Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fighting Botnets with Cyber-Security Analytics: Dealing with Heterogeneous Cyber-Security Information in New Generation SIEMs

One of the cyber-threats with the highest impact nowadays, in terms of number of compromised systems and the impact they can have on the Internet at large, is commonly known as the botnet. In the ACDC (Advanced Cyber Defence Centre) project, partners from 14 European countries, including public administrations, private sector organizations and academia, are trying to achieve a sustainable victory over botnets. This paper presents how a new generation SIEM is being used in the ACDC project to leverage its scalability and enhanced analytic capabilities and produce advance cyber-intelligence from the heterogeneous and massive streams of data continuously produced in the cyber-security context, in combination with traditional security events and system logs. The paper describes a case study where this approach is being tested. In the case study, the SIEM has been adapted to cope, not only with traditional security events and system logs, but also with pre-analyzed information about cyber-threats and incidents reported by the tools of some of the ACDC partner organizations. The case study also tests the adoption of the standard XML-based format called STIX, developed by the Mitre Corporation in the USA, and its suitability as a common specification for exchanging cybersecurity information between a subset of ACDC tools, the Atos SL SIEM and the ACDC's centralized data clearing house (CCH).
Perception and rendering of three-dimensional surround sound

Recent technological trends facilitate threedimensional stereophony. To this day, no internationally agreed standard for three-dimensional sound reproduction exists. Fundamental research is needed to define basic system parameters and ensure compatibility between different formats. Background in spatial audio perception, stereophonic audio reproduction, and automatic channel format conversion is summarized. The current state of the art in sound processing for loudspeaker playback and objective evaluation of sound field quality features is discussed based on three selected papers. Future research necessary to cope with stereophonic reproduction using arbitrary loudspeaker arrangements is motivated and outlined.
Development of a Persian Syntactic Dependency Treebank

This paper describes the annotation process and linguistic properties of the Persian syntactic dependency treebank. The treebank consists of approximately 30,000 sentences annotated with syntactic roles in addition to morpho-syntactic features. One of the unique features of this treebank is that there are almost 4800 distinct verb lemmas in its sentences making it a valuable resource for educational goals. The treebank is constructed with a bootstrapping approach by means of available tagging and parsing tools and manually correcting the annotations. The data is splitted into standard train, development and test set in the CoNLL dependency format and is freely available to researchers.
Performance Evaluation of Face Recognition using PCA and N-PCA

Face recognition has become a valuable and routine forensic tool used by criminal investigators. It is an important area of computer vision research and has gained significant interest in recent years. Efforts in improving security, such as automatic surveillance and the use of biometrics in identification, are partly responsible for this increased interest. However, several challenges remain in improving the accuracy of face recognition under illumination changes, variations in pose, occlusions, and image resolution. This paper presents performance comparison of face recognition using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Normalized Principal Component Analysis (N-PCA). The experiments are carried out on the ORL, Indian face database and Georgia Tech face database which contain variability in expression, pose, and facial details. The results obtained for the two methods have been compared by varying the number of training images and it has been found that as the number of training images increases efficiency also increases. The result also shows that N-PCA gives better results than PCA. General Terms
Traffic Information Service Model Considering Personal Driving Trajectories

In this paper, we newly propose a traffic information service model that collects traffic information sensed by an individual vehicle in real time by using a smart device, and which enables drivers to share traffic information on all roads in real time using an application installed on a smart device. In particular, when the driver requests traffic information for a specific area, the proposed driver-personalized service model provides him/her with traffic information on the driving directions in advance by predicting the driving directions of the vehicle based on the learning of the driving records of each driver. To do this, we propose a traffic information management model to process and manage in real time a large amount of online-generated traffic information and traffic information requests generated by each vehicle. We also propose a road nodebased indexing technique to efficiently store and manage location-based traffic information provided by each vehicle. Finally, we propose a driving learning and prediction model based on the hidden Markov model to predict the driving directions of each driver based on the driver's driving records. We analyze the traffic information processing performance of the proposed model and the accuracy of the driving prediction model using traffic information collected from actual driving vehicles for the entire area of Seoul, as well as driving records and experimental data.
Results of the Doctoral Faculty Publication Project

Results of this longitudinal study of the 1990s revealed that 12 of 61 doctoral faculties (20%) were responsible for 43% of journal articles published. Publication rates of these faculties appeared to accelerate in the 1990s and correlated positively with measures of program size and longevity. However, when all variables were controlled, the perceived academic quality of MSW programs was the sole correlate of faculty publication. Overwhelmingly, faculties of US News and World Report’s most highly rated MSW programs at the end of the decade were also the most frequently published. Implications of these findings are identified and discussed.
Expanding and evaluating a web-based multidimensional scatter plot tool

Scatter plots are a useful, but limited way of visualizing data. Can they be expanded to show more information in an image and does this also positively affect the users of these visualizations? To test this, this thesis describes the implementation of a web-based scatter plot visualization tool, which also has added new ways of adding variables to a plot. These ways are tested, along with some criteria of visualizations and tools, using expert reviews. The research finally concludes that expansion of scatter plots can be done, and in some cases may positively affect readability.
New simple digital self-calibration technique for pipeline ADCs using the internal thermal noise

This paper describes a new digital-domain self- calibration technique for high-speed pipeline A/D converters using the internal thermal noise as input stimulus. This low- amplitude noise is amplified and recycled by the ADC itself and, due to the successive foldings, it is naturally converted into uniform noise. This noise is then used to calculate the required calibrating-codes. As an example, the calibration of a 13-bit pipeline ADC shows that the overall linearity can be significantly improved using this technique.
A Centrifugal Microfluidic Platform That Separates Whole Blood Samples into Multiple Removable Fractions Due to Several Discrete but Continuous Density Gradient Sections

We present a miniaturized centrifugal platform that uses density centrifugation for separation and analysis of biological components in small volume samples (~5 μL). We demonstrate the ability to enrich leukocytes for on-disk visualization via microscopy, as well as recovery of viable cells from each of the gradient partitions. In addition, we simplified the traditional Modified Wright-Giemsa staining by decreasing the time, volume, and expertise involved in the procedure. From a whole blood sample, we were able to extract 95.15% of leukocytes while excluding 99.8% of red blood cells. This platform has great potential in both medical diagnostics and research applications as it offers a simpler, automated, and inexpensive method for biological sample separation, analysis, and downstream culturing.
Curcumin Protects Mitochondria and Cardiomyocytes from Oxidative Damage and Apoptosis Induced by Hemiscorpius Lepturus Venom

Abstract The main aim of the current study was to determine cardio-toxicity mechanisms of H. lepturus and protective effect of curcumin against this toxin in rats, using isolated heart mitochondria and cardiomyocytes. Our findings indicated that H. lepturus venom caused significantly ((P<0.05) cytotoxicity and caspase 3 activation in cardiomyocytes and mitochondrial dysfunction including increased mitochondrial ROS level, swelling in the mitochondria, decline in the mitochondria membrane potential (MMP), decrease in the cytochrome-c oxidase activity (complex IV), decrease ATP level and finally mitochondrial outer membrane (MOM) rupture in isolated mitochondria. Our results showed that the administration of curcumin efficiently decreased (P<0.05) cytotoxicity and caspase 3 activation, ROS formation, MMP collapse, mitochondrial swelling and mitochondrial outer membrane (MOM) rupture. Our findings suggest H. lepturus venom cusses a disruptive effect on mitochondrial respiratory chain, especially on complex II, and IV that predispose cardiomyocytes to ATP depletion and death signaling that could be protected with administration of curcumin.
A quantitative analysis of cache policies for scalable network file systems

Current network file system protocols rely heavily on a central server to coordinate file activity among client workstations. This central server can become a bottleneck that limits scalability for environments with large numbers of clients. In central server systems such as NFS and AFS, all client writes, cache misses, and coherence messages are handled by the server. To keep up with this workload, expensive server machines are needed, configured with high-performance CPUs, memory systems, and I/O channels. Since the server stores all data, it must be physically capable of connecting to many disks. This reliance on a central server also makes current systems inappropriate for wide area network use where the network bandwidth to the server may be limited. In this paper, we investigate the quantitative performance effect of moving as many of the server responsibilities as possible to client workstations to reduce the need for high-performance server machines. We have devised a cache protocol in which all data reside on clients and all data transfers proceed directly from client to client. The server is used only to coordinate these data transfers. This protocol is being incorporated as part of our experimental file system, xFS. We present results from a trace-driven simulation study of the protocol using traces from a 237 client NFS installation. We find that the xFS protocol reduces server load by more than a factor of six compared to AFS without significantly affecting response time or file availability.
A variant histone H3 is enriched at telomeres in Trypanosoma brucei

Variant histones play critical roles in transcriptional activation and repression, DNA repair and chromosome segregation. We have identified HTV, a single-copy gene in Trypanosoma brucei encoding a variant form of histone H3 (H3V). H3V is present at discrete nuclear foci that shift over the course of the cell cycle and associate with the mitotic spindle, a pattern of localization reminiscent of that described previously for both mini-chromosomes and telomeres. By combining fluorescence in situ hybridization with indirect immunofluorescence, we confirmed that the H3V foci overlap with a 177-bp repetitive sequence element found predominantly in mini-chromosomes, as well as with the TTAGGG repeats that compose telomeres. Chromatin immunoprecipitation studies, however, reveal that only the telomeric repeat DNA is substantially enriched with H3V. HTV is not essential for viability, mini-chromosome segregation, telomere maintenance or transcriptional silencing at the telomere-proximal expression sites from which bloodstream-form T. brucei controls antigenic variation. We propose that H3V represents a novel class of histone H3 variant, a finding that has evolutionary implications.
Semantic Query Reformulation in Social PDMS

We consider social peer-to-peer data management systems (PDMS), where each peer maintains both semantic mappings between its schema and some acquaintances, and social links with peer friends. In this context, reformulating a query from a peer's schema into other peer's schemas is a hard problem, as it may generate as many rewritings as the set of mappings from that peer to the outside and transitively on, by eventually traversing the entire network. However, not all the obtained rewritings are relevant to a given query. In this paper, we address this problem by inspecting semantic mappings and social links to find only relevant rewritings. We propose a new notion of 'relevance' of a query with respect to a mapping, and, based on this notion, a new se-mantic query reformulation approach for social PDMS, which achieves great accuracy and flexibility. To find rapidly the most interesting mappings, we combine several techniques: (i) social links are expressed as FOAF links to characterize peer's friendship and compact mapping summaries are used to obtain mapping descriptions; (ii) local semantic views are special views that contain information about external mappings; and (iii) gossiping techniques improve the search of relevant mappings. Our experimental evaluation, based on a prototype on top of PeerSim and a simulated network demonstrate that our solution yields greater recall, compared to traditional query translation approaches proposed in the literature.
The Shared and Contrasting Roles of IL2 and IL15 in the Life and Death of Normal and Neoplastic Lymphocytes: Implications for Cancer Therapy

IL2 and IL15, members of the 4α-helix bundle family of cytokines, play pivotal roles in the control of the life and death of lymphocytes. Although their heterotrimeric receptors have two receptor subunits in common, these two cytokines have contrasting roles in adaptive immune responses. The unique role of IL2 through maintenance of fitness of regulatory T cells and activation-induced cell death is the elimination of self-reactive T cells to prevent autoimmunity. In contrast with IL2, IL15 is dedicated to the prolonged maintenance of memory T-cell responses to invading pathogens. Blockade of IL2 and IL15 using monoclonal antibodies has been reported to be of value in the treatment of patients with leukemia, autoimmune disorders, and in the prevention of allograft rejection. IL2 has been approved by the FDA for the treatment of patients with malignant renal cell cancer and metastatic malignant melanoma. Clinical trials involving recombinant human IL15 given by bolus infusions have been completed, and studies assessing subcutaneous and continuous intravenous infusions are under way in patients with metastatic malignancy. Furthermore, clinical trials are being initiated that employ the combination of IL15 with IL15Rα+/− IgFc. Cancer Immunol Res; 3(3); 219–27. ©2015 AACR.
Mobility Timing for Agent Communities, a Cue for Advanced Connectionist Systems

We introduce a wait-and-chase scheme that models the contact times between moving agents within a connectionist construct. The idea that elementary processors move within a network to get a proper position is borne out both by biological neurons in the brain morphogenesis and by agents within social networks. From the former, we take inspiration to devise a medium-term project for new artificial neural network training procedures where mobile neurons exchange data only when they are close to one another in a proper space (are in contact). From the latter, we accumulate mobility tracks experience. We focus on the preliminary step of characterizing the elapsed time between neuron contacts, which results from a spatial process fitting in the family of random processes with memory, where chasing neurons are stochastically driven by the goal of hitting target neurons. Thus, we add an unprecedented mobility model to the literature in the field, introducing a distribution law of the intercontact times that merges features of both negative exponential and Pareto distribution laws. We give a constructive description and implementation of our model, as well as a short analytical form whose parameters are suitably estimated in terms of confidence intervals from experimental data. Numerical experiments show the model and related inference tools to be sufficiently robust to cope with two main requisites for its exploitation in a neural network: the nonindependence of the observed intercontact times and the feasibility of the model inversion problem to infer suitable mobility parameters.
Improving 802.11 fingerprinting of similar devices by cooperative fingerprinting

Fingerprinting 802.11 devices has been proposed to identify devices in order to mitigate IEEE 802.11 weaknesses. However, important limitations prevent any real deployment. On the first hand, fingerprinting has a low accuracy when the devices have similar hardware and software. On the second hand, attackers may forge signatures to impersonate devices. We propose Diversity, a cooperative fingerprinting approach that improves accuracy of existing fingerprinting methods while relying only on off-the-shelf hardware. Diversity improves fingerprinting up to the reliable individual identification of identical 802.11 devices. This approach modifies the signature of devices by modifying slightly their traffic attributes. We evaluate Diversity with both a simulation and an implementation, achieving a false positive rate of 0% with a dataset including identical devices. Finally, we complement Diversity by mechanisms for detecting attackers that try to forge signatures.
XML schema structural equivalence

The Xequiv algorithm determines when two XML schemas are equivalent based on their structural organization. It calculates the percentages of schema inclusion in another schema by considering the cardinality of each leaf node and its interconnection to other leaf nodes that are part of a sequence or choice structure. Xequiv is based on the Reduction Algorithm [8] that focuses on the leaf nodes and eliminates intermediate levels in the XML tree.
Limit Feeding Beef Cattle

(allowed to eat according to appetite). Generally, this allows for maximum performance because energy consumed above the maintenance requirement is available for gain. However, recent work suggests that limit-fed animals may have better feed efficiency. This has economic importance in that changes in feed efficiency have three times the impact on cost of gain as an equal change in rate of gain. Limit feeding also allows a producer to target weights for breeding cattle, grass cattle or marketing of cattle. It also reduces the amount of manure produced which must be utilized. Animals fed under ad libitum conditions will have fluctuations in feed intake. These fluctuations may result in decreased feed utilization due to digestive disturbances. It is also important to realize that as intake increases, rate of passage increases and digestibility decreases. As feed moves through the gastrointestinal tract faster, digestibility is reduced because the feed is exposed to digestive processes for a shorter time. It is possible that a reduction in feed intake will improve digestibility. The improvement in digestibility with limit feeding has been observed in several experiments and has resulted in better than predicted animal performance. There is also interest in limit-feeding high energy diets to beef cattle because corn and some co-products can be cheaper sources of energy than hay or other roughage. Table 1 illustrates the relative energy costs of corn and hay.
Improvement of a Whole Sentence Maximum Entropy Language Model Using Grammatical Features

In this paper, we propose adding long-term grammatical information in a Whole Sentence Maximun Entropy Language Model (WSME) in order to improve the performance of the model. The grammatical information was added to the WSME model as features and were obtained from a Stochastic Context-Free grammar. Finally, experiments using a part of the Penn Treebank corpus were carried out and significant improvements were acheived.
A Novel Lentinula edodes Laccase and Its Comparative Enzymology Suggest Guaiacol-Based Laccase Engineering for Bioremediation

Laccases are versatile biocatalysts for the bioremediation of various xenobiotics, including dyes and polyaromatic hydrocarbons. However, current sources of new enzymes, simple heterologous expression hosts and enzymatic information (such as the appropriateness of common screening substrates on laccase engineering) remain scarce to support efficient engineering of laccase for better “green” applications. To address the issue, this study began with cloning the laccase family of Lentinula edodes. Three laccases perfectio sensu stricto (Lcc4A, Lcc5, and Lcc7) were then expressed from Pichia pastoris, characterized and compared with the previously reported Lcc1A and Lcc1B in terms of kinetics, stability, and degradation of dyes and polyaromatic hydrocarbons. Lcc7 represented a novel laccase, and it exhibited both the highest catalytic efficiency (assayed with 2,2′-azino-bis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid) [ABTS]) and thermostability. However, its performance on “green” applications surprisingly did not match the activity on the common screening substrates, namely, ABTS and 2,6-dimethoxyphenol. On the other hand, correlation analyses revealed that guaiacol is much better associated with the decolorization of multiple structurally different dyes than are the two common screening substrates. Comparison of the oxidation chemistry of guaiacol and phenolic dyes, such as azo dyes, further showed that they both involve generation of phenoxyl radicals in laccase-catalyzed oxidation. In summary, this study concluded a robust expression platform of L. edodes laccases, novel laccases, and an indicative screening substrate, guaiacol, which are all essential fundamentals for appropriately driving the engineering of laccases towards more efficient “green” applications.
Functionality of Two Modes of Communication in the Community by Students with Developmental Disabilities: A Comparison of Signing and Communication Books

Functional communication skills are essential for effective participation in society by persons with autism and other developmental disabilities. Because most of the general public does not understand sign language, use of this method in typical community settings has been questioned. This study examined empirically the functionality of signs and iconic communication book symbols in community settings with two students with autism. The results demonstrated successful communication in community settings by the students with communication books but not with signs. These results are discussed as they relate to functionality and training issues associated with the two communication systems.