Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Software Watermarking using Return-Oriented Programming

We propose a novel dynamic software watermarking design based on Return-Oriented Programming (ROP). Our design formats watermarking code into well-crafted data arrangements that look like normal data but could be triggered to execute. Once triggered, the pre-constructed ROP execution will recover the hidden watermark message. The proposed ROP-based watermarking technique is more stealthy and resilient over existing techniques since the watermarking code is allocated dynamically into data region and therefore out of reach of attacks based on code analysis. Evaluations show that our design not only achieves satisfying stealth and resilience, but also causes significantly lower overhead to the watermarked program.
STASTISTICAL INVERSE PROBLEMS FOR NON-GAUSSIAN NON-STATIONARY STOCHASTIC PROCESSES DEFINED BY A SET OF REALIZATIONS ( UNCECOMP 2015 )

This paper presents a method to analyze the transitory response of complex and nonlinear systems, which are excited by non-Gaussian and non-stationary random fields, by solving of a statistical inverse problem with experimental measurements. Based on a double expansion, it is particularly adapted to the modeling of stochastic processes that are only characterized by a relatively small set of independent realizations. First, an adaptation of the classical KarhunenLoève expansion is presented. Indeed, for the past fifty years, the use of reduced basis has spread to many scientific fields to condense the statistical properties of stochastic processes, and among these bases, the Karhunen-Loève basis plays a major role as it allows the minimization of the total mean square error. Secondly, the random vector, which gathers the projection coefficients of the stochastic process on this basis, is characterized using a polynomial chaos expansion approach. The dimension of this random vector being very high (around several hundreds), advanced identification techniques are introduced to allow performing relevant convergence analyses and identifications. The non-Gaussian non-stationary stochastic process is identified using the experimental measurements and consequently, constitutes a realistic stochastic modeling. The proposed method is then applied to the modeling of seismic accelerations from a measured data set.
The motion control of a statically stable biped robot on an uneven floor

This work studies the motion control of a statically stable biped robot having seven degrees of freedom. Statically stable walking of the biped robot is realized by maintaining the center-of-gravity inside the convex region of the supporting foot and/or feet during both single-support and double-support phases. The main points of this work are framing the stability in an easy and correct way, the design of a bipedal statically stable walker, and walking on sloping surfaces and stairs.
Physical activity intensities in youth: the effect of month of assessment

Abstract Background: There is clear evidence that environmental factors play an important role regarding physical activity (PA) and sedentary behaviour (SB) in youth. This short report highlights seasonal differences in the amount and intensities of PA and SB, in Portuguese youth. Methods: Three hundred and eighty-seven participants (aged 14.7 ± 1.9 years), 220 girls, used the Actigraph GT1M accelerometer for 7 days (15-second epochs), between January and June in 2008. PA and SB differences were assessed using an ANCOVA. Results: Boys had significantly higher values of PA, with the exception of Light intensity. Girls were significantly more sedentary. PA intensities and SB changed significantly according to gender and month of assessment. SB (Gender F = 16.32, p < 0.001; Month F = 2.95, p < 0.013), Light PA (Gender F = 9.30, p = 0.002; Month F = 8.37, p < 0.001; Gender*Month F = 2.24, p = 0.050), Moderate PA (Gender F = 40.04, p < 0.001), Vigorous PA (Gender F = 32.89, p < 0.001; Month F = 2.56, p = 0.027). Both genders increased PA from winter to summer months and SB decreased. Conclusions: Seasonality in PA intensities and SB suggest that interventions to promote PA and decrease SB must be tailored to take into consideration the month of the year they are going to be implemented and also gender characteristics.
The Drawbacks of Electoral Competition

We examine the effect of the number of candidates and the impact of ideology on the efficiency of the electoral process. We show that the tendency to focus on policies that provide particularistic benefits increases with the number of candidates to the expense of policies that benefit the population at large. Thus, the efficiency of policies provided in an electoral equilibrium worsens when the number of candidates increases. We next show that partisan voters are disadvantaged in the process of redistributive politics, and that the larger the fraction of voters who vote ideologically, the less efficient the political process. This is because electoral competition focuses on swing voters, increasing the values of policies with targetable benefits.
A perspective for viewing the present of psychophysics

the stimulus "looks"), and objective instructions (which ask subjects to take into account distance to determine the objective size of the stimulus as measured by a ruler). The different psychophysical functions arise because the instructions induce subjects to look at their subjective experience in different ways. These different perspectives each give a slightly different meaning to the word "size. " Similarly, the different psychophysical methods subtly ask subjects to look at their subjective experience in ways that give slightly different meanings to the word "magnitude. " Some instructions ask subjects either explicitly or implicitly to preserve differences, and subjects dutifully construct a scale, a way of looking at their experience, which more or less preserves differences. Some instructions ask subjects to preserve ratios, and subjects dutifully construct a scale, a way of looking at their experience, which more or less preserves ratios. Undoubtedly, subjects are cognitively flexible enough to produce other psychophysical functions if an experimenter cleverly presents the right instructions.
Prediction of STN-DBS Electrode Implantation Track in Parkinson's Disease by Using Local Field Potentials

Optimal electrophysiological placement of the DBS electrode may lead to better long term clinical outcomes. Inter-subject anatomical variability and limitations in stereotaxic neuroimaging increase the complexity of physiological mapping performed in the operating room. Microelectrode single unit neuronal recording remains the most common intraoperative mapping technique, but requires significant expertise and is fraught by potential technical difficulties including robust measurement of the signal. In contrast, local field potentials (LFPs), owing to their oscillatory and robust nature and being more correlated with the disease symptoms, can overcome these technical issues. Therefore, we hypothesized that multiple spectral features extracted from microelectrode-recorded LFPs could be used to automate the identification of the optimal track and the STN localization. In this regard, we recorded LFPs from microelectrodes in three tracks from 22 patients during DBS electrode implantation surgery at different depths and aimed to predict the track selected by the neurosurgeon based on the interpretation of single unit recordings. A least mean square (LMS) algorithm was used to de-correlate LFPs in each track, in order to remove common activity between channels and increase their spatial specificity. Subband power in the beta band (11–32 Hz) and high frequency range (200–450 Hz) were extracted from the de-correlated LFP data and used as features. A linear discriminant analysis (LDA) method was applied both for the localization of the dorsal border of STN and the prediction of the optimal track. By fusing the information from these low and high frequency bands, the dorsal border of STN was localized with a root mean square (RMS) error of 1.22 mm. The prediction accuracy for the optimal track was 80%. Individual beta band (11–32 Hz) and the range of high frequency oscillations (200–450 Hz) provided prediction accuracies of 72 and 68% respectively. The best prediction result obtained with monopolar LFP data was 68%. These results establish the initial evidence that LFPs can be strategically fused with computational intelligence in the operating room for STN localization and the selection of the track for chronic DBS electrode implantation.
Fast and Accurate Shift-Reduce Constituent Parsing

Shift-reduce dependency parsers give comparable accuracies to their chartbased counterparts, yet the best shiftreduce constituent parsers still lag behind the state-of-the-art. One important reason is the existence of unary nodes in phrase structure trees, which leads to different numbers of shift-reduce actions between different outputs for the same input. This turns out to have a large empirical impact on the framework of global training and beam search. We propose a simple yet effective extension to the shift-reduce process, which eliminates size differences between action sequences in beam-search. Our parser gives comparable accuracies to the state-of-the-art chart parsers. With linear run-time complexity, our parser is over an order of magnitude faster than the fastest chart parser.
Simulating the Potential Savings of Implicit Energy Management on a City Scale

According to statistics and future prospects in the next few years world-wide energy consumption will increase significantly. Therefore not only more energy efficient technologies but also more extensive energy saving concepts have to be realized. We have developed an rdquoimplicit interactionrdquo based power saving concept, which automatically schedules and controls energy consumers depending on the recognized activities of users. Moreover, dynamically schedulable power consumption loads are shifted in time, so as to make use of the cheapest energy prices without compromising user comfort. In order to calculate the potential savings of this concept we have implemented a simulation framework executing energy consumption models on a city scale, which allows for more complex scenarios than being restricted to some devices or buildings only. Both the framework architecture as well as large scale energy consumption simulations are presented. Simulation experiments give strong evidence for our implicit energy management concept as a promising source of energy savings.
The Relationship between Mindfulness and Resiliency among Active Duty Service Members and Military Veterans

Soldier resilience is of paramount importance to the U.S. Military. Mindfulness and Resilience are positively correlated to one another in research focused on civilian populations. Since mindfulness can be learned, if the correlations remain consistent over time, then perhaps resilience can be increased by learning to be mindful. However, no published research has investigated the relationship between mindfulness and resilience among military active duty and veteran populations who have not undergone mindfulness training. Thirty active duty and veteran service members volunteered and completed the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) and the Resilience Scale, while 29 fully completed the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ). Results reveal significant correlations between resilience scores and three of the FFMQ scale (Describe, Conscious Action, and Non-Reactive, p < .05), but not with the overall FFMQ, the other two facets (Observe and Non-Discrimination of the FFMQ), and not with the MAAS (p > .05). These results provide initial information on the relationship between mindfulness and resilience among active duty military and veterans, revealing that only some aspects of mindfulness appear related to, and predictive of, resilience. Should the relationships be consistent over time, then instruction in mindfulness may ultimately impact resilience, however additional research is necessary.
Survival in patients treated by long-term dialysis compared with the general population.

BACKGROUND Relative survival, a methodology previously used in epidemiologic studies of cancer, compares the observed survival of a patient cohort with expected survival derived from general population life tables. We examined relative survival in patients treated by long-term dialysis in the Italian Dialysis and Transplantation Registry in order to determine the prognosis of dialysis patients. STUDY DESIGN Cohort study drawn from a registry. SETTING & PARTICIPANTS Patients enrolled in the Italian Dialysis and Transplantation Registry. FACTORS Sex, age, primary kidney disease, renal replacement therapy modality, and main comorbid conditions. OUTCOMES Death from any cause. MEASUREMENTS Relative survival ratio (the ratio of observed survival in the population of interest to the survival expected given the age- and period-specific mortality of the general population) and excess mortality rate (difference between observed and expected mortality rates). RESULTS In January 2000 to December 2008, a total of 27,642 patients were included. The 5-year relative survival estimate was 55.6% (95% CI, 54.7%-56.5%). The excess mortality rate showed a peak at 3 months (21 deaths/100 patient-years), then decreased, becoming constant from the end of year 1 to year 8, with leveling off at about 10 deaths/100 patient-years. Older age, systemic diseases, and diabetes showed the strongest association with excess mortality. Peritoneal dialysis was associated with a lower relative excess risk in only the first year of treatment. LIMITATIONS The patient cohort comprises about half the Italian patients beginning dialysis therapy in the period. CONCLUSIONS This study highlights the applicability of relative survival methods in dialysis patients. This measure allows estimation of disease prognosis and severity comparisons among chronic diseases. The excess mortality rate appears to be a more sensitive and informative measure than the simple proportion of survivors.
Evaluation of the stage IB designation of the American Joint Committee on Cancer staging system in breast cancer.

PURPOSE The seventh edition of the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) staging system for breast cancer differentiates patients with T1 tumors and lymph node micrometastases (stage IB) from patients with T1 tumors and negative nodes (stage IA). This study was undertaken to determine the utility of the stage IB designation. PATIENTS AND METHODS The following two cohorts of patients with breast cancer were identified: 3,474 patients treated at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center from 1993 to 2007 and 4,590 patients from the American College of Surgeons Oncology Group (ACOSOG) Z0010 trial. Clinicopathologic and outcomes data were recorded, and disease was staged according to the seventh edition AJCC staging system. Recurrence-free survival (RFS), disease-specific survival (DSS), and overall survival (OS) were determined using the Kaplan-Meier method and compared using the log-rank test. RESULTS Median follow-up times were 6.1 years and 9.0 years for the MD Anderson Cancer Center and ACOSOG cohorts, respectively. In both cohorts, there were no significant differences between patients with stage IA and stage IB disease in 5- or 10-year RFS, DSS, or OS. Estrogen receptor (ER) status and grade significantly stratified patients with stage I disease with respect to RFS, DSS, and OS. CONCLUSION Among patients with T1 breast cancer, individuals with micrometastases and those with negative nodes have similar survival outcomes. ER status and grade are better discriminants of survival than the presence of small-volume nodal metastases. In preparing the next edition of the AJCC staging system, consideration should be given to eliminating the stage IB designation and incorporating biologic factors.
Rate-distortion hint tracks for adaptive video streaming

We present a technique for low-complexity rate-distortion (R-D) optimized adaptive video streaming based on the concept of rate-distortion hint track (RDHT). RDHTs store the precomputed characteristics of a compressed media source that are crucial for high performance online streaming but difficult to compute in real time. This enables low-complexity adaptation to variations in transport conditions such as available data rate or packet loss. An RDHT-based streaming system has three components: 1) information that summarizes the R-D attributes of the media; 2) an algorithm for using the RDHT to predict the distortion for a feasible packet schedule; and 3) a method for determining the best packet schedule to adapt the streaming to the communication channel. A family of distortion models, denoted distortion chains, are presented which accurately predict the distortion produced by arbitrary packet loss patterns. Two distortion chain models are examined which lead to two RDHT-based techniques. We evaluate the proposed techniques for two canonical problems in streaming media, adaptation to available data rate and to packet loss. Experimental results demonstrate that for the difficult case of nonscalably coded H.264 video, the proposed systems provide significant performance gains over conventional low-complexity streaming systems, and achieve this gain with a comparable level of complexity making them suitable for online R-D optimized streaming.
Testing Statistical Significance Testing: Some Observations of an Agnostic

I read the article by Hubbard and Ryan (2000 [this issue]) with interest. The article adds one more criticism of statistical significance testing to a large body of literature with a long history. As the editor of a major journal in marketing and reviewer of papers in marketing, psychology, statistics, and other disciplines for more than 20 years, I am acutely aware of the abuses of statistical significance testing. In addition to the very substantial literature on statistical significance testing found in statistics and psychology, my own primary discipline, marketing, has also addressed the role of significance testing (cf. Fern & Monroe, 1996; Sawyer & Ball, 1981; Sawyer & Peter, 1983). Statistical significance testing is an easy target for criticism; it provides rather limited information and is often misused and misinterpreted. Blind use of tests of statistical significance is more likely to mislead rather than enlighten. The recent call for greater information about statistical methods (Wilkinson & the Task Force on Statistical Inference, 1999) is a welcome development. Although statistical significance testing has limitations, I suggest that it is useful and the alternatives are not superior. Indeed, the alternatives have their own problems. Criticism should not be guilty of the same problems it attributes to the object of the criticism. The test of whether statistical significant testing has a role to play in empirical research must be viewed in the context of the available alternatives. Marketing may be more pragmatic in its view of the use of statistical significance testing than some other disciplines. I suspect
Heuristic Analysis Model of Nitrided Layers’ Formation Consisting of the Image Processing and Analysis and Elements of Artificial Intelligence

The article presents a selected area of research and development concerning the methods of material analysis based on the automatic image recognition of the investigated metallographic sections. The objectives of the analyses of the materials for gas nitriding technology are described. The methods of the preparation of nitrided layers, the steps of the process and the construction and operation of devices for gas nitriding are given. We discuss the possibility of using the methods of digital images processing in the analysis of the materials, as well as their essential task groups: improving the quality of the images, segmentation, morphological transformations and image recognition. The developed analysis model of the nitrided layers formation, covering image processing and analysis techniques, as well as selected methods of artificial intelligence are presented. The model is divided into stages, which are formalized in order to better reproduce their actions. The validation of the presented method is performed. The advantages and limitations of the developed solution, as well as the possibilities of its practical use, are listed.
REPERTÓRIOS DISCURSIVOS CONTEMPORÂNEOS SOBRE AS DESIGUALDADES RACIAIS NO BRASIL. UM ESTUDO COM ESTUDANTES PARAIBANOS DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO

Esta pesquisa avaliou discursos de mestrandos sobre a natureza das diferencas raciais, suas consequencias sociais e os fatores psicossociais a que estao relacionados em um estudo exploratorio, de natureza quali-quantitativa, com 19 alunos do mestrado em Psicologia e 15 do de Direito Economico. Verificou-se que os discursos analisados organizaram-se em tres classes: diferencas existem e sao geneticas; diferencas nao existem; processos de exclusao usam tracos fenotipicos como criterio de diferenciacao. Constatou-se que o primeiro condena as reivindicacoes do movimento negro e e contrario as quotas e a sua autonomia politica e cultural; o segundo, mais frequente em estudantes politizados, e favoravel a essas reivindicacoes; o ultimo agrega respostas negativas, positivas e interrogativas em relacao aos aspectos mencionados. Os resultados evidenciam repertorios discursivos que negam ou naturalizam as desigualdades raciais: tanto expressam posicoes adversas as reivindicacoes dos negros quanto as justificam, racionalizando como nao preconceituosas posicoes que o sao.
Education policy racialisations: Afrocentric schools, Islamic schools, and the new enunciations of equity

This paper draws on ideas of assemblage to examine the contingency and (in)coherence of education policy. The paper is a conceptual and thematic attempt to understand the policy terrain, broadly conceived, pertaining to opposition to the establishment of private Islamic schools in Australia and public Afrocentric schools in Canada. This opposition is located within complex policy terrains relating to multiculturalism, whiteness and race/racism. The paper focuses on the complex racialised politics surrounding education policy initiatives that support marketisation and choice in private and public K-12 schooling – with an interest in what forms of choice are legitimated in and by a racialised education market. The paper concludes that opposition to Islamic and Afrocentric schooling highlights the ambiguity of equity, and the fragility of identity in racialised education policy environments.
Bus route evaluation using a two-stage hybrid model of fuzzy AHP and TOPSIS

Usuarios de transporte publico estao constantemente em busca de regularidade do servico, preco justo, seguranca e conforto fisico e psicologico. Criar um sistema de avaliacao de linhas de onibus pode ser considerado dentre os requisitos basicos para a gestao de transporte publico nas cidades. A necessidade de uma ferramenta logica e cientifica para apoiar as decisoes tomadas pelos formuladores de politicas de transporte publico com o objetivo de uma maior qualidade dos servicos, especificamente em uma area metropolitana em desenvolvimento como Shiraz, Ira, comprova a importância de tal sistema. Neste estudo, primeiramente, seis rotas entre as 71 linhas de onibus da regiao metropolitana de Shiraz foram escolhidos. Posteriormente, 16 criterios com base na literatura teorica e os dados coletados em uma pesquisa realizada pela Organizacao de onibus Publicos de Shiraz (SPBO) foram produzidos. Em seguida, usando um modelo de dois estagios multi-criterio de tomada de decisao (MCDM) contendo um Processo Hierarquico Analitico Difuso (Fuzzy AHP) e metodos TOPSIS, os dados foram analisados e a situacao atual das linhas de onibus selecionadas foi avaliada. Este estudo e o arcabouco de avaliacao apresentado para a analise da situacao atual, juntamente com a comparacao das linhas de onibus, podem ajudar os gestores e formuladores de politicas de transporte de onibus em iniciativas para a melhoria dos servicos, o desenvolvimento, fusao e criacao de novas linhas.