Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Static Binary Instrumentation with Applications to COTS Software Security

of the Dissertation Static Binary Instrumentation with Applications to COTS Software Security by Mingwei Zhang Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science Stony Brook University 2015 Binary instrumentation has assumed an important role in software security, as well as related areas such as debugging and monitoring. Binary instrumentation can be performed statically or dynamically. Static binary instrumentation (SBI) is attractive because of its simplicity and efficiency. However, none of the previous SBI systems support secure instrumentation of COTS binaries. This is because of several challenges including: (a) static binary code disassembly errors, (b) difficulty of handling indirect control flow transfers, (c) ensuring completeness of instrumentation, i.e., instrumenting all of the code, including code contained in system libraries and compiler-generated stubs, and (d) maintaining compatibility with complex code, i.e., ensuring that the instrumentation does not break any existing code. We have developed a new static binary instrumentation approach, and present a software platform called PSI that implements this approach. PSI integrates a coarse grained control flow integrity (CFI) property as the basis of secure, nonbypassable instrumentation. PSI scales to large and complex stripped binaries, including low-level system libraries. It provides a powerful API that simplifies the development of custom instrumentations. We describe our approach, present several interesting security instrumentations, and analyze the performance of PSI. Our experiments on several real-world applications demonstrate that PSI’s runtime overheads are about an order of magnitude smaller than that of the most popular platforms available today, such as DynamoRIO and Pin. (Both these platforms rely on dynamic instrumentation.)
Site Classification of the Strong Motion Stations of Uttarakhand , India , based on Generalized Inversion and Horizontal to Vertical Spectral Ratio Methods

PESMOS is a significant source of ground motion records in India consisting of earthquake (EQ) records from 300 recording stations located across the country. The site classification of these stations given by PESMOS is based on the physical description of local geology and not based on in-situ field tests. Thus, there exist an ambiguity in the assessment of local site conditions for these recording stations. Knowledge of accurate SC is essential in order to use accelerograms from these recording stations for both seismic hazard as well as site response analysis. In the absence of field study data accelerograms can be used to estimate SC of the recording stations. In the present study SC of 4 recording stations situated in the region of Garhwal Uttarakand is determined based on the value of predominant frequency (fpeak) obtained from Generalized Inversion Technique (GINV) and Horizontal to Vertical Spectral Ratio method (HVSR). The value of fpeak obtained from both the above methods show 1:1 correspondence. Further, present analyses show a clear difference in the SCs suggested by PESMOS and the one obtained from the present study.
Remote detection of Corrosion under Paint ( CUP ) from distances greater than 5 metres

Corrosion under paint (CUP) is a ubiquitous and persistent problem which affects almost every part of the entire infrastructure of modern civilization. Apart from the great economic damage which it causes annually, estimated to be 3% of Gross Domestic Product, it also compromises the safety, environmental and aesthetic characteristics of the affected structures, machinery and other artefacts. We present the results of a novel instrument, whose development is supported by the European Commission FP7-SME programme. This instrument: Corrosion Under Paint Integrated Detection system (CUPID), incorporates three separate, fully developed and complementary NDT Techniques. The instrument combines a novel and inexpensive active diffuse, on-axis incoherent millimetre wave and THz source of illumination. Incorporated into this same optical platform is a near infra-red (NIR) inspection system. Furthermore, the instrument also takes measurements from a novel planar capacitive imaging system. The results from this instrument represent a truly disruptive technology which is completely non-contact and can instantly detect corrosion under paint under very large areas of painted surfaces from stand-off distances of up to ten metres or more and as such, the CUPID detection system offers an immediate market advantage over current state of the art. The CUPID system technology herein described is filed under UK Patent Application 1413566.9
D RECONSTRUCTION FROM STEREO / RANGE IMAGES

OF THESIS 3D RECONSTRUCTION FROM STEREO/RANGE IMAGES. 3D reconstruction from stereo/range image is one of the most fundamental and extensively researched topics in computer vision. Stereo research has recently experienced somewhat of a new era, as a result of publically available performance testing such as the Middlebury data set, which has allowed researchers to compare their algorithms against all the state-of-the-art algorithms. This thesis investigates into the general stereo problems in both the two-view stereo and multi-view stereo scopes. In the two-view stereo scope, we formulate an algorithm for the stereo matching problem with careful handling of disparity, discontinuity and occlusion. The algorithm works with a global matching stereo model based on an energy minimization framework. The experimental results are evaluated on the Middlebury data set, showing that our algorithm is the top performer. A GPU approach of the Hierarchical BP algorithm is then proposed, which provides similar stereo quality to CPU Hierarchical BP while running at real-time speed. A fast-converging BP is also proposed to solve the slow convergence problem of general BP algorithms. Besides two-view stereo, efficient multi-view stereo for large scale urban reconstruction is carefully studied in this thesis. A novel approach for computing depth maps given urban imagery where often large parts of surfaces are weakly textured is presented. Finally, a new post-processing step to enhance the range images in both the both the spatial resolution and depth precision is proposed.
Evidence of Spatial Price Transmission in the Case of Kosovo

This study is focused on the analysis of spatial price transmission and market integration of Kosovo agricultural markets with world and EU markets. The paper employs asymmetric error correction model to quantify the extent, speed and nature of price adjustment for the long-run relationship between Kosovo, world and EU agricultural commodity prices. Monthly price data for key cereals (wheat, maize, barley) and beef meat covering the period 2004-2016 are used. Main findings of the study suggest that Kosovo is vulnerable to price transmitting signals from world and EU markets. Empirical results reveal evidence of asymmetry between Kosovo and world prices and signify stronger long-run relationship with the EU prices. Kosovo agricultural markets reacts to positive and negative price deviations, while world and EU prices do not respond on Kosovo price shocks. Kosovo as a price taker and as a country heavily reliant on agricultural and food imports has limited policy instruments to mitigate transmission of global price vulnerability. Under the current liberal trade regime with the regional and EU countries, any trade restrictive actions would have harming welfare effects on domestic consumers. Findings of this study contribute to agricultural and trade policymakers dealing with food prices and food security.
DELLA MUTATIONS IN PLANTS WITH SPECIAL EMPHASIS ON WHEAT

DELLA proteins are a subfamily of transcriptional regulators from the GRAS protein family. They act as growth repressors. Gibberellins (GA) promote growth by overcoming the DELLA-mediated growth restraint. A number of dominant mutations in highly conserved orthologous DELLA genes are known in various plant species. These mutations reduce plant height owing to production of more active forms of growth repressors. The aim of the current study is to estimate the genetic similarity of DELLA nucleotide and amino acid sequences stored in GenBank and to identify mutant and wild type alleles that encode DELLAs in modern Ukrainian winter bread wheat varieties. We have performed nucleotide and amino acid sequence search and alignment of the Rht-D1 wheat dwarfing gene and DELLA-encoding genes of other plant species with BLAST and MUSCLE software. A dendrogram illustrating phylogenetic relations among DELLA sequences of 35 plant species has been constructed using MEGA v5. In addition, PCR-based genotyping for the major wheat dwarfing genes Rht-B1 and Rht-D1 has been performed in wheat cultivars from different regions of Ukraine. It is shown that the mutant Rht-D1b allele is the commonest dwarfing allele among those tested in Ukrainian wheat cultivars (68 %), but its distribution over Ukraine is not random.
Non ‐ wage benefits , corporate ownership and firm performance in post ‐ communist economies : evidence from Ukraine

100 words) 4 The association between neighbourhood walkability and children’s independent mobility using an 5 ecological approach is relatively unexplored. In 2007, 1480 10-12 year-old children (and 1314 6 parents) attending low and high walkable schools across Perth, Western Australia, completed 7 surveys. Objective built environment, social-cultural and individual-level factors were explored. 8 High neighbourhood walkability predicted girls’ independent mobility. However, girls and boys 9 were more likely to be independently mobile if they and their parents were confident that they could 10 travel independently. Providing safe, walkable neighbourhoods – particularly for girls combined 11 with strategies to improve children’s skills to safely navigate their neighbourhood may increase 12 independent mobility. 13
Logic of evidence-based inference propositions

Assertions about the content and context of an object of concern guide reasoning about its form, functions and consequences. Equivocation is minimized by the pro-logic state of an assertion affirmed by independent evidence. Four logic states are possible for proposition with two assertions, it exists (A) and it is undescribable (U) – is true (T) if affirmed A is consistent with not affirmed U; it is false (F) if U is affirmed and A is not; it is doubtful (D) if both A and U are affirmed, and it is empty or null (X) if both are not affirmed. This two-step epistemology (Saptbhangi) adopted in suitable languages provides a common basis for the logics that identify and resolve equivocation in semantic arguments and paradoxes to form a degree of belief constrained by evidence. As first proposed by G. N. Ramachandran, within limits this formalism is reduced to a vector-matrix description of the binary logic.
CLOUD EFFECTS ON UV RADIATION AT TWO OPPOSING HEMISPHERIC SITES

1. ABSTRACT The effect of clouds on modifying the ultraviolet (UV) radiation that reaches the Earth’s surface is quantitatively assessed through Cloud Modification Factors (CMF), defined as the ratio between measured UV irradiance in cloudy skies and an estimated cloudless UV irradiance. Behavior of CMF derived from measurements taken at two sites placed in Girona, Spain and Toowoomba, Australia, is presented. In both sites, there have been sky cameras and UV radiometers taking images and measurements during the last 5 years. Combining information about the sky conditions with the UV data, CMF have been computed depending on cloud fraction and for different cloud types. Effects of the solar zenith angle have also been analyzed. Results obtained support the previous knowledge about CMF: cloud effects are in general significant for cloud fraction larger than 0.7; similar cloud fractions produce a large range of CMF values, partly due to different cloud types; cloud effects result sometimes in an enhancement of UV radiation.
Computational Modeling Reveals the Mechanism of Fluorescent State Recovery in the Reversibly Photoswitchable Protein Dreiklang.

The unique properties of the photoswitchable protein Dreiklang are attributed to a reversible hydration/dehydration reaction at the imidazolinone ring of the chromophore. Recovery of the fluorescent state, which is associated with a chemical reaction of chromophore dehydration, is an important part of the photocycle of this protein. Here we characterize the fluorescent (ON) and non-fluorescent (OFF) states of Dreiklang and simulate the thermal recovery reaction OFF → ON using computational approaches. By using molecular modeling methods including the quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) technique, we characterize the structures and spectra of the ON- and OFF-states. The results are consistent with relevant experimental data. The computed reaction profile explains the observed recovery reaction and clarifies the mechanism of chemical transformations in the chromophore-containing pocket in Dreiklang.
Photogrammetric Potential of Digital Cameras in Handheld Gadgets for Digital Close Range Applications

In recent years a large number of new low cost digital consumer cameras have appeared in the market. The aim of this paper is to describe a research undertaken to examine and evaluate the geometric stability of these cameras and their potential for photogrammetric use. For this purpose, three gadgets with cameras were chosen: two mobile phones and a personal digital assistant (PDA), all of them with built-in camera. Their geometric stability is examined using a test field, and the calibration parameters are determined. The calibration parameters’ results, such as the principal distance, principal point, radial and tangential distortion and their accuracies are given. The next step of the research was focused in the exterior orientation and the accuracies which can be achieved using stereopairs of the test field. The results were not discouraging at all and some important conclusions, for these three different types of cameras, are mentioned in the paper. Experimental research has been carried out using two study sites. The first is the fountain “Krini Priouli” at Heraklion of Crete and the second is the marble iconostasis of Saint Apostles in the Ancient Market of Athens. In both cases close-range photographs taken from the PDA were used. Results indicate that such cameras may be used in simple close – range photogrammetric applications, with relatively low accuracy requirements.
The effect of fast neutron radiation on meiosis in pollen mother cells of C apsicum annuum var . abbreviatum

In order to assess the effect of fast neutron irradiation (FNI) on pmc meiosis of Capsicum anuum var abbreviatum, dry seeds of the variety were exposed to fast neutron irradiation (FNI) from an 4 -2 -1 Americium Beryllium source with a flux of 1.5 × 10 n.cm s . Five irradiation treatments, 0, 30, 60, 90, and 120 min. have been tried. The treated seeds were sown with their respective controls and the effects on the meiosis of the plants were studied. The results obtained showed that all irradiation treatments caused meiotic abnormalities, such as chromosome clumping, presence of univalents, multivalents, triads and micronuclei compared to the control plants. There was an increase in aberrant cells with increase in the duration of fast neutron irradiation (FNI); 120 minutes FNI treatment was found most potent in inducing cytological aberrations in pollen mother cells of treated pepper plants.
A Five-Factor Asset Pricing Model

A five-factor model directed at capturing the size, value, profitability, and investment patterns in average stock returns performs better than the three-factor model of Fama and French (FF 1993). The five-factor model’s main problem is its failure to capture the low average returns on small stocks whose returns behave like those of firms that invest a lot despite low profitability. The model’s performance is not sensitive to the way its factors are defined. With the addition of profitability and investment factors, the value factor of the FF three-factor model becomes redundant for describing average returns in the sample we examine.
The Influence of Fan Pages on Consumer Purchase Intention : Liking Behavior as a Moderator

Social networking sites host more than one billion members. These sites feature countless fan pages, containing product information for social media marketing. For this type of business model, a burgeoning social networking environment has arisen. In Taiwan, consumers frequently use social networking sites, which are learned about through electronic word-of-mouth references, as portal sites to transfer to product pages. Thus, consumers can easily obtain numerous types of brand information that promotes purchase intention. Based on the perspective of consumer behavior, a research model was developed to examine what factors affect consumers’ perceived values and purchase intentions on fan pages. Moreover, the relationships between perceived value and purchase intention were determined to be moderated by liking behavior. Empirical analyses were performed using structural equation modeling. The results indicated that brand awareness of products and recommendations through electronic word-of-mouth significantly affect perceived value. Perceived value also significantly affects purchase intention. Additionally, liking behavior moderates the relationship between perceived value and purchase intention, despite brand image having no effect on perceived value. These results could provide a reference for future research on fan page influence and suggest a practical reference for company business strategies.
GENERATION OF DETAILED SKY LUMINANCE MAPS VIA CALIBRATED DIGITAL IMAGING

Reliable prediction of daylight availability in indoor environments via computational simulation requires detailed and accurate sky luminance models. Sky luminance mapping via digital imaging can provide an alternative to high-end research-level sky scanners and thus support the provision of information on sky luminance distribution patterns on a more pervasive basis. In this paper, we compare variously calibrated sky luminance data derived from real-time digital sky images to photometric measurements. Subsequently we compare the application of a digitally derived sky model with other sky models toward the prediction of illuminance levels in a room.
ConvSent at CLPsych 2019 Task A: Using Post-level Sentiment Features for Suicide Risk Prediction on Reddit

This work aims to infer mental health status from public text for early detection of suicide risk. It contributes to Shared Task A in the 2019 CLPsych workshop by predicting users’ suicide risk given posts in the Reddit subforum r/SuicideWatch. We use a convolutional neural network to incorporate LIWC information at the Reddit post level about topics discussed, first-person focus, emotional experience, grammatical choices, and thematic style. In sorting users into one of four risk categories, our best system’s macro-averaged F1 score was 0.50 on the withheld test set. The work demonstrates the predictive power of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count dictionary, in conjunction with a convolutional network and holistic consideration of each post and user.
Regular Paper Improving Automatic Centralization by Version Separation

With today’s importance of distributed applications, their verification and analysis are still challenging. They involve large combinational states, interactive network communications between peers, and concurrency. Although there are some dynamic analysis tools for analyzing the runtime behavior of a single-process application, they do not provide methods to analyze distributed applications as a whole, where multiple processes run simultaneously. Centralization is a general solution which transforms multi-process applications into a single-process one that can be directly analyzed by existing tools. In this paper, we improve the accuracy of centralization. Moreover, we extend it as a general framework for analyzing distributed applications with multiple versions. First, we formalize the version conflict problem and present a simple solution, and further propose an optimized solution to resolving class version conflicts during centralization. Our techniques enable sharing common code whenever possible while keeping the version space of each component application separate. Centralization issues like startup semantics and static field transformation are improved and discussed. We implement and apply our centralization tool to some network benchmarks. Experiments, where existing tools are used on the centralized application, prove the usefulness of our automatic centralization tool, showing that centralization enables these tools to analyze distributed applications with multiple versions.
Mining location information from life- and earth-sciences studies to facilitate knowledge discovery

Location information in published studies represents an untapped resource for literature discovery, applicable to a range of domains. The ability to easily discover scientific articles from specific places, nearby locales, or similar (but geographically separate) areas worldwide is important for advancing science and addressing global sustainability challenges. However, the thematic and not geographic nature of current search tools makes location-based searches challenging and inefficient. Manually geolocating studies is labor intensive, and place-name recognition algorithms have performed poorly due to prevalence of irrelevant place names in scientific articles. These challenges have hindered past efforts to create map-based literature search tools. Thus, automated approaches are needed to sustain article georeferencing efforts. Common pattern-matching algorithms (parsers) can be used to identify and extract geographic coordinates from the text of published articles. Pattern-matching algorithms (geoparsers) were developed using regular expressions and lexical parsing and tested their performance against sets of full-text articles from multiple journals that were manually scanned for coordinates. Both geoparsers performed well at recognizing and extracting coordinates from articles with accuracy ranging from 85.1% to 100%, and the lexical geoparser performing marginally better. Omission errors (i.e. missed coordinates) were 0% to 14.9% for the regular expression geoparser and 0% to 10.3% for the lexical geoparser. Only a single commission error (i.e. erroneous coordinate) was encountered with the lexical geoparser. The ability to automatically identify and extract location information from published studies opens new possibilities for transforming scientific literature discovery and supporting novel research.
A Critical Reappraisal

DURING ITS FIRST 158 YEARS, Mormonism, like any other religious system, has developed its own theological and ritual structure with its own built-in defensive mechanisms. A fundamental part of this defensive infrastructure is a series of Old Testament texts, passages used to justify and validate various unique and unusual theological dogma found within the faith. These passages have played a positive and important role both in underpinning members' faith and in proselyting. Unfortunately, interpretations of the passages have gradually attained a pseudo-canonical status within the community, allowing for little tampering with their traditional understandings. This is unfortunate since such rigorous attention to one narrow avenue of interpretation ignores and obscures literary and structural aspects of the Hebrew Bible, aspects essential for understanding many theological and historical elements of