Abstract
Exciting new capabilities of modern trusted hardware technologies allow for the execution of arbitrary code within environments completely isolated from the rest of the system and provide cryptographic mechanisms for securely reporting on these executions to remote parties. Rigorously proving security of protocols that rely on this type of hardware faces two obstacles. The first is to develop models appropriate for the induced trust assumptions (e.g., what is the correct notion of a party when the peer one wishes to communicate with is a specific instance of an an outsourced program). The second is to develop scalable analysis methods, as the inherent stateful nature of the platforms precludes the application of existing modular analysis techniques that require high degrees of independence between the components. We give the first steps in this direction by studying three cryptographic tools which have been commonly associated with this new generation of trusted hardware solutions. Specifically, we provide formal security definitions, generic constructions and security analysis for attested computation, key-exchange for attestation and secure outsourced computation. Our approach is incremental: each of the concepts relies on the previous ones according to an approach that is quasi-modular. For example we show how to build a secure outsourced computation scheme from an arbitrary attestation protocol combined together with a key-exchange and an encryption scheme.

Abstract
High failure and dropout rates are common in higher education institutions with introductory programming courses. Some researchers advocate that sometimes teachers don't use correct methods of assessment and that many students pass in programming without knowing how to program. In this paper authors describe the assessment methodology applied to a first year, first semester, Biomedical Engineering programming course (2015/2016). Students' programming skills were tested by playing a game in the first class, then they were assessed with three tests and a final exam, each with topics the authors considered fundamental for the students to master. A correlation analyses between the different types of tests and exam questions is done, to evaluate the most suitable, for assessing programming knowledge, showing that it is possible to use different question types as a pedagogical strategy, to assess student difficulty levels and programming skills, that help students acquire abstract, reasoning and algorithm thinking in an acceptable level. Also, it is shown that different forms of questions are equivalent to assess equal knowledge and that it is possible to predict the ability of a student to program at an early stage.

Abstract
We present a proposal for the local control of the nonlinearity in quasi-one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates induced by a local pinching of the transverse confining potential. We investigate the scattering of bright matter-wave solitons through a pinched potential using numerical simulations of the full three-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation and the corresponding effective one-dimensional model with spatially varying nonlinearity.

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Abstract
Catalytic computation, defined by Buhrman, Cleve, Koucký, Loff and Speelman (STOC 2014), is a space-bounded computation where in addition to our working memory we have an exponentially larger auxiliary memory which is full; the auxiliary memory may be used throughout the computation, but it must be restored to its initial content by the end of the computation. Motivated by the surprising power of this model, we set out to study the non-deterministic version of catalytic computation. We establish that non-deterministic catalytic log-space is contained in ZPP, which is the same bound known for its deterministic counterpart, and we prove that non-deterministic catalytic space is closed under complement (under a standard derandomization assumption). Furthermore, we establish hierarchy theorems for non-deterministic and deterministic catalytic computation. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media New York.