Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Privaros: A Framework for Privacy-Compliant Delivery Drones

We present Privaros, a framework to enforce privacy policies on drones. Privaros is designed for commercial delivery drones, such as the ones that will likely be used by Amazon Prime Air. Such drones visit various host airspaces, each of which may have different privacy requirements. Privaros uses mandatory access control to enforce the policies of these hosts on guest delivery drones. Privaros is tailored for ROS, a middleware popular in many drone platforms. This paper presents the design and implementation of Privaros's policy-enforcement mechanisms, describes how policies are specified, and shows that policy specification can be integrated with India's Digital Sky portal. Our evaluation shows that a drone running Privaros can robustly enforce various privacy policies specified by hosts, and that its core mechanisms only marginally increase communication latency and power consumption.
Global Prevalence of Psychological Distress and Comorbidity With Disorders of Gut-Brain Interactions

INTRODUCTION: This study focused on defining the global prevalence of clinically relevant levels of psychological distress and somatic symptoms and the prevalence of coexistence between these symptoms and disorders of gut-brain interaction (DGBI). We also analyzed how clinically relevant psychological distress and somatic symptoms and coexistent DGBI are associated with health-related outcomes. METHODS: We included a representative sample of 54,127 adult participants (49.1% women; mean age of 44.3 years) from 26 countries worldwide. Participants completed an Internet survey (the Rome Foundation Global Epidemiology Study) with validated self-report questionnaires. RESULTS: Clinically relevant psychological distress and/or somatic symptom severity was reported by 37.5% of the sample. These participants had 4.45 times higher odds to have at least one DGBI than individuals without psychological distress and/or somatic symptoms. Compared with participants with psychological distress and/or somatic symptoms with vs without DGBI, participants with a DGBI reported increased healthcare and medication utilization (with OR from 1.6 to 2.8). Coexistent DGBI in participants with psychological distress and/or somatic symptoms was the variable most strongly associated with reduced mental (β = −0.77; confidence interval [−0.86 to −0.68]) and physical (β = −1.17; confidence interval [−1.24 to −1.10]) quality of life. DISCUSSION: This global study shows that psychological distress, somatic symptoms, and DGBI are very common and frequently overlap. The coexistence between psychological distress/somatic symptoms and DGBI seems to be especially detrimental to quality of life and healthcare utilization. Individuals with psychological distress/somatic symptoms and DGBI coexistence seem to be a group vulnerable to psychosocial problems that should be studied further and would likely benefit from psychological/psychiatric interventions.
of the 1st Workshop on Open Community-Driven Machine Translation

Language technologies, including machine translation, are crucial in our multilingual world, particularly since a growing fraction of communication takes place online. For many languages, reasonably useful machine translation does not yet exist, or if there is, it is often in the hands of one or a few companies —with honourable exceptions. In the age of neural machine translation and deep learning, a concentration of translation power occurs: only a few privileged companies (a) possess the necessary resources to collect and curate bilingual corpora which they do not publish, (b) are able to train and execute neural machine translation models which they usually do not publish, and (c) do so on massive computers that only they can aﬀord, generating large amounts of greenhouse gases and heat and leaving behind the waste generated when building their computing facilities. This generates a kind of technological language in-justice through dynamics of technological disempowerment in the communities of the aﬀected languages. As a result, speakers in technology-deprived or dependent communities experience an incomplete citizenship, as citizenship is built and articulated through communication. Aper-tium, a free/open-source rule-based machine translation platform, was born in 2005 when statistical machine translation, the precursor of neural machine translation, was blooming. Apertium was originally designed to deal with closely related languages such as Spanish and Catalan, but the free/open-source licensing attracted a community that started to create systems for other language pairs, encoding in open dictionaries and rules explicit knowledge about their languages, knowledge that can be used to create new machine translation systems or other language technologies. In this talk, I will argue in favour of a free/open-source incarnation of such a vintage but frugal and sustainable technology as rule-based machine translation as a way for vulnerable language communities to technologically empower themselves.
Irisin Ameliorated Skeletal Muscle Atrophy by Inhibiting Fatty Acid Oxidation and Pyroptosis Induced by Palmitic Acid in Chronic Kidney Disease

Introduction: Protein-energy waste (PEW) is a common complication in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), among which skeletal muscle atrophy is one of the most important clinical features of PEW. Pyroptosis is a type of proinflammatory, programmed cell death associated with skeletal muscle disease. Irisin, as a novel myokine, has attracted extensive attention for its protective role in the complications associated with CKD, but its role in muscle atrophy in CKD is unclear. Methods: Palmitic acid (PA)-induced muscular atrophy was evaluated by a reduction in C2C12 myotube diameter. Muscle atrophy model was established in male C57BL/6J mice treated with 0.2% adenine for 4 weeks and then fed a 45% high-fat diet. Blood urea nitrogen and creatinine levels, body and muscle weight, and muscle histology were assessed. The expression of carnitine palmitoyltransferase 1A (CPT1A) and pyroptosis-related protein was analysed by Western blots or immunohistochemistry. The release of IL-1β was detected by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Results: In this study, we showed that PA-induced muscular atrophy manifested as a reduction in C2C12 myotube diameter. During this process, PA can also induce pyroptosis, as shown by the upregulation of NLRP3, cleaved caspase-1 and GSDMD-N expression and the increased IL-1β release and PI-positive cell rate. Inhibition of caspase-1 or NLRP3 attenuated PA-induced pyroptosis and myotube atrophy in C2C12 cells. Importantly, irisin treatment significantly ameliorated PA-induced skeletal muscle pyroptosis and atrophy. In terms of mechanism, PA upregulated CPT1A, a key enzyme of fatty acid oxidation (FAO), and irisin attenuated this effect, which was consistent with etomoxir (CPT1A inhibitor) treatment. Moreover, irisin improved skeletal muscle atrophy and pyroptosis in adenine-induced mice by regulating FAO. Conclusion: Our study firstly verifies that pyroptosis is a novel mechanism of skeletal muscle atrophy in CKD. Irisin ameliorates skeletal muscle atrophy by inhibiting FAO and pyroptosis in CKD, and irisin may be developed as a potential therapeutic agent for the treatment of muscle wasting in CKD patients.
Measuring COVID-19 Related Media Consumption on Twitter

The COVID-19 pandemic has been affecting the world dramatically ever since 2020. The minimum availability of physical interactions during the lockdown has caused more and more people to turn to online activities on social media platforms. These platforms have provided essential updates regarding the pandemic, serving as bridges for communications. Research on studying these communications on different platforms emerges during the meantime. Prior studies focus on areas such as topic modeling, sentiment analysis and prediction tasks such as predicting COVID-19 positive cases, misinformation spread, etc. However, online communications with media outlets remain unexplored on an international scale. We have little knowledge about the patterns of the media consumption geographically and their association with offline political preference. We believe addressing these questions could help governments and researchers better understand human behaviors during the pandemic. In this thesis, we specifically investigate the online consumption of media outlets on Twitter through a set of quantitative analyses. We make use of several public media outlet datasets to extract media consumption from tweets collected based on COVID-19 keyword matching. We make use of a metric "interaction" to quantify media consumption through weighted Twitter activities. We further construct a matrix based on it which could be directly used to measure user-media consumption in different granularities. We then conduct analyses on the United States level and global level. To the best of our knowledge, this thesis presents the first-of-its-kind study on media consumption on COVID-19 across countries, it sheds light on understanding how people consume media outlets during the pandemic and provides potential insights for peer researchers.
“ Lots Done , More To Do ” : The Current State of Agile Systems Development Research

Agile systems development methods emerged as a response to the inability of previous plan-driven approaches to handle rapidly changing environments (Highsmith 2002). Originating from so-called " lightweight " methods and promoted through the publication of the Agile Manifesto (2001), the agile method family have become highly prevalent in recent years. Meantime, agile system development research has gained momentum, as is evident from the increasing number of dedicated journal special issues, conferences, conference tracks and workshops. However, practitioners and consultants have largely driven the creation and dissemination of these methods. Agile research has lagged behind practice, as is often the case with new and emerging phenomena in Information Systems Development (ISD). Despite the fact that existing agile system development research should be lauded in that it is very applied and relevant to industry, the current body of knowledge has several shortcomings. Conboy (2009) and Dyba and Dingsoyr (2008) conducted two studies in particular which surface issues including clarity regarding what constitutes agility, more research required into the adaptability and extension of agile methods, a deeper understanding of how agile methods are deployed in practice, and an overall necessity to improve the level of rigor in agile system development research. Before introducing the papers in this special issue it is worth summarising these issues, so one can then get an appreciation for the contribution the special issue papers add to the current body of knowledge. The need for a better understanding of what constitutes 'agility': Any good concept needs a strong underlying logic and rationale which serves as a 'theoretical glue' and binds all of the factors together (Whetten 1989). However, the current body of agile method knowledge suffers from a lack of clarity as to what constitutes agility. It seems almost every piece of
Tracking SARS-CoV-2 in rivers as a tool for epidemiological surveillance of the Total

The aim of this work was to evaluate if rivers could be used for SARS-CoV-2 surveillance. Five sampling points from three rivers (AR-1 and AR-2 in Arenales River, MR-1 and MR-2 in Mojotoro River, and CR in La Caldera River) from Salta (Argentina), two of them receiving discharges from wastewater plants (WWTP), were monitored from July to December 2020. Fifteen water samples from each point (75 in total) were collected and characterized physicochemically and microbiologically and SARS-CoV-2 was quanti ﬁ ed by RT-qPCR. Also, two targets linked to human contributions,humanpolyomavirus(HPyV)andRNaseP,werequanti ﬁ edandusedtonormalizeSARS-CoV-2concen-tration, which was compared to reported COVID-19 cases. Statistical analyses allowed us to verify the correlation be- tweenSARS-CoV-2andtheconcentrationoffecalindicatorbacteria(FIB),aswellasto ﬁ ndsimilaritiesanddifferences between sampling points. La Caldera River showed the best water quality; FIBs were within acceptable limits for rec- reational activities. Mojotoro River's water quality was not affected by the northern WWTP of the city. Instead, Arenales River presented the poorest water quality; at AR-2 was negatively affected by the discharges of the southern WWTP, which contributedtosigni ﬁ cant increase of fecal contamination. SARS-CoV-2was foundinabout halfof samples in low concentrations in La Caldera and Mojotoro Rivers, while it was high and persistent in Arenales River. No human tracers were detected in CR, only HPyV was found in MR-1, MR-2 and AR-1, and both were quanti ﬁ ed in AR-2. The experimental and normalized viral concentrations strongly correlated with reported COVID-19 cases; thus, Arenales River at AR-2 re ﬂ ected the epidemiological situation of the city. This is the ﬁ rst study showing the for SARS-CoV-2 surveillance to support health authorities.
Towards complete and accurate reporting of studies of diagnostic accuracy: the STARD initiative.

OBJECTIVE Our aim was to improve the accuracy and completeness of reporting of studies of diagnostic accuracy in order to allow readers to assess the potential for bias in a study and to evaluate the generalizability of its results. METHODS The Standards for Reporting of Diagnostic Accuracy (STARD) steering committee searched the literature to identify publications on the appropriate conduct and reporting of diagnostic studies and extracted potential items into an extensive list. Researchers, editors and members of professional organizations shortened this list during a 2-day consensus meeting with the goal of developing a checklist and a generic flow diagram for studies of diagnostic accuracy. RESULTS The search for published guidelines about diagnostic research yielded 33 previously published checklists, from which we extracted a list of 75 potential items. At the consensus meeting, participants shortened the list to a 25-item checklist, by using evidence whenever available. A prototype of a flow diagram provides information about the method of recruitment of patients, the order of test execution and the numbers of patients undergoing the test under evaluation and/or the reference standard. CONCLUSIONS Evaluation of research depends on complete and accurate reporting. If medical journals adopt the checklist and the flow diagram, the quality of reporting of studies of diagnostic accuracy should improve, to the advantage of clinicians, researchers, reviewers, journals and the public.
Fluorescence in situ hybridisation for interphase chromosomal aberration-based biological dosimetry

Abstract Metaphase spreads stained with Giemsa or painted with chromosome-specific probes by fluorescence in situ hybridisation (FISH) have been in use since long for retrospective dose assessment (biological dosimetry). However, in cases of accidental exposure to ionising radiation, the culturing of lymphocytes to obtain metaphase chromosomes and analysis of chromosomal aberrations is time-consuming and problematic after high radiation doses. Similarly, analysing chromosomal damage in G0/G1 cells or nondividing cells by premature chromosome condensation is laborious. Following large-scale radiological emergencies, the time required for analysis is more important than precision of dose estimate. Painting of whole chromosomes using chromosome-specific probes in interphase nuclei by the FISH technique will eliminate the time required for cell culture and allow a fast dose estimate, provided that a meaningful dose-response can be obtained by scoring the number of chromosomal domains visible in interphase nuclei. In order to test the applicability of interphase FISH for quick biological dosimetry, whole blood from a healthy donor was irradiated with 8 Gy of gamma radiation. Irradiated whole blood was kept for 2 h at 37°C to allow DNA repair and thereafter processed for FISH with probes specific for Chromosomes-1 and 2. Damaged chromosomal fragments, distinguished by extra color domains, were observed in interphase nuclei of lymphocytes irradiated with 8 Gy. These fragments were efficiently detected and quantified by the FISH technique utilising both confocal and single plane fluorescence microscopy. Furthermore, a clear dose-response curve for interphase fragments was achieved following exposure to 0, 1, 2, 4 and 8 Gy of gamma radiation. These results demonstrate interphase FISH as a promising test for biodosimetry and for studying cytogenetic effects of radiation in nondividing cells.
Complex Engineering Systems Deep-Sea Image Stitching: Using Multi-Channel Fusion and Improved AKAZE

: Due to medium absorption and dispersion effect, deep sea images taken by ordinary devices always exist low contrast, color distortion and so on, which remains a challenge to extract features for deep sea image stitching. This paper presents a multi-channel fusion and AKAZE features detection (MCF-A) to address the limitations above. First of all, we blend two images restored respectively in LAB space and RGB space with dark channel prior weighted coefficient. Then, an improved AKAZE algorithm is applied to detect feature points and obtain feature descriptors of detected points. Besides, we bring in the multi-band blending algorithm to eliminate the stitched image’s seam. Experimental results demonstrate that the MCF-A can generate perfect stitched images with minimized seam, which provide a new method to obtain panoramic image of the deep sea. Compared with state-of-the-art algorithm, the MCF-A hold better quantitative evaluation, visual stitching results and robustness.
Banco de dados de faces 3D

Resumo Tradicionalmente as expressoes faciais humanas tem sido exploradas usando fotografias 2D ou sequencias de video 2D. Analises e sinteses baseadas em faces 2D sao de dificil realizacao para dados com grandes variacoes de pose e variacoes sutis de expressao facial. Os bancos de dados de faces 3D existentes geralmente incluem faces com variacao de pose e com poucas aquisicoes de expressoes faciais que permitam a investigacao de mudancas de expressoes espontâneas inerentemente da natureza humana. Neste relatorio, sao descritos brevemente os principais bancos de dados de faces apresentados na literatura ate o presente momento, dando especial atencao a conjuntos de dados 3D com expressoes faciais.
Measures of Information Leakage for Incomplete Statistical Information: Application to a Binary Privacy Mechanism

Information leakage is usually defined as the logarithmic increment in the adversary’s probability of correctly guessing the legitimate user’s private data or some arbitrary function of the private data when presented with the legitimate user’s publicly disclosed information. However, this definition of information leakage implicitly assumes that both the privacy mechanism and the prior probability of the original data are entirely known to the attacker. In reality, the assumption of complete knowledge of the privacy mechanism for an attacker is often impractical. The attacker can usually have access to only an approximate version of the correct privacy mechanism, computed from a limited set of the disclosed data, for which they can access the corresponding un-distorted data. In this scenario, the conventional definition of leakage no longer has an operational meaning. To address this problem, in this article, we propose novel meaningful information-theoretic metrics for information leakage when the attacker has incomplete information about the privacy mechanism—we call them average subjective leakage, average confidence boost, and average objective leakage, respectively. For the simplest, binary scenario, we demonstrate how to find an optimized privacy mechanism that minimizes the worst-case value of either of these leakages.
LTL over Finite Words Can Be Exponentially More Succinct Than Pure-Past LTL, and vice versa

Linear Temporal Logic over finite traces ( LTL f ) has proved itself to be an important and effective formalism in formal verification as well as in artificial intelligence. Pure past LTL f ( pLTL ) is the logic obtained from LTL f by replacing each (future) temporal operator by a corresponding past one, and is naturally interpreted at the end of a finite trace. It is known that each property definable in LTL f is also definable in pLTL , and vice versa . However, despite being extensively used in practice, to the best of our knowledge, there is no systematic study of their succinctness . In this paper, we investigate the succinctness of LTL f and pLTL . First, we prove that pLTL can be exponentially more succinct than LTL f by showing that there exists a property definable with a pLTL formula of size n such that the size of all LTL f formulas defining it is at least exponential in n . Then, we prove that LTL f can be exponentially more succinct than pLTL as well. This result shows that, although being expressively equivalent, LTL f and pLTL are incomparable when succinctness is concerned. In addition, we study the succinctness of Safety - LTL (the syntactic safety fragment of LTL over infinite traces) with respect to its canonical form G ( pLTL ), whose formulas are of the form G ( α ), G being the globally operator and α a pLTL formula. We prove that G ( pLTL ) can be exponentially more succinct than Safety - LTL , and that the same holds for the dual cosafety fragment.
PRODUCER RESPONSES TO CARBON SEQUESTRATIONINCENTIVES IN THE NORTHERN GREAT PLAINS

Agricultural lands can be used as a terrestrial sink for atmospheric CO2 by changing their management and/or use. The goal ofthis study was to evaluate the economic potential of carbon sequestration on cropland in the spring wheat producing region of the northern Great Plains. In order to provide a more realistic assessment of the economic potential for agricultural carbon sequestration, this study reflects regional trends in land management practices, incorporates the value of co-products from the conversion of cropland to permanent grass, and considers producer differences in crop production profitability. The economic model compared the expected net present value of (1) maintaining current farm practices, (2) switching tillage practices, or (3) converting cropland to permanent grass over a 20-year time horizon. Six different carbon prices ($10, $25, $50, $75, $100, and $125 per metric ton) were used to gauge producer/landowner response to incentive payments. A carbon price of $25 per metric ton led to a 29% increase over the baseline level of C sequestration, representing 49% of the study area's technical storage capacity. The study area's technical capacity to store C was fully attained when the price ofC was increased to $125 per metric ton.
Characterization of Pre-Monsoon Aerosol and Aerosol-Cloud-Rainfall Interactions in Central Nepal

Characterization of Pre-Monsoon Aerosol and Aerosol-Cloud-Rainfall Interactions in Central Nepal by Prabhakar Shrestha Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Ana P. Barros, Supervisor ___________________________ Andrei Khlystov ___________________________ John D. Albertson ___________________________ M. Susan Lozier ___________________________ Wei-Kuo Tao An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the Graduate School of Duke University 2011 Copyright by Prabhakar Shrestha 2011