MemberShield: A framework for federated learning with membership privacy.

Federated Learning (FL) allows multiple data owners to build high-quality deep learning models collaboratively, by sharing only model updates and keeping data on their premises. Even though FL offers privacy-by-design, it is vulnerable to membership inference attacks (MIA), where an adversary tries to determine whether a sample was included in the training data. Existing defenses against MIA cannot offer meaningful privacy protection without significantly hampering the model's utility and causing a non-negligible training overhead.

Enhanced Security and Privacy via Fragmented Federated Learning.

In federated learning (FL), a set of participants share updates computed on their local data with an aggregator server that combines updates into a global model. However, reconciling accuracy with privacy and security is a challenge to FL. On the one hand, good updates sent by honest participants may reveal their private local information, whereas poisoned updates sent by malicious participants may compromise the model's availability and/or integrity.

Give more data, awareness and control to individual citizens, and they will help COVID-19 containment.

The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the "phase 2" of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raises concerns about citizens' privacy and needlessly strong digital surveillance, thus alerting us to the need to minimize personal data collection and avoiding location tracking.

µ -ANT: semantic microaggregation-based anonymization tool.

Motivation: Detailed patient data are crucial for medical research. Yet, these healthcare data can only be released for secondary use if they have undergone anonymization.

Results: We present and describe µ-ANT, a practical and easily configurable anonymization tool for (healthcare) data.

[Sick leave due to tobacco use in workers aged 35-64. Catalonia, 2007-2016].

Objective: Few recent studies have researched into the size and trends of the impact of tobacco use on productivity losses. The objective of this work was to describe the percentage of episodes and non work-related sick leave days with a duration over 5 days due to tobacco use in Catalonia in the period 2007-2016 in relation to the total sick-leave episodes and sick leave days in patients aged 35-64.

Methods: Descriptive study of 3,627,107 episodes and 237,219,230 days in sick-leave by any cause, except those work-related, in workers aged 35-64.

Local synthesis for disclosure limitation that satisfies probabilistic -anonymity criterion.

Before releasing databases which contain sensitive information about individuals, data publishers must apply Statistical Disclosure Limitation (SDL) methods to them, in order to avoid disclosure of sensitive information on any identifiable data subject. SDL methods often consist of masking or synthesizing the original data records in such a way as to minimize the risk of disclosure of the sensitive information while providing data users with accurate information about the population of interest. In this paper we propose a new scheme for disclosure limitation, based on the idea of of data.

Comment on "Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata".

De Montjoye et al. (Reports, 30 January 2015, p. 536) claimed that most individuals can be reidentified from a deidentified transaction database and that anonymization mechanisms are not effective against reidentification.

FRR: fair remote retrieval of outsourced private medical records in electronic health networks.

Cloud computing is emerging as the next-generation IT architecture. However, cloud computing also raises security and privacy concerns since the users have no physical control over the outsourced data. This paper focuses on fairly retrieving encrypted private medical records outsourced to remote untrusted cloud servers in the case of medical accidents and disputes.

In-situ HRTEM study of the reactive carbide phase of Co/MoS2 catalyst.

Hydrotreatment catalytic operations are commonly performed industrially by layered molybdenum sulfide promoted by cobalt or nickel in order to remove heteroelements (S, N, O) from fossil fuels and biofuels. Indeed, these heteroelements are responsible of the emission of pollutants when these fuels are used in vehicles. In this respect, previous studies made by our research group have shown that the active phase under steady state conditions is partially carbided while strong bending effects of MoS2 slabs were also observed.

Toward the controlled synthesis of hexagonal boron nitride films.

Atomically smooth hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) layers have very useful properties and thus potential applications for protective coatings, deep ultraviolet (DUV) emitters, and as a dielectric for nanoelectronics devices. In this paper, we report on the growth of h-BN by a low-pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) process using diborane and ammonia as the gas precursors. The use of LPCVD allows synthesis of h-BN with a controlled number of layers defined by the growth conditions, temperature, time, and gas partial pressure.

CMOS-compatible synthesis of large-area, high-mobility graphene by chemical vapor deposition of acetylene on cobalt thin films.

We demonstrate the synthesis of large-area graphene on Co, a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible metal, using acetylene (C(2)H(2)) as a precursor in a chemical vapor deposition (CVD)-based method. Cobalt films were deposited on SiO(2)/Si, and the influence of Co film thickness on monolayer graphene growth was studied, based on the solubility of C in Co. The surface area coverage of monolayer graphene was observed to increase with decreasing Co film thickness.

Synthesis and characterization of poly(butylene oxide) grafted carbon nanofibers.

The grafting of polybutylene oxide onto purified and functionalized carbon nanofibers is reported. Grafting was possible after the insertion of 2-(formyloxy)ethyl 2-bromo-2-methylpropanoate onto the carbon nanofibers. The polymerization of tetrahydrofuran was mediated by copper(I) bromide and 1,1,4,7-pentamethyl diethylenetriamine.

Biodistribution and long-term fate of silver nanoparticles functionalized with bovine serum albumin in rats.

Silver nanocrystals (Ag NCs) hold promising antibiotic and antiviral properties in biological systems. The biodistribution of silver nanostructures injected into animals in vivo is currently unknown, remaining as a fundamental issue for potential therapeutic applications. Here, we injected Ag NCs capped with bovine serum albumin (BSA) in live rats to elucidate their fate in several organs including liver, heart and brain.

Templated open flocs of anisotropic particles for pulmonary delivery with pressurized metered dose inhalers.

The challenges in forming stable drug suspensions in hydrofluoroalkane (HFA) propellants have limited drug dosages and efficiency of drug delivery with pressurized metered dose inhalers (pMDI). Herein, stable suspensions of weakly flocculated particles, in the shape of thin plates or needles, of a poorly water-soluble drug, itraconazole (Itz), are efficiently delivered by pMDI at high doses, up to 2.4 mg/actuation.

Secure Many-to-One Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are formed by nodes with limited computational and power resources. WSNs are finding an increasing number of applications, both civilian and military, most of which require security for the sensed data being collected by the base station from remote sensor nodes. In addition, when many sensor nodes transmit to the base station, the implosion problem arises.

Size-selected ag nanoparticles with five-fold symmetry.

Silver nanoparticles were synthesized using the inert gas aggregation technique. We found the optimal experimental conditions to synthesize nanoparticles at different sizes: 1.3 ± 0.