Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Protecting the PIPE from malicious peers

Digital materials can be protected from failures by replicating them at multiple autonomous, distributed sites. A significant challenge in such a distributed system is ensuring that documents are replicated and accessible despite malicious sites. Such sites may hinder the replication of documents in a variety of ways, including agreeing to store a copy but erasing it instead, refusing to serve a document, or serving an altered version of the document. We describe the design of a a Peer-to-peer Information Preservation and Exchange (PIPE) network: a distributed replication system that protects documents both from failures and from malicious nodes. We present the design of a PIPE system, discuss a threat model for malicious sites, and propose basic solutions for managing these malicious sites.
Graphulo implementation of server-side sparse matrix multiply in the Accumulo database

The Apache Accumulo database excels at distributed storage and indexing and is ideally suited for storing graph data. Many big data analytics compute on graph data and persist their results back to the database. These graph calculations are often best performed inside the database server. The GraphBLAS standard provides a compact and efficient basis for a wide range of graph applications through a small number of sparse matrix operations. In this article, we discuss a server-side implementation of GraphBLAS sparse matrix multiplication that leverages Accumulo's native, high-performance iterators. We compare the mathematics and performance of inner and outer product implementations, and show how an outer product implementation achieves optimal performance near Accumulo's peak write rate. We offer our work as a core component to the Graphulo library that will deliver matrix math primitives for graph analytics within Accumulo.
Variation of C-Reactive Protein Levels in Adolescents: Association With Sleep-Disordered Breathing and Sleep Duration

Background—There is increasing evidence that sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) is an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD) in adults. C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of systemic inflammation, is an important predictor of future cardiovascular events. The goal of this study was to quantify the associations of SDB, sleep duration, and CRP in adolescents to better understand the role of SDB in CVD risk. Methods and Results—Adolescents (n=143; age, 13 to 18 years; 36% black; 50% female) with a wide range of SDB severity underwent polysomnography and measurement of high-sensitivity CRP. SDB was quantified with the apnea hypopnea index (AHI) and oxygen desaturation measures. Sleep duration was estimated from 7-day actigraphy. The independent and dose-response associations of SDB with CRP were addressed through linear mixed-effects models. Forty-eight percent were overweight or obese, and 12% had SDB (AHI ≥5). CRP levels varied with increasing body mass index and SDB. After adjustment for body mass index, age, sex, and race, mean CRP levels were 0.50, 0.43, 0.97, and 1.66 mg/L for SDB severity levels of AHI <1, 1 to 4.9, 5 to 14.9, and ≥15, respectively (P=0.0049, AHI ≥15 versus <1). Adjusted mean CRP levels demonstrated a dose response with SDB above a threshold AHI of 5. This association was partially explained by overnight hypoxemia and less so by sleep duration. Conclusions—In adolescents free of known CVD, an AHI ≥5 is associated with increasing levels of CRP, suggesting that pediatric SDB may confer additional CVD risk beyond that of obesity.
Complexity Reduction for DRM System Using Time Domain Preprocessing

Inter-carrier-interference (ICI) phenomena in the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems complicates the channel estimation and equalization tasks at the receiver side when the number of carriers increases, since the minimum mean squared error (MMSE) and zero forcing (ZF) criterions require non-trivial matrix inversion. The complexity can be reduced without strongly affecting the performance using time domain windowing which squeezes the channel matrix into a small number of diagonals that have the strongest ICI coefficients. In this paper, a window is designed to maximize the signal-to-noise-plus interference ratio (SINR) according to digital radio mondiale (DRM) channel. Iterative algorithms for detecting the OFDM symbols are applied to further increase the system performance
Shape-adaptive DCT for denoising and image reconstruction

The shape-adaptive DCT (SA-DCT) can be computed on a support of arbitrary shape, but retains a computational complexity comparable to that of the usual separable block DCT. Despite the near-optimal decorrelation and energy compaction properties, application of the SA-DCT has been rather limited, targeted nearly exclusively to video compression. It has been recently proposed by the authors8 to employ the SA-DCT for still image denoising. We use the SA-DCT in conjunction with the directional LPA-ICI technique, which defines the shape of the transform's support in a pointwise adaptive manner. The thresholded or modified SA-DCT coefficients are used to reconstruct a local estimate of the signal within the adaptive-shape support. Since supports corresponding to different points are in general overlapping, the local estimates are averaged together using adaptive weights that depend on the region's statistics. In this paper we further develop this novel approach and extend it to more general restoration problems, with particular emphasis on image deconvolution. Simulation experiments show a state-of-the-art quality of the final estimate, both in terms of objective criteria and visual appearance. Thanks to the adaptive support, reconstructed edges are clean, and no unpleasant ringing artifacts are introduced by the fitted transform.
An extension of the time-domain Friis equation

The time-domain Friis-type antenna equation is in the literature standardly limited to a rather special class of antenna systems whose radiation impedance or/and load show (electromagnetically) instantaneously-reacting behavior. In this paper, this limitation is removed thereby generalizing the time-domain Friis equation. An illustrative example is given for pulsed-field interaction between two electrically-small thin wires.
Heritable Variation in Courtship Patterns in Drosophila melanogaster

Little is known about the genetic basis of naturally occurring variation for sexually selected behavioral traits. Drosophila melanogaster, with its rich repertoire of courtship behavior and genomic and genetic resources, is an excellent model organism for addressing this question. We assayed a genetically diverse panel of lines with full genome sequences, the Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel, to assess the heritability of variation in courtship behavior and mating progression. We subsequently used these data to quantify natural variation in transition probabilities between courtship behaviors. We found heritable variation along the expected trajectory for courtship behaviors, including the tendency to initiate courtship and rate of progression through courtship, suggesting a genetic basis to male modulation of courtship behavior based on feedback from unrelated, outbred, and genetically identical females. We assessed the genetic basis of variation of the transition with the greatest heritability—from copulation to no engagement with the female—and identified variants in Serrate and Furin 1 as well as many other polymorphisms on the chromosome 3R associated with this transition. Our findings suggest that courtship is a highly dynamic behavior with both social and genetic inputs, and that males may play an important role in courtship initiation and duration.
Yang–Mills theory and Tamagawa numbers: the fascination of unexpected links in mathematics

Atiyah and Bott used equivariant Morse theory applied to the Yang–Mills functional to calculate the Betti numbers of moduli spaces of vector bundles over a Riemann surface, rederiving inductive formulae obtained from an arithmetic approach which involved the Tamagawa number of SLn. This article attempts to survey and extend our understanding of this link between Yang–Mills theory and Tamagawa numbers, and to explain how methods used over the last three decades to study the singular cohomology of moduli spaces of bundles on a smooth projective curve over ℂ can be adapted to the setting of 𝔸1‐homotopy theory to study the motivic cohomology of these moduli spaces over an algebraically closed field.
Text-dependent pathological voice detection

While global characteristics of the speaker’s source and spectral features have been successfully employed in pathological voice detection, the underlying text has largely been ignored. In this work, we focus on experiments that exploit the text stimulus that is read by the subject. Features derived from text include the mean cepstral distortion of the subject from an average intelligible speaker, and prosodic features include the speaking rate, statistics of phoneme durations, etc. The phonetic labeling information is also exploited to ignore all the unvoiced regions of the speech samples to improve the discriminability between intelligible and pathological voices. We also designed features that capture the speaker’s overall closeness to intelligible instances of the same text stimulus from other speakers. Our experiments show that the proposed text-derived features improve the detection of pathological voices by 20%.
SENATUS: An Approach to Joint Traffic Anomaly Detection and Root Cause Analysis

In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called SENATUS, for joint anomaly detection and root-cause analysis. Inspired from the concept of a senate, the key idea of the proposed approach is divided into three stages: election, voting and decision. At the election stage, a small number of traffic flow sets (termed as senator flows) are chosen based on the K-sparse approximation technique, which can be used to represent approximately the total (usually huge) set of traffic flows. In the voting stage, Principal Component Pursuit (PCP) analysis is used for anomaly detection on the senator flows. In addition, the detected anomalies are correlated across traffic features to identify the most possible anomalous time bins. Finally, in the decision stage, a machine learning (ML) technique is applied to the senator flows of anomalous time bins to find the root cause of the anomalies. The performance of SENATUS is evaluated using real traffic traces collected from a Pan European network, GEANT, and compared against another approach which detects anomalies using lossless compression of traffic histograms. The evaluation shows that SENATUS has higher effectiveness in diagnosing traffic anomalies.
A Prematriculation Intervention to Improve the Adjustment of Students to Medical School

Background and purpose: The transition from a baccalaureate program to a medical curriculum can be a difficult period for some students. Our study asked whether providing students with review materials and a means of assessing their degree of preparedness prior to matriculation influenced actual and perceived performance in 1st-year basic science courses. Methods: Didactic review materials in basic science subjects encountered in the 1st year were made available to prematriculants online. Access to materials for each subject was contingent upon completion of a pretest. Prematriculants were free to use the materials as they saw fit. Once students matriculated, performance in basic science subjects was compared between those who had accessed the materials and those who had not. Students who accessed the materials were also surveyed to determine if they perceived any benefit from their use. Results: More than half of matriculants chose to access the intervention materials. There was no significant difference in MCAT, prerequisite grade point average, or total grade point average between those students who chose to access the intervention materials and those who did not. Students who accessed the intervention materials reported gains in confidence in their ability to perform well in medical school. Those students who accessed the intervention materials had significantly higher examination scores in an early basic science course than those who did not. Conclusions: An online prematriculation intervention can provide useful background material to interested students. Access to this material increased performance in a 1st-year basic science course and was perceived as valuable by students.
USENIX Association Proceedings of the FREENIX Track : 2001 USENIX Annual

We present Malicious Email Filter, MEF, a freely distributed malicious binary filter incorporated into Procmail that can detect malicious Windows attachments by integrating with a UNIX mail server. The system has three capabilities: detection of known and unknown malicious attachments, tracking the propagation of malicious attachments and efficient model update algorithms. The system filters multiple malicious attachments in an email by using detection models obtained from data mining over known malicious attachments. It leverages preliminary research in data mining applied to malicious executables which allows the detection of previously unseen, malicious attachments. In addition, the system provides a method for monitoring and measurement of the spread of malicious attachments. Finally, the system also allows for the efficient propagation of detection models from a central server. These updated models can be downloaded by a system administrator and easily incorporated into the current model. The system will be released under GPL in June 2001.
Compression Efficiency and Delay Tradeoffs for Hierarchical B-Pictures and Pulsed-Quality Frames

Real-time video applications require tight bounds on end-to-end delay. Hierarchical bidirectional prediction requires buffering frames in the encoder input buffer, thereby contributing to encoder input delay. Long-term frame prediction with pulsed quality requires buffering at the encoder output, increasing the output buffer delay. Both hierarchical B-pictures and pulsed-quality coders involve uneven bit-rate allocation. Both the encoder and decoder buffering requirements depend on the rate allocation. We derive an efficient rate allocation for hierarchical B-pictures using the power spectral density of a wide-sense stationary process. In addition, we discuss important aspects of hierarchical predictive coding, such as the effect of the temporal prediction distance and delay tradeoffs for prediction branch truncation. Finally, we investigate experimentally the tradeoff between delay and compression efficiency.
Entity Coreference Resolution Services in Sindice.com: Identification on the Current Web of Data

Sindice [1] is a backend service that operates on semantically structured data harvested from the Web. Sindice uses both crawlers and Semantic Web Sitemaps [2] to find RDF sources as well as microformats1 such as XFN, hcards, hvote and others. Sindice targets developers by offering the following a set of API to find, reuse and publish structured data on the Semantic Web. Examples of low level APIs provided by Sindice include locating an RDF source given a URI, a string or a tuple property/value that should be contained in the source itself. High level APIs provided by Sindice include, for example, a SIOC specific API to interconnect messages posted by people in different settings. In this paper we introduce the operating principles behind the Entity Coreference Resolution APIs, soon to be offered by Sindice. This new API addresses primarily two use cases:
Введение в анализ методов и средств поддержки научных экспериментов, движимых гипотезами (Introduction into Analysis of Methods and Tools for Hypothesis-Driven Scientific Experiment Support)

Data intensive sciences (DIS) are being developed in frame of the new paradigm of scientific study known as the Fourth paradigm, emphasizing an increasing role of observational, experimental and computer simulated data practically in all fields of scientific study. The principal goal of data intensive research (DIR) is an extraction (inference) of knowledge from data. The intention of this work is to make an overview of the existing approaches, methods and infrastructures of the data analysis in DIR accentuating the role of hypotheses in such research process and efficient support of hypothesis formation, evaluation and selection in course of the natural phenomena modeling and experiments carrying out. An introduction into various concepts, methods and tools intended for effective organization of hypothesis driven experiments in DIR is presented in the paper. 1 Hypotheses, theories, models and laws in data intensive science
A Pause in Nucleus Accumbens Neuron Firing Is Required to Initiate and Maintain Feeding

Nucleus accumbens (NAc) inactivation increases food intake, indicating that NAc neurons exert ongoing inhibition of feeding. We previously described a subpopulation of NAc neurons that pause during sucrose licking and proposed that the pause permits consumption. We tested this hypothesis by first recording NAc neurons during sucrose consumption, and then electrically stimulating through the same electrodes. A large proportion of NAc shell and core neurons were inhibited during sucrose consumption, and local electrical stimulation abruptly interrupted licking. Effective stimulation sites were more anterior than ineffective sites in NAc. At low stimulus intensities, licking resumed immediately on stimulation offset. The latency to lick resumption from NAc neuron inhibition onset (∼460 ms) was very similar to that after electrical stimulation offset (∼440 ms). These results directly support the hypothesis that a significant subpopulation of NAc neurons inhibit palatable food consumption and that a pause in their firing is required to initiate and maintain consumption.
Verification and Validation Activities for Embedded Systems - A Feasibility Study on a Reading Technique for SysML Models

Embedded Systems play an important role on today's interconnected world. However, there is a gap in relation to Verification and Validation (VV ii) the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA); and iii) the syntactic and semantic elements available in the formalism of the SysML language. A feasibility study was carried out to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of one of the techniques. From a total of 26 subjects, 50% have found an average of 72% of defects and spent an average of 48 minutes.
Physical organization of the Bradyrhizobium japonicum nitrogenase gene region

In Bradyrhizobium japonicum USDA 110 the three genes that encode the nitrogenase enzyme complex are separated into two transcription units, nifH and nifDK. We have physically mapped a 33-kilobase-pair region of the B. japonicum genome that contains both nifH and nifDK. The nifDK operon is located transcriptionally upstream from nifH, and all three genes are transcribed in the same direction. Within the 20-kilobase-pair region that separates the promoters for these two transcription units, we have identified a region homologous to the Klebsiella pneumoniae nifA gene. This nifA homology is situated about 6 kilobase pairs upstream from the nifH transcriptional initiation signal, in an analogous position to the nifA-like locus previously described for Rhizobium meliloti. In addition, we have characterized a second distinct nifA homology in B. japonicum that is not directly linked to the nitrogenase structural gene region.
Vaccines, Contagion, and Social Networks

Consider the causal effect that one individual's treatment may have on another individual's outcome when the outcome is contagious, with specific application to the effect of vaccination on an infectious disease outcome. The effect of one individual's vaccination on another's outcome can be decomposed into two different causal effects, called the "infectiousness" and "contagion" effects. We present identifying assumptions and estimation or testing procedures for infectiousness and contagion effects in two different settings: (1) using data sampled from independent groups of observations, and (2) using data collected from a single interdependent social network. The methods that we propose for social network data require fitting generalized linear models (GLMs). GLMs and other statistical models that require independence across subjects have been used widely to estimate causal effects in social network data, but, because the subjects in networks are presumably not independent, the use of such models is generally invalid, resulting in inference that is expected to be anticonservative. We introduce a way to ensure that GLM residuals are uncorrelated across subjects despite the fact that outcomes are non-independent. This simultaneously demonstrates the possibility of using GLMs and related statistical models for network data and highlights their limitations.
Gate current modeling for MOSFETs

The topic of gate current modeling has been of strong interest in recent years, and with the accelerating pace of device miniaturization it is becoming more and important. We present a survey of tunneling models describing carrier transport through insulating layers for semiconductor device simulation. The crucial topics are particularly discussed, namely, models for the energy distribution function, the transmission coefficient for single and layered dielectrics, defect-assisted tunneling and its relation to dielectric degradation and breakdown, and the influence of quasi-bound states in the inversion layer. The models are compared to measurements.
A Follow Up Study into the Effect of Disruptions on the Performance of Software Engineering Teams

This paper describes follow up research carried out n software engineering teams composed of students who were engaged in the Maxi p roject, one of the group projects in operation at the University of Sheffiel d. Once again an online version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) was used to ascertain the personality type of the students and the teams were observed in meeting s throughout the project. The previous study had shown that teams who failed to d iscuss pertinent issues to a satisfactory level ran the greatest risk of encount eri g serious project problems. In the follow up study lack of debate was not such a s erious problem, with more problems caused by what one might term interpersona l issues, i.e. inter-team squabbles, sarcasm, and lack of cohesion
Barrier membranes with high concentrations of aligned impermeable flakes

We have been developing barrier membranes containing aligned mineral flakes [1-5]. Because these mineral flakes are crystalline, their very low permeabilities can reduce the permeability of the composite film. However, the mechanism of reduction remains controversial. Many expect that the permeability change will vary linearly with the volume fraction of flakes; others, including us, think that it will vary more nearly with the square of this volume fraction. There are similar disagreements about how the permeability will vary with flake shape, usually expressed as an aspect ratio.