Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A look into the information your smartphone leaks

Some smartphone applications (apps) pose a risk to users' personal information. Events of apps leaking information stored in smartphones illustrate the danger that they present. In this paper, we investigate the amount of personal information leaked during the installation and use of apps when accessing the Internet. We have opted for the implementation of a Man-in-the-Middle proxy to intercept the network traffic generated by 20 popular free apps installed on different smartphones of distinctive vendors. This work describes the technical considerations and requirements for the deployment of the monitoring WiFi network employed during the conducted experiments. The presented results show that numerous mobile and personal unique identifiers, along with personal information are leaked by several of the evaluated apps, commonly during the installation process.
Contributions au recalage d'images et à la reconstruction 3D de scènes rigides et déformables. (Contributions to Image Registration and to the 3D Reconstruction of Rigid and Deformable Scenes)

Ce document comprend deux parties, la premiere redigee en francais et la deuxieme en anglais. Alors que la premiere partie est une synthese de l'ensemble de mes activites professionnelles (animation de la communaute scientifique, encadrement, enseignement, projets de recherche, participation a des comites de programme, expertises, publications, etc.), la deuxieme partie porte sur les aspects purement scientifiques. Un resume detaille de la deuxieme partie est cependant donne dans la premiere, ainsi qu'un ensemble de perspectives. La deuxieme partie va de pair avec un recueil de mes articles les plus representatifs dont la structure est similaire. L'annexe A explicite les acronymes des Universites, instituts et groupes de recherche utilises les plus frequemment dans ce document. Ce document couvre la periode 2004 ? 2007, alors que ma these de doctorat couvre en detail mes contributions scientifiques sur la periode 2000 ? 2003. Les contributions que je decris sont issues de travaux menes a differents endroits : au LASMEA en tant que Charge de Recherche CNRS, a l'Universite d'Oxford avec Andrew Zisserman en tant que post-doctorant, et au DIKU a Copenhague en tant que "Visiting Professor". J'ai travaille seul sur certains themes et au travers de nombreuses collaborations sur d'autres, avec mes etudiants, des etudiants en visite, des stagiaires, et bien sur d'autres chercheurs. Il est dans ce cadre important de bien manier la premiere et la troisieme personne. J'exprime, notamment dans l'introduction et les perspectives, des points de vue qui n'engagent que moi. Ils sont parfois bases sur des travaux effectues en collaboration avec d'autres chercheurs, ce qui rend difficile le choix du pronom. J'ai essaye d'indiquer de maniere rigoureuse les contributions de chacun.
Interaction between proteolytic strains of Lactococcus lactis influenced by different types of proteinase during growth in milk

The influence of the type of cell envelope-located proteinase (PI versus PIII) on the associative growth of Lactococcus lactis in milk was studied. Two genetically engineered strains, differing only by the type of proteinase, were first used as a model study. An interaction occurred during the second exponential growth phase of the mixed culture and resulted in a decrease in growth rate of the PI-type proteinase strain, whereas that of the PIII-type proteinase strain remained unaffected. The reduction in proteolytic activity of the PI-type proteinase strain (presumably resulting from an inhibition of the synthesis of the enzyme) due to the peptides released by the PIII-type proteinase was found to be partly responsible for this interaction. Extension of the study to wild-type proteinase-positive L. lactis strains showed a systematic imbalance of the mixture of the two strains in favor of the PIII-type proteinase strain.
Barriers to engagement with a personal informatics productivity tool

Technology helps us get work done but also provides many distractions. As a result, seemingly unproductive activities such as social networking sites (SNS) cause considerable stress. This paper reports a series of studies into whether personal informatics (PI) tools for productivity can make people more aware of their SNS usage and encourage behaviour change. The first two studies took an in-the-wild approach, encouraging students to use a PI tool, RescueTime, to improve their estimations of how much time they spent using SNS, in line with research that had used this technique to reduce participants' stress. However, participants simply did not engage with RescueTime in the studies. A further interview study found that there are four barriers that inhibit engagement with this PI tool and reduce its potential to facilitate behaviour change. In particular, the way it presents data lacks: salience; contextual information; credibility; and action advice.
Effectiveness of different min imally invasive epiphysiodesis techniques in the management of pediatric leg length discrepancies: a systematic review protocol

JBI Review question/objective: The objective of this review is to synthesize the best available evidence on the use of minimally invasive epiphysiodesis (MIE) for the management of pediatric leg length discrepancies (LLDs). The effectiveness of four different MIE techniques will be compared, including transphyseal screws, physeal drilling and curettage, physeal stapling and guided growth with eight-Plates. Specific review questions to be addressed include: What method of MIE is most effective at achieving growth arrest and correcting a LLD in children? Percentage of correction Rate of correction Are the postoperative complication profiles different for each method of MIE? Angular deformity Failure of growth arrest Infection Re-operation/intervention How do children respond to each technique? Length of hospital stay -Time to return to activities of daily living such as schooling
Composite Grid Atomistic Continuum Method: An Adaptive Approach to Bridge Continuum with Atomistic Analysis

The Composite Grid Atomistic Continuum Method (CACM), a method to couple continuum and atomistic models is proposed in a three dimensional setting. In this method, atomistic analysis is used only at places where it is needed in order to capture the intrinsically non-linear/non-local behavior of the material at the atomic scale, while continuum analysis is used elsewhere for efficiency. The atomistic model is defined on a separate grid that overlaps the continuum in selected regions. The atomistic and the smallest scale continuum model are connected by appropriately defined operators. The continuum model provides boundary conditions to the discrete model while the atomistic model returns correcting eigenstrains. The adaptive selection of the spatial regions where the atomistic correction is needed is made based on error indicators developed to capture the non-linearity and non-locality modeling errors. The method is applied to represent dislocation nucleation from crack tips and nanoindentation in aluminum.
Use of mulberry–soybean intercropping in salt–alkali soil impacts the diversity of the soil bacterial community

Diverse intercropping system has been used to control disease and improve productivity in the field. In this research, the bacterial communities in salt–alkali soils of monoculture and intercropping mulberry and soybean were studied using 454‐pyrosequencing of the 16S rDNA gene. The dominant taxonomic groups were Proteobacteria, Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, Chloroflexi, Bacteroidetes, Planctomycetes and Gemmatimonadetes and these were present across all samples. However, the diversity and composition of bacterial communities varied between monoculture and intercropping samples. The estimated bacterial diversity (H') was higher with intercropping soybean than in monoculture soybean, whereas H' showed an opposite pattern in monoculture and intercropping mulberry. Populations of Actinobacteria, Acidobacteria, and Proteobacteria were variable, depending on growth of plants as monoculture or intercropped. Most of Actinobacteria and Chloroflexi were found in intercropping samples, while Acidobacteria and Proteobacteria were present at a higher percentage in monoculture samples. The plant diversity of aboveground and microbial diversity of belowground was linked and soil pH seemed to influence the bacterial community. Finally, the specific plant species was the major factor that determined the bacterial community in the salt–alkali soils.
Exploring public e-service sustainability: In the case of Malaysia

E-service enables citizens to interact and receive services from most government agencies which are convenient, dependable, and less costly. Due to high investment allocated by the government all around the world to implement the e-service initiatives, it is important to ensure that the public e-service is sustained and continues to evolve. This study aims to identify the elements and dimensions of the e-service sustainability and how it can influence its sustainability. A case study was conducted at the one of the government agency in Malaysia to explore the public e-service sustainability criteria as it is perceived as a role model of a successful e-service provider. Qualitative data collected through interviews, observations and document analysis were analyzed verbatim using thematic analysis. Two regulators, three implementers, two e-service providers, nine users and one representative from a non-profit organization were interviewed to get a better understanding of the public e-service sustainability. Three dimensions with seventeen elements emerged from the case study and were visualized through the public e-service model.
Reproductive phenomena during the post partum-preconception interval in the Uganda kob.

Summary. Female Uganda kob antelope conceive while lactating maximally and may continue lactating to 180 days of pregnancy. Udders of lactating females exceed 450 g in weight; in non-lactating adults, udders weigh < 300 g. The uterus is grossly involuted by 20 to 30 days post partum, declining from about 1000 g to < 100 g. Immature ovarian follicles of 2 to 5 mm diameter occur at about the same rate both in pregnant and non-pregnant adults. Mature follicles >5 mm in diameter are absent in the last 60 days of gestation and are rare in the first 20 days post partum. Follicles in oestrous females become >8 mm, increasing to 11 mm at ovulation which may commence at about 10 days post partum. Some females may conceive at this time. Seven females conceived at < 65 days post partum. Post partum females commonly have up to four or five oestrous cycles before conception. Many oestrous periods recur at 6- to 13-day intervals and are accompanied by ovulations resulting in accumulations of small cl which begin to regress before reaching maturity. These brief dioestrous intervals are thought to result from premature regression of cyclic cl brought on by increased secretion of oxytocin induced by various sensory stimuli associated with the territorial mating grounds to which oestrous females go to mate.
Ludwig Döderlein’s Pioneering Research on Echinoderms, Ecology and Evolution: A brief historical review*

The German zoologist and paleontologist Ludwig Heinrich Philip Doderlein (1855–1936) was one of the foremost echi­noderm researchers of his time. Self-taught in many subjects of natural science, he rose from provincial obscurity to international fame. We present some aspects of: a) his life history; b) his echinoderm research; c) his contributions to ecology and evolutionary biology, with the coral genus Fungia as an example; and d) his achievements in building up and promoting biological collections. The latter is illustrated by the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology, being second only to the Zoological Museum of Strasbourg in the diversity of Doderlein specimens that survived the perils of two world wars.
Mothers and Marimbas in “The Bight”: Bishop’s Danse Macabre

The impact of Elizabeth Bishop’s maternal loss on the symbolic order of her poems is well-established, but the ways in which Bishop draws on literary tradition in exploring that loss have received less attention. This essay offers a close reading of “The Bight” that demonstrates how the poem unites the key elements of danse macabre—skeletal imagery, musical procession, grisly humor—with apprehensions of the absent mother, an approach founded upon but aesthetically distinct from original symboliste works such as Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, or the work of American symbolists such as Wallace Stevens. The essay argues that, in contrast to the imitative earlier poems “Florida” and “Current Dreams,” “The Bight” constitutes an intimate, modern reinvigoration of the danse macabre tradition, representative of both a post- Freudian sensibility alert to psychological submergence and repression, and of Bishop’s characteristically subtle deployment of symbolic planes in her apparently realist work.
Hydraulic actuator leakage quantification scheme using extended Kalman filter and sequential test method

This study is a further research based on previous published papers focusing on hydraulic leakage fault detection and isolation. The authors have verified the effectiveness of a FDI scheme based on extended Kalman filter (EKF) for the change of supply pressure (An and Sepehri, 2003). A completed FDI scheme (An and Sepehri, 2005) was also proposed by the authors focusing on various actuator leakages. However, the quantification of the leakages was not elaborated. In this paper, the quantification of leakage faults in a hydraulically powered actuation system is presented. A quantification scheme based on sequential analysis (SA) is proposed and is shown to be effective to estimate the seriousness of the leakage. A bank of hypothesis tests that based on Wald's method (Wald, 1947) is composed to report the average value of the residual error. The relation between the residual error and the corresponding leakage is determined and, based on this information, an assessment of the leakage damage can be achieved
Transmission-Line Model of Nonuniform Leaky-Wave Antennas

Nonuniform leaky-wave antennas (LWAs) are analyzed and synthesized using a lossy transmission line model. The analysis is based on a general waveguide circuit theory. Compared to the classical approach, the model yields a higher accuracy in the computation of both aperture field distribution and radiation patterns. The proposed analysis is also able to provide scattering parameters of the whole structure in a fraction of a second, which is valuable for antenna optimization. Based on the analysis, a general method for far-field pattern synthesis utilizing global optimization is presented. As an application demonstration, the half-mode substrate-integrated waveguide (HMSIW), or half-width microstrip line, has been selected as basis structure for the LWA designs. Two antennas have been optimized targeting different specifications, i.e., a low-sidelobe level and a wide null in the radiation pattern. Experimental results are provided for these selected examples of nonuniform LWAs, which ultimately validate the proposed technique as an improvement over the classical approach.
The City as a Self-Help Book: The Psychology of Urban Promises

Despite the many negative aspects of life in cities, urban promises of economic prosperity, freedom and happiness have fuelled the imagination of generations of migrants, who have flocked to cities in search of a better life, invariably exaggerating the opportunities and neglected the potential disadvantages of their choice. This paper uses insights from psychological literature to better understand why people have such strong, positive and apparently overrated expectations about cities. We dwell into concepts of bounded rationality to describe the cognitive biases and heuristics affecting decision-making under uncertainty and apply them to the way individuals perceive and act upon the promises of urban life. By linking this literature to urban theory, we can better understand how individuals make their decisions about moving to and living in cities. We thereby offer an understanding of urbanisation and migration processes departing from economic rationality assumptions and explain the remarkable attractive force of cities throughout human history. Finally, we discuss the ways in which human biases in favour of city narratives and bright urban futures can be exploited by 'triumphalist' accounts of cities in policy and media, which neglect the embedded injustices and structural problems of urban life.
A 40MHz 4th-order active-UGB-RC filter using VCO-based amplifiers with zero compensation

This paper describes a 4th-order active-UGB-RC filter using VCO-based amplifiers with zero compensation. The VCO-based amplifier intrinsically has a huge DC gain without the associated stability penalties of conventional multi-stage amplifiers such as reducing unity-gain bandwidth or requiring large area by compensation schemes. By using the large gain of the amplifier, the filter achieves small area and good linearity performance for a signal bandwidth of 40MHz. The filter prototype in a 55nm CMOS process has an active area of 0.07mm2 and a power consumption of 7.8mW at 1.2V. The measured in-band IIP3 and out-of-band IIP3 are 27.3dBm and 22.5dBm respectively.
Anti‐angiogenic therapy affects the relationship between tumor vascular structure and function: A correlation study between micro–computed tomography angiography and dynamic contrast enhanced MRI

To compare the effects of two anti‐angiogenic drugs, bevacizumab and a cytosolic phospholipase A2‐α inhibitor (AVX235), on the relationship between vascular structure and dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE)‐MRI measurements in a patient‐derived breast cancer xenograft model.
Study of a high-speed motorization for electric vehicle based on PMSM, IM and VRSM

The paper presents the study of a high speed motorization dedicated for electric vehicle (EV). Three types of electrical machines are analyzed: permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM), induction machine (IM) and variable synchronous reluctance machine (VRSM). They are studied from the electromagnetic point of view, with closer look on the power density, energetic performances and torque wave (this last parameter being critical while controlling the transients on the EV's motorization). Mechanical aspects will be also treated, since they are influencing the losses and since the presence of centrifugal forces could irreversibly affect the structure of the motors. The best suited variant is constructed and preliminary information on the prototype is given.
The fitness of names to drawings. A cross-cultural study in Tanganyika.

A set of experiments is described in which native children in the Mahali peninsula, Lake Tanganyika, were asked to match nonsense names with abstract drawings. The African children allotted names to drawings in a highly consistent manner and their choices were similar to those of a control group of English school children. It is argued that the results support the theory that purely structural similarities between sounds and shapes can be appreciated and used in naming.
A Simple and Efficient MapReduce Algorithm for Data Cube Materialization

Data cube materialization is a classical database operator introduced in Gray et al.~(Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Vol.~1), which is critical for many analysis tasks. Nandi et al.~(Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol.~6) first studied cube materialization for large scale datasets using the MapReduce framework, and proposed a sophisticated modification of a simple broadcast algorithm to handle a dataset with a 216GB cube size within 25 minutes with 2k machines in 2012. We take a different approach, and propose a simple MapReduce algorithm which (1) minimizes the total number of copy-add operations, (2) leverages locality of computation, and (3) balances work evenly across machines. As a result, the algorithm shows excellent performance, and materialized a real dataset with a cube size of 35.0G tuples and 1.75T bytes in 54 minutes, with 0.4k machines in 2014.
Protein structure prediction enhanced with evolutionary diversity: SPEED

For naturally occurring proteins, similar sequence implies similar structure. Consequently, multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) often are used in template‐based modeling of protein structure and have been incorporated into fragment‐based assembly methods. Our previous homology‐free structure prediction study introduced an algorithm that mimics the folding pathway by coupling the formation of secondary and tertiary structure. Moves in the Monte Carlo procedure involve only a change in a single pair of ϕ,ψ backbone dihedral angles that are obtained from a Protein Data Bank‐based distribution appropriate for each amino acid, conditional on the type and conformation of the flanking residues. We improve this method by using MSAs to enrich the sampling distribution, but in a manner that does not require structural knowledge of any protein sequence (i.e., not homologous fragment insertion). In combination with other tools, including clustering and refinement, the accuracies of the predicted secondary and tertiary structures are substantially improved and a global and position‐resolved measure of confidence is introduced for the accuracy of the predictions. Performance of the method in the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP8) is discussed.
UAV motion planning and obstacle avoidance based on adaptive 3D cell decomposition: Continuous space vs discrete space

One important challenge in the current research of UAVs is the obstacle avoidance feature, a highly demanded capability in all kinds of UAV applications. Different algorithms that perform sampling tasks in continuous or discrete spaces are widely used in path planning. The Probabilistic Roadmap (PRM) and Rapidly Exploring Random Tree (RRT) variants have a stochastic essence, which allows them to obtain a response even in wide and complex environments. However, they present disadvantages related to computational cost and time convergence of results. In this paper a survey on sampling-based planners is presented, comparing algorithms with continuous and discrete sampling in 3D environments. On the other hand, two new variants are introduced: the Exact Cell Decomposition on Probabilistic Roadmap (ECD-PRM), as an extension of PRM method, and the Modified Adaptive Cell Decomposition (MACD) performing a reduced space decomposition. The comparison is performed attending to several criteria such as path cost, number of generated nodes and number of control points in the final path, whenever it has been reached.
On sampling rate, analog prefiltering, and sufficient statistics for digital receivers

We consider the joint sequence estimation, timing and phase recovery for linear modulation. The paper differs from the classical ones in the sense that time-discrete algorithms suitable for fully digital receivers are discussed. Sufficient conditions are given such that the signal samples represent sufficient statistics. These conditions involve signal bandwidth, sampling/symbol rate and the analog prefilter characteristics. It is shown that the sampling rate need not be an exact multiple of the symbol rate, i.e., the samples can be taken from a free-running oscillator. All subsequent signal processing operations in the receiver then operate with the clock of this free-running oscillator. Timing recovery is then performed by a time-variant linear digital interpolator and a decimator. Carrier recovery and sequence estimation are performed at an average rate of one symbol per sample. The digital matched filter for this case is derived for an arbitrary colored noise spectrum. >