Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Worst-case interactive communication I: Two messages are almost optimal

The reduction in communication achievable by interaction is investigated. The model assumes two communicators: an informant having a random variable X, and a recipient having a possibly dependent random variable Y. Both communicators want the recipient to learn X with no probability of error, whereas the informant may or may not learn Y. To that end, they alternate in transmitting messages comprising finite sequences of bits. Messages are transmitted over an error-free channel and are determined by an agreed-upon, deterministic protocol for (X,Y) (i.e. a protocol for transmitting X to a person who knows Y). A two-message protocol is described, and its worst case performance is investigated. >
Specific carotenoid pigments in the diet and a bit of oxidative stress in the recipe for producing red carotenoid-based signals

Colorful ornaments have been the focus of sexual selection studies since the work of Darwin. Yellow to red coloration is often produced by carotenoid pigments. Different hypotheses have been formulated to explain the evolution of these traits as signals of individual quality. Many of these hypotheses involve the existence of a signal production cost. The carotenoids necessary for signaling can only be obtained from food. In this line, carotenoid-based signals could reveal an individual’s capacity to find sufficient dietary pigments. However, the ingested carotenoids are often yellow and became transformed by the organism to produce pigments of more intense color (red ketocarotenoids). Biotransformation should involve oxidation reactions, although the exact mechanism is poorly known. We tested the hypothesis that carotenoid biotransformation could be costly because a certain level of oxidative stress is required to correctly perform the conversion. The carotenoid-based signals could thus reveal the efficiency of the owner in successfully managing this challenge. In a bird with ketocarotenoid-based ornaments (the red-legged partridge; Alectoris rufa), the availability of different carotenoids in the diet (i.e. astaxanthin, zeaxanthin and lutein) and oxidative stress were manipulated. The carotenoid composition was analyzed and quantified in the ornaments, blood, liver and fat. A number of oxidative stress biomarkers were also measured in the same tissues. First, we found that color and pigment levels in the ornaments depended on food levels of those carotenoids used as substrates in biotransformation. Second, we found that birds exposed to mild levels of a free radical generator (diquat) developed redder bills and deposited higher amounts of ketocarotenoids (astaxanthin) in ornaments. Moreover, the same diquat-exposed birds also showed a weaker resistance to hemolysis when their erythrocytes were exposed to free radicals, with females also enduring higher oxidative damage in plasma lipids. Thus, higher color production would be linked to higher oxidative stress, supporting the biotransformation hypothesis. The recent discovery of an avian oxygenase enzyme involved in converting yellow to red carotenoids may support our results. Nonetheless, the effect could also depend on the abundance of specific substrate carotenoids in the diet. Birds fed with proportionally higher levels of zeaxanthin showed the reddest ornaments with the highest astaxanthin concentrations. Moreover, these birds tended to show the strongest diquat-mediated effect. Therefore, in the evolution of carotenoid-based sexual signals, a biotransformation cost derived from maintaining a well-adjusted redox machinery could coexist with a cost linked to carotenoid acquisition and allocation (i.e. a resource allocation trade-off).
A Copyright Protection Scheme for Color Images using Secret Sharing and Wavelet Transform

This paper proposes a copyright protection scheme for color images using secret sharing and wavelet transform. The scheme contains two phases: the share image generation phase and the watermark retrieval phase. In the generation phase, the proposed scheme first converts the image into the YCbCr color space and creates a special sampling plane from the color space. Next, the scheme extracts the features from the sampling plane using the discrete wavelet transform. Then, the scheme employs the features and the watermark to generate a principal share image. In the retrieval phase, an expanded watermark is first reconstructed using the features of the suspect image and the principal share image. Next, the scheme reduces the additional noise to obtain the recovered watermark, which is then verified against the original watermark to examine the copyright. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can resist several attacks such as JPEG compression, blurring, sharpening, noise addition, and cropping. The accuracy rates are all higher than 97%. Keywords—Color image, copyright protection, discrete wavelet transform, secret sharing, watermarking.
A New Admission Control Metric for VoIP Traffic in 802 . 11 Networks

In this paper, we propose a new metric for admission control of VoIP traffic for IEEE 802.11b networks. Due to the large fixed overhead in IEEE 802.11b, the bandwidth available at the payload sizes typical for VoIP traffic is far less than the bandwidth available when using the network for data traffic. Hence, bandwidth is inappropriate as criterion whether or not a new VoIP stream or data stream can be accommodated without pushing the network over its throughput limit. We propose a new criterion called network utilization characteristic which allows to assess the available resources in the wireless network in an accurate way and show how it can be used for admission control.
Ensuring global coverage with isophoric direct radiating ring arrays

In this contribution we discuss the feasibility of a full-Earth coverage from GEO satellite by means of isophoric (that is, equi-amplitude) Direct Radiating Arrays (DRAs). By focusing on the ring-array architecture we show that a large beam scanning requirement imposes some severe geometrical constraints on the final array layout. Furthermore, we introduce a synthesis procedure capable to generate arrays satisfying the desired specifications with a reasonably low number of control points.
Pushdown Model Generation of Malware

Model checking software consists of two steps: model generation and model checking. A model is often generated statically by abstraction, and sometimes refined iteratively. However, model generation is not easy for malware, since malware is often distributed without source codes, but as binary executables. Worse, sophisticated malware tries to obfuscate its behavior, like self-modification, which dynamically modifies itself and destination of indirect jumps. This paper proposes a pushdown model generation of x86 binaries in an on-the-fly manner with concolic testing to decide the precise destinations of indirect jumps. A tool BE-PUM (Binary Emulation for PUshdown Model generation) is built on JakStab, and currently it covers 52 popular x86 instructions. Experiments are performed on 1700 malwares taken from malware database. Compared to JakStab and IDA Pro, two stateof-the-art tools in this field, BE-PUM shows better tracing ability, which sometimes shows significant differences.
Edinburgh Research Explorer Adaptive thresholding for reliable topological inference in single subject fMRI analysis

Single subject fMRI has proved to be a useful tool for mapping functional areas in clinical procedures such as tumor resection. Using fMRI data, clinicians assess the risk, plan and execute such procedures based on thresholded statistical maps. However, because current thresholding methods were developed mainly in the context of cognitive neuroscience group studies, most single subject fMRI maps are thresholded manually to satisfy speciﬁc criteria related to single subject analyzes. Here, we propose a new adaptive thresholding method which combines Gamma-Gaussian mixture modeling with topological thresholding to improve cluster delineation. In a series of simulations we show that by adapting to the signal and noise properties, the new method performs well in terms of total number of errors but also in terms of the trade-off between false negative and positive cluster error rates. Similarly, simulations show that adaptive thresholding performs better than ﬁxed thresholding in terms of over and underestimation of the true activation border (i.e., higher spatial accuracy). Finally, through simulations and a motor test–retest study on 10 volunteer subjects, we show that adaptive thresholding improves reliability, mainly by accounting for the global signal variance. This in turn increases the likelihood that the true activation pattern can be determined offering an automatic yet ﬂexible way to threshold single subject fMRI maps.
DAP Final Version Segmenting the brain via sparse inverse covariance estimation and graph-based clustering on high-dimensional fMRI data

Background. An important problem in neuroscience is understanding what parts of the human brain work together. Neuroscientists often approach this problem by generating — largely by hand — clusterings of points in and on the brain. From the point of view of statistics, the relevant tools here are: (1) sparse inverse covariance estimators, which yield partial correlation graphs, and (2) graph-based clustering methods, for clustering the graphs. Aim. We apply a state-of-the-art estimator of the inverse covariance matrix, called PseudoNet, as well as several graph-based clustering methods (including the well-known Louvain method), to recently released functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, in order to generate an entirely data-driven clustering of the brain that reveals insights about how the brain works. Data. As far as fMRI data go, the data we use is relatively new and good quality; the data is from the Human Connectome Project, a research project started by the government to study what parts of the brain work together. Specifically, the data we use is an (91, 282 × 91, 282)dimensional sample correlation matrix that is of size ≈ 30 GB. Method. We take a two-step approach. First, we generate a partial correlation graph by running the sample correlation matrix through PseudoNet. Then, we use a graph-clustering method to generate clusters from the graph. We compare how close our clustering is to a stateof-the-art, hand-crafted clustering from the neuroscience literature by using a variant of the standard Jaccard score. Results. Although our method is not perfect, it does capture some important features of the brain known to neuroscientists. Conclusion. The results we get are encouraging, suggesting that with a little more work, we might be able to generate a clustering that is completely on par with (or better than), in some sense, the hand-crafted one from the neuroscience literature. Intellectual merit. As far as we can tell, there really does not seem to be a single paper in either the neuroscience or statistics literatures that uses the latest in fMRI data as well as statistical methodology to generate clusterings of the brain. This is probably because (1) fMRI data tends to be very high-dimensional, ruling out many standard tools in a computational scientist’s toolbox; (2) neuroscientists may simply, by and large, be unaware of the latest tools in statistics; and (3) good quality fMRI data has only recently become widely available. Broader impacts. Understanding which parts of the brain work together can help suggest avenues for future research in neuroscience and medicine. Our method can also be applied to other domains, e.g., genetics, finance, and energy, and might be useful there.
Neutron Spectroscopy Using LiF Thin-Film Detectors

Abstract : A stacked array of segmented micro-structured semiconductor neutron detectors (MSNDs) has been fabricated to perform as a neutron spectrometer simultaneously capable of differentiating fast and thermal neutrons. The MSND devices consist of thin-film perforated diodes constructed from LiF powder back-filled into an etched silicon wafer. Geant4 simulations demonstrate than an eight-layer spectrometer consisting of alternating layers of MSND and hydrogenous moderator can successfully resolve neutron energies at a resolution dependent upon the number of layers and the thickness of the adjacent moderating materials. The simulated spectrometer response was compared to that obtained experimentally with mono-energetic neutrons from a D+D neutron generator. The commissioning tests of the spectrometer reveal that the energy of a mono-energetic neutron source can be identified to within + or -1 MeV. Following the commissioning tests, the spectrometer was used to characterize the poly-energetic neutron spectrum of a plutonium-beryllium neutron source.
Prevention of diet-induced hepatic steatosis and hepatic insulin resistance by second generation antisense oligonucleotides targeted to the longevity gene mIndy (Slc13a5)

Reducing the expression of the Indy (I'm Not Dead Yet) gene in lower organisms extends life span by mechanisms resembling caloric restriction. Similarly, deletion of the mammalian homolog, mIndy (Slc13a5), encoding for a plasma membrane tricarboxylate transporter, protects from aging- and diet-induced adiposity and insulin resistance in mice. The organ specific contribution to this phenotype is unknown. We examined the impact of selective inducible hepatic knockdown of mIndy on whole body lipid and glucose metabolism using 2′-O-methoxyethyl chimeric anti-sense oligonucleotides (ASOs) in high-fat fed rats. 4-week treatment with 2′-O-methoxyethyl chimeric ASO reduced mIndy mRNA expression by 91% (P<0.001) compared to control ASO. Besides similar body weights between both groups, mIndy-ASO treatment lead to a 74% reduction in fasting plasma insulin concentrations as well as a 35% reduction in plasma triglycerides. Moreover, hepatic triglyceride content was significantly reduced by the knockdown of mIndy, likely mediating a trend to decreased basal rates of endogenous glucose production as well as an increased suppression of hepatic glucose production by 25% during a hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp. Together, these data suggest that inducible liver-selective reduction of mIndy in rats is able to ameliorate hepatic steatosis and insulin resistance, conditions occurring with high calorie diets and during aging.
An integrated image and sketching environment for archaeological sites

We introduce a tool for organizing images and drawings of archaeological sites. The tool is based on a 3D sketching system developed for conceptual architectural design. The sketching system for design allows a user to represent structures as strokes located on 2D canvases situated in 3D space. The design of a consistent 3D structure evolves as the user is allowed to move the strokes from the 2D canvases into a consistent assembly in 3D space. This system is extended by allowing the user to introduce images and drawings of archaeological sites into the space. The initial positioning of the images onto the 2D canvases is obtained using automated bundling techniques from computer vision, in the manner used by systems such a Photosynth. Many of the historic photographs and all of the orthographic drawings of sites however can not be automatically situated. We introduce simple user interactions to assist in including these additional photographs and drawings. Once the 3D environment is populated with imagery, the user can use the tool to tour the space, to enter annotation as written text or 3D sketches, and to prepare interactive tours to communicate information about the site to others.
A Review on Minimum Quantity Lubrication for Machining Processes

In the pursuit toward achieving dry cutting, air machining, minimum quantity lubrication (MQL), and cryogenically cooled machining are the stepping stones. Nevertheless, machining is always accompanied by certain difficulties, and hence none of these methods has provided a complete solution. Hence, this article reviews various MQL methods used by various machining processes for different materials. It also highlights the future work directions for research in this area.
Generating Quantitative Test Cases for Probabilistic Timed Web Service Composition

The environment of enterprise applications is characterized by frequently changing market demands, time-to-market pressure and fierce competition. To seamlessly integrate complex computing activities, Web Service Composition (WSC) has been regarded as an emerging E-Commerce solution to support interoperable machine-to-machine business interactions over network. To guarantee the composite Web service can be successfully produced, testing is a preferred validation technique to efficiently verify the correctness of functional and nonfunctional requirements of WSC behaviors. BPEL4WS is a high level and semi-formal abstract description language for WSC orchestration. Manually generating test cases from BPEL4WS is tedious, time-consuming, and error prone. Thus, the automated test case generation plays a critical role in all the phases of Web service life cycle. Considering the uncertain environment, an extended WSC model, namely probabilistic timed interface automata for Web service (PTIA4WS), is pro-posed to transform and extend BPEL4WS with regard to the stochastic and time-related behaviors. Based on PTIA4WS model, we propose an approach for generating quantitative test cases from counterexamples of violated PTCTL formulae using coverage criterions. After that, timed test case with fastest execution response time and probabilistic test case with maximal execution success rate are discussed. The series of experiments show that our method gains better performance than traditional methods.
Towards a New Modality-Independent Interface for a Robotic Wheelchair

This work presents the development of a robotic wheelchair that can be commanded by users in a supervised way or by a fully automatic unsupervised navigation system. It provides flexibility to choose different modalities to command the wheelchair, in addition to be suitable for people with different levels of disabilities. Users can command the wheelchair based on their eye blinks, eye movements, head movements, by sip-and-puff and through brain signals. The wheelchair can also operate like an auto-guided vehicle, following metallic tapes, or in an autonomous way. The system is provided with an easy to use and flexible graphical user interface onboard a personal digital assistant, which is used to allow users to choose commands to be sent to the robotic wheelchair. Several experiments were carried out with people with disabilities, and the results validate the developed system as an assistive tool for people with distinct levels of disability.
First-Principles Study on Electronic Structure and Magnetic Properties of Freestanding Ni Nanobelts

Calculations have been performed for the relaxed structures and electronic properties of Ni nanobelts with the cross-section 3×3, 3×5, 3×7 and 3×9 atomic layers, using the first-principles projector-augmented wave (PAW) potential within density functional theory (DFT) framework. For all of the four size Ni nanobelts, the most atoms relax inward and the magnetic moment decrease as the belt width increase. Compared with bulk Ni, the freestanding Ni nanobelt offer strong spin polarization at the Fermi level as well as considerable magnetic moment. Thus such structures can be potentially utilized to design magnetic nano-devices.
Sectorial Coverage in a Deployment of a WMN Backbone Based on Directional Antennas

Recently, the directional antenna has received intensive research due to its variety of potential benefits for wireless communication systems, especially in the context of ad hoc networks. Nodes equipped with this type of antennas can communicate simultaneously without interference, and potentially establish links between them with less routing hops. This interference reduction provide a higher channel reuse leading to better resource exploitation and potentially better performance. In this study we want to take the advantage of directional antennas by proposing a sectorial coverage in a deployment of a WMN backbone based on mesh mode. Mainly, we propose a new architecture based on this type of antennas and OLSR protocol is used as routing protocol. We show by simulations under NS3 that the proposed architecture improve the overall QoS. We propose also an implementation of this type of antennas and we show with numerical results that the use of directional coverage outperform the omnidirectional coverage.
Convergence index filter for vector fields

This paper proposes a unique fitter called an iris filter, which evaluates the degree of convergence of the gradient vectors within its region of support toward a pixel of interest. The degree of convergence is related to the distribution of the directions of the gradient vectors and not to their magnitudes. The convergence index of a gradient vector at a given pixel is defined as the cosine of its orientation with respect to the line connecting the pixel and the pixel of interest. The output of the iris filter is the average of the convergence indices within its region of support and lies within the range [-1,1]. The region of support of the iris filter changes so that the degree of convergence of the gradient vectors in it becomes a maximum, i.e., the size and shape of the region of support at each pixel of interest changes adaptively according to the distribution pattern of the gradient vectors around it. Theoretical analysis using models of a rounded convex region and a semi-cylindrical one is given. These show that rounded convex regions are generally enhanced, even if the contrast to their background is weak and also that elongated objects are suppressed. The filter output is 1/pi at the boundaries of rounded convex regions and semi-cylindrical ones. This value does not depend on the contrast to their background. This indicates that boundaries of rounded or slender objects, with weak contrast to their background, are enhanced by the iris filter and that the absolute value of 1/pi can be used to detect the boundaries of these objects. These theoretical characteristics are confirmed by experiments using X-ray images.
The genetic basis of adaptive pigmentation variation in Drosophila melanogaster

In a broad survey of Drosophila melanogaster population samples, levels of abdominal pigmentation were found to be highly variable and geographically differentiated. A strong positive correlation was found between dark pigmentation and high altitude, suggesting adaptation to specific environments. DNA sequence polymorphism at the candidate gene ebony revealed a clear association with the pigmentation of homozygous third chromosome lines. The darkest lines sequenced had nearly identical haplotypes spanning 14.5 kb upstream of the protein‐coding exons of ebony. Thus, natural selection may have elevated the frequency of an allele that confers dark abdominal pigmentation by influencing the regulation of ebony.