Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MINIMIZING THE SECURE WIRELESS SESSION ENERGY

In this paper we identified the various sources of energy consumption during the setup, operation and tear down of a secure wireless session. Our analysis showed that the data transfers during a secure wireless transaction, the number and size of messages exchanged during secure session establishment and the cryptographic computations used for data authentication and privacy during secure data transactions in that order are the main sources of energy consumption during a secure wireless session. We developed techniques based on compression, protocol optimization and hardware acceleration to reduce the energy consumed by a secure session. A mobile test bed was developed to verify our energy management schemes and to study the energy consumption vs. security trade-offs. Using our proposed schemes we were able to reduce the session establishment energy by more than 85% and the secure data transaction energy by more than 40% during data transmission and by more than 65% during data reception
Almost IPP-codes or provably secure digital fingerprinting codes

Codes with the Identifiable Parent Property (IPP codes) form a very useful tool in traitor tracing schemes since they guarantee (with probability 1) identification of at least one of the traitors. We consider a natural generalization of IPP codes, namely codes for which this property holds with probability close to 1. A probabilistic version of the IPP problem has been studied under the name of collusion-secure digital fingerprinting codes. We point out that, somewhat surprisingly, fingerprinting codes do no automatically have the “almost IPP property. ” In practice, this means that for a given forged fingerprint, a good tracing algorithm identifies some user, say u, as a traitor, claiming that the probability of incorrect accusation is close to 0. Nevertheless this user can successfully dispute this claim because with high probability there exist coalitions that do not contain u and that can generate the same forged fingerprint. The described shortcoming of the accepted definition of fingerprinting capacity is manifest even in the simplest case of two traitors. We discuss this case and then analyze some known constructions of digital fingerprinting codes based on concatenated codes.
Relay selection in OFDM based two-way cooperative systems

In this paper, error performance analysis of relay selection in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) based amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying two-way cooperative communication systems is examined over frequency selective Nakagami-m fading channels. In the selection process, we investigate a simple suboptimal min-max criterion for relay selection, where a single relay that minimizes the maximum bit error rate (BER) of two source nodes will be selected. Also, the effect of relay positioning is examined. Results show that BER performance of proposed system increases with the number of relays and also, is enhancing with the increase of the value of fading parameter m.
Simulation of charge transport in pixelated CdTe

The Voxel Imaging PET (VIP) Pathfinder project intends to show the advantages of using pixelated semiconductor technology for nuclear medicine applications to achieve an improved image reconstruction without efficiency loss. It proposes designs for Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Positron Emission Mammography (PEM) and Compton gamma camera detectors with a large number of signal channels (of the order of 106). The design is based on the use of a pixelated CdTe Schottky detector to have optimal energy and spatial resolution. An individual read-out channel is dedicated for each detector voxel of size 1 × 1 × 2 mm3 using an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) which the VIP project has designed, developed and is currently evaluating experimentally. The behaviour of the signal charge carriers in CdTe should be well understood because it has an impact on the performance of the readout channels. For this purpose the Finite Element Method (FEM) Multiphysics COMSOL software package has been used to simulate the behaviour of signal charge carriers in CdTe and extract values for the expected charge sharing depending on the impact point and bias voltage. The results on charge sharing obtained with COMSOL are combined with GAMOS, a Geant based particle tracking Monte Carlo software package, to get a full evaluation of the amount of charge sharing in pixelated CdTe for different gamma impact points.
O ct 2 00 4 A General Approach to the Investigation of Soft Materials by Thermodynamics Formalism

In this study, internal energy (U), electric field (E) and particle number (N) which specify the system quantities i.e. thermodynamical quantities for the proteins. In the frame of thermodynamical formalism, the relation between the heat capacity at effective field CE and the heat capacity at total dipole moment CM and the relations for the increment of enthalpy ∆H , entropy ∆S and Gibbs energy ∆G which come out in the dissolving of the proteins in water have been obtained. By thinking about the present system being in the heat bath the canonical distribution function, by considering the system in heat and electric field bath the macro canonical distribution function and once more by taking the system in heat and particle number bath the macro canonical distribution function have been calculated. Partition functions have been related to the macro canonical quantities with the help of the free energy. Understanding the structure of the proteins have been endeavoured by fitting the theoretical calculations to the curves of experimental results.
Formation scenarios for the young stellar associations between galactic longitudes l = 280-360 deg

We investigate the spatial distribution, the space velocities and age distribution of the pre-main sequence (PMS) stars belonging to Ophiuchus, Lupus and Chamaeleon star-forming regions (SFRs), and of the young early-type star members of the Scorpius-Centaurus OB association. These young stellar associations extend over the galactic longitude range from 280 to 360, and are at a distance interval of around 100 and 200 pc. This study is based on a compilation of distances, proper motions and radial velocities from the literature for the kinematic properties, and of basic stellar data for the construction of Hertzsprung-Russel diagrams. Although there was no well-known OB association in Chamaeleon, the distances and the proper motions of a group of 21 B- and A-type stars, taken from the Hipparcos Catalogue, lead us to propose that they form a young association. We show that the young early-type stars of the OB associations and the PMS stars of the SFRs follow a similar spatial distribution, i.e., there is no separation between the low and the high-mass young stars. We find no dierence in the kinematics nor in the ages of these two populations studied. Considering not only the stars selected by kinematic criteria but the whole sample of young early-type stars, the scattering of their proper motions is similar to that of the PMS stars and all the young stars exhibit a common direction of motion. The space velocities of the Hipparcos PMS stars of each SFR are compatible with the mean values of the OB associations. The PMS stars in each SFR span a wide range of ages (from 1 to 20 Myr). The ages of the OB subgroups are 8-10 Myr for Upper Scorpius (US), and 16-20 Myr for Upper Centaurus Lupus (UCL) and for Lower Centaurus Crux (LCC). Thus, our results do not confirm that UCL is older than the LCC association. Based on these results and the uncertainties associated with the age determination, we cannot say that there is indeed a dierence in the age of the two populations. We analyze the dierent scenarios for the triggering of large-scale star-formation that have been proposed up to now, and argue that most probably we are observing a spiral arm that passes close to the Sun. The alignment of young stars and molecular clouds and the average velocity of the stars in the opposite direction to the Galactic rotation agree with the expected behavior of star formation in nearby spiral arms.
MRIM-LIG at ImageCLEF 2010 Visual Concept Detection and Annotation task

This paper focuses on one of the Image CLEF Photo tasks at which the MRIM research group of the LIG participated: the Visual Concept Detection and Annotation. For this task, we applied a simple state of the art technique based on bag of vi- sual words. We extracted SIFT-like features that integrate colors (rgSIFT) proposed by van de Sande(10). We used then a Kmeans clustering in a way to group these features according to 4000 clus- ters. We generated then for each image of the training set a 4000 dimensions histogram by summing all the occurrences of each clus- ter, using the nearest neighbour centroid for each extracted feature. For the recognition we extracted the rgSIFT features from the test set, before generating the 4000 dimensional histograms. We applied then SVMs with RBF kernels using a probabilistic estimation of recognition. The results obtained by our run are presented.
A Light Lock Management Mechanism for Optimizing Real-Time and Non-Real-Time Performance in Embedded Linux

In a real-time Linux system, the critical sections are known as the main factor delaying the execution of real-time tasks. Traditional approaches to overcoming this issue have given less consideration to both real-time and non-real-time tasks. In this paper, we propose a new lock management mechanism to improve the real-time performance with a small penalty for non-real-time tasks. Using this mechanism, we guarantee the deadlines of real-time tasks while keeping the penalties accruing for non-real-time tasks small. We implemented a prototype system in Linux 2.6. 20. Experimental results showed that the worst-case OS latency of real-time task is reduced to 19% of the original one, while the penalty for a non-real-time task is 10.1% of the original. The results also showed that the lock management mechanism proposed in this paper is efficient and useful for a future real-time Linux system.
An Efficient Detecting Communities Algorithm with Self-Adapted Fuzzy C-Means Clustering in Complex Networks

Community structure is an important characteristic in real complex networks, meaning the networks are divided naturally into modules or communities, groups of vertices with relatively dense connections within groups but sparser connections between them. Fuzzy c-means clustering have been proposed to detect the community structure in networks for the past few years, and gained some fruitful results. In this paper, we present a new method to find the community structure in complex networks with self-adapted fuzzy c-means clustering, which can find the sum of the community structure voluntarily and overcome the deficiencies of original Fuzzy c-means clustering algorithms. The simulation results on the real-world networks and on synthetic benchmarks verify that the algorithm is more complete and accurate than the other mainstream FCM algorithms.
Defects per Million (DPM) Evaluation for a Cloud Dealing with VM Failures Using Checkpointing

In cloud computing systems, a user request goes through several cloud service provider specific processing steps from the instant it is submitted until the service is completed. In this paper, we use service-oriented metrics to characterize the dependability of cloud computing systems in order to find the pitfalls and improve the service. We find that it is not possible to fully reflect the impact of a cloud-service's dependability behavior through traditional dependability metrics like availability or reliability. We use a user-perceived dependability metric called Defects Per Million (DPM), defined as the number of user requests dropped out of a million. We demonstrate a new formulation for computing DPM metric in cloud computing systems. We incorporate check pointing scheme for job execution in the cloud to mitigate the impact of virtual machine failures, and compute DPM in order to characterize the improvement in the DPM due to the check pointing scheme compared to no-check pointing scheme.
Adaptively Secure Computationally Efficient Searchable Symmetric Encryption

Searchable encryption is a technique that allows a client to store documents on a server in encrypted form. Stored documents can be retrieved selectively while revealing as little information as possible to the server. In the symmetric searchable encryption domain, the storage and the retrieval are performed by the same client. Most conventional searchable encryption schemes suffer from two disadvantages. First, searching the stored documents takes time linear in the size of the database, and/or uses heavy arithmetic operations. Secondly, the existing schemes do not consider adaptive attackers; a search-query will reveal information even about documents stored in the future. If they do consider this, it is at a significant cost to updates. In this paper we propose a novel symmetric searchable encryption scheme that offers searching at constant time in the number of unique keywords stored on the server. We present two variants of the basic scheme which differ in the efficiency of search and update. We show how each scheme could be used in a personal health record system.
Self-Organization In 1-d Swarm Dynamics

Self-organization of a biologically motivated swarm into smaller subgroups of different velocities is found by solving a 1-dimensional adaptive-velocity swarm, in which the velocity of an agent is averaged over a finite local radius of influence. Using a mean field model in phase space, we find a dependence of this group-division phenomenon on the typical scales of the initial swarm in the position and velocity dimensions. Comparisons are made to previous swarm models in which the speed of an agent is either fixed or adjusted according to the degree of direction consensus among its local neighbors. Key words: self-organization of swarm, phase space, multi-agent system, dynamical system, group-division.
Development of a coaxial self-balancing robot based on sliding mode control

A low cost coaxial self-balancing robot is proposed in this paper, the two wheels of which are placed coaxially for turning with zero-radius. Low cost MEMS accelerometer and gyro are selected to measure the posture information of the robot with a novel data fusion method. This data fusion method can overcome the shortcomings of accelerometer and gyro so that the precise posture information is obtained even with oscillation and impact. Based on the robot's dynamics model established by Lagrange's function method, two robust sliding mode controllers are designed for controlling the motions of the robot. Not only numerical simulation experiments using MATLAB Simulink and ADAMS but also physical experiments are conducted to confirm the effectiveness of the two controllers, and the results show that the robot performs well with precise measurement of the posture and sliding mode controllers.
Prevalence of BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations in patients with early-onset breast cancer.

BACKGROUND Mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are found in most families with cases of both breast and ovarian cancer or with many cases of early-onset breast cancer. However, in an outbred population, the prevalence of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations in patients with breast cancer who were unselected for a family history of this disease has not been determined. METHODS Mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes were detected in blood samples from two population-based series of young patients with breast cancer from Britain. RESULTS Mutations were detected in 15 (5.9%) of 254 women diagnosed with breast cancer before age 36 years (nine [3.5%] in BRCA1 and six [2.4%] in BRCA2) and in 15 (4.1%) of 363 women diagnosed from ages 36 through 45 years (seven [1.9%] in BRCA1 and eight [2.2%] in BRCA2). Eleven percent (six of 55) of patients with a first-degree relative who developed ovarian cancer or breast cancer by age 60 years were mutation carriers, compared with 45% (five of 11) of patients with two or more affected first- or second-degree relatives. The standardized incidence ratio for breast cancer in mothers and sisters was 365 (five observed and 1.37 expected) for 30 mutation carriers and 199 (64 observed and 32.13 expected) for 587 noncarriers. If we assume recent penetrance estimates, the respective proportions of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers are 3.1% and 3.0%, respectively, of patients with breast cancer who are younger than age 50 years, 0.49% and 0.84% of patients with breast cancer who are age 50 years or older, and 0.11% and 0.12% of women in the general population. CONCLUSIONS Mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes make approximately equal contributions to early-onset breast cancer in Britain and account for a small proportion of the familial risk of breast cancer.
Knee Joint Misalignment in Exoskeletons for the Lower Extremities: Effects on User's Gait

Due to the complexity of the human musculoskeletal system and intra/intersubjects variability, powered exoskeletons are prone to human-robot misalignments. These induce undesired interaction forces that may jeopardize safe operation. Uncompensated inertia of the robotic links also generates spurious interaction forces. Current design approaches to compensate for misalignments rely on the use of auxiliary passive degrees of freedom that unavoidably increase robot inertia, which potentially affects their effectiveness in reducing undesired interaction forces. Assessing the relative impact of misalignment and robot inertia on the wearer can, therefore, provide useful insights on how to improve the effectiveness of such approaches, especially in those situations where the dynamics of the movement are quasi-periodic and, therefore, predictable such as in gait. In this paper, we studied the effects of knee joint misalignments on the wearer's gait, by using a treadmill-based exoskeleton developed by our group, the ALEX II. Knee joint misalignments were purposely introduced by adjusting the mismatch between the length of the robot thigh and that of the human thigh. The amount of robot inertia reflected to the user was adjusted through control. Results evidenced that knee misalignment significantly changes human-robot interaction forces, especially at the thigh interface, and this effect can be attenuated by actively compensating for robot inertia. Misalignments caused by an excessively long robot thigh are less critical than misalignments of equal magnitude deriving from an excessively short robot thigh.
Development of RAPAT: Asynchronous GSS at the Pre-meeting Stages of Strategy Formulation for Indonesian Culture

Research about Group Support Systems and the design of these group support technologies is mainly based on western culture and takes little explicit account of other cultures. While the research reveals promising results on the effectiveness of these technologies, the research results and the technologies themselves may be less effective when applied directly to different cultures or cross-cultural situations. These cultures may require different forms or styles of group support. This paper presents the prototype development of RAPAT (Replicable Asynchronous Pre-meeting Application Templates), an asynchronous GSS for groups engaged in strategy formulation in Indonesia. Indonesian culture has relatively high power distance, low individualism, and weak uncertainty avoidance (Hofstede, 1980), and high context (Hall and Hall, 1990). The development of RAPAT is based on Lotus TeamRoom templates and can be reconfigured and used by groups with similar culture to Indonesia and the same tasks. This paper presents the requirement and architecture of RAPAT as well as a discussion of aspects of its implementation.
Increased Incidence of Choroid Plexus Carcinoma Due to the Germline TP53 R337H Mutation in Southern Brazil

Background Choroid plexus carcinomas (CPC) are rare tumors predominantly found in children. Given the high frequency of the germline R337H mutation in the TP53 gene in southern Brazil, we have evaluated the frequency of the R337H mutation in families with CPC in children. Methodology/Principal Findings The present series included 29 patients that were admitted to the same institution from 1992 to 2010, including 22 children with CPC (0.08–13.6 years of age at diagnosis) and 7 children with papilloma of the choroid plexus (Pp; 0.5–9.8 years of age). Surgical resection was possible in 28 children. Blood and/or tumor DNA was extracted and analyzed using PCR-RFLP and results were confirmed by sequencing 240 bp of the TP53 exon 10. The patients, all parents, and some relatives submitted samples for blood DNA analysis. In addition, we have also examined the presence of the mutation in DNA from paraffin-embedded tumor samples to evaluate loss of heterozygosity. We found 63.3% (14/22) of the CPC patients positive for the germline R337H mutation; CPC samples were either heterozygous (n = 7), lost only the wild-type (n = 4), or only the R337H copy (n = 2). One CPC sample was not available. All Pp cases (7/7, 100%) were negative for R337H. Cure (>5 years survival free of disease) was observed in 18.1% of the CPC cases with the R337H mutation (2/11), 71.4% of the Pp (5/7), and 25% of CPC cases negative for the R337H mutation (2/8). Family history of cancer (with 2 or more cancer cases) was exclusively identified on the parental side segregating the R337H mutation, and 50% (7/14) of them were compatible with Li-Fraumeni-like syndrome. Significance Our results show for the first time that the R337H TP53 mutation is responsible for 63% of the CPC cases in children, suggesting a higher incidence of CPC in southern Brazil.
Geometric Optimization Methods for Adaptive Filtering

The techniques and analysis presented in this thesis provide new methods to solve optimization problems posed on Riemannian manifolds. These methods are applied to the subspace tracking problem found in adaptive signal processing and adaptive control. A new point of view is offered for the constrained optimization problem. Some classical optimization techniques on Euclidean space are generalized to Riemannian manifolds. Several algorithms are presented and their convergence properties are analyzed employing the Riemannian structure of the manifold. Specifically, two new algorithms, which can be thought of as Newton's method and the conjugate gradient method on Riemannian manifolds, are presented and shown to possess quadratic and superlinear convergence, respectively. These methods are applied to several eigenvalue and singular value problems, which are posed as constrained optimization problems. New efficient algorithms for the eigenvalue problem are obtained by exploiting the special homogeneous space structure of the constraint manifold. It is shown that Newton's method applied to the Rayleigh quotient on a sphere converges cubically, and that the Rayleigh quotient iteration is an efficient approximation of Newton's method. The Riemannian version of the conjugate gradient method applied to this function gives a new algorithm for finding the eigenvectors corresponding to the extreme eigenvalues of a symmetric matrix. The Riemannian version of the conjugate gradient method applied to a generalized Rayleigh quotient yields a superlinearly convergent algorithm for computing the k eigenvectors corresponding to the extreme eigenvalues of an n-by-n matrix. This algorithm requires $O(nk\sp2)$ operations and O(k) matrix-vector multiplications per step. Several gradient flows are analyzed that solve eigenvalue and singular value problems. The new optimization algorithms are applied to the subspace tracking problem of adaptive signal processing. A new algorithm for subspace tracking is given, which is based upon the conjugate gradient method applied to the generalized Rayleigh quotient. The results of several numerical experiments demonstrating the convergence properties of the new algorithms are given.