Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Privacy and integrity in the untrusted cloud

Cloud computing has become increasingly popular because it offers users the illusion of having infinite computing resources, of which they can use as much as they need, without having to worry about how those resources are provided. It also provides greater scalability, availability, and reliability than users could achieve with their own resources. Unfortunately, adopting cloud computing has required users to cede control of their data to cloud providers, and a malicious provider could compromise the data's confidentiality and integrity. Furthermore, the history of leaks, breaches, and misuse of customer information at providers has highlighted the failure of government regulation and market incentives to fully mitigate this threat. Thus, users have had to choose between trusting providers or forgoing cloud computing's benefits entirely. This dissertation aims to overcome this trade-off. We present two systems, SPORC and Frientegrity, that enable users to benefit from cloud deployment without having to trust the cloud provider. Their security is rooted not in the provider's good behavior, but in the users' cryptographic keys. In both systems, the provider only observes encrypted data and cannot deviate from correct execution without detection. Moreover, for cases when the provider does misbehave, SPORC introduces a mechanism, also applicable to Frientegrity, that enables users to recover. It allows users to switch to a new provider and repair any inconsistencies that the provider's misbehavior may have caused. SPORC is a framework for building a wide variety of user-facing applications from collaborative word processing and calendaring to email and instant messaging with an untrusted provider. It allows concurrent, low-latency editing of shared state, permits disconnected operation, and supports dynamic access control even in the presence of concurrency. Frientegrity extends SPORC's model to online social networking. It introduces novel mechanisms for verifying the provider's correctness and access control that scale to hundreds of friends and tens of thousands of posts while still providing the same security guarantees as SPORC. By effectively returning control of users' data to the users themselves, these systems do much to mitigate the risks of cloud deployment. Thus, they clear the way for greater adoption of cloud applications.
Successful Intrauterine Management of Severe Feto-Fetal Transfusion in a Monochorionic Triplet Pregnancy Using Bipolar Umbilical Cord Coagulation

Triplet-to-triplet transfusion is a rare clinical complication of monochorionic pregnancies. We present such a case in a monochorionic triamniotic triplet gestation. After a single fetal demise an ongoing twin-to-twin transfusion continued in the surviving triplets. The donor triplet had ultrasound evidence of secondary structural brain damage. The pregnancy was successfully managed with bipolar umbilical cord coagulation of the donor triplet and spontaneous vaginal delivery of the recipient triplet. The case highlights the clinical spectrum and diagnostic and management options that present themselves in these high-risk pregnancies.
Smart Generation and Transmission With Coherent, Real-Time Data

In recent years, much of the discussion involving “smart grids” has implicitly involved only the distribution side, notably advanced metering. However, today's electric systems have many challenges that also involve the rest of the system. An enabling technology for improving the power system, which has emerged in recent years, is the ability to measure coherent, real-time data. In this paper, we describe major challenges facing electrical generation and transmission today that availability of these measurements can help address. We overview applications using coherent, real-time measurements that are in use today or proposed by researchers. Specifically, we describe, normalize, and then quantitatively compare key factors for these power applications that influence how the delivery system should be planned, implemented, and managed. These factors include whether a person or computer is in the loop and (for both inputs and outputs) latency, rate, criticality, quantity, and geographic scope. From this, we abstract the baseline communications requirements of a data delivery system supporting these applications and suggest implementation guidelines to achieve them. Finally, we overview the state of the art in the supporting computer science areas of overlay networking and distributed computing (including middleware) and analyze gaps in commercial middleware products, utility standards, and issues that limit low-level network protocols from meeting these requirements when used in isolation.
Prospective evaluation of type 2 diabetes mellitus on the risk of primary liver cancer in Chinese men and women.

BACKGROUND No prospective study has investigated the relationship between type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and the risk of primary liver cancer (PLC) in mainland China, and little is known about the effect of diabetes duration on PLC risk. DESIGN Data from two population-based cohorts (the Shanghai Men's Health Study, SMHS, 2002-2006 and the Shanghai Women's Health Study, SWHS, 1996-2000) were thus used to assess the associations among T2DM, diabetes duration and PLC risk in Chinese population. RESULTS During follow-up through 2009, 344 incident PLC cases were identified among 60 183 men and 73 105 women. T2DM is significantly associated with the increased risk of PLC in both men [hazard ratio (HR) = 1.63, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.06-2.51] and women (HR = 1.64, 95% CI 1.03-2.61). The highest risk of incident liver cancer was observed in the first 5 years after diabetes diagnosis, and decreased substantially with the prolonged diabetes duration (P(trend) < 0.001). No synergistic interaction in the development of PLC was found between diabetes and other known risk factors. CONCLUSIONS T2DM is associated with the increased risk of subsequent liver cancer within 5 years after diagnosis in Chinese population, suggesting that hyperinsulinaemia rather than hyperglycaemia is more likely to be a primary mediator for this association.
Coordinated dynamic spectrum management of LTE-U and Wi-Fi networks

This paper investigates the co-existence of Wi-Fi and LTE networks in emerging unlicensed frequency bands which are intended to accommodate multiple radio access technologies. Wi-Fi and LTE are the two most prominent wireless access technologies being deployed today, motivating further study of the inter-system interference arising in such shared spectrum scenarios as well as possible techniques for enabling improved co-existence. An analytical model for evaluating the baseline performance of co-existing Wi-Fi and LTE networks is developed and used to obtain baseline performance measures. The results show that both Wi-Fi and LTE networks cause significant interference to each other and that the degradation is dependent on a number of factors such as power levels and physical topology. The model-based results are partially validated via experimental evaluations using USRP-based SDR platforms on the ORBIT testbed. Further, inter-network coordination with logically centralized radio resource management across Wi-Fi and LTE systems is proposed as a possible solution for improved co-existence. Numerical results are presented showing significant gains in both Wi-Fi and LTE performance with the proposed inter-network coordination approach.
Characterization of the flexibility of the peripheral stalk of prokaryotic rotary A‐ATPases by atomistic simulations

Rotary ATPases are involved in numerous physiological processes, with the three distinct types (F/A/V‐ATPases) sharing functional properties and structural features. The basic mechanism involves the counter rotation of two motors, a soluble ATP hydrolyzing/synthesizing domain and a membrane‐embedded ion pump connected through a central rotor axle and a stator complex. Within the A/V‐ATPase family conformational flexibility of the EG stators has been shown to accommodate catalytic cycling and is considered to be important to function. For the A‐ATPase three EG structures have been reported, thought to represent conformational states of the stator during different stages of rotary catalysis. Here we use long, detailed atomistic simulations to show that those structures are conformers explored through thermal fluctuations, but do not represent highly populated states of the EG stator in solution. We show that the coiled coil tail domain has a high persistence length (∼100 nm), but retains the ability to adapt to different conformational states through the presence of two hinge regions. Moreover, the stator network of the related V‐ATPase has been suggested to adapt to subunit interactions in the collar region in addition to the nucleotide occupancy of the catalytic domain. The MD simulations reported here, reinforce this observation showing that the EG stators have enough flexibility to adapt to significantly different structural re‐arrangements and accommodate structural changes in the catalytic domain whilst resisting the large torque generated by catalytic cycling. These results are important to understand the role the stators play in the rotary‐ATPase mechanism. Proteins 2016; 84:1203–1212. © 2016 The Authors. Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
A comparative assessment of appearance based feature extraction techniques and their susceptibility to image degradations in face recognition systems

Over the past decades, automatic face recognition has become a highly active research area, mainly due to the countless application possibilities in both the private aswell as the public sector. Numerous algorithms have been propose d in the literature to cope with the problem of face recognition, nevertheless, a group of methods commonly referred to as appearance based have emerged as the dominant solution to th e face recognition problem. Many comparative studies concer ned with the performance of appearance based methods have alrea dy been presented in the literature, not rarely with inconclusive and often with contradictory results. No consent has been reached within the scientific community regarding the relative ranking of the efficiency of appearance based methods for the face recognition task, let alone regarding their susceptib ility to appearance changes induced by various environmental facto rs. To tackle these open issues, this paper assess the performance of the three dominant appearance based methods: principal compon ent analysis, linear discriminant analysis and independent co mponent analysis, and compares them on equal footing (i.e., with the same preprocessing procedure, with optimized parameters for the best possible performance, etc.) in face verification experimen ts on the publicly available XM2VTS database. In addition to the comparative analysis on the XM2VTS database, ten degraded versions of the database are also employed in the experiment s to evaluate the susceptibility of the appearance based meth ods on various image degradations which can occur in ”real-life” operating conditions. Our experimental results suggest th at linear discriminant analysis ensures the most consistent verifica tion rates across the tested databases.
Outliers and Bayesian Inference

In this paper we report about an investigation in which we studied the proper- ties of Bayes' inferred neural network classi- fiers in the context of outlier detection. The problem of misclassification due to outliers in the test data is seen as a serious prob- lem in safety critical environments. We com- pare the usual way to deal with uncertainty in the Bayesian framework with a new ap- proach based on the variance of the output layer activations and investigate the utility of both methods for outlier detection. The properties of both methods are visualized on a simple two dimensional classification prob- lem. An investigation comparing both meth- ods on some public data-sets with artificially constructed outlier patterns showed that a combination of the conventional method and the method proposed here should be used. These results where confirmed in a final ex- periment on real data, where a combination of both methods showed significantly better per- formance in rejecting outlying observations.
Cardiac Output in the Neonatal Period Using Impedance Cardiography

Summary: This paper describes a study comparing the impedance cardiac output (ICO) with effective pulmonary capillary blood flow (Qpc eff), measured by rebreathing N2O, in a group of healthy babies during the neonatal period. The calculation of ICO requires a value for the electrical resistivity of blood, p. The resistivity of blood was measured on 40 samples of neonatal blood with hematocrit range of 18–70% and a new relationship was defined between haematocrit and resistivity, whereby p = 67.919 exp (0.02433 Het) (Fig. 2). A total of 109 simultaneous measurements of Qpc eff and ICO, made from 32 different babies studied upon 41 occasions, was considered for correlation purposes (Table 2). The different methods are plotted against each other in the graphs (Fig. 3). It is seen that using any one of the available data for human blood resistivity alone, a good correlation between ICO and Qpc eff is only achieved over a part of the haematocrit range. A hematocrit-related correction factor, S, has been derived to be applied to the stroke volume equation. The corrected ICO compared with Qpc eff results is shown in Figure 5 and the correlation coefficients and percentage differences between the two methods for the different hematocrit groups are shown in Table 2. The mean ICO is 205 ml kg1 min1 SEM 3.5 (range 124–289). Impedance cardiography is a safe and easy technique to apply to the newborn human infant but even if accurate values for resistivity are used, a further hematocrit-related factor should be applied for optimal results.Speculation: A technique having been established by which impedance cardiography can be used to make accurate measurements of cardiac output in the healthy newborn infant, it is now possible to use this method to provide noninvasive observations on the normal cardiovascular physiology of the newborn and to assess its potential for making clinically useful measurements on sick infants.
Searching for diabetes decision aids and related background information

Aims Patient decision aids (DAs) are interventions designed to help patients making informed decisions. DAs are complex interventions comprising a number of active components each essential to the proper functioning of the aid. Critical appraisal of DAs therefore requires access to information describing the incremental assessment of each stage in their development, including information about the theoretical funding, development processes, efficacy trials and long‐term implementation. We explored the feasibility of identifying such information with conventional database search strategies. Our study was conducted only in the field of diabetes care.
The Strength-Instability Interaction of Double-Skinned Composite Circular Shells under External Pressure

This paper describes the construction and external pressure-testing of cylindrical shells fabricated by filling the annulus between two thin steel concentric membranes with an epoxy resin-glass syntatic foam. The investigation was specifically aimed to study the strength-instability interaction of relatively thin composite shells. The experimental behaviour of eight shells is reported and their failure pressures are compared with previously published predictions. The results provided empirical evidence to support a modified Rankine-type interaction curve yielding safe lower bound solutions.
The effects of frequency-dependent attenuation and dispersion on sound speed measurements: applications in human trabecular bone

Sound speed may be measured by comparing the transit time of a broadband ultrasonic pulse transmitted through an object with that transmitted through a reference water path. If the speed of sound in water and the thickness of the sample are known, the speed of sound in the object may be computed. To measure the transit time differential, a marker such as a zero-crossing, may be used. A sound speed difference between the object and water shifts all markers backward or forward. Frequency-dependent attenuation and dispersion may alter the spectral characteristics of the waveform, thereby distorting the locations of markers and introducing variations in sound-speed estimates. Theory is derived to correct for this distortion for Gaussian pulses propagating through linearly attenuating, weakly dispersive media. The theory is validated using numerical analysis, measurements on a tissue mimicking phantom, and on 24 human calcaneus samples in vitro. Variations in soft tissue-like media are generally not exceptionally large for most applications but can be substantial, particularly for high bandwidth pulses propagating through media with high attenuation coefficients. At 500 kHz, variations in velocity estimates in bone can be very substantial, on the order of 40 to 50 m/s because of the high attenuation coefficient of bone. In trabecular bone, the effects of frequency-dependent attenuation are considerable, and the effects of dispersion are negligible.
A Major Determinant of Cyclophilin Dependence and Cyclosporine Susceptibility of Hepatitis C Virus Identified by a Genetic Approach

Since the advent of genome-wide small interfering RNA screening, large numbers of cellular cofactors important for viral infection have been discovered at a rapid pace, but the viral targets and the mechanism of action for many of these cofactors remain undefined. One such cofactor is cyclophilin A (CyPA), upon which hepatitis C virus (HCV) replication critically depends. Here we report a new genetic selection scheme that identified a major viral determinant of HCV's dependence on CyPA and susceptibility to cyclosporine A. We selected mutant viruses that were able to infect CyPA-knockdown cells which were refractory to infection by wild-type HCV produced in cell culture. Five independent selections revealed related mutations in a single dipeptide motif (D316 and Y317) located in a proline-rich region of NS5A domain II, which has been implicated in CyPA binding. Engineering the mutations into wild-type HCV fully recapitulated the CyPA-independent and CsA-resistant phenotype and four putative proline substrates of CyPA were mapped to the vicinity of the DY motif. Circular dichroism analysis of wild-type and mutant NS5A peptides indicated that the D316E/Y317N mutations (DEYN) induced a conformational change at a major CyPA-binding site. Furthermore, nuclear magnetic resonance experiments suggested that NS5A with DEYN mutations adopts a more extended, functional conformation in the putative CyPA substrate site in domain II. Finally, the importance of this major CsA-sensitivity determinant was confirmed in additional genotypes (GT) other than GT 2a. This study describes a new genetic approach to identifying viral targets of cellular cofactors and identifies a major regulator of HCV's susceptibility to CsA and its derivatives that are currently in clinical trials.
Nested parallelism in transactional memory

This paper investigates adding transactions with nested parallelism and nested transactions to a dynamically multithreaded parallel programming language that generates only series-parallel programs. We describe XConflict, a data structure that facilitates conflict detection for a software transactional memory system which supports transactions with nested parallelism and unbounded nesting depth. For languages that use a Cilk-like work-stealing scheduler, XConflict answers concurrent conflict queries in O(1) time and can be maintained efficiently. In particular, for a program with T1 work and a span (or critical-path length) of T∞, the running time on p processors of the program augmented with XConflict is only O(T1/p + pT∞). Using XConflict, we describe CWSTM, a runtime-system design for software transactional memory which supports transactions with nested parallelism and unbounded nesting depth of transactions. The CWSTM design provides transactional memory with eager updates, eager conflict detection, strong atomicity, and lazy cleanup on aborts. In the restricted case when no transactions abort and there are no concurrent readers, CWSTM executes a transactional computation on p processors also in time O(T1/p + pT∞). Although this bound holds only under rather optimistic assumptions, to our knowledge, this result is the first theoretical performance bound on a TM system that supports transactions with nested parallelism which is independent of the maximum nesting depth of transactions.
Rapid application configuration in Amazon cloud using configurable virtual appliances

Virtual Appliance (VA) promises to dramatically change how software is distributed, installed and configured. Although it simplifies some aspects of the process, it falls short of solving the complete problem. Furthermore, it introduces additional management hassles because of the proliferation of VAs, one for each commonly used scenario. Borrowing the Spring IoC (Inversion of Control) concept from the Java community, we propose a new approach which includes three components: Configurable VAs (similar to a Java class), separate configuration metadata (similar to a configuration file), and the Rapid Application Configurator (RAC) container (similar to the Spring IoC container). The separation of concerns allows each component to be independently developed and the cost to be effectively amortized. We describe the design and implementation of RAC in the Amazon EC2 environment.
Beamforming via Nonconvex Linear Regression

Impulsive processes frequently occur in many fields, such as radar, sonar, communications, audio and speech processing, and biomedical engineering. In this paper, we propose a nonconvex linear regression (NLR) based minimum dispersion beamforming technique for impulsive signals to achieve significant performance improvement over the conventional minimum variance beamformer. The proposed beamformer minimizes the lp-norm of the output with subject to a linear distortionless response constraint, resulting in a difficult nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problem. The constrained optimization problem is first reduced to a multivariate linear regression via constraint elimination. As a major contribution of this paper, a coordinate descent algorithm (CDA) is devised for solving the resultant NLR problem of lp-minimization with at a computational complexity of O(MN2), where M is the number of sensors and N is the sample size. At each inner iteration of the CDA, an efficient algorithm is designed to find the global minimum of each subproblem of univariate linear regression. The convergence of the CDA is analyzed. The NLR beamformer with a single constraint is further generalized to the case of multiple linear constraints, which is robust against model mismatch. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of nonconvex optimization based beamformer.