Victorian values: Politicians and the public incorrectly see security and privacy as opposites

It is impossible to make any progress on the security vs. privacy debate, or move towards a political settlement around identity for the coming years, unless we develop a more modern notion of what identity is and how it should be addressed online. So long as we maintain an essentially “Victorian” view of the balance between security and privacy, founded on the central concept of identity as a card in a filing cabinet, then society cannot properly take advantage of technological developments. If it does, then security and privacy are no longer competing concerns that need to be balanced but simultaneous deliverables of an infrastructure founded in utility.     

Christopher Strachey: Recollections of His Influence

My early research was inspired by the mathematical semantics of Scott and Strachey. Two such topics, recounted in this paper, were the fixed-point analysis of pointer loops and the expressibility of a style of functional programming introduced by Barron and Strachey.     

Streak Preventive Image Reconstruction with ART and Adaptive Filtering

Streaks arise in computed tomograms for a variety of reasons, such as presence of high-contrast edges and objects, aliasing errors, patient movement, and use of very few views. The problem appears to be an inherent difficulty with all reconstruction methods, including backprojection (with convolution) and the algebraic reconstruction technique (ART). This paper presents the derivation and results of an ART-like algorithm (SPARTAF) oriented towards prevention of streaks via optimization of a cost function based on features of streaks, subject to the constraints of the given projection data. The object-dependent method employs pattern recognition of streaks and adaptive filtering during iterative reconstruction by ART. Results of experiments with a test pattern and of application of the method to reconstructive tomography from radiographic films are presented and the convergence properties demonstrated.     

Discovery of context-specific ranking functions for effective information retrieval using genetic programming

The Internet and corporate intranets have brought a lot of information. People usually resort to search engines to find required information. However, these systems tend to use only one fixed ranking strategy regardless of the contexts. This poses serious performance problems when characteristics of different users, queries, and text collections are taken into account. We argue that the ranking strategy should be context specific and we propose a , new systematic method that can automatically generate ranking strategies for different contexts based on genetic programming (GP). The new method was tested on TREC data and the results are very promising.     

A short course in antivirus software testing: seven simple rules for evaluating tests

Antivirus software tests are important when selecting antivirus software. However, there are many different tests, and interpreting the results can be challenging. Additionally, the needs of the corporate customer and home user differ, and it is important to understand these differences in order to evaluate antivirus software tests critically.