Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A security architecture for survivability mechanisms

In survivability management systems, some management entities reside on application hosts that are not necessarily trustworthy. The integrity of these software entities is essential to the security of the network management scheme. In this talk, I present a novel framework to facilitate software security against malicious execution environments. The approach consists of two fundamental techniques: (a) Incorporating diversity in the deployment and the design of the program such that impersonation or intelligent tampering attacks require extensive analysis of the program; and (b) one important aspect of program analysis, namely static analysis, is deterred by the incorporation of aliasing and further degeneration of the program control flow. It is shown that analyzing the transformed programs statically is an NP-hard problem. Theoretic bounds on approximate analysis methods are also provided. The transformations are implemented in a C compiler. Program performance results are presented. Empirical experiments with existing analysis tools showed that static analysis for the transformed programs are hindered to a significant degree.
Modified Nanoemulsions with Iron Oxide for Magnetic Resonance Imaging

A nanoemulsion (NE) is a surfactant-based, oil-in-water, nanoscale, high-energy emulsion with a mean droplet diameter of 400–600 nm. When mixed with antigen and applied nasally, a NE acts as a mucosal adjuvant and induces mucosal immune responses. One possible mechanism for the adjuvant effect of this material is that it augments antigen uptake and distribution to lymphoid tissues, where the immune response is generated. Biocompatible iron oxide nanoparticles have been used as a unique imaging approach to study the dynamics of cells or molecular migration. To study the uptake of NEs and track them in vivo, iron oxide nanoparticles were synthesized and dispersed in soybean oil to make iron oxide-modified NEs. Our results show that iron oxide nanoparticles can be stabilized in the oil phase of the nanoemulsion at a concentration of 30 µg/μL and the iron oxide-modified NEs have a mean diameter of 521 nm. In vitro experiments demonstrated that iron oxide-modified NEs can affect uptake by TC-1 cells (a murine epithelial cell line) and reduce the intensity of magnetic resonance (MR) images by shortening the T2 time. Most importantly, in vivo studies demonstrated that iron oxide-modified NE could be detected in mouse nasal septum by both transmission electron microscopy and MR imaging. Altogether these experiments demonstrate that iron oxide-modified NE is a unique tool that can be used to study uptake and distribution of NEs after nasal application.
DISPERSAL OF HORMOSIRA BANKSII (PHAEOPHYCEAE) VIA DETACHED FRAGMENTS: REPRODUCTIVE VIABILITY AND LONGEVITY 1

Drifting, fertile thalli are well documented to be the primary long‐distance dispersal vector for many marine macroalgae, but little information about reproductive viability of drift is known. This study examined the reproductive viability and longevity of floating fragments of the intertidal Australasian fucoid Hormosira banksii (Turner) Decne. Beach wrack surveys and field experiments were conducted to test the model that long‐distance dispersal is achieved in H. banksii via floating, fertile fronds. High densities of beach wrack fragments were evident during summer compared to autumn. The majority of beach wrack occurred on sandy beaches rather than rocky shores. Both male and female fragments were present in the beach wrack. Detached fronds were capable of releasing gametes up to 8 weeks after detachment. Beach wrack produced high fertilization rates and recruited successfully onto artificial panels. Results suggest that detached fragments are reproductively viable and that floating, fertile fronds may be an important mechanism for facilitating long‐distance dispersal in this species. Nevertheless, the frequency of fronds reaching a suitable habitat and contributing to gene flow between populations, or colonizing new populations, may not be proportional to the total density of beach wrack.
Mining Biosynthetic Gene Clusters of Pseudomonas vancouverensis Utilizing Whole Genome Sequencing

Natural product (NP)-based pesticides have emerged as a compelling alternative to traditional chemical fungicides, attracting substantial attention within the agrochemical industry as the world is pushing toward sustainable and environmentally friendly approaches to safeguard crops. Microbes, both bacteria and fungi, are a huge source of diverse secondary metabolites with versatile applications across pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and the food industry. Microbial genome mining has been accelerated for pesticide/drug discovery and development in recent years, driven by advancements in genome sequencing, bioinformatics, metabolomics/metabologenomics, and synthetic biology. Here, we isolated and identified Pseudomonas vancouverensis that had shown antifungal activities against crop fungal pathogens Colletotrichum fragariae, Botrytis cinerea, and Phomopsis obscurans in a dual-plate culture and bioautography assay. Further, we sequenced the whole bacterial genome and mined the genome of this bacterium to identify secondary metabolite biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) using antiSMASH 7.0, PRISM 4, and BAGEL 4. An in-silico analysis suggests that P. vancouverensis possesses a rich repertoire of BGCs with the potential to produce diverse and novel NPs, including non-ribosomal peptides (NRPs), polyketides (PKs), acyl homoserine lactone, cyclodipeptide, bacteriocins, and ribosomally synthesized and post-transcriptionally modified peptides (RiPPs). Bovienimide-A, an NRP, and putidacin L1, a lectin-like bacteriocin, were among the previously known predicted metabolites produced by this bacterium, suggesting that the NPs produced by this bacterium could have biological activities and be novel as well. Future studies on the antifungal activity of these compounds will elucidate the full biotechnological potential of P. vancouverensis.
Innovative Label Embedding for Food Safety Comment Classification: Fusion of Self-Semantic and Self-Knowledge Features

Food safety comment classification represents a specialized task within the realm of text classification. The objective is to efficiently identify a large volume of food safety comments, aiding relevant authorities in timely food analysis and safety alerts. Traditional methods typically employ one-hot encoding for label processing. However, in real-world situations, classified labels often convey valuable semantic information and guidance. This paper introduces an innovative approach to enhance the classification performance of food safety comments by embedding label information. Initially, we extracted generic sentiment pivot words from various classification labels as label description information. Subsequently, we employ a joint embedding approach to integrate this label description information into the text. This process will pool the expressions of the pivot word into the corresponding sentiment labels in the known domains after averaging to get the embedded expression. This aims to acquire highly detailed self-semantic feature vectors and self-knowledge feature vectors that are integrated with labeled descriptive information. Then, feed the semantic representation of comments and the word-embedded representation of labeled description information into a time-step-based multilayer Bi-LSTM and a step-based multilayer CNN, respectively. Ultimately, we concatenate these two feature vectors to facilitate matching, thereby fusing the self-semantic and self-knowledge features of labeled description information to train a classification model for food safety comments. Experimental results on the food safety comment dataset showcase a noteworthy improvement of 1.74% and 1.27% in Macro_Precision and Macro_F1 metrics, respectively, compared to BERT, BERT-RNN, and BERT-CNN. Through extensive ablation experiments and additional studies, our method effectively embeds labeling information, demonstrating a clear advantage over traditional methods in the task of classifying food safety comments. Doi: 10.28991/HIJ-2024-05-01-013 Full Text: PDF
Bridging the gap between technical and human elements in digital service innovation

Creating and establishing a successful innovation is challenging and many attempts fail. Despite of the complex nature of the phenomenon, previous literature often tends to limit its focus on either to the technical elements or human elements related to an innovation. Current research-in-progress paper aims to avoid this ‘either-or’ thinking and rather examine the roles, impact and mutual interaction of both, technical and human elements, in order to further understand the successful emergence of a digital service innovation, i.e. a novel value co-creation practice enabled by a digital infrastructure. To achieve this we draw from three separate fields: service ecosystem perspective, information technology (IT) perspective and actor-network theory. The paper presents a plan for future empirical study and provides initial description of a case study about establishing a digital shopping solution in a small brick and mortar convenience store in Northern Finland.
Mobilisation of heavy metals from a mixed metal sulfide ore concentrate in aquatic environments

The influence of surface area, oxygen, temperature, pH, light, iron and humic acid on the mobilisation of heavy metals from a mixed metal sulfide ore concentrate (OC) in aquatic environments is investigated. The main mineral constituents of OC include sphalerite, galena, pyrite and chalcopyrite. Mineralogical data indicate Cd and some Fe are substituted into the sphalerite matrix. The relatively linear mobilisation of Zn, Fe, Cu and Cd from OC, as a function of time, in acidic, oxic and anoxic solutions suggests a surface controlled mechanism is responsible for the release of these metals from OC. The Zn, Fe and Cd mobilisation in oxic and anoxic solutions at p1-I 2 increases with increasing surface area of OC exposed to solution, which indicates the importance of surface sites in metal release from OC. Copper mobilisation in oxic solution also increases with increasing OC, but an inverse relationship between dissolved Cu and OC surface area is observed in anoxic solutions. This is attributed to exchange reactions that remove mobilised Cu from solution. In contrast to the other metals, the trend in Pb mobilisation is hyperbolic rather than linear. This suggests a diffusion controlled mechanism is responsible for Pb mobilisation from OC. Moreover, data for Pb release could be fitted to the parabolic rate law used to describe diffusion controlled dissolution. A linear plot of maximum dissolved Pb against OC surface area also illustrates the importance of surface sites in Pb mobilisation. The combined results for Pb indicate a mixed transport-surface controlled mechanism is responsible for Pb mobilisation from OC. The curvature of Pb mobilisation is also attributed to exchange reactions that remove dissolved Pb from solution. The mechanisms identified for Zn, Pb, Fe, Cu and Cd mobilisation from OC are supported by calculations of apparent activation energies. The mobilisation of metals from OC in anoxic solutions at pH 2 can be primarily attributed to proton promoted dissolution. The release of Zn, Cu and Cd from OC is enhanced in aerated solution by oxidative dissolution. However, the mobilisation of Pb and Fe are mostly driven by proton promoted dissolution irrespective of oxygen conditions. This is attributed to the diamagnetism of PbS and FeS2. The Fe impurities make ZnS and CdS paramagnetic and thus can readily adsorb oxygen. Paramagnetic oxygen also appears to readily react with antiferrornagnetic CuFeS2. The mobilisation of Zn, Fe and Cd is increased under illumination, which is attributed to the semiconductor nature of ZnS, FeS2 and CdS, respectively. An increase in mobilisation of Zn,
Location-Based Microblog Viewing System Synchronized with Web Pages

Microblogging is a new form of blogging in which microbloggers can share their status in short posts. Microbloggers can be kept up to date with current information from microblog senders, however, Web users cannot be simultaneously updated by microblogs, to obtain the most recent information, whilst they browse Web pages since these are not updated in real time. To circumvent this time lag and provide Web users with up to date information, it is thought that an appropriate method is to associate microblogs and Web pages. Therefore, we have developed a location-based microblog viewing system to support Web users. Our system can present microblogs that are synchronized with Web pages in order to help Web users grasp the current situation in real time, both easily and effectively. In order to map heterogeneous media, we extract the relationship between microblogs and Web pages by generating queries based on common location names. In this paper, we discuss our prototype system and evaluate of our proposed mapping method's effectiveness.
Conjunctive ranking function using geographic distance and image distance for geotagged image retrieval

Nowadays, an enormous number of photographic images are uploaded on the Internet by casual users. In this study, we consider the concept of embedding geographical identification of locations as geotags in images. We attempt to retrieve images having certain similarities (or identical objects) from a geotagged image dataset. We then define the images having identical objects as orthologous images. Using content-based image retrieval (CBIR), we propose a ranking function--orthologous identity function (OIF)--to estimate the degree to which two images contain similarities in the form of identical objects; OIF is a similarity rating function that uses the geographic distance and image distance of photographs. Further, we evaluate the OIF as a ranking function by calculating the mean reciprocal rank (MRR) using our experimental dataset. The results reveal that the OIF can improve the efficiency of retrieving orthologous images as compared to using only geographic distance or image distance.
A Computer-Based Microarray Experiment Design-System for Gene-Regulation Pathway Discovery

This paper reports the methods and evaluation of a computer-based system that recommends microarray experimental design for biologists - causal discovery in Gene Expression data using Expected Value of Experimentation (GEEVE). The GEEVE system uses causal Bayesian networks and generates a decision tree for recommendations. To evaluate the GEEVE system, we first built an expression simulation model based on a gene regulation model assessed by an expert biologist. Using the simulation model, we conducted a controlled study that involved 10 biologists, some of whom used GEEVE and some of whom did not. The results show that biologists who used GEEVE reached correct causal assessments about gene regulation more often than did those biologists who did not use GEEVE.
In vitro Cytotoxic Effects and Antibacterial Activity of Moroccan Medicinal Plants Aristolochia longa and Lavandula multifida

Aims: The aim of this study was the evaluation of in vitro cytotoxic and antibacterial activities of organic extracts from Aristolochia longa and Lavandula multifida. Study Design: Evaluation of in vitro cytotoxic and antibacterial activities of extracts. Place and Duration of Study: Department of Biology (Faculty of Sciences), between July 2007 and July 2008. Methodology: The aerial parts were extracted by organic solvents (hexane, dichloromethane and methanol). The antibacterial activity of extracts was tested against Rhodococcus strains using the agar well diffusion method and cytotoxic activity was evaluated against three cancerous cell lines using the MTT assay. The chemical composition of extracts was determined using GC-MS. Results: The results show that the hexanic extract of A. longa (AH) and the dichloromethanic extract of A. longa (AD) present a good inhibitory effect on the three cancerous cell growth with 15 μg/ml≤IC50≤ 250 μg/ml and a total inhibitory effect on the bacterial growth with inhibition zone 30 mm at 50 mg/ml. Whereas, the extracts of L. multifida present less important inhibiting effects on the cell growth, in particular hexanic extract of L. multifida (LH) and dichloromethanic extract of Original Research Article Aneb et al.; EJMP, 16(2): 1-13, 2016; Article no.EJMP. 28534 2 L. multifida (LD) with 115 μg/ml≤IC50≤ 300 μg/ml. These extracts are also active against the three strains of Rhodococcus, with more than 20 mm rings of inhibition at 50 mg/ml. The study of the chemical composition of each these species was undertaken by means of GC-MS. The phytochemical analysis of the extracts studied showed the presence of many chemical compounds which can explain these biological activities. These preliminary results suggest the presence in the extracts of compounds such as linoleic acid chloride; oleic acid and limonene-6-ol, pivalate for A. longa, and methyl linolenate; octadecane; oleic acid; 2,3,5,8-tetramethyldecane, phenol, 2methyl-5-(1-methylethyl) for L. multifida. Conclusion: This study deserves to be pursued to characterize better the asset compounds and to clarify their mechanism of action.
Algorithm for fast fractal image compression

Fractal image compression is a promising new technology that may successfully provide a codec for PC-to-PC video communications. Unfortunately, the large amount of computation needed for the compression stage is a major obstacle that needs to be overcome. This paper introduces the Fast Fractal Image Compression algorithm, a new approach to breaking the `speed problem' that has plagued previous efforts. For still images, experiments show that at comparable quality levels the FFIC algorithm is 5 to 50 times faster than the current state of the art. Such an improvement brings real-time video applications within the reach of fractal mathematics.
Comparison of affine-invariant local detectors and descriptors

In this paper we summarize recent progress on local photometric invariants. The photometric invariants can be used to find correspondences in the presence of significant viewpoint changes. We evaluate the performance of region detectors and descriptors. We compare several methods for detecting affine regions [4, 9, 11, 18, 17]. We evaluate the repeatability of the detected regions, the accuracy of the detectors and the invariance to geometric as well as photometric image transformations. Furthermore, we compare several local descriptors [3, 5, 8, 14, 19]. The local descriptors are evaluated in terms of two properties: robustness and distinctiveness. The evaluation is carried out for different image transformations and scene types. We observe that the ranking of the detectors and descriptors remains the same regardless the scene type or image transformation.
Eigenstructure approach for complete characterization of linear-phase FIR perfect reconstruction analysis length 2M filterbanks

The eigenstructure based characterization of M-channel finite impulse response perfect reconstruction (FIR PR) filterbanks in a previous paper by the authors is extended here to the linear-phase case. Some results relating to linear-phase filterbanks is derived by finding appropriate restrictions on the eigenstructure of the analysis polyphase matrix. Consequently, a complete and minimal characterization for such filterbanks with all analysis length 2M and any synthesis length is developed. Parameterization and design examples are also presented.
Obscurin Depletion Impairs Organization of Skeletal Muscle in Developing Zebrafish Embryos

During development, skeletal myoblasts differentiate into myocytes and skeletal myotubes with mature contractile structures that are precisely oriented with respect to surrounding cells and tissues. Establishment of this highly ordered structure requires reciprocal interactions between the differentiating myocytes and the surrounding extracellular matrix to form correctly positioned and well-organized attachments from the skeletal muscle to the bony skeleton. Using the developing zebrafish embryo as a model, we examined the relationship between new myofibril assembly and the organization of the membrane domains involved in cell-extracellular matrix interactions. We determined that depletion of obscurin, a giant muscle protein, resulted in irregular cell morphology and disturbed extracellular matrix organization during skeletal muscle development. The resulting impairment of myocyte organization was associated with disturbance of the internal architecture of the myocyte suggesting that obscurin participates in organizing the internal structure of the myocyte and translating those structural cues to surrounding cells and tissues.
Chinese-Chinese and English-Chinese Question Answering with ASQA at NTCIR-6 CLQA

For NTCIR-6 CLQA, we improved our question answering system ASQA (Academia Sinica Question Answering System), which participated in NTCIR-5 CLQA, so that it could deal with the Chinese-Chinese (C-C) subtask and the English-Chinese (E-C) subtask. There are three innovations in the improved system: (a) to handle the E-C subtask, we have built an English question classifier that adopts Question Informer as a key classification feature; (b) with automatically generated Answer Templates, we can accurately pinpoint the correct answers for some questions. When Answer Templates are applied, the RU-accuracy is 0.911 for the applied questions; and (c) the Answer Ranking module has been improved by incorporating a new feature called, SCO-QAT (Sum of Co-occurrence of Question and Answer Terms). In NTCIR-6 CLQA, ASQA achieved 0.553 RU-accuracy in the C-C subtask and 0.34 RU-accuracy in the E-C subtask.
MICROBIOLOGICAL QUALITY AND SAFETY ASSESSMENT OF FRESHLY PREPARED FRUIT JUICES SOLD IN DIFFERENT AREAS OF LAHORE, PAKISTAN

Fruit juices are among the best food products with respect to the nutritional and medicinal applications. However, disaster can come along the way, as bacteria can cause spoiling of fruit juices through contaminated raw materials, extraction equipment and malpractice of handlers and results into the deleterious health effects. Numerous bacterial species including Streptococcus spp. , Escherichia coli, Candida albicans, Staphylococcus aureus, Vibrio cholera, etc can be present in high concentrations in fruit juices. In the present study, a total of 164 bacterial strains were isolated from nine samples of fresh fruit juices (Carrot, Orange and sugarcane) from different areas in Lahore. Three media i.e., Nutrient agar, MacConkey agar and Eosin Methylene Blue agar (EMB) were used for enumeration and isolation of various bacterial genera. Among the total 164 isolated bacterial strains, 37 were recovered from sugarcane juice samples, 91 from carrot juice samples and 36 from orange juice samples. The most frequent strains were E. coli and Enterobaacter spp. which were most likely due to the contamination from water. A panel of 10 antibiotics including Erythromycin, Ceftizoxime, Ciprofloxacin, Tobramycin, Vancomycin, Ampicillin, Streptomycin, Polymyxin B, Levofloxacin, and Cephalexin was used to determine the antibiotics sensitivity (AST) status of the isolated strains. It was observed that Levofloxacin showed highest zones of inhibition against all the tested strains and overall, strains didn’t have significant resistance against the tested antibiotics. The practice of proper hand and fruit washing can minimize the potential threat of bacterial contamination in food products.