Remote storage of data has become an increasingly attractive and advantageous option, especially due to cloud systems. While encryption protects the data, it does not hide the access pattern to the data. A natural solution is to access remote storage using an Oblivious RAM (ORAM) which provably hides all access patterns. While ORAM is asymptotically efficient, the best existing scheme (Pinkas a...

Earthquakes frequently destroy the homes and livelihoods of thousands. One of the most important concerns after an earthquake is to find a safe shelter for the affected people. Because of large numbers of potential locations, the multitude of constraints (e.g. access to infrastructures; security); and the uncertainty prevailing (e.g., number of places required) the identification of optimal she...

In this study, we first analyze the specific dynamics of the shelter site location problem for an application in Turkey and develop a mixed integer linear programming based methodology which incorporates with their requirements of the Turkish Red Cresent and improve their current system. The mathematical model maximizes the minimum weight of open shelter areas while deciding on the location of ...

Movement behavior determines the success or failure of insects in finding important resources such as food, mates, reproductive sites, and shelter. We examined the response of female red flour beetles (Tribolium castaneum Herbst: Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae) to habitat cues by quantifying the number of individuals that located a patch (either with or without flour) in response to the distance rel...

PURPOSE We examined the cross-sectional and longitudinal association between social network characteristics and street youths' shelter use, a determinant of health outcomes for homeless youth. METHODS We analyzed interview data from 138 street youth recruited through venue-based sampling in San Francisco, to assess the cross-sectional relationship between shelter use in youths' social network...

The use of statistical measures to constrain generalisa-tion in learning systems has proved successful in many domains, but can only be applied where large numbers of examples exist. In domains where few training examples are available, other mechanisms for constraining gener-alisation are required. In this paper, we propose a representation of background knowledge based on arguments for and ag...