Library and Information Science Commons^™

Secure Multi-Party Computation In Practice, Marcella Hastings

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) is a cryptographic primitive for computing on private data. MPC provides strong privacy guarantees, but practical adoption requires high-quality application design, software development, and resource management. This dissertation aims to identify and reduce barriers to practical deployment of MPC applications.

First, the dissertation evaluates the design, capabilities, and usability of eleven state-of-the-art MPC software frameworks. These frameworks are essential for prototyping MPC applications, but their qualities vary widely; the survey provides insight into their current abilities and limitations. A comprehensive online repository augments the survey, including complete build environments, sample programs, and additional documentation for each …

Complexity And Entanglement In Quantum Gravity, Arjun Kar

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

We present a collection of recent results concerning quantum information theory applied to quantum gravity. We first study the entanglement structure of Euclidean path integral states in SU(2) Chern-Simons theory, where we elucidate a connection between topological entanglement and quantum mechanical entanglement. We prove that the topology of certain three-manifolds controls the entanglement structure of the resulting quantum state, and conjecture a more general relationship for arbitrary three-manifolds. We then analyze the quantum circuit complexity of the time evolution operator in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, a theory of near-extremal black hole microstates. We find that this complexity grows linearly for a …

Essays On Empirical Operations Management In Retail Sales And Service, Youran Fu

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

This dissertation studies empirical operational problems in retail sales and service systems through three essays. We are in the middle of a remarkable rise in data analytics as available data, as well as the capability of artificial intelligence grows exponentially. This dissertation demonstrates how we can use traditional econometrics and cutting-edge machine learning models to provide data analytics for retail operations management. The first essay studies the value of unstructured social media text data in forecasting future fashion demands several months out, at a granular style-color level. Using recent advancement in natural language processing and machine learning techniques, we show …

Learning And Decision Making In Groups, M. Amin Rahimian

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

Many important real-world decision-making problems involve group interactions among individuals with purely informational interactions. Such situations arise for example in jury deliberations, expert committees, medical diagnoses, etc. We model the purely informational interactions of group members, where they receive private information and act based on that information while also observing other people's beliefs or actions.

In the first part of the thesis, we address the computations that a rational (Bayesian) decision-maker should undertake to realize her optimal actions, maximizing her expected utility given all available information at every decision epoch. We use an approach called iterated eliminations of infeasible signals …

Resource-Efficient Scheduling Of Multiprocessor Mixed-Criticality Real-Time Systems, Jaewoo Lee

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

Timing guarantee is critical to ensure the correctness of embedded software systems that

interact with the physical environment. As modern embedded real-time systems evolves,

they face three challenges: resource constraints, mixed-criticality, and multiprocessors. This

dissertation focuses on resource-efficient scheduling techniques for mixed-criticality systems

on multiprocessor platforms.

While Mixed-Criticality (MC) scheduling has been extensively studied on uniprocessor plat-

forms, the problem on multiprocessor platforms has been largely open. Multiprocessor al-

gorithms are broadly classified into two categories: global and partitioned. Global schedul-

ing approaches use a global run-queue and migrate tasks among processors for improved

schedulability. Partitioned scheduling approaches use per …

Developing A Tool To Support Decisions On Patient Prioritization At Admission To Home Health Care, Maxim Topaz

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

Background and aims: Millions of Americans are discharged from hospitals to home health every year and about third of them return to hospitals. A significant number of rehospitalizations (up to 60%) happen within the first two weeks of services. Early targeted allocation of services for patients who need them the most, have the potential to decrease readmissions. Unfortunately, there is only fragmented evidence on factors that should be used to identify high-risk patients in home health. This dissertation study aimed to (1) identify factors associated with priority for the first home health nursing visit and (2) to construct and validate …

Unveiling Hidden Values Of Optimization Models With Metaheuristic Approach, Ann Kuo

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

Considering that the decision making process for constrained optimization problem is based on modeling, there is always room for alternative solutions because there is usually a gap between the model and the real problem it depicts. This study looks into the problem of finding such alternative solutions, the non-optimal solutions of interest for constrained optimization models, the SoI problem. SoI problems subsume finding feasible solutions of interest (FoIs) and infeasible solutions of interest (IoIs). In all cases, the interest addressed is post-solution analysis in one form or another. Post-solution analysis of a constrained optimization model occurs after the model has …

Damage Detection And Mitigation In Open Collaboration Applications, Andrew Granville West

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

Collaborative functionality is changing the way information is amassed, refined, and disseminated in online environments. A subclass of these systems characterized by "open collaboration" uniquely allow participants to *modify* content with low barriers-to-entry. A prominent example and our case study, English Wikipedia, exemplifies the vulnerabilities: 7%+ of its edits are blatantly unconstructive. Our measurement studies show this damage manifests in novel socio-technical forms, limiting the effectiveness of computational detection strategies from related domains. In turn this has made much mitigation the responsibility of a poorly organized and ill-routed human workforce. We aim to improve all facets of this incident response …

Neo-Babylonian Texts From The John Frederick Lewis Collection Of The Free Library Of Philadelphia, Raymond B. Dillard

Dropsie College Theses

The central purpose of this study is to present a full edition of 82 heretofore unpublished Neo-Babylonian economic and legal texts from the John Frederick Lewis Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia. It is hoped that the publication of these texts in autograph copy, transliteration, and translation along with selected notes relating them to published corpora will shed more light on this often neglected genre of material from the Chaldean period.

A Survey Of 65 Kenicott Mss. Of The Book Of Joshua, Abraham Handelman

Dropsie College Theses

Since the end of the 18th century no attempt has been m ade to revise the work of collation, so as to incorporate evidence of any additional Mss. previously unknown. Only at the close of the 19th century Ch. David Ginsburg brought to light some 68 new Mss.³, on the basis of which he published his Bible edition.⁴

Of the new Mss. that came to light, some have been made accessible in Facsimile reproduction, and the evidence was made use of by S. Baer. But there is no complete collation of all existing Mss. of the Hebrew …