℱ via reductions to the assumption that a distributional problem is hard for ℱ, that make black-box use of the tampering functions in the proof. In particular, this yields concrete obstacles for the construction of efficient codes for NC, even assuming average-case variants of P ⊈ NC
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
We have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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