Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
WiScape: A Framework for Measuring the Performance of Wide-Area Wireless Networks

We present WiScape, a framework for benchmarking and understanding the behavior of wide-area wireless networks, e.g., city-wide or nation-wide cellular data networks using active participation from clients. The goal of WiScape is to provide a coarse-grained view of a wide-area wireless landscape that allows operators and users to understand broad performance characteristics of the network. In WiScape, a centralized controller instructs clients to collect minimal measurement samples over time and space in an opportunistic manner. To limit the overheads of this measurement framework, WiScape partitions the world into zones, contiguous areas with relatively similar user experiences, and partitions time into zone-specific epochs over which network statistics are relatively stable. For each epoch in each zone, WiScape takes a minimalistic view-it attempts to collect a small number of measurement samples to characterize the client experience in a zone at a specific epoch, thereby limiting the bandwidth and energy overheads for collecting measurements at client devices. For this effort, we have collected ground truth measurements for three commercial cellular networks across a nation-wide area in USA for a period of more than one year. We justify our design choices of WiScape through collected data, demonstrate that WiScape can provide an accurate performance characterization of the networks over a wide-area (within 4 percent error for more than 70 percent of instances) with a low overhead on the clients, and illustrate multiple applications of this framework through a sustained and ongoing measurement study.
IKP: Turning a PKI Around with Blockchains

Man-in-the-middle attacks in TLS due to compromised CAs have been mitigated by log-based PKI enhancements such as Certificate Transparency. However, these log-based schemes do not offer sufficient incentives to logs and monitors, and do not offer any actions that domains can take in response to CA misbehavior. We propose IKP, a blockchain-based PKI enhancement that offers automatic responses to CA misbehavior and incentives for those who help detect misbehavior. IKP’s decentralized nature and smart contract system allows open participation, offers incentives for vigilance over CAs, and enables financial recourse against misbehavior. We demonstrate through a game theoretic model and through an Ethereum prototype implementation that the incentives and increased deterrence offered by IKP are technically and economically viable.
High-workload endurance training may increase serum ischemia-modified albumin concentrations

Abstract The measurement of cardiac troponins has emerged as the biochemical “gold standard” for the diagnosis and management of patients with acute chest pain. However, earlier markers should support investigation strategies, as several patients with acute coronary syndrome might present with non-diagnostic concentrations. Ischemia-modified albumin (IMA), measured by the albumin cobalt binding (ACB) assay, was recently proposed for early detection of myocardial ischemia. To establish the potential influence of endurance training on the diagnostic approach to patients with suspected myocardial injury, cardiac troponin T (cTnT), creatine kinase isoenzyme MB (CK-MB), myoglobin and IMA were evaluated in healthy individuals subjected to different aerobic workloads. The concentrations of both IMA and CK-MB were significantly increased in athletes subjected to high-workload endurance training, whereas the concentration of cTnT and myoglobin was not influenced by physical exercise in the medium term. Taken together, our results demonstrate that demanding aerobic physical activity might influence the generation of IMA, which might be increased in the medium term following high-workload endurance training, while the concentration of other conventional markers of myocardial injury remains non-diagnostic.
Extent and dynamics of the Saalian ice-sheet margin in Neple, eastern Poland

The Neple site is located on a marginal moraine between the valleys of Bug and Krzna rivers in the southern part of the Polish–Belarusian border area. A glacial diamicton is overlain there by glaciofluvial sand and gravel. The glacial diamicton is laminated and, based on petrographic examination, it was ascribed both to the Sanian 2 Glaciation (Elsterian) and the Warta Stadial ice-sheet of the Odranian Glaciation (Saalian). The sediments were glaciotectonically deformed during readvance of the Warta Stadial icesheet. A local stress field was from the northwest and north but it partly encountered resistance from the glacial lobe located in the present-day river-mouth of the Krzna River. Similar glaciotectonic deformations are common also along the southwestern slope of the present Bug River valley, demarcating the maximum extent of the Warta Stadial (Saalian) ice-sheet in this area.
Steady‐state supercritical CO2 and brine relative permeability in Berea sandstone at different temperature and pressure conditions

We measure steady‐state two‐phase supercritical CO2‐brine relative permeabilities in a 61 cm‐long Berea sandstone core at three different conditions (40°C and 12.41 MPa, 40°C and 8.27 MPa, and 60°C and 12.41 MPa) under primary drainage. We use pressure taps to obtain pressure drops of individual sections of the core, and X‐ray Computed Tomography (CT) to obtain in situ saturation profiles, which together help to mitigate the capillary end effect. We include previously measured relative permeabilities at 20°C and 10.34 MPa, and compare all the data using both an eye‐test and a statistical test. We find no appreciable temperature and pressure dependence of CO2 relative permeability within 20–60°C and 8.27–12.41 MPa. We find slight changes in the brine relative permeability between supercritical CO2 conditions (40–60°C and 8.27–12.41 MPa) and the liquid CO2 condition (20°C and 10.34 MPa). The temperature and pressure independence of CO2 relative permeability has been previously recognized and reassured in this work using a capillary‐effect‐free method. This allows one to use a single CO2 relative permeability curve in modeling two‐phase CO2 flow within 20–60°C and 8.27–12.41 MPa.
Real Time Target Tracking Scale Adaptive Based on LBP Operator and Nonlinear Meanshift

The classical meanshift tracking algorithm is widely used because of its small computation and real-time performance. But the robustness of the classical meanshift algorithm is poor, the target location accuracy is not high, and the algorithm stability is not good. So, this paper proposes a nonlinear meanshift algorithm is a combination of color and texture histogram representation, this paper used the two value model of local LBP texture operator block thought based on improved, effectively extract the main target model of edge and corner to more refined target; in addition, through the effective use of information of the target candidate moment to solve the region, following the changes of the scale and direction of target motion in the problem. Three features of the algorithm proposed in this paper combining the complementary: accurate description of target color feature, texture feature, edge feature, first through the Bhattacharyya similarity coefficient between selected high similarity of the target histogram, and then choose two times through the log function. Through different scenes video tracking experiments show that, combined with characteristics of the classical meanshift algorithm and improved the representation method compared to target improvement algorithm in the complex scene tracking has higher stability and robustness. Finally, the real-time target tracking algorithm is applied to the video surveillance and traffic video surveillance in important places. The real-time target tracking algorithm can effectively track the vehicle target.
Technical Report for Real-Time Certified Probabilistic Pedestrian Forecasting

The success of autonomous systems will depend upon their ability to safely navigate human-centric environments. This motivates the need for a real-time, probabilistic forecasting algorithm for pedestrians, cyclists, and other agents since these predictions will form a necessary step in assessing the risk of any action. This paper presents a novel approach to probabilistic forecasting for pedestrians based on weighted sums of ordinary differential equations that are learned from historical trajectory information within a fixed scene. The resulting algorithm is embarrassingly parallel and is able to work at real-time speeds using a naive Python implementation. The quality of predicted locations of agents generated by the proposed algorithm is validated on a variety of examples and considerably higher than existing state of the art approaches over long time horizons.
Sulfadiazine resistance in Toxoplasma gondii: no involvement of overexpression or polymorphisms in genes of therapeutic targets and ABC transporters

Several treatment failures have been reported for the treatment of toxoplasmic encephalitis, chorioretinitis, and congenital toxoplasmosis. Recently we found three Toxoplasma gondii strains naturally resistant to sulfadiazine and we developed in vitro two sulfadiazine resistant strains, RH-RSDZ and ME-49-RSDZ, by gradual pressure. In Plasmodium, common mechanisms of drug resistance involve, among others, mutations and/or amplification within genes encoding the therapeutic targets dhps and dhfr and/or the ABC transporter genes family. To identify genotypic and/or phenotypic markers of resistance in T. gondii, we sequenced and analyzed the expression levels of therapeutic targets dhps and dhfr, three ABC genes, two Pgp, TgABC.B1 and TgABC.B2, and one MRP, TgABC.C1, on sensitive strains compared to sulfadiazine resistant strains. Neither polymorphism nor overexpression was identified. Contrary to Plasmodium, in which mutations and/or overexpression within gene targets and ABC transporters are involved in antimalarial resistance, T. gondii sulfadiazine resistance is not related to these toxoplasmic genes studied.
Utility of mesothelin, L1CAM and Afamin as biomarkers in primary ovarian cancer.

BACKGROUND We evaluated the prognostic value of the new serum biomarkers mesothelin (cell surface glycoprotein and tumor differentiation antigen), L1 cell adhesion molecule (L1CAM) and afamin (vitamin D-binding protein) alone and in combination with cancer antigen 125 (CA125) in serum samples of 154 patients with first-diagnosis of primary ovarian cancer, before surgery and after platinum-based chemotherapy. We correlated these findings with clinical parameters and evaluated their prognostic value with regard to overall survival (OS). MATERIALS AND METHODS Blood (9 ml) was obtained before surgery (n=154) and after chemotherapy (n=82) for the measurement of serum markers using commercial Enzyme Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) kits for mesothelin, L1CAM, afamin and CA125. Mesothelin positivity was defined as >2.0 nM, L1CAM as >10 ng/ml, afamin as <45 mg/l and CA125 as >35 U/ml, respectively. RESULTS Before surgery, mesothelin positivity significantly correlated with advanced International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) stage (p=0.002), residual postoperative tumor (p<0.0001), serous histological subtype (p<0.0001) and higher age (p=0.013). Elevated CA125 levels significantly correlated with advanced FIGO stage (p<0.0001) and grading (p=0.012). After chemotherapy, mesothelin as well as CA125 levels, were significantly associated with FIGO stage (p=0.041 and p=0.017) and residual tumor (p=0.022 and p=0.002) while L1CAM correlated with platinum sensitivity (p=0.041). In contrast, afamin at all determined time points showed no correlation with any of these parameters. The combination of markers did not add any significant power to their use. CONCLUSION Mesothelin and L1CAM appear to correlate with clinical prognostic parameters and might be useful biomarkers for therapy monitoring and, thus, could serve as attractive targets for therapy of ovarian cancer.
On the choice of carrier frequency and bandwidth for 5G small cell deployments

The use of previously unused spectrum in the millimeter-wave band is discussed for future fifth generation (5G) mobile communications systems. The legacy frequency bands are very densely used and free spaces are rare, but the question remains, whether increasing the carrier frequency is a good idea. In this paper we derive frequency dependent link capacities and energy efficiency measures for a small cell heterogeneous network scenario.
GIS-BASED REGRESSION ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF SELECTED COUNTRIES

Ecological footprint is an innovative concept to present the consumption of natural resources and generation of waste in terms of the Earth biological carrying capacity in a standardized format. The Earth overall sustainability can also be measured with the idea of ecological footprint and bio-capacity. The aim of this paper is to analyse the interactive spatial relationship between economic development and ecological footprints of selected nations. The GIS-based spatial regression tool Ordinary Least Square (OLS) and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) are used for fulfilling the purpose. Individual components ofecological footprints - cropland, grazing land, fishing ground, forest land, builtup land and carbon footprints - are also analysed against the per capita GDP of the nations in order to understand the interrelationship between them. The analysis has found a significant relationship between ecological footprint and economic development and the OLS model can explain approximately 64% of the variation in the dependent variable with the explanatory variables. The study has also found that nation’s economic development contributes much inincreasing the carbon footprint. The resulted outcome is significant enough to warrant a study on the spatial dimension of environment and economy in order to analyse the individual nation’s economic growth and its relationship with environmental degradation, which can ultimately influence the global environmental sustainability
Improving malicious URL re-evaluation scheduling through an empirical study of malware download centers

The retrieval and analysis of malicious content is an essential task for security researchers. At the same time, the distributors of malicious files deploy countermeasures to evade the scrutiny of security researchers. This paper investigates two techniques used by malware download centers: frequently updating the malicious payload, and blacklisting (i.e., refusing HTTP requests from researchers based on their IP). To this end, we sent HTTP requests to malware download centers over a period of four months. The requests are distributed across two pools of IPs, one exhibiting high volume research behaviour and another exhibiting semi-random, low volume behaviour. We identify several distinct update patterns, including sites that do not update the binary at all, sites that update the binary for each new client but then repeatedly serve a specific binary to the same client, sites that periodically update the binary with periods ranging from one hour to 84 days, and server-side polymorphic sites, that deliver new binaries for each HTTP request. From this classification we identify several guidelines for crawlers that re-query malware download centers looking for binary updates. We propose a scheduling algorithm that incorporates these guidelines, and perform a limited evaluation of the algorithm using the data we collected. We analyze our data for evidence of blacklisting and find strong evidence that a small minority of URLs blacklisted our high volume IPs, but for the majority of malicious URLs studied, there was no observable blacklisting response, despite issuing over over 1.5 million requests to 5001 different malware download centers.
Building components with embedded security monitors

A software component should be trustworthy and behave in a secure manner as it will be reused many times. Despite extensive efforts, usually, it cannot be guaranteed that a developed software component is completely secure. Hence, its execution in the real-world needs to be monitored against its security specifications. Each time components are used to develop a component-based software (CBS), a new monitor has to be designed to observe the behavior of the CBS. This results in recurring costs as such monitors cannot be reused for other CBS. Moreover, development life cycle artifacts are usually not available when a pre-fabricated component is used to build a CBS. Given that, it is imperative that a specification-based security monitor is developed along with the monitored component (when all development artifacts are available) and is embedded in the component to increase the component's trustworthiness. In this paper, we identify the types of constraints that may be imposed by security specifications. These constraints should be taken into account while developing the software components and should also be monitored. Furthermore, we propose a design approach to develop components with built in monitors that are able to observe these security constraints. Components developed following this approach would be self-monitoring, promote greater reusability, and be more trustworthy. We evaluate our approach by analyzing the performance and design complexity of different versions of CBS. These versions are developed by following the traditional and proposed approaches for monitoring security aspects of CBS.
Micro-differential evolution with extra moves along the axes

This paper proposes a novel implementation of micro-Differential Evolution (μDE) that incorporates within the DE scheme an extra search move that attempts to improve the best solution by perturbing it along the axes. These extra moves complement the DE search logic and allows the exploration of the decision space from an alternative perspective. In addition, these extra moves at subsequent activations tend to explore a progressively narrowing area. This mechanism increases the exploitation of the original scheme thus helping μDE to prevent from stagnation. An experimental set-up including various test problems and dimensionality values has been considered. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm enhances upon the original μDE performance and, despite its simplicity, is competitive with modern complex DE based algorithms.
The CMU Machine Translation Systems at WMT 2014

We describe the CMU systems submitted to the 2014 WMT shared translation task. We participated in two language pairs, German–English and Hindi–English. Our innovations include: a label coarsening scheme for syntactic tree-to-tree translation, a host of new discriminative features, several modules to create “synthetic translation options” that can generalize beyond what is directly observed in the training data, and a method of combining the output of multiple word aligners to uncover extra phrase pairs and grammar rules.
Zeta potential of microfluidic substrates: 2. Data for polymers

Zeta potential data are reviewed for a variety of polymeric microfluidic substrate materials. Many of these materials currently used for microchip fabrication have only recently been employed for generation of electroosmotic flow. Despite their recent history, polymeric microfluidic substrates are currently used extensively for microchip separations and other techniques, and understanding of the surface ζ potential is crucial for experimental design. This paper proposes the use of pC (the negative logarithm of the counterion concentration) as a useful normalization for the ζ potential on polymer substrates in contact with indifferent univalent counterions. Normalizing ζ by pC facilitates comparison of results from many investigators. The sparseness of available data for polymeric substrates prevents complete and rigorous justification for this normalization; however, it is consistent with double layer and adsorption theory. For buffers with indifferent univalent cations, normalization with the logarithm of the counterion concentration in general collapses data onto a single ζ/pC vs. pH curve, and (with the exception of PMMA) the repeatability of the data is quite encouraging. Normalization techniques should allow improved ability to predict ζ potential performance on microfluidic substrates and compare results observed with different parameters.
Research and application of digital transmission of differential resistance sensor

By analyzing different resistance values, this collector of this article collects signal of the Differential Resistance Sensor (DRS) acquisition embedded in the dams, reservoirs and other hydraulic buildings, and monitors the facilities in real time view. The position of embedded sensors can be distinguished by setting the address and code. The analog signal is one-on-one converted to digital signals through high-precision analog-to-digital conversion and amplification chips by digitized transducers. The digital signals are transported to the central server, and the deformation of the structure is estimated by original data in the server. Meanwhile, it extended the transformer's effective measuring distance from normal analog 200 meters up to digitalized 1200 meters. In situation of multi DRS installed field, all the output of the transformers can be connected in parallel to eliminate the cables to only one RS485-Bus as a twisted-pair cable and a power line. It has been proved from the applications in several reservoir dam security monitoring systems that this transducer is a highly accurate, reliable, strong anti-interference solution for all the DRS applications of the relative monitoring and measurement projects. The collector has been applied in dam monitoring system with remarkable performance.
Exposure to Ionizing Radiation in Adulthood and Thyroid Cancer Incidence

Background: Recent reviews of the radiation epidemiology literature have concluded that there is little evidence that exposure to ionizing radiation in adulthood causes thyroid cancer. This paper examines the association between radiation dose and thyroid cancer incidence among Japanese survivors who were adults at the time of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Methods: Analyses were conducted using data on cancer incidence during the period 1958–1998 among 59,687 members of the Life Span Study of atomic bomb survivors who were 20 years or older at time of bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Poisson regression methods were used to derive estimates of associations between thyroid dose in gray (Gy) and thyroid cancer incidence by sex, age at exposure, and time-since-exposure. Results: The number of thyroid cancer cases among women (n = 241) was nearly 5-fold the number of cases among men (n = 55). Estimated thyroid dose was positively associated with thyroid cancer incidence among women A-bomb survivors (excess relative rate/Gy = 0.70; 90% confidence interval = 0.20–1.46). In contrast, a negative association was observed between thyroid dose and thyroid cancer among men (excess relative rate/Gy = −0.25; <0 to 90% confidence interval = 0.35). The association among women was positive for all time-since-exposure periods examined but tended to diminish in magnitude with time-since-exposure. Conclusions: Exposure to ionizing radiation in adulthood was positively associated with thyroid cancer among women A-bomb survivors, although the risk seems to be lower than for those exposed to radiation in childhood.