Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fourℚ on ASIC: Breaking Speed Records for Elliptic Curve Scalar Multiplication

An ASIC cryptoprocessor for scalar multiplication (SM) on Fourℚ is proposed. By exploiting Karatsuba multiplication and lazy reduction techniques, the arithmetic units of the proposed processor are tailored for operations over quadratic extension field $\left( {{\mathbb{F}_{{p^2}}}} \right)$. We also propose an automated instruction scheduling methodology based on a combinatorial optimization solver to fully exploit the available instruction-level parallelism. With the proposed processor fabricated by using a 65 nm silicon-on-thin-box (SOTB) CMOS process, we demonstrate that an SM can be computed in 10.1 μs when a typical operating voltage of 1.20 V is applied, which corresponds to 3.66× acceleration compared to the conventional P-256 curve SM accelerator implemented on an ASIC platform and is the fastest ever reported. We also demonstrate that by lowering the supply voltage down to 0.32 V, the lowest ever reported energy consumption of 0.327 μJ/SM is achieved.
Improved Modeling of Bulk Charge Effect for BSIM-BULK Model

In this brief, we present an improved model of bulk charge effect for both drain current (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${I}_{\text {DS}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) and capacitances and its implementation in the industry standard Berkeley short-channel IGFET model (BSIM)-BULK model. The proposed model captures all the well-known and important bulk charge effects, as the Abulk term does for BSIM3/BSIM4. The model is validated with the experimental and technology computer-aided design (TCAD) data. The proposed model enhances the fitting accuracy for <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${I}_{\text {DS}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, and more importantly its derivatives and capacitances too.
Accident Detection and Health-Monitoring UWB Sensor in Toilet

Japan is experiencing a super-aging society and the number of domestic accidents caused by elderly is increasing. Especially in toilet, many accidents such as fall-down and stroke have been reported every year. In this paper, a toilet accident detection and health-monitoring system using ultra-wideband radio sensor system is suggested in order to prevent various accident. Measurement are conducted to investigate the usefulness. As a result, the detection rate has been found to be more than 95%. It is also found that the vital sign of respiration while toilet seating can be estimated.
Resistive Switching Model of OxRAM Devices Based on Intrinsic Electrical Parameters

In this work, a model for the resistive switching of ReRAM devices that considers the electrical signal of the measurement element is developed. This model works for bipolar devices that have filamentary-type conduction and it is based on the circuit representation of the conductive filament (CF). The stochastic nature of the switching process, observed in experimental data, has been included by using a switching probability to control CF changes, and therefore, the ReRAM's state. For calibration, the analysis of current-voltage curves of devices of six different areas (nm2range) has been done. Good agreement between the experimental results and the model simulation were found.
Enhancing Channel Reciprocity of Secret Key Generation Scheme by Using Modified Polynomial Regression Method

Channel reciprocity is a very crucial component in establishing a secret key generation scheme. Non-simultaneous measurement conditions and noise cause low channel reciprocity, which is indicated by measurements of channel parameters that are not perfectly identical in both users. The stages of the secret key generation scheme that directly quantifies the channel parameters will have an impact on the high difference in the bits produced. In this paper, we propose the use of Modified Polynomial Regression methods to enhance channel reciprocity that would lower the rate of key disagreement between two users. We also propose a combination of the Modified Polynomial Regression method with multilevel quantization to overcome the trade-off between performance parameters, i.e. the key disagreement rate and key generation rate. The test results conducted in an indoor wireless environment show that our proposed scheme has better performance compared to the existing scheme in terms of increasing reciprocity, key generation rate and decreasing key disagreement rate. The resulting secret key has also fulfilled the randomness requirements set by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology statistical suite.
Antidepressants for major depressive disorder and dysthymic disorder in patients with comorbid alcohol use disorders: a meta-analysis of placebo-controlled randomized trials.

OBJECTIVE Mood and alcohol use disorders are often co-occurring, each condition complicating the course and outcome of the other. The aim of this study was to examine the efficacy of antidepressants in patients with unipolar major depressive disorder (MDD) and/or dysthymic disorder with comorbid alcohol use disorders and to compare antidepressant and placebo response rates between depressed patients with or without comorbid alcohol use disorders. DATA SOURCES MEDLINE/PubMed publication databases were searched for randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials of antidepressants used as monotherapy for the acute-phase treatment of MDD and/or dysthymic disorder in patients with or without alcohol use disorders. The search term placebo was cross-referenced with each of the antidepressants approved by the US, Canadian, or European Union drug regulatory agencies for the treatment of MDD and/or dysthymic disorder. STUDY SELECTION 195 articles were found eligible for inclusion in our analysis, 11 of which focused on the treatment of MDD/dysthymic disorder in patients with comorbid alcohol use disorders. The search was limited to articles published between January 1, 1980, and March 15, 2009 (inclusive). RESULTS We found that antidepressant therapy was more effective than placebo in patients with comorbid alcohol use disorders (risk ratio of response = 1.336; P = .021). However, this was not the case when selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants were examined alone (P > .05). There was no significant difference in the relative efficacy of antidepressants (versus placebo) when comparing studies in MDD/dysthymic disorder patients with or without alcohol use disorders (P = .973). Meta-regression analyses yielded no significant differences in the risk ratio of responding to antidepressants versus placebo in trials with comorbid alcohol use disorders, whether antidepressants were used alone or adjunctively to psychotherapy, whether they were used in patients actively drinking or recently sober, or whether they were used in pure MDD or in combined MDD and dysthymic disorder populations. CONCLUSIONS These results support the utility of certain antidepressants (tricyclics, nefazodone) in treating depression in patients with comorbid alcohol use disorders. More data on the use of newer antidepressants, including the SSRIs, for this select patient population are needed.
Diagnosis and surgical treatment of retroperitoneal paraganglioma: A single-institution experience of 34 cases

The present study aimed at identifying the clinical, radiological and pathological characteristics of retroperitoneal paragangliomas, and determining the association between the tumor features and the prognosis of patients following surgery. A total of 34 patients with retroperitoneal paragangliomas, who underwent resection between November 1999 and December 2015, were included in the present retrospective study. The patients' demographics, clinical symptoms and signs, tumor functional status, surgical procedure, intraoperative results, tumor pathology, radiological results, and postoperative survival time were recorded and analyzed. Of the 34 patients, the most common type of presenting symptom was abdominal mass (46%), followed by hypertension (39%) and abdominal pain (32%). Functional tumors occurred in 20 patients (59%). Computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging revealed soft-tissue masses, with marked enhancement in the arterial phase, indicative of retroperitoneal paragangliomas. The preoperative CT diagnostic accuracy rate between 2010 and 2015 was markedly improved, compared with that between 1999 and 2009. The tumors were primarily located close to the renal arteries and veins surrounding the abdominal aorta and inferior vena cava. With the exception of one malignant paraganglioma, the majority of paragangliomas were positive for chromogranin A, S-100 protein, vimentin and heat-shock protein 90, and exhibited decreased expression of Ki-67 antigen and insulin-like growth factor 2. All tumors were completely removed by surgery. Distant metastasis, but not tumor size, functional status and local invasion, was markedly associated with survival. The preoperative diagnostic accuracy rate of retroperitoneal paragangliomas may be improved by focusing on the predilection sites and CT characteristics. In addition, immunohistochemical markers were useful to determine tumor malignancy. Complete surgical resection was appropriate for all patients and postoperative survival time was identified to be associated with tumor metastasis.
[Effects of iron-deficiency anemia on placenta and birth weight].

OBJECTIVE To determine placenta alterations in iron deficiency anemia cases and the effect of this condition on birthweight. PATIENTS, MATERIAL AND METHODS One hundred and fifty three women with term-pregnancy and their newborns were included. Patients with iron deficiency anemia were those with an hemoglobin of less than 11.0 g/dL and serum ferritin below 12 micrograms/L. Outcome variables were: placenta weight, placenta weight/newborn weight ratio, macroscopic and microscopic alterations on placenta, weight and height of the newborn. RESULTS The frequency of iron deficiency anemia was determined in 26 patients, 17%. The placenta weight in the group of women with a diagnosis of iron deficiency anemia was 558 +/- 105 g and in the group of women without this diagnosis 527 +/- 107 g (p = 0.18). Placenta weight/newborn weight ratio was higher in the anemia group patients (p = 0.04). The most frequent microscopic lesions observed were intervillous thrombosis, infarcts and fibrosis. The birthweight and length of newborn was similar in both groups. CONCLUSION A trend towards an increase in placenta weight and in the placenta weight/newborn weight ratio in patients fulfilling the anemia criteria was observed, but a significant effect on the weight and height of the newborn was not determined, suggesting that the changes present in the placenta would be enough to ensure a fetal growth.
End-to-end Convolutional Neural Networks for Sound Event Detection in Urban Environments

We present a novel approach to tackle the problem of sound event detection (SED) in urban environments using end-to-end convolutional neural networks (CNN). It consists of a 1D CNN for extracting the energy on mel-frequency bands from the audio signal based on a simple filter bank, followed by a 2D CNN for the classification task. The main goal of this two-stage architecture is to bring more interpretability to the first layers of the network and to permit their reutilization in other problems of same the domain. We present a novel model to calculate the mel-spectrogam using a neural network that outperforms an existing work, both in its simplicity and its matching performance. Also, we implement a recently proposed approach to normalize the energy of the mel-spectrogram (per channel energy normalization’ PCEN) as a layer of the neural network. We show how the parameters of this normalization can be learned by the network and why this is useful for SED on urban environments. We study how the training modifies the filter bank as well as the PCEN normalization parameters. The obtained system achieves classification results that are comparable to the state-of-the-art, while decreasing the number of parameters involved.
Extended Quad-Tree Partitioning for Future Video Coding

The quad-tree plus binary-tree (QTBT) coding unit (CU) partitioning structure, which has been adopted to the next generation video coding standard, shows promising coding performance when compared with the conventional quad-tree structure in HEVC. In this paper, we propose the Extended Quad-tree (EQT) partitioning, which further extends the QTBT scheme and increases the partitioning exibility. More specifcally, EQT splits a parent CU into four sub-CUs of dierent sizes, which can adequately model the local image content that cannot be elaborately characterized with QTBT. Meanwhile, EQT partitioning allows the interleaving with BT partitioning for enhanced adaptability. Experimental results on the JEM7-QTBT-Only platform show that EQT brings better coding performance with 3.17%, 3.20% and 3.06% BD-Rate gains under random access, low-delay P and low-delay B configurations, respectively.
Key Management for Beyond 5G Mobile Small Cells: A Survey

The highly anticipated 5G network is projected to be introduced in 2020. 5G stakeholders are unanimous that densification of mobile networks is the way forward. The densification will be realized by means of small cell technology, and it is capable of providing coverage with a high data capacity. The EU-funded H2020-MSCA project “SECRET” introduced covering the urban landscape with mobile small cells, since these take advantages of the dynamic network topology and optimizes network services in a cost-effective fashion. By taking advantage of the device-to-device communications technology, large amounts of data can be transmitted over multiple hops and, therefore, offload the general network. However, this introduction of mobile small cells presents various security and privacy challenges. Cryptographic security solutions are capable of solving these as long as they are supported by a key management scheme. It is assumed that the network infrastructure and mobile devices from network users are unable to act as a centralized trust anchor since these are vulnerable targets to malicious attacks. Security must, therefore, be guaranteed by means of a key management scheme that decentralizes trust. Therefore, this paper surveys the state-of-the-art key management schemes proposed for similar network architectures (e.g., mobile ad hoc networks and ad hoc device-to-device networks) that decentralize trust. Furthermore, these key management schemes are evaluated for adaptability in a network of mobile small cells.
CXCR7 Upregulation Is Required for Early Endothelial Progenitor Cell–Mediated Endothelial Repair in Patients With Hypertension

Dysfunction of early endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) is responsible for impaired endothelial repair capacity after arterial injury in patients with hypertension. Here, we hypothesized that diminished signaling of CXC chemokine receptor 7 (CXCR7) contributes to the reduced EPC functions, and enhanced CXCR7 expression restores the capacities of EPCs from hypertensive patients. CXCR7 expression of EPCs from hypertensive patients was significantly reduced when compared with that from healthy subjects. Meanwhile, the phosphorylation of p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase, a downstream signaling of CXCR7, was elevated, which increased cleaved caspase-3 level of EPCs. CXCR7 gene transfer augmented CXCR7 expression and decreased the phosphorylation of p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase, which was paralleled to EPC functional upregulation of in vitro adhesion, antiapoptosis activities, and in vivo re-endothelialization capacity in a nude mouse model of carotid artery injury. The enhanced in vitro and in vivo functions of EPCs were markedly inhibited by neutralizing monoclonal antibody against CXCR7, which was blocked by p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase inhibitor SB203580. Downregulation of cleaved caspase-3 level induced by CXCR7 gene transfer or SB203580 pretreatment improved EPC functions. Furthermore, we found that lercanidipine, a dihydropyridine calcium channel antagonist, enhanced CXCR7 expression and facilitated in vitro and in vivo functions of EPCs. Our study demonstrated for the first time that diminished CXCR7 signal at least partially contributes to the reduced in vitro functions and in vivo re-endothelialization capacity of EPCs from hypertensive patients. Upregulation of CXCR7 expression induced by gene transfer or lercanidipine treatment may be a novel therapeutic target for increased endothelial repair capacity in hypertension.
Identification of scope creep factors and their impact on software project success

Scope creep refers to the variation or growth of project scope or pressure to deliver more than what was approved. It is considered as a significant risk in software development projects. The incapability to manage scope creep is the main cause for 80% of failing software projects. The motivation behind this research is to identify the various factors of scope creep that can threat the software project’s success. Due to exploratory nature of this study the Systematic Literature Review was conducted to identify the scope creep factors and their impact on project success. A total of 13 factors were identified based on our criteria of most commonly used and critical factors in terms of our study.
Phase II Study of Radiotherapy and Temsirolimus versus Radiochemotherapy with Temozolomide in Patients with Newly Diagnosed Glioblastoma without MGMT Promoter Hypermethylation (EORTC 26082).

PURPOSE EORTC 26082 assessed the activity of temsirolimus in patients with newly diagnosed glioblastoma harboring an unmethylated O6 methylguanine-DNA-methyltransferase (MGMT) promoter. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN Patients (n = 257) fulfilling eligibility criteria underwent central MGMT testing. Patients with MGMT unmethylated glioblastoma (n = 111) were randomized 1:1 between standard chemo-radiotherapy with temozolomide or radiotherapy plus weekly temsirolimus (25 mg). Primary endpoint was overall survival at 12 months (OS12). A positive signal was considered >38 patients alive at 12 months in the per protocol population. A noncomparative reference arm of 54 patients evaluated the assumptions on OS12 in a standard-treated cohort of patients. Prespecified post hoc analyses of markers reflecting target activation were performed. RESULTS Both therapies were administered per protocol with a median of 13 cycles of maintenance temsirolimus. Median age was 55 and 58 years in the temsirolimus and standard arms, the WHO performance status 0 or 1 for most patients (95.5%). In the per protocol population, 38 of 54 patients treated with temsirolimus reached OS12. The actuarial 1-year survival was 72.2% [95% confidence interval (CI), 58.2-82.2] in the temozolomide arm and 69.6% (95% CI, 55.8-79.9) in the temsirolimus arm [hazard ratio (HR) 1.16; 95% CI, 0.77-1.76; P = 0.47]. In multivariable prognostic analyses of clinical and molecular factors, phosphorylation of mTORSer2448 in tumor tissue (HR 0.13; 95% CI, 0.04-0.47; P = 0.002), detected in 37.6%, was associated with benefit from temsirolimus. CONCLUSIONS Temsirolimus was not superior to temozolomide in patients with an unmethylated MGMT promoter. Phosphorylation of mTORSer2448 in the pretreatment tumor tissue may define a subgroup benefitting from mTOR inhibition. Clin Cancer Res; 22(19); 4797-806. ©2016 AACR.
Estimation of Density from a Sample of Joint Point and Nearest-Neighbor Distances.

Distances are measured from sample points to the nearest member of a population, from that member to its nearest neighbor, and from that neighbor to its nearest neighbor. The point-to-nearest member is used to obtain an estimate of density, which is characteristically unbiased if the population is random, but biased if the population is uniformly or contagiously distributed. The bias is corrected by an exponential function of the sum of the point distances divided by the sum of either the nearest- or second-nearest-neighbor distances. The distances also provide an index of departure from randomness.
Exact and Asymptotic Analysis of Partial Relay Selection for Cognitive RF-FSO Systems With Non-Zero Boresight Pointing Errors

In this paper, we investigate the performance of asymmetric radio frequency (RF) and free space optical (FSO) dual-hop cooperative relay network along with a direct RF link between source and destination. The FSO link experiences double generalized Gamma turbulence in the presence of the generalized non-zero boresight pointing errors, and RF links experience non-identically distributed Nakagami- $m$ fading. Moreover, considering both cognitive radio and non-cognitive scenarios, a partial relay selection (PRS) strategy has been employed. Furthermore, both relay selection and underlay power restriction are governed with the outdated channel state information (CSI). We also assume both heterodyne and intensity modulation/direct detection methods in the FSO receiver. Under the assumption of amplify-and-forward relaying and PRS, we derive closed-form expressions for outage probability (OP) of both scenarios, while bit-error probability and ergodic capacity of the non-cognitive scenario are also obtained. The asymptotic expressions of OP and diversity order of this network are derived for both perfect CSI and outdated CSI cases. It is demonstrated that the diversity order is a function of the fading severity of the RF links, turbulence parameters of the FSO link, and pointing error, regardless of interference channel parameter of the primary user.
Investigating Material Changes at Different Gadolinium Doping Power Levels in Indium-Tin Oxide Intended for Use as an Insulator in Resistive Switching Memory

This paper investigates material modifications induced by cosputtering indium-tin oxide (ITO) with gadolinium (Gd) at two different power levels. In addition, resistance switching (RS) properties were also verified for use as an insulator in resistive random access memory (RRAM). Comparison of scanning electron microscope (SEM) measurements for the two different cosputtering powers indicated significant changes of the ITO surface. Transparency was also verified by an N&K analyzer measurement, with results indicating a constant in transparency induced by the lower power Gd doping, indicating potential for transparent applications. Furthermore, the mole fraction ratio defined by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy reveals a Gd2O3 peak, a likely reason for the ITO thin film becoming less conductive. This ITO/Gd:ITO/TiN RRAM can exhibit stable and robust RS characteristics at a lower forming voltage. In addition, lower operating voltages, including both SET and RESET voltages, can be obtained. Reliability tests including endurance and retention were carried out to confirm its RS stability. The RS mechanism of this ITO/Gd:ITO/TiN device was also investigated with the current–voltage ( ${I}$ – ${V}$ ) fitting method. Moreover, temperature effects were also applied to verify the high-resistance state (HRS) mechanism. Finally, a conduction model was proposed to clarify the RS characteristics and confirm that the ITO/Gd:ITO/TiN device is appropriate for data storage.