Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards verifiable parallel content retrieval

Many software vendors are providing mechanisms for parallel content retrieval using multiple connections, e.g., parallel HTTP channels, to increase the availability and reliability of the download procedure. At the same time, there is no native verification mechanism to support simultaneous content verification from multiple sources. While it is possible to set-up multiple TLS tunnels with different sources, there is no guarantee that the data itself is authentic since the trust is placed on the connection and not in the data itself. In this paper we present a parallel verification mechanism based on hash trees, allowing clients to authenticate data segments regardless of the container from where they were retrieved from, but just with the original provider. Some benefits of the proposed mechanism include low CPU processing costs, low verification overhead and possibility to support legacy data.
A real-time variable sampling technique: DIEM

We describe a sampling technique particularly suitable for active vision, dimensionally-independent exponential mapping (DIEM), in which each dimension of the original data is sampled in an exponentially increasing or decreasing series of steps, with bilateral symmetry about the data mid-point. Multidimensional data sampling is achieved by combining single dimension sampling coordinates. DIEM is simple, fast, flexible and very useful for active vision, but may also have applications in other domains possibly of higher dimensionality. Its most unusual feature, invertibility, is also one of its most useful features. The many advantages of DIEM are described. We also describe the functional characteristics of DIEM, provide formulae for DIEM specification and verification, and refer to how DIEM may best be exploited, giving our own work in visual robotics as an example.
The real-time reprojection cache

We describe a simple and inexpensive method that uses stock graphics hardware to cache and track surface information through time. Cached information is stored in frame-buffers, thereby avoiding complex data-structures and bus traffic. When a new frame is rendered, an efficient reprojection method gives each new pixel access to information computed during previous frames.This idea can be used to adapt a variety of real-time rendering techniques to efficiently exploit spatio-temporal coherence. When applications are pixel bound, the cached algorithms show significant cost and/or quality improvements over their plain counterparts, at virtually no extra implementation overhead.
Mutually Aware Prefetcher and On-Chip Network Designs for Multi-Cores

Hardware prefetching has become an essential technique in high performance processors to hide long external memory latencies. In multi-core architectures with cores communicating through a shared on-chip network, traffic generated by the prefetchers can account for up to 60% of the total on-chip network traffic. However, the distinct characteristics of prefetch traffic have not been considered in on-chip network design. In addition, prefetchers have been oblivious to the network congestion. In this work, we investigate the interactions between prefetchers and on-chip networks, exploiting the synergy of these two components in multi-cores. Firstly, we explore the design space of prefetch-aware on-chip networks. Considering the difference between prefetch and non-prefetch packets, we propose a priority-based router design, which selects non-prefetch packets first over prefetch packets. Secondly, we investigate network-aware prefetcher designs. We propose a prefetch control mechanism sensitive to network congestion-throttling prefetch requests based on the current network congestion. Our evaluation with full system simulations shows that the combination of the proposed prefetch-aware router and congestion-sensitive prefetch control improves the performance of benchmark applications by 11-12% with out-of-order cores, and 21-22% with SMT cores on average, up to 37% on some of the workloads.
System Call Redirection: A Practical Approach to Meeting Real-World Virtual Machine Introspection Needs

Existing VMI techniques have high overhead, and require customized introspection programs/tools for different guest OS versions - lack of generality. In this paper, we present Shadow Context, a system for close-to-real time manual-effort-free VMI. Shadow Context can meet several important real-world VMI needs which existing VMI techniques cannot. Compared to other automatic introspection tool generation techniques, Shadow Contexthas two merits: (1) Its overhead is significantly less. It achieves close-to-real time VMI. (2) It significantly improves the practical usefulness of introspection tools by allowing one introspection program to inspect a variety of guest OS versions. These merits are achieved via a new concept called "Shadow Context" which allows the guest OSessystem call code to be reused inside a "shadowed" portion of the context of the out-of-guest inspection program. Besides, Shadow Context is secure enough to defend against a variety of real world attacks. Shadow Context is designed, implemented and systematically evaluated. Experimental results show that the performance overhead is about 75%with a median initialization time of 0.117 milliseconds.
A Mobility-Prediction-Based Relay Deployment Framework for Conserving Power in MANETs

There has been a growing interest in designing mobile systems consisting of special relay nodes whose mobility can be controlled by the underlying network. In this paper, we consider the design of a heterogeneous mobile ad hoc network (MANET) consisting of two kinds of mobile nodes-traditional nodes with limited energy and a few controllable mobile relay nodes with relatively abundant energy resources. We propose a novel relay deployment framework that utilizes mobility prediction and works in tandem with the underlying MANET routing protocol to optimally define the movement of the relay nodes. We present two instances of the relay deployment problem, together with the solutions, to achieve different goals. Instance 1, termed Min-Total, aims to minimize the total energy consumed across all the traditional nodes during data transmission, while instance 2, termed Min-Max, aims to minimize the maximum energy consumed by a traditional node during data transmission. Our solutions also enable the prioritization of individual nodes in the network based on residual energy profiles and contextual significance. We perform an extensive simulation study to understand the trade-offs involved in deploying an increasing fraction of such relay nodes in the network. We also investigate the performance of the proposed framework under different mobility prediction schemes. Results indicate that even when the relay nodes constitute a small fraction of the total nodes in the network, the proposed framework results in significant energy savings. Further, we observed that while both the schemes have their potential advantages, the differences between the two optimization schemes are clearly highlighted in a sparse network.
Brain-imaging during an isometric leg extension task at graded intensities

Imaging the brain during complex and intensive movements is challenging due to the susceptibility of brain-imaging methods for motion and myogenic artifacts. A few studies measured brain activity during either single-joint or low-intensity exercises; however, the cortical activation state during larger movements with increases up to maximal intensity has barely been investigated so far. Eleven right-handed volunteers (22–45 years in age) performed isometric leg extensions with their right leg at 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100% of their maximal voluntary contraction. Contractions were hold for 20 s respectively. Electroencephalographic (EEG) and electromyographic (EMG) activity was recorded. Standardized low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA) was used to localize the cortical current density within the premotor (PMC), primary motor (M1), primary somatosensory (S1) and somatosensory association cortex (SAC). ANOVA was used for repeated measures for comparison of intensities and between the left and right hemispheres. The quality of the EEG signal was satisfying up to 80% intensity. At 100% half of the participants were not able to keep their neck and face muscles relaxed, leading to myogenic artifacts. Higher contralateral vs. ipsilateral hemispheric activity was found for the S1, SAC and, PMC. M1 possessed higher ipsilateral activity. The highest activity was localized in the M1, followed by S1, PMC, and SAC. EMG activity and cortical current density within the M1 increased with exercise intensity. EEG recordings during bigger movements up to submaximal intensity (80%) are possible, but maximal intensities are still hard to investigate when subjects contracted their neck and face muscles at the same time. Isometric contractions mainly involve the M1, whereas the S1, PMC, and SAC seem not to be involved in the force output. Limitations and recommendations for future studies are discussed.
Alignments of radio galaxies in deep radio imaging of ELAIS N1

We present a study of the distribution of radio jet position angles of radio galaxies over an area of 1 square degree in the ELAIS N1 field. ELAIS N1 was observed with the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope at 612 MHz to an rms noise level of 10 $\mu$Jy and angular resolution of $6"\times 5"$. The image contains 65 resolved radio galaxy jets. The spatial distribution reveals a prominent alignment of jet position angles along a "filament" of about 1$^{\circ}$. We examine the possibility that the apparent alignment arises from an underlying random distribution and find that the probability of chance alignment is less than 0.1%. An angular covariance analysis of the data indicates the presence of spatially coherence in position angles on scales $>0.5^{\circ}$. This angular scales translates to a co-moving scale of $>20h^{-1}$Mpc at a redshift of 1. The implied alignment of the spin axes of massive black holes that give rise the radio jets suggest the presence of large-scale spatial coherence in angular momentum. Our results reinforce prior evidence for large-scale spatial alignments of quasar optical polarisation position angles.
Gaze shifts as dynamical random sampling

We discuss how gaze behavior of an observer can be simulated as a Monte Carlo sampling of a distribution obtained from the saliency map of the observed image. To such end we propose the Levy Hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm, a dynamic Monte Carlo method in which the walk on the distribution landscape is modelled through Levy flights. Some preliminary results are presented comparing with data gathered by eye-tracking human observers involved in an emotion recognition task from facial expression displays.
Neurotoxic Manifestations of an Overdose Intrathecal Injection of Gadopentetate Dimeglumine

The intravenous administration of gadopentetate dimeglumine (GD) is relatively safe and rarely causes systemic toxicity in the course of routine imaging studies. However, the general safety of intrathecal GD has not been established. We report a very rare case of an overdose intrathecal GD injection presenting with neurotoxic manifestations, including a decreased level of consciousness, global aphasia, rigidity, and visual disturbance.
A study by polarization techniques of the corrosion rates of aluminum and steel underground for sixteen months.

ONE ALUMINUM AND ONE STEEL SPECIMEN WERE EXPOSED UNDERGROUND FOR 16 MONTHS IN ORDER TO MAKE A RUNNING SURVEY OF THEIR CORROSION RATES AS INFLUENCED BY WEATHER AND TIME. CATHODIC AND ANODIC DATA WERE OBTAINED PERIODICALLY AS A BASIS FOR CALCULATING RATES OF CORROSION. AUTOMATIC POLARIZING AND RECORDING EQUIPMENT, HOUSED INDOORS, WAS USED FOR MAKING THE MEASUREMENTS. THE METHOD IS ADAPTABLE FOR FIELD USE IN MAKING CORROSION RATE OR SOIL CORROSIVITY STUDIES WHERE COMMERCIAL POWER SOURCES ARE NOT AVAILABLE. /AUTHOR/
Background Readings for Collection Synthesis

Automatic collection building will be key to efficient and affordable digital libraries of the future [13]. Many of these resources will be found on the Web. Since hand-curated collections will not scale with the Web, effective automated techniques for collecting resources from the Web are highly desired. This section deals with crawling the Web to extract topics, related documents, or collections. To do that, technologies such as feature extraction, page categorization, and Web crawling are needed. This section covers these technologies. See also the section below on “Knowledge Extraction and Organization”, which also has to do with finding information on the Web. These techniques are being applied in a collection building project for the National Science Digital Library[97, 134, 149]. The issue of generating metadata to describe these collections is at the moment a to-be-done research topic, but there are some good ideas in [110].
Logic SER reduction through flip flop redesign

In this paper, we present a new flip flop sizing scheme that efficiently immunizes combinational logic circuits from the effects of radiation induced single event transients (SET). The proposed technique leverages the effect of temporal masking by selectively increasing the length of the latching windows associated with the flip flops thereby preventing faulty transients from being registered. We propose an effective flip flop sizing scheme and construct a variety of flip flop variants that function as low-pass filters for SETs and reduce the soft error rates (SER) of combinational circuits. In contrast to previously proposed flip flop designs that rely on logic duplication and complicated circuit design styles, our method provides a simple yet highly effective mechanism for logic SER reduction while incurring very small overheads in both delay (about 5 FO4) and power (about 5%). Experimental results at the circuit level on a wide range of benchmarks show 1000times reductions in SER for small increases in circuit delay and power
NASA interdisciplinary collaboration in tribology. A review of oxidational wear

An in-depth review of oxidational wear of metals is presented. Special emphasis is given to a description of the concept of oxidational wear and the formulation of an Oxidational Wear Theory. The parallelism between the formation of an oxide film for dry contact conditions and the formation of other surface films for a lubricated contact is discussed. The description of oxidational wear is prefaced with a unification of wear modes into two major classes of mild and severe wear including both lubricated and dry contacts. Oxidational wear of metals is a class of mild wear where protective oxide films are formed at real areas of contact and during the time of contact at temperataure T sub c. When the oxide reaches a critical thickness, frequently in the range of 1 to 3 microns, the oxide breaks up and eventually appears as a wear particle. These oxides are preferentially formed on plateaux which alternately carry the load as they reach their critical thickness and are removed. If the system is operated at elevated temperatures, thick oxides can form both out of contact and between the plateaux. Temperature is important in determining the structure of the oxide film present. Spinel oxide (Fe3O4) which forms above 300 C is more protective than the lower temperature rhomobohedral (alpha-Fe2O3) oxide which is abrasive. An Oxidational Wear Theory is derived using a modified Archard wear law expressed in terms of activation energy (Qp) and Arrhenius constant (Ap).
Influence of the Degree of Crystallinity on the Mechanical and Tribological Properties of High-Performance Thermoplastics Over a Wide Range of Temperatures: From Room Temperature up to 250°C

The mechanical characteristics of block-shaped samples of a number of thermally stable thermoplastics for structural applications are investigated over a wide range of temperatures: from the room temperature (RT) up to 250°C. Together with several commercially available materials, namely, polyetheretherketone, polyphenylene sulfide, and a polyetherimide Ultem-1000; a number of polyimide thermoplastics designed at the Institute of Macromolecular Compounds RAS having both semicrystalline and amorphous structures were studied. The tribological behavior of these thermoplastics was investigated in the tribometers of different types using polymer–steel couples with the variation of both the temperature (from RT to 250°C) and the contact pressure. The experimental determination of the overheating values of the contact surface of the polymer sample was carried out during the friction process at different medium temperatures. The possibilities of obtaining a maximally broad temperature range for applications of thermoplastic polymeric material by regulating the degree of its structural ordering are analyzed.
Identification of a new hemidesmosomal protein, HD1: a major, high molecular mass component of isolated hemidesmosomes

Hemidesmosomes (HDs) mediate cell adhesion to the extracellular matrix and have morphological association with intermediate-sized filaments (IFs) through cytoplasmic plaques. Though several proteins have been located in HDs, most of them have not been well characterized, with the exception of the 230-kD antigen of bullous pemphigoid (BP), an autoimmune skin blistering disease. Only recently we have succeeded in isolating HDs from bovine corneal epithelial cells and in identifying five major components on SDS-PAGE (Owaribe K., Y. Nishizawa, and W. W. Franke. 1991. Exp. Cell Res. 192:622-630). In this study we report on immunological characterization of one of the major components, termed HD1, with an apparent molecular mass of 500 kD. Immunofluorescence microscopy showed colocalization of HD1 with BP antigen at the basement membrane zone of those tissues that have typical HDs, including skin epidermis, corneal and tracheal epithelia, and myoepithelium. In cultured keratinocytes, HD1 demonstrated colocalization with BP antigen in the precise way, while being absent from focal adhesions. Immunoelectron microscopy revealed that an epitope of HD1 was located on the cytoplasmic side of HDs. Taking all these results together, we conclude that HD1 is a new hemidesmosomal component. Interestingly, HD1 also exists in endothelial and glial cells, which lack typical HDs.
Evaluation of a Hybrid Method of User Location Anonymization

Recently, highly accurate positioning devices enable us to provide various types of location based services (LBS). Since location information may reveal private information, preserving location privacy has become a significant issue in LBS. Lots of different techniques for securing the location privacy have been proposed, for instance the concept of Silent period, the concept of Dummy node, and the concept of Cloaking-region. However, many of these researches have a problem that quality of the LBS (QoS) decreased when anonymity is improved, and anonymity falls down when QoS is improved. In this paper, we present a node density-based location anonymization scheme which can provide location privacy by utilizing hybrid concept of Dummy node and Cloaking-region. Simulation is conducted to evaluate our proposed method in the view point of the location error in LBS and the probability of tracking of a target node. Simulation results show that the probability of tracking of a target node by an adversary is reduced and the QoS of LBS is also improved.
A NEW TOP -K CONDITIONAL XML PREFERENCE QUERIES

Preference querying technology is a very important issue in a variety of applications ranging from ecommerce to personalized search engines. Most of recent research works have been dedicated to this topic in the Artificial Intelligence and Database fields. Several formalisms allowing preference reasoning and specification have been proposed in the Artificial Intelligence domain. On the other hand, in the Database field the interest has been focused mainly in extending standard Structured Query Language (SQL) and also eXtensible Markup Language (XML) with preference facilities in order to provide personalized query answering. More precisely, the interest in the database context focuses on the notion of Top-k preference query and on the development of efficient methods for evaluating these queries. A Top-k preference query returns k data tuples which are the most preferred according to the user’s preferences. Of course, Top-k preference query answering is closely dependent on the particular preference model underlying the semantics of the operators responsible for selecting the best tuples. In this paper, we consider the Conditional Preference queries (CP-queries) where preferences are specified by a set of rules expressed in a logical formalism. We introduce Top-k conditional preference queries (Top-k CP-queries), and the operators BestK-Match and Best-Match for evaluating these queries will be presented.
The CMS Auction: Experimental Studies of a Median-Bid Procurement Auction with Nonbinding Bids

We report on the experimental results of simple auctions with (i) a median-bid pricing rule and (ii) nonbinding bids (winning bids can be withdrawn)--the two central pillars of the competitive bidding program designed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Comparisons between the performance of the CMS auction and the performance of the excluded-bid auction reveal the problematic nature of the CMS auction. The CMS auction fails to generate competitive prices of goods and fails to satisfy demand. In all proposed efficiency measures, we find the excluded-bid auction significantly outperforms the CMS auction. Copyright 2012, Oxford University Press.
Computational modelling of energy absorption characteristics of epoxy/CNT nanocomposites

iii Declaration . v Acknowledgements . vii Notations and conventions . xiii Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1. Background . 1 1.2. Motivation . 4 1.3. Objective of the thesis . 7 1.4. Outline of the thesis . 8 Chapter 2: Literature review 2.1. Fundamentals of CNTs . 11 2.2. Processing of CNT/epoxy nanocomposites . 15 2.3. Mechanics of CNT/epoxy nanocomposites . 19 2.3. 1. Stiffness and strength . 23 2.3. 2. Interface aspects: Fracture and damping behaviour . 29 2.3. 3. Compressive finite strain and strain rate dependent behaviour . 35 2.4. Multiscale computational modelling of the mechanics of CNT/polymer nanocomposites . 39 2.4. 1. Discrete-to-continuum modelling of CNTs . 41 2.4. 1.1. Atomic bond-to-structural beam modelling of CNT bonds . 42 2.4. 1.2. Discrete-to-structural beam modelling of CNTs . 45
Predicting external rogue access point in IEEE 802.11 b/g WLAN using RF signal strength

With the widespread use of Wireless Local Area Network(WLAN)s Rogue Access Point(AP)s have become a severe security threat to the WLAN user. In a recent survey, Gartner reported that nearly 20% organizations have rogue access points inside their premises. WLANs have evolved with the rapid development of wireless technologies. Nowadays WLAN is present in almost everywhere from a school to a Multinational Company, a coffee shop to public transport. Their presence has become indispensable in any organization, as they are cost effective and easily deployable. Predicting rogue access points with proper accuracy and using low cost is a very challenging task. In this paper, we propose an external rogue access point prediction mechanism which uses radio frequency(RF) signal strength to predict a rogue access point. The prediction of rogue access points happens in two phases: Distance Calculation and Access Point Prediction. The first phase uses FSPL transmission model to calculate the distances of various APs from the user device by collecting strength of radio frequency signal from each AP. The second phase predicts whether an external AP is rogue or not based on the calculated distance and by comparing it with a threshold distance. We have tested our mechanism by implementing it in an Android based smartphone and it was successfully able to predict rogue APs with acceptable accuracies. The threshold values were decided based on extensive experiments conducted in IIT Guwahati campus.