Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Call by Contract for Cryptographic Protocols

Abstract : A compositional approach to protocol design and analysis is recognized as advantageous. We wish to perform design decomposition in a way that permits independent design and verification of components, and preserves security and correctness goals when the components are recombined. There are many different ways in which composition can be interpreted and implemented. Our version of composition applies to the design of secure protocols. Our objective is to extend verification techniques based on abstract encryption models to protocols that incorporate or implement encapsulated services. One use for such services is to invoke computations that are not included in the vocabulary of operations built into the protocol specification language, such as the special operations of a Trusted Platform Module or some other specialized cryptographic application interface. Another use is to allow flexibility in the choice of means to implement an operation. For a public-key lookup, for example, there may be two alternative services, one that fetches a locally cached certificate, and another that initiates a protocol with a directory server to retrieve one. A service might even establish a shared session key between two parties who have already begun a protocol. With encapsulation of services, we can create and maintain a library of services that could be shared by all protocol processes running on the same system. The service library can be updated with improved implementations without disturbing existing protocols, and new services can be added at any time for use by future protocols. New services can also be used by older protocols if they extend older services, that is, if their functionality is more general or their input requirements are less strict.
Top-k densest subgraphs in sliding-window graph streams

Given a large graph, the densest-subgraph problem asks to find a subgraph with maximum average degree. When considering the top-k version of this problem, a naive solution is to iteratively find the densest subgraph and remove it in each iteration. However, such a solution is impractical due to high processing cost. The problem is further complicated when dealing with dynamic graphs, since adding or removing an edge requires re-running the algorithm. In this paper, we study the top-k densest subgraph problem in the sliding-window model and propose an efficient fully-dynamic algorithm. The input of our algorithm consists of an edge stream, and the goal is to find the node-disjoint subgraphs that maximize the sum of their densities. In contrast to existing state-of-the-art solutions that require iterating over the entire graph upon any update, our algorithm profits from the observation that updates only affect a limited region of the graph. Therefore, the top-k densest subgraphs are maintained by only applying local updates. We provide a theoretical analysis of the proposed algorithm and show empirically that the algorithm often generates denser subgraphs than state-of-the-art competitors. Experiments show an improvement in efficiency of up to three to five orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art solutions.
Ethics and Water Governance

Ethics and values are important dimensions of water governance. We show how a "values approach" contributes to an understanding of global water governance, and how it complements other perspectives on governance, namely management, institutional capacity, and social-ecological systems. We connect these other approaches to their own value systems and the ethical attitudes they engender. We then offer a way to explicitly incorporate, and where necessary adjudicate, competing value systems through a values-based approach to governance. A case of the Santa Fe River in New Mexico, USA illustrates how value systems are reflected in water policies and how these values affect governance priorities, such as in environmental flows. The values-based approach clarifies tacit values and creates space to align local values with those needed for effective water governance at the global level.
La maîtrise du slack budgétaire : une analyse autour des théories de la déviance et de la criminologie : Le cas d'une entreprise de distribution

Les travaux effectues a ce jour, temoignent de toute la complexite de la dynamique sous-jacente a la creation de slack budgetaire. Les resultats divergents, complementaires et parfois meme contradictoires des differentes recherches sur ses determinants temoignent de l‟existence d‟un reseau d‟influences impliquant a la fois des facteurs personnels organisationnels et contextuels. Ce phenomene peut etre considere comme une forme de deviance. Ses consequences sont ambivalentes, il est source de dysfonctionnement et le moteur de l‟innovation et du progres constant. Selon cette perspective le role du controle est de le piloter. A partir d‟une observation participante au niveau du controle de gestion d‟une societe de distribution, nous nous sommes interroges sur les moyens de maitrise du slack budgetaire. En prenant comme cadre d‟analyse les theories de la deviance et de la criminologie, nous etudions le phenomene de creation de slack budgetaire selon quatre axes d‟analyse : la norme de slack, la transgression, la detection et la sanction. Cette these a pour objectif de comprendre de quelle maniere le slack budgetaire est maitrise a travers l‟etude longitudinale d‟un cas. Elle developpe une approche multidisciplinaire en utilisant les apports theoriques et methodologiques des sciences humaines.
Depressive symptoms in Parkinson's disease are related to reduced [123I]FP-CIT binding in the caudate nucleus

Background Depression is a common neuropsychiatric symptom in Parkinson's disease (PD). In previous research, PD-related depression was associated with striatal dopaminergic deficits, presumably due to degeneration of brainstem dopaminergic projections. Segregated areas of the striatum are crucially involved in various parallelly arranged cortical-striatal-thalamocortical circuits and serve functions in, among others, motor control or emotion. This suggests regional specificity of dopaminergic deficits in the striatum in motor and depressive symptoms in PD. Methods In this cross-sectional retrospective study, we correlated severity scores of depressive and motor symptoms in 100 non-demented PD patients (median Hoehn & Yahr stage: 2) with dopamine loss in specific regions of the striatum as measured by [123I]FP-CIT SPECT tracer binding to the dopamine transporter (DaT). Results Depressive symptoms were related to lower DaT binding in the right caudate nucleus, while motor symptoms were associated with decreased DaT binding in the right putamen. This double dissociation was most pronounced in early-stage PD patients. Conclusions These results suggest that depressive symptoms in PD are associated with dopamine loss in the caudate nucleus, possibly related to degeneration of dopaminergic projections from the ventral tegmental area, while motor symptoms are associated with low dopamine signalling to the putamen and loss of nigrostriatal projections. This is consistent with the neuroanatomy of partially segregated cortical-striatal-thalamocortical circuits and supports the role of dysfunctional associative and motivational circuits in PD-related depression.
Are you looking at me? Eye contact and desktop video conferencing

Mutual gaze is an important conversational resource, but is difficult to provide using conventional video conferencing equipment due to the disparity between the position of the camera and the position of the eyes on the screen. Various elaborate inventions have been proposed to get around this problem but none have found wide use. The alternative explored here is that these expensive alternatives may be unnecessary. Users of conventional desktop video equipment may, under the right conditions, be able to learn to interpret what is at first sight inappropriate apparent gaze direction as signalling that the other person is "looking at me. "Data are presented from two experiments where an estimator judges where a gazer is looking. The gazer may be looking either at the desktop video image of the estimator or some point to the side. Experiment 1 compared two image sizes and two camera positions. While the size of the image (352 × 288 pixels versus 176 × 144) had no significant effect on participants' ability to judge where the gazer was looking, horizontally offsetting the position of the camera inhibited performance. Experiment 2 examined the effect of reducing the image size further. The smallest image size (88 × 72 pixels) resulted in poorer performance than the intermediate (176 × 144). The results show that it is possible for users of low cost desktop video conferencing to learn to interpret gaze direction to a very high degree of accuracy if the equipment is configured optimally. The practical and theoretical implications of these results are discussed.
Scalable Routing in Sensor Actuator Networks with Churn

Routing in wireless networks is inherently difficult since their network topologies are typically unstructured and unstable. Therefore, many routing protocols for ad-hoc networks and sensor networks revert to flooding to acquire routes to previously unknown destinations. However, such an approach does not scale to large networks, especially when nodes need to communicate with many different destinations. This paper advocates a novel approach, the scalable source routing (SSR) protocol. It combines overlay-like routing in a virtual network structure with source routing in the physical network structure. As a consequence, SSR can efficiently provide the routing semantics of a structured routing overlay, making it an efficient basis for the scalable implementation of fully decentralized applications. In T. Fuhrmann (2005) it has been demonstrated that SSR can almost entirely avoid flooding, thus leading to a both memory and message efficient routing mechanism for large unstructured networks. This paper extends SSR to unstable networks, i. e. networks with churn where nodes frequently join and leave, the latter potentially ungracefully
Investigation and Review of Embedded Events in Public Video Datasets

This paper aims to pre-study on finding events embedded in recent video datasets and transforming them into verbs. To this end, we need to look over conventional video datasets for human action and activity and then analyze the events embedded in video datasets. Finally we should also allow for transformation from events to verbs. As an early stage for this purpose, we investigate conventional and recently available visual datasets and analyze activities or actions embedded in those datasets in this paper.
Major components associated with Green Networking in Information Communication Technology systems

According to a number of studies, Information Communication Technology(ICT) alone is responsible for a percentage which varies from 2% to 10% of the world power consumption, due to the ever increasing diffusion of electronic devices. Communication networks, including the Internet and wireless networks, represent a non-negligible part of the energy consumption of ICT. In addition, the carbon footprint of ICT devices due to energy consumption and the activities related to their entire lifecycle contributes to global warming. Green Network Technology is one such technology which specializes in end user management and energy conservation across IT networks. It is committed to reducing operating costs across any company's network and minimizing its impact on the environment whilst delivering a swift return on investment. Green Networking covers all aspects of the network (personal computers, peripherals, switches, routers, and communication media). Energy efficiencies of all network components must be optimized to have a significant impact on the overall energy consumption by these components. Consequently, these efficiencies gained by having a Green Network will reduce CO2 emissions and thus will help mitigate global warming. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the components must be considered. LCA is the valuation of the environmental impacts on a product from cradle to grave. New ICT technologies must be explored and the benefits of these technologies must be assessed in terms of energy efficiencies and their associated benefits in minimizing the environmental impact of ICT. In context to Green Networking many companies are working on the same technology such as worldwide leader in networking i.e. Cisco says that “Everything Connected to the Network Can Be Greener with Cisco Energy Wise”.
Learning Sessions Tracking Methodology in relation to its Learning Scenario

In the context of learning activity, which is supported by a system, it is important to have a feedback on the actors' usage of the learning system. The feedback is given especially by tracks [1]. In our research activities, we think that it is interesting to propose a methodology, which describe how to put in place a whole of organization, which facilitate and allow the tracking of an implemented or a described learning scenario. In this paper, we will show that such an approach is interesting.
Utilization of wireless sensor network for health monitoring in home environment

The health care costs in developed countries are increasing fast due to the aging of the population. In-home monitoring of health is becoming more and more attractive both because of expected cost-savings and technical development of suitable measurement devices and wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we present on-going work about embedding health monitoring devices into ordinary homes. The developed system is targeted both for monitoring elderly and for monitoring rehabilitation after hospitalization period. The paper presents the utilized sensor network implementation, chosen set of sensors for the first test trial, as well as other design choices for the trial. In addition, further objectives about concentrating on one special case, the ubiquitous heart rate measurement, are discussed. Our objective is to install several non-contact heart rate monitors into a home environment. The designed system performed well during the trial. However, some issues, such as sensor addressing in WSN and user identification, will be better taken into account in the next trials.
On the Synchronization Mechanisms in Distributed Shared Memory Systems

Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) is the implementation of the shared memory programming paradigm on a distributed memory (or multicomputer) system. Programming multicomputer systems using Distributed Shared Memory as the programming model is appealing because it combines the performance advantage of distributed memory systems and the ease of programming of shared memory systems. In DSM systems, cooperating tasks communicate with one another through shared variables. Thus, DSM systems must provide synchronization mechanisms to Coordinate concurrent access to these shared variables. In this paper we describe and classify the synchronization mechanisms supported by several Distributed Shared Memory systems. We classify these systems according to whether they are hardware or software based, whether the mechanism is integrated into the system or not and whether implementation of the synchronization mechanism is centralized or distributed.
A decision support tool to optimize scheduling of IT changes

Change management is one of the most critical processes in IT management. Some of the reasons are the sheer number of changes and the difficulty of evaluating the impact of changes on the IT services being provided. Through carrying out a survey with IT managers and practitioners, we have found that, among the activities performed during change management, change scheduling (allocating changes to change windows) is the most problematic one. In this paper we solve the change scheduling problem by using a business-driven approach that evaluates the impact of a change schedule in terms of the financial loss imposed on the service provider. Toward this aim, we model the impact of SLA violations when the implementation of changes is done after their deadline. A change scheduling optimization problem is then formalized and its solution is applied to a typical scenario. The results show that optimizing the scheduling of changes can result in significant savings to an IT support organization.
Self checking FIFO queue

The advances in VLSI technology have made many changes not only in the architecture of computer and digital systems, but also in the amount of hardware that can be implemented in a single chip which makes it possible to include the entire system in single chip. But as the scale of integration has increased so also has the occurrence of intermittent faults. The detection of intermittent faults requires the use of concurrent error detection CED (coding) techniques. This paper investigates the use of Berger code as a mean of incorporating CED into a self checking FIFO queue.
A portable modular system for automatic acquisition of 3D objects

A modular system which is able to reconstruct the 3D surface of an object is presented here, if has a three level architecture. The first level is devoted to the acquisition of a set of 3D points over the surface (digitisation), the second level constructs the 3D surface in the form of a mesh, filtering the measurement noise. In the third level a bitmap of the surface, obtained from a snapshot, is projected over the 3D mesh to obtain a highly realistic 3D model. This instrument improves the commercial available scanners in two main aspects. The digitiser proves highly flexible and it can easily accommodate objects of different dimension. The construction of the mesh and the filtering of the digitisation noise is carried in a single step through an algorithm which can be parallelised to work in real time. When the spot detection will be transferred to a standard graphic board and the mesh construction over a dedicated (FPGA) board, this instrument shall be seen as a standard input device of next generation graphical workstations.
Problems Within Families With Patients With Dementia

Abstract Dementia in later age is an extreme hardship for the affected families. More than 90% of these patients in Bulgaria live with their families. The results from the conducted study pointed out that a big share of the specific problems of these families is related to the lack of communication skills on the part of the relatives of the patient. This was to a great extent due to the lack of information on the characteristics of the process of dementia as well as on the concurrent personality changes in the patient. This article reviews the main difficulties of the families in taking care of patients with dementia as well as clarifies appropriate psychological forms of support aimed at lowering the family distress originating from the disease.
From Ages 27 to 72: Career and Personal Development of a Productive Counselor Over the Life Span

Interviews of productive counselors usually do not capture their adult life span in depth. This article examines the life of a prolific counselor over 5 decades in context and through the theories of personal and career development formulated by Erikson (1994) and Super (1980). It looks biographically at his life and its challenges as well as resolutions to difficulties he faced in the process. Lessons that have universal application are highlighted.
Assessment of micro loan payment using structured data mining techniques: the case of Indonesian People' credit bank

 Abstract— Providing financial service to Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in Indonesia presents a challenge for small rural banks such as People' Credit Banks. These banks are required to infer risks about customers' loan repayment from structured (quantitative, financial) and unstructured (qualitative, non-financial) type of credit information. In this study, the complex nature of credit related information is contextualised and represented in domain specific way using the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). An approach that enables the application of wider selections of data mining techniques on XML data is utilized. Experiments are performed using real world credit data obtained from an Indonesian bank. The results demonstrate the potential of the approach to generate reliable and valid patterns useful for evaluation of existing lending policy.
Security and Peace in the Middle East. Experiments with Democracy in an Islamic World

Abstract : In this excellent essay Lt Col David G. Curdy examines the prospects for democratic transitions in the Middle East. He notes that with the conclusion of the cold war, the basis for US Middle East policy, which had centered around oil, Israel, and the Soviet Union, should be reexamined and, perhaps, redesigned. Moreover, major political events stemming from the 199-91 Gulf War have reenergized efforts to implement democratic processes within the region. Colonel Curdy argues that the West has generally held the view that democracy and Islam are mutually exclusive and incompatible. However, he notes that the Islam-based traditions of consultation, consensus, and independent judgment are being used today to legitimize the rise of democracy in a number of Arab states. In opposition to this democratizing trend is the rise of Islamic radicalism which rejects evolutionary political change and liberal political formulas. The clash of these two approaches will severely test US policy in the Middle East. Contemporaneous with these political currents is a new phase in resolving the decades-old Palestinian- Israeli conflict. The Palestinians' struggle to create a democratic identity will be key in establishing their economic vitality and in reassuring Israelis that a Palestinian state will not be a security threat. Colonel Curdy concludes that the future challenge for the US will be to foster the view among Arab states that the US favors democratization based on Islamic traditions, rather than the imposition of Western democratic institutions on our Muslim friends. When democratic Arab nations can coexist with Israel, the US will have contributed to a basis for regional peace and stability that it has long sought, both as an ideal in itself and as instrumental to America's continuing access to Middle East oil and markets.
The translation and psychometric evaluation of the Vietnamese version of the Aggression Scale

ABSTRACT The Aggression Scale (AS) measures overt aggressive adolescent behaviour including physical and verbal aggression and anger. In the current study, psychometric properties of the Vietnamese version of the AS were evaluated in 411 adolescents (Mage = 14.00, SDage = 1.12; 47.2% boys). Test-retest reliability was calculated in 184 participants. Among five models tested, confirmatory factor analysis supported the second-order factor solution with three first-order factors (Physical Aggression, Verbal Aggression and Anger) all loading on one general factor. Internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and convergent, divergent validity of the total scale were satisfactory. In conclusion, the Vietnamese AS is a reliable and valid measure of aggressive behaviour in Vietnamese adolescents.