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Creators/Authors contains: "Nguyen, Kien"

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  1. Reliable failure detection holds paramount importance in safety-critical applications.Yet, neural networks are known to produce overconfident predictions for misclassified samples. As a result, it remains a problematic matter as existing confidence score functions rely on category-level signals, the logits, to detect failures. This research introduces an innovative strategy, leveraging human-level concepts for a dual purpose: to reliably detect when a model fails and to transparently interpret why.By integrating a nuanced array of signals for each category, our method enables a finer-grained assessment of the model's confidence.We present a simple yet highly effective approach based on the ordinal ranking of concept activation to the input image. Without bells and whistles, our method is able to significantly reduce the false positive rate across diverse real-world image classification benchmarks, specifically by 3.7% on ImageNet and 9.0% on EuroSAT. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available April 11, 2026
  2. Abstract Protein synthesis by the ribosome requires large-scale rearrangements of the ‘small’ subunit (SSU; ∼1 MDa), including inter- and intra-subunit rotational motions. However, with nearly 2000 structures of ribosomes and ribosomal subunits now publicly available, it is exceedingly difficult to design experiments based on analysis of all known rotation states. To overcome this, we developed an approach where the orientation of each SSU head and body is described in terms of three angular coordinates (rotation, tilt and tilt direction) and a single translation. By considering the entire RCSB PDB database, we describe 1208 fully-assembled ribosome complexes and 334 isolated small subunits, which span >50 species. This reveals aspects of subunit rearrangements that are universal, and others that are organism/domain-specific. For example, we show that tilt-like rearrangements of the SSU body (i.e. ‘rolling’) are pervasive in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic (cytosolic and mitochondrial) ribosomes. As another example, domain orientations associated with frameshifting in bacteria are similar to those found in eukaryotic ribosomes. Together, this study establishes a common foundation with which structural, simulation, single-molecule and biochemical efforts can more precisely interrogate the dynamics of this prototypical molecular machine. 
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  4. A geo-marketplace allows users to be paid for their location data. Users concerned about privacy may want to charge more for data that pinpoints their location accurately, but may charge less for data that is more vague. A buyer would prefer to minimize data costs, but may have to spend more to get the necessary level of accuracy. We call this interplay between privacy, utility, and price spatial privacy pricing. We formalize the issues mathematically with an example problem of a buyer deciding whether or not to open a restaurant by purchasing location data to determine if the potential number of customers is sufficient to open. The problem is expressed as a sequential decision making problem, where the buyer first makes a series of decisions about which data to buy and concludes with a decision about opening the restaurant or not. We present two algorithms to solve this problem, including experiments that show they perform better than baselines. 
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  7. Monitoring location updates from mobile users has important applications in many areas, ranging from public health (e.g., COVID-19 contact tracing) and national security to social networks and advertising. However, sensitive information can be derived from movement patterns, thus protecting the privacy of mobile users is a major concern. Users may only be willing to disclose their locations when some condition is met, for instance in proximity of a disaster area or an event of interest. Currently, such functionality can be achieved using searchable encryption. Such cryptographic primitives provide provable guarantees for privacy, and allow decryption only when the location satisfies some predicate. Nevertheless, they rely on expensive pairing-based cryptography (PBC), of which direct application to the domain of location updates leads to impractical solutions. We propose secure and efficient techniques for private processing of location updates that complement the use of PBC and lead to significant gains in performance by reducing the amount of required pairing operations. We implement two optimizations that further improve performance: materialization of results to expensive mathematical operations, and parallelization. We also propose an heuristic that brings down the computational overhead through enlarging an alert zone by a small factor (given as system parameter), therefore trading off a small and controlled amount of privacy for significant performance gains. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed techniques significantly improve performance compared to the baseline, and reduce the searchable encryption overhead to a level that is practical in a computing environment with reasonable resources, such as the cloud. 
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  8. Monitoring location updates from mobile users has important applications in many areas, ranging from public health (e.g., COVID-19 contact tracing) and national security to social networks and advertising. However, sensitive information can be derived from movement patterns, thus protecting the privacy of mobile users is a major concern. Users may only be willing to disclose their locations when some condition is met, for instance in proximity of a disaster area or an event of interest. Currently, such functionality can be achieved using searchable encryption. Such cryptographic primitives provide provable guarantees for privacy, and allow decryption only when the location satisfies some predicate. Nevertheless, they rely on expensive pairing-based cryptography (PBC), of which direct application to the domain of location updates leads to impractical solutions. We propose secure and efficient techniques for private processing of location updates that complement the use of PBC and lead to significant gains in performance by reducing the amount of required pairing operations. We implement two optimizations that further improve performance: materialization of results to expensive mathematical operations, and parallelization. We also propose an heuristic that brings down the computational overhead through enlarging an alert zone by a small factor (given as system parameter), therefore trading off a small and controlled amount of privacy for significant performance gains. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed techniques significantly improve performance compared to the baseline, and reduce the searchable encryption overhead to a level that is practical in a computing environment with reasonable resources, such as the cloud. 
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