Scientific discovery is often portrayed as a purely rational process, yet personal writing of scientists frequently reveal rich emotional narratives interwoven with their intellectual journeys. We present Scientific Crosstalk, a computational framework leveraging topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and similarity metrics that allows to explore the alignment between emotional expression in personal correspondences and formal scientific publications. Using a curated corpus of Albert Einstein’s personal letters and research papers, we apply transformer-based sentiment classifiers and BERTopic to extract topic-specific sentiment distributions. Cosine similarity and Jaccard index measures are used to quantify emotional alignment across matched thematic regions. To visualize these dynamics over time, we construct a temporal knowledge graph linking emotional states to stages of scientific development. Our preliminary results reveal measurable emotional correspondences during key periods of discovery, suggesting that affective language in informal texts may reflect or even anticipate formal scientific reasoning. Our work offers a novel methodological contribution to affective computing, science-of-science studies, and interdisciplinary application of machine-learning techniques, opening new directions for analyzing cognitive and emotional processes that shape innovation.

We introduce a new lightweight Symmetric Threshold Predicate Encryption (STPE) scheme, which expands the definition of Predicate Encryption. In STPE, the recipient’s private key evaluates only k predicates instead of all predicates on the sender’s encrypted data. The recipient can decrypt the data if at least k predicates are satisfied. As a new building block, we design a Content-Filtered Encryption (CFE) scheme based on STPE, which allows the sender to encrypt the message with the extracted words and the recipient to generate a filter with abusive words. The recipient can decrypt the message if the evaluation of extracted words and abusive words does not intersect more than a threshold k, where k is a flexible limit of sensitive words the recipient can accept. Otherwise, the recipient can refuse to read the message. It is essential for the recipient to generate a filter of abusive words beforehand; the incoming encrypted message will be delivered only if it bypasses this filter. Therefore, our proposed scheme enables secure filtering of words in the end-to-end encryption messaging protocol, which achieves selective security and efficiency for all communication devices. We prove that our STPE and CFE schemes are secure under the selected security assumptions. Furthermore, by utilizing the Pseudo-Random Function and XOR gate, our construction achieves lightweight computation, which benefits from the primitives of symmetric crypto mechanisms. We experimented on multiple devices, such as PCs and mobile devices. Additionally, our work demonstrates the feasibility across heterogeneous devices.

Numerous institutions are developing cybersecurity education and training programs to supply the considerable global demand for cybersecurity professionals. However, these institutions face barriers in building realistic laboratory environments, commonly referred to as cyber ranges, needed for hands-on skills development. Cybersecurity labs differ from traditional computing labs in both size and complexity. They often require multiple distinct components to represent network configurations, adversarial computing, and defense mechanisms.

Access control is an important aspect of shared virtual environments. Resource access may not only depend on prior authorization, but also on context of usage such as distance or position in the scene graph hierarchy. In virtual worlds that allow user-created content, participants must be able to define and exchange access rights to control the usage of their creations. Using object capabilities, fine-grained access control can be exerted on the object level. We describe our experiences in the application of the object-capability model for access control to object-manipulation tasks common to collaborative virtual environments. We also report on a prototype implementation of an object-capability safe virtual environment that allows anonymous, dynamic exchange of access rights between users, scene elements, and autonomous actors.

Multi-frame rate rendering is a parallel rendering technique that renders interactive parts of the scene on one graphics card while the rest of the scene is rendered asynchronously on a second graphics card. The resulting color and depth images of both render processes are composited and displayed. This paper presents advanced multi-frame rate rendering techniques, which remove limitations of the original approach and reduce artifacts. The interactive manipulation of light sources and their parameters affects the entire scene. Our multi-GPU deferred shading splits the rendering task into a rasterization and lighting pass and distributes the passes to the appropriate graphics card to enable light manipulations at high frame rates independent of the geometry complexity of the scene. We also developed a parallel volume rendering technique, which allows the manipulation of objects inside a translucent volume at high frame rates. Due to the asynchronous nature of multi-frame rate rendering artifacts may occur during the migration of objects from the slow to the fast graphics card, and vice versa. We show how proper state management can be used to avoid these artifacts almost completely. These techniques were developed in the context of a single-system multi-GPU setup, which considerably simplifies the implementation and increases performance.

We introduce a new concept for improved interaction with complex scenes: multi-frame rate rendering and display. Multi-frame rate rendering produces a multi-frame rate display by optically or digitally compositing the results of asynchronously running image generators. Interactive parts of a scene are rendered at the highest possible frame rates while the rest of the scene is rendered at regular frame rates. The composition of image components generated with different update rates may cause certain visual artifacts, which can be partially overcome with our rendering techniques. The results of a user study confirm that multi-frame rate rendering can significantly improve the interaction performance while slight visual artifacts are either not even recognized or gladly tolerated by users. Overall, digital composition shows the most promising results, since it introduces the least artifacts while requiring the transfer of frame buffer content between different image generators

We present our experiences of combining wave field synthesis audio with a projection-based multi-viewer stereo display. Wave field synthesis is able to simulate spatial sound sources of various kinds without the need for headphones or user tracking. Multi-viewer systems support multiple tracked users with individual perspectively correct stereoscopic images. The combination of both approaches allows the consistent display of virtual objects and spatial audio sources for multiple participants. First impressions with two application scenarios confirm that sound sources can be quite well located in space by each user. The system allows the creation of sound sources attached to virtual objects, which can be moved around in real-time without perceivable latency. In addition users appreciated the possibility of natural communication while they were exploring the audio-visual scenarios.