This paper explores new ways to support blind and low vision (BLV) game stream participants. Prior work on game-aware streaming systems has focused on the potential for viewer interaction and personalization for sighted viewers, but how such systems impact interaction and personalization for BLV viewers remains largely unexplored. Most streaming experiences have significant visual information but no non-visual or sensemaking alternatives, which can exclude BLV viewers from understanding and interacting with the streaming experience. Building on the pre-existing system MARS, we developed a design probe that makes game data available to stream viewers in personalizable visual and non-visual formats. We use this probe to investigate the needs of BLV game stream viewers through qualitative interviews and live prototype testing sessions on Twitch. In addition to the technical contributions of our probe, our work addresses how game-aware streaming technologies can align with the needs and motivations of BLV viewers, and paves the way for novel designs in future iterations of game-aware streaming technologies.

Enabling the sharing of quantum computers among different users requires a secure reset operation that can reset the state of a qubit to ground state |0> and prevent leakage of the state to a post-reset circuit. This work highlights that the existing reset operations available in superconducting qubit NISQ quantum computers are not fully secure. In particular, this work demonstrates for the first time a new type of higher-energy state attack. Although NISQ quantum computers are typically abstracted as working with only energy states |0> and |1>, this work shows that it is possible for unprivileged users to set the qubit state to |2 or |3>. By breaking the abstraction of a two-level system, the new higher-energy state attack can be deployed to affect the operation of circuits or for covert communication between circuits. This work shows that common reset protocols are ineffective in resetting a qubit from a higher-energy state. To provide a defense, this work proposes a new Cascading Secure Reset (CSR) operation. CSR, without hardware modifications, is able to efficiently and reliably reset higher-energy states back to |0>. CSR achieves a reduction in |3> -initialized state leakage channel capacity by between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude, and does so with a 25x speedup compared with the default decoherence reset.

Web users provide rich multi-modal and heterogeneous data. Taking use of the data for extracting the representation of web users is a vital prerequisite of further profiling tasks. In this paper, we study the web user profiling based on the user-entity interaction data integrating the taxonomy information of the entity. To overcome the challenges of the representation of a web user and the distance definition of two web users, we introduce TaxoVec, an interpretable method to represent a user’s interaction history by vectors with the help of the entities’ category information. The TaxoVec is employed in clustering-based web user profiling on their transaction data and geographical data, which provide the information on their interests and activity area. Experiments show that the TaxoVec performs well on representing characteristics of web users.