Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stochastic Database Cracking: Towards Robust Adaptive Indexing in Main-Memory Column-Stores

Modern business applications and scientific databases call for inherently dynamic data storage environments. Such environments are characterized by two challenging features: (a) they have little idle system time to devote on physical design; and (b) there is little, if any, a priori workload knowledge, while the query and data workload keeps changing dynamically. In such environments, traditional approaches to index building and maintenance cannot apply. Database cracking has been proposed as a solution that allows on-the-fly physical data reorganization, as a collateral effect of query processing. Cracking aims to continuously and automatically adapt indexes to the workload at hand, without human intervention. Indexes are built incrementally, adaptively, and on demand. Nevertheless, as we show, existing adaptive indexing methods fail to deliver workload-robustness; they perform much better with random workloads than with others. This frailty derives from the inelasticity with which these approaches interpret each query as a hint on how data should be stored. Current cracking schemes blindly reorganize the data within each query's range, even if that results into successive expensive operations with minimal indexing benefit. In this paper, we introduce stochastic cracking, a significantly more resilient approach to adaptive indexing. Stochastic cracking also uses each query as a hint on how to reorganize data, but not blindly so; it gains resilience and avoids performance bottlenecks by deliberately applying certain arbitrary choices in its decision-making. Thereby, we bring adaptive indexing forward to a mature formulation that confers the workload-robustness previous approaches lacked. Our extensive experimental study verifies that stochastic cracking maintains the desired properties of original database cracking while at the same time it performs well with diverse realistic workloads.
Quantification and Heterogeneity of Infiltration and Transport in Alluvial Floodplains

In order to protect drinking water systems and aquatic ecosystems, all critical nutrient source areas and transport mechanisms need to be characterized. It is hypothesized that hydrologic heterogeneities (e.g., macropores and gravel outcrops) in the subsurface of floodplains play an integral role in impacting flow and contaminant transport between the soil surface and shallow alluvial aquifers which are intricately connected to streams. Infiltration is often assumed to be uniform at the field scale, but this neglects the high spatial variability common in anisotropic, heterogeneous alluvial floodplain soils. In the Ozark ecoregion, for example, the erosion of carbonate bedrock (primarily limestone) by slightly acidic water has left a large residuum of chert gravel in Ozark soils, with floodplains generally consisting of coarse chert gravel overlain by a mantle (1 to 300 cm) of gravelly loam or silt loam. The process of alluvial sediment deposition is highly variable, and can cause gravel layers to outcrop on the soil surface at various locations within a floodplain. The objective of this research was to quantify heterogeneity in infiltration rates at three floodplain sites in the Ozark ecoregion of Oklahoma and Arkansas. Innovative field studies, including plot scale (1 by 1 m and 3 by 3 m) solute injection experiments along with geophysical imaging, were performed on both gravel outcrops and non-gravel outcrops. Plots maintained a constant head of 3 to 10 cm for up to 48 hours. Infiltration rates varied from 0.8 to 70 cm/h, and varied considerably even within a single floodplain. Electrical resistivity imaging was used to identify zones of preferential flow as well as characterize subsurface soil layering. Fluid samples from observation wells outside the plot (0.5 m from the boundary) indicated nonuniform subsurface flow and transport. Phosphorus was detected in the groundwater for 6 of the 12 plots and was positively correlated to the presence of gravel outcrops. Results indicated that flow paths are sub-meter scale for detecting infiltrating solutions. Tension infiltrometers showed that macropore flow accounted for approximately 85% to 99% of the total infiltration.
Improved DCT coefficient analysis for forgery localization in JPEG images

In this paper, we propose a statistical test to discriminate between original and forged regions in JPEG images, under the hypothesis that the former are doubly compressed while the latter are singly compressed. New probability models for the DCT coefficients of singly and doubly compressed regions are proposed, together with a reliable method for estimating the primary quantization factor in the case of double compression. Based on such models, the probability for each DCT block to be forged is derived. Experimental results demonstrate a better discriminating behavior with respect to previously proposed methods.
A framework to specify big data driven complex cyber physical control systems

Big data technology is a new technology that aims to efficiently obtain value from very big volumes of a wide variety of data, by enabling high velocity capture, process, store, discovery and/or analysis, while ensuring their veracity by an automatic quality control in order to obtain a big value and make decision. Big Data is described by what is often represented as a multi-V model. In multi-V model, volume, velocity and variety are the items most commonly recognized. Big data driven cyber physical systems refer to such cyber physical systems that use large quantities of complex data to perform their functions. Data is very important to the correct specification, analysis, design and implementation and operation of these big data driven cyber physical systems. he design of big data driven cyber physical systems requires that new concepts are used to model classical data structures, 4V features of big data, spatio-temporal constraints and moving object, and the dynamic continuous behavior of the physical world. In this paper, we propose an approach to integrate Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL) [6], Modelicaml and Hybrid Relation Calculus for big data driven cyber physical system development. We illustrate the proposed method by specifying and modeling the Vehicular Ad doc NETwork (VANET).
Path selection for monitoring unexpected systematic timing effects

This paper presents a novel path selection methodology to select paths for monitoring unexpected systematic timing effects. The methodology consists of three components: path filtering, path encoding, and path clustering. Given a large set of critical paths, in path filtering, the goal is to filter out paths that cannot be functionally sensitized. To explore the space of unexpected timing effects, a set of features are defined to encode paths into path vectors. Each feature is a source of concern that may potentially contribute to the cause of an unexpected timing effect. Finally, a kernel-based clustering algorithm is employed to group similar path vectors into clusters from which the best representative paths are selected for post-silicon monitoring. The effectiveness of our proposed methodology is demonstrated through experiments on an industrial ASIC design.
Recent Advances in Molecular Scale Electronics

ABSTRACT: This paper describes four significant breakthroughs in the syntheses and testing of molecular scale electronic devices. The 16‐mer of oligo(2‐dodecylphenylene ethynylene) was prepared on Merrifield's resin using the iterative divergent/convergent approach which significantly streamlines the preparation of this molecular scale wire. The formation of self‐assembled monolayers (SAMs) and multilayers on gold surfaces of rigid rod conjugated oligomers that have thiol, α,ω‐dithiol, thioacetyl, or α,ω‐dithioacetyl end groups have been studied. The direct observation of charge transport through molecules of benzene‐1,4‐dithiol, which have been self‐assembled onto two facing gold electrodes, has been achieved. Finally, we are reporting initial studies into what effect varying the molecular alligator clip has on the molecular scale wire's conductivity.
On the use of TCH sequences for synchronization, channel and noise estimation

TCH sequences have been studied for code-spreading and channel coding, but its true essence if that of synchronization and channel estimation. This is due to their property of being (almost) orthogonal to all sequences obtained via circular shifts. This property is extremely useful for time-offset synchronization (there is a distinct “peak” only when both sequences are aligned), and for dispersive channel-estimation (since the multipath-taps are now orthogonal to each other). Alongside the use of the TCH sequences, a sequence of equal symbols is also employed for frequency-synchronization — essential for correcting the phase offset between estimates (especially for high offset values), and thus allowing for the posterior signal-processing.
With or Beyond Piaget? A Dialogue between New Probabilistic Models of Learning and the Theories of Jean Piaget

For more than 10 years, we have seen the emergence of new “probabilistic” models of learning. They clearly echo Jean Piaget's works and theories but they also claim to go further. However, references to Piaget are often quick and rarely take the time to explore the rich heritage of the Genevan's works. This article takes a closer look at their links through a systematic review of the literature. To do so, I selected, read, and compared articles and books about the probabilistic models of learning and the works of Jean Piaget dealing with similar questions. I will first present the theoretical evolutions offered by the probabilistic models of learning. Then, I will reexamine the words and works of Jean Piaget to show how he had in fact formulated and addressed similar questions at his time, from his point of view. I will finally discuss how we could question, today, Jean Piaget's works in regard to these new models, but also how these new models could be discussed with regard to Piagetian works.
MARCH 1-mediated MHCII ubiquitination promotes dendritic cell selection of natural regulatory T cells

Membrane-associated RING-CH1 (MARCH1) is an E3 ubiquitin ligase that mediates ubiquitination of MHCII and CD86 in DCs (Matsuki et al., 2007; Baravalle et al., 2011). This ubiquitination induces MHCII and CD86 endocytosis, lysosomal transport, and degradation (Shin et al., 2006; van Niel et al., 2006; Baravalle et al., 2011). The functional role of MARCH1 has been studied mainly in the context of DC maturation and T cell activation or regulation in vitro. When DCs are exposed to maturation stimuli, MARCH1 is rapidly down-regulated (De Gassart et al., 2008; Walseng et al., 2010). This down-regulation leads to an increase in MHCII and CD86 on the DC surface, which enhances the ability of the cell to stimulate antigen-specific T cells (Baravalle et al., 2011). In contrast, when DCs are exposed to the immune suppressive cytokine IL-10, MARCH1 is up-regulated (Tze et al., 2011; Baravalle et al., 2011). This up-regulation results in a reduction of MHCII and CD86 surface levels, and diminishes the DC’s ability to activate T cells (Baravalle et al., 2011). These studies suggest that MARCH1 plays a regulatory role in T cell activation during immune responses. However, the role of MARCH1 at steady state or in vivo is not well understood although a recent study has suggested that MARCH1 might be involved in splenic DC homeostasis (OhmuraHoshino et al., 2009). At steady state, MHCII plays an important role in CD4 T cell development in the thymus (Laufer et al., 1996). Furthermore, MHCII critically impacts the development of natural regulatory T cells (T reg cells), a unique CD4 T cell subset equipped with potent immune suppressive capacity (Hsieh et al., 2012). Co-stimulatory molecules, including CD86, also mediate T reg cell and NKT cell development (Salomon et al., 2000; Williams et al., 2008). Thus, given the function of MARCH1 in controlling MHCII CORRESPONDENCE Jeoung-Sook Shin: jeoung-sook.shin@ucsf.edu
ERβ1 and the ERβ2 Splice Variant (ERβcx/β2) Are Expressed in Distinct Cell Populations in the Adult Human Testis

Estrogens can regulate germ cell function. Estrogen action is mediated via high affinity ERs; two subtypes (ERα and ERβ) have been identified. We have shown previously that ERβ is expressed in nuclei of multiple human testicular cells. A variant isoform of human (h) ERβ (hERβcx/2), formed by alternative splicing, has been identified in testicular cDNA libraries by two laboratories. The present study examined the expression of wild-type (ERβ1) and variant (ERβ2) β receptors in human testes by 1) RT-PCR with isoform specific primers, and 2) single and double immunohistochemistry using monoclonal antibodies raised against peptides unique to the C termini of hERβ1 and hERβ2. PCR products specific for ERβ1 and ERβ2 were amplified from cDNA pools prepared from human testes and granulosa cells. On Western blots, the anti-ERβ1 monoclonal antibody bound to recombinant ERβ1 and the anti-ERβ2 monoclonal to recombinant hERβ2. Neither bound to the other ERβ isoform nor to recombinant ERα. ERβ1 and ERβ2 proteins were b.
Parental and Nonparental Career-Related Support Among Young Adults

The present study examined the prevalence and role of career-related support in 100 Israeli emerging adults who were followed from ages 22 to 29. At the age of 29, participants were asked to name any significant persons who had impacted their career history. Both parents and nonfamily other adults were most frequently cited to provide career-related support. While both parents provided both emotional and professional career-related support, other adults tended to provide mainly professional support. Availability of career-related support was associated with greater occupational adequacy and higher psychosocial functioning. Parental career-related support was mainly predicted by parental support 7 years earlier. The likelihood of citing a nonparental career-related supportive relationship was predicted by increased personal efficacy and maternal support 7 years earlier. Findings of this study shed light on the role of parental and nonparental career-related support in navigating successfully the transition to adulthood.
A Novel Peptide Enhances Therapeutic Efficacy of Liposomal Anti-Cancer Drugs in Mice Models of Human Lung Cancer

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. The lack of tumor specificity remains a major drawback for effective chemotherapies and results in dose-limiting toxicities. However, a ligand-mediated drug delivery system should be able to render chemotherapy more specific to tumor cells and less toxic to normal tissues. In this study, we isolated a novel peptide ligand from a phage-displayed peptide library that bound to non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cell lines. The targeting phage bound to several NSCLC cell lines but not to normal cells. Both the targeting phage and the synthetic peptide recognized the surgical specimens of NSCLC with a positive rate of 75% (27 of 36 specimens). In severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) mice bearing NSCLC xenografts, the targeting phage specifically bound to tumor masses. The tumor homing ability of the targeting phage was inhibited by the cognate synthetic peptide, but not by a control or a WTY-mutated peptide. When the targeting peptide was coupled to liposomes carrying doxorubicin or vinorelbine, the therapeutic index of the chemotherapeutic agents and the survival rates of mice with human lung cancer xenografts markedly increased. Furthermore, the targeting liposomes increased drug accumulation in tumor tissues by 5.7-fold compared with free drugs and enhanced cancer cell apoptosis resulting from a higher concentration of bioavailable doxorubicin. The current study suggests that this tumor-specific peptide may be used to create chemotherapies specifically targeting tumor cells in the treatment of NSCLC and to design targeted gene transfer vectors or it may be used one in the diagnosis of this malignancy.
Binarization-Based Human Detection with Hardware Reconfigurability

Limitations in power and resources make the implementation of human detection a challenging issue for embedded applications, such as wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs). To address this issue, binarization-based optimization is presented in this study. By implementing this optimization, the required calculations and memory space for the hardware realization of human detection can be minimized. Meanwhile, the human detection system is deployed in a variety of environments. As there is the large variation among different environments, a custom classifier, which is trained on a data-sets similar to the deployed environment, can deliver the better accuracy compared to the generic classifier. Therefore, the partial dynamic reconfiguration of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) is utilized to enable multiple classifiers in this paper. The classifier can be updated remotely for embedded implementation. Initial experimental results demonstrate that the proposed implementation achieved 348 fps by using a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA. The detection accuracy achieved a miss rate of 1.97% and a false positive rate of 1%. Compared to the state-of-art, The power consumption can reduce up to 36%. In this paper, remote hardware reconfigurablity is enabled. The newly trained classifier can be updated through wireless communication. To our knowledge, it is the first work to implement the Scene-adaptive classifier in hardware and combine it with remotely DPR function of FPGA.
International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering

- In this manuscript handwritten Gurmukhi character recognition for isolated characters is proposed. We have used Gabor Filter based method for feature extraction. Our database consists of 200 samples of each of basic 35 characters of Gurmukhi script collected from different writers. These samples are pre-processed and normalized to 32*32 sizes. The highest accuracy obtained is 94.29% as 5-fold cross validation of whole database with SVM classifier used with RBF kernel.
Intrusion Alert Elimination on Network Attack Alerting System

Network attack alerting system becomes a critical technology to help and assist security engineers and network administrators to secure their network infrastructure. The proposed system implements network attack alerting system based on Network-based and Host-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS). Open source attacking system, Backtrack is used to initiate and launch the attacks. Well-known free open source tools available on Security Onion Linux Distribution are used to distinguish the important network IDS alert types. The system uses existing IDS rules and defines the set of new rules to fetch these attacks. There are the overwhelming alerts generated by IDSs so finding a solution to reduce these alerts is the most important field of IDS. The system eliminates the large numbers of alerts that belong to the same attack type within the defined time window.
Similarity-Based Malware Classification Using Hidden Markov Model

The problem of malware classification has gained the attention of cyber security community due to the following facts: (1) thousands of new malware are generated every day (2) the global losses caused by malware are in billions of dollars every year. In this paper a novel malware classification scheme is proposed that is based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and discriminative classifiers. Sequences of system calls generated by malware during execution are represented as observation sequences to train the HMMs. Individual malware samples are then evaluated against these models to generate similarity vectors, which are used to predict the class label for an unknown sample by training a discriminative classifier. Our novel combination of HMMs, dynamic program features and discriminative classifier has shown promising results in experiments performed using system call logs of real malware.
International Journal of Pure and Applied Sciences and Technology Efficacy of Capsicum Frutescens in Curing the Peptic Ulcer

Chili peppers are often used around the world to make a wide variety of sauces, known as hot sauce, chili sauce, or pepper sauce. Red chilis contain high amounts of vitamin C and carotene (provitamin A). meanwhile Several studies found that capsaicin could have an anti-ulcer protective effect on stomachs infected with H. pylori by affecting the chemicals the stomach secretes in response to infection. The present study was designated to clear out the effect of aqueous extracts of red chilli pepper (RCP) and some spicy foods on healing acute gastric ulcer induced by aspirin in rats. Sixty six adult male albino rats (170+5g B.Wt.) of Sprague Dawley Strain were obtained from animal house of the faculty of medicine, Um Al Qura University were used and disported into 6 groups (n= 6 rats), one of them used as control-ve while other groups had given aspirin orally (200mg/kg B.Wt.), one of these groups left as control +ve and other groups administrated with aqueous extracts of RCP at doses of 300 and 600 mg/kg B.Wt. and 30% spicy nuggets and chicken for seven days. The length of gastric ulcer, volume of gastric juice, pH value, and histopathological changes were examined. Our results revealed that, oral administration of aspirin (200mg/kg B.Wt.) induced gastric ulcer in rats; the mean length of gastric ulcer in control +ve group was higher compared with in control-ve group. Also, Oral administration of RCP extract at a dose of 600mg/kg B.Wt. , caused high decrease in the length of gastric ulcer. On the other hand, the lowest decrease of gastric ulcer length was happened in rats fed on 30% spicy nuggets. The results concluded that oral administration with all tested plants reduced the length of gastric ulcer, volume of gastric juice, and histopathological changes. On the other hand, RCP extracts Int. 44 increased pH value of gastric juice. According to the results, RCP could be used for healing acute gastric ulcer disease.
Trust Is a Key Element for Society

If reputation systems weight all perspectives similarly, they may devolve into simple majority rule. But if they give each user reputation scores that take only other similar users’ opinions into account, they run the risk of becoming “echo chambers” in which like-minded people reinforce each others’ views without being open to outside perspectives. Massa discusses design choices and trust metrics that may help balance these two extremes and the broader implications for our future societies.
Trust and distrust: Polar opposites, or independent but co-existing?

This article provides an empirical test of whether trust and distrust can co-exist in the mind of an employee. Two interrelated questions are considered: firstly, whether trust and distrust judgements are ‘symmetrical’ or whether they can occur ‘simultaneously’ as separate constructs; and, secondly, whether trust and distrust judgements entail the same or conceptually different expectations as revealed in their expressions and anticipated manifestations. Using a concurrent mixed-method design incorporating a structured card sort and in-depth interviews, data were collected from 56 participants in two organizations. The card-sort findings offer little support for the co-existence of trust and distrust, but suggest they could be separate constructs. Interview data indicate that participants do perceive trust and distrust as entailing different sets of expectations and having different manifestations, providing some support for the ‘separate constructs’ thesis. We also find evidence of two new combinations of weak levels of trust and distrust not previously specified. The findings highlight how employees’ trust and distrust judgements are shaped, in part, by managerial actions and policies relating to quality of communication and job security. They also emphasize how, when employees are distrustful, different practice interventions may be needed to reduce distrust from those used to build trust.