Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extracting Java library subsets for deployment on embedded systems

Embedded systems provide means for enhancing the functionality delivered by small-sized electronic devices such as hand-held computers and cellular phones. Java is a programming language which incorporates a number of features that are useful for developing such embedded systems. However the size and the complexity of the Java language and its libraries have slowed its adoption for embedded systems, due to the processing power and storage space limitations found in these systems. A common approach to address storage space limitations is for the vendor to offer special versions of the libraries with reduced functionality and size to meet the constraints of embedded systems. This paper presents a technique that is used for dynamically selecting, on an as needed basis, the subset of library entities that is exactly required for a given Java application to run. This subset can then be down-loaded to the device for execution. The advantage of this approach is that the developer can use arbitrary libraries, instead of being restricted to those which have been adapted for embedded systems by the vendors. A prototype system, that dynamically builds library subsets on an as needed per application basis, has been built and tested on several mid-size Java applications with positive results.
Supporting hand gestures in mobile remote collaboration: a usability evaluation

Rapid advances in networking and hardware have made it possible for remotely located individuals to perform physical tasks together. Although a range of systems have been developed for remote collaboration, how to support the richness of hand gestures for an expert guiding a mobile worker located in a non-traditional-desktop environment has not been fully explored. HandsOnVideo is a system developed to fill this gap. The system uses a near-eye display to support mobility and unmediated representations of hands to support remote gestures. A usability evaluation has been conducted to gain in-depth understanding of the usefulness and usability of HandsOnVideo and the study yields positive results. In this paper, we describe the evaluation method, report the experimental results, discuss the findings and envision possible future improvements.
A low power CMOS 2.4-GHz monolithic integer-N synthesizer for wireless sensor

A low-power 2.4-GHz monolithic frequency synthesizer, realized in a standard 0.18-/spl mu/M CMOS technology is reported. It consumes 8 mW from a single 1.8 V power supply, and is fully functional from 2.1-GHz to 2.4-GHz. The phase noise of the output signal is -98.7 dBc/Hz at 500 KHz offset. The die size is 0.8/spl times/0.8 mm/sup 2/.
Distribution of high-conductance Ca(2+)-activated K+ channels in rat brain: targeting to axons and nerve terminals

Tissue expression and distribution of the high-conductance Ca(2+)- activated K+ channel Slo was investigated in rat brain by immunocytochemistry, in situ hybridization, and radioligand binding using the novel high-affinity (Kd 22 pM) ligand [3H]iberiotoxin-D19C ([3H]IbTX-D19C), which is an analog of the selective maxi-K peptidyl blocker IbTX. A sequence-directed antibody directed against Slo revealed the expression of a 125 kDa polypeptide in rat brain by Western blotting and precipitated the specifically bound [3H]IbTX-D19C in solubilized brain membranes. Slo immunoreactivity was highly concentrated in terminal areas of prominent fiber tracts: the substantia nigra pars reticulata, globus pallidus, olfactory system, interpeduncular nucleus, hippocampal formation including mossy fibers and perforant path terminals, medial forebrain bundle and pyramidal tract, as well as cerebellar Purkinje cells. In situ hybridization indicated high levels of Slo mRNA in the neocortex, olfactory system, habenula, striatum, granule and pyramidal cell layer of the hippocampus, and Purkinje cells. The distribution of Slo protein was confirmed in microdissected brain areas by Western blotting and radioligand-binding studies. The latter studies also established the pharmacological profile of neuronal Slo channels. The expression pattern of Slo is consistent with its targeting into a presynaptic compartment, which implies an important role in neural transmission.
Dynamics and structure in competitive social systems

Competition is ubiquitous in complex social systems, from informal online gaming environments to professional sports, to workers competing for jobs in the labor market. Given its universality, understanding the complex relationships between a competition's dynamics, competitor behavior, and environmental structure is of great interest to the scientific community and society at large. In this thesis, we analyze the structure of and behavioral dynamics in three different competitive social systems: a massive online game, four professional sports, and a network of occupations. Our results shed new light on how a competition's environment can predict its dynamics, what types of temporal and pro-social behaviors are indicative of friendship between competitors, how those friendships evolve over time, and how the structural properties of an occupation network inform career path decisions and forecast the long term distribution of incomes in an economy.
On the complexity of optimal coordinated downlink beamforming

In a cellular wireless system, users located at cell edges often suffer significant out-of-cell interference. In this paper we consider a coordinated beamforming approach whereby multiple base stations jointly optimize their downlink beamforming vectors in order to simultaneously improve the data rates of a given group of cell edge users. Assuming perfect channel knowledge, we formulate this problem as the maximization of a system utility function (which balances user fairness and average user rates), subject to individual power constraints at each base station. We show that, for the single carrier case and when the number of antennas at each base station is at least two, the optimal coordinated beamforming problem is strongly NP-hard for both the harmonic mean utility function and the proportional fairness utility function. For the min-rate utility function, we show that the problem is solvable in polynomial time.
Indexing for Dynamic Abstract Regions

We propose a new main memory index structure for abstract regions (objects) which may heavily overlap, the RCtree. These objects are "dynamic" and may have short life spans. The novelty is that rather than representing an object by its minimum bounding rectangle (MBR), possibly with pre-processed segmentation into many small MBRs, we use the actual shape of the object to maintain the index. This saves significant space for objects with large spatial extents since pre-segmentation is not needed. We show that the query performance of RC-tree is much better than many indexing schemes on synthetic overlapping data sets. The performance is also competitive on real-life GIS nonoverlapping data sets.
The " TRACE " Method for Segmentation of Lungs from Chest CT Images by Deterministic Edge Linking

Accurate and robust segmentation of anatomical structures is a basic requirement of image-domain medical expert systems. In particular, when image analysis is based on a model representation of structure, a high level of relational accuracy is required as the diagnosis of a disease process may be based upon a subtle disparity with normal anatomy. This report introduces an implementation for the segmentation of lung tissue from chest CT scans. TRACE represents an object using its edge description. We argue that the explicitly controllable and non-approximating nature of TRACE has some advantages over heuristic techniques such as Active Contour Models (Snakes) for segmentation of non-occluded objects with high complexity edges.
Guest Editors' Introduction Security and Usability

As the joke's continuing popularity demonstrates, many people believe that there is an inherent trade-off between security and usability. A computer without passwords is usable , but not very secure. On the other hand, a computer that requires you to authenticate every 5 minutes with your password and a fresh drop of blood might indeed be very secure, but nobody would want to use it. This " received wisdom " on the inherent conflict between usability and security goes against common sense and more than 30 years' experience in building secure systems. Common sense tells us that security and usability must go together: systems that are secure but not usable will not be used, while systems that are usable but not secure will get hacked, compromised, and otherwise rendered useless. 1 identified " psychological acceptability " as one of the eight key principles for building secure systems. In 1983, Don Norman noted that many user errors resulting in data loss are often partly the result of poor interface design. " People will make errors, so make the system insensitive to them, " he wrote. Instead of simply requiring confirmation of irreversible actions—confirmations that themselves become automatic— Norman argued that systems should be designed so that their actions are both visible and undoable. 2 Nevertheless, software that implements security has rightfully earned the reputation of being dramatically more difficult to use than software that lacks explicit security functionality. A simple explanation is that any system that implements some kind of secure functionality in addition to its underlying purpose is inherently more complex than a similar system that does not, because there is more to configure. Another reason is that security mechanisms are designed to make things difficult for attackers: thus, any system that improves usability must ensure that this benefit is only offered to authorized individuals, or else overall security will be compromised. As design goals, security and us-ability have many aspects in common. Both require a holistic approach and a vision that system architects, developers, and marketers share. Rarely is security or usability successfully sprinkled on at the end of a product's development: instead, both must be designed and built in from the beginning. But because security and usability are different skills, it's generally harder and more expensive to build systems that are both secure and usable. In recent years, there has been a growing realization that usability problems are …
Interplay between Telecommunications and Face-to-Face Interactions: A Study Using Mobile Phone Data

In this study we analyze one year of anonymized telecommunications data for over one million customers from a large European cellphone operator, and we investigate the relationship between people's calls and their physical location. We discover that more than 90% of users who have called each other have also shared the same space (cell tower), even if they live far apart. Moreover, we find that close to 70% of users who call each other frequently (at least once per month on average) have shared the same space at the same time - an instance that we call co-location. Co-locations appear indicative of coordination calls, which occur just before face-to-face meetings. Their number is highly predictable based on the amount of calls between two users and the distance between their home locations - suggesting a new way to quantify the interplay between telecommunications and face-to-face interactions.
RepTrap: a novel attack on feedback-based reputation systems

Reputation systems are playing critical roles in securing today's distributed computing and communication systems. Similar to other security mechanisms, reputation systems can be under attack. In this paper, we report the discovery of a new attack, named RepTrap(Reputation Trap), against feedback-based reputation systems, such as those used in P2P file-sharing systems and E-commerce websites(e.g. Amazon.com). We conduct an in-depth investigation on this new attack, including analysis, case study, and performance evaluation based on real data and realistic user behavior models. We discover that the RepTrap is a strong and destructive attack that can manipulate the reputation scores of users, objects, and even undermine the entire reputation system. Compared with other known attacks that achieve the similar goals, the RepTrap requires less effort from the attackers and causes multi-dimensional damage to the reputation systems.
Real time FPGA implementation of brushless DC motor control using single current sensor

In modern industry power consumption is becoming one of the most important constraints during the development phase of the product. In motor industry, significant part of the power consumption improvement can be done in motor control. Brushless dc (BLDC) motor drives are penetrating the market rapidly. Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems use conventional motor drive technology and the machines found in these devices are characterized by low efficiency and high maintenance. BLDC motor drives are characterized by higher efficiency, lower maintenance and higher cost. This paper presents the analysis, design, and implementation of a cost-effective control technique for a low cost solution, six switch three-phase inverter brushless dc motor drive using single current sensor for current control. Various parameters defined optimization path for target drive solution. Also, basic framework for low cost BLDC control IC is presented. The controller is modeled and the concept is proven using simulator. Then the verification and feasibility study are done by using field-programmable gate array prototyping on the custom board made for this research. Final simulation results along with prototype operation measurements are presented as well.
Text Document Latent Subspace Clustering by PLSA Factors

Text documents are often high dimensional and sparse, it is a great challenge to discover the clusters among the unlabelled text data, because there are no obvious clusters by common distance measure. In this paper we present a latent subspace clustering method to find text clusters. In our algorithm, we use latent factors extracted by probability latent semantic analysis (PLSA) to generate latent clustering subspaces, and then use the distance between sample and each latent clustering subspace as similarity for text clustering. On some text document datasets our method shows effective implementation for text clustering.
Framework of Key Processes and Quality Management

Purpose – Many organizations integrate their performance improvement initiatives under the banner of process management methodologies. This paper resumes the spectrum of the most common Business Process Management, as is currently applied in practice and attempts to contribute to the problem of key business processes’ identification. Design/Methodology/Approach – The paper utilizes quality tools and techniques in the identification of key processes. Findings – A quality based methodology to key processes’ identification is presented. Research limitations – Many of the detailed and already applied business approaches may have not been made publicly available. Originality/value Integration of quality tools and techniques with processes management. Short biography of the author(s) Please see the lines below the authors at the paper title area.
The Low Volatility Effect: A Comprehensive Look

We analyze the low volatility effect in the U.S equity market with a focus on the common properties of various low volatility strategies. We examine the two major approaches to constructing low volatility portfolios and apply them to the U.S. equity market: mean-variance optimization-based versus the rankings or quantile-based approaches. Our analysis shows that both approaches are equally effective in reducing portfolio volatility over a long-term investment horizon. We then extend our analysis to the international and emerging markets. Our findings confirm that the low volatility effect is not unique to the U.S. equity markets; it is present on a global scale.
Dopamine, through the Extracellular Signal-Regulated Kinase Pathway, Downregulates CD4+CD25+ Regulatory T-Cell Activity: Implications for Neurodegeneration

Fighting off neuronal degeneration requires a well controlled T-cell response against self-antigens residing in sites of the CNS damage. The ability to evoke this response is normally suppressed by naturally occurring CD4+CD25+ regulatory T-cells (Treg). No physiological compound that controls Treg activity has yet been identified. Here, we show that dopamine, acting via type 1 dopamine receptors (found here to be preferentially expressed by Treg), reduces the suppressive activity and the adhesive and migratory abilities of Treg. Treg activity was correlated with activation of the ERK1/2 (extracellular signal-regulated kinase 1/2) signaling pathway. Systemic injection of dopamine or an agonist of its type 1 receptors significantly enhanced, via a T-cell-dependent mechanism, protection against neuronal death after CNS mechanical and biochemical injury. These findings shed light on the physiological mechanisms controlling Treg and might open the way to novel therapeutic strategies for downregulating Treg activity (e.g., in neuronal degeneration) or for strengthening it (in autoimmune diseases).
Multiple phase generation and distribution for a fully-integrated 24-GHz phased-array receiver in silicon

This paper presents an on-chip multiphase LO generation and distribution technique used to implement a fully-integrated 24-GHz 8-path phased-array receiver in silicon. Sixteen LO phases are generated by an LC ring oscillator and distributed by a symmetric network to all eight paths. The 8-path array achieves a phase shifting resolution of 22.5/spl deg/ and a total array gain of 61dB.
Zero-knowledge with public keys

In STOC 2000, Canetti, Goldreich, Goldwasser, and Micali put forward the strongest notion of zero-knowledge to date, resettable zero-knowledge (RZK) and implemented it in constant rounds in a new model, where the verifier simply has a public key registered before any interaction with the prover. This work explores their new public-key model for zero-knowledge protocols. First, it shows that the soundness notion in this model has not been sufficiently understood and is, in fact, more subtle and complex than in the classical model. It identifies four meaningful notions of soundness, and proves that they are distinct. Thus, protocol designers should understand the needs of the application in order to avoid designing protocols whose soundness is too weak (thus resulting in insecure protocols) or too strong (thus resulting in protocols that are less efficient than necessary). Second, having precisely defined the model, this work proceeds to demonstrate that stronger notions of soundness require more rounds to implement. Specifically, it provides upper and lower bounds on the numbers of rounds needed to implement the various soundness notions. Finally, to achieve both ultimate round efficiency and strong soundness, this work puts forward a slightly stronger model. Informally, as long as the honest verifier does not use a given public key more than a fixed-polynomial number of times, there exist 3-round (provably optimal) RZK protocols for all of NP that possess strong soundness. This is particularly surprising, because such 3-round protocols provably do not exist in the publickey model without such an upper bound. Thesis Supervisor: Silvio Micali Title: Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
Architecting and Programming a Hardware-Incoherent Multiprocessor Cache Hierarchy

New architectures for extreme-scale computing need to be designed for higher energy efficiency than current systems. One recently-proposed extreme-scale many core radically simplifies the architecture, and proposes a cluster-based on-chip memory hierarchy without hardware cache coherence. To program for such an environment, this paper proposes two approaches. They use shared-memory programming either inside clusters only, or both inside and across clusters. Both approaches rely on ISA support for writeback and self-invalidation operations. Our simulation results show that hardware-incoherent cache hierarchies with our support deliver reasonable performance for applications that were not written for such hierarchies. Specifically, for execution within a cluster, the average execution time of the applications is 2% higher than with hardware cache coherence, for execution across multiple clusters, it is 5% higher than with hardware cache coherence. This is accomplished with minimal hardware support.
Segregation in swarms of mobile robots based on the Brazil nut effect

We study a simple algorithm inspired by the Brazil nut effect for achieving segregation in a swarm of mobile robots. The algorithm lets each robot mimic a particle of a certain size and broadcast this information locally. The motion of each particle is controlled by three reactive behaviors: random walk, taxis, and repulsion by other particles. The segregation task requires the swarm to self-organize into a spatial arrangement in which the robots are ranked by particle size (e.g., annular structures or stripes). Using a physics-based computer simulation, we study the segregation performance of swarms of 50 mobile robots. The robots represent particles of three different sizes. We first analyze the problem of how to combine the basic behaviors so as to minimize the percentage of errors in rank. We then show that the system is very robust to noise on inter-robot perception and communication. For a noise level of 50%, the mean percentage of errors in rank is 1%. Moreover, we investigate a simplified version of the control algorithm, which does not rely on communication. Finally, we show that the mean percentage of errors in rank decreases exponentially as the particles' size ratio increases. As the error is bounded, one can achieve 100% error-free segregation. The reduction in error, however, comes at the expense of an increase in the required sensing/communication range.
Risk Evaluation Process Model of Information Security

The risk assessment applied in information technology is the information security risk evaluation. A modeling method of security system that is suitable to description results and restriction of information and to modeling form and control of distributed system is put forward based on the analysis of the concept of security system risk evaluation in the field of information security. A model of information security evaluation process has been built based on Petri net. The process is divided into several objects, such as assets identification, threats identification, vulnerability identification and existing security control measures identification etc. and make a detailed description to each object on Petri net theory.
Online Group-Buying: Literature Review and Directions for Future Research

Online group-buying business has existed in American and European online marketplaces since the late 1990s. Consumers with similar purchase interests are congregated on group-buying websites to obtain group discounts. In the last decade, group-buying business models have evolved to adapt to consumer needs, and a number of studies have offered several insights into how to improve online group-buying. This paper begins with a description of the global development of group-buying websites and an overview of the group-buying business models. Next, it provides a comprehensive overview of the existing literature in the online group-buying research field. Building on this review, the paper presents a meta-theoretical framework toward the sustainability of group-buying and provides research directions to guide future studies on online group-buying.