Abstract

A method for real-time detection of nerves together with a needle and its trajectory in ultrasound videos to autonomously guide the needle towards nerve block target. We also publicly release needle annotations for further research.

Abstract

G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) are the most prominent family of membrane proteins that serve as major targets for one-third of the drugs produced. A detailed understanding of the molecular mechanism of drug-induced activation and inhibition of GPCRs is crucial for the rational design of novel therapeutics. The binding of the neurotransmitter adrenaline to the β2-adrenergic receptor (β2AR) is known to induce a flight or fight cellular response, but much remains to be understood about binding-induced dynamical changes in β2AR and adrenaline. In this article, we examine the potential of mean force (PMF) for the unbinding of adrenaline from the orthosteric binding site of β2AR and the associated dynamics using umbrella sampling and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The calculated PMF reveals a global energy minimum, which corresponds to the crystal structure of β2AR−adrenaline complex, and a meta-stable state in which the adrenaline is moved slightly deeper into the binding pocket with a different orientation compared to that in the crystal structure. The orientational and conformational changes in adrenaline during the transition between these two states and the underlying driving forces of this transition are also explored. Based on the clustering of MD configurations and machine learning-based statistical analyses of time series of relevant collective variables, the structures and stabilizing interactions of these two states of the β2AR−adrenaline complex are also investigated.

Abstract

The cloud computing technology is a novel storage and computing paradigm that enables individuals and organizations to store data, share data with intended group of users and retrieve data when require. It greatly improves peoples’ data storage and sharing, and data retrieval capabilities by providing flexible, less expensive and quality services. For data security and privacy concerns, secure and authenticated data storage, fine-grained access control of encrypted data, secure search for the outsourced data and search results verification are of critical importance. However, achieving the aforementioned functionalities simultaneously is quite challenging. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a secure lightweight Attribute-Based verifiable Data Storage and data Retrieval Scheme (ABDSRS) for cloud environments that attains the following features: (i) lightweight design, (ii) provably secure, (iii) fine-grained …

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) allows better solutions for managing challenges such as reliability and power quality in a smart grid environment. It also assists in adopting smart grid measures in smart city development. A smart meter in the smart grid environment must securely access services from a service provider via public channels. An adversary can pose several security vulnerabilities as the communication occurs through a public channel. Various researchers recently conducted several research types to determine the most challenging problems with the smart grid. The security features like integrity, authentication, and confidentiality are indispensable requirements of the smart grid environment. On the other hand, different objects like smart meters in the smart grid environment are resource-constrained, posing in designing lightweight security protocols. Hence, we propose a lightweight mutual authentication

Abstract

The Energy Internet (EI) presents a novel paradigm for renewable energy distribution that utilizes communication and computing technologies to revolutionize the conventional Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) and power grid into a structure that provides assistance to open innovation. The EI offers sustainable and bidirectional transmission for the improvement and analysis of energy convention among Electric Vehicles (EVs) and service providers. To ensure efficient, reliable, and secure operation, EI must be safe from security attacks. Therefore, efficient and secure key negotiation is a significant issue for the EI-based Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) architecture. Thus, to ensure the system’s security, we have devised a robust scheme to facilitate a secure key agreement between the entities involved for the secure and efficient renewable energy distribution for the EI-based energy vehicles in V2G. The devised scheme’s robustness is solicited through the widely-accepted formal Random or Real (RoR) model. In addition, the informal security analysis is conducted on the devised scheme, which is evident that the designed scheme achieves all the required security features of EI-based ITS. Moreover, the performance evaluation results endorse that the designed scheme achieves the desired security and minimizes the communication, computation, and energy overhead by 29.33%, 27.94% and 28.08% in comparison to the existing competitive schemes.

Abstract

Recently, with the increasing application of the Internet of Things (IoT), various IoT environments such as smart factories, smart homes, and smart grids are being generated. In the IoT environment, a lot of data are generated in real time, and the generated IoT data can be used as source data for various services such as artificial intelligence, remote medical care, and finance, and can also be used for purposes such as electricity bill generation. Therefore, data access control is required to grant access rights to various data users in the IoT environment who need such IoT data. In addition, IoT data contain sensitive information such as personal information, so privacy protection is also essential. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) technology has been utilized to address these requirements. Furthermore, system structures applying blockchains with CP-ABE are being studied to prevent bottlenecks and single failures of cloud servers, as well as to support data auditing. However, these systems do not stipulate authentication and key agreement to ensure the security of the data transmission process and data outsourcing. Accordingly, we propose a data access control and key agreement scheme using CP-ABE to ensure data security in a blockchain-based system. In addition, we propose a system that can provide data nonrepudiation, data accountability, and data verification functions by utilizing blockchains. Both formal and informal security verifications are performed to demonstrate the security of the proposed system. We also compare the security, functional aspects, and computational and communication costs of previous systems. Furthermore, we perform cryptographic calculations to analyze the system in practical terms. As a result, our proposed protocol is safer against attacks such as guessing attacks and tracing attacks than other protocols, and can provide mutual authentication and key agreement functions. In addition, the proposed protocol is more efficient than other protocols, so it can be applied to practical IoT environments.

Abstract

Unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV)-enabled intelligent transportation system (ITS) is an advanced technology that can provide various services including autonomous driving, real-time creation of high-definition maps, and car sharing. In particular, a UAV-enabled ITS can be realized through the combination of traditional vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and UAVs that can act as flying roadside units (RSUs) at the outskirts and monitor road conditions from predefined locations to spot car accidents and any law violations. Notably, to realize these services, real-time communication between UAVs and RSUs must be guaranteed. However, UAVs have limited computing powers, and if extensive computation is required during communication, the provision of real-time ITS services may be hindered. Furthermore, UAVs and RSUs communicate via public channels that are prone to various attacks, such as replay

Abstract

Quantum speed limit is bound on the minimum time a quantum system requires to evolve from an initial state to final state under a given dynamical process. It sheds light on how fast a desired state transformation can take place which is pertinent for design and control of quantum technologies. In this paper, we derive speed limits on correlations such as entanglement, Bell-CHSH correlation, and quantum mutual information of quantum systems evolving under dynamical processes. Our main result is speed limit on an entanglement monotone called negativity which holds for arbitrary dimensional bipartite quantum systems and processes. Another entanglement monotone which we consider is the concurrence. To illustrate efficacy of our speed limits, we analytically and numerically compute the speed limits on the negativity, concurrence, and Bell-CHSH correlation for various quantum processes of practical interest. We are able to show that for practical examples we have considered, some of the speed limits we derived are actually attainable and hence these bounds can be considered to be tight.

Abstract

With progress in quantum technologies, the field of quantum networks has emerged as an important area of research. In the last few years, there has been substantial progress in understanding the correlations present in quantum networks. In this article, we study cloning as a prospective method to generate three party quantum networks which will help us to create larger networks. We analyze various quantum network topologies that can be created using cloning transformations. This would be useful in situations wherever the availability of entangled pairs is limited. In addition to that, we focus on the problem of distinguishing networks created by cloning from those that are created by distributing independently generated entangled pairs. We find that there are several states that cannot be distinguished using the Finner inequalities in the standard way. For such states, we propose an extension to the existing Finner inequality for triangle networks by further increasing the number of observers from three to four or six depending on the network topology. This takes into account the additional correlations that exist in the case of cloned networks. In the last part of the article, we use tripartite mutual information to distinguish cloned networks from networks created by independent sources and further use squashed entanglement as a measure to quantify the amount of dependence in the cloned networks.

Abstract

The most simplest form of quantum network is an one dimensional quantum network with a single player in each node. In remote entanglement distribution each of the players carry out measurement at the intermediate nodes to produce an entangled state between initial and final node which are remotely separated. It is imperative to say that the flow of information as well as the percolation of entanglement in a network between the source and target node is an important area of study. This will help us to understand the limits of the resource states as well as the measurements that are carried out in the process of remote entanglement distribution. In this article we investigate how the concurrence of the final entangled state obtained is connected with the concurrences of the initial entangled states present in a 1-D chain. We extend the works done for the pure entangled states for mixed entangled states like Werner states, Bell diagonal states and for general mixed states. We did not limit ourselves to a situation where the measurements are happening perfectly. We also investigate how these relations change when we consider imperfect swapping. We obtain the limits on the number of swappings as well as the success probability measurements to ensure the final state to be entangled state after swapping. In addition to these we also investigate on how much quantum information can be sent from the initial node to the final node (by computing the teleportation fidelity) when the measurement is perfect and imperfect with the same set of examples. Here also we obtain the limits on the number of swapping and the success probability of measurement