Of married people

Don't you just hate it when married people act as if it's a sin to have fun in the absence of their better halves? I had a friend in Hamburg whose wife couldn't join him for one year due to visa issues. Everytime there was talk of going somewhere for sight seeing or trying a new restaurant or going to the movies, his typical response used to be: "I don't have such interests but I will go when my wife gets here." He spent his days in a constant wait state. Holding off any fun activities until 'she' got there.

Then there is the case of a friend whose facebook statuses reflect a level of despair in direct correlation to the distance between the two of them. Something like 'Life is good' means she is in town; 'Ain't no sunshine when she is gone' means she just left town; 'Not having the best of days' means the wifey won't be back for a while and the local maxima '...is highly demotivated these days', I'm scared to even speculate where it goes next. Although his is a special case of MoIP (Married over IP) and warrants a separate blog post (coming soon) and even though he participates in online activities and tries to sneak back into the cool singles club, the distinction is almost always apparent.

A similar case is of Humpty Dumpty who works with me. Even a hint of 'extra curricular' activities elicits the annoyingly regular response of 'gar nicht' (no way). I mean, come on dude. You can't even go out for a little ice cream with the rest of the gang? Are you afraid it won't taste good enough if you go out with the rest of us mere mortals.

And don't even get me started on the girls. Don't. I might get into trouble for that :P



I respect the connection married people share with their spouses. It's a wonderful thing. They should consider themselves lucky. But remember that before you got hitched, you used to be individuals. Not part of some two headed entity that cannot function if separated. Being such needy saps accomplishes nothing expect rubbing it in the face of us singles that you got there first. So stop crying already and come to the party.

For those reading between the lines, you got it right. I am single (and available :P) and enjoying life in the ever decreasing ranks of the singles club.

Privacy in the Smart Grid and Multi Party Computations

The Smart Grid will enable users to monitor their energy consumption at a much lower level of granularity than the legacy grid. Such detailed information along with time-of-day billing can on the one hand allow consumers to control their energy consumption in order to minimize expenditure but on the other hand, if it falls into the wrong hands, can reveal insights into the daily activities of the user e.g., which appliance is used at what times, how many people use the facility and if/when they are away from home. An ideal resolution to this problem would protect the privacy of the users by ensuring that the profiles are revealed to no one other than the consumer but at the same time be used to calculate the billed amount at the end of the billing period by the supplier.

The role of Multi Party Computations in modern privacy protection schemes has been well established. Privacy is preserved by using algorithms that allow operation on sensitive data without it ever being revealed to any of the participating entities. Such a mechanism which operates without the need for a trusted third party shows promise when considered in the context of the consumer - distributor - supplier chain of communication where detailed energy consumption information is available only to the relevant party (consumer) yet at the same time allowing the distributor and supplier to carry out their billing activities.

The real challenge here is to come up with just such a mechanism and be able to perform the operations using the limited resources of a smart meter. That's what I am working on these days. Wish me luck :)