In the conditional disclosure of secrets problem (Gertner et al., J. Comput. Syst. Sci., 2000) Alice and Bob, who hold inputs x and y respectively, wish to release a common secret s to Carol (who knows both x and y) if only if the input (x, y) satisfies some predefined predicate f . Alice and Bob are allowed to send a single message to Carol which may depend on their inputs and some joint rando...

Cuckoo hashing is a highly practical dynamic dictionary: it provides amortized constant insertion time, worst case constant deletion time and lookup time, and good memory utilization. However, with a noticeable probability during the insertion of n elements some insertion requires Ω(log n) time. Whereas such an amortized guarantee may be suitable for some applications, in other applications (su...

We provide the first economic research on ‘buy now, pay later’ (BNPL): an unregulated FinTech credit product enabling consumers to defer payments into interest-free instalments. study BNPL using UK card transaction data. document charging transactions their card. Charging of cards is most prevalent among younger and those living in deprived geographies. a 0% interest, amortizing debt – where ty...

a broadcast authentication protocol enables the receivers to verify that a received packet was really sent by the claimed sender. Data confidentiality, authenticity, integrity, and non repudiation are basic concerns of securing data delivery over an insecure network. Large and distributed systems with time critical applications require immediate and secure authentication of command and control ...

Bayesian models of cognition posit that people compute probability distributions over hypotheses, possibly by constructing a sample-based approximation. Since people encounter many closely related distributions, a computationally efficient strategy is to selectively reuse computations – either the samples themselves or some summary statistic. We refer to these reuse strategies as amortized infe...

Flood is a most serious hazard to life and property. Dams, dikes and levees are often designed to a fuzzy quantity (PMF). Probabilistic design is preferable but requires that hydrological data be translated into a local monoscopic flood probability distribution. This process introduces information that goes beyond the facts. The method of relative entropy with quantile constraints minimizes thi...

We introduce tools from numerical analysis and high dimensional probability for precision control complexity of subdivision-based algorithms in computational geometry. combine these with the continuous amortization framework exact computation. use on a well-known example subdivision family: adaptive algorithm due to Plantinga Vegter. The only existing estimate this rather fast was an exponentia...

We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that using tighter evidence lower bounds (ELBOs) can be detrimental to the process of learning an inference network by reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of the gradient estimator. Our results call into question common implicit assumptions that tighter ELBOs are better variational objectives for simultaneous model learning and inference amortization...

We introduce a new cryptographic primitive: Proofs of SpaceTime (PoSTs) and construct a practical protocol for implementing these proofs. A PoST allows a prover to convince a verifier that she spent a “spacetime” resource (storing data—space—over a period of time). Formally, we define the PoST resource as a linear tradeoff between CPU work and space-time (under reasonable cost assumptions, a ra...