Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
By-example synthesis of structurally sound patterns

Several techniques exist to automatically synthesize a 2D image resembling an input exemplar texture. Most of the approaches optimize a new image so that the color neighborhoods in the output closely match those in the input, across all scales. In this paper we revisit by-example texture synthesis in the context of additive manufacturing. Our goal is to generate not only colors, but also structure along output surfaces: given an exemplar indicating 'solid' and 'empty' pixels, we generate a similar pattern along the output surface. The core challenge is to guarantee that the pattern is not only fully connected, but also structurally sound. To achieve this goal we propose a novel formulation for on-surface by-example texture synthesis that directly works in a voxel shell around the surface. It enables efficient local updates to the pattern, letting our structural optimizer perform changes that improve the overall rigidity of the pattern. We use this technique in an iterative scheme that jointly optimizes for appearance and structural soundness. We consider fabricability constraints and a user-provided description of a force profile that the object has to resist. Our results fully exploit the capabilities of additive manufacturing by letting users design intricate structures along surfaces. The structures are complex, yet they resemble input exemplars, resulting in a modeling tool accessible to casual users.
Economic and financial analysis of investments in information security

The paper analyzes information security investments from both economic and financial points of view. Authors research special characteristics of information security investments and the difficulties which appear during the determination of input parameters of the economic analysis. Challenges in application of internal rate of return method are also analyzed. The constructed model of cash flow analysis of information security solution investments shows the feasibility of calculating the net present value, internal rate of return and the return on capital when using such an approach.
Innovation in Mobile Learning: A European Perspective

In the evolving landscape of mobile learning, European researchers have conducted significant mobile learning projects, representing a distinct perspective on mobile learning research and development. Our article aims to explore how these projects have arisen, showing the driving forces of European innovation in mobile learning. We propose context as a central construct in mobile learning and examine theories of learning for the mobile world, based on physical, technological, conceptual, social and temporal mobility. We also examine the impacts of mobile learning research on educational practices and the implications for policy. Throughout, we identify lessons learnt from European experiences to date.
Disclosure and the Cost of Capital: Evidence from Firms’ Responses to the Enron Shock

This paper examines the link between disclosure and the cost of capital. We exploit an exogenous cost of capital shock that the Enron scandal in Fall 2001 created for other U.S. firms and analyze whether and how firms respond to this shock. These tests are opposite to the typical research design that analyzes cost of capital responses to disclosure changes. In reversing the tests and using an exogenous shock, we mitigate endogeneity concerns in traditional crosssectional disclosure studies. Our analysis is based on a unique method that allows us to estimate shocks to firms’ betas as well as subsequent changes in systematic risk due to firms’ disclosure responses to the transparency crisis. Our analysis shows that beta shocks around the Enron scandal are associated with increased disclosure. Firms expand the number of pages of their annual 10-K filings, notably the sections containing the management discussion & analysis, related-party transactions, financial statements and footnotes. The increase in disclosure is particularly pronounced for firms that have positive cost of capital shocks and larger financing needs. We also find that firms respond with additional interim disclosures (e.g., 8-K filings and conference calls) and provide evidence suggesting that these disclosures are complementary to the increase in 10-K disclosures. Finally, we show that firms’ disclosure responses are effective in reducing the impact of the transparency crisis on firms’ costs of capital. JEL classification: G14, G15, G30, K22, M41, M42
The Subset Principle in syntax: costs of compliance

Following Hale & Reiss' paper on the Subset Principle (SP) in phonology, we draw attention here to some unsolved problems in the application of SP to syntax acquisition. While noting connections to formal results in computational linguistics, our focus is on how SP could be implemented in a way that is both linguistically well-grounded and psychologically feasible. We concentrate on incremental learning (with no memory for past inputs), which is now widely assumed in psycholinguistics. However, in investigating its interactions with SP, we uncover the rather startling fact that incremental learning and SP are incompatible, given other standard assumptions. We set out some ideas for ways in which they might be reconciled. Some seem more promising than others, but all appear to carry severe costs in terms of computational load, learning speed or memory resources. The penalty for disobeying SP has long been understood. In future language acquisition research it will be important to address the costs of obeying SP.
More Investment in Conceptual Designers: Think about it!

Developing database (DB) and data warehouse (DW) applications passes through three main modeling phases imposed by the ANSI/SPARC architecture: conceptual, logical and physical. This architecture creates two different actors: (i) conceptual designers and Database Administrators (DBA). The first actor collects user requirements, chooses the relevant diagrams for designing the conceptual model (or the logical model). The DBA ensures the performance, the maintenance and the tuning of the final application. Most of the tasks performed by these two actors are complex and time consuming for a majority of companies. Recently, some academic and industry research efforts are moving towards truly zero-administration of DW by proposing tools (advisors) substituting some tasks of DBA. One of the functionalities of these tools is to propose recommendations in choosing optimization structures such as indexing, materialized views, etc. They do not guarantee robust solutions. In this paper, we propose a revolutionary economical model for DB /DW application. Instead of substituting the DBA by advisors, we propose to delegate some DBA tasks to conceptual designers like selecting optimization structures. First, we propose to connect user requirements to the conceptual model of the target application. Secondly, based on the analysis of requirements, SQL queries are identified and then used to select optimization structures. Finally, a feasibility of our approach is tested through the selection of bitmap join indexes based on user requirements.
VOXEL-BASED VOLUME MODELLING OF INDIVIDUAL TREES USING TERRESTRIAL LASER SCANNERS

Accurate modelling of individual trees is essential for forestry applications e.g. forestry inventory and biomass estimation. This paper aims to utilise Terrestrial Laser Scanners (TLS) in order to derive a three dimensional (3D) tree structure and compute its volume. A new approach is proposed and tested to estimate the tree structure and leaf area using precise voxel-based tree models. In this study, four different types of trees were chosen from Centennial Park, Sydney, and the corresponding TLS data was obtained and co-registered. The 3D information from the TLS data was reproduced in terms of voxel attributes in the 3D voxel arrays and the K-Dimensional tree (KD-tree) algorithms were applied to the voxelisation of the point cloud data and the 3D visualization of trees. This voxel method has advantages for 3D modelling of trees over a pixel-based method as it can be used to render discontinuous surfaces and allows for the simultaneous representation of the trunk and branches as well as the foliage. The 3D visualisation of individual tree surfaces derived from the TLS testing was compared with 3D point cloud data obtained by Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS). These TLS results were processed with the KD-tree algorithms (raw data, 10 cm, 50 cm and 100 cm) acquired by the voxelisation of the tree trunk, branches and the total leaf volume which were then further compared with the ALS data. Key word: KD-tree algorithms, Voxelisation, 3D Modelling, forestry inventory, Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS), Airborne Laser Scanner (ALS)
Leveraging Arabic morphology and syntax for achieving better keyphrase extraction

Arabic is one of the fastest growing languages on the Web, with an increasing amount of user generated content being published by both native and non-native speakers all over the world. Despite the great linguistic differences between Arabic and western languages such as English, most Arabic keyphrase extraction systems rely on approaches designed for western languages, thus ignoring its rich morphology and syntax. In this paper we present a new approach leveraging the Arabic morphology and syntax to generate a restricted set of meaningful candidates among which keyphrases are selected. Though employing a small set of well-known features to select the final keyphrases, our system consistently outperforms the well-known and established systems.
Some Attacks Upon Authenticated Group Key Agreement Protocols

During the last few years, a number of authenticated group key agreement protocols have been proposed in the literature. We observed that the efforts in this domain were mostly dedicated to the improvement of their performance in term of bandwidth or computational requirements, but that there were very few systematic studies on their security properties. In this paper, we tried to develop a systematic way to analyse protocol suites extending the Diffie-Hellman key-exchange scheme to a group setting and presented in the context of the Cliques project. This led us to propose a very simple machinery that allowed us to manually pinpoint several unpublished attacks against the main security properties claimed in the definition of these protocols (implicit key agreement, perfect forward secrecy, resistance to known-key attacks).
Effect of agrotechnical factors on the yield of the Grolim asparagus (Asparagus officinalis L.) hybrid on acidic sandy soil

Research of blanched asparagus has begun at the University of Debrecen Institutes for Agricultural Research and Educational Farm Research Institutes of Nyíregyháza in 2011. Establishment of the plantation took place in May 2011. The Grolim hybrid was used in the trial, 16 medium plot trial area has been formed under field conditions, with four repetitions and 36 m2 plot size. In the course of our studies, the effect of different nutriment supply methods (untreated, manure, sheep manure compost, fertilizer) has been analysed on the spear yield of the Grolim asparagus hybrid between 2013 and 2017. In our studies, the beginning of vegetative growth has been recorded upon the constant presence of 10 °C of average soil temperature in the case of the Grolim asparagus hybrid. The beginning and length of spear harvesting are both influenced by the time and dynamics of initial development in spring. During the analysed period, the dates of spear harvesting were various, the earliest being on 23rd March, 2014 and the latest on 23rd April, 2015; the rest of the three years have been varied within this one month interval. The total of heat units required for the vegetative development of spears has been determined; it provides important information for cultivation practice. Spear yields turned out to be hectic during the analysed period. In 2013 and 2014, yields have surpassed the amount of 50 kg/harvest period/plot in the case of every treatment version. However, in 2015 a significantly lower specific yield has been recorded due to the unfavourable weather conditions in spring; a yield decline of nearly 50% was recorded in the case of the control treatment compared to the previous years. Yield was also lower in the rest of the fertilization treatments compared to 2014; however, in these cases, the degree of yield decrease was around 5–10%, which suggests the yield stabilising effect of fertilization. In 2016, a slight yield increase was measured in comparison with the base year. In 2017, there was a decline of yield in the control treatment; however, the different fertilization treatments resulted in yield increase as compared to previous years. On the basis of our studies, it is clear that the best yield results have been provided by the artificial fertilization treatment in all of the five analysed years. It was followed by the sheep manure compost and manure treatments in terms of their effect on spear yield. During the three harvesting periods, the lowest yield on acidic sandy soil was recorded in the case of the control treatment. The most remarkable effect of nutriment treatments has been realised in terms of the decreased deviation of yield results, which perfectly represents the yield stabilising effect of nutriment supply in the case of perennial crops – asparagus – as well, even on a poor nutriment supply characteristic sandy soil.
DNA Methyltransferases: A Novel Target for Prevention and Therapy

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in US. Despite the emergence of new, targeted agents, and the use of various therapeutic combinations, none of the available treatment options are curative in patients with advanced cancer. Epigenetic alterations are increasingly recognized as valuable targets for the development of cancer therapies. DNA methylation at the 5-position of cytosine, catalyzed by DNA methyltransferases (DNMTs), is the predominant epigenetic modification in mammals. DNMT1, the major enzyme responsible for maintenance of the DNA methylation pattern is located at the replication fork and methylates newly biosynthesized DNA. DNMT2 or TRDMT1, the smallest mammalian DNMT is believed to participate in the recognition of DNA damage, DNA recombination, and mutation repair. It is composed solely of the C-terminal domain, and does not possess the regulatory N-terminal region. The levels of DNMTs, especially those of DNMT3B, DNMT3A, and DNMT3L, are often increased in various cancer tissues and cell lines, which may partially account for the hypermethylation of promoter CpG-rich regions of tumor suppressor genes in a variety of malignancies. Moreover, it has been shown to function in self-renewal and maintenance of colon cancer stem cells and need to be studied in several cancers. Inhibition of DNMTs has demonstrated reduction in tumor formation in part through the increased expression of tumor suppressor genes. Hence, DNMTs can potentially be used as anti-cancer targets. Dietary phytochemicals also inhibit DNMTs and cancer stem cells; this represents a promising approach for the prevention and treatment of many cancers.
arrayMap 2014: an updated cancer genome resource

Somatic copy number aberrations (CNA) represent a mutation type encountered in the majority of cancer genomes. Here, we present the 2014 edition of arrayMap (http://www.arraymap.org), a publicly accessible collection of pre-processed oncogenomic array data sets and CNA profiles, representing a vast range of human malignancies. Since the initial release, we have enhanced this resource both in content and especially with regard to data mining support. The 2014 release of arrayMap contains more than 64 000 genomic array data sets, representing about 250 tumor diagnoses. Data sets included in arrayMap have been assembled from public repositories as well as additional resources, and integrated by applying custom processing pipelines. Online tools have been upgraded for a more flexible array data visualization, including options for processing user provided, non-public data sets. Data integration has been improved by mapping to multiple editions of the human reference genome, with the majority of the data now being available for the UCSC hg18 as well as GRCh37 versions. The large amount of tumor CNA data in arrayMap can be freely downloaded by users to promote data mining projects, and to explore special events such as chromothripsis-like genome patterns.
Corn agronomic traits and recovery of nitrogen from fertilizer during crop season and off-season

Abstract: The objective of this work was to evaluate corn agronomic traits in a cultivation subjected to different N rates, during the fall-winter (off-season) and spring-summer crop seasons, and N recovery from fertilizer. The experiment was set up in a randomized complete block design with four replicates, in a 5x2 factorial arrangement, with the following treatments: five N topdressing rates - 0, 30, 60, 90, and 120 kg ha-1 -, using urea as source; and two crop seasons, fall-winter and spring-summer. The following variables were determined: plant height, height of the first ear insertion, number of grains per ear, diameter and length of ear, 1,000-grain weight, N concentration in the leaves and grains, grain-protein concentration, grain yield, N recovery from fertilizer, and soil-N supply. Nitrogen rates in the fertilizer in the fall-winter season had no effect on grain yield, although corn agronomic traits showed a greater reliance on fertilizer-N rates in that season than in the spring-summer, which is a season associated to a greater capacity of soil-N supply to plants. The quantification of soil-N supply enabled knowing the nutrient dynamics during the fall-winter and the spring-summer seasons, which may be useful to guide N fertilization of corn.
Study on the Regulatory Mechanism of the Lipid Metabolism Pathways during Chicken Male Germ Cell Differentiation Based on RNA-Seq

Here, we explore the regulatory mechanism of lipid metabolic signaling pathways and related genes during differentiation of male germ cells in chickens, with the hope that better understanding of these pathways may improve in vitro induction. Fluorescence-activated cell sorting was used to obtain highly purified cultures of embryonic stem cells (ESCs), primitive germ cells (PGCs), and spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs). The total RNA was then extracted from each type of cell. High-throughput analysis methods (RNA-seq) were used to sequence the transcriptome of these cells. Gene Ontology (GO) analysis and the KEGG database were used to identify lipid metabolism pathways and related genes. Retinoic acid (RA), the end-product of the retinol metabolism pathway, induced in vitro differentiation of ESC into male germ cells. Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) was used to detect changes in the expression of the genes involved in the retinol metabolic pathways. From the results of RNA-seq and the database analyses, we concluded that there are 328 genes in 27 lipid metabolic pathways continuously involved in lipid metabolism during the differentiation of ESC into SSC in vivo, including retinol metabolism. Alcohol dehydrogenase 5 (ADH5) and aldehyde dehydrogenase 1 family member A1 (ALDH1A1) are involved in RA synthesis in the cell. ADH5 was specifically expressed in PGC in our experiments and aldehyde dehydrogenase 1 family member A1 (ALDH1A1) persistently increased throughout development. CYP26b1, a member of the cytochrome P450 superfamily, is involved in the degradation of RA. Expression of CYP26b1, in contrast, decreased throughout development. Exogenous RA in the culture medium induced differentiation of ESC to SSC-like cells. The expression patterns of ADH5, ALDH1A1, and CYP26b1 were consistent with RNA-seq results. We conclude that the retinol metabolism pathway plays an important role in the process of chicken male germ cell differentiation.
FlowMine: Android app analysis via data flow

The demeanor towards sensitive data is an important factor to differentiate malicious apps from benign apps in Android platform. In this work, we consider the data flow path from a data source to a data sink, where `source' is a non-constant data that marks the beginning of the path, and `sink' is the resource where the data reaches. To accurately identify the behavioral differences, we analyzed the data flow paths in 2800 benign apps against 15000 malicious apps. We assigned weights to each path which is the absolute difference between its use in benign and malicious samples. If a path is more used by malicious apps, then weight becomes negative otherwise positive. We assigned rankings according to the popularity of the path. If the benignity rank of a path is higher than its malignity rank, then it can be inferred that the path is more used by benign application. We cover all possible paths in an application based on context-sensitivity, flow-sensitivity, and object-sensitivity of data. We name our proposed solution FlowMine. FlowMine takes these rankings and weights as its contrivance and evaluates the behavior of any test application towards maliciousness or benignity. For evaluation purpose, we took 5000 benign and 10000 malware samples. To the best of our knowledge, FlowMine is the first approach that finds the degree of similarity of an unknown sample app with known benign and malware samples for the classification of app. Our prototype excelled and correctly classified 96% of all benign apps and 98% of all novel malware leaking sensitive data.
Short Cycle Covers of Cubic Graphs

The Shortest Cycle Cover Conjecture asserts that the edges of every bridgeless graph with m edges can be covered by cycles of total length at most 7m/5 = 1.4m. We show that every cubic bridgeless graph has a cycle cover of total length at most 34m/21 ≈ 1.619m.
Fast pixelwise road inference based on Uniformly Reweighted Belief Propagation

The future of autonomous vehicles and driver assistance systems is underpinned by the need of fast and efficient approaches for road scene understanding. Despite the large explored paths for road detection, there is still a research gap for incorporating image understanding capabilities in intelligent vehicles. This paper presents a pixelwise segmentation of roads from monocular images. The proposal is based on a probabilistic graphical model and a set of algorithms and configurations chosen to speed up the inference of the road pixels. In brief, the proposed method employs Conditional Random Fields and Uniformly Reweighted Belief Propagation. Besides, the approach is ranked on the KITTI ROAD dataset yielding state-of-the-art results with the lowest runtime per image using a standard PC.