A New variant of the McEliece cryptosystem based on the Smith form of convolutional codes

In this article, the authors propose a new version of the McEliece cryptosystem based on the Smith form of convolutional codes. They use the Smith form to hide a part of the code in the public matrix, and they leave the other part secret. The secret part will then be used for decryption. They hide this part by multiplying it on the left by a random matrix, and they add a random matrix which has a few conditions. Their scheme has a small public key size compared to the original McEliece scheme and resists the unique decoding attack against convolutional structure presented at the conference PQCrypto 2013 by Landais and Tillich. Further, the exhaustive search attack is infeasible on their system.     

Service Quality Gaps Analysis at SCECO-East, Saudi Arabia

This research examines the Saudi Consolidated Electric Company in the Eastern Province, a typical service provider in Saudi Arabia in which service quality is of primary importance. Four gaps have an impact on the consumer's evaluation of service quality: consumer expectation-management perception, service quality specification, service performance, and external communication. The study revealed that Gap 3 (service performance) is more critical than the others in affecting perceived service quality, making service delivery the main area of improvement. Frontline staff also agree that Gap 4 contributed to the problem (i.e., when delivery does not match the company's promises) but to a lesser degree than Gap 3.     

Alterations in ACE and ACE2 Activities and Cardiomyocyte Signaling Underlie Improved Myocardial Function in a Rat Model of Repeated Remote Ischemic Conditioning

Post-ischemic left ventricular (LV) remodeling and its hypothetical prevention by repeated remote ischemic conditioning (rRIC) in male Sprague–Dawley rats were studied. Myocardial infarction (MI) was evoked by permanent ligation of the left anterior descending coronary artery (LAD), and myocardial characteristics were tested in the infarcted anterior and non-infarcted inferior LV regions four and/or six weeks later. rRIC was induced by three cycles of five-minute-long unilateral hind limb ischemia and five minutes of reperfusion on a daily basis for a period of two weeks starting four weeks after LAD occlusion. Sham operated animals served as controls. Echocardiographic examinations and invasive hemodynamic measurements revealed distinct changes in LV systolic function between four and six weeks after MI induction in the absence of rRIC (i.e., LV ejection fraction (LVEF) decreased from 52.8 ± 2.1% to 50 ± 1.6%, mean ± SEM, p < 0.05) and in the presence of rRIC (i.e., LVEF increased from 48.2 ± 4.8% to 55.2 ± 4.1%, p < 0.05). Angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) activity was about five times higher in the anterior LV wall at six weeks than that in sham animals. Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) activity roughly doubled in post-ischemic LVs. These increases in ACE and ACE2 activities were effectively mitigated by rRIC. Ca²⁺-sensitivities of force production (pCa₅₀) of LV permeabilized cardiomyocytes were increased at six weeks after MI induction together with hypophosphorylation of 1) cardiac troponin I (cTnI) in both LV regions, and 2) cardiac myosin-binding protein C (cMyBP-C) in the anterior wall. rRIC normalized pCa₅₀, cTnI and cMyBP-C phosphorylations. Taken together, post-ischemic LV remodeling involves region-specific alterations in ACE and ACE2 activities together with changes in cardiomyocyte myofilament protein phosphorylation and function. rRIC has the potential to prevent these alterations and to improve LV performance following MI.     

Reactions with the arylhydrazones of some α,β-diketoesters

Treatment of the α, β-diketo-ester-α-arylhydrazones 1a–e and 2a–d with GRIGNARD reagents results in the formation of the ketocarbinols 3a–h and 4a–g , respectively. The arylhydrazones of ethyl mesoxalate 5a–e react with phenylmagnesium bromide to yield compounds 3a–e . A novel synthesis of α-arylazo-β-arylchalcones 6a–e and their reaction with hydrazines are reported. Whereas the arylhydrazones 10a, b, 2a, b, d, 13a–c and 14a–c react with piperidine and formaldehyde to yield the MANNICH bases 11a, b, 12a–c and 15a–c , compound 5a was recovered unchanged.     

Efficiency Effect of Obstacle Margin on Line-of-Sight in Wireless Networks

Line-of-sight clarity and assurance are essential because they are considered the golden rule in wireless network planning, allowing the direct propagation path to connect the transmitter and receiver and retain the strength of the signal to be received. Despite the increasing literature on the line of sight with different scenarios, no comprehensive study focuses on the multiplicity of parameters and basic concepts that must be taken into account when studying such a topic as it affects the results and their accuracy. Therefore, this research aims to find limited values that ensure that the signal reaches the future efficiently and enhances the accuracy of these values’ results. We have designed MATLAB simulation and programming programs by Visual Basic .NET for a semi-realistic communication system. It includes all the basic parameters of this system, taking into account the environment's diversity and the characteristics of the obstacle between the transmitting station and the receiving station. Then we verified the correctness of the system's work. Moreover, we begin by analyzing and studying multiple and branching cases to achieve the goal. We get several values from the results, which are finite values, which are a useful reference for engineers and designers of wireless networks.     

The IBM expressive text-to-speech synthesis system for American English

Expressive text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis should contribute to the pleasantness, intelligibility, and speed of speech-based human-machine interactions which use TTS. We describe a TTS engine which can be directed, via text markup, to use a variety of expressive styles, here, questioning, contrastive emphasis, and conveying good and bad news. Differences in these styles lead us to investigate two approaches for expressive TTS, a "corpus-driven" and a "prosodic-phonology" approach. Each speaker records 11 h (excluding silences) of "neutral" sentences. In the corpus-driven approach, the speaker also records 1-h corpora in each expressive style; these segments are tagged by style for use during search, and decision trees for determining f/sub 0/ contours and timing are trained separately for each of the neutral and expressive corpora. In the prosodic-phonology approach, rules translating certain expressive markup elements to tones and break indices (ToBI) are manually determined, and the ToBI elements are used in single f/sub 0/ and duration trees for all expressions. Tests show that listeners identify synthesis in particular styles ranging from 70% correctly for "conveying bad news" to 85% for "yes-no questions". Further improvements are demonstrated through the use of speaker-pooled f/sub 0/ and duration models.     

A modified method for accurate correlation between the craze density and the optomechanical properties of fibers using pluta microscope

A modified method was suggested to improve the performance of the Pluta microscope in its nonduplicated mode in the calculation of the areal craze density especially, for relatively low draw ratio (low areal craze density). This method decreases the error that is resulted from the similarity between the formed crazes and the dark fringes of the interference pattern. Furthermore, an accurate method to calculate the birefringence and the orientation function of the drawn fibers via nonduplicated Pluta polarizing interference microscope for high areal craze density (high draw ratio) was suggested. The advantage of the suggested method is to relate the optomechanical properties of the tested fiber with the areal craze density, for the same region of the fiber material. Microsc. Res. Tech. 79:422–430, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

An energy-efficient cuckoo search algorithm for virtual machine placement in cloud computing data centers

The Journal of Supercomputing - The advent of virtualization technology has created a huge potential application for cloud computing. In virtualization, a large hardware resource is often broken...     

Search and Rescue Optimization with Machine Learning Enabled Cybersecurity Model

Presently, smart cities play a vital role to enhance the quality of living among human beings in several ways such as online shopping, e-learning, e-healthcare, etc. Despite the benefits of advanced technologies, issues are also existed from the transformation of the physical word into digital word, particularly in online social networks (OSN). Cyberbullying (CB) is a major problem in OSN which needs to be addressed by the use of automated natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) approaches. This article devises a novel search and rescue optimization with machine learning enabled cybersecurity model for online social networks, named SRO-MLCOSN model. The presented SRO-MLCOSN model focuses on the identification of CB that occurred in social networking sites. The SRO-MLCOSN model initially employs Glove technique for word embedding process. Besides, a multiclass-weighted kernel extreme learning machine (M-WKELM) model is utilized for effectual identification and categorization of CB. Finally, Search and Rescue Optimization (SRO) algorithm is exploited to fine tune the parameters involved in the M-WKELM model. The experimental validation of the SRO-MLCOSN model on the benchmark dataset reported significant outcomes over the other approaches with precision, recall, and F1-score of 96.24%, 98.71%, and 97.46% respectively.