Private information retrieval (PIR) allows clients to retrieve records from online database servers without revealing to the servers any information about what records are being retrieved. To achieve this, the servers must typically do a computation involving the entire database for each query. Previous work by Ishai et al. has suggested using batch codes to allow a single client (or collaborat...

With the accelerated accumulation of genomic sequence data, there is a pressing need to develop computational methods and advanced bioinformatics infrastructure for reliable and large-scale protein annotation and biological knowledge discovery. The Protein Information Resource (PIR) provides an integrated public resource of protein informatics to support genomic and proteomic research. PIR prod...

Rhythmic inhibition entrains the firing of excitatory neurons during oscillations throughout the brain. Previous work has suggested that the strength and duration of inhibitory input determines the synchrony and period, respectively, of these oscillations. In particular, sleep spindles result from a cycle of events including rhythmic inhibition and rebound bursts in thalamocortical (TC) neurons...

The tremendous growth of the Internet has significantly reduced the cost of obtaining and sharing information about individuals, raising many concerns about user privacy. Spatial queries pose an additional threat to privacy because the location of a query may be sufficient to reveal sensitive information about the querier. In this paper we focus on k nearest neighbor (kNN) queries and define th...

Private Information Retrieval (PIR), despite being well studied, is computationally costly and arduous to scale. We explore lower-cost relaxations of information-theoretic PIR, based on dummy queries, sparse vectors, and compositions with an anonymity system. We prove the security of each scheme using a flexible differentially private definition for private queries that can capture notions of i...

Private Information Retrieval (PIR), despite being well studied, is computationally costly and arduous to scale. We explore lower-cost relaxations of information-theoretic PIR, based on dummy queries, sparse vectors, and compositions with an anonymity system. We prove the security of each scheme using a flexible differentially private definition for private queries that can capture notions of i...

Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocols allow a user to retrieve a data item from a database while hiding the identity of the item being retrieved. Specifically, in information-theoretic, -server PIR protocols the database is replicated among servers, and each server learns nothing about the item the user retrieves. The cost of such protocols is measured by the communication complexity of...

Private Information Retrieval (PIR), despite being well studied, is computationally costly and arduous to scale. We explore lower-cost relaxations of information-theoretic PIR, based on dummy queries, sparse vectors, and compositions with an anonymity system. We prove the security of each scheme using a flexible differentially private definition for private queries that can capture notions of i...

Neocortico-thalamo-cortical loops represent a common, yet poorly understood, circuit employing giant synapses also referred to as "class I", giant, or driver synapses. Here, we characterize a giant synapse formed by projection neurons of the paleocortical piriform cortex (PIR) onto neurons of the mediodorsal thalamus (MD). Three-dimensional (3D) ultrastructure of labeled PIR-MD terminals, obtai...

A private information retrieval (PIR) protocol allows a user to retrieve one of N records from a database while hiding the identity of the record from the database server. With the initially proposed PIR protocols to process a query, the server has to process the entire database, resulting in an unacceptable response time for large databases. Later solutions make use of some preprocessing and o...