Multiparty Communication Research Articles

Indicating engagement in online workplace meetings

Abstract Amid COVID-19 and the so-called “digital pivot”, online virtual communication is at the heart of our professional and private lives. As we move into a post-COVID context, the affordances of the digital turn have shown that we can operate professionally online but there is a need for better understanding of communication in the online workplace. This paper contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of indicators of engagement in multi-party communication online, as evidenced by a corpus-based multi-modal study. It showcases the importance of building naturally-occurring spoken corpora that go beyond written transcription and include annotation of non-verbal behaviour. The work focuses on the incidence, frequency, position, and function of spoken and head nod backchannels, exploring coordination and co-occurrence of these features in online talk. Findings point to a changing profile of how engagement is displayed in online workplace meetings, which appears to be linked to the functionality of platforms.

Using intervention mapping to develop an intervention for multiparty communication with people with congenital deafblindness.

Due to their dual sensory impairment, people with congenital deafblindness (CDB) are rarely naturally involved in other people's conversations. Their communication partners find it challenging to include them in group conversations. However, overhearing others communicate is important for developing social and communication skills. Hence, we developed an intervention program to guide communication partners in offering multiparty communication to people with CDB. This article describes how the program was developed through an intervention mapping approach. Intervention mapping is a six-step process: logic model, model of change, program design, program production, program implementation plan, and evaluation plan. These six steps were applied to systematically develop a program to foster multiparty communication in people with CDB. Representatives of the involved groups participated in the project group and the working group to ensure feasibility and acceptability. Following the intervention mapping steps resulted in creation of a program for communication partners that consists of an education session, practicals, and four video-feedback sessions. Information sessions for practitioners and managers were also developed. The program was implemented incrementally with program implementers in each organization. A subjective evaluation and an impact evaluation were done after each implementation phase. Intervention mapping was used to develop a program that connects theory to practice. The program appeared to meet the communication partners' needs and be feasible in terms of time investment. This article offers suggestions for broadening the scope of the program to other settings and for further investigating the effects of the program on the social and communication skills of people with CDB.

Digitale Öffentlichkeit(en). Linguistische Perspektiven

Abstract In this thematic volume we ask how digitalization and mediatization are transforming public communication and its conceptual understanding. This introductory text delves into the historical shift from oral and body media to written media in societal communication, highlighting the evolution through telecommunication mass media to the replacement of analog communication by digital forms. It addresses the lack of consensus on the definition of ‘publics’ and public communication, underscoring the multidimensional, heterogeneous, and fluid nature of these concepts. We ask how digitalization and mediatization processes raise questions about fundamental changes in publics due to new technological-communicative possibilities. Furthermore, we discuss the concept of publics as communicatively constructed and maintained, shaped by media and community ideologies. We propose a continuum model for digital/digitized publics, ranging from dyadic communication to multi-party communication. It emphasizes four key aspects for linguistic engagement with digital publics: communicative construction, technical and social affordances, multiplicity of addressing, and practices of digital community formation. With this model and the contributions following the introduction we contribute to a nuanced understanding of digital publics, considering their scale, complexity, and the dynamics of content creation and audience interaction.

Novel data encryption scheme and its application to secure multi-party communication

Recent advances in cellular mobile telecommunication field have dramatically facilitated the multi-party collaborative work in social networks. However, the privacy issues exposed by insecure network channels and semi-trusted service providers, such as underlying data analysis and mining, have gradually aroused public concerns. In this context, a novel Multi-Party Privacy Data Encryption (MP-PDE) scheme built upon the deep learning framework is proposed. In this scheme, a four-dimensional autonomous chaotic system is initially leveraged to configurate the key-controlled cipher streams. Under the guidance of a multi-objective optimization function, the proposed encryption network manipulates the multi-party private data into a cipher image with the statistical pseudo-randomness. At the recipient side, distinct participants can decrypt the corresponding data availing their own licensing key from the identical cipher image. Furthermore, the encryption and decryption networks are equivalent except for their trainable network parameters. Finally, numerous experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness and security of the proposed scheme.

Implementation of the Pentahelix Model in Community-Based Downstreaming of Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) in Kerinci Regency

Accelerated downstreaming of Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) products can be achieved if cooperation and coordination between relevant stakeholders (multi-stakeholders) goes well, so that sustainable adoption of innovation can occur. This research aims to analyze the effectiveness of multi-party communication in community-based downstreaming of non-timber forest products. The research was carried out in August-October 2023 in Kerinci Regency. This research used a qualitative method, with key informants being the Head of the Kerinci Production Forest Management Unit (KPHP), the Social Forestry Business Group (KUPS), Companions, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), as well as community members of the HHBK processing business. Data collection was carried out through Focus Group Discussion (FGD), using questionnaires, interview guides and observations. Secondary data was obtained from KPHP, Forestry Service and Kerinci Agriculture Service. Data were analyzed using N-Vivo analysis. The research results show that multi-party communication between non-timber forest product managers has not been effective. The interaction patterns of parties in the forest management network are not evenly distributed. The forest farmer group assisted by KPHP Kerinci has attempted to downstream processed products such as robusta coffee, kawa leaf, honey, cinnamon bark, cinnamon tea, coffee leaf dent, various taro chips, serundeng and so on, but are still constrained by market access and capital. , as well as its institutions. This means that the success of social forestry is not enough to only rely on strengthening one aspect, but must go hand in hand and complement each other.

FTMPST: Fault-Tolerant Multiparty Session Types

Multiparty session types are designed to abstractly capture the structure of communication protocols and verify behavioural properties. One important such property is progress, i.e., the absence of deadlock. Distributed algorithms often resemble multiparty communication protocols. But proving their properties, in particular termination that is closely related to progress, can be elaborate. Since distributed algorithms are often designed to cope with faults, a first step towards using session types to verify distributed algorithms is to integrate fault-tolerance. We extend multiparty session types to cope with system failures such as unreliable communication and process crashes. Moreover, we augment the semantics of processes by failure patterns that can be used to represent system requirements (as, e.g., failure detectors). To illustrate our approach we analyse a variant of the well-known rotating coordinator algorithm by Chandra and Toueg.

Distributed Computing Column 87 Recent Advances in Multi-Pass Graph Streaming Lower Bounds

Overview. In this Fall edition of the column, we resume our coverage of "hot topics" in areas connected to distributed computing with a column by Sepehr Assadi, who is an Associate Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. Sepehr's work was highlighted by the PODC community before, as he was the recipient of the 2019 PODC Doctoral Dissertation Award for his work on streaming algorithms, multiparty communication, and massively parallel computation on graphs, and features frequently in the proceedings of mainstream theory conferences such as FOCS, STOC, and SODA. In this column, Sepehr covers some of the recent progress on multi-pass graph streaming lower bounds, which includes a significant amount of his own work. Many thanks to Sepehr for his interesting contribution!

Quantum identity authentication for non-entanglement multiparty communication: A review, state of art and future directions

Quantum identity authentication for non-entanglement multiparty communication: A review, state of art and future directions

Securing Scalable Real-time Multiparty Communications with Hybrid Information-centric Networking

In this article, we consider security aspects of online meeting applications based on protocols such as WebRTC that leverage the Information-centric Networking (ICN) architecture to make the system fundamentally more scalable. If the scalability properties provided by ICN have been proved in recent literature, the security challenges and implications for real-time applications have not been reviewed. We show that this class of applications can benefit from strong security and scalability jointly without any major tradeoff and with significant performance improvements over traditional WebRTC systems. To achieve this goal, some modifications to the current ICN architecture must be implemented in the way integrity and authentication are verified. Extensive performance analysis of the architecture based on the open source implementation of Hybrid-ICN proves that real-time applications can greatly benefit from this novel network architecture in terms of strong security and scalable communications.

Quantum broadcast and multicast with non-maximally channels

Broadcast and multicast protocols are two branches of multi-party quantum communication. Implementing these protocols based on partial entanglement is of great practical importance since maximally entangled channels are not robust due to noise applied by the surrounding environment. Previous research has used global operators (i.e. operators which are applied on the qubits owned by different parties), which contradicts the concept of multi-party communication protocols. In this research, broadcast protocol and multicast protocol with two receivers are proposed using partially entangled channels. Then the protocols are extended to the case with an arbitrary number of receivers. In the proposed protocol, Alice shares a two-qubit maximally entangled state with each receiver, therefore the whole channel is a partially entangled state. Then, the proposed protocol is modified to be secure against eavesdroppers. Also, the effects of phase damping, bit flip, and phase damping noise on the broadcast protocol are examined and compared.

Experimental quantum secret sharing based on phase encoding of coherent states

Quantum secret sharing (QSS) is one of the basic communication primitives in future quantum networks which addresses part of the basic cryptographic tasks of multiparty communication and computation. Nevertheless, it is a challenge to provide a practical QSS protocol with security against general attacks. A QSS protocol that balances security and practicality is still lacking. Here, we propose a QSS protocol with simple phase encoding of coherent states among three parties. Removing the requirement of impractical entangled resources and the need for phase randomization, our protocol can be implemented with accessible technology. We provide the finite-key analysis against coherent attacks and implement a proof-of-principle experiment to demonstrate our scheme's feasibility. Our scheme achieves a key rate of 85.3 bps under a 35 dB channel loss. Combined with security against general attacks and accessible technology, our protocol is a promising candidate for practical multiparty quantum communication networks.

A Hybrid Federated Learning Framework and Multi-Party Communication for Cyber-Security Analysis

A Hybrid Federated Learning Framework and Multi-Party Communication for Cyber-Security Analysis

Information-theoretic secure rational secret sharing in asynchronous networks for untrusted cloud environments

AbstractToday, cloud storage services increased the popular for data storage in the cloud and retrieve from any location without any time limitations. One of the most important demands required in cloud is secured data transmission in un-trusted cloud applications. Particularly, secure and efficient multiparty communications in Untrusted Cloud Environments (UCE) attract widespread attentions. The equipment used in UCE have the particularity of being heterogeneous and UCE communication environment are asynchronous networks in which multiple users cannot transmit their messages simultaneously. How to ensure secure communication between these heterogeneous intelligent devices is a major challenge for multiparty communication applied in UCE. In such an asynchronous environment, the asynchronous transmission can cause security problems in cryptographic functions. Therefore, how to implement rational secret sharing (RSS) in an asynchronous model of the UCE networks has become a burning research topic. The RSS refers to finding a solution composed of strategies to encourage players in the secret reconstruction to act honestly even players are rational to act for their own interest. If each player plays the game for the best response to the best response of other players, the game is in Nash equilibrium. The objective of an RSS is to achieve the Nash equilibrium state corresponding to the global optima. In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic secure RSS in asynchronous model for UCE. Our design uses Petersen’s VSS to allow every player to divide his share into multiple pieces for other players. Then, shares can be revealed asynchronously. If any player acts maliciously, his share can be recovered by other players. This feature can encourage players to act honestly since any malicious action (i.e., either revealing a fake share or refusing to release one) is useless. Our scheme is practically valuable for secure group-oriented applications in UCE.

Simple proof of security of the multiparty prepare and measure QKD

The majority of research to date has concentrated on the quantum key distribution (QKD) between two parties. In general, the QKD protocols proposed for the multiparty scenario often involve the usage of a maximally entangled state, such as GHZ, which is challenging to implement in practice. This paper examines the prepare and measure version of multiparty communication through quantum key distribution. It is sufficient to have the capability of preparing and measuring a single qubit state. The security of the multiparty prepare and measure QKD is demonstrated by utilizing the well-known techniques of quantum error correction and entanglement purification. We begin by establishing the security of the entangled-based version and progress through a series of reductions to arrive at our equivalent multiparty prepare and measure version of QKD. We establish the security proof of multiparty entangled-based version by combining FTQC and classical statistics on the GHZ basis. Then proved the conditional security of the multiparty prepare-and-measure QKD by the equivalency.

Resource theory of causal connection

The capacity of distant parties to send signals to one another is a fundamental requirement in many information-processing tasks. Such ability is determined by the causal structure connecting the parties, and more generally, by the intermediate processes carrying signals from one laboratory to another. Here we build a fully fledged resource theory of causal connection for all multi-party communication scenarios, encompassing those where the parties operate in a definite causal order and also where the order is indefinite. We define and characterize the set of free processes and three different sets of free transformations thereof, resulting in three distinct resource theories of causal connection. In the causally ordered setting, we identify the most resourceful processes in the bipartite and tripartite scenarios. In the general setting, instead, our results suggest that there is no global most valuable resource. We establish the signalling robustness as a resource monotone of causal connection and provide tight bounds on it for many pertinent sets of processes. Finally, we introduce a resource theory of causal non-separability, and show that it is – in contrast to the case of causal connection – unique. Together our results offer a flexible and comprehensive framework to quantify and transform general quantum processes, as well as insights into their multi-layered causal connection structures.

Private Facial Prediagnosis as an Edge Service for Parkinson's DBS Treatment Valuation.

Facial phenotyping for medical prediagnosis has recently been successfully exploited as a novel way for the preclinical assessment of a range of rare genetic diseases, where facial biometrics is revealed to have rich links to underlying genetic or medical causes. In this paper, we aim to extend this facial prediagnosis technology for a more general disease, Parkinson's Diseases (PD), and proposed an Artificial-Intelligence-of-Things (AIoT) edge-oriented privacy-preserving facial prediagnosis framework to analyze the treatment of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) on PD patients. In the proposed framework, a novel edge-based privacy-preserving framework is proposed to implement private deep facial diagnosis as a service over an AIoT-oriented information theoretically secure multi-party communication scheme, while data privacy has been a primary concern toward a wider exploitation of Electronic Health and Medical Records (EHR/EMR) over cloud-based medical services. In our experiments with a collected facial dataset from PD patients, for the first time, we proved that facial patterns could be used to evaluate the facial difference of PD patients undergoing DBS treatment. We further implemented a privacy-preserving information theoretical secure deep facial prediagnosis framework that can achieve the same accuracy as the non-encrypted one, showing the potential of our facial prediagnosis as a trustworthy edge service for grading the severity of PD in patients.

Practical Undeniable Multiparty Drawing-Straw Protocol in Asynchronous Networks for Resource-Constrained Information Systems

The next generation of mobile networks and communications (5G networks) has a very strong ability to compute, store, and so on. Group-oriented applications demonstrate their potential ability in resource-constrained information systems (RISs) towards 5G. The security issues in RIS towards 5G have attracted great attention. For example, how to conduct fair and orderly multiparty communication in an intelligent transportation system (ITS). One of the main challenges for secure group-oriented applications in RIS towards 5G is how to manage RIS communications fairly in multiparty applications. In other words, when the users cannot transmit their messages simultaneously, the order of their communication can cause security concerns in multiparty applications. A feasible solution to the problem is for the group of users to follow a specific order to transmit their messages. Otherwise, some users may take advantage over other users if there has no agreeable order to be followed. In this paper, we propose a novel cryptographic primitive, called multiparty drawing-straw (MDS) protocol, which can be used by a group of users to determine the order of the group to participate in the multiparty applications. Our scheme is based on Pedersen’s verifiable secret sharing (VSS), which is a well-known scheme. Our proposed protocol is fair since the output is uniformly distributed, and this is an attractive feature for secure multiparty applications in RIS towards 5G.

Quantum information processing with nuclear spins mediated by a weak-mechanically controlled electron spin

We propose a scheme to achieve nuclear–nuclear indirect interactions mediated by a mechanically driven nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in a diamond. Here we demonstrate two-qubit entangling gates and quantum-state transfer between two carbon nuclei. When the dipole–dipole interaction strength is much larger than the driving field strength, the scheme is robust against decoherence caused by coupling between the NV center (nuclear spins) and the environment. Conveniently, precise control of dipole coupling is not required so this scheme is insensitive to fluctuating positions of the nuclear spins and the NV center. Our scheme provides a general blueprint for multi-nuclear-spin gates and for multi-party communication.

Quantum Cooperative Multicast in a Quantum Hybrid Topology Network

Quantum multicast is a significant transmission mode in a multiparty communication scenario. Multisource collaboration can further enhance the efficient multicast. However, it remains a challenge to realize quantum multicast with a cooperative way in a complex topology network. In this article, we propose a scheme of quantum cooperative multicast in a hybrid topology network. It provides information aggregation and simultaneous multipoint transmission services. First, collaborative information aggregation allows central network data to be integrated into the aggregation node. By exploiting the quantum multicast mode, the aggregation node can simultaneously deliver integrated quantum states to multiple targets. Second, our scheme is feasible for dynamic network expansion. It is capable of extending the network architecture iteratively, while the peer network requests can be handled in parallel. Finally, the new scheme shows great application potential in the distributed quantum network. It is a promising candidate for the implementation of quantum data disaster backup in future.

A secure blockchain system for Internet of Vehicles based on 6G-enabled Network in Box

Network in Box (NIB) is a self-organizing and portable device. The six-generation wireless communication technologies (6G) can empower NIB with better spectrum efficiency by integrating satellite broadcasting. 6G-enabled NIB is promising to promote the communication efficiency of Internet of Vehicles (IoV). IoV has emerged as the concrete practice of intelligent transportation. However, IoV is vulnerable to attacks from quantum computers because they use traditional RSA and elliptic cure cryptographic systems. Therefore, it is critical to improving the security of IoV against quantum computer attacks. This paper proposes the first secure scheme based on post-quantum techniques for 6G-enabled NIB to protect IoV against quantum attacks. On the one hand, a blockchain-based public key infrastructure is proposed to authenticate the IoV devices securely. On the other hand, we design a blockchain-based multi-party key agreement and communication system to support multi-party communication among IoV devices. The extensive theoretical analysis and experimental results indicate that the proposed blockchain system based on 6G-enabled NIB can achieve high security and efficiency for IoV.