Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On all-or-nothing transforms and password-authenticated key exchange protocols

This thesis provides a formal analysis of two kinds of cryptographic objects that used to be treated with much less rigor: All-or-Nothing Transforms (AONTs) and Password-Authenticated Key Exchange protocols. For both, novel formal definitions of security are given, and then practical and efficient constructions are proven secure. The constructions for password-authenticated key exchange are novel, and the AONT construction is an application of an existing scheme to a new area. AONTs have been proposed by Rivest as a mode of operation for block ciphers. An AONT is an unkeyed, invertible, randomized transformation, with the property that it is hard to invert unless all of the output is known. Applications of AONTs include improving the security and efficiency of encryption. We give several strong formal definitions of security for AONTs. We then prove that Optimal Asymmetric Encryption Padding (OAEP) satisfies these definitions (in the random oracle model). This is the first construction of an AONT that has been proven secure in the strong sense. We also show that no AONT can achieve substantially better security than OAEP. The second part of this thesis is about password-authenticated key exchange protocols. We present a new protocol called PAK which is the first such Diffie-Hellman-based protocol to provide a formal proof of security (in the random oracle model) against active adversaries. In addition to the PAK protocol that provides mutual explicit authentication, we also show a more efficient protocol called PPK that is provably secure in the implicit-authentication model. We then extend PAK to a protocol called PAK-X, in which one side (the client) stores a plaintext version of the password, while the other side (the server) only stores a verifier for the password. We formally prove security of PAK-X, even when the server is compromised. Our formal model for password-authenticated key exchange is new, and may be of independent interest. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)
Low dimensional manifold embedding for scattering coefficients of intrapartum fetale heart rate variability

Intrapartum fetal surveillance for early detection of fetal acidosis in clinical practice focuses on reducing neonatal morbidity via early detection. It is the subject of on going research studies attempting notably to improve detection performance by reducing false positive rate. In that context, the present contribution tailors to fetal heart rate variability analysis a graph-based dimensionality reduction procedure performed on scattering coefficients. Applied to a high quality and well-documented database constituted by obstetricians from a French academic hospital, the low dimensional embedding enables to distinguish between the temporal dynamics of healthy and acidotic fetuses, as well as to achieve satisfactory detection performance detection compared to those obtained by the clinical-benchmark FIGO criteria.
Clinical Interventions in Aging Dovepress Effectiveness of Exercise and Protein Supplementation Intervention on Body Composition, Functional Fitness, and Oxidative Stress among Elderly Malays with Sarcopenia

Sarcopenia, characterized as muscle loss that occurs with aging, is a major health problem in an aging population, due to its implications on mobility, quality of life, and fall risk. Protein supplementation could improve the physical fitness by increasing protein anabolism, and exercise has a documented evidence of positive effect on functional status among the elderly. However, the combined effect of both protein supplementation and exercise has not been investigated among sarcopenic elderly in the Asian population. Thus, this study aimed to determine the effectiveness of exercise intervention and protein supplementation either alone or in combination for 12 weeks, on body composition, functional fitness, and oxidative stress among elderly Malays with sarcopenia. Sixty five sarcopenic elderly Malays aged 60−74 years were assigned to the control group, exercise group (ExG), protein supplementation group (PrG), or the combination of exercise and protein supplementation group. A significant interaction effect between body weight and body mass index (BMI) was observed, with the PrG (−2.1% body weight, −1.8% BMI) showing the highest reductions. Further, there was a decrease in % body fat (−4.5%) and an increase in fat-free mass (kg) (+5.7%) in the ExG after 12 weeks (P , 0.05). The highest increments in lower and upper body strength were observed in the PrG (73.2%) and ExG (47.6%), respectively. In addition, the ExG showed a reduction in superoxide dismutase (SOD) levels, and both interventions did not alter either lipid or protein oxidation. In conclusion, the exercise program was found to improve muscle strength and body composition, while protein supplementation reduced body weight and increased upper body strength, among sarcopenic elderly in Malaysia.
Additional furosemide treatment beyond saline hydration for the prevention of contrast-induced nephropathy: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.

OBJECTIVES There have been conflicting results on the clinical utility of furosemide in preventing contrast-induced nephropathy (CIN). This study aimed to elucidate the effect of additional furosemide treatment beyond saline hydration on CIN post radiologic procedures by a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). METHODS The Medline, EMBASE, and Cochrane databases were systematically searched. Two reviewers independently determined the eligibility of studies that randomly assigned patients undergoing radiologic procedure to receive additional peri-procedural furosemide injection or intravenous saline hydration alone. Combined results were presented as risk ratios (RR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) by random-effect models. RESULTS We identified 5 RCTs including 1330 patients. Of them 659 received peri-procedural furosemide injection in addition to saline hydration, and 671 only received intravenous saline hydration (the control). Relatively small total number of dialysis events and heart failure events were reported in the included studies (n = 18 across 5 trials, n = 24 across 3 trials, respectively). Compared to the control, additional furosemide treatment did not significantly increase the incidence of CIN (RR = 1.18; 95% CI, 0.50-2.78; P = 0.71) and the risk of dialysis (RR = 1.03; 95% CI, 0.41-2.57; P = 0.95) post radiologic procedure. Furthermore, furosemide treatment appeared to decrease the occurrence of heart failure (RR = 0.35; 95% CI, 0.14-0.88; P = 0.02). CONCLUSIONS Peri-procedural furosemide treatment in addition to saline hydration did not provide significantly prophylactic effect on CIN after radiologic procedure. Nevertheless, the process seemed likely to decrease the risk of heart failure post saline hydration.
XMem: type-safe, transparent, shared memory for cross-runtime communication and coordination

Developers commonly build contemporary enterprise applications using type-safe, component-based platforms, such as J2EE, and architect them to comprise multiple tiers, such as a web container, application server, and database engine. Administrators increasingly execute each tier in its own managed runtime environment (MRE) to improve reliability and to manage system complexity through the fault containment and modularity offered by isolated MRE instances. Such isolation, however, necessitates expensive cross-tier communication based on protocols such as object serialization and remote procedure calls. Administrators commonly co-locate communicating MREs on a single host to reduce communication overhead and to better exploit increasing numbers of available processing cores. However, state-of-the-art MREs offer no support for more efficient communication between co-located MREs, while fast inter-process communication mechanisms, such as shared memory, are widely available as a standard operating system service on most modern platforms. To address this growing need, we present the design and implementation of XMem ? type-safe, transparent, shared memory support for co-located MREs. XMem guarantees type-safety through coordinated, parallel, multi-process class loading and garbage collection. To avoid introducing any level of indirection, XMem manipulates virtual memory mapping. In addition, object sharing in XMem is fully transparent: shared objects are identical to local objects in terms of field access, synchronization, garbage collection, and method invocation, with the only difference being that sharedto-private pointers are disallowed. XMem facilitates easy integration and use by existing communication technologies and software systems, such as RMI, JNDI, JDBC, serialization/XML, and network sockets. We have implemented XMem in the open-source, productionquality HotSpot Java Virtual Machine. Our experimental evaluation, based on core communication technologies underlying J2EE, as well as using open-source server applications, indicates that XMem significantly improves throughput and response time by avoiding the overheads imposed by object serialization and network communication.
Monte Carlo Bayesian filtering and smoothing for TVAR signals in symmetric α-stable noise

In this paper we propose an on-line Bayesian filtering and smoothing method for time series models with heavy-tailed alpha-stable noise, with a particular focus on TVAR models. We first point out how a filter that fails to take into account the heavy-tailed character of the noise performs poorly and then examine how an α-stable based particle filter can be devised to overcome this problem. The filtering methodology is based on a scale mixtures of normals (SMiN) representation of the α-stable distribution, which allows efficient Rao-Blackwellised implementation within a conditionally Gaussian framework, and requires no direct evaluation of the α-stable density, which is in general unavailable in closed form. The methodology is shown to work well, outperforming the traditional Gaussian methods both on simulated and real audio data. The analysis of real degraded audio samples highlights the fact that α-stable distributions are particularly well suited for noise modelling in a realistic scenario.
The Research of Digital Image Quality Evaluation Method for Beef Tenderness

Abstract-Digital image quality evaluation is a relatively new area of research. In this field, how to choose a good image is an important research content for enhancing the efficiency of pattern recognition system. In this paper, beef images are used as an object of study for computing tenderness. Based on the traditional evaluation method of image quality, the thesis analyzes some factors that affect the quality of digital image and proposes an comprehensive evaluation method combined Spatial Distribution of Edges, Color Distribution , Hue Count, Blur, contrast and brightness. Experiments prove that: Image quality assessment scores marked from the method proposed in this paper are consistent with results gotten from pattern recognition system and the efficiency of pattern recognition system is significantly increased. It means that the proposed approach is effective.
A High-Precision Calibration and Optimization Method for Stereo Vision System

Stereo-vision plays an important part in planetary exploration. A high-precision calibration method is introduced for such system, which uses wide-angle lens. It makes use of planar homography constraint to estimate intrinsic and extrinsic parameters. On the basis of this initial guess, an optimization scheme is used to minimize a new cost function, 3D reprojection error sum. All calibration parameters of two cameras are globally optimized simultaneously with genetic algorithm (GA). Both simulation and real image experiment results show this scheme have much higher precision than traditional methods
Blind Spectral Weighting for Robust Speaker Identification under Reverberation Mismatch

Room reverberation poses various deleterious effects on performance of automatic speech systems. Speaker identification (SID) performance, in particular, degrades rapidly as reverberation time increases. Reverberation causes two forms of spectro-temporal distortions on speech signals: i) self-masking which is due to early reflections and ii) overlap-masking which is due to late reverberation. Overlap-masking effect of reverberation has been shown to have a greater adverse impact on performance of speech systems. Motivated by this fact, this study proposes a blind spectral weighting (BSW) technique for suppressing the reverberation overlap-masking effect on SID systems. The technique is blind in the sense that prior knowledge of neither the anechoic signal nor the room impulse response is required. Performance of the proposed technique is evaluated on speaker verification tasks under simulated and actual reverberant mismatched conditions. Evaluations are conducted in the context of the conventional GMM-UBM as well as the state-of-the-art i-vector based systems. The GMM-UBM experiments are performed using speech material from a new data corpus well suited for speaker verification experiments under actual reverberant mismatched conditions, entitled MultiRoom8. The i-vector experiments are carried out with microphone (interview and phonecall) data from the NIST SRE 2010 extended evaluation set which are digitally convolved with three different measured room impulse responses extracted from the Aachen impulse response (AIR) database. Experimental results prove that incorporating the proposed blind technique into the standard MFCC feature extraction framework yields significant improvement in SID performance under reverberation mismatch.
SGNET: Implementation insights

We present in this paper SGNET, a distributed framework to collect information on Internet attacks, with special attention to self-propagating malware and code injections. This framework is the result of our latest research work on the so-called ScriptGen technology. It is characterized by several unique characteristics that may allow it to provide in the future an extremely interesting perspective on the Internet attacks. In order to make it possible, we need to spread its observation points as much as possible to obtain a complete view on the different blocks of the IP space. We present here an overview of the characteristics of its design with special focus on the possibility to expand it and improve it with additional functional blocks. The SGNET is in fact an open initiative, integrating together tools produced by different research teams such as Argos (VU Amsterdam), Nepenthes, Anubis (TU Wien) and VirusTotal (Hispasec Sistemas). Everybody is welcome and encouraged to participate to this initiative, by hosting observation points and/or by extending this framework with additional modules.
Evidential multinomial logistic regression for multiclass classifier calibration

The calibration of classifiers is an important task in information fusion. To compare or combine the outputs of several classifiers, they need to be represented in a common space. Probabilistic calibration methods transform the output of a classifier into a posterior probability distribution. In this paper, we introduce an evidential calibration method for multiclass classification problems. Our approach uses an extension of multinomial logistic regression to the theory of belief functions. We demonstrate that the use of belief functions instead of probability distributions is often beneficial. In particular, when different classifiers are trained with unbalanced amount of training data, the gain achieved by our evidential approach can become significant. We applied our method to the calibration of multiclass SVM classifiers which were constructed through a “one-vs-all” framework. Experiments were conducted using six different datasets from the UCI repository.
Amending PHB with Algal Biomass to Enhance Biodegradability

Pollution due to petroleum-based plastic is a growing problem all over the world. Petroleumbased plastics that fill landfills and oceans take hundreds of years to degrade. One possible solution to this growing problem is to increase the use of bioplastics . Polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) is a widely studied bioplastic that is biodegradable in both soil and marine environments. However, PHB use is limited due to its poor mechanical properties. Past researchers have investigated the use of natural additives, primarily different types of plant fibers , to enhance both the mechanical properties and degradation rates of bioplastics. The purpose of this project was to develop a composite bioplastic using PHB and algal biomass in order to enhance the mechanical and degradation properties of PHB. Composite bioplastic films were fonned using a solvent casting method with algal biomass to PHB ratios of 0, 5, 10, and 20% on a weight-to-weight basis. To test the mechanical properties of the biocomposites using a tensile testing machine, the films were cut into dogbones, 3 cm in length. The films were also cut into 2.5 x 3 cm ships that were placed into gas-tight serum vials filled with seawater to measure the degradation rate through CO2 evolution. The mechanical prope1iies of the biocomposite that were tested include ultimate tensile strength , modulus of elasticity, and percent elongation at break. The ultimate tensile strength and modulus of elasticity of the 20% algae biocomposite were found to be significantly lower than those of the neat , 5, and 10% algae biocomposite. The percent elongation at break of the different biocomposite blends, however, were not significantly different. For the rate of degradation, the neat , 5, and 10% algae biocomposites were found to degrade at significantly different rates, with the 10% blend having the highest rate of degradation followed by the 5% blend and then the neat PHB . The 20% algae biocomposite degraded at a rate that was not significantly different from the degradation rate of the 10% algae biocomposite. From the results of the mechanical properties and degradation rate testing, the 10% algae biocomposite was found to have mechanical properties similar to those of neat PHB and a degradation rate that was much higher than that of neat PHB. Therefore, it can be concluded that the addition of algal biomass to PHB on a 10% weight-to-weight basis enhances both the mechanical properties and degradation rate of PHB.
Movement sequencing in Huntington disease

Abstract Objectives. To examine longitudinal changes in movement sequencing in prodromal Huntington's disease (HD) participants (795 prodromal HD; 225 controls) from the PREDICT-HD study. Methods. Prodromal HD participants were tested over seven annual visits and were stratified into three groups (low, medium, high) based on their CAG-Age Product (CAP) score, which indicates likely increasing proximity to diagnosis. A cued movement sequence task assessed the impact of advance cueing on response initiation and execution via three levels of advance information. Results. Compared to controls, all CAP groups showed longer initiation and movement times across all conditions at baseline, demonstrating a disease gradient for the majority of outcomes. Across all conditions, the high CAP group had the highest mean for baseline testing, but also demonstrated an increase in movement time across the study. For initiation time, the high CAP group showed the highest mean baseline time across all conditions, but also faster decreasing rates of change over time. Conclusions. With progress to diagnosis, participants may increasingly use compensatory strategies, as evidenced by faster initiation. However, this occurred in conjunction with slowed execution times, suggesting a decline in effectively accessing control processes required to translate movement into effective execution.
Auroral Hiss Emissions During Cassini's Grand Finale: Diverse Electrodynamic Interactions Between Saturn and Its Rings

The Cassini Grand Finale orbits offered a new view of Saturn and its environment owing to multiple highly inclined orbits with unprecedented proximity to the planet during closest approach. The Radio and Plasma Wave Science instrument detected striking signatures of plasma waves in the southern hemisphere. These all propagate in the whistler mode and are classified as (1) a filled funnel‐shaped emission, commonly known as auroral hiss. Here however, our analysis indicates that they are likely associated with currents connected to the rings. (2) First observations of very low frequency saucers directly linked to the planet on field lines also connected to the rings. The latter observations are unique to low altitude orbits, and their presence at the Earth and Saturn alike shows that they are fundamental plasma waves in planetary ionospheres. Our results give an insight, from a unique perspective, into the dynamic and diverse nature of Saturn's environment.
The Financial Management of Catastrophic Flood Risks in Emerging‐Economy Countries

This article examines the potential of pre‐ and post‐disaster instruments for funding disaster response and recovery and for creating incentives for flood loss mitigation in countries with emerging or transition economies. As a concrete case, we discuss the disaster recovery arrangements following the 1997 flood disaster in Poland. We examine the advantages and limitations of hedging instruments, which are instruments for transferring the risk to investors either through insurance or capital market‐based securities. We compare these mechanisms with financing instruments, whereby the government sets aside funds prior to a disaster or taps its own funding sources after the event occurs. We show how hedging instruments can be designed to create incentives for the mitigation of damage to public infrastructure using the flood proofing of a water‐treatment plant on the hypothetical Topping River as an illustrative example. We conclude that hedging instruments can be an attractive alternative to financing instruments that have been traditionally used in the poorer, emerging‐economy countries to fund disaster recovery. Since very poor countries are likely to have difficulty paying the price of protection prior to a disaster, we suggest that international lending institutions consider innovations for subsidizing these payments.
Software-based wireless power transfer platform for power control experimentation

We present the design and evaluation of a software-based wireless power transfer platform that enables various open- and closed-loop power control functions to be prototyped and experimented. Our platform is based on a loosely-coupled planar wireless power transfer system using the class E power amplifier via inductive coupling. In conjunction with the system, flexible control functions are implemented using NI DAQ board and algorithms on MATLAB/Simulink software. For verifying our platform, we show two power control experimentations. The one is an output voltage regulation on different receiver position using a closed-loop power control, and the other is a no-load and metal detection using an open-loop power control. We show the good performance results for our two experimentations. We believe it is the first inexpensive platform that readily experiments the power control algorithm of a loosely-coupled planar wireless power transfer system.