Members of the family Platytroctidae (tubeshoulders) are found throughout the meso- and bathypelagic waters of the World Ocean. Due to the lack of specimens collected globally, this taxon has received little attention, despite recent evidence suggesting its predominance in the bathypelagic biome. Prior to this study, only four species had been reported in the Gulf of Mexico’s (GoM) highly diverse deep-pelagic ecosystem. An extensive meso- and bathypelagic trawl series in the GoM allowed a detailed examination of this family, which included analyses of species composition, abundance, vertical distribution, sex ratios, and trophic ecology. A total of 16 species were collected, which included 12 new records for the GoM. The five most-abundant species collected were Mentodus facilis, Platytroctes apus, Barbantus curvifrons, Mentodus mesalirus, and Maulisia microlepis. All platytroctids were collected from tows that extended below 700 m. Mentodus facilis was the only species that significantly differed from the expected 1:1 sex ratio (pMentodus mesalirus and Maulisia microlepis heavily consumed gelatinous zooplankton. Mentodus facilis and Barbantus curvifrons had a more varied diet consuming chaetognaths, copepods, and ostracods, with M. facilis exhibiting a slightly greater reliance on ostracods and gelatinous prey. This study represents the first investigation into the diet of this fish family and adds to the sparse community data of the bathypelagic zone by identifying alternative nutrient pathways (e.g., the fish-jelly link) that connect the deep and upper oceanic ecosystems.

Static analysis is a technique to automatically audit code without having to execute or manually read through it. It is highly effective and can scan large amounts of code or text very quickly. This thesis uses static analysis to find potential threats within a software's extension modules. These extensions are developed by third parties and should not be allowed to access information belonging to other extensions. However, due to the structure of the software there is no easy way to restrict this and still keep the software's functionality intact. The use of a static analysis tool could detect such threats by analyzing the code of an extension before it is published online, and therefore keep all current functionality intact. As the software is based on a lesser known language and there is a specific threat by way of information disclosure, a new static analysis tool has to be developed. To achieve this, a combination of language specific functionality and features available in C++ are combined to create an extendable tool which has the capability to detect cross-extension data access.

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This thesis examines one magazine's transition from print to digital media in order to shine a spotlight on one successful magazine brand and its attempts to navigate the digital revolution while also maintaining a successful magazine. Through a systematic descriptive analysis of communication strategies, a case analysis of Bon Appétit magazine is the focus of this thesis. Guided by the uses and gratifications theoretical perspective and informed by a systematic descriptive analysis, this thesis offers a rich examination of the Bon Appétit magazine brand and the ways the brand has been extended in the evolving digital media environment. The unique approach implemented in this thesis provides the opportunity to observe uses and gratifications from the organization's standpoint, instead of the consumer's. This unique approach was designed to reveal how Bon Appétit is attempting to fulfill consumer needs and gratifications through the digital media brand extensions, specifically its website, social media, and podcast. Analysis of Bon Appétit brand extensions indicate that six of Parham Santana's ten brand extension strategies are being implemented by Bon Appétit, including shift the form, transfer a component, transfer a benefit, leverage a special expertise, leverage your consumer base, and leverage a lifestyle. Another significant finding indicates that Bon Appétit implemented communication strategies centered on accessibility and convenience, surveillance, diversion, and interaction gratifications on its digital media platforms. Findings from this study suggest that future researchers would benefit from adding convenience and accessibility as gratifications considered in the uses and gratifications theoretical approach when researching digital media. Additionally, replication of the systematic method in this thesis, especially if applied to other magazine brands, could help reveal the types of brand extensions at play in digital platforms and whether other magazines use similar strategies to build and maintain relationships with consumers. / Master of Arts / This study explores how one magazine has added a website, social media, and a podcast to its content delivery strategy. Since consumer’s use of the internet, social media, and podcasts is rapidly increasing, they are no longer turning to magazines and other print publications for entertainment and information. In order for magazines to adapt to this trend, they need to take advantage of these digital media platforms. This study examines the communication strategies implemented on Bon Appétit’s website, social media, and podcast to determine how they are attempting to satisfy the desires consumers now have because of the new digital media. Results of this study indicate that consumers want to be able to have convenient and immediate access to the media and brand of their choice.

The Internet has made tremendous progress since its inception. The kingpin has been the transmission control protocol (TCP), which supports a large fraction of communication. With the Internet's wide-spread access, users now have increased expectations. The demands have evolved to an extent which TCP was never designed to support. Since network stacks do not provide the necessary functionality for modern applications, developers are forced to implement them over and over again --- as part of the application or supporting libraries. Consequently, application developers not only bear the burden of developing application features but are also responsible for building networking libraries to support sophisticated scenarios. This leads to considerable duplication of effort. The challenge for TCP in supporting modern use cases is mostly due to limiting assumptions, simplistic communication abstractions, and (once expedient) implementation shortcuts. To further add to the complexity, the limited TCP options space is insufficient to support extensibility and thus, contemporary communication patterns. Some argue that radical changes are required to extend the networks functionality; some researchers believe that a clean slate approach is the only path forward. Others suggest that evolution of the network stack is necessary to ensure wider adoption --- by avoiding a flag day. In either case, we see that the proposed solutions have not been adopted by the community at large. This is perhaps because the cost of transition from the incumbent to the new technology outweighs the value offered. In some cases, the limited scope of the proposed solutions limit their value. In other cases, the lack of backward compatibility or significant porting effort precludes incremental adoption altogether. In this dissertation, we focus on the development of a communication model that explicitly acknowledges the context of the conversation and describes (much of) modern communications. We highlight how the communication stack should be able to discover, interact with and use available resources to compose richer communication constructs. The model is able to do so by using session, flow and endpoint abstractions to describe communications between two or more endpoints. These abstractions provide means to the application developers for setting up and manipulating constructs, while the ability to recognize change in the operating context and reconfigure the constructs allows applications to adapt to the changing requirements. The model considers two or more participants to be involved in the conversation and thus enables most modern communication patterns, which is in contrast with the well-established two-participant model. Our contributions also include an implementation of a framework that realizes such communication methods and enables future innovation. We substantiate our claims by demonstrating case studies where we use the proposed abstractions to highlight the gains. We also show how the proposed model may be implemented in a backwards compatible manner, such that it does not break legacy applications, network stacks, or middleboxes in the network infrastructure. We also present use cases to substantiate our claims about backwards compatibility. This establishes that incremental evolution is possible. We highlight the benefits of context awareness in setting up complex communication constructs by presenting use cases and their evaluation. Finally, we show how the communication model may open the door for new and richer communication patterns. / PHD / In this dissertation, we focus on the development of a communication model that explicitly acknowledges the context of the conversation and describes (much of) modern communications. We highlight how the networking software should be able to discover, interact with and use available resources. The model is able to do so by using abstractions that describe communications between participants as if human beings were having a conversation i.e., the semantics of interactions between participants are defined in terms of a conversation session. These abstractions provide means to the application developers for describing communications in a holistic manner, recognizing change in the context and reconfigure communications to allow adaptation to changing requirements. The model considers two or more participants to be involved in the conversation and thus enables most modern communication patterns, which is in contrast with the well-established two-participant legacy model. Our contributions also include an implementation of a framework that realizes such communication methods and enables future innovation. We substantiate our claims by demonstrating case studies where we use the proposed abstractions to highlight the gains. We also show how the proposed model may be implemented in a backwards compatible manner, such that it does not break legacy applications, networking software, or network infrastructure. We also present use cases to substantiate our claims about backwards compatibility. This establishes that incremental evolution is possible. We highlight the benefits of context awareness in setting up complex communication constructs by presenting use cases and their evaluation. Finally, we show how the communication model may open the door for new and richer communication patterns.

Motivated by the recent development of noise systems, we try to describe, for fixed persistence modules \(X\) and \(Y\), the set of all persistence modules that are extensions of \(X\) by \(Y\), as well as their sizes. We restrict ourselves to tame persistence modules indexed by nonnegative numbers, and our notion of size is \((p,C)\)-norms, which is a generalization of \(p\)-norms. We prove that when \(X\) is a single bar, there is a monotone bijection between a set of antichains in the barcode of \(Y\) and the mentioned set of all extensions. A corollary is that the antichain consisting of maximal elements corresponds to the extension with maximal norm. Without this assumption on \(X\), we can reuse the previous result to construct a surjection from a set of tuples of antichains to the set of all extensions. We also conjecture that, with regards to this surjection, the tuple consisting of maximal antichains is mapped to the extension with maximal norm. We also provide some experimental justification for this conjecture. / Med anledning av det nyligen utvecklade begreppet noise system, försöker vi, för givna \(X\) och \(Y\), beskriva mängden av alla persistensmoduler som är utvidgningar av \(X\) med \(Y\), liksom deras storlekar. Vi begränsar oss till fallet med tama persistensmoduler, och där vi med storlek avser \((p,C)\)-normen, vilket är en generalisering av \(p\)-normen. I fallet när \(X\) består av en enda bar, konstruerar vi en monoton bijektion mellan en mängd av antikedjor och den nämnda mängden av alla utvidgningar. Ett korollarium är att antikedjan som består av maximala element motsvarar utvidgningen med störst norm. Vi använder sedan den nämnda bijektionen för att i det generella fallet konstruera en surjektion från en mängd av tuplar av antikedjor till mängden av alla utvidgningar. Vi formulerar även ett experimentellt bestyrkt påstående, nämligen att tupeln bestående av maximala antikedjor avbildas på utvidgningen med störst norm, av den nämnda surjektionen.

Recent processor architectures such as Intel Westmere (and later) and ARMv8 include instruction-level support for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), for the Secure Hashing Standard (SHA-1, SHA2) and for carry-less multiplication. These crypto-instructions are optimized for a single algorithm and provide significant performance improvements over software written using general-purpose instruction set. However, today's secure systems and protocols do not rely on just one, but a suite of many cryptographic applications that are expected to work in a correct and reliable manner. In this work, we propose a new instruction set for supporting efficient and reliable cryptography on modern processors. For efficiency, we propose flexible instruction set extensions for Keccak, a cryptographic kernel for hashing, authenticated encryption, key-stream generation and random-number generation. Keccak is the basis of the SHA-3 standard and the newly proposed Keyak and Ketje authenticated ciphers. For reliability, we propose a set of trusted instructions to verify the integrity of a cryptographic software library. These instructions are aimed at detecting tamper in the software or in the configurable hardware. We develop the instruction extensions for a 128-bit interface, commonly available in the vector processing unit of many modern processors. Simulation results on GEM5 architectural simulator show that the proposed instructions not only improves the performance of Keccak applications by 2 times (over NEON programming) and 6 times (over assembly programming), but also improves the reliability of applications at a performance overhead of just 6%. / Master of Science

The cryptographic algorithms are designed to be mathematically secure; however, side-channel analysis attacks go beyond mathematics by taking measurements of the device’s electrical activity to reveal the secret data of a cipher. These attacks also go hand in hand with fault analysis techniques to disclose the secret key used in cryptographic ciphers with even fewer measurements. This is of practical concern due to the ubiquity of embedded systems that allow physical access to the adversary such as smart cards, ATMs, etc.. Researchers through the years have come up with techniques to block physical attacks to the hardware or make such attacks less likely to succeed. Most of the conducted research consider one or the other of side-channel analysis and fault injection attacks whereas, in a real setting, the adversary can simultaneously take advantage of both to retrieve the secret data with less effort. Furthermore, very little work considers a software implementation of these ciphers although, with the availability of small and affordable or free microarchitectures, and flexibility and simplicity of software implementations, it is at times more practical to have a software implementation of ciphers instead of dedicated hardware chips. In this project, we come up with a modular presentation, suitable for software implementation of ciphers, to allow having simultaneous resistance against side-channel and fault analysis attacks. We also present an extension at the microarchitecture level to make our proposed countermeasures more intact and efficient. / M.S. / Ciphers are algorithms designed by mathematicians. They protect data by encrypting them. In one of the main categories of these ciphers, called symmetric-key ciphers, a secret key is used to both encrypt and decrypt the data. Once the secret key of a cipher is retrieved, anyone can find the decoded data and thereby access the original data. Cryptographers traditionally sought to design ciphers in such a way that no adversary could reveal the secret key by finding holes in the algorithm. However, this has been shown insufficient for a specific implementation of a cryptographic algorithm to be considered as “unbreakable” since the physical properties of the implementation, can help an adversary find the secret key and break the encryption. Analyzing these physical properties can be either active; by making controlled changes in the normal progress of its execution, or passive; by merely measuring the physical properties during normal execution. Designers try to take these analyses into account when implementing a cryptographic function and so, in this project, we aim to present architectural support for a combination of some of the countermeasures.

Denna uppsats presenterar utvecklingen av ett webbläsartillägg som integrerar en lokal språkmodell, specifikt GPT-4All, för att förbättra hantering och analys av privat och akademisk information direkt i användarens webbläsare. Syftet är att erbjuda en mer personlig och säker användarupplevelse genom att tillämpa avancerade teknologier för att skydda användarnas integritet och datasekretess. Genom tekniska förklaringar och metodiska framställningar beskrivs skapandet av ett funktionellt webbläsartillägg som använder teknologier som HTML, CSS, och JavaScript, samt en lokal installation av språkmodellen för att hantera data från Ladok. Resultaten indikerar att tillägget effektivt kan processa och analysera information, vilket bidrar till en förbättrad akademisk informationshantering. Projektet understryker potentialen hos lokala språkmodeller i utvecklingen av digitala verktyg, med särskild betoning på etiska och säkerhetsmässiga aspekter. Framtida forskning uppmanas utforska ytterligare applikationer och effekter av dessa teknologier inom olika användarområden. / This paper presents the development of a browser extension that integrates a local language model, specifically GPT-4All, to improve the management and analysis of private and academic information directly in the user’s browser. The aim is to offer a more personalized and secure user experience by applying advanced technologies to protect user privacy and data confidentiality. Through technical explanations and methodological presentations, the creation of a functional browser extension using technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as well as a local installation of the language model to handle data from Ladok, is described. The results indicate that the extension can efficiently process and analyze information, contributing to an improved academic information management. The project underlines the potential of local language models in the development of digital tools, with particular emphasis on ethical and security aspects. Future research is encouraged to explore further applications and impacts of these technologies in different user domains.