Point-wise Self-similar Solution for Spiral Shocks in Accretion Disk with Mass Outflow in Binary

We examine the properties of spiral shocks from a steady, adiabatic, non-axisymmetric accretion disk around a compact star in binary. We first time incorporate all the possible influences from binary through adopting the Roche potential and Coriolis forces in the basic conservation equations. In this paper, we assume the spiral shocks to be point-wise self-similar, and the flow is in vertical hydrostatic equilibrium to simplify the study. We also investigate the mass outflow due to the shock compression and apply it to the accreting white dwarf in binary. We find that our model will be beneficial to overcome the ad hoc assumption of optically thick wind generally used in the studies of the progenitor of supernovae Ia.

Anisotropic neutrinos and gravitational waves from black hole neutrino-dominated accretion flows in fallback core-collapse supernovae

Fallback in core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) plays an important role in determining the properties of the central compact remnants, which might produce a black hole (BH) hyperaccretion system in the centre of a massive CCSN. When the accretion rate is extremely high and neutrino cooling is dominant, the hyperaccretion should be in the phase of the neutrino-dominated accretion flows (NDAFs), and thus a large number of anisotropic MeV neutrinos will be launched from the disc along with the strong gravitational waves (GWs). In this paper, we perform a series of one-dimensional CCSN simulations with the initial explosion energy in the range of $2-8$ B (1 B = $10^{51}$ erg) to investigate the fallback processes. By considering the evolution of the central BH mass and spin in the fallback accretion, we present the effects of the initial explosion energies, masses and metallicities of the massive progenitor stars on the spectra of anisotropic MeV neutrinos and the waveform of GWs from NDAFs. These neutrino or GW signals might be detected by operational or future detectors, and the multimessenger joint detections could constrain the properties of CCSNe and progenitor stars.

Independent Reinforcement Learning for Weakly Cooperative Multiagent Traffic Control Problem

The adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC) problem can be modeled as a multiagent cooperative game among urban intersections, where intersections cooperate to optimize their common goal. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved marked successes in managing sequential decision making problems, which motivates us to apply RL in the ASTC problem. Here we use independent reinforcement learning (IRL) to solve a complex traffic cooperative control problem in this study. One of the largest challenges of this problem is that the observation information of intersection is typically partially observable, which limits the learning performance of IRL algorithms. To this, we model the traffic control problem as a partially observable weak cooperative traffic model (PO-WCTM) to optimize the overall traffic situation of a group of intersections. Different from a traditional IRL task that averages the returns of all agents in fully cooperative games, the learning goal of each intersection in PO-WCTM is to reduce the cooperative difficulty of learning, which is also consistent with the traffic environment hypothesis. We also propose an IRL algorithm called Cooperative Important Lenient Double DQN (CIL-DDQN), which extends Double DQN (DDQN) algorithm using two mechanisms: the forgetful experience mechanism and the lenient weight training mechanism. The former mechanism decreases the importance of experiences stored in the experience reply buffer, which deals with the problem of experience failure caused by the strategy change of other agents. The latter mechanism increases the weight experiences with high estimation and `leniently trains the DDQN neural network, which improves the probability of the selection of cooperative joint strategies. Experimental results show that CIL-DDQN outperforms other methods in almost all performance indicators of the traffic control problem.

An Experiment Study on Federated LearningTestbed

While the Internet of Things (IoT) can benefit from machine learning by outsourcing model training on the cloud, user data exposure to an untrusted cloud service provider can pose threat to user privacy. Recently, federated learning is proposed as an approach for privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) for the IoT, while its practicability remains unclear. This work presents the evaluation on the efficiency and privacy performance of a readily available federated learning framework based on PySyft, a Python library for distributed deep learning. It is observed that the training speed of the framework is significantly slower than of the centralized approach due to communication overhead. Meanwhile, the framework bears some vulnerability to potential man-in-the-middle attacks at the network level. The report serves as a starting point for PPML performance analysis and suggests the future direction for PPML framework development.

DIMY: Enabling Privacy-preserving Contact Tracing

The infection rate of COVID-19 and lack of an approved vaccine has forced governments and health authorities to adopt lockdowns, increased testing, and contact tracing to reduce the spread of the virus. Digital contact tracing has become a supplement to the traditional manual contact tracing process. However, although there have been a number of digital contact tracing apps proposed and deployed, these have not been widely adopted owing to apprehensions surrounding privacy and security. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based privacy-preserving contact tracing protocol, Did I Meet You (DIMY), that provides full-lifecycle data privacy protection on the devices themselves as well as on the back-end servers, to address most of the privacy concerns associated with existing protocols. We have employed Bloom filters to provide efficient privacy-preserving storage, and have used the Diffie-Hellman key exchange for secret sharing among the participants. We show that DIMY provides resilience against many well known attacks while introducing negligible overheads. DIMYs footprint on the storage space of clients devices and back-end servers is also significantly lower than other similar state of the art apps.

InaudibleKey: Generic Inaudible Acoustic Signal based Key Agreement Protocol for Mobile Devices

Secure Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is becoming increasingly important with the ever-growing number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in our daily life. To achieve secure D2D communication, the key agreement between different IoT devices without any prior knowledge is becoming desirable. Although various approaches have been proposed in the literature, they suffer from a number of limitations, such as low key generation rate and short pairing distance. In this paper, we present InaudibleKey, an inaudible acoustic signal-based key generation protocol for mobile devices. Based on acoustic channel reciprocity, InaudibleKey exploits the acoustic channel frequency response of two legitimate devices as a common secret to generating keys. InaudibleKey employs several novel technologies to significantly improve its performance. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed system in different real environments. Compared to state-of-the-art works, InaudibleKey improves key generation rate by 3-145 times, extends pairing distance by 3.2-44 times, and reduces information reconciliation counts by 2.5-16 times. Security analysis demonstrates that InaudibleKey is resilient to a number of malicious attacks. We also implement InaudibleKey on modern smartphones and resource-limited IoT devices. Results show that it is energy-efficient and can run on both powerful and resource-limited IoT devices without incurring excessive resource consumption.

A Survey of COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps

The recent outbreak of COVID-19 has taken the world by surprise, forcing lockdowns and straining public health care systems. COVID-19 is known to be a highly infectious virus, and infected individuals do not initially exhibit symptoms, while some remain asymptomatic. Thus, a non-negligible fraction of the population can, at any given time, be a hidden source of transmissions. In response, many governments have shown great interest in smartphone contact tracing apps that help automate the difficult task of tracing all recent contacts of newly identified infected individuals. However, tracing apps have generated much discussion around their key attributes, including system architecture, data management, privacy, security, proximity estimation, and attack vulnerability. In this article, we provide the first comprehensive review of these much-discussed tracing app attributes. We also present an overview of many proposed tracing app examples, some of which have been deployed countrywide, and discuss the concerns users have reported regarding their usage. We close by outlining potential research directions for next-generation app design, which would facilitate improved tracing and security performance, as well as wide adoption by the population at large.