No abstract

This paper explores the growing concerns with computer science research, and in particular, computer security research and its relationship with the committees that review human subjects research. It offers cases that review boards are likely to confront, and provides a context for appropriate consideration of such research, as issues of bots, clouds, and worms enter the discourse of human subjects review.

Encryption and watermarking are complementary lines of defense in protecting multimedia content. Recent watermarking techniques have therefore been developed independent from encryption techniques. In this paper, we present a hybrid image protection scheme to establish a relation between the data encryption key and the watermark. Prepositioned secret sharing allows the reconstruction of different encryption keys by communicating different activating shares for the same prepositioned information. Each activating share is used by the receivers to generate a fresh content decryption key. In the proposed scheme, the activating share is used to carry copyright or usage rights data. The bit stream that represents this data is also embedded in the content as a visual watermark. When the encryption key needs to change, the data source generates a new activating share, and embeds the corresponding watermark into the multimedia stream. Before transmission, the composite stream is encrypted with the key constructed from the new activating share. Each receiver can decrypt the stream after reconstructing the same key, and extract the watermark from the image. Our presentation will include the application of the scheme to a test image, and a discussion on the data hiding capacity, watermark transparency, and robustness to common attacks.

While research linking science and aesthetics continues to proliferate, in technical domains like software development, quantitative investigations of aesthetics are virtually nonexistent. As an initial exploration, we administered an online survey to 12 experts and 38 novices in programming, assessing the frequency, nature, time course, and judgment criteria of their aesthetic experience with software code. Both groups reported having aesthetic experiences with code, though somewhat less frequently and intensely than with other creative artifacts. Overall, judgments of "ugly" code were reported to be faster than those of "beautiful" code, which in tum were faster than those of "correct" code. Aesthetic considerations of code were generally rated as quite important, though not as important as functionality. Finally, aesthetic judgment criteria were highly correlated among experts and novices. Results suggest a quantitative approach to aesthetics in software code is a promising direction, with trans-domain implications for aesthetics and creativity.