Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
NLP-EYE: Detecting Memory Corruptions via Semantic-Aware Memory Operation Function Identification

Memory corruption vulnerabilities are serious threats to software security, which is often triggered by improper use of memory operation functions. The detection of memory cor-ruptions relies on identifying memory operation functions and examining how it manipulates the memory. Distinguishing memory operation functions is challenging because they usually come in various forms in real-world software. In this paper, we propose NLP-EYE, an NLP-based memory corruption detection system. NLP-EYE is able to identify memory operation functions through a semantic-aware source code analysis automatically. It ﬁrst creates a programming language friendly corpus in order to parse function prototypes. Based on the similarity comparison by utilizing both semantic and syntax information, NLP-EYE identiﬁes and labels both standard and customized memory operation functions. It uses symbolic execution at last to check whether a memory operation causes incorrect memory usage. Instead of analyzing data dependencies of the entire source code, NLP-EYE only focuses on memory operation parts. We evaluated the performance of NLP-EYE by using seven real-world libraries and programs, including Vim , Git , CPython , etc. NLP-EYE successfully identiﬁes 27 null pointer de-reference, two double-free and three use-after-free that are not discovered before
SIMULTANEOUS INVERSION OF RECEIVER FUNCTIONS AND SURFACE-WAVE DISPERSION MEASUREMENTS FOR LITHOSPHERIC STRUCTURE BENEATH ASIA AND NORTH AFRICA

This paper reports on initial investigations into the seismic structure of the lithosphere in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) using surface waves and receiver functions. Collections of prior work in the region and computing receiver functions for use in the joint inversion have been initiated. Critical to the joint inversion are surface-wave dispersion information localized to approximately the same region sampled by receiver functions. We continue to improve our surface-wave dispersion model of Western Eurasia and North Africa. We have developed group velocity maps at 2-degree resolution for both Love and Rayleigh waves from 10to 100-second periods. The model shows excellent relationship to tectonic structure and group velocity variations correlate well with orogenic zones, cratons, sedimentary basins, and rift zones. We have recently implemented a variable-resolution tomography and have pushed the resolution of the model down to 1-degree in areas with sufficient density sampling. We plan to present information on the complexity of receiver structure at many permanent sites in the region and several illustrative inversions for lithospheric structure. We have examined receiver functions at over 200 stations in Eurasia and North Africa and have inverted about 160 using dispersion measurement from global and regional tomographic models. We will present a comparison of crustal thickness and Poisson’s ratio estimates for the crust beneath these stations as well as several examples of the joint receiver function surface-wave modeling methodology. 27th Seismic Research Review: Ground-Based Nuclear Explosion Monitoring Technologies
Multiple stakeholders , cooperation and conflict in common pasture resources – Comparative analysis of property rights in Azerbaijan and Georgia

Village pastures are still an important and contested resource for village smallholders, large-scale mobile and sedentary livestock keepers in the South Caucasus. We use the bundles of property rights approach (Schlager & Ostrom, 1992) to identify stakeholders in common pasture management, their property rights and possible sources of conflict and unsustainable management in a comparative analysis of 6 case study villages in Azerbaijan and Georgia. We show that local, collective decision making by the villagers takes place within national and regional level institutions enabling local management in Azerbaijan, while in Georgia a pending privatization process leaves common management legally unregulated. Nevertheless, in both countries villagers created access and withdrawal rules for mobile livestock keepers, still the interaction is partly a source of conflict. In contrast, the rules for internal management among villagers, e.g. limiting livestock numbers or rules for rotational grazing, are only marginally developed.
A MULTI-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION DESIGN FOR PARALLEL STRUCTURES

In this paper, a multi-objective optimization process is proposed in order to enhance the design of parallel structures. Manipulators with parallel architecture have inherent advantages in some applications with respect to serial manipulators, like high stiffness, accurate positioning and high movement velocities. Therefore, they address great interest in some industrial applications and medical fields. Main characteristics of parallel structures like workspace, singularities and compliant displacements are considered in order to propose design criteria obtaing a computationally efficient objective functions. The proposed procedure has been applied to a 5R Symmetric Parallel Manipulator.
STATIC AND DYNAMIC PHONETIC INTERACTIONS IN THE L2 AND L3 ACQUISITION OF JAPANESE VELAR VOICELESS STOPS

This production experiment investigates how L1 English-L2 Japanese bilinguals and L1 Spanish-L2 English-L3 Japanese trilinguals produce voiceless velar stops /k/ in each of their languages in order to ascertain if these speakers create separate phonological categories in Spanish, English, and Japanese. The results show that even though the bilingual and multilingual individuals maintain language-specific VOT patterns for each language, they produce /k/ in bilingual and trilingual sessions that display less native-like VOT values in each language in comparison to the same productions in the monolingual sessions. These findings demonstrate that increased activation of the nontarget language(s) in the multilingual experimental condition creates cross-linguistic phonetic convergence in the acoustic realization of these phonemic categories, however, it does not impede these multilingual individuals from maintaining language-specific categories in each language. It is proposed that a model of multilingual processing based on the principles of episodic frameworks can explain these findings.
SPOKEN WORD RECOGNITION BY ENGLISH-SPEAKING LEARNERS OF SPANISH

Spoken word recognition is a hard task. As an aid, native listeners develop segmentation strategies efficiently attuned to phonological properties of their language, like the rhythmic unit (foot, syllable, or mora). If second-language (L2) learners persist in using their own unit, they may experience longer processing times and even miss word boundaries. Therefore, the question arises as to whether highly proficient L2-speakers can inhibit their segmentation habits. Native Spanish subjects and English-speaking learners of Spanish took a word-spotting test. Participants heard nonsensical words and had to decide whether a real Spanish word or pseudoword was embedded. Some words and pseudowords were stress-initial; others were stress-medial. Different reaction times for both conditions would indicate foot-based segmentation. RTs showed non-significant differences across conditions for either L1 group. English speakers may interpret Spanish unreduced vowels as cues to foot beginning, with their foot-based segmentation having the same effect as syllable-based in this case.
The Extent of Autism Knowledge of Novice Alternatively Certified Special Education Teachers in Texas

An increase in the prevalence rate of autism is not necessarily matched by a concurrent increase in the rate of highly qualified special education teachers. The low ratio of highly qualified teachers to the number of students with autism has resulted in chronic teacher shortages in this area. Alternative certification is used as a mechanism to alleviate the demand for highly qualified teachers in special education. However, alternative certification routes have often left novice teachers underprepared for teaching students with autism, more specifically in the implementation of evidence-based practices necessary for instructional effectiveness. The purposes of the study were: a) to assess the knowledge of novice alternatively certified (AC) teachers in the area of autism education; and b) to determine the extent to which age, credit hours of instruction, formal hours of instruction, amount of professional development, and number of students with autism predict the variance in knowledge scores. Participants included all novice (i.e., first-and second-year) alternatively certified special education teachers in the state of Texas. Data were collected through an electronic survey instrument disseminated state-wide to approximately 33 individuals. Multiple regression was conducted in order to determine the strongest predictors of autism knowledge scores. In addition, a multi-way ANOVA was performed to identify differences between groups. The largest predictor of knowledge of autism was hours engaged in self-directed learning. Overall, AC programs in Texas need to provide basic and core content in the area of autism to increase the knowledge of novice teachers.
Quality assessment guidebook : a guide to assessing health services for adolescent clients

assessing health services for adolescent clients is part of a set of tools developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to strengthen programmatic action in countries, on adolescent health. It is intended to enable public health programme managers to assess the quality of health service provision to adolescents, and to take appropriate action (including problem solving and action planning) where the quality is found wanting. It is intended for use in countries where agreed upon national quality standards exist as well as in ones where they do not. Q ulity Aessm nt G uibook
Adversarial Networks for Machine Reading

Deep machine reading models have recently progressed remarkably with the help of differentiable reasoning models. In this context, deep end-to-end trainable networks enhanced with memory and attention have demonstrated promising performance on simple natural language based reasoning tasks. However, the training of machine comprehension models commonly requires a large annotated question-answer dataset for learning. In this paper, we explore the paradigm of adversarial learning and self-play for machine reading comprehension. Inspired by the success in the domain of game learning, we propose a novel approach to train machine comprehension models based on a coupled attention-based model. In this approach, a reader network is in charge of finding answers to the questions regarding a passage of text, while an obfuscation network tries to obfuscate spans of text in order to minimize the probability of success of the reader. The model is evaluated on several question-answering corpora. The proposed learning paradigm and associated models show promising results. RÉSUMÉ. Les modèles d’apprentissage profond utilisés sur des tâches de lecture automatique ont remarquablement progressé ces dernières années. Parmi ces architectures, les modèles d’attention et à mémoire ont démontré des performances encourageantes sur différentes tâches de raisonnement. Cependant, le protocole d’apprentissage de ces modèles suppose qu’une grande quantité d’exemples soient disponibles. Dans cet article, nous proposons d’exploiter l’apprentissage adversarial et le self-play durant la phase d’entraînement des modèles. Nous proposons un nouveau protocole d’apprentissage sous la forme d’un jeu entre deux modèles adverses. Ces modèles sont mis en compétition sur une tâche de question-réponse. D’un côté un modèle, appelé « lecteur », est chargé de répondre à une question portant sur un document, et de l’autre un modèle, appelé « réseau d’obfuscation », est chargé d’obfusquer un passage du document de manière à maximiser la probabilité de tromper le lecteur sur ce document corrompu. Nous avons testé ce protocole sur plusieurs datasets de question-réponse, et ce nouveau protocole d’apprentissage adversarial permet d’obtenir des résultats encourageants.
The University of Hong Kong Final Year Project FRing : A Geography-Based P 2 P Overlay Network for Fast and Robust Blockchain Systems Final Report

Blockchain systems record the transactions among parties by leveraging the decentralized nature of a distributed ledger. The verifiability and immutability of records led to the popularity of cryptocurrencies in the finance industry. Starting from Bitcoin, numerous blockchain systems with various consensus protocols emerges to achieve high transaction rates (2∼10K tps). However, recent studies show that the underlying P2P network primitives responsible for peer discovery and information dissemination have been a serious bottleneck for further improvements on the transaction rate. We owe it to two main problems. First, to achieve extreme robustness, the dominant broadcast approach Gossip generates excessive redundant messages, which can cause congestion and degrade the performance of the blockchain system. We argue that Gossip is overly robust for blockchain systems. All state-of-the-art blockchain systems can only tolerate 20% to 50% node failure while Gossip can withstand up to 90%. Second, the existing broadcast topologies ignore geographical distances among nodes and incur message paths with unnecessarily high latency so that each broadcast operation takes a long time to converge. In this paper, we present FRing, a geography-based P2P overlay network for fast and robust broadcast in blockchain systems. FRing has three main features: (i) sufficient robustness, (ii) low message redundancy, and (iii) fast convergence. FRing mitigates the two problems above and well support blockchain systems with high transaction rates. To reduce convergence time, FRing forms the network topology by taking geographical proximity into consideration. A novel broadcast algorithm based on FRing topology is also proposed to lower the message redundancy while maintaining sufficient robustness for blockchain systems. One major challenge for FRing is to eliminate the risk of topology being inferred by traffic pattern analysis. FRing leverages Intel SGX to guarantee the behavior integrity of each node and incorporates pattern obfuscation to prevent the traffic pattern analysis. Evaluation shows that the throughput of EOS and Hyperledger Fabric facilitated by FRing can be further improved by around 2.2X and 2.1X respectively.
Emotion-Focused Therapy, Revised Edition

Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) can be defined as the practice of therapy informed by an understanding of the role of emotion in psychotherapeutic change. EFT is founded on a close and careful analysis of the meanings and contributions of emotion to human experience and change in psychotherapy. This focus leads therapist and client toward strategies that promotes the awareness, acceptance, expression, utilization, regulation, and transformation of emotion as well as corrective emotional experience with the therapist. The goals of EFT are strengthening the self, regulating affect, and creating new meaning. introduction
Labor Markets in the Aftermath of the Crisis

For much of the world’s population, labor is the main source of income. Ensuring that workers have access to good “quality” jobs is thus a prerequisite to improving standards of living and reducing poverty. In the short-term, some countries may need to continue policies implemented during the crisis, gradually shifting from those focused on income protection towards those seeking to bring individuals back to work and out of dependency. However, governments should not lose track of the medium-term agenda, which focuses on structural problems that keep the majority of the world labor force in low productivity jobs while lacking access to social protection. The situation is particularly challenging in countries with young populations, where the number of youth entering the labor market for the first time is growing rapidly. Specific policy interventions will need to consider differences in initial conditions, including levels of economic and institutional development and demographic structures. However, there are common challenges that, to different degrees, will need to receive attention across countries: reducing distortions that negatively affect investment, the creation and growth of firms, or innovation; facilitating transitions into self-employment; upgrading the skills of the labor force and addressing constraints affecting its mobility; improving the matching of skills and jobs; and extending the coverage of social insurance programs to the unorganized sector.
Tilburg University Enhancement of Sandwich Algorithms for Approximating Higher Dimensional Convex Pareto

In many fields, we come across problems where we want to optimize several conflicting objectives simultaneously. To find a good solution for such multi-objective optimization problems, an approximation of the Pareto set is often generated. In this paper, we consider the approximation of Pareto sets for problems with three or more convex objectives and with convex constraints. For these problems, sandwich algorithms can be used to determine an inner and outer approximation between which the Pareto set is ’sandwiched’. Using these two approximations, we can calculate an upper bound on the approximation error. This upper bound can be used to determine which parts of the approximations must be improved and to provide a quality guarantee to the decision maker. In this paper, we extend higher dimensional sandwich algorithms in three different ways. Firstly, we introduce the new concept of adding dummy points to the inner approximation of a Pareto set. By using these dummy points, we can determine accurate inner and outer approximations more efficiently, i.e., using less time-consuming optimizations. Secondly, we introduce a new method for the calculation of an error measure which is easy to interpret. The combination of easy calculation and easy interpretation makes this measure very suitable for sandwich algorithms. Thirdly, we show how transforming certain objective functions can improve the results of sandwich algorithms and extend their applicability to certain non-convex problems. The calculation of the introduced error measure when using transformations will also be discussed. To show the effect of these enhancements, we make a numerical comparison using four test cases, including a four-dimensional case from the field of intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). The results of the different cases show that we can indeed achieve an accurate approximation using significantly fewer optimizations by using the enhancements.
Rapid plant DNA and RNA extraction protocol using a bench drill Brief Note

Plant DNA and RNA extraction methods are well established, with a wide range of protocols, depending on the purposes of each laboratory/research. Nowadays, quick, inexpensive and easy plant DNA and RNA extraction methods are highly sought after. We developed an optimized protocol for plant DNA and RNA extraction that uses an inexpensive bench drill and plastic bags and does not require liquid nitrogen. DNA from leaves and RNA from leaves and roots of banana, pineapple, citrus, papaya, passion fruit and cassava, were extracted using a basic cetyltrimethylammonium bromide method. Both nucleic acids were quantified and evaluated for quality based on agarose gel electrophoresis. The DNA and RNA extractions were successful for all species, and RNA quality in pellets was maintained after storage at room temperature for three weeks. This protocol can reduce costs considerably in laboratories with ongoing routine activities of DNA and
N 95-27357 WITH SURFACE RADIATION NUMERICAL SOLUTION OF FLUID FLOW AND HEAT TRANSFER PROBLEMS _ ?

This paper presents a numerical scheme, based on the finite element method, to solve strongly coupled fluid flow and heat transfer problems. The surface radiation effect for gray, diffuse and isothermal surfaces is considered. A procedure for obtaining the view factors between the radiating surfaces is discussed. The overall solution strategy is verified by comparing the available results with those obtained using this approach. An analysis of a thermosyphon is undertaken and the effect of considering the surface radiation is clearly explained.
Does the Internet Help Unemployed Job Seekers Find a Job ? Evidence from the Broadband Internet Expansion in Germany ∗

This paper studies the effects of the introduction of a new mass medium on reemployment probabilities of unemployed job seekers in the German labor market. We address the question of whether an increase in the availability of high-speed internet affects the probability of becoming reemployed within a period of 12 months after the inflow into unemployment. We combine German data on broadband internet availability at the municipality level with administrative data on individual employment biographies and construct monthly reemployment propensities for an inflow sample into unemployment. To address the endogeneity in broadband internet availability, we exploit technological peculiarities at the regional level that determined the roll-out of highspeed internet. Our results suggest that the introduction of high-speed internet had positive effects on the reemployment probabilities, with the internet improving the prospects of finding a job especially for males after the first four months in unemployment. To further explore the relationship between increased internet availability and individuals’ job search behavior, we complement the analysis with individual survey data. Our results reveal that home internet access is indeed causally related to online job search, whereas there is no evidence for more realized job interviews. However, looking at the duration dependent incidence of job interviews on a descriptive basis indicates that home internet access is associated with more job interviews after about a quarter in unemployment. This suggests that online job search increases job offer arrival rates only after a certain time lag. JEL Classification: J64, K42, H40, L96, C26
Porous PDMS / CNF Nanocomposites for Sensing Applications

This paper reports the fabrication of highly flexible and electrically conducting porous PDMS/CNF nanocomposites using sugar particles as templates. CNF are transferred into the pores of the porous PDMS via the direct fabrication method. In this method, the sugar particles are first coated with CNF, ensuring good adhesion between the CNF and polymer during the fabrication process. Solvents with different CNF concentration are used to investigate the effectiveness of the CNF concentrations on the sensing properties. A high resolution scanning electron microscope is used to investigate the CNF distribution. Sensing response is measured via electrical resistivity using the two-probe method. The sensing capability of the porous PDMS/CNF nanocomposite is characterized under compressive cyclic load and their corresponding piezoresistive functions are evaluated.