This study addresses the long-term trends in heat-related mortality across 29 US metropolitan areas from 1975 to 2004 to discern the spatial patterns and temporal trends in heat vulnerability. Mortality data have been standardized to account for population trends, and seasonal and interannual variability. On days when a city experienced an ‘‘oppressive’’ air mass, mean anomalous mortality was c...

The IPv6 privacy extension introduces temporary addresses to protect against address-based correlation, i. e., the attribution of different transactions to the same origin using addresses, and is considered as state-of-the-art mechanism for privacy protection in IPv6. In this paper, we scrutinize the extension’s capability for protection by analyzing its algorithm for temporary address generati...

In this paper, we introduce a general notion of functional proxy-re-encryption (F-PRE), where a wide class of functional encryption (FE) is combined with proxy-re-encryption (PRE) mechanism. The PRE encryption system should reveal minimal information to a proxy, in particular, hiding parameters of re-encryption keys and of original ciphertexts which he manipulate is highly desirable. We first f...

Economies of scale, corporate partnerships and a need to increase the efficiency of Information Technology in the Healthcare sector are leading to the construction of Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) across the United States. RHIOs are normally aligned by service provision given by particular healthcare payers (e.g. Blue Cross-Blue Shield, PacifiCare etc.) in particular geograp...

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the applicability of recently proposed knowledge modelling tools to the development of agent-based systems. The discussion is derived from the real world experience of a particular software tool called KSM (Knowledge Structure Manager). The chapter provides details about this tool and then proceeds to show in which forms the software may be used to support ...

Traffic analysis is a type of attack on secure communications systems, in which the adversary extracts useful patterns and information from the observed traffic. This paper improves and extends an efficient traffic analysis attack, called “statistical disclosure attack.” Moreover, we propose a solution to defend against the improved (and, a fortiori, the original) statistical disclosure attack....

The existing classification-based policy iteration (CBPI) algorithms can be divided into two categories: direct policy iteration (DPI) methods that directly assign the output of the classifier (the approximate greedy policy w.r.t. the current policy) to the next policy, and conservative policy iteration (CPI) methods in which the new policy is a mixture distribution of the current policy and th...

Hybrid traffic modeling and simulation provide an important way to represent and evaluate large-scale traffic networks at different levels of details. The first level, called “microscopic” allows the description of individual vehicles and their interactions as well as the study of driver’s individual behavior. The second, based on the analogy with fluidic dynamic, is the “macroscopic” one and p...