Protecting the privacy of crowd workers has been an important topic in crowdsourcing, however, task privacy has largely been ignored despite the fact that many tasks, e.g., form digitization, live audio transcription or image tagging often contain sensitive information. Although assigning an entire job to a worker may leak private information, jobs can often be split into small components that individually do not. We study the problem of distributing such tasks to workers with the goal of maximizing task privacy using such an approach.

We study the multi-broadcast problem in multi-hop ad-hoc wireless networks, under the SINR model, deployed in the 2D Euclidean plane. In multi-broadcast, there are $k$ initial messages, potentially belonging to different nodes, that must be forwarded to all $n$ nodes of the network. We present deterministic algorithms for multi-broadcast for the different settings reflecting the different types of knowledge, about the topology of the network, available to the nodes: (i) the whole network topology (ii) their own coordinates and coordinates of their neighbors (iii) only their own physical coordinates (iv) only their own ids and the ids of their neighbors, but not actual physical co-ordinates. The last result is specially interesting, as it is the first deterministic protocol, for the SINR model, that does not require nodes to know their coordinates in the plane (a very specialized type of knowledge), but intricately exploits the fact that they lie on a two dimensional plane.

Crowdsourcing through web technologies has emerged as a key method and tool for conducting distributed work. There are new platforms constantly emerging that aim to provide crowdsourcing opportunities on mobile phones. However, most of these systems are very specific to certain types of tasks and do

Organization networks are hierarchical trees and were proposed by Papadimitrious and Schreiber to model interactions in an organization. Packets arrive from the outside world at (possibly intermediate) nodes of this directed rooted tree and are to be forwarded to the root. A fixed delivery cost is charged every time a link is used and a delay cost is charged in proportion to the total time packets wait in the network before they reach the root. This is a natural setting.

We consider a recently proposed model for secure computation appropriate to the setting of low degree networks called almost everywhere secure computation. This model of multiparty computation allows a few honest parties to not achieve the canonical guarantees of Correctness and Privacy. Such honest parties may not be able to communicate reliably or securely with other honest parties in the network due to lack of infrastructure. We explain why a straightforward hybrid argument employed in the previous work can be used to realize privacy only when honest-but-curious type passive corruptions are considered. We further note that the notion of almost everywhere secure computation is theoretically challenging and practically relevant only when malicious corruptions are allowed. We argue and emphasize why simulation based reduction approach taken by the author is the only way to meaningfully realize privacy of almost everywhere secure computation. We present such an approach and show how to realize a.e.s.c. for general Byzantine corruptions, resolving the principle open problem in this line of research. Finally, we note several technical and conceptual improvements to the results given in previous work.

We describe new graph bipartization algorithms for lay-out modification and phase assignment of bright-field alternating phase-shifting masks (AltPSM) [25]. The problem of layout modification for phase-assignability reduces to the problem of making a certain layout-derived graph bipartite (i.e., 2-colorable). Previous work [3] solves bipartization optimally for the dark field alternating PSMregime. Only one degree of freedom is allowed (and relevant) for such a bipartization: edge deletion, which corresponds to increasing the spacing between features in order to remove phase conflict. Unfortunately, dark-field PSM is used only for contact layers, due to limitations of negative photoresists. Poly and metal layers are actually created using positive photoresists and bright-field masks. In this paper, we define a new graph bipartization formulation that pertains to the more technologically relevant bright-field regime. Previous work [3] does not apply to this regime. This formulation allows two degrees of freedom for layout perturbation: (i) increasing the spacing between features, and (ii) increasing the width of critical features. Each of these corresponds to node deletion in a new layout-derived graph that we define, called the feature graph. Graph bipartization by node deletion asks for a minimum weight node set A such that deletion of A makes the graph bipartite. Unlike bipartization by edge deletion, this problem is NP-hard. We investigate several practical heuristics for the node deletion bipartization of planar graphs, including one that has 9/4 approximation ratio. Computational experience with industrial VLSI layout benchmarks shows promising results.