Algebraic nonlinearity and its applications to cryptography

The algebraic nonlinearity of an n-bit boolean function is defined as the degree of the polynomial f(X) Z ₂[x ₁, x ₂,..., x _n] that represents f. We prove that the average degree of an ANF polynomial for an n-bit function is n+o(1). Further, for a balanced n-bit function, any subfunction obtained by holding less than n-[log n]- 1 bits constant is also expected to be nonaffine. A function is partially linear if f(X) has some indeterminates that only occur in terms bounded by degree 1. Boolean functions which can be mapped to partially linear functions via a linear transformation are said to have a linear structure, and are a potentially weak class of functions for cryptography. We prove that the number of n-bit functions that have a linear structure is asymptotic .The author is presently employed by the Distributed System Technology Center, Brisbane, Australia.Project sponsored in part by NSERC operating Grant OGP0121648, and the National Security Agency under Grant Number MDA904-91-H-0012. The United States Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints notwithstanding any copyright notation hereon.     

Ultrarapid metabolizers of debrisoquine: characterization and PCR-based detection of alleles with duplication of the CYP2D6 gene

During a six-month period 2,221 haemocultures obtained from patients hospitalized in the Faculty Hospital Olomouc were examined. In all 304 isolated bacteria the sensitivity was assessed by the standard dilution micromethod and moreover all positive haemocultures were examined the "direct" disc method. Agreement between the results of the two methods was proved in 84% of pairs of tests and within a range from 67 to 100%, depending on the type of antimicrobial preparation. Based on these findings it may be stated that assessment of the sensitivity by the "direct" method agrees significantly with assessment of the sensitivity according to minimal inhibitory concentrations (MIC). In patients with septicaemia this procedure makes it possible to change empirical antibiotherapy by 24 hours sooner to aimed therapy.     

TreeNetViz: revealing patterns of networks over tree structures

Network data often contain important attributes from various dimensions such as social affiliations and areas of expertise in a social network. If such attributes exhibit a tree structure, visualizing a compound graph consisting of tree and network structures becomes complicated. How to visually reveal patterns of a network over a tree has not been fully studied. In this paper, we propose a compound graph model, TreeNet, to support visualization and analysis of a network at multiple levels of aggregation over a tree. We also present a visualization design, TreeNetViz, to offer the multiscale and cross-scale exploration and interaction of a TreeNet graph. TreeNetViz uses a Radial, Space-Filling (RSF) visualization to represent the tree structure, a circle layout with novel optimization to show aggregated networks derived from TreeNet, and an edge bundling technique to reduce visual complexity. Our circular layout algorithm reduces both total edge-crossings and edge length and also considers hierarchical structure constraints and edge weight in a TreeNet graph. These experiments illustrate that the algorithm can reduce visual cluttering in TreeNet graphs. Our case study also shows that TreeNetViz has the potential to support the analysis of a compound graph by revealing multiscale and cross-scale network patterns.     

Indoor robot gardening: design and implementation

This paper describes the architecture and implementation of a distributed autonomous gardening system with applications in urban/indoor precision agriculture. The garden is a mesh network of robots and plants. The gardening robots are mobile manipulators with an eye-in-hand camera. They are capable of locating plants in the garden, watering them, and locating and grasping fruit. The plants are potted cherry tomatoes enhanced with sensors and computation to monitor their well-being (e.g. soil humidity, state of fruits) and with networking to communicate servicing requests to the robots. By embedding sensing, computation, and communication into the pots, task allocation in the system is de-centrally coordinated, which makes the system scalable and robust against the failure of a centralized agent. We describe the architecture of this system and present experimental results for navigation, object recognition, and manipulation as well as challenges that lie ahead toward autonomous precision agriculture with multi-robot teams.     

Computer-aided development of a real-time program

The refinement calculus is a well-established theory for formal development of imperative program code and is supported by a number of automated tools. Via a detailed case study, this article shows how refinement theory and tool support can be extended for a program with real-time constraints. The approach adapts a timed variant of the refinement calculus and makes corresponding enhancements to a theorem-prover based refinement tool.     

Query-driven visualization of time-varying adaptive mesh refinement data

The visualization and analysis of AMR-based simulations is integral to the process of obtaining new insight in scientific research. We present a new method for performing query-driven visualization and analysis on AMR data, with specific emphasis on time-varying AMR data. Our work introduces a new method that directly addresses the dynamic spatial and temporal properties of AMR grids that challenge many existing visualization techniques. Further, we present the first implementation of query-driven visualization on the GPU that uses a GPU-based indexing structure to both answer queries and efficiently utilize GPU memory. We apply our method to two different science domains to demonstrate its broad applicability.     

Semantic email: theory and applications

This paper investigates how the vision of the Semantic Web can be carried over to the realm of email. We introduce a general notion of semantic email, in which an email message consists of a structured query or update coupled with corresponding explanatory text. Semantic email opens the door to a wide range of automated, email-mediated applications with formally guaranteed properties. In particular, this paper introduces a broad class of semantic email processes. For example, consider the process of sending an email to a program committee, asking who will attend the PC dinner, automatically collecting the responses, and tallying them up. We define both logical and decision-theoretic models where an email process is modeled as a set of updates to a data set on which we specify goals via certain constraints or utilities. We then describe a set of inference problems that arise while trying to satisfy these goals and analyze their computational tractability. In particular, we show that for the logical model it is possible to automatically infer which email responses are acceptable w.r.t. a set of constraints in polynomial time, and for the decision-theoretic model it is possible to compute the optimal message-handling policy in polynomial time. In addition, we show how to automatically generate explanations for a process's actions, and identify cases where such explanations can be generated in polynomial time. Finally, we discuss our publicly available implementation of semantic email and outline research challenges in this realm.¹