Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The transmembrane adaptor protein SIT regulates T-cell development and homeostasis

Acknowledgement First of all, I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Burkhart Schraven for giving me the opportunity to work in his institute, providing an international, motivating and enthusiastic atmosphere as well as for his strong scientific guidance. I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Luca Simeoni for his nearly four years of supervision, and the many useful comments and suggestions I have received over the duration of my work. There are many people to whom I owe a debt of thanks for their support over the last years. I am grateful to my former colleagues Michal Smida, and Dr. Mauro Togni for being nice collaborative colleagues all the time who never refused to share their expertise with me. In addition, they were always nice friends who always put up with my occasional bad mood and helped me to overcome them. I should like to thank Dr. Jonatan Lindquist for being always helpful when I needed it. My special thanks go to Mathias Wolff for his excellent assistance in the animal facility as well as for his patience to deal with my incapability to speak a good German. Needless to say that this dissertation would not exist without the contribution of many supporting people to whom I am also very thankful. Last but certainly not least, I would like to show my gratitude to my wife Anita who gave me continuous emotional support especially during those times when everything went wrong and when I tended to lose my hope and strength to finish my work. Without her support, I would not have been able to complete my thesis.
The effectiveness of community schools: evidence from the Netherlands

Introductie Brede scholen worden steeds populairder. Op dit moment zijn er in Nederland officieel 1600 brede scholen in het voortgezet onderwijs en 420 in het basisonderwijs. De toename van het aantal brede scholen hangt direct samen met een grote hoeveelheid publieke middelen die vanuit gemeenten voor brede scholen beschikbaar zijn, in de vorm van subsidies. De gemeente Schiedam bijvoorbeeld heeft tussen 2000 en 2012 ongeveer €4,6 miljoen euro besteed aan subsidies voor brede scholen.
Incorporating Failure-to-Success Transitions in Imitation Learning for a Dynamic Pouring Task

We present an imitation learning approach for a dynamic fluid pouring task. Our approach allows learning from errors made by humans and how they recovered from these errors subsequently. We collect both successful and failed human demonstrations of the task. Our algorithm combines a support vector machine based classifier and iterative search to generate initial task parameters for the robot. Next, a refinement algorithm, capturing how demonstrators change parameters to transition from failure to success, enables the robot to address failures. Experimental results with a Baxter robot are reported to illustrate our approach.
Microbially induced corrosion of carbon steel in deep groundwater environment

The metallic low and intermediate level radioactive waste generally consists of carbon steel and stainless steels. The corrosion rate of carbon steel in deep groundwater is typically low, unless the water is very acidic or microbial activity in the environment is high. Therefore, the assessment of microbially induced corrosion of carbon steel in deep bedrock environment has become important for evaluating the safety of disposal of radioactive waste. Here we studied the corrosion inducing ability of indigenous microbial community from a deep bedrock aquifer. Carbon steel coupons were exposed to anoxic groundwater from repository site 100 m depth (Olkiluoto, Finland) for periods of 3 and 8 months. The experiments were conducted at both in situ temperature and room temperature to investigate the response of microbial population to elevated temperature. Our results demonstrate that microorganisms from the deep bedrock aquifer benefit from carbon steel introduced to the nutrient poor anoxic deep groundwater environment. In the groundwater incubated with carbon steel the planktonic microbial community was more diverse and 100-fold more abundant compared to the environment without carbon steel. The betaproteobacteria were the most dominant bacterial class in all samples where carbon steel was present, whereas in groundwater incubated without carbon steel the microbial community had clearly less diversity. Microorganisms induced pitting corrosion and were found to cluster inside the corrosion pits. Temperature had an effect on the species composition of microbial community and also affected the corrosion deposits layer formed on the surface of carbon steel.
Security Extension for Bresson-Chevassut-Pointcheval's model

Summary The Bresson-Chevassut-Pointcheval (BCP) model is a formalism for the analysis of authenticated group key exchange protocols. Also there are some desired security goals for a practical group key exchange protocol, which are necessary in achieving resistance to active attacks mounted by an increasingly powerful adversary. However, whether a proved secure protocol in the BCP model can meet these security goals remains unknown. Firstly, the relationship between the BCP model and the desired security goals is analyzed in this paper. And it is shown that a protocol proved authenticated key exchange (AKE) security in the BCP model can surely achieve some security goals such as key independence, resistance to all types of passive attacks, Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) and implicit key authentication, but can not provide key integrity and known-key security. It is the lack of group key consistency in the definition of AKE security that causes the security flaws. Then, we present new definition of group key (GK) security, and show that a proved GK secure protocol can guarantee all the desired security goals.
Zone Poisoning: The How and Where of Non-Secure DNS Dynamic Updates

This paper illuminates the problem of non-secure DNS dynamic updates, which allow a miscreant to manipulate DNS entries in the zone files of authoritative name servers. We refer to this type of attack as to zone poisoning. This paper presents the first measurement study of the vulnerability. We analyze a random sample of 2.9 million domains and the Alexa top 1 million domains and find that at least 1,877 (0.065%) and 587 (0.062%) of domains are vulnerable, respectively. Among the vulnerable domains are governments, health care providers and banks, demonstrating that the threat impacts important services. Via this study and subsequent notifications to affected parties, we aim to improve the security of the DNS ecosystem.
IEATH: Improved Energy Aware and Two Hop Multipath Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks in terms of energy sources are limited. Furthermore due to this type of network infrastructure wireless communications and channel errors not possible to reach the correct packet to the destination exists; hence the proposing algorithms to improve the quality of service in these networks and sending packets are very important. In this paper we proposed a reliable and energy aware packet delivery mechanism to ensure quality of service in wireless sensor networks. In our proposed algorithm to ensure that a packet of information sent to the destination, the multi- path Forwarding method is used; So that several copies of an information packet via separate routes are sent to the destination, also routing decisions in this way occurs by considering the remaining energy in the neighborhood of nodes that are located in two hop of sender node. Simulation results show that the rate of release of data packets reduced in this way and thus the reliability of packet is increased, also the energy efficiency of sensor nodes effectively improved. Therefore this algorithm increase overall lifetime in wireless sensor networks.
DIRECTION GÉNÉRALE DES ÉTUDES ET DES RELATIONS INTERNATIONALES A SMOKE SCREEN THEORY OF FINANCIAL INTERMEDIATION

This paper explores the role of diversification and size in protecting information. We present a simple two period credit market with a sophisticated lender faced with competitors who free ride on his screening activity. Absent commitment problems, the lender funds one borrower and exerts optimal evaluation. When borrowers cannot commit to a long term relationship, the free riding problem is responsible for too little evaluation. We show how this problem can be mitigated by simultaneously financing several borrowers. This effect provides a rationale for intermediaries as an ‘information garbling’ device.
On Minimax Estimation of a Sparse Normal Mean Vector

Mallows has conjectured that among distributions which are Gaussian but for occasional contamination by additive noise, the one having least Fisher information has (two-sided) geometric contamination. A very similar problem arises in estimation of a non-negative vector parameter in Gaussian white noise when it is known also that most, i.e. (1i†), components are zero. We provide a partial asymptotic expansion of the minimax risk as †! 0. While the conjecture seems unlikely to be exactly true for flnite †, we verify it asymptotically up to the accuracy of the expansion. Numerical work suggests the expansion is accurate for † as large as . 05. The best ‘1-estimation rule is flrst but not second order minimax. The results bear on an earlier study of maximum entropy estimation and various questions in robustness and function estimation using wavelet bases.
Scalability Analysis of the TurfNet Internetworking Architecture

TurfNet is an internetworking architecture that enables communication among autonomous and heterogeneous network domains. The architecture uses a global identity namespace and does not require global addressing or a common internetworking protocol. It integrates the new concept of dynamic network composition with other recent architectural concepts, such as decoupling locators from identifiers. This paper analyzes whether the TurfNet naming and interdomain routing mechanisms can scale to networks of the size of the global Internet. To the authors' knowledge, this is one of the first scalability analyses of any next-generation internetworking proposal based on today's Internet AS topology. It adapts existing research results on the topology of the Internet's autonomous system graph and related results that quantify typical traffic patterns to construct a realistic model of an Internet-like TurfNet.
Gaining Credibility for Inflation Targets

In this paper, I consider a simple model in which agents learn about the inflation target of a central bank over time by observing the policy instrument or inflation outcomes. Measuring credibility as the distance between the perceived target and the actual target, an increase in credibility is beneficial to the central bank because it brings the policy consistent with attaining the inflation target closer to that required to attain the output target. In this model, the crucial assumptions are that (1) the central bank knows what its target is, but lacks the means to credibly communicate this to agents; and (2) observed changes in the policy instrument are not perfectly informative to agents as to the objective of the central bank. Optimal monetary policy therefore entails endogenising the learning process of agents and solving the resultant "optimal control" problem. I show that a linear approximation to the optimal control problem is observationally equivalent to a "conservative central banker" in the sense of Rogoff (1985), and results in most of the gains that are available from pursuing a higher order approximation, and may actually be preferable if agents cannot determine the exact weights with which to update their view of the target. A conservative central banker is especially beneficial if society places a high weight on output deviations from target. I then illustrate the impact of other factors on credibility formation, including choice of monetary policy instrument, being transparent about the central bank's view of the economy, and publishing forecasts.
P2PAM: a framework for peer-to-peer architectural modeling based on PeerSim

A peer-to-peer architectural model defines an overlay network topology and a routing strategy. If these aspects are tied together by a deterministic logical model, we say that the architecture is structured. Otherwise, we say it is unstructured. Based on these assumptions, in recent years many complex P2P architectural models have been defined, their performance evaluation being carried out mainly by means of simulative tools. However, there is an emerging need for a general-purpose tool, enabling large-scale overlay network simulations, yet also providing ready-to-use complex building blocks. The widely known PeerSim simulator addresses the first issue quite effectively, although it appears quite limited with respect to several important aspects, i. e. churn modeling. In this paper we propose P2PAM as a PeerSim enhancement providing a rather complete framework for peer-to-peer architectural modeling. P2PAM effectiveness is demonstrated by showing how it has been used to rapidly develop simulations of two interesting systems, namely JXTA and HALO.
A Framework for Analyzing Public Policies: Practical Guide

Usually, public health actors do not have the power to make public policy decisions, and they represent only one voice among many: policy making is influenced by numerous groups and organizations with an interest in the outcome (Milio, 2001). It is therefore important to present the public health perspective while remaining aware of the other perspectives being expressed and how these may resonate with policy makers. Given this context, the analysis of public policies proves useful, particularly in the following situations:
Directed mutagenesis affects recombination in Azospirillum brasilense nif genes

In order to improve the gene transfer/mutagenesis system for Azospirillum brasilense, gene-cartridge mutagenesis was used to replace the nif D gene with the Tn5 kanamycin resistance gene. The construct was transferred to A. brasilense by electrotransformation. Of the 12 colonies isolated using the suicide plasmid pSUP202 as vector, only four did not show vector integration into the chromosome . Nevertheless, all 12 colonies were deficient in acetylene reduction, indicating an Nif - phenotype. Four Nif - mutants were analyzed by Southern blot, using six different probes spanning the nif and Km r genes and the plasmid vector. Apparently, several recombination events occurred in the mutant genomes, probably caused mainly by gene disruption owing to the mutagenesis technique used: resistance g enecartridge mutagenesis combined with electrotransformation.
On-line Automatic Detection of Human Activity in Home Using Wavelet and Hidden Markov Models Scilab Toolkits

In this work, a pilot study of on-line automatic detection of human activity in home using wavelet and hidden Markov models Scilab toolkits was carried out. The collected raw data are provided by a biaxial accelerometer ADXL202E attached to the person. Several activities were simulated by the researchers (walking slowly , walking quickly, sitting down-getting up, fall during walking, fall from a position upright, .). The feature vectors of these data were then used to build different hidden Markov models of these activities with different persons. The built models were employed for online detection of these activities. The obtained results are very promising.
Vehicle detection based on underneath vehicle shadow using edge features

This paper proposes a computer vision vehicle detection algorithm. The main focus of this proposed algorithm, in which the vehicle is detected based on dynamic traffic scenes. The scene can be recorded using on-board camera that fixed in position to monitor the front traffic. The method that proposed in this vehicle detection algorithm is based on underneath vehicle shadows. The shadows underneath vehicle have a higher intensity compared to the background and road area which advantageous as the main feature for detection. To achieve low computational complexity, the edges feature is detected using a horizontal Sobel operator, which is enhanced by using Scharr operator. Together with blob analysis to detect the wanted features and bounding box is used to label the vehicle detected in the final detection. The algorithm test result shows that the method is effective in the vehicle detection and display a highly accurate result.
Multiple Handwritten Text Line Recognition Systems Derived from Specific Integration of a Language Model

This paper investigates the generation and use of multiple recognition results to improve the performance of an offline handwritten text line recognition system. Multiple recognition results are created by specific integration of a language model in the hidden Markov model based recognition system. The ROVER algorithm is applied to combine the multiple results. Experiments conducted on the IAM database show that the proposed system is able to produce statistically significant improvements in the recognition rate compared to the original system.
Evolving directed graphs with artificial bee colony algorithm

Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is a relatively new optimization technique that simulates the intelligent foraging behavior of honey bee swarms. It has been applied to several optimization domains to show its efficient evolution ability. In this paper, ABC algorithm is applied for the first time to evolve a directed graph chromosome structure, which derived from a recent graph-based evolutionary algorithm called genetic network programming (GNP). Consequently, it is explored to new application domains which can be efficiently modeled by the directed graph of GNP. In this work, a problem of controlling the agents's behavior under a wellknown benchmark testbed called Tileworld are solved using the ABC-based evolution strategy. Its performance is compared with several very well-known methods for evolving computer programs, including standard GNP with crossover/mutation, genetic programming (GP) and reinforcement learning (RL).
Gaming the Boston School Choice Mechanism in Beijing

The Boston mechanism is criticized for its poor incentive and welfare performance compared to the Gale-Shapley deferred-acceptance mechanism (DA). Using school choice data from Beijing, I investigate parents’ behavior under the Boston mechanism, taking into account parents’ possible mistakes when they strategize. Evidence shows that parents are overcautious as they play "safe" strategies too often. Wealthier/more educated parents are less overcautious and perform slightly better because they have better outside options while not being any more adept at strategizing. Parents who are always truth-telling experience a utility gain in switching from the Boston mechanism to the DA, equivalent to a 7.1% decrease in the distance to a school. Among them, 44.2% are better off under the DA, while 35.5% are worse off.
The Effect of Endogenous Human Capital Accumulation on Optimal Taxation

This paper considers the impact of endogenous human capital accumulation on optimal tax policy in a life cycle model. Including endogenous human capital accumulation, either through learning-by-doing or learning-or-doing, is analytically shown to create a motive for the government to use age-dependent labor income taxes. If the government cannot condition taxes on age, then it is optimal to use a tax on capital in order to mimic such taxes. Quantitatively, introducing learning-by-doing or learning-or-doing increases the optimal tax on capital by forty or four percent, respectively. Overall, the optimal tax on capital is thirty five percent higher in the model with learning-by-doing compared to the model with learning-or-doing implying that how human capital accumulates is of significant importance when determining the optimal tax policy.
Scalable, Controlled Imagery Capture in Urban Environments

We describe the design considerations underlying a system for scalable, automated capture of precisely controlled imagery in urban scenes. The system operates for architectural scenes in which, from every camera position, some two vanishing points are visible. It has been used to capture thousands of controlled images in outdoor environments spanning hundreds of meters. The proposed system architecture forms the foundation for a future, fully robotic outdoor mapping capability for urban areas, analogous to existing, satellite-based robotic mapping systems which acquire images and models of natural terrain. Four key ideas distinguish our approach from other methods. First, our sensor acquires georeferencing metadata with every image, enabling related images to be efcien tly identied and registered. Second, the sensor acquires omni-directional images; we show strong experimental evidence that such images are fundamentally more powerful observations than conventional (narrow-FOV) images. Third, the system uses a probabilistic, projective error formulation to account for uncertainty. By treating measurement error in an appropriate depth-free framework, and by deferring decisions about camera calibration and scene structure until many noisy observations can be fused, the system achieves superior robustness and accuracy. Fourth, the system’s computational requirements scale linearly in the input size, the area of the acquisition region, and the size of the output model. This is in contrast to most previous methods, which either assume constant-size inputs or exhibit quadratic running time (or worse) asymptotically. These attributes enable the system to operate in a regime of scale and physical extent which is unachievable by any other method, whether manual or automated. Consequently, it can acquire the most complex calibrated terrestrial image sets in existence, while operating faster than any existing manual or algorithmic method.
Reconsidering the effect of family size on labour supply: the twin problems of the twin birth instrument

We consider two econometric problems when investigating the effect of family size on labour market outcomes using the popular twin birth instrument. The first is the potential for omitted variable bias caused by the fact that fertility treatments are linked to twin births and are typically unobserved. We present estimates that are corrected for this bias and find that it is comparatively small. Second, we show that the effects of twin‐birth‐induced variation in family size, as well as characteristics of the compliers, varies substantially with time passed since birth, which has consequences for the interpretation of estimates across samples and time.
It wasn't me! Plausible Deniability in Web Search

Our ability to control the flow of sensitive personal information to online systems is key to trust in personal privacy on the internet. We ask how to detect, assess and defend user privacy in the face of search engine personalisation? We develop practical and scalable tools allowing a user to detect, assess and defend against threats to plausible deniability. We show that threats to plausible deniability of interest are readily detectable for all topics tested in an extensive testing program. We show this remains the case when attempting to disrupt search engine learning through noise query injection and click obfuscation are used. We use our model we design a defence technique exploiting uninteresting, proxy topics and show that it provides amore effective defence of plausible deniability in our experiments.