Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Strong Security Enabled Certificateless Aggregate Signatures Applicable to Mobile Computation

An aggregate signature scheme allows a public algorithm to aggregate n signatures of n distinct messages from n signers into a single signature. By validating the single resulting signature, one can be convinced that the messages have been endorsed by all the signers. Certificateless aggregate signatures allow the signers to authenticate messages without suffering from the complex certificate management in the traditional public key cryptography or the key escrow problem in identity-based cryptography. In this paper, we present a new efficient certificate less aggregate signature scheme. Compared with up-to-date certificate less aggregate signatures, our scheme is equipped with a number of attracting features: (1) it is shown to be secure under the standard computational Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model, (2) the security is proven in the strongest security model so far, (3) the signers do not need to be synchronized, and (4) its performance is comparable to the most efficient up-to-date schemes. These features are desirable in a mobile networking and computing environment where the storage/computation capacity of the end devices are limited, and due to the wireless connection and distributed feature, the computing devices are easy to be attacked and hard to be synchronized.
Digital Linearization of Direct-Detection Transceivers for Spectrally Efficient 100 Gb/s/λ WDM Metro Networking

Single-polarization, single-photodiode-based direct-detection (DD) transceivers offer advantages for metro networks due to their simple and low-cost optical hardware structure. Single-sideband Nyquist-pulse-shaped subcarrier modulation (SSB Nyquist-SCM) is a promising signal format to achieve high information spectral density (ISD) in such DD systems. In this paper, we present theoretical and experimental evaluations of a variety of direct-detection SSB Nyquist-SCM system designs, operating at 100 Gb/s per wavelength in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) metro network scenarios. Through simulations, several receiver-based digital linearization techniques to overcome the effect of signal-signal beat interference were investigated, and their performance compared with alternative approaches, including optical beat-interference cancellation receivers (BICRx) and coherent receivers (both heterodyne and homodyne). Subsequently, experimental assessments of the digitally-linearized DD receivers were carried out. Spectrally efficient (net ISD exceeding 3 b/s/Hz) 4 × 112 Gb/s WDM DD single-sideband 16-QAM Nyquist-SCM transmission over distances of up to 240 km (multi-span links) and 160 km (single-span links without mid-span amplification) were shown to be possible using uncompensated standard single-mode fiber.
Feeding amount significantly alters overt tumor onset rate in a zebrafish melanoma model

ABSTRACT The manner in which zebrafish are fed may have important impacts on the behavior of disease models. We examined the effect of different feeding regimens on the rate of overt melanoma tumor onset in a p53/BRAF-dependent model, a commonly used read-out in this and many other cancer models. We demonstrate that increased feeding leads to more rapid melanoma onset. The ability to modulate overt tumor onset rates with this regimen indicates additional flexibility to ‘tune’ the system to more quickly generate tumors for study and to begin to address questions related to cancer metabolism using the zebrafish model. Summary: The rate of tumor formation in a BRAF-driven zebrafish melanoma model can be significantly altered by increased feeding and opens a new avenue for studying the underlying metabolic pathways involved.
Downhole-friction-estimation-based rotary speed control for drillstring system with stick-slip vibrations

In a drilling process, stick-slip vibrations are one of the main resources resulting in unstable motions or drillstring failures. In this paper, combined with a LuGre bit-rock interaction, the drillstring system is modeled as lumped parameters to capture the main features of stick-slip vibrations. Then, a novel control configuration involving five modules is developed in order to track a desired speed while suppressing the vibration, where the equivalent-input-disturbance method is skilfully employed to suppress such vibrations. In such five modules, the state observer is combined with the friction estimator to obtain the equivalent friction torques, which are corresponding to downhole frictions, on the surface control platform. In addition, the internal model and the state feedback are utilized to get the speed tracking torques so as to guarantee the desired tracking precision. Based on the dual conversion and two quadratic performances, the closed-loop stability is guaranteed by appropriate design of the controller and observer's gain matrices. Simulation is conducted to compare our method with an LQR method, showing our method's superiority and effectiveness.
Metrological challenges for reconstruction of 3‐D microstructures by focused ion beam tomography methods

The development of combined focused ion beam and scanning electron microscopes has enabled significant advances in the characterization of the 3‐D structure of materials. The repeated removal of thin layers or slices with an ion beam and imaging or mapping the chemical or crystallographic structure of each slice enables a 3‐D reconstruction from the images or maps. The accuracy of the reconstruction thus depends on the accuracy with which the slice thickness is measured and maintained throughout the process, and the alignment accuracy of the slices achieved during acquisition or by postacquisition corrections. A survey of papers published in this field suggests that the reconstruction accuracy is not often considered or reported. Using examples from examination of the 3‐D structure of hardmetals, issues affecting the accuracy of slice thicknesses and image realignments are examined and illustrated and potential errors quantified by the use of fiducial markers and the expected isotropy of the hardmetal structure itself.
Huge Automatically Extracted Training-Sets for Multilingual Word SenseDisambiguation

We release to the community six large-scale sense-annotated datasets in multiple language to pave the way for supervised multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation. Our datasets cover all the nouns in the English WordNet and their translations in other languages for a total of millions of sense-tagged sentences. Experiments prove that these corpora can be effectively used as training sets for supervised WSD systems, surpassing the state of the art for low-resourced languages and providing competitive results for English, where manually annotated training sets are accessible. The data is available at trainomatic.org.
A threshold method for Imbalanced Multiple Noisy Labeling

Internet-based crowdsourcing systems can be viewed as a kind of loosely coupled social networks. With these systems, it is easy to collect multiple noisy labels for the same object when conducting annotation for supervised learning. Because non-expert labelers lack expertise and dedication, and have strong personal preference, they may have bias when labeling. These cause Imbalanced Multiple Noisy Labeling. In this paper, we propose an agnostic algorithm Positive LAbel frequency Threshold (PLAT) to deal with imbalanced labeling. Because of the dynamics of social networks, in most cases no information about the qualities of labelers and underlying class distributions can be acquired. PLAT does not require prior knowledge of the labeling qualities of labelers, the underlying class distributions, and the level of labeling imbalance. Simulations on eight real-world datasets with different underlying class distributions demonstrate that PLAT not only effectively deals with the imbalanced multiple noisy labeling that off-the-shelf agnostic methods cannot cope with, but also performs nearly the same as majority voting under the circumstances that labelers have no bias.
Gait Kinematics in Individuals with Acute and Chronic Patellofemoral Pain

PurposeThis study aimed to identify the discriminating kinematic gait characteristics between individuals with acute and chronic patellofemoral pain (PFP) and healthy controls. MethodsNinety-eight runners with PFP (39 male, 59 female) and 98 healthy control runners (38 male, 60 female) ran on a treadmill at a self-selected speed while three-dimensional lower limb kinematic data were collected. Runners with PFP were split into acute (n = 25) and chronic (n = 73) subgroups on the basis of whether they had been experiencing pain for less or greater than 3 months, respectively. Principal component analysis and linear discriminant analysis were used to determine the combination of kinematic gait characteristics that optimally separated individuals with acute PFP and chronic PFP and healthy controls. ResultsCompared with controls, both the acute and chronic PFP subgroups exhibited greater knee flexion across stance and greater ankle dorsiflexion during early stance. The acute PFP subgroup demonstrated greater transverse plane hip motion across stance compared with healthy controls. In contrast, the chronic PFP subgroup demonstrated greater frontal plane hip motion, greater knee abduction, and reduced ankle eversion/greater ankle inversion across stance when compared with healthy controls. ConclusionsThis study identified characteristics that discriminated between individuals with acute and chronic PFP when compared with healthy controls. Certain discriminating characteristics were shared between both the acute and chronic subgroups when compared with healthy controls, whereas others were specific to the duration of PFP.
Toughness Enhancement by Aligned Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotubes Pullout from Polymer Matrix of Multi-Scale Composites

There have been tremendous researches on carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and CNTs reinforced composites due to their excellent mechanical, electromagnetical and thermal properties. Radially aligned multi-walled CNTs grown in situ on the surface of carbon fiber or its woven fabric by the chemical vapor deposition method not only provide the significant three-dimensional reinforcement, but also overcome the poor dispersion of nanostructures. In order to investigate how the aligned multi-walled CNTs affect the mechanical properties of the multi-scale composites, a representative volume element is used to simulate the multi-walled CNT pullout process by means of the finite element method. Related influencing factors are taken into consideration: CNT length, CNT Youngs modulus, and the shear strength of the interface between multi-walled CNTs and epoxy matrix, which is characterized by a cohesive zone model. The results reveal that the aligned multi-walled CNTs make a significant contribution to the fracture toughness of the multi-scale composites, and the CNT/epoxy composites with high toughness require relatively high interfacial shear strength, reasonable CNT length and Youngs modulus. The study is helpful for the optimal design of multi-scale composites.
Autonomy in Software Engineering: A Preliminary Study on the Influence of Education Level and Professional Experience

Context: Software development process is executed by professionals with different roles, who are responsible for distinct activities. These roles can have different degrees of autonomy depending on some factors, such as the adopted process and hierarchy. Goal: This study aims to identify what factors can impact autonomy and also investigate how autonomy is given to an employee based on two main factors: education level and professional experience. Methodology: Initially, a survey was carried out to understand how autonomy is perceived by 102 software engineers, as well as by 83 professionals from other areas. The next step was applying semi-structured interviews with software engineers to find a better understanding of the quantitative findings. Results: In general, education level and professional experience do not have an impact on autonomy. Only when autonomy is evaluated from the education level perspective, there is a significant difference among the respondents. During the interviews, we also could identify some topics that respondents mentioned which were related to autonomy. For example, the experience that software engineer has in a current project and the development process adopted by the company influence how autonomy is perceived. Conclusion: While professional qualification and experience are not directly related to autonomy, the lack of process and the amount of work experience on specific projects seem to be relevant factors to be aware of.
Micro- and nano-scale deformation processes during scratch damage in high density polyethylene

Abstract Atomic force microscopy and scanning electron microscopy techniques have been used to examine the surface deformation experienced by high density polyethylene during the scratch test. The scratch deformation process involves stretching of fibrils and microfibrils resulting in the formation of surface openings. At the molecular level the chains of molecules unfold and align in the direction of the moving indenter. In the scratch test, the scratch velocity may suggest that low strain rates are valid, but the local strain rates can be many orders of magnitiude higher as exemplified by atomic force microscopy. A number of modes of deformation are encountered during scratching. They include deformation bands, crazing, tearing, microcracking, regular cracking, and grooving. Crazing-tearing is the predominant mode of scratch deformation. It is envisaged that the sequence of tearing along the craze involves formation of deformation bands, development of craze, followed by tearing. Atomic force and scanning electron microscopy of scratch surface damage indicated that the nature and modes of scratch deformation are qualitatively similar to the case of uniaxial tensile deformation, implying similarities in the deformation behaviour between scratch and tensile deformation.
Biofeedback, electrical stimulation, pelvic floor muscle exercises, and vaginal cones: a combined rehabilitative approach for sexual dysfunction associated with urinary incontinence.

INTRODUCTION Urinary incontinence (UI) is often associated with sexual dysfunction. We present our preliminary experience with a combined rehabilitative approach consisting of biofeedback, functional electrical stimulation, pelvic floor muscle exercises, and vaginal cones. AIM The potential impact of such practice on UI and sexual function was analyzed in our case series and discussed. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES AND METHODS We evaluated three women affected by UI and sexual dysfunction. The patients underwent combined pelvic floor rehabilitation (PFR), kept voiding diaries, and filled out the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI questionnaire) before and after the completion of PFR. We evaluated each domain score, including desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, satisfaction, and pain. RESULTS After the combined rehabilitation program, none of them had UI requiring pad use or referred urine leakage during sexual activity, including intercourse. Before PFR, FSFI score ranged from 16 to 21; after treatment, the FSFI score ranged from 22.1 to 29.3. There was an improvement in patients regarding desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, satisfaction, and pain. CONCLUSIONS A complete rehabilitation can provide a beneficial effect on sexual function. A larger trial, on a more extended female population, is currently in progress, in order to confirm our findings. The effectiveness of a complete PFR scheme, together with the lack of side effects, makes it a suitable approach to sexual dysfunction that is associated with UI.
Two-Stream 3-D convNet Fusion for Action Recognition in Videos With Arbitrary Size and Length

3-D convolutional neural networks (3-D-convNets) have been very recently proposed for action recognition in videos, and promising results are achieved. However, existing 3-D-convNets has two “artificial” requirements that may reduce the quality of video analysis: 1) It requires a fixed-sized (e.g., 112 $\times$ 112) input video; and 2) most of the 3-D-convNets require a fixed-length input (i.e., video shots with fixed number of frames). To tackle these issues, we propose an end-to-end pipeline named Two-stream 3-D-convNet Fusion, which can recognize human actions in videos of arbitrary size and length using multiple features. Specifically, we decompose a video into spatial and temporal shots. By taking a sequence of shots as input, each stream is implemented using a spatial temporal pyramid pooling (STPP) convNet with a long short-term memory (LSTM) or CNN-E model, softmax scores of which are combined by a late fusion. We devise the STPP convNet to extract equal-dimensional descriptions for each variable-size shot, and we adopt the LSTM/CNN-E model to learn a global description for the input video using these time-varying descriptions. With these advantages, our method should improve all 3-D CNN-based video analysis methods. We empirically evaluate our method for action recognition in videos and the experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods (both 2-D and 3-D based) on three standard benchmark datasets (UCF101, HMDB51 and ACT datasets).
Synchrotron Small‐Angle X‐Ray Scattering Studies on Flow‐Induced Gyroid to Cylinder Transition in an Elastomeric SBS Triblock Copolymer

Abstract We report elongational flow‐induced morphological transition from double gyroid (DG) to hexagonal cylinders in polystyrene‐block‐polybutadiene‐block‐polystyrene triblock copolymer (SBS). First, the SBS sample was fully annealed at 190°C for 24 hr to prepare a DG structure. Then the sample was subjected to planar elongational flow at 190°C for 24 hr. Two‐dimensional, small‐angle x‐ray scattering (2d‐SAXS) measurements revealed that the DG structure transformed into uniaxially aligned cylinders with hexagonally close packing upon imposing the flow, where a (101¯0) plane of the hexagonally packed cylinders was preferentially aligned parallel to the substrate.
Fault in your stars: an analysis of Android app reviews

Mobile app distribution platforms such as Google Play Store allow users to share their feedback about downloaded apps in the form of a review comment and a corresponding star rating. Typically, the star rating ranges from one to five stars, with one star denoting a high sense of dissatisfaction with the app and five stars denoting a high sense of satisfaction. Unfortunately, due to a variety of reasons, often the star rating provided by a user is inconsistent with the opinion expressed in the review. For example, consider the following review for the Facebook App on Android; "Awesome App". One would reasonably expect the rating for this review to be five stars, but the actual rating is one star! Such inconsistent ratings can lead to a deflated (or inflated) overall average rating of an app which can affect user downloads, as typically users look at the average star ratings while making a decision on downloading an app. Also, the app developers receive a biased feedback about the application that does not represent ground reality. This is especially significant for small apps with a few thousand downloads as even a small number of mismatched reviews can bring down the average rating drastically. In this paper, we conducted a study on this review-rating mismatch problem. We manually examined 8600 reviews from 10 popular Android apps and found that 20% of the ratings in our dataset were inconsistent with the review. Further, we developed three systems; two of which were based on traditional machine learning and one on deep learning to automatically identify reviews whose rating did not match with the opinion expressed in the review. Our deep learning system performed the best and had an accuracy of 92% in identifying the correct star rating to be associated with a given review. In another evaluation, we asked 23 end users to write reviews for any 5 apps that they had used recently. We got 115 reviews from 66 different mobile apps. Our deep learning system had an accuracy of 87%. Further, our study suggests that this problem is quite prevalent among apps. Across the ten apps used in our study, the mismatch percentage ranged from 16% to 26%.
Infliximab for Crohn’s Disease: More Than 13 Years of Real-world Experience

Abstract Background The purpose of this study was to compare the long-term safety of infliximab and nonbiologic agents as Crohn’s disease (CD) therapy. Methods Patients with CD were prospectively evaluated in this large, observational registry. Results Patients (n = 6273) participated in this observational registry from July 1999 through March 2012; 3440 (54.8%) received infliximab (20,971 patient-years), and 2833 (45.2%) received other treatments only (14,806 patient-years). Overall, 59,875 infliximab infusions were administered (80%, 5 mg/kg); 3006 (89.9%) patients received ≥2 infusions. Adverse events (AEs), most commonly those related to CD (eg, abdominal pain, diarrhea), and serious AEs occurred at a higher rate among infliximab-treated patients. Mortality (0.57/100 patient-years, 0.67/100 patient-years) and malignancy rates (0.69/100 patient-years, 0.71/100 patient-years) for infliximab-treated and other-treatments-only patients, respectively, were generally similar. Serious infection rates were higher for infliximab-treated (2.15/100 patient-years) than other-treatments-only patients (0.86/100 patient-years). Infliximab dose was not associated with mortality or serious infection. An increased risk of serious infection was observed with age (>52 years vs ≤30 years) when examined in infliximab-treated patients. Nonserious cerebrovascular accidents (13 events, 0.06/100 patient-years; 5 events, 0.03/100 patient-years) and pulmonary embolisms (11 events, 0.05/100 patient-years; 4 events 0.03/100 patient-years) also occurred at higher rates among infliximab-treated patients than other-treatments-only patients. Conclusions Through more than 13 years of registry experience and an overall median duration of patient follow-up >6 years, mortality was similar between the infliximab-treated and other-treatments-only groups. These final cumulative results are representative of real-world experience among infliximab-treated patients with CD and are consistent with the known risks of disease activity and tumor necrosis factor antagonist therapy.
Testing Process Factor Analysis Models Using the Parametric Bootstrap

ABSTRACT Process factor analysis (PFA) is a latent variable model for intensive longitudinal data. It combines P-technique factor analysis and time series analysis. The goodness-of-fit test in PFA is currently unavailable. In the paper, we propose a parametric bootstrap method for assessing model fit in PFA. We illustrate the test with an empirical data set in which 22 participants rated their effects everyday over a period of 90 days. We also explore Type I error and power of the parametric bootstrap test with simulated data.