Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
TCP NewReno: Slow-but-Steady or Impatient?

In this paper, we compare the throughputs of two different TCP NewReno variants, namely Slow-but-Steady and Impatient. We develop analytic throughput models of these variants as a function of round-trip time, loss event rate, and the burstiness of packet drops within a loss event. Our models build upon prior work on TCP Reno throughput modeling, but extend this work to provide an analytical characterization of the NewReno fast recovery algorithms. We validated our models using the ns-2 simulator. Our models accurately predict the steady-state NewReno throughput for a wide range of loss rates. Based on these models, we analytically determine the preferred operating regions for each TCP variant. Our results show that the Slow-but-Steady variant is comparable to or superior to the Impatient variant in all but the most extreme scenarios for network packet loss.
BinText steganography based on Markov state transferring probability

In recent years, information hiding technology has developed from the focus of verifying the authenticity into Internet communication as an effective means of enhancing its safety secretly. High transmission efficiency, low resource occupancy and intelligible meaning make text message as the most commonly used type of media in our daily communication. But, text message is difficult to hide secret information effectively and reliably because of its restriction of redundant information as well as the alterability in manual operation. This paper introduces the text steganography, an information hiding technology based on text message, and explores the application of Markov state transferring probability among the sequence of nature languages to achieve the purpose of text steganography in online communication. The above approach can realize information hiding in text message with the capability of immunity from regular operations, such as formatting, compressing and sometimes manual altering operation on its text attributes.
Exploiting mirrors for laser stripe 3D scanning

We propose and evaluate the use of a mirror for improving the scanning process when using laser-stripe acquisition devices. We propose to exploit mirrors for two different purposes: automatizing the 3D acquisition process and allowing the scanning of hard-to-reach parts. The combined use of a flat mirror and a rotary table allows to scan, in a completely automatic and unattended manner, small complex objects with an high level of completeness. Moreover we show how the use of a small hand-held mirror can to be effective for scanning parts that are difficult to be reached or scanned because the physical dimension of the scanner device.
A HMM-based Approach to Question Answering against Linked Data

In this paper, we present a QA system enabling NL questions against Linked Data, designed and adopted by the Tor Vergata University AI group in the QALD-3 evaluation. The system integrates lexical semantic modeling and statistical inference within a complex architecture that decomposes the NL interpretation task into a cascade of three different stages: (1) The selection of key ontological information from the question (i.e. predicate, arguments and properties), (2) the location of such salient information in the ontology through the joint disambiguation of the different candidates and (3) the compilation of the final SPARQL query. This architecture characterizes a novel approach for the task and exploits a graphical model (i.e. an Hidden Markov Model) to select the proper ontological triples according to the graph nature of RDF. In particular, for each query an HMM model is produced whose Viterbi solution is the comprehensive joint disambiguation across the sentence elements. The combination of these approaches achieved interesting results in the QALD competition. The RTV is in fact within the group of participants performing slightly below the best system, but with smaller requirements and on significantly poorer input information.
The Discourse of Tattoo Consumption among Female Youth in Nigeria

Abstract Among female youth in Nigeria, especially those living in Abuja, Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and its environs, skin design or tattooing has become a trendy social ritual in reinventing the notion of the “self” or perceived personhood, according to some subjective relevance. The body, or the skin in particular, has become a site for cultural (re)production and interpretation of meaning and a symbolic resource for embodied social capital and individual agency. This article interrogates the practice of tattooing among these youth: its motivations, semiotic interpretations, and perception. It illuminates how female tattoos have helped to create a conceptual dialogue between the biological (objective) body and the social (subjective) body. The study is conceptually rooted in African feminist thoughts and postmodern perspectives about the (female) body which view it as a text that can be written, rewritten and interpreted in powerful ways through a cultural lens. The results indicate that female tattoos are symbolic investments that represent fashion, self-expression, individuality, social change and sexual agency. Fundamentally, the aesthetic and artistic female body is deployed to reconstruct postmodern female identity while protesting the mainstream stereotyped representation of women especially in a male-dominated conservative society like Nigeria.
A Congestion Window Control Mechanism Based on Fuzzy Logic to Improve TCP Performance in MANETs

In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), the TCP performance is significantly degraded due to some characteristics of MANETs such as mobility, multi-hop routing, dynamic topology, distributed control and management. In TCP the sender assumes that packet loss is an indicator of network congestion. However, this assumption may not apply to MANETs. In this paper, the authors have proposed a fuzzy inference system based on the factors of expected throughput and actual throughput to dynamically adjust the congestion window size that lead to improvement in the performance of TCP in MANETs. This proposed scheme does not rely on any explicit feedback from the network, it requires only the sender side modifications. The simulation study of the ad hoc network in this work is with regard to equal sharing of network bandwidth among multiple TCP flows. Through extensive simulations, the authors have shown that the number of concurrent flows significantly affects the TCP performance. The proposed scheme achieves the desired goals of improved performance compared to other TCP variants.
Quantum inequalities and ``quantum interest'' as eigenvalue problems

Quantum inequalities (QI's) provide lower bounds on the averaged energy density of a quantum field. We show how the QI's for massless scalar fields in even dimensional Minkowski space may be reformulated in terms of the positivity of a certain self-adjoint operator - a generalised Schroedinger operator with the energy density as the potential - and hence as an eigenvalue problem. We use this idea to verify that the energy density produced by a moving mirror in two dimensions is compatible with the QI's for a large class of mirror trajectories. In addition, we apply this viewpoint to the `quantum interest conjecture' of Ford and Roman, which asserts that the positive part of an energy density always overcompensates for any negative components. For various simple models in two and four dimensions we obtain the best possible bounds on the `quantum interest rate' and on the maximum delay between a negative pulse and a compensating positive pulse. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that - in four dimensions - it is impossible for a positive delta-function pulse of any magnitude to compensate for a negative delta-function pulse, no matter how close together they occur.
Growing Chaos in the Lives of Children Youth and Families: How Can We Turn It Around?

This chapter consists of three parts that lay the foundation for understanding and improving the present state of parenthood in America. The first part draws on demographic data, mostly from the United States, to identify the principal manifestations and sources of chaos in the lives of families living in economically developed societies. The second part introduces the bioecological model of human development. The third part moves from the model to experimental programs designed to counteract the chaos.
Identification of CD14 residues involved in specific lipopolysaccharide recognition

CD14 is a key molecule responsible for the innate host inflammatory response to microbial infection. It is able to bind a wide variety of microbial ligands and facilitate the activation of both myeloid and nonmyeloid cells. However, its specific contribution to the innate recognition of bacteria is not known. Presently there is no information on the contribution of individual CD14 residues to Escherichia coli lipopolysaccharide (LPS) binding or on the molecular basis of the interaction between CD14 and LPS from other bacteria. LPS obtained from Porphyromonas gingivalis, a bacterium associated with chronic inflammatory disease, binds CD14 and activates myeloid cells but does not facilitate the activation of nonmyeloid cells. The transfer and binding of these two LPS species to soluble CD14 recombinant globulin proteins with single point mutations was examined. Functional activity of the mutant proteins was monitored by E-selectin expression on human umbilical cord endothelial cells. The analysis identified a charge reversal mutation in a single residue, E47, that demonstrated selective binding to E. coli LPS but not to P. gingivalis LPS. E-selectin activation assays indicated that proteins with mutations at position E47 maintained their structural integrity. Other mutations, including a charge reversal mutation of residue E58, did not significantly reduce the binding of either LPS ligand or the ability of the molecule to facilitate E-selectin activation. These data demonstrate that CD14 can selectively recognize different LPS ligands.
Figure-Ground Organization using 3D Symmetry

We present a novel approach to object localization using mirror symmetry as a general purpose and biologically motivated prior. 3D symmetry leads to good segmentation because (i) almost all objects exhibit symmetry, and (ii) configurations of objects are not likely to be symmetric unless they share some additional relationship. Furthermore, psychophysical evidence suggests that the human vision system makes use symmetry in constructing 3D percepts, indicating that symmetry may be important in object localization. No general purpose approach is known for solving 3D symmetry correspondence in 2D camera images, because few invariants exist. Therefore, to test symmetry as a clustering mechanism, we disambiguated the symmetry correspondence problem with the epipolar geometry of the binocular correspondence problem in order to simplify both. Mirror symmetry is a spatially global property that is not likely to be lost in the spatially local noise of binocular depth maps. Furthermore, each of these two correspondence problems provides non-overlapping constraints that makes it easier to solve both at once rather that each individually. We tested our approach on a corpus of 60 images collected indoors with a stereo camera system. K-means clustering was used as a baseline for comparison. The informative nature of the symmetry prior makes it possible to cluster data without a priori knowledge of which objects may appear in the scene, and without knowing how many objects there are in the scene.
Results of CRL/NYU System at DUC-2003 and an Experiment on Division of Document.

We participated in three multi-document summarization tasks at the DUC-2003 formal run and evaluated the performance of our summarization system. Our summarization system based on sentence extraction also incorporated a module to estimate similarity between sentences for multi-document summarization. The similarity information was used for selecting the representative sentence among similar sentences. We also conducted a preliminary experiment to divide document sets into two groups corresponding to the distribution of key sentences.
Identification of Transcriptional Regulatory Elements by Functional Enrichment Analysis

Corresponding author Abstract Deciphering the complex interaction between transcriptional regulatory (both transand cis-) elements comprehensively and identifying these potential binding sites are fundamental problems in functional genomics. Therefore, determining the transcription factors that regulate a gene in different cell types and the cis-regulatory elements they are binding to will help lay the foundation for building gene regulatory networks. While many computational approaches have been developed for lower eukaryotes and prokaryotes, most of them often do not generalize to vertebrates. Here, we use gene ontological evidences to perform functional enrichment analysis among the TFs and genes, and group the functionally related genes to characterize their transcriptional association. We also analyze correlations between TFs and genes using their expression profiles. Thus, we search for putative transcriptional regulatory elements (transcription factor binding sites) along core promoter regions of the grouped genes. The performance of our search is highly satisfactory in term of binding site hit accuracy.
Topology Representation for the Voronoi Diagram of 3D Spheres

Euclidean Voronoi diagram of spheres in 3-dimensional space has not been explored as much as it deserves even though it has significant potential impacts on diverse applications in both science and engineering. In addition, studies on the data structure for its topology have not been reported yet. Presented in this paper is the topological representation for Euclidean Voronoi diagram of spheres which is a typical non-manifold model. The proposed representation is a variation of radial edge data structure capable of dealing with the topological characteristics of Euclidean Voronoi diagram of spheres distinguished from those of a general non-manifold model and Euclidean Voronoi diagram of points. Various topological queries for the spatial reasoning on the representation are also presented as a sequence of adjacency relationships among topological entities. The time and storage complexities of the proposed representation are analyzed.
Refining Concepts in Description Logics

While the problem of learning logic programs has been extensively studied in ILP, the problem of learning in description logics (DLs) has been studied to a lesser extent. Learning in DLs is however worthwhile , since both Horn logic and description logics are widely used knowledge representation formalisms, their expressive powers being incompa-rable (neither includes the other as a fragment). Unlike most approaches to learning in description logics, which provide bottom-up (and typically overly speciic) least generalizations of the examples, this paper addresses learning in DLs using downward (and upward) reenement operators. Technically, we construct a complete and proper reenement operator for the ALER description logic (to avoid overrtting, we disallow disjunctions from the target DL). Although no minimal reenement operators exist for ALER, we show that we can achieve minimality of all reenement steps, except the ones that introduce the ? concept. We additionally prove that complete reenement operators for ALER cannot be locally nite and suggest how this problem can be overcome by an MDL search heuristic. We also discuss the innuence of the Open World Assumption (typically made in DLs) on example coverage.
A 2 pole 9.6–11.7 GHz band stop filter using analog tuning RF MEMS varactors

A tunable 9.6 GHz to 11.7 GHz bandstop filter is presented. Tuning is done using RF-MEMS structures with analogical capacitance variation, from 25 fF to 225 fF [1]. The filter is a 2 pole design, based on ring resonators coupled on a 50 Ohms micro-strip transmission line. A half-wave line is arranged between the two resonators, to optimize microwave performances with a zero reflection mode, and minimizes the out of band losses. The measured performances are −35 dB of rejection at 9.6 GHz, shifting to −42 dB at 11.7 GHz. The losses below the rejected band are less than −1 dB. This device has also been measured under variable RF power and has shown handling at 6 W.
What is process window?

Process window is a collection of values of process parameters that allow circuit to be manufactured and to operate under desired specifications. For instance, lithographic process window is typically defined as the set of {focus, exposure} points to control critical dimension (CD) variation to within 10%. One simple way visualizing it is using a Focus-Exposure Matrix (FEM) curve which plots exposure vs. defocus for a given linewidth tolerance. Maximal inscribed rectangle in this plot then represents the process window [1]. Of course, metrics can go beyond linewidth (e.g., sidewall angle) as can process variables (e.g., overlay, temperature). Furthermore, the overall process window for a design will be intersection or overlap of process windows for all different layout patterns existing in the design (e.g., isolated vs. dense lines) [2].
Practical Parallel Algorithms for Graph Coloring Problems in Numerical Optimization

Finding a good graph coloring quickly is often a crucial phase in the development of efficient, parallel algorithms for many scientific and engineering applications. In this paper we consider the problem of solving the graph coloring problem itself in parallel. We present a simple and fast parallel graph coloring heuristic that is well suited for shared memory programming and yields an almost linear speedup on the PRAM model. We also present a second heuristic that improves on the number of colors used. The heuristics have been implemented using OpenMP. Experiments conducted on an SGI Cray Origin 2000 super computer using very large graphs from finite element methods and eigenvalue computations validate the theoretical run-time analysis.
The community Analysis of User Behaviors Network for Web Traffic

Understanding the structure and dynamics of the user behavior networks for web traffic (To be convenient in next sections, we refer to replace it as UBNWT) that connect users with servers across the Internet is a key to modeling the network and designing future application. The Web-visited bipartite networks, called the user behavioral networks, display a natural bipartite structure: two kinds of nodes coexist with links only between nodes of different types. We obtained the result that the out-degree distribution of clients (the host initiating the connection), the in-degree distribution of servers (the host receiving the connection) and the strength distribution (the exchange bytes between clients and servers) are approximately power-law, whose exponential is between 1.7 and 3.4. The clustering coefficient of clients and servers is larger than that in randomized, degree preserving versions of the same graph, which indicate a modular structure of UBNWT. Finally, based on the algorithm of finding the community structure in bipartite network, we divided the clients into different communities, through manual examination of hosts in these communities, the typical normal (interest) and abnormal (DOS) communities were found. Interestingly, the loyalty of clients belonging to the same community in different time is higher than 80%. The structure analysis of UBNWT is very helpful for the network management, resource allocation, traffic engineering and security.
Running application specific kernel code by a just-in-time compiler

Kernel scripting is a technique to run an extension code in a script language in an operating system kernel. Conventional kernel scripting has two limitations. First, it affects an entire system and only privileged users are allowed to install a new script. This prohibits developers from running their own application-specific code in the kernel. Second, its performance is not sufficient for some time-sensitive applications. In this paper, we address these problems. Our system call scripting allows developers to run their own application-specific code in the kernel without the root privilege. Our system call scripting runs with less overhead because we use a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler. To evaluate our idea, we ported the LuaJIT compiler into the FreeBSD 10.1 x86 kernel. We modified Memcached to use system call scripting that processes multiple UDP GET requests at a time. With one worker thread and under a high-load condition, we achieved a 33% reduction in the average response time and a 44% improvement in the throughput when the response value size was small.
The De-Identification Camera

Visual surveillance is increasingly prevalent today but the privacy issues of individuals involved in surveillance videos have not been dealt with adequately so far. In most cases, if not all, the chief purpose of placing a camera can be served without knowing the identity of the individuals involved unless the activity is of some predetermined kind. One needs to transform these videos to protect identity of individuals involved possibly at the source camera itself. In this paper we present the De-Identification Camera, which is a scalable, low cost and real-time solution to the privacy protection issues. Our main contribution lies in proposing a privacy protection architecture which transforms the video at the camera level itself, We also present and implement a de-identification pipeline which is suitable for real-time implementation. We implemented the system on a Texas Instrument OMAP4 based embedded platform and was able to de-identify videos in real time, transforming the video on the camera itself ensures protection from various attacks. We also address issues like data utility of surveillance videos by making this solution customizable. We propose that such systems can replace the traditional surveillance cameras in the future by providing all the surveillance and privacy protection solutions on hardware, probably with few performance upgrades.
Practice Parameter update: The care of the patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis: Multidisciplinary care, symptom management, and cognitive/behavioral impairment (an evidence-based review)

Objective: To systematically review evidence bearing on the management of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Methods: The authors analyzed studies from 1998 to 2007 to update the 1999 practice parameter. Topics covered in this section include breaking the news, multidisciplinary clinics, symptom management, cognitive and behavioral impairment, communication, and palliative care for patients with ALS. Results: The authors identified 2 Class I studies, 8 Class II studies, and 30 Class III studies in ALS, but many important areas have been little studied. More high-quality, controlled studies of symptomatic therapies and palliative care are needed to guide management and assess outcomes in patients with ALS. Recommendations: Multidisciplinary clinic referral should be considered for managing patients with ALS to optimize health care delivery and prolong survival (Level B) and may be considered to enhance quality of life (Level C). For the treatment of refractory sialorrhea, botulinum toxin B should be considered (Level B) and low-dose radiation therapy to the salivary glands may be considered (Level C). For treatment of pseudobulbar affect, dextromethorphan and quinidine should be considered if approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (Level B). For patients who develop fatigue while taking riluzole, withholding the drug may be considered (Level C). Because many patients with ALS demonstrate cognitive impairment, which in some cases meets criteria for dementia, screening for cognitive and behavioral impairment should be considered in patients with ALS (Level B). Other management strategies all lack strong evidence.