ALBERT

Description: Location-based services have attracted much attention in both academia and industry. However, protecting user’s privacy while providing accurate service for users remains challenging. In most of the existing research works, a semi-trusted proxy is employed to act on behalf of a user to minimize the computation and communication costs of the user. However, user privacy, e.g. location privacy, cannot be protected against the proxy. In this paper, we design a new blind filter protocol where a user can employ a semi-trusted proxy to determine whether a point of interest is within a circular area centered at the user’s location. During the protocol, neither the proxy nor the location-based service provider can obtain the location of the user and the query results. Moreover, each type of query is controlled by an access tree and only the users whose attributes satisfy this access tree can complete the specific type of query. Security analysis and efficiency experiments validate that the proposed protocol is secure and efficient in terms of the computation and communication overhead.

Description: The ecological functions of core and non-core bacteria are gradually being identified, yet little is known about their responses to environmental changes and assembly processes, especially in urban river ecosystems. Here, we investigated bacterioplankton communities over 1 year in an urban section of the Ganjiang River, China. The results revealed that the alpha- and beta-diversity of bacterioplankton communities had no significant spatial differences along the urbanization gradient, but they presented distinct seasonal variations. The bacterioplankton communities were comprised of a few core taxa (11.8%) and a large number of non-core taxa (88.2%), of which the non-core taxa were the most active component responsible for community dynamics. Most non-core taxa (76.84%) belonged to non-typical freshwater bacteria, implying that they are more likely to derive from allochthonous inputs than the core taxa. Variance partitioning analyses showed that air temperature, flow rate and water chemistry together explained 58.2 and 38.9% of the variations of the core taxa and non-core taxa, respectively. In addition, the relative importance of temperature and water chemistry on the bacterioplankton communities prevailed over that of flow rate alone. This means that deterministic processes and stochastic processes simultaneously control the bacterioplankton community assembly, with deterministic processes contributing more than stochastic processes.

Description: Due to its efficiency, convenience, non-destructive nature and strong anti-interference capability, the microtremor survey method (MSM) has found wide applications in urban geological surveys. The spatial autocorrelation method is diffusely applied to extract the dispersion curves from microtremor signals, which needs to satisfy the assumption that the energy of the fundamental Rayleigh wave is dominant. However, for layered media containing a layer with a significant low- or high-velocity contrast, this assumption is distinctly incorrect for certain frequency ranges. We present a processing methodology comprising the extraction and inversion of the apparent dispersion curves based on extended spatial autocorrelation method and fast simulated-annealing algorithm. We analyse synthetic microtremor signals for three selected geological models, and then compare the S-wave velocity structures estimated from their inversions with the actual models. Subsequently, a filed data example is given to detect the shallow stratigraphic structures in Guangzhou city, China, in which the new MSM was used. The estimated two-dimensional S-wave velocity model provided an accurate description of the thickness and depth of the strata in the study area, based on a priori information. Moreover, the S-wave velocity structures estimated from the MSM and the results from the drilling match very well, indicating that MSM is a reliable geophysical technique in urban geological surveys. Combined with available borehole information, MSM can be a very robust and effective method for detecting the shallow three-dimensional velocity structures in an urban area.