Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multi-Stage Key Exchange and the Case of Google's QUIC Protocol

The traditional approach to build a secure connection is to run a key exchange protocol and, once the key has been established, to use this key afterwards in a secure channel protocol. The security of key exchange and channel protocols, and to some extent also of the composition of both, has been scrutinized extensively in the literature. However, this approach usually falls short of capturing some key exchange protocols in which, due to practical motivation, the originally separated phases become intertwined and keys are established continuously. Two prominent examples of such protocols are TLS (with resumption), and Google's recently proposed low-latency protocol QUIC. In this work we revisit the previous security of model of Brzuska et al. (CCS'11) and expand it into a multi-stage key exchange model in the style of Bellare and Rogaway. In our model, parties can establish multiple keys in different stages and use these keys between stages, even to establish the next key. The advantage of using the formalization of Brzuska et al. is that it has been designed with the aim to provide compositional guarantees. Hence, we can, too, give sufficient conditions under which multi-stage key exchange protocols compose securely with any symmetric-key application protocol, like a secure channel protocol. We then exercise our model for the case of the QUIC protocol. Basically, we show that QUIC is an adequately secure multi-stage key exchange protocol and meets the suggested security properties of the designers. We continue by proposing some slight changes to QUIC to make it more amenable to our composition result and to allow reasoning about its security as a combined connection establishment protocol when composed with a secure channel protocol.
Detection of Image Region Duplication Forgery Using Model with Circle Block

Due to the widespread use of sophisticated imaging tools, digital image forgeries have already become a serious social problem. In this paper, we proposes an efficient and robust algorithm for detection of a specific category of digital image forgery known as region duplication forgery, which is done by copying a block of an image and pasting it on to some other block of the same image. The image is first reduced in dimension by Gaussian pyramid, and four features are adopted for each circle block. The feature vectors are lexicographically sorted. Then similar vectors will be matched by a certain threshold value. Finally, the area threshold value is proposed to remove the wrong similar blocks. Experimental results show that our method is robust to not only the post processing including noise adding, blurring, lossy compression, but also the copy region rotation. Meanwhile, the proposed method reduces the total number of blocks to narrow block-matching searching space, which can improve the efficiency comparing with the exiting methods.
Uniqueness of the mass in the radiating regime

The usual approaches to the deﬁnition of energy give an ambiguous result for the energy of ﬁelds in the radiating regime. We show that for a massless scalar ﬁeld in Minkowski space–time the deﬁnition may be rendered unambiguous by adding the requirement that the energy cannot increase in retarded time. We present a similar theorem for the gravitational ﬁeld, proved elsewhere, which establishes that the Trautman–Bondi energy is the unique (up to a multiplicative factor) functional, within a natural class, which is monotonic in time for all solutions of the vacuum Einstein equations admitting a smooth “piece” of conformal null inﬁnity J ( .
Unreliable Gut Feelings Can Lead to Correct Decisions: The Somatic Marker Hypothesis in Non-Linear Decision Chains

Dual-process approaches of decision-making examine the interaction between affective/intuitive and deliberative processes underlying value judgment. From this perspective, decisions are supported by a combination of relatively explicit capabilities for abstract reasoning and relatively implicit evolved domain-general as well as learned domain-specific affective responses. One such approach, the somatic markers hypothesis (SMH), expresses these implicit processes as a system of evolved primary emotions supplemented by associations between affect and experience that accrue over lifetime, or somatic markers. In this view, somatic markers are useful only if their local capability to predict the value of an action is above a baseline equal to the predictive capability of the combined rational and primary emotional subsystems. We argue that decision-making has often been conceived of as a linear process: the effect of decision sequences is additive, local utility is cumulative, and there is no strong environmental feedback. This widespread assumption can have consequences for answering questions regarding the relative weight between the systems and their interaction within a cognitive architecture. We introduce a mathematical formalization of the SMH and study it in situations of dynamic, non-linear decision chains using a discrete-time stochastic model. We find, contrary to expectations, that decision-making events can interact non-additively with the environment in apparently paradoxical ways. We find that in non-lethal situations, primary emotions are represented globally over and above their local weight, showing a tendency for overcautiousness in situated decision chains. We also show that because they tend to counteract this trend, poorly attuned somatic markers that by themselves do not locally enhance decision-making, can still produce an overall positive effect. This result has developmental and evolutionary implications since, by promoting exploratory behavior, somatic markers would seem to be beneficial even at early stages when experiential attunement is poor. Although the model is formulated in terms of the SMH, the implications apply to dual systems theories in general since it makes minimal assumptions about the nature of the processes involved.
Literature Survey : Entity and Relationship Extraction

The field of entity extraction has got an immense importance to process this kind of unstructured data. Extracting information from such data is a challenging task and it can be achieved through entity extraction. The way how different entities interact with each other is also an equally imporatant factor to build the knowledge base. The report explains and examines various methods to achieve this goal of extracting entities and their relationships from the automobile warranty data. It presents and evaluates a rule based system to perform this task.
Model-Based Lane Detection and Lane Following for Intelligent Vehicles

A robust model-based lane detection and tracking algorithm has been studied. Initially, Dynamic programming (DP) and Hough transform are employed to detect lane boundaries. The Dynamic programming is known to be a powerful algorithm for optimal path finding on a cost field. Utilizing the intensities of edge image as costs of the DP, most likely road boundaries are obtained in this paper. An improved Hough Transform is applied to detect practically useful road boundaries with straight line segments. In the following stage, based on the prior information of lane boundaries in the detection procedure, the road boundary region has been obtained. A linear lane model has been employed with an energy function in tracking algorithm. Experiment results in inter-frame processing describe the proposed method can fit for real condition on expressway.
An Adaptive Cognitive Dissociation Between Willingness to Help Kin and Nonkin in Samoan Fa’afafine

Androphilia refers to sexual attraction and arousal to adult males, whereas gynephilia refers to sexual attraction and arousal to adult females. Previous research has demonstrated that Samoan male androphiles (known locally as fa’afafine) exhibit significantly higher altruistic tendencies toward nieces and nephews than do Samoan women and gynephilic men. The present study examined whether adaptive design features characterize the psychological mechanisms underlying fa’afafine’s elevated avuncular tendencies. The association between altruistic tendencies toward nieces and nephews and altruistic tendencies toward nonkin children was significantly weaker among fa’afafine than among Samoan women and gynephilic men. We argue that this cognitive dissociation would allow fa’afafine to allocate resources to nieces and nephews in a more economical, efficient, reliable, and precise manner. These findings are consistent with the kin selection hypothesis, which suggests that androphilic males have been selected over evolutionary time to act as “helpers-in-the-nest,” caring for nieces and nephews and thereby increasing their own indirect fitness.
Supporting the Whole Child Through Coordinated Policies, Processes, and Practices

BACKGROUND The Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) model provides a framework for promoting greater alignment, integration, and collaboration between health and education across the school setting and improving students' cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development. By providing a learning environment that ensures each student is emotionally and physically healthy, safe, actively engaged, supported, and challenged, the WSCC model presents a framework for school systems to evaluate, streamline, implement, and sustain policies, processes, and practices. METHODS This article examines the essential roles of the school district and of schools in aligning, developing, and implementing policy, processes, and practices to create optimal learning environments that support the whole child. RESULTS Three key factors advance efforts to align policies, processes, and practices. These include hiring a coordinator at the district and school levels, having collaborative teams address health and learning at the district and school levels, and using data to make decisions and build health outcomes into school and district accountability systems. CONCLUSIONS These key factors provide a road map for successfully implementing WSCC. More research is needed to determine the extent that coordinators, collaborative teams, and the inclusion of health indicators in accountability systems impact student health and learning.
Product Classification based on SVM and PHOG Descriptor

Summary It is a great need to classify the numerous product into some categories automatically. In this paper, we adopt SVM classifier combined with PHOG (Pyramid of Histograms of Orientation Gradients) descriptors to implement product–image classification. The support vector machine maps the input vectors into a highdimension space, in which a max margin supper hyper plane is set up to classify the samples and PHOG can flexibly represent the spatial layout of local image shape. Experimental results showed the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
A healthy dose of reality for game-theoretic approaches to residential demand response

This paper addresses the assumptions underpinning many control schemes for residential demand response (RDR), with particular focus on those that adopt the framework of non - cooperative games. We propose four principal assumptions that we believe are necessary to give a realistic grounding to research on RDR, so that they might be more readily applied to the real problems faced by aggregators and households in a future energy network. These are that: (i) The energy use levels of households do not take continuous values, they take discrete and hybrid values; (ii) In addition to the system state variables, each household has a private state, representing the states of the goals it addresses in consuming electricity; (iii) Households have private preferences that are state-based, and therefore non-convex and combinatorial, and moreover, the monetary costs imposed by the system operator represents only part of their preferences for electrical energy use; and (iv) Household behaviour is strategic, both at the level of equilibrium analysis and algorithmic design. For each assumption we argue why it is necessary that a RDR scheme satisfy it, and illustrate the effects of violating our proposed assumption, with reference the existing literature on RDR schemes. We also provide several examples of techniques that satisfy each assumption, and illustrate our assumptions by developing a model that satisfies all four.
Corticofugal Modulation of Initial Sound Processing in the Brain

The brain selectively extracts the most relevant information in top-down processing manner. Does the corticofugal system, a “back projection system,” constitute the neural basis of such top-down selection? Here, we show how focal activation of the auditory cortex with 500 nA electrical pulses influences the auditory information processing in the cochlear nucleus (CN) that receives almost unprocessed information directly from the ear. We found that cortical activation increased the response magnitudes and shortened response latencies of physiologically matched CN neurons, whereas decreased response magnitudes and lengthened response latencies of unmatched CN neurons. In addition, cortical activation shifted the frequency tunings of unmatched CN neurons toward those of the activated cortical neurons. Our data suggest that cortical activation selectively enhances the neural processing of particular auditory information and attenuates others at the first processing level in the brain based on sound frequencies encoded in the auditory cortex. The auditory cortex apparently implements a long-range feedback mechanism to select or filter incoming signals from the ear.
Considering topology in the clustering of self-organizing maps

 The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) [1] is an effective tool for clustering and data mining. One way to extract cluster structure from a trained SOM is by clustering its weights, which has great potential for automation. This potential is not fully realized by existing algorithms, and leaves large, high-dimensional, complex data to semi-manual treatment. Our main contribution is the exploitation of the data topology in clustering the SOM. Combined with appropriate distance and cluster validity measures, this results in a high degree of precision and automation of cluster extraction, including the discovery of rare clusters. It may work with prototypes of other quantization methods since direct use of SOM locations can be avoided.
How does Fitts' law fit pointing and dragging?

Two experiments examined selecting text using a movement sequence of pointing and dragging. Experiment 1 showed that, in the Point-Drag sequence, the pointing time was related to the pointing distance but not to the width of the text to be selected; in contrast, pointing time was related to both the pointing distance and the width of the text in the Point-Click sequence. Experiment 2 demonstrated that both the pointing and dragging times for the Point-Drag sequence were sensitive to the height of the text that was selected. The discussion of the results centers around the application of Fitts' Law to pointing and dragging in a point-drag sequence, proposing that the target for pointing is the leftmost edge of the text to be selected, and the target for dragging is the rightmost edge of the text.
DOES HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGMENT PRACTICES INCREASED EMPLOYEES’ PERFORMANCE? (An Analytical Study of Pakistan Telecom Corporation)

The study investigated the effects of different HR practices on the performance of employees working at National Telecom Corporation (NTC), Peshawar. Training, Selection, Performance Appraisal, Compensation taken as independent variables while dependent variable was taken as employees’ performance. The required data was collected through 5 point Likert scale planned questionnaires, The 150 employees of NTC Peshawar was taken as the sample of this study. As this study was cross-sectional in nature, clustersampling technique was applied. Descriptive statistics (mean & standard deviation) was used to find precision and to determine the causes and effect linear Regression, were used. To find out the relation among the variable, correlation technique was used for this study. Reliability of the variables was measured through Cronbach’s Alpha. The results show that different HR practices are major forecaster of employees’ performance. HR practices have important effects on the employees’ performance.Keywords:- HR Practice, Employee Performance, Selection, Training, Performance Appraisal, Compensation.
Experimental study of nonlinear interaction of plasma flow with charged thin current sheets: 1. Boundary structure and motion

Abstract. We study plasma transport at a thin magnetopause (MP), described hereafter as a thin current sheet (TCS), observed by Cluster at the southern cusp on 13 February 2001 around 20:01 UT. The Cluster observations generally agree with the predictions of the Gas Dynamic Convection Field (GDCF) model in the magnetosheath (MSH) up to the MSH boundary layer, where significant differences are seen. We find for the MP a normal roughly along the GSE x-axis, which implies a clear departure from the local average MP normal, a ~90 km thickness and an outward speed of 35 km/s. Two populations are identified in the MSH boundary layer: the first one roughly perpendicular to the MSH magnetic field, which we interpret as the "incident" MSH plasma, the second one mostly parallel to B. Just after the MP crossing a velocity jet is observed with a peak speed of 240 km/s, perpendicular to B, with MA=3 and β>10 (peak value 23). The magnetic field clock angle rotates by 70° across the MP. Ex is the main electric field component on both sides of the MP, displaying a bipolar signature, positive on the MSH side and negative on the opposite side, corresponding to a ~300 V electric potential jump across the TCS. The E×B velocity generally coincides with the perpendicular velocity measured by CIS; however, in the speed jet a difference between the two is observed, which suggests the need for an extra flow source. We propose that the MP TCS can act locally as an obstacle for low-energy ions (
Personalized advertising services through hybrid recommendation methods : the case of digital interactive television

Recommender systems are a special class of personalized systems that aim at predicting a user’s interest on available products and services by relying on previously rated items or item features. Human factors associated with a user’s personality or lifestyle, although potential determinants of user behavior, are rarely considered in the personalization process. In this paper we demonstrate how the concept of lifestyle can be incorporated in the recommendation process to improve the prediction accuracy by efficiently managing the problem of limited data availability. We propose two approaches: one relying on lifestyle alone and another integrating lifestyle within the nearest neighbor approach. Both approaches are empirically tested in the domain of recommendations for personalized television advertisements and are shown to outperform existing nearest neighborhood approaches in critical cases.
Practical belief and philosophical theory

Philosophy invariably starts with the attempt to spell out ideas and beliefs that we already hold, whether on topics like time or causality, colour or value, consciousness or free will, democracy or justice or freedom. It may go well beyond such pre-philosophical assumptions in its further developments, regimenting them in unexpected ways, revising them on novel lines, even discarding them entirely in favour of other views. But philosophy always begins with the articulation of ordinary ideas and beliefs. This is where its ladder starts. As the name suggests, articulation requires that the ideas and beliefs articulated were already there waiting to be spelled out, and that identifying them is a matter of analysing what is there, not a matter of adding something new. If philosophical articulation is to deserve its name, and if at the same time it is to be a significant enterprise, then the contents that it articulates--the contents of our pre-philosophical beliefs--must satisfy two constraints. First, they must be sufficiently familiar to us pre-philosophical believers for articulation to be guidable by our common understanding of what we believe; otherwise it would not be, properly speaking, articulation. But, second, the contents must remain unfamiliar enough for articulation to be able to increase that prior understanding; otherwise it would not be a significant enterprise. But how can any pre-philosophical beliefs simultaneously meet these two constraints? That is the problem that I want to address in this paper. The problem is associated with the paradox of analysis (Ackerman [1]). According to that paradox, analysis or articulation cannot be analytically responsible to our prior understanding of what we believe and capable at the same time of substantively advancing that understanding. The usual approach to the paradox of analysis concentrates on the notion of analysis or articulation, arguing that analysis can be so understood that no problem arises (Mackie [27, Chapter 1]). In this paper I approach the paradox from a different angle. I concentrate on the notion of belief--this is already implicit in my formulation of the problem--arguing that belief can be so understood that the paradox is avoided. The paper is in three sections. In the first, I discuss familiar behavioural and judgmental modes of believing things and show how they fall foul of the paradox. In the second, I introduce a third, distinct mode which I describe as practical belief. And then in the third section, I show that the contents of practical beliefs satisfy both the familiarity and unfamiliarity constraints and point us towards a coherent and attractive account of philosophical articulation.
FPGA IMPLEMENTATION OF A DIGITAL WATERMARKING SYSTEM FOR VIDEO AUTHENTICATION

Digital video sequences are very vulnerable to manipulations and alterations using widely available editing tools. So some authentication techniques are needed in order to maintain authenticity, integrity, and security of digital video content. As a result, digital watermarking (WM), a data hiding technique has been considered as one of the key authentication methods. This paper presents a hardware implementation of a digital watermarking system that can insert invisible, semi fragile watermark information into compressed video streams in real time. The watermark embedding is treated in the discrete cosine transform domain. It’s a hardware-based video authentication system using this watermarking technique structures minimum video quality degradation and can survive certain potential attacks, i.e., cover-up attacks, cropping, and segment removal on video sequences. Furthermore, the proposed hardware based watermarking system features low power consumption, low cost implementation, high processing speed, and reliability.
Iterated function system models of digital channels

This paper introduces a new class of models of digital communications channels. Physically, these models take account of the digital nature of the input. Mathematically, they are iterated function systems. As a consequence of making explicit assumptions about the role of discreteness in the models, it is possible to make general statements about the behaviour of these channels without needing to assume that they are linear. We provide the mathematical background necessary to understand the behaviour of these models and prove a number of results about their observability. We also provide a number of examples intended to demonstrate their connection with linear state–space models, and to suggest how the nonlinear theory might be developed towards applications.