Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Trusted Overlay Networks for Robust Privacy-Protecting Communication

This paper presents STONe, Secure Trusted Overlay Network, a novel robust network infrastructure that provides privacypreserving communication. STONe is the first network architecture based on attestation and strong process isolation in Trusted Computing. Using these features to protect the network stack against Byzantine failures, STONe is able to establish different protection techniques against common network attacks like denial-of-service, malicious routing updates or phishing attacks that disrupt network services and also intrude privacy. Further, to enhance privacy within the network it establishes novel measures against one of the most powerful attacks on privacy – traffic analysis. STONe makes three main contributions. First, STONe uses Trusted Computing to protect against Byzantine Failures on the network stack to provide an overlay network for scalable, efficient secure routing and end-to-end communication. Second, it is the first system to provide anonymous routing through load-balancing by random routing to preserve communication anonymity against a traffic analysis adversary. Third, on the application-level STONe provides trusted anonymous sockets (STONe Sockets) and a Trusted Name Service (TNS), an inexpensive trusted certification mechanism with one-way per-session authentication. Thus, it preserves privacy on the application-level and makes it hard for Internet spoofs like phishing to succeed. We implemented and evaluated a prototype of STONe on PlanetLab and show that it achieves its goals with reasonable impact on performance.
Disclosure , Initiative and Regulation

We present a model in which an entrepreneur who needs to raise funds in order to finance a project chooses what level of disclosure his firm will abide to. The disclosure level is assumed to make a proportion of the cash flows verifiable and hence functions as a mechanism for the entrepreneur to credibly commit not to expropriate investors. The model predicts that less than complete disclosure may be optimal if the entrepreneur’s initiative is valuable. If the entrepreneur is not the sole residual claimant then disclosure regulation will be welfare enhancing. If firms vary significantly in size then large firms that experience decreasing returns to scale will find it optimal to cross-list their shares in order to comply with stricter disclosure levels. This implies that having multiple disclosure levels within an economy is advatageous. Giving the manager a wage is not a perfect substitute for disclosure rules.
Using Network Attack Graph to Predict the Future Attacks

An intrusion detection system (IDS) generates alerts indicating what malicious behaviors are going on against the protected network system. When comparing the real-time reported IDS alerts with the network attack graph which provides all possible sequences of exploits that an intruder may use to penetrate the system, some prediction on future attacks can be made. In this paper we proposed a novel approach to predicting future attacks. First an attack graph is generated through data mining and the predictability of every attack scenario which represents how probable there would be oncoming attacks following the attack scenario can be estimated. Then in real-time intrusion detection environment the IDS alerts are correlated into attack scenarios and ranked by their predictability scores. Finally the attack scenarios with high predictability are used as the evidence to make prediction on future attacks. The effectiveness of the approach has been validated with a honeynet system.
Introduction to case, animacy and semantic roles

The organization of this introductory chapter is as follows. In Section 2, the multifaceted nature of the title concepts will be discussed. Section 3 deals with semantic roles and cases. This means that we will briefly discuss some relevant aspects of how semantic roles can be coded by cases as well as adpositions, wherever the dividing line can be drawn. Section 4 is devoted to discussing the interplay between animacy and semantic roles. It will be shown that certain roles are more readily borne by animate entities, while others are rather seen as inanimate roles, which can be easily accounted for by the nature of the roles. Section 5 deals with animacy and case and shows how certain cases occur typically with animate nouns, while others are more common with inanimate arguments. Finally, Section 6 provides a brief introduction to the individual chapters in this book.
BIOMETRIC IDENTIFICATION USING PALMPRINT LOCAL FEATURES ∗

In the networked society there are a great number of systems that need biometric identification, so it has become an important issue in our days. This identification can be based on palmprint features. In this work we present a biometric identification system based on palmprint local features. For this purpose, we have compared the error rate (ER) of 3 different preprocessing methods.
Interactions between PPAR Gamma and the Canonical Wnt/Beta-Catenin Pathway in Type 2 Diabetes and Colon Cancer

In both colon cancer and type 2 diabetes, metabolic changes induced by upregulation of the Wnt/beta-catenin signaling and downregulation of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPAR gamma) may help account for the frequent association of these two diseases. In both diseases, PPAR gamma is downregulated while the canonical Wnt/beta-catenin pathway is upregulated. In colon cancer, upregulation of the canonical Wnt system induces activation of pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase and deactivation of the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex. As a result, a large part of cytosolic pyruvate is converted into lactate through activation of lactate dehydrogenase. Lactate is extruded out of the cell by means of activation of monocarboxylate lactate transporter-1. This phenomenon is called Warburg effect. PPAR gamma agonists induce beta-catenin inhibition, while inhibition of the canonical Wnt/beta-catenin pathway activates PPAR gamma.
Proximity data-loggers increase the quantity and quality of social network data

Social network analysis is an ideal quantitative tool for advancing our understanding of complex social behaviour. However, this approach is often limited by the challenges of accurately characterizing social structure and measuring network heterogeneity. Technological advances have facilitated the study of social networks, but to date, all such work has focused on large vertebrates. Here, we provide proof of concept for using proximity data-logging to quantify the frequency of social interactions, construct weighted networks and characterize variation in the social behaviour of a lek-breeding bird, the wire-tailed manakin, Pipra filicauda. Our results highlight how this approach can ameliorate the challenges of social network data collection and analysis by concurrently improving data quality and quantity.
A Closed System of Production Possibility and Social Welfare

We offer a closed system production possibility and social welfare system that can be modelled using virtually any available software package. It has the attribute that social welfare is not independent of production possibilities. The closure is made using the famous result by Negishi (1960) for a purely competitive economy. The goal is to help students to understand the interaction, through experimentation, between production and social choice in a competitive economy.
PerfCompass: Toward Runtime Performance Anomaly Fault Localization for Infrastructure-as-a-Service Clouds

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds are becoming widely adopted. However, as multiple tenants share the same physical resources, performance anomalies have become one of the top concerns for users. Unfortunately, performance anomaly diagnosis in the production IaaS cloud often takes a long time due to its inherent complexity and sharing nature. In this paper, we present PerfCompass, a runtime performance anomaly fault localization tool using online system call trace analysis techniques. Specifically, PerfCompass tackles a challenging fault localization problem for IaaS clouds, that is, differentiating whether a production-run performance anomaly is caused by an external fault (e.g., interference from other co-located applications) or an internal fault (e.g., software bug). PerfCompass does not require any application source code or runtime instrumentation, which makes it practical for production IaaS clouds. We have tested PerfCompass using a set of popular software systems (e.g., Apache, MySQL, Squid, Cassandra, Hadoop) and a range of common cloud environment issues and real software bugs. The results show that PerfCompass accurately diagnoses all the faults while imposing low overhead during normal application execution time.
Catching Fire via "Likes": Inferring Topic Preferences of Trump Followers on Twitter

In this paper, we propose a framework to infer the topic preferences of Donald Trump's followers on Twitter. We first use latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to derive the weighted mixture of topics for each Trump tweet. Then we use negative binomial regression to model the "likes," with the weights of each topic serving as explanatory variables. Our study shows that attacking Democrats such as President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earns Trump the most "likes. " Our framework of inference is generalizable to the study of other politicians.
A reversible high embedding capacity data hiding technique for hiding secret data in images

As the multimedia and internet technologies are growing fast, the transmission of digital media plays an important role in communication. The various digital media like audio, video and images are being transferred through internet. There are a lot of threats for the digital data that are transferred through internet. Also, a number of security techniques have been employed to protect the data that is transferred through internet. This paper proposes a new technique for sending secret messages securely, using steganographic technique. Since the proposed system uses multiple level of security for data hiding, where the data is hidden in an image file and the stego file is again concealed in another image. Previously, the secret message is being encrypted with the encryption algorithm which ensures the achievement of high security enabled data transfer through internet.
The Effect of a Bile Acid Sequestrant on Glucose Metabolism in Subjects With Type 2 Diabetes

We designed an experiment to examine the effect of bile acid sequestration with Colesevelam on fasting and postprandial glucose metabolism in type 2 diabetes. To do so, we tested the hypothesis that Colesevelam increases the disposition index (DI), and this increase is associated with increased glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) concentrations. Thirty-eight subjects on metformin monotherapy were studied using a double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group design. Subjects were studied before and after 12 weeks of Colesevelam or placebo using a labeled triple-tracer mixed meal to measure the rate of meal appearance (Meal Ra), endogenous glucose production (EGP), and glucose disappearance (Rd). Insulin sensitivity and β-cell responsivity indices were estimated using the oral minimal model and then used to calculate DI. Therapy with Colesevelam was associated with a decrease in fasting (7.0 ± 0.2 vs. 6.6 ± 0.2 mmol/L; P = 0.004) and postprandial glucose concentrations (3,145 ± 138 vs. 2,896 ± 127 mmol/6 h; P = 0.01) in the absence of a change in insulin concentrations. Minimal model–derived indices of insulin secretion and action were unchanged. Postprandial GLP-1 concentrations were not altered by Colesevelam. Although EGP and Rd were unchanged, integrated Meal Ra was decreased by Colesevelam (5,191 ± 204 vs. 5,817 ± 204 μmol/kg/6 h; P = 0.04), suggesting increased splanchnic sequestration of meal-derived glucose.
Evolutionary Relationships and Systematics of the Alphaviruses

ABSTRACT Partial E1 envelope glycoprotein gene sequences and complete structural polyprotein sequences were used to compare divergence and construct phylogenetic trees for the genus Alphavirus. Tree topologies indicated that the mosquito-borne alphaviruses could have arisen in either the Old or the New World, with at least two transoceanic introductions to account for their current distribution. The time frame for alphavirus diversification could not be estimated because maximum-likelihood analyses indicated that the nucleotide substitution rate varies considerably across sites within the genome. While most trees showed evolutionary relationships consistent with current antigenic complexes and species, several changes to the current classification are proposed. The recently identified fish alphaviruses salmon pancreas disease virus and sleeping disease virus appear to be variants or subtypes of a new alphavirus species. Southern elephant seal virus is also a new alphavirus distantly related to all of the others analyzed. Tonate virus and Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus strain 78V3531 also appear to be distinct alphavirus species based on genetic, antigenic, and ecological criteria. Trocara virus, isolated from mosquitoes in Brazil and Peru, also represents a new species and probably a new alphavirus complex.
Multimodal image coregistration and inducible selective cell ablation to evaluate imaging ligands

We combined multimodal imaging (bioluminescence, X-ray computed tomography, and PET), tomographic reconstruction of bioluminescent sources, and two unique, complementary models to evaluate three previously synthesized PET radiotracers thought to target pancreatic beta cells. The three radiotracers {[18F]fluoropropyl-(+)-dihydrotetrabenazine ([18F]FP-DTBZ), [18F](+)-2-oxiranyl-3-isobutyl-9-(3-fluoropropoxy)-10-methoxy-2,3,4,6,7,11b-hexahydro-1H-pyrido[2,1-a]isoquinoline (18F-AV-266), and (2S,3R,11bR)-9-(3-fluoropropoxy)-2-(hydroxymethyl)-3-isobutyl-10-methoxy-2,3,4,6,7,11b-hexahydro-1H-pyrido[2,1-a]isoquinolin-2-ol (18F-AV-300)} bind vesicular monoamine transporter 2. Tomographic reconstruction of the bioluminescent signal in mice expressing luciferase only in pancreatic beta cells was used to delineate the pancreas and was coregistered with PET and X-ray computed tomography images. This strategy enabled unambiguous identification of the pancreas on PET images, permitting accurate quantification of the pancreatic PET signal. We show here that, after conditional, specific, and rapid mouse beta-cell ablation, beta-cell loss was detected by bioluminescence imaging but not by PET imaging, given that the pancreatic signal provided by three PET radiotracers was not altered. To determine whether these ligands bound human beta cells in vivo, we imaged mice transplanted with luciferase-expressing human islets. The human islets were imaged by bioluminescence but not with the PET ligands, indicating that these vesicular monoamine transporter 2-directed ligands did not specifically bind beta cells. These data demonstrate the utility of coregistered multimodal imaging as a platform for evaluation and validation of candidate ligands for imaging islets.
Pituitary Androgen Receptor Signalling Regulates Prolactin but Not Gonadotrophins in the Male Mouse

Production of the androgen testosterone is controlled by a negative feedback loop within the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis. Stimulation of testicular Leydig cells by pituitary luteinising hormone (LH) is under the control of hypothalamic gonadotrophin releasing hormone (GnRH), while suppression of LH secretion by the pituitary is controlled by circulating testosterone. Exactly how androgens exert their feedback control of gonadotrophin secretion (and whether this is at the level of the pituitary), as well as the role of AR in other pituitary cell types remains unclear. To investigate these questions, we exploited a transgenic mouse line (Foxg1Cre/+; ARfl/y) which lacks androgen receptor in the pituitary gland. Both circulating testosterone and gonadotrophins are unchanged in adulthood, demonstrating that AR signalling is dispensable in the male mouse pituitary for testosterone-dependent regulation of LH secretion. In contrast, Foxg1Cre/+; ARfl/y males have a significant increase in circulating prolactin, suggesting that, rather than controlling gonadotrophins, AR-signalling in the pituitary acts to suppress aberrant prolactin production in males.
Research in language teaching over two decades: A retrospective of the first 20 volumes of Language Teaching Research

Since 1997, Language Teaching Research (LTR) has published hundreds of research articles, most of which have reported on empirical studies whose broad purpose was to increase understanding on how second or foreign language teaching can be improved. These articles, as a collective whole, can be viewed as an artifact of the research issues and topics that interested LTR scholars in the time period around the beginning of the 21st century. Moreover, because of the journal’s special focus on research, a survey of the first 20 years of LTR’s articles holds the potential to monitor the field at large over that time period. Via a survey that examines the main focuses of each of the 359 articles under categories as ‘Instructional effects’, ‘Teacher cognition’ and ‘Learner behavior’, this study serves as an extant inventory of research interests over the first 20 years of the journal’s existence.
APPRAISING PUBLIC VALUE: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURES

Despite the increasing popularity of the concept of ‘public value’ within both academic and practice settings, there has to date been no formal review of the literature on its provenance, empirical basis, and application. This paper seeks to fill this gap. It provides a critical introduction to public value and its conceptual development before presenting the main elements of the published literature. Following this, a series of key areas of disagreement are discussed and implications for future research and practice put forward. The authors argue that if the espoused aspirations for the public value framework are to be realized, a concerted process of research, debate and application is required. Although some criticisms of public value are argued to be unwarranted, the authors acknowledge ongoing concerns over the apparent silence of public value on questions of power and heterogeneity, and the difficulties in empirically testing the framework's propositions.
Iris Biometric Recognition for Person Identification in Security Systems

The security is an important aspect in our daily life whichever the system we consider security plays vital role. The biometric person identification technique based on the pattern of the human iris is well suited to be applied to access control and provides strong e-security. Security systems having realized the value of biometrics for two basic purposes: to verify or identify users. In this paper we focus on an efficient methodology for identification and verification for iris detection, even when the images have obstructions, visual noise and different levels of illuminations and we use the CASIA iris database it will also work for UBIRIS Iris database which has images captured from distance while moving a person. Efficiency is acquired from iris detection and recognition when its performance evaluation is accurate.
Weighted Branching Simulation Distance for Parametric Weighted Kripke Structures

This paper concerns branching simulation for weighted Kripke structures with parametric weights. Concretely, we consider a weighted extension of branching simulation where a single transitions can be matched by a sequence of transitions while preserving the branching behavior. We relax this notion to allow for a small degree of deviation in the matching of weights, inducing a directed distance on states. The distance between two states can be used directly to relate properties of the states within a sub-fragment of weighted CTL. The problem of relating systems thus changes to minimizing the distance which, in the general parametric case, corresponds to finding suitable parameter valuations such that one system can approximately simulate another. Although the distance considers a potentially infinite set of transition sequences we demonstrate that there exists an upper bound on the length of relevant sequences, thereby establishing the computability of the distance.
Continuous Human Action Recognition Using Depth-MHI-HOG and a Spotter Model

In this paper, we propose a new method for spotting and recognizing continuous human actions using a vision sensor. The method is comprised of depth-MHI-HOG (DMH), action modeling, action spotting, and recognition. First, to effectively separate the foreground from background, we propose a method called DMH. It includes a standard structure for segmenting images and extracting features by using depth information, MHI, and HOG. Second, action modeling is performed to model various actions using extracted features. The modeling of actions is performed by creating sequences of actions through k-means clustering; these sequences constitute HMM input. Third, a method of action spotting is proposed to filter meaningless actions from continuous actions and to identify precise start and end points of actions. By employing the spotter model, the proposed method improves action recognition performance. Finally, the proposed method recognizes actions based on start and end points. We evaluate recognition performance by employing the proposed method to obtain and compare probabilities by applying input sequences in action models and the spotter model. Through various experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient for recognizing continuous human actions in real environments.
Sortase-mediated assembly and surface topology of adhesive pneumococcal pili

The rlrA genetic islet encodes an extracellular pilus in the Gram‐positive pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae. Of the three genes for structural subunits, rrgB encodes the major pilin, while rrgA and rrgC encode ancillary pilin subunits decorating the pilus shaft and tip. Deletion of all three pilus‐associated sortase genes, srtB, srtC and srtD, completely prevents pilus biogenesis. Expression of srtB alone is sufficient to covalently associate RrgB subunits to one another as well as linking the RrgA adhesin and the RrgC subunit into the polymer. The active‐site cysteine residue of SrtB (Cys 177) is crucial for incorporating RrgC, even when the two other sortase genes are expressed. SrtC is redundant to SrtB in permitting RrgB polymerization, and in linking RrgA to the RrgB filament, but SrtC is insufficient to incorporate RrgC. In contrast, expression of srtD alone fails to mediate RrgB polymerization, and a srtD mutant assembles heterotrimeric pilus indistinguishable from wild type. Topological studies demonstrate that pilus antigens are localized to symmetric foci at the cell surface in the presence of all three sortases. This symmetric focal presentation is abrogated in the absence of either srtB or srtD, while deletion of srtC had no effect. In addition, strains expressing srtB alone or srtC alone also displayed disrupted antigen localization, despite polymerizing subunits. Our data suggest that both SrtB and SrtC act as pilus subunit polymerases, with SrtB processing all three pilus subunit proteins, while SrtC only RrgB and RrgA. In contrast, SrtD does not act as a pilus subunit polymerase, but instead is required for wild‐type focal presentation of the pilus at the cell surface.
A Study on Batch Method of Thermal Fixing for Multiplexed Holographic Recordings

Abstract : We have investigated the batch method of thermal fixing for multiplexed holograms. The batch fixing process is pictured and analyzed, for the first time to our knowledge. The batch procedure of thermal fixing includes optical erasure of electronic gratings by subsequent recordings both in the same batch and in different batches, ionic compensation during thermal fixing in one batch, smoothing of ionic gratings during thermal fixing of subsequent batches, and revealing of ionic gratings. The inter-batch optical erasure time constants of LiNbO3:Fe:Ce crystals are measured in experiment.