Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cellular Networks for a Society in Motion

Due to rising mobility worldwide, a growing number of people utilizes cellular network services while on the move. Persistent urbanization trends raise the number of daily commuters, leading to a situation where telecommunication requirements are mainly dictated by two categories of users: 1) quasi-static users inside buildings, demanding instantaneous and virtually bandwidth-unlimited access to the Internet and the Cloud; 2) moving users outside, expecting ubiquitous and seamless mobility even at high velocity. While most work on future mobile communications is motivated by the first category of users, we outline in this article a layered cellular network architecture that has the potential to efficiently support both user groups simultaneously. We deduce novel transceiver architectures and derive research questions that need to be tackled to effectively maintain wireless connectivity for the envisioned Society in Motion.
Fp-Scanner: The Privacy Implications of Browser Fingerprint Inconsistencies

By exploiting the diversity of device and browser configurations, browser fingerprinting established itself as a viable technique to enable stateless user tracking in production. Companies and academic communities have responded with a wide range of countermeasures. However , the way these countermeasures are evaluated does not properly assess their impact on user privacy, in particular regarding the quantity of information they may indirectly leak by revealing their presence. In this paper, we investigate the current state of the art of browser fingerprinting countermeasures to study the inconsistencies they may introduce in altered fingerprints , and how this may impact user privacy. To do so, we introduce FP-SCANNER as a new test suite that explores browser fingerprint inconsistencies to detect potential alterations, and we show that we are capable of detecting countermeasures from the inconsistencies they introduce. Beyond spotting altered browser fingerprints, we demonstrate that FP-SCANNER can also reveal the original value of altered fingerprint attributes, such as the browser or the operating system. We believe that this result can be exploited by fingerprinters to more accurately target browsers with countermeasures.
ALTERNATING AUTOENCODERS FOR MATRIX COMPLETION

We consider autoencoders (AEs) for matrix completion (MC) with application to collaborative filtering (CF) for recommedation systems. It is observed that for a given sparse user-item rating matrix, denoted as ${\boldsymbol {M}}$, an AE performs matrix factorization so that the recovered matrix is represented as a product of user and item feature matrices. Such an AE sequentially estimates user and item feature matrices: for the item-based AE (I-AE) that uses columns of M as its input vectors, the AE's encoder first estimates an item feature matrix and then the decoder estimates a user feature matrix based on the output of the encoder. Similarly, the user-based AE (U-AE) that uses the columns of ${\boldsymbol {M}} ^{T\, }$ as its input vectors first estimates a user feature matrix and then an item feature matrix. This sequential estimation can degrade the performance of the MC/CF, because the decoder depends on the output of the encoder. To enhance MC/CF performance, we propose alternating AEs (AAEs), a parallel algorithm employing both I-AE and U-AE and alternatively use them. We apply the AAE to synthetic, MovieLens 100k and 1M data sets. The results demonstrate that AAE can outperform all existing MC/CF methods.
Does Reinforcement Learning outperform PID in the control of FES-induced elbow flex-extension?

Functional electrical stimulation (FES) is an effective technology in post-stroke rehabilitation of the upper limbs. Because of the complexity of the system, traditional linear controllers are still far to drive accurate and natural movements. In this work, we apply reinforcement learning (RL) to design a nonlinear controller for an upper limb FES system combined with a passive exoskeleton. RL methods learn by interacting with the environment and, to efficiently use the collected data, we simulated large numbers of experience episodes through artificial neural network (ANN) models of the electrically stimulated arm muscles. The performance of the novel control solution was compared to a PID controller on five healthy subjects during planar reaching tasks. Both controllers correctly drove the arm at the target position, with a mean absolute error < 1°. The RL control significantly outperformed the PID in terms of setting time, position accuracy and smoothness. Future trials are needed to confirm these promising results.
Supporting community-building in digital libraries: A pilot study of LibraryThing

Digital libraries should improve their support of social interactions, especially the building of communities around and within themselves, to integrate better with social groups and communities across boundaries. This poster reports on ongoing work that has developed an online survey instrument to measure support for community-building activities in digital libraries. In a small pilot sample of users of Library Thing, the level of support for community-building was low and the social networks of participants with regard to Library Thing and its users were not wide-ranging or dense. Community-building activity occurred, but without the support of Library Thing as a boundary object. Continuing research will survey larger samples from a broader population, add open-ended questions to the instrument, and incorporate qualitative methods, improving validity and generalizability. This research into community-building in Library Thing and other digital libraries will contribute to the important tasks of learning more about and improving support for the social contexts of digital libraries.
A Miniature Electromagnetic Bandgap Structure Using Integrated Fan-Out Wafer-Level Package (InFO-WLP) for Gigahertz Noise Suppression

This work presents a periodic electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structure in integrated fan-out wafer-level package (InFO-WLP) technology for GHz-band noise suppression. The proposed EBG structure consists of an LC resonator with two symmetrical spiral inductors in series and a shunt MIM capacitor between power and ground planes. The EBG arrays with different sizes of unit cell, and the corresponding stopband bandwidth and isolation were characterized. The measurement results show the proposed $\mathbf{1}\times \mathbf{4}$ EBG array of $\mathbf{600}\ \mu\mathbf{m}$ square unit cell can achieve a 29.5 GHz stopband bandwidth together with an over 30 dB isolation level.
Two Classes of Pigments, Carotenoids and C-Phycocyanin, in Spirulina Powder and Their Antioxidant Activities

Arthrospira platensis is the widely available source of spirulina that contains distinctive natural pigments, including carotenoids and C-phycocyanin (C-PC). In this study, the major carotenoid and C-PC contents were determined in seven commercially available spirulina powder products and laboratory-prepared A. platensis trichomes (AP-1) by an LC-DAD method and UV-Visible spectrometry, respectively. The correlation of these two pigment content levels with Hunter color coordinates and antioxidant activity was also evaluated. The L* value failed to show a significant correlation with pigment content, but a positive correlation was observed between a* values and the contents of total carotenoid and C-PC. As b* values decreased, the chlorophyll a and C-PC contents increased. AP-1 exhibited the highest content of total carotenoids, chlorophyll a and C-PC, and antioxidant activities among the samples. This observation could be related to degradation of these pigments during the mass production process. The carotenoid profiles suggested that the commercial spirulina powders originated from two different sources, A. platensis and A. maxima. Total carotenoid and C-PC content exhibited positive significant correlations with antioxidant activities measured by 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and 2,2′-azino-bis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulphonic acid) (ABTS) assays. These results provide a strong scientific foundation for the establishment of standards for the commercial distribution of quality spirulina products.
Who Left Open the Cookie Jar? A Comprehensive Evaluation of Third-Party Cookie Policies

Nowadays, cookies are the most prominent mechanism to identify and authenticate users on the Internet. Although protected by the Same Origin Policy, popular browsers include cookies in all requests, even when these are cross-site. Unfortunately, these third-party cookies enable both cross-site attacks and third-party tracking. As a response to these nefarious consequences, various countermeasures have been developed in the form of browser extensions or even protection mechanisms that are built directly into the browser. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of these defense mechanisms by leveraging a framework that automatically evaluates the enforcement of the policies imposed to third-party requests. By applying our framework, which generates a comprehensive set of test cases covering various web mechanisms, we identify several ﬂaws in the policy implementations of the 7 browsers and 46 browser extensions that were evaluated. We ﬁnd that even built-in protection mechanisms can be circum-vented by multiple novel techniques we discover. Based on these results, we argue that our proposed framework is a much-needed tool to detect bypasses and evaluate solutions to the exposed leaks. Finally, we analyze the origin of the identiﬁed bypass techniques, and ﬁnd that these are due to a variety of implementation, conﬁguration and design ﬂaws.
A Large Planar Holographic Refiectarray for Fresnel-Zone Microwave Wireless Power Transfer at 5.8 GHz

We present a 5.8 GHz Fresnel-zone microwave wireless power transfer experiment leveraging a large planar holographic metasurface reflectarray to form a focused spot at a distance of 6.5 m. The 1.5 $\mathbf{m}^{2}$ holographic metasurface is fabricated from 15 panels having total dimensions of $\mathbf{122}\times \mathbf{127}$ cm, and is comprised of over 4,000 reflective patch resonators on the top surface of a 3.0 mm thick FR-4 substrate. A constrained hologram approach is used to discretize the desired hologram and approximate the desired focal spot given the Lorentzian coupled amplitude-phase response of the patch resonators. When the metasurface is illuminated by a 20 dB standard-gain horn 1.8 $\mathbf{m}$ away, it produces a spot with a 3 dB beam waist (FWHM) of approximately 50 cm. The experimentally measured beam profile matches the simulated beam profile to ± 1 dB within the beam, and we estimate almost 40% of the transmitted power was incident onto the receiver at the focus point.
Similarity Measure based on Punishing Popular Items for Collaborative Filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) helps users to find the items they may like in large quantity of items. It is widely used because of its interpretability and simplicity. However, there's still a challenging problem in calculating similarity between users or items. The existence of popular items will cause the similarity too big, resulting in misjudgment of the user's preferences. In order to alleviate this problem, This paper proposed that adding the punishment to popular items when calculating the similarity between users, so as to minimize the negative influence caused by popular items. The extensibility problem is caused by the growing number of users and items. This paper uses clustering collaborative filtering model to alleviate this problem, which uses the similarity with punishment as the basis of clustering. The combination of clustering collaborative filtering model and popular items punishment achieves the goal of finding more accurate nearest neighbors to predict user's preference with reducing the calculation complexity. The movie dataset in real world was used to test the proposed algorithm. The results of experiment show that the model can not only reduce the calculation complexity, but also greatly improve the accuracy of recommendation and surpass traditional item based collaborative filtering.
The Role of Resilience in Internet Addiction among Adolescents between Sexes: A Moderated Mediation Model

The behavioral inhibition/activation systems (BIS/BAS) have been considered to be predictors of Internet addiction, mediated by clinical variables such as anxiety and depression. However, resilience has been suggested as a protective factor toward Internet addiction, and certain sex differences in resilience buffering the effects of vulnerability have been reported. Thus, the aim of this study was to identify any role of resilience that might moderate the effects of BIS/BAS on Internet addiction through multiple clinical variables in boys and girls. A total of 519 middle-school students (268 boys and 251 girls, all 14 years old) were administered a questionnaire battery that measures Internet addiction, BIS/BAS, depression, anxiety, impulsivity, anger, and resilience. We used the PROCESS macro in SPSS to perform moderation and mediation analysis. Findings revealed that although a somewhat similar mediation model was supported in both sexes, moderating effects of resilience only emerged in girls. The results showed a protective role of resilience differing between sexes. These results suggest that clinicians should consider sex in the way resilience works as a protective factor against Internet addiction and focus on mitigating the effects of vulnerability by enhancing resilience in female Internet addicts.
Malicious Management Unit: Why Stopping Cache Attacks in Software is Harder Than You Think

Cache attacks have increasingly gained momentum in the security community. In such attacks, attacker-controlled code sharing the cache with a designated victim can leak confidential data by timing the execution of cache-accessing operations. Much recent work has focused on defenses that enforce cache access isolation between mutually distrusting software components. In such a landscape, many software-based defenses have been popularized, given their appealing portability and scalability guarantees. All such defenses prevent attacker-controlled CPU instructions from accessing a cache partition dedicated to a different security domain. In this paper, we present a new class of attacks (indirect cache attacks), which can bypass all the existing software-based defenses. In such attacks, rather than accessing the cache directly, attacker-controlled code lures an external, trusted component into indirectly accessing the cache partition of the victim and mount a confused-deputy side-channel attack. To demonstrate the viability of these attacks, we focus on the MMU, demonstrating that indirect cache attacks based on translation operations performed by the MMU are practical and can be used to bypass all the existing software-based defenses. Our results show that the isolation enforced by existing defense techniques is imperfect and that generalizing such techniques to mitigate arbitrary cache attacks is much more challenging than previously assumed.
Integrative Biomarker Assessment of the Influence of Saxitoxin on Marine Bivalves: A Comparative Study of the Two Bivalve Species Oysters, Crassostrea gigas, and Scallops, Chlamys farreri

Harmful algae blooms have expanded greatly in recent decades, and their secreted toxins pose a severe threat to human health and marine ecosystems. Saxitoxin (STX) is a main paralytic shellfish poison naturally produced by marine microalgae of the genus Alexandrium. Despite numerous studies have assessed the impacts of STX on marine bivalves, comparative in vivo study on the toxicity of STX on bivalves with distinct accumulation ability (such as oysters and scallops) has been seldom investigated. The aim of this study was to identify whether distinct sensitivity exists between oysters, Crassostrea gigas, and scallops, Chlamys farreri under the same amount of STX exposure using multiple biomarker responses. The responses of different biochemical markers including oxidative stress markers (catalase, superoxide dismutase, glutathione S-transferase, and lipid peroxidation) and immunotoxicity biomarkers (hemocyte phagocytosis rate, reactive oxidative species production, and DNA damages) were evaluated in bivalves after 12, 48, and 96 h of exposure to STX. The integrated biomarker responses value combined with two-way ANOVA analysis suggested that STX posed slightly severer stress on scallops than oysters for the extended period of time. This study provided preliminary results on the usefulness of a multi-biomarker approach to assess the toxicity associated with STX exposure in marine bivalves.
Design and Implementation of a Two-Wheel and Hopping Robot With a Linkage Mechanism

Wheeled robots exhibit fast and stable motion on a flat road but lack the ability to overcome the obstacles and rough terrains. To address this shortage, a two-wheel hopping robot is proposed by combining the wheel locomotion and bounce movement. A gear train and a four-bar linkage are employed for jumping. In particular, the take-off angle is dependent on the link length of the four-bar linkage, thus providing versatile flight trajectories. Therefore, the dependency of the hopping performance on the four-bar linkage can be maximized. A four-bar linkage with the same length is used for the specific trajectory and balance control of the inverted pendulum model of the prototype. Dynamics analyses and simulations have been conducted to verify the robot design and its parameters. By jumping tests, the hopping performance is compared with other robots in a quantitative manner. The experimental results show that the wheeled hopping robot has the advantages of light mass and jumping height efficiency.
Pangea: Monolithic Distributed Storage for Data Analytics

Storage and memory systems for modern data analytics are heavily layered, managing shared persistent data, cached data, and nonshared execution data in separate systems such as a distributed file system like HDFS, an in-memory file system like Alluxio, and a computation framework like Spark. Such layering introduces significant performance and management costs. In this paper we propose a single system called Pangea that can manage all data---both intermediate and long-lived data, and their buffer/caching, data placement optimization, and failure recovery---all in one monolithic distributed storage system, without any layering. We present a detailed performance evaluation of Pangea and show that its performance compares favorably with several widely used layered systems such as Spark.
Runtime Analysis of Whole-System Provenance

Identifying the root cause and impact of a system intrusion remains a foundational challenge in computer security. Digital provenance provides a detailed history of the flow of information within a computing system, connecting suspicious events to their root causes. Although existing provenance-based auditing techniques provide value in forensic analysis, they assume that such analysis takes place only retrospectively. Such post-hoc analysis is insufficient for realtime security applications; moreover, even for forensic tasks, prior provenance collection systems exhibited poor performance and scalability, jeopardizing the timeliness of query responses. We present CamQuery, which provides inline, realtime provenance analysis, making it suitable for implementing security applications. CamQuery is a Linux Security Module that offers support for both userspace and in-kernel execution of analysis applications. We demonstrate the applicability of CamQuery to a variety of runtime security applications including data loss prevention, intrusion detection, and regulatory compliance. In evaluation, we demonstrate that CamQuery reduces the latency of realtime query mechanisms, while imposing minimal overheads on system execution. CamQuery thus enables the further deployment of provenance-based technologies to address central challenges in computer security.
Systematic analysis of transcriptomic profiles of COPD airway epithelium using next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics

Introduction COPD is a chronic inflammatory disease of lung. The inflammatory response in COPD is associated with neutrophils, macrophages, T lymphocytes, and bronchial epithelial cells, and occurs mainly in the small airway, leading to irreversible airflow limitation. Methods In order to investigate the microRNA–mRNA interaction in the microenvironment of the COPD airway, we used next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics in this study. Results We identified four genes with microRNA–mRNA interactions involved in COPD small-airway bronchial epithelial cells: NT5E, SDK1, TNS1, and PCDH7. Furthermore, miR6511a-5p–NT5E interaction was found to be involved in small-airway bronchial epithelial cells, large-airway bronchial epithelial cells, and alveolar macrophages. Conclusion Our results showed that miR6511a-5p–NT5E interaction plays an important role in COPD, which might be associated with cell–cell contact, activation of leukocytes, activation of T lymphocytes, and cellular homeostasis. These findings provide new information for further investigations of the COPD microenvironment, and may help to develop new diagnostic or therapeutic strategies targeting the bronchial epithelium for COPD.
Soil multifunctionality and drought resistance are determined by plant structural traits in restoring grassland

Abstract It is increasingly recognized that belowground responses to vegetation change are closely linked to plant functional traits. However, our understanding is limited concerning the relative importance of different plant traits for soil functions and of the mechanisms by which traits influence soil properties in the real world. Here we test the hypothesis that taller species, or those with complex rooting structures, are associated with high rates of nutrient and carbon (C) cycling in grassland. We further hypothesized that communities dominated by species with deeper roots may be more resilient to drought. These hypotheses were tested in a 3‐yr grassland restoration experiment on degraded ex‐arable land in southern England. We sowed three trait‐based plant functional groups, assembled using database derived values of plant traits, and their combinations into bare soil. This formed a range of plant trait syndromes onto which we superimposed a simulated drought 2 yr after initial establishment. We found strong evidence that community weighted mean (CWM) of plant height is negatively associated with soil nitrogen cycling and availability and soil multifunctionality. We propose that this was due to an exploitative resource capture strategy that was inappropriate in shallow chalk soils. Further, complexity of root architecture was positively related to soil multifunctionality throughout the season, with fine fibrous roots being associated with greater rates of nutrient cycling. Drought resistance of soil functions including ecosystem respiration, mineralization, and nitrification were positively related to functional divergence of rooting depth, indicating that, in shallow chalk soils, a range of water capture strategies is necessary to maintain functions. Finally, after 3 yr of the experiment, we did not detect any links between the plant traits and microbial communities, supporting the finding that traits based on plant structure and resource foraging capacity are the main variables driving soil function in the early years of grassland conversion. We suggest that screening recently restored grassland communities for potential soil multifunctionality and drought resilience may be possible based on rooting architecture and plant height. These results indicate that informed assembly of plant communities based on plant traits could aid in the restoration of functioning in degraded soil.