Acknowledgements I would like to thank some people who were involved in the creation of this thesis: • Berry Schoenmakers of TU Eindhoven for introducing me to the topic of cryptographic voting protocols. • Evangelos Karatsiolis for his work in guiding me through the process of writing this thesis and his constant motivation. • Roberto Samarone Araujo for hours of discussing various protocols w...

This study examines how Greek-Cypriot students aged 12 to 18, an understudied group of students, construct their ethnic identity in a complex setting such as Cyprus and what motivates the students in the selection of ethnic identity labels. The choice to focus on students aged 12-18 was made on the hypothesis that young children, who did not experience the 1974 war in Cyprus, may have a differe...

The proposed signs are used for the transliteration of the Arabic script into Gujarati by Ismaili Khoja communities. They are used for representing Arabic letters and signs for which correspondences do not exist in Gujarati. They were devised in the late 19th century and are standard elements of the Gujarati orthography used by the Ithnashari Khoja (“Twelver Shia”) and the Agakhani Khoja commun...

BACKGROUND No study to date has focused on the impact of Greek Orthodox Christian fasting on serum lipoproteins and obesity yet. METHODS 120 Greek adults were followed longitudinally for one year. Sixty fasted regularly in all fasting periods (fasters) and 60 did not fast at all (controls). The three major fasting periods under study were: Christmas (40 days), Lent (48 days) and Assumption (A...

L2 production of tones has been widely discussed; however, the role of orthography in the learning process has received little attention. Previous studies suggested that the opaque orthography of Chinese characters plays an important role in both L2 production and perception. The present study further investigates the role of different orthographies (Pinyin vs. Chinese characters) in L2 product...

This paper describes a work-flow designed to populate a digital library of ancient Greek critical editions with highly accurate OCR scanned text. While the most recently available OCR engines are now able after suitable training to deal with the polytonic Greek fonts used in 19th and 20th century editions, further improvements can also be achieved with postprocessing. In particular, the progres...

The study explores first language (L1) influences on the mechanisms of spelling in English as a foreign language (EFL). We hypothesized that the transparency of L1 orthography influences (a) the amount of hesitation associated with spelling irregular English words, and (b) the size of units EFL spellers operate. Participants were adult speakers of three languages differing by the degree of tran...

We introduce a new method to construct approximation algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems using semidefinite programming. It consists of expressing each combinatorial object in the original problem as a constellation of vectors in the semidefinite program. When we apply this technique to systems of linear equations mod p with at most two variables in each equation, we can show tha...

A large Greek-English Dictionary with 81,515 entries, 192,592 translations into English and 50,106 usage examples with their translation has been developed in combined printed and electronic (DVD) form. The electronic dictionary features unique facilities for searching the entire or any part of the Greek and English section, and has incorporated a series of speech and language processing tools ...