Range Queries Research Articles

AI in Hidradenitis Suppurativa: Expert Evaluation of Patient-Facing Information.

This study investigates the accuracy of Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots, ChatGPT and Bard, in providing information on Hidradenitis Suppurativa (HS), aiming to explore their potential in assisting HS patients by offering insights into symptoms, thus possibly reducing the diagnostic and treatment time gap. Using questions formulated with the help of HS patient associations, both ChatGPT and Bard were assessed. Responses to these questions were evaluated by 18hS experts. ChatGPT's responses were considered accurate in 86% of cases, significantly outperforming Bard, which only achieved 14% accuracy. Despite the general efficacy of ChatGPT in providing relevant information across a range of HS-related queries, both AI systems showed limitations in offering adequate advice on treatments. The study identifies a significant difference in the performance of the two AIs, emphasizing the need for improvement in AI-driven medical advice, particularly regarding treatment options. The study highlights the potential of AI chatbots, particularly ChatGPT, in supporting HS patients by improving symptom understanding and potentially reducing the time to diagnosis and treatment. AI chatbots, while promising, cannot yet substitute for professional medical diagnosis and treatment, indicating the importance of enhancing AI capabilities for more accurate and reliable medical information dissemination.

MulRF: A Multi-Dimensional Range Filter for Sublinear Time Range Query Processing

MulRF: A Multi-Dimensional Range Filter for Sublinear Time Range Query Processing

Exploring Meditron-7b performance on a small-scale purpose made dataset in human nutrition queries

Abstract The interest in Large Languages Models (LLMs) has been rapidly evolving over the last years, boosting concerns about their potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of clinical, educational and research work in medicine. In this study, we aimed to test the performance of MEDITRON, a recently released suite of open-source LLMs with 7B parameters adapted to the medical domain, on a small sample of human nutrition queries. To facilitate our assessment, we curated a specialized dataset comprising a diverse range of human nutrition-related queries, which have been manually collected from various medical databases and nutrition exams. The dataset was adapted for the scope of our analysis to encompass variations in language complexity, query types, and semantic nuances commonly encountered in real-world settings. Additionally, to ensure a standardized and clinically relevant context for our evaluations, we engineered a specialized prompt designed to mimic interactions with a highly esteemed physician specializing in nutrition, food science, and diet-related disorders. The prompt guided the generation of nutrition-related queries in a structured format, enabling MEDITRON to provide responses consistent with the latest advancements in medical research. Our preliminary findings revealed promising capabilities of MEDITRON in understanding medical language, providing contextually appropriate responses to several human nutrition related questions. Through this study, we add valuable insights to the ongoing discussion around the deployment of LLMs in public health, highlighting their potential to improve access to essential human nutrition literacy. Key messages • Design of LLMs tools holds the potential to improve healthcare in clinical, research and education applications. • Further evidence is needed to foster their actual integration in real world settings.

Efficient Distance Queries on Non-point Data

Distance queries, including distance-range queries, k -nearest neighbors search, and distance joins, are very popular in spatial databases. However, they have been studied mainly for point data. Inspired by a recent approach on indexing non-point objects for rectangular range queries, we propose a secondary partitioning approach for space-partitioning indices, which is appropriate for distance queries. Our approach classifies the contents of each primary partition into 16 secondary partitions, taking into consideration the begin and end values of objects with respect to the spatial extent of the primary partition. Based on this, we define algorithms for three popular spatial query types, that avoid duplicate results and skip unnecessary computations. We compare our approach to the previous secondary partitioning method and to state-of-the-art data-partitioning indexing and find that it has a significant performance advantage.

Computational Differential Privacy for Encrypted Databases Supporting Linear Queries

Differential privacy is a fundamental concept for protecting individual privacy in databases while enabling data analysis. Conceptually, it is assumed that the adversary has no direct access to the database, and therefore, encryption is not necessary. However, with the emergence of cloud computing and the << on-cloud >> storage of vast databases potentially contributed by multiple parties, it is becoming increasingly necessary to consider the possibility of the adversary having (at least partial) access to sensitive databases. A consequence is that, to protect the on-line database, it is now necessary to employ encryption. At PoPETs'19, it was the first time that the notion of differential privacy was considered for encrypted databases, but only for a limited type of query, namely histograms. Subsequently, a new type of query, summation, was considered at CODASPY'22. These works achieve statistical differential privacy, by still assuming that the adversary has no access to the encrypted database. In this paper, we take an essential step further by assuming that the adversary can eventually access the encrypted data, making it impossible to achieve statistical differential privacy because the security of encryption (beyond the one-time pad) relies on computational assumptions. Therefore, the appropriate privacy notion for encrypted databases that we target is computational differential privacy, which was introduced by Beimel et al. at CRYPTO '08. In our work, we focus on the case of functional encryption, which is an extensively studied primitive permitting some authorized computation over encrypted data. Technically, we show that any randomized functional encryption scheme that satisfies simulation-based security and differential privacy of the output can achieve computational differential privacy for multiple queries to one database. Our work also extends the summation query to a much broader range of queries, specifically linear queries, by utilizing inner-product functional encryption. Hence, we provide an instantiation for inner-product functionalities by proving its simulation soundness and present a concrete randomized inner-product functional encryption with computational differential privacy against multiple queries. In terms of efficiency, our protocol is almost as practical as the underlying inner product functional encryption scheme. As evidence, we provide a full benchmark, based on our concrete implementation for databases with up to 1 000 000 entries. Our work can be considered as a step towards achieving privacy-preserving encrypted databases for a wide range of query types and considering the involvement of multiple database owners.

Fast Range Query on Encrypted Multi-dimensional Data in Cloud Environment

Fast Range Query on Encrypted Multi-dimensional Data in Cloud Environment

Design Concerns for Integrated Scripting and Interactive Visualization in Notebook Environments.

Interactive visualization can support fluid exploration but is often limited to predetermined tasks. Scripting can support a vast range of queries but may be more cumbersome for free-form exploration. Embedding interactive visualization in scripting environments, such as computational notebooks, provides an opportunity to leverage the strengths of both direct manipulation and scripting. We investigate interactive visualization design methodology, choices, and strategies under this paradigm through a design study of calling context trees used in performance analysis, a field which exemplifies typical exploratory data analysis workflows with Big Data and hard to define problems. We first produce a formal task analysis assigning tasks to graphical or scripting contexts based on their specificity, frequency, and suitability. We then design a notebook-embedded interactive visualization and validate it with intended users. In a follow-up study, we present participants with multiple graphical and scripting interaction modes to elicit feedback about notebook-embedded visualization design, finding consensus in support of the interaction model. We report and reflect on observations regarding the process and design implications for combining visualization and scripting in notebooks.

Utilizing Large Language Models in Ophthalmology: The Current Landscape and Challenges.

A large language model (LLM) is an artificial intelligence (AI) model that uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand, interpret, and generate human-like language responses from unstructured text input. Its real-time response capabilities and eloquent dialogue enhance the interactive user experience in human-AI communication like never before. By gathering several sources on the internet, LLM chatbots can interact and respond to a wide range of queries, including problem solving, text summarization, and creating informative notes. Since ophthalmology is one of the medical fields integrating image analysis, telemedicine, AI, and other technologies, LLMs are likely to play an important role in eye care in the near future. This review summarizes the performance and potential applicability of LLMs in ophthalmology according to currently available publications.

Towards forward secure verifiable data streaming with support for keyword query

Verifiable data streaming (VDS) allows users to continuously upload their encrypted data items to untrusted cloud servers to reduce the burden of local storage. Meanwhile, it enables users to update outsourced data and initiate queries to verify data integrity. However, most previous works focus on queries for a certain index and are not compatible with general keyword queries. To this end, we propose a VDS protocol that supports keyword queries. Specifically, we first present an efficient dynamic symmetric searchable encryption (DSSE) with range query, which can represent multiple queried keywords within a range as the concise query token, thereby achieving communication-optimized keyword queries while achieving unbounded data appending. Furthermore, we construct a new VDS protocol supporting keyword queries by integrating the proposed range DSSE. Specifically, suppose the user searches for multiple keywords within a certain range. In that case, cloud servers can match the corresponding data items based on the user's query token, and users can verify the integrity of these data items. Security analysis demonstrates that our VDS protocol achieves forward security. Experimental results show that it sacrifices acceptable costs in exchange for keyword retrieval capability.

Efficient and Verifiable Range Query Scheme for Encrypted Geographical Information in Untrusted Cloud Environments

With the rapid development of geo-positioning technologies, location-based services have become increasingly widespread. In the field of location-based services, range queries on geographical data have emerged as an important research topic, attracting significant attention from academia and industry. In many applications, data owners choose to outsource their geographical data and range query tasks to cloud servers to alleviate the burden of local data storage and computation. However, this outsourcing presents many security challenges. These challenges include adversaries analyzing outsourced geographical data and query requests to obtain privacy information, untrusted cloud servers selectively querying a portion of the outsourced data to conserve computational resources, returning incorrect search results to data users, and even illegally modifying the outsourced geographical data, etc. To address these security concerns and provide reliable services to data owners and data users, this paper proposes an efficient and verifiable range query scheme (EVRQ) for encrypted geographical information in untrusted cloud environments. EVRQ is constructed based on a map region tree, 0–1 encoding, hash function, Bloom filter, and cryptographic multiset accumulator. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the efficiency of EVRQ, and a comprehensive analysis confirms the security of EVRQ.

Enabling space-time efficient range queries with REncoder

Enabling space-time efficient range queries with REncoder

Enhanced calendar support for temporal datacube queries

AbstractA significant share of our data are timeseries. Time can occur as the single dimension, or further (such as spatial) dimensions can be present as well, leading to multidimensional data such as 3D x/y/t satellite image timeseries or 4D x/y/z/t atmospheric simulations like weather forecasts. However, no user would like to count “seconds since epoch,” rather we all prefer calendar notation. Libraries, SQL, etc. support calendar arithmetics, yet more advanced functionality is needed. Instead of demoting advanced calendar functionality to low‐level coding, it seems desirable to have semantic support for calendars at high‐level, declarative query level. We present a conceptual framework for temporal modeling which allows the expression of a wide range of temporal queries. It smoothly enhances existing calendar handling by adding two new data and query description parameters, period of validity, and granularity. While our work is embedded in spatio‐temporal geo services, it can be incorporated in a non‐breaking manner in any environment needing calendar addressing. The concepts are implemented in an Array DBMS operational on several Petabytes of Earth datacubes.

DRM LISTS CREATED WITH CHATGPT: ANALYSING RECOGNITION MEMORY WITH CLIMATE-CHANGE THEMED LISTS

Machine learning and natural language processing have led to the development of powerful language models such as ChatGPT, which can generate consistent and human-like responses to a wide range of queries. In many domains, ChatGPT provides appropriate responses to given commands. One of the aims of this study is to investigate the use of these association lists, such as the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists popular in cognitive psychology studies, by ChatGPT by giving the necessary instructions. The same method was then used to create association lists around a specific topic (climate change). The results of the first study showed that participants gave more false answers when discriminating whether critical words were presented during the test phase than when related and unrelated words were presented. This finding shows that DRM lists generated by ChatGPT can be used to search for memory errors. In line with the literature, false answers for critical words were predominantly rated as ‘remember’. The results of the second study, which was applied to the lists created on the topic of climate change and compared the responses of the groups with the climate denial scores, show that there is no significant difference in the emergence of false memories between the two groups. The level of climate change denial did not significantly affect the participants’ responses to the critical words in the climate- related lists. The low level of climate denial in the sample is a limitation of this study. It is recommended that future studies compare memory performance across an appropriate sample.

Efficient Algorithms for Range Mode Queries in the Big Data Era

The mode is a fundamental descriptive statistic in data analysis, signifying the most frequent element within a dataset. The range mode query (RMQ) problem expands upon this concept by preprocessing an array A containing n natural numbers. This allows for the swift determination of the mode within any subarray A[a..b], thus optimizing the computation of the mode for a multitude of range queries. The efficacy of this process bears considerable importance in data analytics and retrieval across diverse platforms, including but not limited to online shopping experiences and financial auditing systems. This study is dedicated to exploring and benchmarking different algorithms and data structures designed to tackle the RMQ problem. The goal is to not only address the theoretical aspects of RMQ but also to provide practical solutions that can be applied in real-world scenarios, such as the optimization of an online shopping platform’s understanding of customer preferences, enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of data retrieval in large datasets.

Geospatial indexing for sea–land navigation based on machine learning

The exponential growth of geospatial data has created a need for efficient data processing and indexing, especially for acquiring the required data around while traveling on land and sea. Machine learning based learned index has brought a new phase in the field of spatial data indexing on land and sea for fast and accurate acquisition of points of interest. Recently proposed spatial learned indexes and traditional spatial indexes are difficult to maintain their performance while traveling on land and sea due to high memory cost and time consumption. Considering the above issue, we propose SLIP, a novel in-memory spatial learned index. SLIP uses an optimized mapping function and a piecewise linear model to handle data updates (e.g., insertion and deletion) efficiently. Based on SLIP, we design a range query algorithm and a faster KNN(K-NearestNeighbor) query algorithm using the optimized radius expansion model to get the results more quickly. Experiments on real geospatial datasets and synthetic datasets used the electronic navigation chart software show that SLIP achieved an average improvement of 10x in query performance over traditional spatial indexes and state-of-the-art learned indexes. Therefore, SLIP provides an innovative idea for high-efficiency geospatial data processing and indexing, and offers an efficient method for acquiring the surrounding geographic data for future navigation on land and sea.

Secure Range-Searching Using Copy-And-Recurse

Range searching is the problem of preprocessing a set of points P, such that given a query range gamma we can efficiently compute some function f(P cap gamma). For example, in a 1 dimensional range counting query, P is a set of numbers, gamma is a segment and we need to count how many numbers of P are in gamma. In higher dimensions, P is a set of d dimensional points and the query range is some volume in R^d. In general, we want to compute more than just counting, for example, the average of P cap gamma. Range searching has applications in databases where some SELECT queries can be translated to range queries. It had received a lot of attention in computational geometry where a data structure called partition tree was shown to solve range queries in time sub-linear in |P| using space only linear in |P|. In this paper we consider partition trees under FHE where we answer range queries without learning the value of the points or the parameters of the range. We show how partition trees can be securely traversed with O(t n^{1-1/d+epsilon} + n^{1+epsilon}) operations, where n=|P|, t is the number of operations needed to compare to gamma and epsilon>0 is a parameter. When the ranges are axis-parallel hyper-boxes the running time is O(t n^epsilon + n log^{d-1} n). As far as we know, this is the first non-trivial bound on range searching under FHE and it improves over the naive solution that needs O(t n) operations. Our algorithms are independent of the encryption scheme but as an example we implemented them using the CKKS FHE scheme. Our experiments show that for databases of sizes 2^{23} and 2^{25}, our algorithms run x2.8 and x4.7 (respectively) faster than the naive algorithm. The improvement of our algorithm comes from a method we call copy-and-recurse. With it we efficiently traverse a r-ary tree (where each inner node has r children) that also has the property that at most xi of them need to be recursed into when traversing the tree. We believe this method is interesting in its own and can be used to improve traversals in other tree-like structures.

A Change from Negative to Positive of Later Adoption Using the Innovation Decision Process to Imply Sustainability for HR Chatbots of Private Companies in Thailand

The current adoption of human resource (HR) chatbots has created problems within organizations, such as stilted conversational flow and a limited range of queries and responses. This paper presents an analysis of the factors affecting these issues by employing a new conceptual model. The instances of rejection and acceptance of an HR chatbot were analyzed in this study using the innovation decision process. A survey of 251 employees from private companies in Thailand was conducted, scrutinizing their experiences of using HR chatbots. Then, the innovation decision process was utilized to identify the critical factors that influenced the shift in attitude from rejection to acceptance. The survey identified three key findings affecting employees’ negative attitudes towards the HR chatbot, namely, hesitation concerning the perceived ease-of-use (HPEOU), word of mouth (WoM), and personal innovation (PI). Additionally, our research also revealed that the way people perceive the level of risk associated with using the HR chatbot directly affects their intention to reject. This highlighted the significance of organizational development for facilitating the re-engagement of employees with the HR chatbot, and specifically, a focus on the elements of people (PP), processes (PC), technology (TE), and policy (PL). This study demonstrated the advances in process development within an organization and its corresponding policies. The validation of HR chatbots was influenced by a distinct corporate vision. This study provides guidelines for the implementation of HR chatbots for employees in private corporations in Thailand. The findings can assist in enhancing operational performance and the subsequent adoption of HR chatbots, resulting in the sustainable development of an efficient acceptance evaluation model of change from negative to positive. This model uses the innovation decision process to foster the sustainability of HR chatbots in private companies in Thailand.

Privacy-Preserving Arbitrary Geometric Range Query in Mobile Internet of Vehicles

Privacy-Preserving Arbitrary Geometric Range Query in Mobile Internet of Vehicles

PriPL-Tree: Accurate Range Query for Arbitrary Distribution under Local Differential Privacy

Answering range queries in the context of Local Differential Privacy (LDP) is a widely studied problem in Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). Existing LDP solutions all assume a uniform data distribution within each domain partition, which may not align with real-world scenarios where data distribution is varied, resulting in inaccurate estimates. To address this problem, we introduce PriPL-Tree, a novel data structure that combines hierarchical tree structures with piecewise linear (PL) functions to answer range queries for arbitrary distributions. PriPL-Tree precisely models the underlying data distribution with a few line segments, leading to more accurate results for range queries. Furthermore, we extend it to multi-dimensional cases with novel data-aware adaptive grids. These grids leverage the insights from marginal distributions obtained through PriPL-Trees to partition the grids adaptively, adapting the density of underlying distributions. Our extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of PriPL-Tree over state-of-the-art solutions in answering range queries across arbitrary data distributions.

Dynamic Range Query Privacy-Preserving Scheme for Blockchain-Enhanced Smart Grid Based on Lattice

Blockchain-enhanced Smart Grid has attracted a lot of attention from scholars in recent years, due to its excellent decentralization, anti-collusion and immutability. With the wide deployment of blockchain and the popularity of more accurate intelligent applications, its role in Smart Grid is becoming more and more irreplaceable. However, because of the threat of quantum computer, it still confronts the risk of privacy disclosure. In this paper, we propose a novel and dynamic range query privacy-preserving scheme for blockchain-enhanced Smart Grid based on lattice. In this scheme, lattice-based homomorphic encryption algorithm is designed to resist the attack of quantum computer and realizes data aggregation to improve efficiency. In particular, this article designs a dynamic range query method with the aid of consortium blockchain by using proxy re-encryption. This method avoids the communication pressure caused by repeated data collection and improves the query efficiency and user experience. In addition, dynamic ciphertext and users update are considered, which further improves the flexibility and feasibility of the scheme. Last but not least, security analysis, exhaustive performance analysis and experiments show that our proposed scheme meets the requirements of dynamic, privacy, security and low computational cost.