Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Initial Investigation into Change-Based Reconstruction of Floss-Refactorings

Today, it is widely accepted that if refactoring is applied in practice, it is mainly interweaved with normal software development - so called "floss refactoring". Unfortunately, the current state-of-the-art is poorly equipped to mine floss refactoring from version histories, mainly because they infer refactorings by comparing two snapshots of a system and making educated guesses about the precise edit operations applied in between. In this paper we propose a solution that reconstructs refactorings not on snapshots of a system but using the actual changes as they are performed in an integrated development environment. We compare our solution against RefFinder and demonstrate that on a small yet representative program (the well-known "Video Rental system") our approach is more accurate in identifying occurrences of the "Move Method" and "Rename Method" refactorings.
A rules-based intrusion detection and prevention framework against SIP malformed messages attacks

SIP malformed messages detection and prevention has become an important indicator of high availability for SIP servers or IMS system. This paper describes the SIP malformed messages attacks, analyses sip protocol features and builds an abstract data model according to RFC 3261 protocol specification. The author presents an efficient intrusion detection and prevention framework against SIP malformed messages attacks. Using rules-based detection techniques, the paper improves detection performance against SIP malformed messages attacks and implements a detection algorithm in the kernel layer which improves the performance of the system.
“It’s Not a Job!” Foster Care Board Payments and the Logic of the Profiteering Parent

Modern-day conceptions of American childhood and family situate children, and the labor required to rear them, outside of the wage labor market. This ethnographic study of a foster care adoption program shows how board payments elicit commodification anxiety at this local site, and in American culture more broadly. In using board payments as a litmus test to weed out parents with profiteering motives, workers inadvertently play into a model that devalues care work—which is disproportionately done by women and minorities. This study places everyday casework into the context of welfare state history and the history of foster care, and describes troubling similarities between the profiteering parent of foster care and the stereotype of the welfare queen used to garner public support for the 1996 welfare reforms. I argue that a socially just approach to caregiving must abandon the fiction that sentiments and markets operate in separate spheres.
Accountable Internet Protocol

Kurzfassung Das Accountable Internet Protocol wurde von einer Gruppe amerikanischer Forscher als Alternative zum heutigen Internet Protocol vorgeschlagen. Das Ziel dieses Protokolls ist es, durch selbstzertifizierende Adressen per Public-Key Kryptographie, IP Pakete verlässlich und schwer fälschbar zu machen und dadurch das Routing der Pakete abzusichern. Dieses neue Verfahren soll helfen viele Probleme, wie IP-Spoofing, RouteHijacking oder Denial-of-Service Attacken entgegen zu wirken und soll dabei gleichzeitig einfacher wartbar sein als es heutige Lösungen sind. Das wird hauptsächlich durch den Einsatz von Selbstzertifizierung und den Verzicht auf eine zentrale Schlüsselverwaltung (PKI) erreicht. In dieser Arbeit wird dieser Vorschlag vorgestellt und mit den jetzt gebräuchlichen Herangehensweisen verglichen.
Laquinimod reduces neuroaxonal injury through inhibiting microglial activation

Laquinimod is an emerging oral medication for multiple sclerosis (MS) that reduces brain atrophy and progression of disability in two Phase III clinical trials. The mechanism of these effects is unclear. Persistent activation of microglia occurs in MS and contributes to injury. Thus, we investigated whether laquinimod alters properties of microglia in culture and in experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), and whether this reduces neurodegeneration.
Sparse Time Frequency Representations and Dynamical Systems

In this paper, we establish a connection between the recently developed data-driven time-frequency analysis \cite{HS11,HS13-1} and the classical second order differential equations. The main idea of the data-driven time-frequency analysis is to decompose a multiscale signal into a sparsest collection of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) over the largest possible dictionary via nonlinear optimization. These IMFs are of the form $a(t) \cos(\theta(t))$ where the amplitude $a(t)$ is positive and slowly varying. The non-decreasing phase function $\theta(t)$ is determined by the data and in general depends on the signal in a nonlinear fashion. One of the main results of this paper is that we show that each IMF can be associated with a solution of a second order ordinary differential equation of the form $\ddot{x}+p(x,t)\dot{x}+q(x,t)=0$. Further, we propose a localized variational formulation for this problem and develop an effective $l^1$-based optimization method to recover $p(x,t)$ and $q(x,t)$ by looking for a sparse representation of $p$ and $q$ in terms of the polynomial basis. Depending on the form of nonlinearity in $p(x,t)$ and $q(x,t)$, we can define the degree of nonlinearity for the associated IMF. %and the corresponding coefficients for the associated highest order nonlinear terms. This generalizes a concept recently introduced by Prof. N. E. Huang et al. \cite{Huang11}. Numerical examples will be provided to illustrate the robustness and stability of the proposed method for data with or without noise. This manuscript should be considered as a proof of concept.
A Workflow Instance-based Model-checking Approach to Analysing Organisational Controls in a Loan Origination Process

Demonstrating the safety of a system (ie. avoiding the undesired propagation of access rights or indirect access through some other granted resource) is one of the goals of access control research, e.g. [1-4]. However, the flexibility required from enterprise resource management (ERP) systems may require the implementation of seemingly contradictory requirements (e.g. tight access control but at the same time support for discretionary delegation of workflow tasks and rights). To aid in the analysis of safety problems in workflow-based ERP systems, this paper presents a model-checking based approach for automated analysis of delegation and revocation functionalities. This is done in the context of a real-world banking workflow. We expand on some of our earlier work reported in [44], which was restricted to single workflow models and not arbitrary workflow instances of one or several models. This initial restriction to model-checking at the workflow model level meant that we were not able to analyse delegation and revocation of tasks and access rights in the detail as required in some of our earlier conceptual models [11, 12]. We derived information about the workflow from BPEL specifications and ERP business object repositories. This was captured in a SMV specification together with a definition of possible delegation and revocation scenarios. Possibly required separation of duty properties were translated into a set of LTL-based constraints.
Pain-related quality of life related to mental health and sociodemographic indicators in adolescents

Abstract Background: A total of 6150 junior and senior high school students aged 11–18 years participated in this study. Their level of pain-related QOL was assessed using the pain subscale of the Taiwanese QOL Questionnaire for Adolescents. The severities of depression, suicidality, anxiety, and alcohol abuse were also examined. Objectives: This study examined the associations between pain-related quality of life (QOL) and sociodemographic characteristics and those between pain-related QOL and mental health problems such as depression, suicidality, anxiety, and alcohol abuse. Methods : The association of sociodemographic factors with pain-related QOL was examined through multiple regression analysis. The association of pain-related QOL with mental health problems was examined through logistic regression analysis. Results : The boys exhibited a higher level of satisfaction with pain-related QOL than did the girls. Older age was significantly associated with a lower level of satisfaction with pain-related QOL. Residential background, parental marital status, and parental education levels were not significantly associated with the level of satisfaction with pain-related QOL. Increased risks of depression, suicidality, anxiety, and alcohol abuse were significantly associated with a low level of satisfaction with pain-related QOL.
Wnt activation followed by Notch inhibition promotes mitotic hair cell regeneration in the postnatal mouse cochlea

Hair cell (HC) loss is the main cause of permanent hearing loss in mammals. Previous studies have reported that in neonatal mice cochleae, Wnt activation promotes supporting cell (SC) proliferation and Notch inhibition promotes the trans-differentiation of SCs into HCs. However, Wnt activation alone fails to regenerate significant amounts of new HCs, Notch inhibition alone regenerates the HCs at the cost of exhausting the SC population, which leads to the death of the newly regenerated HCs. Mitotic HC regeneration might preserve the SC number while regenerating the HCs, which could be a better approach for long-term HC regeneration. We present a two-step gene manipulation, Wnt activation followed by Notch inhibition, to accomplish mitotic regeneration of HCs while partially preserving the SC number. We show that Wnt activation followed by Notch inhibition strongly promotes the mitotic regeneration of new HCs in both normal and neomycin-damaged cochleae while partially preserving the SC number. Lineage tracing shows that the majority of the mitotically regenerated HCs are derived specifically from the Lgr5+ progenitors with or without HC damage. Our findings suggest that the co-regulation of Wnt and Notch signaling might provide a better approach to mitotically regenerate HCs from Lgr5+ progenitor cells.
Robust Preprocessing: Denoising and Whitening in the context of Blind Source Separation of Instantaneous Mixtures

In this paper the feasibility and performance of two different preprocessing schemes for blind source separation (BSS) problems have been investigated. BSS is a promising technique for non-destructive machine condition monitoring by vibration and acoustic analysis. BSS methods offer non-invasive and inexpensive solution by restoring the specific signature of each machine from a mixture of signals which can be used for monitoring and fault diagnosis. Signals recorded by sensors in an industrial application are often disrupted by ambient noise and other mechanical systems. The presence of noise in the observation poses difficulties in the BSS process. Robust preprocessing involves denoising followed by whitening. Eigenfilters as well as wavelets have been used prior to the traditional independent component analysis (ICA) algorithm to test the separation ability for the instantaneous mixtures of synthetic signals, speech and acoustic noise from electromechanical systems. A comparative assessment with and without the denoising schemes have been presented.
Fundamental issues on the recognition of autonomic patterns produced by visual stimuli

One of the common approaches to the automatic emotion recognition problem is based on biological signal analysis. In this context, this paper aims at identifying the biological component related to levels of arousal of the subjects, and to use such a component to automatically discriminate among these levels. We have formalized the automatic emotion recognition as a classification problem. In order to allow the system to generalize over different subjects, we addressed two crucial aspects of the procedure: normalization and cross-validation. Assuming that different subjects could react differently to the same stimuli, we defined a distance metric between their models. We performed an experiment where 14 volunteers were stimulated by means of the IAPS set of pictures divided into classes of increasing arousal intensity. Under the effect of these external visual stimuli, subjects exhibited a principal component in their autonomic space that accounts for full class separability. Moreover we observed that some of the subjects' data can be represented by the same model, while others have to be represented differently possibly due to a poor induction mechanism. This work demonstrates the possibility to build a model able to generalize over different subjects without over-fitting, but we have to guarantee that data used to build the model represent sufficiently well the measured phenomena.
The Prediction of Ratings of Students in a Doctoral Training Program

Problem. The problem investigated in this study was to determine the validity of a battery of tests to predict the performance of doctoral candidates on a comprehensive series of examinations which partially determine admittance to the doctoral training program. Description of Predictor Variables. The predictor variables consisted of the Aptitude Test of the Graduate Record Examinatiors which yields separate verbal and quantitative scores and the Area Tests of the GRE which furnish scores in the areas of Natural Sci-
Synchronization and semistability analysis of the Kuramoto model of coupled nonlinear oscillators

An interesting problem in synchronization is the study of coupled oscillators, wherein oscillators with different natural frequencies synchronize to a common frequency and equilibrium phase difference. In this paper, we investigate the stability and convergence in a network of coupled oscillators described by the Kuramoto model. We consider networks with finite number of oscillators, arbitrary interconnection topology, non-uniform coupling gains and non-identical natural frequencies. We show that such a network synchronizes provided the underlying graph is connected and certain conditions on the coupling gains are satisfied. In the analysis, we consider as states the phase and angular frequency differences between the oscillators, and the resulting dynamics possesses a continuum of equilibria. The synchronization problem involves establishing the Lyapunov stability of the fixed points and showing convergence of trajectories to these points. The synchronization result is established in the framework of semistability theory.
Integrated 2-D Optical Flow Sensor

I present a new focal-plane analog VLSI sensor that estimates optical flow in two visual dimensions. The chip significantly improves previous approaches both with respect to the applied model of optical flow estimation as well as the actual hardware implementation. Its distributed computational architecture consists of an array of locally connected motion units that collectively solve for the unique optimal optical flow estimate. The novel gradient-based motion model assumes visual motion to be translational, smooth and biased. The model guarantees that the estimation problem is computationally well-posed regardless of the visual input. Model parameters can be globally adjusted, leading to a rich output behavior. Varying the smoothness strength, for example, can provide a continuous spectrum of motion estimates, ranging from normal to global optical flow. Unlike approaches that rely on the explicit matching of brightness edges in space or time, the applied gradient-based model assures spatiotemporal continuity on visual information. The non-linear coupling of the individual motion units improves the resulting optical flow estimate because it reduces spatial smoothing across large velocity differences. Extended measurements of a 30x30 array prototype sensor under real-world conditions demonstrate the validity of the model and the robustness and functionality of the implementation.
Increasing Diversity Through Furthest Neighbor-Based Recommendation

One of the current challenges concerning improving recommender systems consists of nding ways of increasing serendipity and diversity, without compromising the precision and recall of the system. One possible way to approach this problem is to complement a standard recommender by another recommender \orthogonal" to the standard one, i.e. one that recommends dierent items than the standard. In this paper we investigate to which extent an inverted nearest neighbor model, k-furthest neighbor, is suitable for complementing a traditional kNN recommender. We compare the recommendations obtained when recommending items disliked by people least similar to oneself to those obtained by recommending items liked by those most similar to oneself. Our experiments show that the proposed furthest neighbor method provides more diverse recommendations with a tolerable loss in precision in comparison to traditional nearest neighbor methods. The recommendations obtained by kfurthest neighbor-based approaches are almost completely orthogonal to those obtained by their k-nearest neighborsbased counterparts.
ALIN results for OAEI 2018

ALIN is an ontology matching system specialized in the interactive ontology matching, and its main characteristic is the use of expert feedback to improve the set of mapping suggestions, using semantic and structural techniques to make this improvement. ALIN has obtained the alignment with the highest quality in the interactive tracking for Conference data set. This paper describes its configuration for the OAEI 2018 competition and discusses its results.
Operational Two-Stage Stratified Topographic Correction of Spaceborne Multispectral Imagery Employing an Automatic Spectral-Rule-Based Decision-Tree Preliminary Classifier

The increasing amount of remote sensing (RS) imagery acquired from multiple platforms and the recent announcements that scientists and decision makers around the world will soon have unrestricted access at no charge to large-scale spaceborne multispectral (MS) image databases make urgent the need to develop easy-to-use, effective, efficient, robust, and scalable satellite-based measurement systems. In these scientific and industrial contexts, it is well known that, to date, the operational performance of existing stratified non-Lambertian (anisotropic) topographic correction (SNLTOC) algorithms has been limited by the need for a priori knowledge of structural landscape characteristics, such as surface roughness which is land cover class specific. In practice, to overcome the circular nature of the SNLTOC problem, a mutually exclusive and totally exhaustive land cover classification map of a spaceborne MS image is required before SNLTOC takes place. This system requirement is fulfilled by the original operational automatic two-stage SNLTOC approach presented in this paper which comprises, in cascade, 1) an automatic stratification first stage and 2) a second-stage ordinary SNLTOC method selected from the literature. The former combines 1) four subsymbolic digital-elevation-model-derived strata, namely, horizontal areas, self-shadows, and sunlit slopes either facing the sun or facing away from the sun, and 2) symbolic (semantic) strata generated from the input MS image by an operational fully automated spectral-rule-based decision-tree preliminary classifier recently presented in RS literature. In this paper, first, previous works related to the TOC subject are surveyed, and next, the novel operational two-stage SNLTOC system is presented. Finally, the original two-stage SNLTOC system is validated in up to 19 experiments where the system's capability of reducing within-stratum spectral variance while preserving pixel-based spectral patterns (shapes) is assessed quantitatively.
Rotation and anisotropy of galaxies revisited

The use of the tensor virial theorem (TVT) as a diagnostic of anisotropic velocity distributions in galaxies is revisited. The TVT provides a rigorous global link between velocity anisotropy, rotation and shape, but the quantities appearing in it are not easily estimated observationally. Traditionally, use has been made of a centrally averaged velocity dispersion and the peak rotation velocity. Although this procedure cannot be rigorously justified, tests on model galaxies show that it works surprisingly well. With the advent of integral-field spectroscopy it is now possible to establish a rigorous connection between the TVT and observations. The TVT is reformulated in terms of sky-averages, and the new formulation is tested on model galaxies.
An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Computer Assisted Learning Strategy and Expository Method of Teaching Biology: A Case Study of Lumen Christi International High School, Uromi, Nigeria

Abstract The study assessed the effectiveness of computer assisted learning strategy and expository or traditional method of teaching biology using lumen Christi International high school, Uromi, Edo State Nigeria as a case study. The study which was a true experimental design: randomized, two groups, pre-test, post-test control group, involved sixty (60) senior secondary class one (SSC 1) students of the high school. The instrument for the study consisted of six essay questions based on three selected topics from SSC 1 curriculum. Data were analyzed using t-test statistics and analysis of variance (ANOVA). Results showed that expository method of instruction was superior to computer assisted learning strategy in teaching biology. Besides students taught through co-operative or interactive computer assisted learning strategy achieved significantly higher than those taught through individual computer assisted learning strategy. Recommendations were offered based on the result of the study.
Supporting schema evolution in schema-less NoSQL data stores

NoSQL data stores are becoming popular due to their schema-less nature. They offer a high level of flexibility, since they do not require to declare a global schema. Thus, the data model is maintained within the application source code. However, due to this flexibility, developers have to struggle with a growing data structure entropy and to manage legacy data. Moreover, support to schema evolution is lacking, which may lead to runtime errors or irretrievable data loss, if not properly handled. This paper presents an approach to support the evolution of a schema-less NoSQL data store by analyzing the application source code and its history. We motivate this approach on a subject system and explain how useful it is to understand the present database structure and facilitate future developments.