Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Proactive Data Security Framework for Mission-Critical Wireless Sensor Networks

The resource-constrained sensors in mission-critical applications are subject to both random failures and intentional compromise by the adversary, which poses severe security threats in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The different types of security threats have been identified and addressed in an individual manner in the past. And most solutions are cryptography based. In this paper, we argue that cryptography alone is insufficient to fully address the insider attacks in the existence of both the compromised and faulty sensor nodes. We further propose a proactive data security framework (PDSF) to identify compromised and faulty nodes proactively and prohibit them from participating network activities in a dynamic manner. PDSF is aimed to serve as the front line in defending against all different types of security threats. The rationale behind our approach is that a sensor’s future behavior can be predicted (at least) probabilistically by its past behavior. PDSF is divided into two key modules, that is, misbehavior characterization & monitoring, and trust management. PDSF characterizes different types of misbehavior in WSNs and defines a set of monitoring criteria. PDSF further develops a trust management model, which adapts to the resource constrained nature of the WSNs.
One-loop corrections and all order factorization in deeply virtual Compton scattering

We calculate the one-loop corrections to a general off-forward deeply virtual Compton process at leading twist for both parton helicity-dependent and independent cases. We show that the infrared divergences can be factorized entirely into off-forward parton distributions, even when one of the two photons is on shell. We argue that this property persists to all orders in perturbation theory. We obtain the next-to-leading order Wilson coefficients for the general leading-twist expansion of the product of two electromagnetic currents in the {ovr MS} scheme. {copyright} {ital 1998} {ital The American Physical Society}
Analysis and Modeling of Stress over Layer Induced Threshold Voltage Shift in HKMG nMOS Transistors

This paper analyzes and models the stress over layer induced threshold voltage (VT) shift observed in high-K metal gate (HKMG) nMOS transistors. It is shown that the conventional in-plane uniaxial strain based VT shift model cannot explain the large VT shift observed in HKMG MOS transistors. A VT shift model considering both the in-plane longitudinal and out-of-plane transverse stress component is proposed. The accuracy of the proposed model is verified by comparing it with the experimental data obtained from the transistor fabricated using 28nm HKMG CMOS technology. The new model, unlike the earlier models, successfully predicts the stress over layer induced VT shift in HKMG nMOS transistors within 5% for all gate lengths.
Heritability of Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy

OBJECTIVE—Diabetic nephropathy clusters in families, suggesting that genetic factors play a role in its pathogenesis. We investigated whether similar clustering exists for proliferative retinopathy in families with two or more siblings with type 1 diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—The FinnDiane Study has characterized 20% (4,800 patients) of adults with type 1 diabetes in Finland. In 188 families, there were at least two siblings with type 1 diabetes. Ophthalmic records were obtained for 369 of 396 (93%) and fundus photographs for 251 of 369 (68%) patients. Retinopathy was graded based on photographs and/or repeated ophthalmic examinations using the Early Treatment of Diabetic Retinopathy grading scale. RESULTS—Mean age at onset of diabetes was 14.3 ± 10.2 years, and mean duration was 25.9 ± 11.8 years. Proliferative retinopathy was found in 115 of 369 patients (31%). The familial risk of proliferative retinopathy was estimated in 168 of 188 sibships, adjusted for A1C, duration, and mean blood pressure. Proliferative retinopathy in the probands (48 of 168) was associated with an increased risk (odds ratio 2.76 [95% CI 1.25- 6.11], P = 0.01) of proliferative retinopathy in the siblings of probands (61 of 182). The heritability of proliferative retinopathy was h2 = 0.52 ± 0.31 (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS—We found a familial clustering of proliferative retinopathy in patients with type 1 diabetes. The observation cannot be accounted for by conventional risk factors, suggesting a genetic component in the pathogenesis of proliferative retinopathy in type 1 diabetes.
‘Costa da Morte’ ataxia is spinocerebellar ataxia 36: clinical and genetic characterization

Spinocerebellar ataxia 36 has been recently described in Japanese families as a new type of spinocerebellar ataxia with motor neuron signs. It is caused by a GGCCTG repeat expansion in intron 1 of NOP56. Family interview and document research allowed us to reconstruct two extensive, multigenerational kindreds stemming from the same village (Costa da Morte in Galicia, Spain), in the 17th century. We found the presence of the spinocerebellar ataxia 36 mutation co-segregating with disease in these families in whom we had previously identified an ∼0.8 Mb linkage region to chromosome 20 p. Subsequent screening revealed the NOP56 expansion in eight additional Galician ataxia kindreds. While normal alleles contain 5–14 hexanucleotide repeats, expanded alleles range from ∼650 to 2500 repeats, within a shared haplotype. Further expansion of repeat size was frequent, especially upon paternal transmission, while instances of allele contraction were observed in maternal transmissions. We found a total of 63 individuals carrying the mutation, 44 of whom were confirmed to be clinically affected; over 400 people are at risk. We describe here the detailed clinical picture, consisting of a late-onset, slowly progressive cerebellar syndrome with variable eye movement abnormalities and sensorineural hearing loss. There were signs of denervation in the tongue, as well as mild pyramidal signs, but otherwise no signs of classical amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Magnetic resonance imaging findings were consistent with the clinical course, showing atrophy of the cerebellar vermis in initial stages, later evolving to a pattern of olivo-ponto-cerebellar atrophy. We estimated the origin of the founder mutation in Galicia to have occurred ∼1275 years ago. Out of 160 Galician families with spinocerebellar ataxia, 10 (6.3%) were found to have spinocerebellar ataxia 36, while 15 (9.4%) showed other of the routinely tested dominant spinocerebellar ataxia types. Spinocerebellar ataxia 36 is thus, so far, the most frequent dominant spinocerebellar ataxia in this region, which may have implications for American countries associated with traditional Spanish emigration.
Dividend Puzzle – A Review of Dividend Theories*

Dividend policy has been one of the areas of corporate finance to be analyzed with a rigorous model, and it has since been one of the most thoroughtly researched issues in modern finance. There are a number of theories of dividend behaviour, and empirical studies provide little evidence for one over the other. Also the conceptions concerning corporate dividend theories are different. The main part of the discussion is related to the evaluation of financial research, because at all times researchers have tried to solve the dividend puzzle by using new theories and insights.
Efficient Exploration for Dialog Policy Learning with Deep BBQ Networks \& Replay Buffer Spiking

When rewards are sparse and action spaces large, Q-learning with $\epsilon$-greedy exploration can be inefficient. This poses problems for otherwise promising applications such as task-oriented dialogue systems, where the primary reward signal, indicating successful completion of a task, requires a complex sequence of appropriate actions. Under these circumstances, a randomly exploring agent might never stumble upon a successful outcome in reasonable time. We present two techniques that significantly improve the efficiency of exploration for deep Q-learning agents in dialogue systems. First, we introduce an exploration technique based on Thompson sampling, drawing Monte Carlo samples from a Bayes-by-backprop neural network, demonstrating marked improvement over common approaches such as $\epsilon$-greedy and Boltzmann exploration. Second, we show that spiking the replay buffer with experiences from a small number of successful episodes, as are easy to harvest for dialogue tasks, can make Q-learning feasible when it might otherwise fail.
Module generators driving the compilation for adaptive computing systems

We present GLACE, the Generic Library for Adaptive Computing Systems, which offers a comprehensive set of user-extensible module generators and associated meta-data (e.g., timing, interfaces, topology, etc.). Furthermore, we will discuss some of the issues that need to be addressed when using GLACE from a high-level compilation How.
The Power of an Infant's Smile: Maternal Physiological Responses to Infant Emotional Expressions

Infant emotional expressions, such as distress cries, evoke maternal physiological reactions. Most of which involve accelerated sympathetic nervous activity. Comparatively little is known about effects of positive infant expressions, such as happy smiles, on maternal physiological responses. This study investigated how physiological and psychological maternal states change in response to infants’ emotional expressions. Thirty first-time mothers viewed films of their own 6- to 7-month-old infants’ affective behavior. Each observed a video of a distress cry followed by a video showing one of two expressions (randomly assigned): a happy smiling face (smile condition) or a calm neutral face (neutral condition). Both before and after the session, participants completed a self-report inventory assessing their emotional states. The results of the self-report inventory revealed no effects of exposure to the infant videos. However, the mothers in the smile condition, but not in the neutral condition, showed deceleration of skin conductance. These findings demonstrate that the mothers who observed their infants smiling showed decreased sympathetic activity. We propose that an infant’s positive emotional expression may affect the branch of the maternal stress-response system that modulates the homeostatic balance of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.
Short comings of latent models in supervised settings

The Aspect Model [1, 2] and the Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model [3, 4] are latent generative models proposed with the objective of modeling discrete data such as text. Though it is not explicitly published (to the best of our knowledge), it is reasonably well known in there search community that the Aspect Model does not perform very well in supervised settings and also that latent models are frequently not identifiable, i.e. their optimal parameters are not unique.In this paper, we make a much stronger claim about the pitfalls of commonly-used latent models. By constructing a small, synthetic, but by no means unrealistic corpus, we show that latent models have inherent limitations that prevent them from recovering semantically meaningful parameters from data generated from a reasonable generative distribution. In fact, our experiments with supervised classification using the Aspect Model, showed that its performance was rather poor, even worse than Naive Bayes, leading us to the synthetic study.We also analyze the scenario of using tempered EM and show that it would not plug the above shortcomings. Our analysis suggests that there is also some scope for improvement in the Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model(LDA) [3, 4]. We then use our insight into the shortcomings of these models, to come up with a promising variant of the LDA, that does not suffer from the aforesaid drawbacks. This could potentially lead to much better performance and model fit, in the supervised scenario.
Fast design-space exploration with FPGA clusters

Clusters of FPGAs are a promising environment for prototyping and evaluation of new MPSoC architectures with a large number of parallel cores. The high complexity of both the MPSoC and the FPGA cluster pose many challenges for the designer [1]. Tools like Synopsys Certify can be used to automatically partition designs on systems with a fixed communication infrastructure, still they do not address the problem that minor changes in the design might require a whole rerun of the mapping procedure. For each FPGA the architecture mapping consists of synthesis, place & route, bitstream generation, and finally the FPGA configuration. While the configuration is done within milliseconds, synthesis, place & route, and bitstream generation easily take several hours to complete. Thus, the evaluation of different architectural variants becomes a very time-consuming task. In design-space exploration typically not all parts of the architecture are changed at a time. Based on this idea, we have developed an approach that utilizes concepts of dynamic reconfiguration to speed-up the exploration. In our environment, the evaluated design consists of a number of pre-synthesized and pre-routed modules and communication structures that can be combined to new architecture variants. This results in a very fast setup of the prototyping environment compared to a completely new synthesis. The design-flow relies on a tool supported rather than an automatic approach. This takes into account that the majority of the targeted application scenarios consists of regular structures instead of a single large design that has to be partitioned to multiple FPGAs.
Mycobacterium avium Infection Induces H-Ferritin Expression in Mouse Primary Macrophages by Activating Toll-Like Receptor 2

Important for both host and pathogen survivals, iron is a key factor in determining the outcome of an infectious process. Iron with-holding, including sequestration inside tissue macrophages, is considered an important strategy to fight infection. However, for intra-macrophagic pathogens, such as Mycobacterium avium, host defence may depend on intracellular iron sequestration mechanisms. Ferritin, the major intracellular iron storage protein, plays a critical role in this process. In the current study, we studied ferritin expression in mouse bone marrow-derived macrophages upon infection with M. avium. We found that H-ferritin is selectively increased in infected macrophages, through an up-regulation of gene transcription. This increase was mediated by the engagement of Toll like receptor-2, and was independent of TNF-alpha or nitric oxide production. The formation of H-rich ferritin proteins and the consequent iron sequestration may be an important part of the panoply of antimicrobial mechanisms of macrophages.
OrfMapper: A Web-Based Application for Visualizing Gene Clusters on Metabolic Pathway Maps

Computational analyses of, e.g., genomic, proteomic, or metabolomic data, commonly result in one or more sets of candidate genes, proteins, or enzymes. These sets are often the outcome of clustering algorithms. Subsequently, it has to be tested if, e.g., the candidate gene-products are members of known metabolic processes. With OrfMapper we provide a powerful but easy-to-use, web-based database application, that supports such analyses. All services provided by OrfMapper are freely available at this http URL
A 1.5-V 2–9.6-GHz Inductorless Low-Noise Amplifier in 0.13-$\mu{\hbox {m}} $ CMOS

This paper presents an inductorless low-noise amplifier (LNA) design for an ultra-wideband (UWB) receiver front-end. A current-reuse gain-enhanced noise canceling architecture is proposed, and the properties and limitations of the gain-enhancement stage are discussed. Capacitive peaking is employed to improve the gain flatness and -3-dB bandwidth, at the cost of absolute gain value. The LNA circuit is fabricated in a 0.13-mum triple-well CMOS technology. Measurement result shows that a small-signal gain of 11 dB and a -3-dB bandwidth of 2-9.6 GHz are obtained. Over the -3-dB bandwidth, the input return loss is less than -8.3 dB, and the noise figure is 3.6-4.8 dB. The LNA consumes 19 mW from a low supply voltage of 1.5 V. It is shown that the LNA designed without on-chip inductors achieves comparable performances with inductor-based designs. The silicon area is reduced significantly in the inductorless design, the LNA core occupies only 0.05 mm2, which is among the smallest reported designs.
Structured random measurements in signal processing

Compressed sensing and its extensions have recently triggered interest in randomized signal acquisition. A key finding is that random measurements provide sparse signal reconstruction guarantees for efficient and stable algorithms with a minimal number of samples. While this was first shown for (unstructured) Gaussian random measurement matrices, applications require certain structure of the measurements leading to structured random measurement matrices. Near optimal recovery guarantees for such structured measurements have been developed over the past years in a variety of contexts. This article surveys the theory in three scenarios: compressed sensing (sparse recovery), low rank matrix recovery, and phaseless estimation. The random measurement matrices to be considered include random partial Fourier matrices, partial random circulant matrices (subsampled convolutions), matrix completion, and phase estimation from magnitudes of Fourier type measurements. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the mathematical techniques for the analysis of such structured random measurements. (© 2014 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
Supermodular game for energy efficient TOA-based positioning

In this paper we address the problem of minimizing the energy cost of positioning a node in a wireless sensor network, using time of arrival measurements. A sensor needs to receive at least three distance measurements to known anchors in order to position itself. The accuracy of its position estimation depends on the signal to noise ratio of the beacons from the anchor nodes, whose power levels are to be selected according to a twofold criterion: minimum power level and desired positioning quality for users, determined by the error covariance metric. We derive a solution based on modeling the positioning problem as a non-cooperative game. We show that the resulting game is Supermodular and that it possesses a unique Nash Equilibrium, which can be quickly reached with best response dynamics. Finally, in the numerical results we find the price of anarchy of our game.
The Self creation challenge to the cosmological 'concordance model'

The theory of Self Creation Cosmology is described and found to be as concordant as the standard cosmological 'concordance model' with local experiments and cosmological observations. However it does not require the speculative hypotheses of inflation, dark matter or dark energy. The theory is highly predictive and when its only free parameter, H, is fixed empirically, all other cosmological constraints are then determined and found to be consistent with present observations. It is highly testable and challenges General Relativity in the geodetic precession measurement to be made by the Gravity Probe B satellite. The new theory predicts a N-S geodetic plus Thomas precession about a direction perpendicular to the plane of the orbit of 4.4096 arcsec/yr, that is, 2/3 of that of General Relativity. The predictions of the 'frame dragging' precession of that experiment are equal in both theories that is 0.0409 arcsec/yr. Furthermore, there are at least two other experiments that will distinguish between the two theories, which should be performed at the earliest opportunity, if the geodetic measurement proves to be consistent with the theory. These experiments ask the questions, "Do photons fall at the same rate as particles? " and "Is the Casimir force coupled to curvature? "
Image Blur Assessment with Feature Points

Blur is a key factor in the perception of image quality, leading to spread of edges in images. The quantity of feature points extracted from images can represent image shape changes. Compared with sharp images, blurred images tend to contain less feature points, and the reduction of feature points is related to blur. In this paper, we propose a new blind blur assessment metric based on feature points. First, we apply Gaussian blur to the blurred image, producing the re-blurred image. Then feature points from the blurred and re-blurred images are extracted and used to form feature point maps. Next, each feature point map is divided into blocks to compute block-wise quantity map, based on which a feature point similarity map is calculated. Finally, a visual saliency map is employed to conduct the pooling, producing the (cid:12)nal blur score. Experimental results on four public databases demonstrate that the predicted blur scores has high correlation with subjective evaluations, and the proposed method outperforms several no-reference image blur metrics, as well as some representative general-purpose blind image quality metrics.
Suffix Tree Clustering on Post-retrieval Documents

Clustering is used to divide a collection of data into groups based on similarity of objects. With respect to IR, document clustering has been studied. An information retrieval (IR) system would always return a list of retrieved documents to the user. The post-retrieval documents can be clustered in order to help users browse and navigate the searching results. For this purpose, Zamir and Etzioni (1998) have proposed to use a suffix-tree based document clustering algorithm.
Towards Multi – Layer Trusted Virtual Domains

We address the fine-grained control of information flow between distributed applications to protect transactions. Confining transactions in distributed untrusted environments is crucial for Web services, distributed computing, and most e-commerce applications relying on those technologies. Applications must be protected from rogue peer applications but at the same time applications need to communicate to selected peer applications to implement transactions and distributed services. We propose a solution based on Trusted Virtual Domains (TVD), which represent a new model for achieving IT and business security. TVDs are designed to satisfy business-level goals by simplifying management and providing explicit infrastructure-level containment and trust guarantees. TVDs can be applied to different layers within a system. We consider here TVDs for the virtual machine monitor (VMM) as well as at the application level. Combining protection in those layers is especially useful for systems that intersect multiple virtual machines and need to separate information flow at the applications level. In this contribution, we briefly describe the design and the prototype implementations of TVDs at the application and VMM levels. We focus on implications of the layering of these two TVDs to achieve consistent trust and confinement properties across distributed applica-
Efficient network coding at relay for relay-assisted network-coding ARQ protocols

Relay-assisted network-coding (RANC) automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocols are ARQ protocols that leverage both opportunistic retransmission and network coding for wireless relay networks. This paper studies the issue of efficient network coding at relay for RANC ARQ. We develop a XOR-based with the help of Fibonacci sequence scheme, abbreviated as XOR Fibo. Simulation results show that in terms of relative inefficiency, XOR Fibo has a significant performance gain over a plain XOR scheme. Moreover, the use of XOR Fibo can provide close to the same performance as a random network coding scheme that uses a large field size, with the added advantage of requiring fewer and simpler operations during the encoding and decoding processes.