Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Efficient Identity-based Signature Scheme and Its Applications

Mapping messages or user's identity into a point on elliptic curves is required in many pairing-based cryptographic schemes. In most of these pairing-based schemes, this requirement is realized by a special hash function called MapToPoint function. However, the efficiency of the MapToPoint function is much lower than the general hash functions. In this paper, we propose a new identity-based signature (IBS) scheme without MapToPoint function, which speeds up extracting the secret key and verifying the signatures. The security of the proposed scheme depends on a complex assumption similar to k-CAA. Another benefit of the proposed scheme is that it supports batch verifications such that multiple signatures of distinct messages for distinct users are verified simultaneously. The results show that batch verifications on the proposed IBS scheme is much faster than other IBS schemes. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is used to construct an efficient chameleon signature scheme by cooperating with an identity-based chameleon hash function.
Importance and Discrete Three Point Transport

Global illumination within nondiffuse environments is ideally suited for computation under importance and radiance driven hierarchical refinement: a transport interaction is significant to the view from the eye only if it lies within paths of directional reflection of both radiance originating at a light source, and importance originating at the eye. We have recently developed a hierarchical algorithm for global illumination based on a radiance formulation for three point transport, and have implemented this algorithm over environments containing surfaces exhibiting glossy reflection. In this paper we derive the adjoint to our original transport formulation, and describe the preliminary results of application of this adjoint in the form of an importance driven version of our glossy implementation. These results show a significant reduction in transport computation, and indicate that an importance and radiance driven hierarchical technique possesses great promise for the development of efficient global illumination algorithms for general reflection. CR
Exercise Performance and Corticospinal Excitability during Action Observation

Purpose: Observation of a model performing fast exercise improves simultaneous exercise performance; however, the precise mechanism underpinning this effect is unknown. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the speed of the observed exercise influenced both upper body exercise performance and the activation of a cortical action observation network (AON). Method: In Experiment 1, 10 participants completed a 5 km time trial on an arm-crank ergometer whilst observing a blank screen (no-video) and a model performing exercise at both a typical (i.e., individual mean cadence during baseline time trial) and 15% faster than typical speed. In Experiment 2, 11 participants performed arm crank exercise whilst observing exercise at typical speed, 15% slower and 15% faster than typical speed. In Experiment 3, 11 participants observed the typical, slow and fast exercise, and a no-video, whilst corticospinal excitability was assessed using transcranial magnetic stimulation. Results: In Experiment 1, performance time decreased and mean power increased, during observation of the fast exercise compared to the no-video condition. In Experiment 2, cadence and power increased during observation of the fast exercise compared to the typical speed exercise but there was no effect of observation of slow exercise on exercise behavior. In Experiment 3, observation of exercise increased corticospinal excitability; however, there was no difference between the exercise speeds. Conclusion: Observation of fast exercise improves simultaneous upper-body exercise performance. However, because there was no effect of exercise speed on corticospinal excitability, these results suggest that these improvements are not solely due to changes in the activity of the AON.
What Is the Primary Cause of Individual Differences in Contrast Sensitivity?

One of the primary objectives of early visual processing is the detection of luminance variations, often termed image contrast. Normal observers can differ in this ability by at least a factor of 4, yet this variation is typically overlooked, and has never been convincingly explained. This study uses two techniques to investigate the main source of individual variations in contrast sensitivity. First, a noise masking experiment assessed whether differences were due to the observer’s internal noise, or the efficiency with which they extracted information from the stimulus. Second, contrast discrimination functions from 18 previous studies were compared (pairwise, within studies) using a computational model to determine whether differences were due to internal noise or the low level gain properties of contrast transduction. Taken together, the evidence points to differences in contrast gain as being responsible for the majority of individual variation across the normal population. This result is compared with related findings in attention and amblyopia.
SonicFunction: Experiments with a function browser for the visually impaired

We present in this paper SonicFunction, a prototype for the interactive sonification of mathematical functions. Since many approaches to represent mathematical functions as auditory graphs exist already, we introduce in SonicFunction three new aspects related to sound design. Firstly, SonicFunction features a hybrid approach of discrete and continuous sonification of the function values f(x). Secondly, the sonification includes information about the derivative of the function. Thirdly, SonicFunction includes information about the sign of the function value f(x) within the timbre of the sonification and leaves the auditory graph context free for an acoustic representation of the bounding box. We discuss SonicFunction within the context of existing function sonifications, and report the results from an evaluation of the program with 14 partially sighted and blind students.
Can hidden correlations mimic a variable fine structure constant

Murphy et al. (2003a, MNRAS, 345, 609) claim to find evidence of cosmological variations of the fine structure con- stant α in the spectra of intervening QSO absorption line systems. We find that this result is affected by systematic effects. The α values estimated in individual line systems depend on the set of atomic transitions used and therefore the quoted dependence on the cosmic age may reflect the fact that different sets of transitions are used at different redshifts. A correlation between line shifts and relative optical depths of the atomic transitions is also present. This correlation is very tight for a high-redshift sub- sample and accounts for the anomalous dispersion of the α values found by Murphy et al. (2003a) in this subsample. The above correlations are consistent with a scenario in which gravitational redshift, caused by the gravity of the dark halo, contributes to the shift in frequency of individual components. Gravitational redshift causes differential spectral shifts of the same order as magnitude of those measured. In the presence of line misidentification, these shifts can be interpreted in terms of a variable α. In order to verify the gravitational redshift hypothesis, a direct access to Murphy et al. (2003a) data, or to a large amount of new high resolution data, is necessary.
Individual Dispositions, Resistance to Change and Organizational Empathy in the Hospitality Industry when Change Means Implementation of a New IS

Using a sample of employees in various hospitality organizations, we proposed that individual disposition such as tolerance for ambiguity, positve affectivity, internal locus of control, and self-efficacy, will influence hospitality employees’ resitance to change. The results supported hypotheses. Ultimately, we hope the results of this study provide propoer guidelines with hospitality managers and employees to decrease thiere resistance to change such as new IS implementation and thus increase their willingness to adopt in implementing new IS.
SUDOKU: Secure and usable deployment of keys on wireless sensors

Initial deployment of secrets plays a crucial role in any security design, but especially in hardware constrained wireless sensor networks. Many key management schemes assume either manually pre-installed shared secrets or keys authenticated with the aid of out-of-band channels. While manually installing secret keys affects the practicability of the key deployment, out-of-band channels require additional interfaces of already hardware-limited wireless sensor nodes. In this work, we present a key deployment protocol that uses pair-wise ephemeral keys generated from physical layer information which subsequently enables an authenticated exchange of public keys. Hence, this work presents an elegant solution to the key deployment problem without requiring more capabilities than already available on common low-cost devices. To justify the feasibility of this solution, we implement and experimentally evaluate the proposed key deployment protocol using commodity wireless sensor motes.
Towards Ontology-Based Program Analysis

Program analysis is fundamental for program optimizations, debugging, and many other tasks. But developing program analyses has been a challenging and error-prone process for general users. Declarative program analysis has shown the promise to dramatically improve the productivity in the development of program analyses. Current declarative program analysis is however subject to some major limitations in supporting cooperations among analysis tools, guiding program optimizations, and often requires much effort for repeated program preprocessing. In this work, we advocate the integration of ontology into declarative program analysis. As a way to standardize the definitions of concepts in a domain and the representation of the knowledge in the domain, ontology offers a promising way to address the limitations of current declarative program analysis. We develop a prototype framework named PATO for conducting program analysis upon ontology-based program representation. Experiments on six program analyses confirm the potential of ontology for complementing existing declarative program analysis. It supports multiple analyses without separate program preprocessing, promotes cooperative Liveness analysis between two compilers, and effectively guides a data placement optimization for Graphic Processing Units (GPU).
Integrable Discrete Geometry: the Quadrilateral Lattice, its Transformations and Reductions

We review recent results on Integrable Discrete Geometry. It turns out that most of the known (continuous and/or discrete) integrable systems are particular symmetries of the quadrilateral lattice, a multidimensional lattice characterized by the planarity of its elementary quadrilaterals. Therefore the linear property of planarity seems to be a basic geometric property underlying integrability. We present the geometric meaning of its tau-function, as the potential connecting its forward and backward data. We present the theory of transformations of the quadrilateral lattice, which is based on the discrete analogue of the theory of rectilinear congruences. In particular, we discuss the discrete analogues of the Laplace, Combescure, Levy, radial and fundamental transformations and their interrelations. We also show how the sequence of Laplace transformations of a quadrilateral surface is described by the discrete Toda system. We finally show that these classical transformations are strictly related to the basic operators associated with the quantum field theoretical formulation of the multicomponent Kadomtsev-Petviashvilii hierarchy. We review the properties of quadrilateral hyperplane lattices, which play an interesting role in the reduction theory, when the introduction of additional geometric structures allows to establish a connection between point and hyperplane lattices. We present and fully characterize some geometrically distinguished reductions of the quadrilateral lattice, like the symmetric, circular and Egorov lattices; we review also basic geometric results of the theory of quadrilateral lattices in quadrics, and the corresponding analogue of the Ribaucour reduction of the fundamental transformation.
Isolated Word Recognition Using Very Simple Recurrent Neural Network Plus and Noise Compensation LPC Analysis

In this paper, the isolated word recognition using very simple recurrent neural network plus (VSRN+) and noise compensation linear predictive coding (LPC) analysis is proposed. In the proposed system, a feature extraction based on noise compensation LPC analysis achieves accurate speech feature vector in noisy environment. Since VSRN+ is utilized as a recognizer, the proposed system is able to deal with complex time series data. Therefore, the proposed system yields accurate word recognition in noisy environment. From the investigation of performance evaluation, the proposed system improves word recognition rate in noisy environment.
C-band bidirectional amplifier with switchable matching circuits

This paper presents a CMOS bidirectional amplifier for time division duplexing systems. By switching supply and ground voltages of a common gate amplifier, the bias current and amplification direction can be switched between forward and backward modes. Depending on the amplification direction, CMOS switches parallel with matching inductors perform switchable matching circuits. The source and drain voltages of CMOS switches are switched by the bias direction, and the CMOS switches can be automatically turned on and off with a fixed gate voltage. The measured peak gain is 9.8 dB at 7.4 GHz with input and output return losses lower than -6.4 dB. The measured output 1-dB power compression point and average noise figure are 4.2 dBm and 7.7 dB including probe loss, respectively. The designed circuit and layout are directional input-output symmetric, and therefore the amplification characteristics of the forward and backward modes are identical. The measured insertion phase difference between forward and backward modes is <;6°. The chip measures 470×544 μm2 without pads.
Enhanced Correlation Power Analysis Using Key Screening Technique

An enhanced CPA (correlation power analysis) attack which screens key candidates using correlation levels and ranking is proposed in this paper. An AES circuis is implemented on a Xilinxreg FPGA on SASEBO (side-channel attack standard evaluation board) specifically designed for side-channel attack experiments, and the proposed attack is performed and compared to the standard CPA. As a result, the key screening technique successfully reduces the calculation time for handing 5,000 power traces by 26%. In addition to the accelerated computation, the accuracy of the key estimation is also improved.
Unified framework for representation, analysis of multimedia content for correlation and prediction

Varieties of multimedia data are being captured, stored and shared at an unprecedented scale. The technology that helps people search, use and express themselves with such media is lagging behind. The variety of media types from multiple sources is an essential feature of modern multimedia content. Effective integration of multimedia data is a challenging problem. The overall objective of this study is to show that the common representation strategy should be capable of taking full advantage of information collected from multiple sources and combine the descriptions of data in a unified framework for various tasks to be performed for analysing the multimedia content. This paper aims at proposing a framework to deal with variety and integration of Multimedia data in a generic form to express as input for video processing systems and get a desired optimal correlation and prediction of multimedia data.
Use of Quantitative Membrane Proteomics Identifies a Novel Role of Mitochondria in Healing Injured Muscles*

Background: Cellular processes involved in healing injured skeletal muscle fibers are poorly understood. Results: Using an improved quantitative membrane proteomics approach for cells and tissues, we have identified accumulation of mitochondria at the site of sarcolemma injury as a key requirement for myofiber healing. Conclusion: Mitochondria are the earliest responders to myofiber injury. Significance: This work identifies a novel function of mitochondria in muscle injury. Skeletal muscles are proficient at healing from a variety of injuries. Healing occurs in two phases, early and late phase. Early phase involves healing the injured sarcolemma and restricting the spread of damage to the injured myofiber. Late phase of healing occurs a few days postinjury and involves interaction of injured myofibers with regenerative and inflammatory cells. Of the two phases, cellular and molecular processes involved in the early phase of healing are poorly understood. We have implemented an improved sarcolemmal proteomics approach together with in vivo labeling of proteins with modified amino acids in mice to study acute changes in the sarcolemmal proteome in early phase of myofiber injury. We find that a notable early phase response to muscle injury is an increased association of mitochondria with the injured sarcolemma. Real-time imaging of live myofibers during injury demonstrated that the increased association of mitochondria with the injured sarcolemma involves translocation of mitochondria to the site of injury, a response that is lacking in cultured myoblasts. Inhibiting mitochondrial function at the time of injury inhibited healing of the injured myofibers. This identifies a novel role of mitochondria in the early phase of healing injured myofibers.
Staggered striping in multimedia information systems

Multimedia information systems have emerged as an essential component of many application domains ranging from library information systems to entertainment technology. However, most implementations of these systems cannot support the continuous display of multimedia objects and suffer from frequent disruptions and delays termed hiccups. This is due to the low I/O bandwidth of the current disk technology, the high bandwidth requirement of multimedia objects, and the large size of these objects that almost always requires them to be disk resident. One approach to resolve this limitation is to decluster a multimedia object across multiple disk drives in order to employ the aggregate bandwidth of several disks to support the continuous retrieval (and display) of objects. This paper describes staggered striping as a novel technique to provide effective support for multiple users accessing the different objects in the database. Detailed simulations confirm the superiority of staggered striping.
Optimal scheduling of service requirements with a DHR tail in the M/G/1 queue

We consider the mean delay optimization in the M/G/1 queue for service time distributions that have a tail with decresing hazard rate (DHR). If the DHR property is valid for the whole distribution, then it is known that the Foreground-Background (FB) discipline, which gives full priority to the job with least amount of attained service, is optimal among nonanticipating scheduling disciplines. However, FB may fail to be optimal if the DHR property is valid only for the tail of the distribution. An important example is the Pareto distribution bounded away from zero. In this paper we show that for a wide class of service time distributions with a DHR tail (including the Pareto distribution), the optimal nonanticipating discipline is a combination of FCFS and FB disciplines, which gives full priority to the jobs with attained service less than some fixed threshold $\theta^*$. These priority jobs are served in the FCFS manner. If there are no jobs with attained service less than $\theta^*$, the full priority is given to the job with least amount of attained service.
REGISTRATION OF NASOPHARYNGOSCOPIC VIDEO WITH TREATMENT PLANNING CT SCANS

Purpose: We present a method that allows one to generate data from nasopharyngoscopy videos into a form suitable for use in radiation treatment planning, as well as for review of the data itself as a 3D object. Methods and Materials: The accurate transfer of data from endoscopic video frames to the planning CT requires an explicit endoscopic video/CT registration. Our approach to accomplishing this goal is to first reconstruct an accurate 3D model of the anatomy from the 2D video data as seen on multiple video frames. That reconstruction, which we call an endoscopogram, can then be deformably registered to the CT scan. To generate the endoscopogram we first compute a sparse 3D point cloud by tracking corresponding feature points from one video frame to another using standard structure-from-motion (SfM) techniques adapted to the pharyngeal region. We then use a second technology, shape-from-shading (SFS), to produce highquality images from each video frame. Uncorrected, these SFS images contain dense information and in many places accurate local curvature, but they lack global spatial fidelity. Using our newly developed techniques, we can correct the SFS images using global information from the sparse SFS-generated point cloud as a constraint. We then register several of these corrected SFS images to each other to generate a 3D image that displays the entire surface area seen in the whole video. Results: We have successfully computed a spatially accurate endoscopogram (shown below) and have registered it with the planning CT scan with an average accuracy of about 3-5 mms. Conclusions: The technologies developed by our working group will allow accurate transfer of data from endoscopy images directly onto the planning CT scan as well as review of the video as a 3D object.
Low-skilled Migration: Immigrant Workers in European Domestic Care

Over the last 15 years, since the entry into force of the Amsterdam Treaty, migration policies in the European Union have principally focused on security-related issues of migration, such as border management, visa policy and readmission agreements. The European Commission’s directives have concentrated on the entry and residence of specific groups: students, researchers and high-skilled migrants.1 In addition, EU member states have followed a selective and sectoral approach in the admission of immigrants, and a growing number of countries have been adopting points-based systems. In several EU member countries, however, the unprecedented increase of immigrant labour happened rather in low-skilled occupations. The domestic care sector has attracted a particularly high share of migrants and in some countries massive immigration of low-skilled2 female workers has continued since the onset of the global financial crisis.3