Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has gained popularity as a way to enhance system performance. Nodes in a P2P network work together by providing network resources to one another. In this study, we examine the use of P2P technology for video streaming and develop a distributed incentive mechanism to prevent free-riding. Our proposed solution combines WebTorrent and the Solana blockchain and can be accessed through a web browser. To incentivize uploads, some of the received video chunks are encrypted using AES. Smart contracts on the blockchain are used for third-party verification of uploads and for managing access to the video content. Experimental results on a test network showed that our system can encrypt and decrypt chunks in about 1/40th the time it takes using WebRTC, without affecting the quality of video streaming. Smart contracts were also found to quickly verify uploads in about 860 milliseconds. The paper also explores how to effectively reward virtual points for uploads.

High power dissipation during scan test often causes undue yield loss, especially for low-power circuits. One major reason is that the resulting IR-drop in shift mode may corrupt test data. A common approach to solving this problem is partial-shift, in which multiple scan chains are formed and only one group of scan chains is shifted at a time. However, existing partial-shift based methods suffer from two major problems: (1) their IR-drop estimation is not accurate enough or computationally too expensive to be done for each shift cycle; (2) partial-shift is hence applied to all shift cycles, resulting in long test time. This paper addresses these two problems with a novel IR-drop-aware scan shift method, featuring: (1) Cycle-based IR-Drop Estimation (CIDE) supported by a GPU-accelerated dynamic power simulator to quickly find potential shift cycles with excessive peak IR-drop; (2) a scan shift scheduling method that generates a scan chain grouping targeted for each considered shift cycle to reduce the impact on test time. Experiments on ITC'99 benchmark circuits show that: (1) the CIDE is computationally feasible; (2) the proposed scan shift schedule can achieve a global peak IR-drop reduction of up to 47%. Its scheduling efficiency is 58.4% higher than that of an existing typical method on average, which means our method has less test time.

Question-answering tasks over structured knowledge (i.e., tables and graphs) require the ability to encode structural information. Traditional pre-trained language models trained on linear-chain natural language cannot be directly applied to encode tables and graphs. The existing methods adopt the pre-trained models in such tasks by flattening structured knowledge into sequences. However, the serialization operation will lead to the loss of the structural information of knowledge. To better employ pre-trained transformers for structured knowledge representation, we propose a novel structure-aware transformer (SATrans) that injects the local-to-global structural information of the knowledge into the mask of the different self-attention layers. Specifically, in the lower self-attention layers, SATrans focus on the local structural information of each knowledge token to learn a more robust representation of it. In the upper self-attention layers, SATrans further injects the global information of the structured knowledge to integrate the information among knowledge tokens. In this way, the SATrans can effectively learn the semantic representation and structural information from the knowledge sequence and the attention mask, respectively. We evaluate SATrans on the table fact verification task and the knowledge base question-answering task. Furthermore, we explore two methods to combine symbolic and linguistic reasoning for these tasks to solve the problem that the pre-trained models lack symbolic reasoning ability. The experiment results reveal that the methods consistently outperform strong baselines on the two benchmarks.

As a typical surface defect of tunnel lining structures, cracking disease affects the durability of tunnel structures and poses hidden dangers to tunnel driving safety. Factors such as interference from the complex service environment of the tunnel and the low signal-to-noise ratio of the crack targets themselves, have led to existing crack recognition methods based on semantic segmentation being unable to meet actual engineering needs. Based on this, this paper uses the Unet network as the basic framework for crack identification and proposes to construct a multi-kernel convolution cascade enhancement (MKCE) model to achieve accurate detection and identification of crack diseases. First of all, to ensure the performance of crack feature extraction, the model modified the main feature extraction network in the basic framework to ResNet-50 residual network. Compared with the VGG-16 network, this modification can extract richer crack detail features while reducing model parameters. Secondly, considering that the Unet network cannot effectively perceive multi-scale crack features in the skip connection stage, a multi-kernel convolution cascade enhancement module is proposed by combining a cascaded connection of multi-kernel convolution groups and multi-expansion rate dilated convolution groups. This module achieves a comprehensive perception of local details and the global content of tunnel lining cracks. In addition, to better weaken the effect of tunnel background clutter interference, a convolutional block attention calculation module is further introduced after the multi-kernel convolution cascade enhancement module, which effectively reduces the false alarm rate of crack recognition. The algorithm is tested on a large number of subway tunnel crack image datasets. The experimental results show that, compared with other crack recognition algorithms based on deep learning, the method in this paper has achieved the best results in terms of accuracy and intersection over union (IoU) indicators, which verifies the method in this paper has better applicability.

Personalized stock recommendations aim to suggest stocks tailored to individual investor needs, significantly aiding the financial decision making of an investor. This study shows the advantages of incorporating context into personalized stock recommendation systems. We embed item contextual information such as technical indicators, fundamental factors, and business activities of individual stocks. Simultaneously, we consider user contextual information such as investors' personality traits, behavioral characteristics, and attributes to create a comprehensive investor profile. Our model incorporating contextual information, validated on novel stock recommendation tasks, demonstrated a notable improvement over baseline models when incorporating these contextual features. Consistent outperformance across various hyperparameters further underscores the robustness and utility of our model in integrating stocks' features and investors' traits into personalized stock recommendations.

This paper proposes a fault-resilient ROS platform supporting rapid fault detection and recovery. The platform employs heartbeat-based fault detection and node replication-based recovery. Our prototype implementation on top of the ROS Melodic shows a great performance in evaluations with a Nvidia development board and an inverted pendulum device.

Micro-expression recognition (MER) draws intensive research interest as micro-expressions (MEs) can infer genuine emotions. Prior information can guide the model to learn discriminative ME features effectively. However, most works focus on researching the general models with a stronger representation ability to adaptively aggregate ME movement information in a holistic way, which may ignore the prior information and properties of MEs. To solve this issue, driven by the prior information that the category of ME can be inferred by the relationship between the actions of facial different components, this work designs a novel model that can conform to this prior information and learn ME movement features in an interpretable way. Specifically, this paper proposes a Decomposition and Reconstruction-based Graph Representation Learning (DeRe-GRL) model to efectively learn high-level ME features. DeRe-GRL includes two modules: Action Decomposition Module (ADM) and Relation Reconstruction Module (RRM), where ADM learns action features of facial key components and RRM explores the relationship between these action features. Based on facial key components, ADM divides the geometric movement features extracted by the graph model-based backbone into several sub-features, and learns the map matrix to map these sub-features into multiple action features; then, RRM learns weights to weight all action features to build the relationship between action features. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modules, and the proposed method achieves competitive performance.

The social infrastructure, including roads and bridges built during period of rapid economic growth in Japan, is now aging, and there is a need to strategically maintain and renew the social infrastructure that is aging. On the other hand, road maintenance in rural areas is facing serious problems such as reduced budgets for maintenance and a shortage of engineers due to the declining birthrate and aging population. Therefore, it is difficult to visually inspect all roads in rural areas by maintenance engineers, and a system to automatically detect road damage is required. This paper reports practical improvements to the road damage model using YOLOv5, an object detection model capable of real-time operation, focusing on road image features.

In this paper, we developed the latest IoT honeypots to capture IoT malware currently on the loose, analyzed IoT malware with new features such as persistent infection, developed malware removal methods to be provided to IoT device users. Furthermore, as attack behaviors using IoT devices become more diverse and sophisticated every year, we conducted research related to various factors involved in understanding the overall picture of attack behaviors from the perspective of incident responders. As the final stage of countermeasures, we also conducted research and development of IoT malware disabling technology to stop only IoT malware activities in IoT devices and IoT system disabling technology to remotely control (including stopping) IoT devices themselves.

We are given a set S of n points in the Euclidean plane. We assume that S is in general position. A simple polygon P is an empty polygon of S if each vertex of P is a point in S and every point in S is either outside P or a vertex of P. In this paper, we consider the problem of enumerating all the empty polygons of a given point set. To design an efficient enumeration algorithm, we use a reverse search by Avis and Fukuda with child lists. We propose an algorithm that enumerates all the empty polygons of S in O(n2|ε(S)|)-time, where ε(S) is the set of empty polygons of S. Moreover, by applying the same idea to the problem of enumerating surrounding polygons of a given point set S, we propose an enumeration algorithm that enumerates them in O(n2)-delay, while the known algorithm enumerates in O(n2 log n)-delay, where a surroundingpolygon of S is a polygon such that each vertex of the polygon is a point in S and every point in S is either inside the polygon or a vertex of the polygon.

In a convex grid drawing of a plane graph, all edges are drawn as straight-line segments without any edge-intersection, all vertices are put on grid points and all facial cycles are drawn as convex polygons. A plane graph G has a convex drawing if and only if G is internally triconnected, and an internally triconnected plane graph G has a convex grid drawing on an (n-1) × (n-1) grid if either G is triconnected or the triconnected component decomposition tree T(G) of G has two or three leaves, where n is the number of vertices in G. An internally triconnected plane graph G has a convex grid drawing on a 2n × 2n grid if T(G) has exactly four leaves. Furthermore, an internally triconnected plane graph G has a convex grid drawing on a 20n × 16n grid if T(G) has exactly five leaves. In this paper, we show that an internally triconnected plane graph G has a convex grid drawing on a 10n × 5n grid if T(G) has exactly five leaves. We also present a linear-time algorithm to find such a drawing.

The bin packing problem is a problem of finding an assignment of a sequence of items to a minimum number of bins, each of capacity one. An online algorithm for the bin packing problem is an algorithm that irrevocably assigns each item one by one from the head of the sequence. Gutin, Jensen, and Yeo (2006) considered a version in which all items are only of two different sizes and the online algorithm knows the two possible sizes in advance, and gave an optimal online algorithm for the case when the larger size exceeds 1/2. In this paper we provide an optimal online algorithm for some of the cases when the larger size is at most 1/2, on the basis of a framework that facilitates the design and analysis of algorithms.

Packet classification is used to determine the behavior of incoming packets in network devices according to defined rules. As it is achieved using a linear search on a classification rule list, a large number of rules will lead to longer communication latency. To solve this, the problem of finding the order of rules minimizing the latency has been studied. Misherghi et al. and Harada et al. have proposed a problem that relaxes to policy-based constraints. In this paper, we show that the Relaxed Optimal Rule Ordering (RORO) for the allowlist is NP-hard, and by reducing from this we show that RORO for the general rule list is NP-hard. We also propose a heuristic algorithm based on the greedy method for an allowlist. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method using ClassBench, which is a benchmark for packet classification algorithms.

There are two types of elliptic curves, ordinary elliptic curves and supersingular elliptic curves. In 2012, Sutherland proposed an efficient and almost deterministic algorithm for determining whether a given curve is ordinary or supersingular. Sutherland's algorithm is based on sequences of isogenies started from the input curve, and computation of each isogeny requires square root computations, which is the dominant cost of the algorithm. In this paper, we reduce this dominant cost of Sutherland's algorithm to approximately a half of the original. In contrast to Sutherland's algorithm using j-invariants and modular polynomials, our proposed algorithm is based on Legendre form of elliptic curves, which simplifies the expression of each isogeny. Moreover, by carefully selecting the type of isogenies to be computed, we succeeded in gathering square root computations at two consecutive steps of Sutherland's algorithm into just a single fourth root computation (with experimentally almost the same cost as a single square root computation). The results of our experiments using Magma are supporting our argument; for cases of characteristic p of 768-bit to 1024-bit lengths, our proposed algorithm for characteristic p≡1 (mod 4) runs in about 61.5% of the time and for characteristic p≡3 (mod 4) also runs in about 54.9% of the time compared to Sutherland's algorithm.

Message franking is introduced by Facebook in end-to-end encrypted messaging services. It allows to produce verifiable reports of malicious messages by including cryptographic proofs, called reporting tags, generated by Facebook. Recently, Grubbs et al. (CRYPTO'17) proceeded with the formal study of message franking and introduced committing authenticated encryption with associated data (CAEAD) as a core primitive for obtaining message franking. In this work, we aim to enhance the security of message franking and introduce forward security and updates of reporting tags for message franking. Forward security guarantees the security associated with the past keys even if the current keys are exposed and updates of reporting tags allow for reporting malicious messages after keys are updated. To this end, we firstly propose the notion of key-evolving message franking with updatable reporting tags including additional key and reporting tag update algorithms. Then, we formalize five security requirements: confidentiality, ciphertext integrity, unforgeability, receiver binding, and sender binding. Finally, we show a construction of forward secure message franking with updatable reporting tags based on CAEAD, forward secure pseudorandom generator, and updatable message authentication code.

A fault-tolerant aggregate signature (FT-AS) scheme is a variant of an aggregate signature scheme with the additional functionality to trace signers that create invalid signatures in case an aggregate signature is invalid. Several FT-AS schemes have been proposed so far, and some of them trace such rogue signers in multi-rounds, i.e., the setting where the signers repeatedly send their individual signatures. However, it has been overlooked that there exists a potential attack on the efficiency of bandwidth consumption in a multi-round FT-AS scheme. Since one of the merits of aggregate signature schemes is the efficiency of bandwidth consumption, such an attack might be critical for multi-round FT-AS schemes. In this paper, we propose a new multi-round FT-AS scheme that is tolerant of such an attack. We implement our scheme and experimentally show that it is more efficient than the existing multi-round FT-AS scheme if rogue signers randomly create invalid signatures with low probability, which for example captures spontaneous failures of devices in IoT systems.

For any m strings of total length n, we propose an O(mn log n)-time, O(n)-space algorithm that finds a maximal common subsequence of all the strings, in the sense that inserting any character in it no longer yields a common subsequence of them. Such a common subsequence could be treated as indicating a nontrivial common structure we could find in the strings since it is NP-hard to find any longest common subsequence of the strings.

Our research group has been working on attractiveness prediction, reasoning, and even enhancement for multimedia content, which we call “attractiveness computing.” Attractiveness includes impressiveness, instagrammability, memorability, clickability, and so on. Analyzing such attractiveness was usually done by experienced professionals but we have experimentally revealed that artificial intelligence (AI) based on big multimedia data can imitate or reproduce professionals' skills in some cases. In this paper, we introduce some of the representative works and possible real-life applications of our attractiveness computing for image media.

The existing target-dependent scalable image compression network can control the target of the compressed images between the human visual system and the deep learning based classification task. However, in its RNN based structure controls the bit-rate through the number of iterations, where each iteration generates a fixed size of the bit stream. Therefore, a large number of iterations are required at the high BPP, and fine-grained image quality control is not supported at the low BPP. In this paper, we propose a novel RNN-based image compression model that can schedule the channel size per iteration, to reduce the number of iterations at the high BPP and fine-grained bit-rate control at the low BPP. To further enhance the efficiency, multiple network models for various channel sizes are combined into a single model using the slimmable network architecture. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves comparable performance to the existing method with finer BPP adjustment, increases parameters by only 0.15% and reduces the average amount of computation by 40.4%.

This paper develops a design method and theoretical analysis for piecewise nonlinear oscillators that have desired circular limit cycles. Especially, the mathematical proof on existence, uniqueness, and stability of the limit cycle is shown for the piecewise nonlinear oscillator. In addition, the relationship between parameters in the oscillator and rotational directions and periods of the limit cycle trajectories is investigated. Then, some numerical simulations show that the piecewise nonlinear oscillator has a unique and stable limit cycle and the properties on rotational directions and periods hold.