Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enhancing the security of the IoT LoraWAN architecture

The Internet of things (IoT) is invading our lives by connecting surrounding human things to the Internet. This allows a smarter and comfortable human living space. However, it exposes private and sensitive data as well as human appliances to attackers. Security solutions based on cryptography might solve these problems. However, these solutions need the use of encryption keys that must be managed securely and properly. We investigate, in this paper, existing key management protocols proposed for the Internet of things. Then, we propose a solution to enhance the security of the IoT loraWAN architecture. Our solution is inspired from an existing key management solution that uses proxy nodes to alleviate the computation in the constrained node side. We propose the use of a reputation system for proxy nodes selection which permits a reliable and attacks free security solution.
Receiving aphasia intervention in a virtual environment: the participants’ perspective

ABSTRACT Background: Digital technology is making an increasing contribution to aphasia therapy. However, applications of virtual reality are rare. EVA Park is a virtual island developed with and for people with aphasia. It is a multi-user environment, which enables people with aphasia to interact with support workers, therapists and each other. The first study to use EVA Park in aphasia rehabilitation demonstrated significant gains in functional communication. This article augments the findings of that study, by reporting results from qualitative interviews conducted with the 20 study participants. Aims: This study aimed to determine the views of participants about the intervention that they received in EVA Park, and the impacts of that intervention. Long-term retrospective views were also explored. Methods & Procedures: Participants took part in 1:1, semi-structured interviews two weeks before (entry) and two weeks after (exit) the intervention. Questions focussed on activities undertaken by participants, communication, changes since the stroke and uses of technology. Exit interviews additionally explored participants’ views and experiences of EVA Park and any perceived impacts of the intervention. A subset of five participants was interviewed at least one year later, to explore long-term recollections of the EVA Park intervention and any perceived long-term impacts. Interview data were transcribed and subject to framework analysis. Outcomes & Results: The thematic framework comprised 10 parent themes and 33 sub-themes. Following “affect”, the largest single theme related to EVA Park, with 636 coded references. Comments were overwhelmingly positive. EVA Park intervention was strongly associated with fun and enjoyment. Participants particularly valued their relationship with the support workers who delivered the intervention. The virtual locations and activities in EVA Park were also appreciated, together with the contact with other participants. Perceived impacts related to communication, activity, computer use and confidence. Most (4) participants in the long-term interviews described maintained impacts. Conclusions: These interview results indicate that the first intervention delivered in EVA Park was highly acceptable to participants and perceived as beneficial. They augment the findings of our experimental study and suggest that EVA Park could be a valuable addition to the resources available to practising clinicians.
MmmTurkey: A Crowdsourcing Framework for Deploying Tasks and Recording Worker Behavior on Amazon Mechanical Turk

Internal HITs on Mechanical Turk can be programmatically restrictive, and as a result, many requesters turn to using external HITs as a more flexible alternative. However, creating such HITs can be redundant and time-consuming. We present MmmTurkey, a framework that enables researchers to not only quickly create and manage external HITs, but more significantly also capture and record detailed worker behavioral data characterizing how each worker completes a given task.
Textual Entailment at EVALITA 2009

The rst shared task for recognising textual entailment for Italian was organised during the EVALITA 2009 campaign. The task def- inition followed that of its English counterpart, and consists of the task of when given a pair of texts, determining whether the rst entails the second. A corpus of 800 examples pairs (400 for development/training and 400 for testing) was constructed on the basis of Wikipedia revision histories. Two groups of researchers participated, submitting eight runs in total, with a variation in performance ranging from 0.50 (conform a baseline system that always predicts entailment) to 0.71 accuracy.
Survival of Vibrio parahaemolyticus at low temperatures under starvation conditions and subsequent resuscitation of viable, nonculturable cells

Morphological changes of Vibrio parahaemolyticus from rods to spheres took place after a culture was subjected to starvation at a wide range of temperatures. Scanning electron micrographs revealed that starved spherical cells gradually developed a rippled cell surface with blebs and an extracellular filamentous substance adhesive to the cell surface. Cells starved at a low temperature for certain intervals were counted by various bacterial enumeration methods, including plate count, direct viable count, and total cell count for both Kanagawa-positive and -negative strains. The results indicated that this species could reach the nonculturable stage in 50 to approximately 80 days during starvation at 3.5 degrees C. Kanagawa-negative strain 38C6 lost culturability more slowly than Kanagawa-positive strain 38C1 at low temperature. As detected by thiosulfate-citrate-bile salts-sucrose plate count, a high percentage of the surviving cells at 3.5 degrees C in starvation medium were possibly injured by the low temperature rather than by starvation. Both addition of nalidixic acid to the starved cultures and the most-probable-number method demonstrated that the cells recovered after a temperature upshift probably represented the regrowth of a few surviving cells. These surviving cells were capable of growth and multiplication with limited nutrients at an extraordinary rate when the temperature was upshifted.
Personal and situational influences on the functions of music listening

On the one hand, the majority of research on the functions of music listening focuses on individual differences; on the other hand, a growing amount of research investigates situational influences. However, the question of how much of our daily engagement with music is attributable to individual characteristics and how much it depends on the situation is still under-researched. To answer this question and to reveal the most important predictors of the two domains, participants (n = 587) of an online study reported on questions regarding the situation, the music, and the functions of music listening for three self-selected situations. Additionally, multiple person-related variables were measured. Results revealed that the influence of individual and situational variables on the functions of music listening varied across functions. The influence of situational variables on the functions of music listening outweighed the influence of individual characteristics. On the situational level, main activity while listening to music showed the greatest impact, while on the individual level, intensity of music preference was most influential. Our findings suggest that research on music in everyday life should incorporate both – individual and situational – variables determining the complex behavior of people interacting with music in a certain situation.
Spatial Stochastic Dynamics Enable Robust Cell Polarization

Although cell polarity is an essential feature of living cells, it is far from being well-understood. Using a combination of computational modeling and biological experiments we closely examine an important prototype of cell polarity: the pheromone-induced formation of the yeast polarisome. Focusing on the role of noise and spatial heterogeneity, we develop and investigate two mechanistic spatial models of polarisome formation, one deterministic and the other stochastic, and compare the contrasting predictions of these two models against experimental phenotypes of wild-type and mutant cells. We find that the stochastic model can more robustly reproduce two fundamental characteristics observed in wild-type cells: a highly polarized phenotype via a mechanism that we refer to as spatial stochastic amplification, and the ability of the polarisome to track a moving pheromone input. Moreover, we find that only the stochastic model can simultaneously reproduce these characteristics of the wild-type phenotype and the multi-polarisome phenotype of a deletion mutant of the scaffolding protein Spa2. Significantly, our analysis also demonstrates that higher levels of stochastic noise results in increased robustness of polarization to parameter variation. Furthermore, our work suggests a novel role for a polarisome protein in the stabilization of actin cables. These findings elucidate the intricate role of spatial stochastic effects in cell polarity, giving support to a cellular model where noise and spatial heterogeneity combine to achieve robust biological function.
Etiology and Outcomes of ARDS in a Rural-Urban Fringe Hospital of South India

Objectives. Etiology and outcomes of acute lung injury in tropical countries may be different from those of western nations. We describe the etiology and outcomes of illnesses causing acute lung injury in a rural populace. Study Design. A prospective observational study. Setting. Medical ICU of a teaching hospital in a rural-urban fringe location. Patients. Patients ≥13 years, admitted between December 2011 and May 2013, satisfying AECC criteria for ALI/ARDS. Results. Study had 61 patients; 46 had acute lung injury at admission. Scrub typhus was the commonest cause (7/61) and tropical infections contributed to 26% of total cases. Increasing ARDS severity was associated with older age, higher FiO2 and APACHE/SOFA scores, and longer duration of ventilation. Nonsurvivors were generally older, had shorter duration of illness, a nontropical infection, and higher total WBC counts, required longer duration of ventilation, and had other organ dysfunction and higher mean APACHE scores. The mortality rate of ARDS was 36.6% (22/61) in our study. Conclusion. Tropical infections form a major etiological component of acute lung injury in a developing country like India. Etiology and outcomes of ARDS may vary depending upon the geographic location and seasonal illnesses.
Relationship between Starting and Finishing Position in Formula One Car Races

This study examined the relationship between starting position and finishing position performed in 70 official Formula One Grand Prix car races over a four year period. Associations were analyzed for positions 1 to 8, resulting N=560 cases, for which the finishers score points towards the drivers’ world championships. Contingency coefficient revealed a significant correlation between starting and finishing position (C=0.63, p<0.001). Furthermore, the relative frequency to win a race was highest (59.9%) when starting from pole position, but progressively decreased up to 0% when starting from position seven or eight. Frequency of reasons why pole position drivers and those starting behind lost races were highest for races finished 2nd or less (n=396 cases) followed by technical problems (n=56) and accidents (n=35). The most frequently reason why drivers starting behind pole position won their races were a poor fueling strategy (n=11) made by the pole drivers or their teams. Results reflect that the outcome of Formula One car races is to some extent based on merit achieved during final and qualifying races.
Conjugation as public key agreement protocol in mobile cryptography

We analyze a key agreement algorithm realization, not using Diffie-Hellman approach, but using matrix powers and conjugation. Introduced in a theoretical frame by Sakalauskas et. al. in 2007, it is here implemented in J2ME on mobile devices (Nokia N70 equipped with Symbian S60 operating system). We study its appli-ability and performances and compare them with Elliptic Curve and standard Diffie-Hellman Bouncy Castle implementation, freely available on the web.
M31’s Heavy-Element Distribution and Outer Disk

Hubble Space Telescope imaging of 11 fields in M31 were reduced to color-magnitude diagrams. The fields were chosen to sample all galactocentric radii to 50 kpc (≈9 disk scale lengths, or >99.9% of the total light enclosed). The colors of the red giants at each pointing map to an abundance distribution with errors of order 0.1 dex in [M/H]. The abundance distributions are all about the same width but show a mild gradient that flattens outside ~20 kpc. These distributions were weighted and summed with the aid of a new surface brightness profile fit to obtain an abundance distribution representative of the entirety of M31. Since we expect M31 to have retained most of its congenital gas and subsequently accreted material, and since the present-day gas mass fraction is around 2%, it must be a system near chemical maturity. This "observed closed box" is found to suffer from a lack of metal-poor stars and metal-rich stars relative to the simplest closed-box model in the same way as the solar neighborhood. Models modified to include inhomogeneous chemical enrichment, variable yield, or infall all fit to within the uncertainties. As noted elsewhere, stars in the outer regions of M31 are a factor of 10 more metal-rich than the Milky Way halo, 10 times more metal-rich than the dwarf spheroidals cospatial with it, and more metal-rich than most of the globular clusters at the same galactocentric radius. Difficulties of interpretation are greatly eased if we posit that the M31 disk dominates over the halo at all radii out to 50 kpc. In fact, scaling from current density models of the Milky Way, one should not expect to see halo stars dominating over disk stars until beyond our 50 kpc limit. A corollary conclusion is that most published studies of the M31 "halo" are actually studies of its disk.
Computational delineation of the catalytic step of a high‐fidelity DNA polymerase

The Bacillus fragment, belonging to a class of high‐fidelity polymerases, demonstrates high processivity (adding ∼115 bases per DNA binding event) and exceptional accuracy (1 error in 106 nucleotide incorporations) during DNA replication. We present analysis of structural rearrangements and energetics just before and during the chemical step (phosphodiester bond formation) using a combination of classical molecular dynamics, mixed quantum mechanics molecular mechanics simulations, and free energy computations. We find that the reaction is associative, proceeding via the two‐metal‐ion mechanism, and requiring the proton on the terminal primer O3′ to transfer to the pyrophosphate tail of the incoming nucleotide before the formation of the pentacovalent transition state. Different protonation states for key active site residues direct the system to alternative pathways of catalysis and we estimate a free energy barrier of ∼12 kcal/mol for the chemical step. We propose that the protonation of a highly conserved catalytic aspartic acid residue is essential for the high processivity demonstrated by the enzyme and suggest that global motions could be part of the reaction free energy landscape.
UCL Depthmap 7 : From Isovist Analysis to Generic Spatial Network Analysis

This short paper discusses some of the new functions available in UCL Depthmap 7. UCL Depthmap’s original purpose was to perform integration analysis of isovists just as the integration of axial lines could be calculated. It has now developed in a number of different directions, so it has become closer to a traditional GIS system with analysis functions for graphs built in. In doing so, it has acquired features available in other space syntax software, including data layers for gate counts and building information, scattergrams and derived columns, as well as new measures and analysis of space, including agent-based tools, axial map generation and angular segment analysis.
From subjects to objects: Knowledge in International Relations theory

There has been a resurgence of interest in the role of scientific knowledge and expertise in International Relations, but it is not clear what the theoretical value-added of this work is. This article places recent work on scientific knowledge and expertise in a longer-term perspective. The history shows that knowledge has played an important role in International Relations theory since Carr and Morgenthau, but that thinking has been trapped within a simple conceptual framework centered on tracing how knowledge shapes the beliefs and interests of international subjects. This mode of theorizing first entered International Relations via Mannheim and has been further developed by Foucauldian and practice-based approaches since the 1990s. Outlining the history of knowledge from Carr through Haas to the present makes it possible to identify the distinctive contribution of recent work: whereas International Relations has focused on how knowledge shapes subjects such as states and international organizations, recent work by Corry, Sending, and others reorients International Relations to the constitution of governance objects. On the object-centered view, knowledge plays a key role in the construction of the hybrid entities like the economy and the climate that structure the landscape of international politics.
Co-expression of wild-type FLT3 attenuates the inhibitory effect of FLT3 inhibitor on FLT3 mutated leukemia cells

FLT3 mutation is found in about 30% of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients and is associated with a poor prognosis. Several FLT3 inhibitors are undergoing investigation, while their clinical efficacies were lower than expected and several resistant mechanisms to FLT3 inhibitors have been demonstrated. Although most AML cells harboring FLT3 mutation co-express wild-type (Wt)-FLT3, it is not fully understood how Wt-FLT3 expression is associated with the resistance to FLT3 inhibitors. In this study, we elucidated a resistant mechanism by which FL-dependent Wt-FLT3 activation reduced inhibitory effects of FLT3 inhibitors. We demonstrated that FL-stimulation much more strongly reduced growth inhibitory effects of FLT3 inhibitors on Wt- and mutant-FLT3 co-expressing cells than sole mutant-FLT3 expressing cells both in vitro and in vivo. It was also confirmed that FL impaired the anti-leukemia effects of FLT3 inhibitors on primary AML cells. We elucidated that FL impeded the inhibitory effects of FLT3 inhibitors mainly through the activation of Wt-FLT3, but not mutated FLT3, in the Wt- and ITD-FLT3 co-expressing cells. Furthermore, FL-induced activation of Wt-FLT3-MAPK axis was the dominant pathway for the resistance, and the glycosylation of Wt-FLT3 was also vital for FL-dependent kinase activation and following resistance to FLT3 inhibitors. Thus, we clarified the importance of co-expressing Wt-FLT3 in resistance to FLT3 inhibitors. These findings provide us with important implications for clinical application and new strategies to improve clinical outcomes of FLT3 inhibitors.
Predicting Coding Effort in Projects Containing XML Code

This paper studies the problem of predicting the coding effort for a subsequent year of development by analysing metrics extracted from project repositories, with an emphasis on projects containing XML code. The study considers thirteen open source projects and applies machine learning algorithms to generate models to predict one-year coding effort, measured in terms of lines of code added, modified and deleted. Both organisational and code metrics associated to revisions are taken into account. The results show that coding effort is highly determined by the expertise of developers while source code metrics have little effect on improving the accuracy of estimations of coding effort. The study also shows that models trained on one project are unreliable at estimating effort in other projects.
A Conceptual Model of Social Entrepreneurial Intention Based on the Social Cognitive Career Theory

Entrepreneurial intention plays a major role in entrepreneurship academia and practice. However, little is known about the intentions of entrepreneurs in the social area of venture creation. This paper aims to formulate a well-organized model of social entrepreneurial intention. ,The paper draws on intention models in entrepreneurship literature in general and social entrepreneurship in particular to identify gaps. Based on these findings, a new conceptual model is formulated. ,There is no research to be found which uses the social cognitive career theory (SCCT) to explain about an individual’s intention to become a social entrepreneur, although this theory is recently suggested as an inclusive framework for entrepreneurial intention (Doan Winkel et al., 2011). It is also supportive by the empirical research of Segal et al. (2002). Therefore, a conceptual model of entrepreneurial intention in the field of social entrepreneurship is formulated based on adapting and extending the SCCT. ,The paper contributes to the social entrepreneurship literature by providing new insights about social entrepreneurial intention. The result has important implications for theory and practice. In theory, it is the first model offering the SCCT as the background of formation for social entrepreneurial intention, with a distinct perspective of social entrepreneurship as a career. It raises a future direction for researchers to test this model. In practice, this framework provides a broad view of factors that could contribute to the success of the would-be a social entrepreneur.
Leader strain and follower burnout: Exploring the role of transformational leadership behaviour

This study contributes to leadership literature by linking leader strain with followers’ level of burnout while considering leaders’ transformational leadership behaviour. The study provides promising insights into the field of leadership theory by shedding light on the nature of leadership under stress. The sample consisted of 294 dyads of leaders and their followers, who provided information on transformational leadership style, levels of perceived strain, and burnout via an online survey. Results show that (1) strained leaders display less transformational leader behaviours, (2) leaders’ transformational behaviours reduce follower burnout, and (3) the relationship between leader strain and follower burnout is mediated by transformational leadership behaviours. This study contributes to the existing literature by exploring the link between leaders’ strain and followers’ burnout within a health-oriented leadership framework, and uncovers direct and indirect effects seen as a result of transformational leadership.