Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Testing noninterference, quickly

Information-flow control mechanisms are difficult to design and labor intensive to prove correct. To reduce the time wasted on proof attempts doomed to fail due to broken definitions, we advocate modern random testing techniques for finding counterexamples during the design process. We show how to use QuickCheck, a property-based random-testing tool, to guide the design of a simple information-flow abstract machine. We find that both sophisticated strategies for generating well-distributed random programs and readily falsifiable formulations of noninterference properties are critically important. We propose several approaches and evaluate their effectiveness on a collection of injected bugs of varying subtlety. We also present an effective technique for shrinking large counterexamples to minimal, easily comprehensible ones. Taken together, our best methods enable us to quickly and automatically generate simple counterexamples for all these bugs.
An overview on the Gaussian Fields and Harmonic Functions method for semi-supervised learning

Graph-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms have gained increased attention in the last few years due to their high classification performance on many application domains. One of the widely used methods for graph-based SSL is the Gaussian Fields and Harmonic Functions (GFHF), which is formulated as an optimization problem using a Laplacian regularizer term with a fitting constraint on labeled examples. Such a method and its variations were effectively applied on many fields of machine learning, such as active learning and dimensionality reduction. In this paper, we provide an overview on the GFHF algorithm, focusing on its regularization framework, convergence analysis, out-of-sample extension, scalability, and active learning. We also provide an experimental analysis on inductive SSL in order to show that we can effectively classify out-of-sample examples using the GFHF algorithm without the necessity of using kernel expansions.
An Efficient Level Set Method for Constructing Wavefronts in Three Space Dimensions

Wavefront construction in geometrical optics has long faced the twin difficulties of dealing with multivalued forms and resolution of wavefront surfaces. A recent change in viewpoint, however, has demonstrated that working in phase space on bicharacteristic strips using eulerian methods can bypass both difficulties. The success of the level set method in science and engineering makes it a suitable choice for such an eulerian method. Unfortunately, in three-dimensional space, the setting of interest for most practical applications, the advantages of this method are largely offset by a new problem: the high dimension of phase space. In this work, we present new types of level set algorithms that remove this obstacle and demonstrate their abilities to accurately construct wavefronts under high resolution. These results propel the level set method forward significantly as a competitive approach in geometrical optics under realistic
The Predictive Value of Eosinophil Cationic Protein and Lactate Dehydrogenase in Asthma: A Comparative Study of Serum Versus Sputum

BackgroundSerum and sputum eosinophil cationic protein (ECP) levels are correlated with asthma disease severity.ObjectiveTo establish a diagnostic accuracy of ECP and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) in serum (indirectly) and sputum (directly) as inflammatory markers in asthma.Patients and MethodsIn a cross sectional study, 76 asthmatic patients with exacerbation were enrolled in the study. ECP was determined using enzyme linked immuno-assay.ResultsAsthmatic patients compared with control subjects, had a significant higher levels of ECP and LDH in sputum. Both sputum and serum ECP and LDH were reduced significantly with prednisolone treatment. FEV1 was inversely correlated with sputum ECP, serum ECP, and sputum LDH. A significant positive correlation was noted between sputum ECP and sputum LDH. Serum LDH does not demonstrate any significant correlations with other variables. The area under receiver operating characteristic curve showed that sputum ECP (0.92) was a significantly an accurate marker more than serum ECP (0.81), sputum (0.80) LDH, and serum (0.65) LDH. Furthermore, the area under curve was lower for serum ECP (0.81) than that for sputum ECP (0.92). However, serum ECP (0.81) was more accurate marker than serum LDH (0.65). ConclusionSerum and sputum ECP as eosinophilic inflammatory markers are associated with poor asthma control. Sputum ECP and LDH were significantly an accurate markers more than serum ECP and LDH.
Zygosity Diagnosis in the Absence of Genotypic Data: An Approach Using Latent Class Analysis

Abstract For zygosity diagnosis in the absence of genotypic data, or in the recruitment phase of a twin study where only single twins from same-sex pairs are being screened, or to provide a test for sample duplication leading to the false identification of a dizygotic pair as monozygotic, the appropriate analysis of respondents' answers to questions about zygosity is critical. Using data from a young adult Australian twin cohort (N = 2094 complete pairs and 519 singleton twins from same-sex pairs with complete responses to all zygosity items), we show that application of latent class analysis (LCA), fitting a 2-class model, yields results that show good concordance with traditional methods of zygosity diagnosis, but with certain important advantages. These include the ability, in many cases, to assign zygosity with specified probability on the basis of responses of a single informant (advantageous when one zygosity type is being oversampled); and the ability to quantify the probability of misassignment of zygosity, allowing prioritization of cases for genotyping as well as identification of cases of probable laboratory error. Out of 242 twins (from 121 like-sex pairs) where genotypic data were available for zygosity confirmation, only a single case was identified of incorrect zygosity assignment by the latent class algorithm. Zygosity assignment for that single case was identified by the LCA as uncertain (probability of being a monozygotic twin only 76%), and the co-twin's responses clearly identified the pair as dizygotic (probability of being dizygotic 100%). In the absence of genotypic data, or as a safeguard against sample duplication, application of LCA for zygosity assignment or confirmation is strongly recommended.
Genetic Suppression of Transgenic APP Rescues Hypersynchronous Network Activity in a Mouse Model of Alzeimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is associated with an elevated risk for seizures that may be fundamentally connected to cognitive dysfunction. Supporting this link, many mouse models for AD exhibit abnormal electroencephalogram (EEG) activity in addition to the expected neuropathology and cognitive deficits. Here, we used a controllable transgenic system to investigate how network changes develop and are maintained in a model characterized by amyloid β (Aβ) overproduction and progressive amyloid pathology. EEG recordings in tet-off mice overexpressing amyloid precursor protein (APP) from birth display frequent sharp wave discharges (SWDs). Unexpectedly, we found that withholding APP overexpression until adulthood substantially delayed the appearance of epileptiform activity. Together, these findings suggest that juvenile APP overexpression altered cortical development to favor synchronized firing. Regardless of the age at which EEG abnormalities appeared, the phenotype was dependent on continued APP overexpression and abated over several weeks once transgene expression was suppressed. Abnormal EEG discharges were independent of plaque load and could be extinguished without altering deposited amyloid. Selective reduction of Aβ with a γ-secretase inhibitor has no effect on the frequency of SWDs, indicating that another APP fragment or the full-length protein was likely responsible for maintaining EEG abnormalities. Moreover, transgene suppression normalized the ratio of excitatory to inhibitory innervation in the cortex, whereas secretase inhibition did not. Our results suggest that APP overexpression, and not Aβ overproduction, is responsible for EEG abnormalities in our transgenic mice and can be rescued independently of pathology.
A Graph-Based Ant Colony Optimization Approach for Process Planning

The complex process planning problem is modeled as a combinatorial optimization problem with constraints in this paper. An ant colony optimization (ACO) approach has been developed to deal with process planning problem by simultaneously considering activities such as sequencing operations, selecting manufacturing resources, and determining setup plans to achieve the optimal process plan. A weighted directed graph is conducted to describe the operations, precedence constraints between operations, and the possible visited path between operation nodes. A representation of process plan is described based on the weighted directed graph. Ant colony goes through the necessary nodes on the graph to achieve the optimal solution with the objective of minimizing total production costs (TPC). Two cases have been carried out to study the influence of various parameters of ACO on the system performance. Extensive comparative experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed approach.
Passivation of Boron-Doped Industrial Silicon Emitters by Thermal Atomic Layer Deposited Titanium Oxide

Passivation of p<sup>+</sup> -doped silicon is demonstrated by using water (H<sub>2</sub>O)-based thermal atomic layer-deposited titanium oxide (TiO<sub>x</sub>) films. Emitter saturation current density (J<sub>0 e</sub>) values below 30 fA/cm<sup>2</sup> are obtained on textured p<sup>+</sup> -doped samples with a sheet resistance in the 80-120 Ω/sq range. This low emitter saturation current density would allow open-circuit voltages up to 720 mV when this TiO<sub>x</sub> film is used in n-type silicon wafer solar cells with a front boron emitter. In addition, the optical properties of TiO<sub>x</sub> make it an excellent option for use as antireflection coating on the silicon wafer solar cell after encapsulation. Thus, the results demonstrated in this paper could enable interesting new routes for future high-efficiency n-type silicon wafer solar cells.
Changing spatial epidemiology of pertussis in continental USA

Prediction and control of the geographical spread of emerging pathogens has become a central public health issue. Because these infectious diseases are by definition novel, there are few data to characterize their dynamics. One possible solution to this problem is to apply lessons learnt from analyses of historical data on familiar and epidemiologically similar pathogens. However, the portability of the spatial ecology of an infectious disease in a different epoch to other infections remains unexamined. Here, we study this issue by taking advantage of the recent re-emergence of pertussis in the United States to compare its spatial transmission dynamics throughout the 1950s with the past decade. We report 4-year waves, sweeping across the continent in the 1950s. These waves are shown to emanate from highly synchronous foci in the northwest and northeast coasts. In contrast, the recent resurgence of the disease is characterized by 5.5-year epidemics with no particular spatial structure. We interpret this to be the result of dramatic changes in patterns of human movement over the second half of the last century, together with changing age distribution of pertussis. We conclude that extrapolation regarding the spatial spread of contemporaneous pathogens based on analyses of historical incidence may be potentially very misleading.
The impact of untreated coronary dissections on acute and long-term outcome after intravascular ultrasound guided PTCA.

AIM Vessel size adapted PTCA results in the use of larger balloons with an increased incidence of severe vascular dissections. The aim of our trial was (a) to evaluate the effect of severe dissections on the acute outcome and (b) to study the natural history of dissections after 1 year. METHODS AND RESULTS One hundred and seventy-eight patients with 195 lesions underwent vessel size adapted PTCA using intravascular ultrasound. Clinical and angiographic 1 year follow-up was obtained for all patients. Intravascular ultrasound was performed before PTCA to measure the external elastic membrane diameter at the lesion site so that the balloon size could be adopted (external elastic membrane-10%) and post-interventionally to determine the procedural success and the incidence of intracoronary dissections. Stent implantation was reduced to persistently flow limiting dissections (TIMI I, II). Dissections were detected by intravascular ultrasound in 128/195 (66%) lesions (by angiography in 111/195 [58%] lesions) and classified by intravascular ultrasound criteria into four groups: group I: no dissection (67 lesions [34%]), group II: mild dissections (21 lesions [11%]), group III: medium dissections (19 lesions [10%]) and group IV: severe dissections (88 lesions [45%]). Because of threatened vessel closure, GPIIb/IIIa antagonists were used in eight (4.5%) patients and a stent was implanted in two (1. 1%) patients. The cumulative event rate after 1 year was 12% and the global angiographic restenosis rate was 19%. The post-interventional evidence of severe dissections was associated with a decrease in clinical events during long-term follow up (group I: 13 events [19%] vs group IV: seven events [7%];P=0.03). This was also true for the occurrence of restenosis which was significantly lower in patients with severe dissections (group I: 19 [28%] lesions vs group IV:10 [11%] lesions;P=0.01). CONCLUSIONS According to the theory of 'therapeutic dissections', our data suggest that substantial dissections following PTCA, which do not diminish antegrade blood flow, do not lead to an increase in acute or long-term events. The natural history of vessel injury seems to provide favourable wound healing without increase of restenosis. Thus, stenting for treatment of large dissections without flow limitation does not seem to be mandatory.
Finding Local Anomalies in Very High Dimensional Space

Time, cost and energy efficiency are critical factors for many data analysis techniques when the size and dimensionality of data is very large. We investigate the use of Local Outlier Factor (LOF) for data of this type, providing a motivating example from real world data. We propose Projection-Indexed Nearest-Neighbours (PINN), a novel technique that exploits extended nearest neighbour sets in the a reduced dimensional space to create an accurate approximation for k-nearest-neighbour distances, which is used as the core density measurement within LOF. The reduced dimensionality allows for efficient sub-quadratic indexing in the number of items in the data set, where previously only quadratic performance was possible. A detailed theoretical analysis of Random Projection(RP) and PINN shows that we are able to preserve the density of the intrinsic manifold of the data set after projection. Experimental results show that PINN outperforms the standard projection methods RP and PCA when measuring LOF for many high-dimensional real-world data sets of up to 300000 elements and 102600 dimensions.
Edinburgh Research Explorer Four-Round Concurrent Non-Malleable Commitments from One-Way Functions

How many rounds and which computational assumptions are needed for concurrent non-malleable commitments? The above question has puzzled researchers for several years. Recently, Pass in [TCC 2013] proved a lower bound of 3 rounds when security is proven through black-box reductions to falsiﬁable assumptions. On the other side, positive results of Goyal [STOC 2011], Lin and Pass [STOC 2011] and Goyal et al. [FOCS 2012] showed that one-way functions are suﬃcient with a constant (at least 6) number of rounds. More recently Ciampi et al. [CRYPTO 2016] showed that subexponentially strong one-way permutations are suﬃcient with just 3 rounds. In this work we almost close the above open question by showing a 4-round concurrent non-malleable commitment scheme that only needs one-way functions. Our main technique consists in showing how to upgrade basic forms of non-malleability (i.e., non-malleability w.r.t. non-aborting adversaries) to full-ﬂedged non-malleability without penalizing the round complexity.
Neural Network Analysis of Chloride Diffusion in Concrete

Chloride diffusion is one of the major causes of deterioration of concrete structures. A large amount of research has been conducted to study the chloride diffusion of concrete, both theoretically and experimentally. Because chloride diffusion experiments are time consuming, it is desired to develop a model to predict the chloride profiles in both steady and unsteady states. This paper studies the feasibility of using a neural network as an adaptive synthesizer as well as a predictor to meet such a requirement. The cascade-correlation algorithm is adopted in the present investigation to predict the chloride profiles diffused through concrete specimens. It is found that the predictions given by the cascade-correlation algorithm are in good agreement with the test results in both steady and unsteady states. The cascade-correlation algorithm can also synthesize an appropriate architecture and train the network simultaneously. It has the potential of becoming an effective tool in the prediction of durability problems. The investigation results demonstrate that the addition of fly ash and microsilica improves the resistance of mixtures to chloride diffusion. However, the addition of calcium nitrite solution degrades the improvement caused by the incorporation of these mineral admixtures, so calcium nitrite should be used in practical engineering with caution.
Investigating the stress relaxation of photopolymer O-ring seal models

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the suitability of additive manufacturing to produce O-ring seals. Design/methodology/approach – The O-rings were made by the PolyJet-Matrix technology using four different digital materials and then tested for relaxation properties under static and dynamic (sliding) conditions. The approximation of the relaxation curves involved modelling with a Prony series. Findings – The PolyJet-Matrix technology offers new opportunities to model elastomeric elements, with examples being the O-rings produced and tested for their relaxation properties. Describing the behaviour of the particular materials fabricated with this technology by using relaxation functions will extend the knowledge base on digital materials. Research limitations/implications – The four types of photopolymers used in the experiment differed in viscoelastic properties. The analysis of the stress relaxation of the O-ring models was performed at four different step displacements of the loading element. Prac.
Size-dependent physiological responses of the branching coral Pocillopora verrucosa to elevated temperature and PCO2

ABSTRACT Body size has large effects on organism physiology, but these effects remain poorly understood in modular animals with complex morphologies. Using two trials of a ∼24 day experiment conducted in 2014 and 2015, we tested the hypothesis that colony size of the coral Pocillopora verrucosa affects the response of calcification, aerobic respiration and gross photosynthesis to temperature (∼26.5 and ∼29.7°C) and PCO2 (∼40 and ∼1000 µatm). Large corals calcified more than small corals, but at a slower size-specific rate; area-normalized calcification declined with size. Whole-colony and area-normalized calcification were unaffected by temperature, PCO2, or the interaction between the two. Whole-colony respiration increased with colony size, but the slopes of these relationships differed between treatments. Area-normalized gross photosynthesis declined with colony size, but whole-colony photosynthesis was unaffected by PCO2, and showed a weak response to temperature. When scaled up to predict the response of large corals, area-normalized metrics of physiological performance measured using small corals provide inaccurate estimates of the physiological performance of large colonies. Together, these results demonstrate the importance of colony size in modulating the response of branching corals to elevated temperature and high PCO2. Summary: Physiological performance of large corals is not accurately estimated by scaling values from small corals, indicating the importance of colony size in the response of branching corals to elevated temperature and PCO2.
Quantifying temporal bone morphology of great apes and humans: an approach using geometric morphometrics

The hominid temporal bone offers a complex array of morphology that is linked to several different functional systems. Its frequent preservation in the fossil record gives the temporal bone added significance in the study of human evolution, but its morphology has proven difficult to quantify. In this study we use techniques of 3D geometric morphometrics to quantify differences among humans and great apes and discuss the results in a phylogenetic context. Twenty‐three landmarks on the ectocranial surface of the temporal bone provide a high level of anatomical detail. Generalized Procrustes analysis (GPA) is used to register (adjust for position, orientation and scale) landmark data from 405 adults representing Homo, Pan, Gorilla and Pongo. Principal components analysis of residuals from the GPA shows that the major source of variation is between humans and apes. Human characteristics such as a coronally orientated petrous axis, a deep mandibular fossa, a projecting mastoid process, and reduced lateral extension of the tympanic element strongly impact the analysis. In phenetic cluster analyses, gorillas and orangutans group together with respect to chimpanzees, and all apes group together with respect to humans. Thus, the analysis contradicts depictions of African apes as a single morphotype. Gorillas and orangutans lack the extensive preglenoid surface of chimpanzees, and their mastoid processes are less medially inflected. These and other characters shared by gorillas and orangutans are probably primitive for the African hominid clade.
Speech recognition with BAHA simulator in subjects with acquired unilateral sensorineural hearing loss

Abstract Conclusion: We question the justification for the cost of a surgically implanted device for the restoration of limited circumstances of audible communication, although we understand that the decision is taken depending on the social relevance of communication or personal criteria. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of the BAHA simulator (BAHAS) system in subjects with acquired unilateral sensorineural hearing loss. In particular we tested the changes of speech reception threshold (SRT) in relation to different speech source positions, with a background of diffuse noise. Methods: The primary message consisting of lists of Italian sentences was delivered from a loudspeaker placed at horizontal azimuths of 0°, 90°, 180° and 270°; the interference consisted of uncorrelated speech-shaped noise simultaneously delivered by four loudspeakers at a fixed intensity. The speech recognition tests were administered to 11 patients with BAHAS either on or off; hence each patient underwent 8 acoustic conditions (4 primary message directions × 2 BAHAS conditions). The SRT (50% correct responses) was measured by a simple 2 dB step adaptive procedure. Ten normal-hearing subjects served as the control group. Results: Our data demonstrated that even for the acoustic condition where BAHAS should be more useful (i.e. lateral speech toward the impaired side), it was definitely ineffective in the study conditions.