Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Denial of Service Attacks Against 802.11 DCF

This paper investigates the vulnerabilities in the 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) mechanisms. We have conducted a series of Denial of Service (DoS) attack experiments targeting at the 802.11 DCF and evaluated the effectiveness of such attacks on different configurations. The results show that any current or upcoming 802.11 standards would not provide adequate help to mitigate the risk of DoS attacks. Therefore, the 802.11-based wireless LANs should not be used in any environments where the requirement of network availability is essential. We have also analysed some countermeasures against such attacks.
Habitat Re-Creation (Ecological Restoration) as a Strategy for Conserving Insect Communities in Highly Fragmented Landscapes

Because of their vast diversity, measured by both numbers of species as well as life history traits, insects defy comprehensive conservation planning. Thus, almost all insect conservation efforts target individual species. However, serious insect conservation requires goals that are set at the faunal level and conservation success requires strategies that conserve intact communities. This task is complicated in agricultural landscapes by high levels of habitat fragmentation and isolation. In many regions, once widespread insect communities are now functionally trapped on islands of ecosystem remnants and subject to a variety of stressors associated with isolation, small population sizes and artificial population fragmentation. In fragmented landscapes ecological restoration can be an effective strategy for reducing localized insect extinction rates, but insects are seldom included in restoration design criteria. It is possible to incorporate a few simple conservation criteria into restoration designs that enhance impacts to entire insect communities. Restoration can be used as a strategy to address fragmentation threats to isolated insect communities if insect communities are incorporated at the onset of restoration planning. Fully incorporating insect communities into restoration designs may increase the cost of restoration two- to three-fold, but the benefits to biodiversity conservation and the ecological services provided by intact insect communities justify the cost.
Networked Sensing for Structural Health Monitoring

This paper describes an ongoing project investigating embedded networked sensing for structural health monitoring applications. The vision is of many low-power sensor “motes” embedded throughout the structure with a smaller number of nodes that can provide local excitation. The challenge is to develop both the networking algorithms to reliably communicate within the network, and distributed algorithms to monitor the state of the structure. A wireless data acquisition network is described, including the methods of storing and transmitting the data. A damage detection scheme is described that uses extremely low transmission bandwidth, and is shown to be effective in detecting damage in a simulated structure. Finally, a large-scale structural testbed that is being used for this project is described. The outcome of this work-in-progress is expected to be strong recommendations and algorithms for distributed wireless sensor/actuator structural health monitoring networks.
Frequent Pattern Mining in Web Log Data

Frequent pattern mining is a heavily researched area in the field of data mining with wide range of applications. One of them is to use frequent pattern discovery methods in Web log data. Discovering hidden information from Web log data is called Web usage mining. The aim of discovering frequent patterns in Web log data is to obtain information about the navigational behavior of the users. This can be used for advertising purposes, for creating dynamic user profiles etc. In this paper three pattern mining approaches are investigated from the Web usage mining point of view. The different patterns in Web log mining are page sets, page sequences and page graphs. The expansion of the World Wide Web (Web for short) has resulted in a large amount of data that is now in general freely available for user access. The different types of data have to be managed and organized in such a way that they can be accessed by different users efficiently. Therefore, the application of data mining techniques on the Web is now the focus of an increasing number of researchers. Several data mining methods are used to discover the hidden information in the Web. However, Web mining does not only mean applying data mining techniques to the data stored in the Web. The algorithms have to be modified such that they better suit the demands of the Web. New approaches should be used which better fit the properties of Web data. Furthermore, not only data mining algorithms, but also artificial intelligence, information retrieval and natural language processing techniques can be used efficiently. Thus, Web mining has been developed into an autonomous research area.
Intrinsic Cone Adaptation Modulates Feedback Efficiency from Horizontal Cells to Cones

Processing of visual stimuli by the retina changes strongly during light/dark adaptation. These changes are due to both local photoreceptor-based processes and to changes in the retinal network. The feedback pathway from horizontal cells to cones is known to be one of the pathways that is modulated strongly during adaptation. Although this phenomenon is well described, the mechanism for this change is poorly characterized. The aim of this paper is to describe the mechanism for the increase in efficiency of the feedback synapse from horizontal cells to cones. We show that a train of flashes can increase the feedback response from the horizontal cells, as measured in the cones, up to threefold. This process has a time constant of ∼3 s and can be attributed to processes intrinsic to the cones. It does not require dopamine, is not the result of changes in the kinetics of the cone light response and is not due to changes in horizontal cells themselves. During a flash train, cones adapt to the mean light intensity, resulting in a slight (4 mV) depolarization of the cones. The time constant of this depolarization is ∼3 s. We will show that at this depolarized membrane potential, a light-induced change of the cone membrane potential induces a larger change in the calcium current than in the unadapted condition. Furthermore, we will show that negative feedback from horizontal cells to cones can modulate the calcium current more efficiently at this depolarized cone membrane potential. The change in horizontal cell response properties during the train of flashes can be fully attributed to these changes in the synaptic efficiency. Since feedback has major consequences for the dynamic, spatial, and spectral processing, the described mechanism might be very important to optimize the retina for ambient light conditions.
The Synthetic Elicitor 2-(5-Bromo-2-Hydroxy-Phenyl)-Thiazolidine-4-Carboxylic Acid Links Plant Immunity to Hormesis1

Immunity triggered by high doses a and hormetic growth enhancement triggered by low doses of a synthetic elicitor doses are associated with distinct transcriptional profiles. Synthetic elicitors are drug-like compounds that induce plant immune responses but are structurally distinct from natural defense elicitors. Using high-throughput screening, we previously identified 114 synthetic elicitors that activate the expression of a pathogen-responsive reporter gene in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana). Here, we report on the characterization of one of these compounds, 2-(5-bromo-2-hydroxy-phenyl)-thiazolidine-4-carboxylic acid (BHTC). BHTC induces disease resistance of plants against bacterial, oomycete, and fungal pathogens and has a unique mode of action and structure. Surprisingly, we found that low doses of BHTC enhanced root growth in Arabidopsis, while high doses of this compound inhibited root growth, besides inducing defense. These effects are reminiscent of the hormetic response, which is characterized by low-dose stimulatory effects of a wide range of agents that are toxic or inhibitory at higher doses. Like its effects on defense, BHTC-induced hormesis in Arabidopsis roots is partially dependent on the WRKY70 transcription factor. Interestingly, BHTC-induced root hormesis is also affected in the auxin-response mutants axr1-3 and slr-1. By messenger RNA sequencing, we uncovered a dramatic difference between transcriptional profiles triggered by low and high doses of BHTC. Only high levels of BHTC induce typical defense-related transcriptional changes. Instead, low BHTC levels trigger a coordinated intercompartmental transcriptional response manifested in the suppression of photosynthesis- and respiration-related genes in the nucleus, chloroplasts, and mitochondria as well as the induction of development-related nuclear genes. Taken together, our functional characterization of BHTC links defense regulation to hormesis and provides a hypothetical transcriptional scenario for the induction of hormetic root growth.
Efficacy and Tolerance of Caudal Epidural Injection. A Retrospective Study of 201 Patients

Objective: Sacrococcygeal epidural (SE) injection is indicated for the relief of lumbo sciatic pain, but is not regularly performed in daily practice. The objective of this study was to evaluate the efficacy and tolerance of SE injections. Design: Retrospective study with a questionnaire sent to patients who underwent the procedure between January 2007 and September 2012. Results: A total of 558 patients (202 men: 36%) underwent the procedure. 57 were excluded from the study (28 for an incorrect postal address, 15 because they had died, 7 because no injection was administered, 5 for cognitive impairment and 2 who refused to respond). Among the 201 respondents (201/501: 40.1%), 53% (n=107) reported an improvement in pain, 64% in less than 5 days after the procedure (68/107), with pain relief lasting for over 6 months in 63% (65/104). 87 patients reported an improvement in walking (87/192: 45%) and in quality of life. Considering that all non-responders had an injection failure, we obtained 19% of success in our sample of 558 patients. The injection was well tolerated by 85% of patients (162/190). 37% of patients (72/194) experienced pain during the procedure, with a mean VAS pain score of 6.8 ± 2.5 mm. 53% (102/191) would agree to have a new injection. Conclusion: Sacrococcygeal epidural injection provided pain relief in more than half of patients and the procedure was well tolerated. This procedure merits a more prominent place in the management of symptomatic lumbar canal stenosis.
Comment on Global dynamics of biological systems

In a recent study, (Grigorov, 2006) analyzed temporal gene expression profiles (Arbeitman et al., 2002) generated in a Drosophila experiment using SSA in conjunction with Monte-Carlo SSA. The author (Grigorov, 2006) makes three important claims in his article, namely: Claim1: A new method based on the theory of nonlinear time series analysis is used to capture the global dynamics of the fruit-fly cycle temporal gene expression profiles. Claim 2: Flattening of a significant part of the eigen-spectrum confirms the hypothesis about an underly-ing high-dimensional chaotic generating process. Claim 3: Monte-Carlo SSA can be used to establish whether a given time series is distinguishable from any well-defined process including deterministic chaos. In this report we present fundamental concerns with respect to the above claims (Grigorov, 2006) in a systematic manner with simple examples. The discussion provided especially discourages the choice of SSA for inferring nonlinear dynamical structure form time series obtained in any biological paradigm.
BRIEF REPORTS Emotional Expression Modulates Perceived Gaze Direction

Gaze perception is an important social skill, as it portrays information about what another person is attending to. Gaze direction has been shown to affect interpretation of emotional expression. Here the authors investigate whether the emotional facial expression has a reciprocal influence on interpretation of gaze direction. In a forced-choice yes–no task, participants were asked to judge whether three faces expressing different emotions (anger, fear, happiness, and neutral) in different viewing angles were looking at them or not. Happy faces were more likely to be judged as looking at the observer than were angry, fearful, or neutral faces. Angry faces were more often judged as looking at the observer than were fearful and neutral expressions. These findings are discussed on the background of approach and avoidance orientation of emotions and of the self-referential positivity bias.
Towards thermally-aware design of 3D MPSoCs with inter-tier cooling

New tendencies envisage 3D Multi-Processor System-On-Chip (MPSoC) design as a promising solution to keep increasing the performance of the next-generation high-performance computing (HPC) systems. However, as the power density of HPC systems increases with the arrival of 3D MPSoCs, supplying electrical power to the computing equipment and constantly removing the generated heat is rapidly becoming the dominant cost in any HPC facility. Thus, both power and thermal/cooling implications play a major role in the design of new HPC systems, given the energy constraints in our society. Therefore, EPFL, IBM and ETHZ have been working within the CMOSAIC Nano-Tera.ch program project in the last three years on the development of a holistic thermally-aware design. This paper presents the exploration in CMOSAIC of novel cooling technologies, as well as suitable thermal modeling and system-level design methods, which are all necessary to develop 3D MPSoCs with inter-tier liquid cooling systems. As a result, we develop energy-efficient run-time thermal control strategies to achieve energy-efficient cooling mechanisms to compress almost 1 Tera nano-sized functional units into one cubic centimeter with a 10 to 100 fold higher connectivity than otherwise possible. The proposed thermally-aware design paradigm includes exploring the synergies of hardware-, software- and mechanical-based thermal control techniques as a fundamental step to design 3D MPSoCs for HPC systems. More precisely, we target the use of inter-tier coolants ranging from liquid water and two-phase refrigerants to novel engineered environmentally friendly nano-fluids, as well as using specifically designed micro-channel arrangements, in combination with the use of dynamic thermal management at system-level to tune the flow rate of the coolant in each micro-channel to achieve thermally-balanced 3D-ICs. Our management strategy prevents the system from surpassing the given threshold temperature while achieving up to 67% reduction in cooling energy and up to 30% reduction in system-level energy in comparison to setting the flow rate at the maximum value to handle the worst-case temperature.
Comparison of Yeasts as Hosts for Recombinant Protein Production

Recombinant protein production emerged in the early 1980s with the development of genetic engineering tools, which represented a compelling alternative to protein extraction from natural sources. Over the years, a high level of heterologous protein was made possible in a variety of hosts ranging from the bacteria Escherichia coli to mammalian cells. Recombinant protein importance is represented by its market size, which reached $1654 million in 2016 and is expected to reach $2850.5 million by 2022. Among the available hosts, yeasts have been used for producing a great variety of proteins applied to chemicals, fuels, food, and pharmaceuticals, being one of the most used hosts for recombinant production nowadays. Historically, Saccharomyces cerevisiae was the dominant yeast host for heterologous protein production. Lately, other yeasts such as Komagataella sp. , Kluyveromyces lactis, and Yarrowia lipolytica have emerged as advantageous hosts. In this review, a comparative analysis is done listing the advantages and disadvantages of using each host regarding the availability of genetic tools, strategies for cultivation in bioreactors, and the main techniques utilized for protein purification. Finally, examples of each host will be discussed regarding the total amount of protein recovered and its bioactivity due to correct folding and glycosylation patterns.
A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF WEB DOCUMENT CLASSIFICATION APPROACHES

With the continuous growth in the World Wide Web, the need arises for indexing and classifying Web documents for fast retrieval of relevant informatio n accessible through it. Traditionally, classificatio n has been accomplished manually. A recent study revealed that, there exist about 29.7 billion pages on the Web in February 2007, which means that manual classification would be infeasible and reflects the need for automated techniques for accomplishing thi s task. Though Web documents should follow the basic definitions on Hypertext Markup Language, they are known to be unstructured or semi-structured, which imposes new challenges to Web classification especially in the area of feature selection. The objective of this paper is to investigate Web document classification approaches, and compare between recent techniques proved promising in literature within this field. Traditionally, automa tic classification is performed by extracting informati on for representing a web document from the document hypertext itself. Several approaches are used for W eb classification; the simplest one uses text features only, known as Text-Only approach. Other approaches include Hypertext approach, Link Analysis approach, and Neighborhood Category approach, depending on the type of context features used. Techniques used with each approach as we as their result, and a final conclusion will be presen t d.
DYNAMICAL SIMULATION OF NUCLEAR "PASTA": SOFT CONDENSED MATTER IN DENSE STARS

More than twenty years ago, it was predicted that nuclei can adopt interesting shapes, such as rods or slabs, etc., in the cores of supernova e and the crusts of neutron stars. These non-spherical nuclei are referred to as nuclea r “pasta. ” In recent years, we have been studying the dynamics of the pasta phases using a method called quantum molecular dynamics (QMD) and have opened up a new aspect of study for this system. Our findings include: dynamica l formation of the pasta phases by cooling down the hot uniform nuclear matter; phase diagrams in the density versus temperature plane; structural transitions between the pasta phases induced by compression and elucidation of the mechanism by which they proceed. In the present article, we give an overview of the basic physics and astrophysics of the pasta phases and review our works for readers in other fields.
Performance comparison among neural decision feedback equalizers

Neural networks add flexibility to the design of equalizers for digital communications. In this work novel decision-feedback (DF) neural equalizers (DFNE) are introduced and compared with classical DF equalizers and Viterbi demodulators. It is shown that the choice of a cost functional based on the discriminative learning, coupled with a fast training paradigm, can provide neural equalizers that out perform the standard DF equalizer at practical signal to noise ratio. Resulting architectures are competitive with the Viterbi solution from cost performance aspects.
Not All Is Gold That Glitters: Response Time & Satisfaction Rates in Yahoo! Answers

This study investigates two questions concerning question-and-answer sites. We analyzed data from "Yahoo! Answers", including 19 months and over 20 million interactions per month. The first question investigates the differences in response time and in the average number of answers between anasker's ranking of "Best Answer" (BA) and the community's BA. The second question concerns the impact of an explicit network on several implicit network activities. The results imply that askers use response time as a parameter to choose the BA, whereas the community chooses the BA with no regard to Answer Response Time (ART). Another finding implies that if the answerer is not listed in the asker's "explicit network, " it might result in longer ranking (award) time and in a slightly decreased number of answer stars (satisfaction-rate indicator). And yet, one result might be surprising. Being a "fan" of the asker implies a long response time to the question. This finding might contradict the intuition that our friends are the first to provide answers to our questions. Several explanations of this result from different research fields are suggested in the discussion.
Towards Autonomic MuniSocket 1

MuniSocket (Multiple-Network-Interface Socket) provides mechanisms to enhance communication performance properties such as throughput, transfer time, and reliability by utilizing existing multiple network interface cards between a pair of computers. Although the MuniSocket model has some communication performance advantages over the regular socket, it has a number of usability drawbacks including the complexity of connection establishment configuration, configuration for good communication performance, and configuration for communication fault tolerance. This paper discusses some enhancements for MuniSocket using autonomic communication techniques. These techniques are self-configuration, selfoptimization, and self-healing. While these techniques enhance communication performance among computers, they also reduce the complexity of configuring MuniSockets.
Screening and Identification for Immunological Active Components from Andrographis Herba Using Macrophage Biospecific Extraction Coupled with UPLC/Q-TOF-MS

The method of cell biospecific extraction coupled with UPLC/Q-TOF-MS has been developed as a tool for the screening and identification of potential immunological active components from Andrographis Herba (AH). In our study, a macrophage cell line (RAW264.7) was used to extract cell-combining compounds from the ethanol extract of AH. The cell binding system was then analyzed and identified by UPLC/Q-TOF-MS analysis. Finally, nine compounds, which could combine with macrophages, in an ethanol extract of AH were detected by comparing basic peak intensity (BPI) profiles of macrophages before and after treatment with AH. Then they were identified as Andrographidine E (1), Andrographidine D (2), Neoandrographolide (3), Dehydroandrographolide (4), 5, 7, 2′, 3′-tetramethoxyflavone (5), β-sitosterol (7), 5-hydroxy-7, 2′, 3′-trimethoxyflavone (8) and 5-hydroxy-7, 8, 2′, 3′-tetramethoxyflavone (9), which could classified into five flavonoids, three diterpene lactones, and one sterol. Their structures were recognized by their characteristic fragment ions and fragmentations pattern of diterpene lactones and flavonoids. Additionally, the activity of compounds 3, 4, and 7 was tested in vitro. Results showed that these three compounds could decrease the release of NO (p < 0.01) in macrophages remarkably. Moreover, 3, 4, and 7 showed satisfactory dose-effect relationships and their IC50 values were 9.03, 18.18, and 13.76 μg/mL, respectively. This study is the first reported work on the screening of immunological active components from AH. The potential immunological activity of flavonoids from AH has not been reported previously.