Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The hybrid process that combines traditional requirements and use cases

For many years systems engineers have produced traditional system requirements specifications containing shall‐statement requirements. The rapid adoption of use case modeling for capturing functional requirements in the software community has caused systems engineers to examine the utility of use case models for capturing system‐level functional requirements. A transition from traditional shall‐statement requirements to use case modeling has raised some issues and questions. This paper advocates a hybrid requirements process in which use case modeling and traditional shall‐statement requirements are applied together to effectively express both functional and nonfunctional requirements for complex, hierarchical systems. This paper also presents a practical method for extracting requirements from the use case text to produce a robust requirements specification. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 7: 303–319, 2004
Morphological communication: exploiting coupled dynamics in a complex mechanical structure to achieve locomotion

Traditional engineering approaches strive to avoid, or actively suppress, nonlinear dynamic coupling among components. Biological systems, in contrast, are often rife with these dynamics. Could there be, in some cases, a benefit to high degrees of dynamical coupling? Here we present a distributed robotic control scheme inspired by the biological phenomenon of tensegrity-based mechanotransduction. This emergence of morphology-as-information-conduit or ‘morphological communication’, enabled by time-sensitive spiking neural networks, presents a new paradigm for the decentralized control of large, coupled, modular systems. These results significantly bolster, both in magnitude and in form, the idea of morphological computation in robotic control. Furthermore, they lend further credence to ideas of embodied anatomical computation in biological systems, on scales ranging from cellular structures up to the tendinous networks of the human hand.
An Enhanced Anonymous Password-based Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme with Formal Proof

With the development of technology, the security of password-based authentication is becoming more and more signiﬁcant. Recently, Lee et al. proposed an anonymous password-based authenticated key agreement scheme with non-temper resistant smart card to reduce the computation cost of Wang et al.’s scheme. However, based on analysis, it shows that the scheme can’t with-stand smart card stolen or lost attack, user impersonation attack and server impersonation attack. Therefore, an enhanced scheme which can resist the attacks mentioned above is presented. By comparing the performance and security with other related schemes, our proposed scheme is more suitable for practical applications.
Multiobjective Genetic Clustering with Ensemble Among Pareto Front Solutions: Application to MRI Brain Image Segmentation

This article describes a multiobjective genetic fuzzy clustering scheme that utilizes the search capabilities of NSGA-II, a popular multiobjective genetic algorithm and optimizes a number of fuzzy cluster validity measures. Real-coded encoding of the cluster centers is used for this purpose. The multiobjective clustering scheme produces a number of non-dominated solutions, each of which contains some information about the clustering structure. Hence it is required to obtain the final optimal clustering by combining those information. For this, clustering ensemble is used to combine the non-dominated solutions of the final Pareto front produced. The proposed method is applied on several simulated T1-weighted, T2-weighted and proton density-weighted normal MRI brain images. Superiority of the proposed method over K-means, Fuzzy C-means, Expectation Maximization and Single Objective Genetic clustering have been demonstrated.
Autonomous collision attack on OCSP services

The paper describes two important design flaws in Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP), a protocol widely used in PKI environments for managing digital certificates' credibility in real time. The flaws significantly reduce the security capabilities of the protocol, and can be exploited by a malicious third party to generate forged signed certificate statuses and, in the worst scenario, forged certificates. Description of the flaws, along with expected exploitation routes, consequences for consuming application layer protocols, and proposed countermeasures, is given.
Knowledge Management: A Text Mining Approach

Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), also known as data mining, focuses on the computerized exploration of large amounts of data and on the discovery of interesting patterns within them. While most work on KDD has been concerned with structured databases, there has been little work on handling the huge amount of information that is available only in unstructured textual form. Given a collection of text documents, most approaches to text mining perform knowledge-discovery operations on labels associated with each document. At one extreme, these labels are keywords that represent the results of non-trivial keyword-labeling processes, and, at the other extreme, these labels are nothing more than a list of the words within the documents of interest. This paper presents an intermediate approach, one that we call text mining at the term level, in which knowledge discovery takes place on a more focused collection of words and phrases that are extracted from and label each document. These terms plus additional higher-level entities are then organized in a hierarchical taxonomy and are used in the knowledge discovery process. This paper describes Document Explorer, our tool that implements text mining at the term level. It consists of a document retrieval module, which converts retrieved documents from their native formats into documents represented using the SGML mark-up language used by Document Explorer; a two-stage term-extraction approach, in which terms are first proposed in a termgeneration stage, and from which a smaller set are then selected in a term-filtering stage in light of their frequencies of occurrence elsewhere in the collection; our taxonomy-creation tool by which the user can help specify higher-level entities that inform the knowledge-discovery process; and our knowledge-discovery tools for the resulting term-labeled documents. Finally, we evaluate our approach on a collection of patent records as well as Reuters newswire stories. Our results confirm that Text Mining serves as a powerful technique to manage knowledge encapsulated in large document collections.
Explicit Control of Vector Field Based Shape Deformations

Vector field based shape deformations (VFSD) have been introduced as an efficient method to deform shapes in a volume-preserving foldover-free manner. However, mainly simple implicitly defined shapes like spheres or cylinders have been explored as deformation tools by now. In contrast, boundary constraint modeling approaches enable the user to exactly define the support of the deformation on the surface. We present an approach to explicitly control VFSD: a scalar function together with two thresholds is placed directly on the shape to mark regions of full, zero, and blended deformation. The resulting deformation is volume-preserving and free of local self-intersections. In addition, the full deformation is steered by a 3D parametric curve and a parametric twisting function. This way our deformations appear to be a generalization of the boundary constraint modeling metaphor. We apply our approach in different scenarios. A parallelization of the computation on the GPU allows for editing high-resolution meshes at interactive speed.
Visualisation of the Semantic Web: Topic Maps visualisation

Topic Maps provide a bridge between the domains of knowledge representation and information management by building a structured semantic network above information resources. Our research at LIP6 aims at visualizing this semantic layer efficiently, which is a critical issue as Topic Maps may contain millions of elements. This paper is divided into two parts. First, we depict briefly basic Topic Maps concepts. Then, we discuss Topic Maps visualisation requirements and we study how existing visualisation techniques may be applied to Topic Maps representation. We conclude by giving a few directions that could lead to the "ultimate" Topic Map visualisation tool.
Evaluating self-checkout lanes as a potential source of alcoholic beverages for minors.

OBJECTIVE This exploratory study examined the ability of young adults to purchase alcoholic beverages through self-checkout lanes without being asked for age verification. Although the minimum drinking age in all 50 U. S. states is 21 years of age, drinking among underage persons (ages 12-20) remains a serious public health concern. Self-checkout options in off-sale alcoholic beverage outlets (e.g., grocery store chains, liquor stores) may represent a potential source of illicit access to alcohol compared with traditional checkout purchases. METHOD A total of 216 stores with self-checkout lanes were randomly selected in five Southern California counties. Pseudo-patrons independently judged to be 23 years of age or younger purchased alcohol in each store. RESULTS Overall, 8.8% of all purchase observations resulted in a failure to ask for identification to purchase alcohol. CONCLUSIONS The growing number of self-checkout options at supermarkets can be a potential source of alcohol for minors; however, the risk they pose is similar to that of traditional checkout purchases. Policies relating to the purchase of alcohol at any store, regardless of checkout type, should be modified so that every purchase of alcohol requires an identification card to be swiped regardless of age.
It was tough, but it was kind of cool : experience of a university wilderness orientation program through the participants' eyes

Many universities are now offering new type of freshman orientation. These Wilderness Orientation Programs offer a unique opportunity to help incoming students transition and adjust into the university setting. Thus far the literature has used pre- and post-test comparisons across many outcomes. Post-program scores indicate that participants have benefitted from these programs. This study uses qualitative data to identify most effective features in wilderness orientation program. This program was run at a public regional comprehensive university in a state in the Southeast. Participants were interviewed on their past experience. The primary goal was to identify reoccurring themes in the participants’ experiences.
Evaluation of residual patient position variation for spinal radiosurgery using the Novalis image guided system.

PURPOSE The Novalis system has been demonstrated to achieve accurate target localization on anthropomorphic phantoms. However, other factors, such as rotational deviation, patient intrafraction motion, and image fusion uncertainty due to patient body deformation, could contribute additional position uncertainty for actual patients. This study evaluates such position uncertainty for spinal radiosurgery patients. MATERIALS AND METHODS Fifty-two consecutive spinal radiosurgery patients were included in the study. Rotational deviation was evaluated from 6-deg of freedom (6D) fusion results for all patients. The combined uncertainty of patient motion and image fusion was determined from fusion results of additional kV x-ray images acquired before, during, and after treatment for 25 of the 52 patients. The uncertainty of image fusion was also evaluated by performing 6D fusion ten different times with various regions of interest in the images selected for fusion. This was performed for two patients with L3 and T2 lesions, respectively, for comparison. RESULTS The mean rotational deviation was 0.7 +/- 1.8, 0.7 +/- 1.5, and 0.7 +/- 1.6 deg along the yaw, roll, and pitch directions, respectively. The combined uncertainty from patient motion and image fusion was 0.1 +/- 0.9, 0.2 +/- 1.2, and 0.2 +/- 1.0 mm in the anteroposterior (AP), longitudinal, and lateral directions, respectively. The uncertainty (standard deviation) due to image fusion was less than 0.28 mm in any direction for the L3 lesion and 0.8 mm in the AP direction for the T2 lesion. CONCLUSION Overall position uncertainty for spinal radiosurgery patients has been evaluated. Rotational deviation and patient motion were the main factors contributed to position uncertainty for actual patient treatment.
Robust hand segmentation and tracking to illumination variation

In this paper, we propose a hand segmentation and tracking algorithm under environment with illumination variation. The initial HSV histogram is computed by the rough HSV ranges of human skin and changed region. The histogram is updated by using the HSV pixel values in the current hand region and changed region. For the accurate update of histogram, other skin region is not used during histogram update. The empirical results show that the proposed method accurately tracks the predefined hand and effectively rules out other skin regions, such as the other hand or face.
Functional and Molecular Characterization of Nucleobase Transport by Recombinant Human and Rat Equilibrative Nucleoside Transporters 1 and 2

The human (h) and rat (r) equilibrative (Na+-independent) nucleoside transporters (ENTs) hENT1, rENT1, hENT2, and rENT2 belong to a family of integral membrane proteins with 11 transmembrane domains (TMs) and are distinguished functionally by differences in sensitivity to inhibition by nitrobenzylthioinosine and coronary vasoactive drugs. Structurally, the proteins have a large glycosylated loop between TMs 1 and 2 and a large cytoplasmic loop between TMs 6 and 7. In the present study, hENT1, rENT1, hENT2, and rENT2 were produced in Xenopus laevis oocytes and investigated for their ability to transport pyrimidine and purine nucleobases. hENT2 and rENT2 efficiently transported radiolabeled hypoxanthine, adenine, guanine, uracil, and thymine (apparent K m values 0.7–2.6 mm), and hENT2, but not rENT2, also transported cytosine. These findings were independently confirmed by hypoxanthine transport experiments with recombinant hENT2 produced in purine-cytosine permease (FCY2)-deficient Saccharomyces cerevisiae and provide the first direct demonstration that the ENT2 isoform is a dual mechanism for the cellular uptake of nucleosides and nucleobases, both of which are physiologically important salvage metabolites. In contrast, recombinant hENT1 and rENT1 mediated negligible oocyte fluxes of hypoxanthine relative to hENT2 and rENT2. Chimeric experiments between rENT1 and rENT2 using splice sites at rENT1 residues 99 (end of TM 2), 171 (between TMs 4 and 5), and 231 (end of TM 6) identified TMs 5–6 of rENT2 (amino acid residues 172–231) as a determinant of nucleobase transport activity, suggesting that this domain forms part(s) of the ENT2 substrate translocation channel.
Engineering a novel cdi-GMP-binding protein for biofilm dispersalemi

Qun Ma,1 Zhonghua Yang,1,2 Mingming Pu,1 Wolfgang Peti3 and Thomas K. Wood1,4,5* Departments of Chemical Engineering, Biology and Civil Engineering, 220 Jack E. Brown Building, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-3122, USA. College of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430081, China. Department of Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology, and Biotechnology, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA.
A Trainable Hierarchical Hidden Markov Tree Model for color image segmentation and labeling

In this paper we consider how to annotate or label regions of grey-level or multispectral images based upon known labels and a set of interacting hierarchical doubly stochastic processes. The proposed model extends current work on the use of hidden Markov models for image processing using multiscale representations. In this paper we explore a new bijective up-down algorithm whereby the spatio-spectral context of specific image region signature s are encoded via different types of trainable support kernel s for the upward and downward hidden Markov trees.
Main and buffering effects of emotional support on job- and health- related strains: A national survey of Israeli social workers

ABSTRACT This study assesses the relationship between emotional support from co-workers and supervisors and work-related stress, strain and job satisfaction among a national random sample of Israeli social workers. The study examines the “main” and “buffering effects” hypotheses, using demographic characteristics and job situational factors as control variables. First, we hypothesized that the presence of emotional support from co-workers and supervisors would be negatively correlated with burnout and job-related strain and positively correlated with job satisfaction. Second, we hypothesized that emotional support from supervisors and co-workers would moderate the effects of stress on job — and health-related strains and job satisfaction. The results, as in most of the previous research on this issue, supported the “main effect” hypothesis. Social workers who re ported a high level of perceived emotional support from co-workers and supervisors reported less stress, depression, anxiety, and irritability, a.
Time series analysis via mechanistic models

The purpose of time series analysis via mechanistic models is to reconcile the known or hypothesized structure of a dynamical system with observations collected over time. We develop a framework for constructing nonlinear mechanistic models and carrying out inference. Our framework permits the consideration of implicit dynamic models, meaning statistical models for stochastic dynamical systems which are specified by a simulation algorithm to generate sample paths. Inference procedures that operate on implicit models are said to have the plug-and-play property. Our work builds on recently developed plug-and-play inference methodology for partially observed Markov models. We introduce a class of implicitly specified Markov chains with stochastic transition rates, and we demonstrate its applicability to open problems in statistical inference for biological systems. As one example, these models are shown to give a fresh perspective on measles transmission dynamics. As a second example, we present a mechanistic analysis of cholera incidence data, involving interaction between two competing strains of the pathogen Vibrio cholerae.
Der Bullying- und Viktimisierungsfragebogen für Kinder (BVF-K): Konstruktion und Analyse eines Verfahrens zur Erhebung von Bullying im Vor- und Grundschulalter

Bullying constitutes a meaningful risk factor concerning the development of emotional problems and behavioral abnormalities and occurs to a considerable degree in kindergarten and primary school already. In order to identify bullying behavior as well as the children involved early enough, reliable and valid assessment methods are needed. The Bulling and Victimization Questionnaire for Children (BVF-K) is an instrument based on self-reports for pre- and primary school children. The questionnaire assesses to what extent 4-10 year old children are affected by direct or indirect bullying. The construction sample consisted of 458 children. Item analysis showed good distribution of item difficulties as well as satisfactory discriminative power of items. Via principal component analysis, two scales (victim and bully) as well as four subscales were extracted (direct and indirect/relational victimization and direct and indirect/relational aggression respectively), showing satisfactory to good internal consistency.
Institutionalized schizophrenic patients ’ performance in clock drawing test

Clock drawing test (CDT) as a neuropsychologic tool is recently used to assessment the cognitive functions. This study was aimed to determ ine the difference in performance of Institutionalized schizophrenic patients and normal subjects in drawing a clock test. To achieve the purpose 45 subjects who were diagnosed a chronic schizophrenic patients by psychiatrists in Isfahan psychiatry hospital, Is fahan, Iran were randomly selected. The normal subjects were selected among the families of patients and their mental health was confirmed after clinical interview (n=30). The schi zophrenic group and normal subjects were assessed by CDT in two stages to determine the differences. The data was analyzed using ANOVA and χ. The results of the study showed that there was si gnificant difference between two groups in all the scores of CDT in two stages of test (first stage: F1, 73= 59.64, P<0.0001; and second stage: F 1,73=121.82, P<0.0001). Also the frequency of errors in schizophrenic group was significantly more than the normal control. It is concluded that a two stages of CDT may used to find the abnormality of executive functions in schizophrenia.
Silicon Speedpath Measurement and Feedback into EDA flows

Timing, test, reliability, and noise are modeled and abstracted in our design and verification flows. Specific EDA algorithms are then designed to work with these abstracted models, often in isolation of other effects. However, tighter design margins and higher reliability issues have increased the need for accurate models and algorithms. We propose utilizing silicon data to tune and improve the EDA tools and flows. In this paper we describe a silicon methodology to isolate silicon speedpath environments and feed these into a simulation framework to temporally and spatially isolate specific speedpaths in order to model and understand the real effects. This is done using accurate electrical speedpath modeling techniques which may be used to tune the accuracy and correlation of the design models. The effort required to distinguish the many different electrical effects will be outlined.
Room temperature continuous operation of sub-μW threshold nanobeam lasers

Nanobeam laser with threshold 230 nW is demonstrated in continuous-wave operation at room-temperature. This is achieved by reducing the size of active medium to 1.5×0.3×0.02 μm<sup>3</sup> via selective wet-etching of a single quantum well layer.
Catecholamine regulation of local lactate production in vivo in skeletal muscle and adipose tissue: role of -adrenoreceptor subtypes.

CONTEXT The regulation of lactate production in skeletal muscle (SM) and adipose tissue (AT) is not fully elucidated. OBJECTIVE Our objective was to investigate the catecholamine-mediated regulation of lactate production and blood flow in SM and AT in healthy, normal-weight subjects by using microdialysis. METHODS First, lactate levels in SM and AT were measured during an iv norepinephrine infusion (n = 11). Local blood flow was determined with the 133Xe-clearance technique. Second, muscle lactate was measured during hypoglycemia and endogenous epinephrine stimulation (n = 12). Third, SM was perfused with selective beta(1-3)-adrenoreceptor agonists in situ (n = 8). Local blood flow was measured with the ethanol perfusion technique. RESULTS In response to iv norepinephrine, the fractional release of lactate (difference between tissue and arterial lactate) increased by 40% in SM (P = 0.001), whereas remaining unchanged in AT. Blood flow decreased by 40% in SM (P < 0.005) and increased by 50% in AT (P < 0.05). In response to hypoglycemia, epinephrine increased 10-fold, and the fractional release of lactate in SM doubled (P < 0.0001). The blood flow remained unchanged. The beta2-agonist, terbutaline, caused a marked concentration-dependent increase of muscle lactate and blood flow (P < 0.0001). The beta(1)-agonist, dobutamine, induced a discrete increase of muscle lactate (P < 0.0001), and the blood flow remained unchanged. The beta3-agonist, CPG 12177, did not affect muscle lactate or blood flow. CONCLUSIONS Catecholamines stimulate lactate production in SM, but not in AT. In SM, the beta2-adrenoreceptor is the most important beta-adrenergic receptor subtype in the regulation of lactate production.