Generating random bits is a difficult task, which is important for physical systems simulation, cryptography, and many applications that rely on high-quality random bits. Our contribution is to show how to generate provably random bits from uncertain events whose outcomes are routinely recorded in the form of massive data sets. These include scientific data sets, such as in astronomics, genomic...

The classification of pollen species and types is an important task in many areas like forensic palynology, archaeological palynology and melissopalynology. This paper presents the first annotated image dataset for the Brazilian Savannah pollen types that can be used to train and test computer vision based automatic pollen classifiers. A first baseline human and computer performance for this da...

We report the synthesis and optical characterisation of different triphenylamine-based hole capture materials able to anchor to CdSe quantum dots (QDs). Cyclic voltammetry studies indicate that these materials exhibit reversible electrochemical behaviour. Photoluminescence and transient absorption spectroscopy techniques are used to study interfacial charge transfer properties of the triphenyla...

We consider in this paper the information-theoretic secure key distribution problem over main and wire-tap noise channels with a public discussion in presence of an active adversary. In contrast to the solution proposed by ourselves for a similar problem using hashing for privacy amplification, in the current paper we use a technique of extractors. We propose modified key distribution protocols...

Broad-coverage knowledge bases (KBs) such as Wikipedia, Freebase, Microsoft’s Satori and Google’s Knowledge Graph contain structured data describing real-world entities. These data sources have become increasingly important for a wide range of intelligent systems: from information retrieval and question answering, to Facebook’s Graph Search, IBM’s Watson, and more. Previous work on learning to ...

We consider the problem of building robust fuzzy extractors, which allow two parties holding similar random variables W , W ′ to agree on a secret key R in the presence of an active adversary. Robust fuzzy extractors were defined by Dodis et al. in Crypto 2006 [6] to be noninteractive, i.e., only one message P , which can be modified by an unbounded adversary, can pass from one party to the oth...