Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bounded Fully Homomorphic Signature Schemes

Homomorphic signatures enable anyone to publicly perform computations on signed data and produce a compact tag to authenticate the results. In this paper, we construct two bounded fully homomorphic signature schemes, as follows. – For any two polynomials d = d(λ), s = s(λ), where λ is the security parameter. Our first scheme is able to evaluate any circuit on the signatures, as long as the depth and size of the circuit are bounded by d and s, respectively. The construction relies on indistinguishability obfuscation and injective (or polynomially bounded pre-image size) one-way functions. – The second scheme, removing the restriction on the size of the circuits, is an extension of the first one, with succinct verification and evaluation keys. More specifically, for an a-prior polynomial d = d(λ), the scheme allows to evaluate any circuit on the signatures, as long as the depth of the circuit is bounded by d. This scheme is based on differing-inputs obfuscation and collision-resistant hash functions and relies on a technique called recording hash of circuits. Both schemes enjoy the composition property. Namely, outputs of previously derived signatures can be reused as inputs for new computations. The length of derived signatures in both schemes is independent of the size of the data set. Moreover, both constructions satisfy a strong privacy notion, we call semi-strong context hiding, which requires that the derived signatures of evaluating any circuit on the signatures of two data sets are identical as long as the evaluations of the circuit on these two data sets are the same.
Nitrate Pollution and Preliminary Source Identification of Surface Water in a Semi-Arid River Basin, Using Isotopic and Hydrochemical Approaches

Nitrate contamination in rivers has raised widespread concern in the world, particularly in arid/semi-arid river basins lacking qualified water. Understanding the nitrate pollution levels and sources is critical to control the nitrogen input and promote a more sustainable water management in those basins. Water samples were collected from a typical semi-arid river basin, the Weihe River watershed, China, in October 2014. Hydrochemical assessment and nitrogen isotopic measurement were used to determine the level of nitrogen compounds and identify the sources of nitrate contamination. Approximately 32.4% of the water samples exceeded the World Health Organization (WHO) drinking water standard for NO3−-N. Nitrate pollution in the main stream of the Weihe River was obviously much more serious than in the tributaries. The δ15N-NO3− of water samples ranged from +8.3‰ to +27.0‰. No significant effect of denitrification on the shift in nitrogen isotopic values in surface water was observed by high dissolved oxygen (DO) values and linear relationship diagram between NO3−-N and δ15N-NO3−, except in the Weihe River in Huayin County and Shitou River. Analyses of hydrochemistry and isotopic compositions indicate that domestic sewage and agricultural activities are the main sources of nitrate in the river.
RADARSAT constellation mission for monitoring ground deformation in Alberta's oil sands

The Canadian RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM, to be launched in 2018) will consist of three C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites. The equivalent four day repeat cycle of RCM will allow monitoring fast ground uplift and subsidence in Alberta's oil sands region, where the Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) and the Cyclical Steam Simulation (CSS) enhanced oil recovery technologies are employed. Previous observations showed slow and steady uplift at the SAGD sites and very fast uplift and subsidence at the CSS sites. The forthcoming RCM and currently operated RADARSAT-2 satellites display significant differences in resolution, coverage, and noise floor. Using RCM simulator we evaluated average interferometric coherence vs spatial resolution and noise floor. We determined that noise floor moderately affects coherence but main limitation is imposed by resolution. The Very High and High resolution RCM beams are best for monitoring ground deformation in Alberta's oil sands.
Validated Computation of Heteroclinic Sets

In this work we develop a method for computing mathematically rigorous enclosures of some one dimensional manifolds of heteroclinic orbits for nonlinear maps. Our method exploits a rigorous curve following argument build on high order Taylor approximation of the local stable/unstable manifolds. The curve following argument is a uniform interval Newton method applied on short line segments. The definition of the heteroclinic sets involve compositions of the map and we use a Lohner-type representation to overcome the accumulation of roundoff errors. Our argument requires precise control over the local unstable and stable manifolds so that we must first obtain validated a-posteriori error bounds on the truncation errors associated with the manifold approximations. We illustrate the utility of our method by proving some computer assisted theorems about heteroclinic invariant sets for a volume preserving map of $\mathbb{R}^3$.
Spectroscopically Well-Characterized RGD Optical Probe as a Prerequisite for Lifetime-Gated Tumor Imaging

Labeling of RGD peptides with near-infrared fluorophores yields optical probes for noninvasive imaging of tumors overexpressing αvβ3 integrins. An important prerequisite for optimum detection sensitivity in vivo is strongly absorbing and highly emissive probes with a known fluorescence lifetime. The RGD-Cy5.5 optical probe was derived by coupling Cy5.5 to a cyclic arginine–glycine–aspartic acid–d-phenylalanine–lysine (RGDfK) peptide via an aminohexanoic acid spacer. Spectroscopic properties of the probe were studied in different matrices in comparison to Cy5.5. For in vivo imaging, human glioblastoma cells were subcutaneously implanted into nude mice, and in vivo fluorescence intensity and lifetime were measured. The fluorescence quantum yield and lifetime of Cy5.5 were found to be barely affected on RGD conjugation but dramatically changed in the presence of proteins. By time domain fluorescence imaging, we demonstrated specific binding of RGD-Cy5.5 to glioblastoma xenografts in nude mice. Discrimination of unspecific fluorescence by lifetime-gated analysis further enhanced the detection sensitivity of RGD-Cy5.5-derived signals. We characterized RGD-Cy5.5 as a strongly emissive and stable probe adequate for selective targeting of αvβ3 integrins. The specificity and thus the overall detection sensitivity in vivo were optimized with lifetime gating, based on the previous determination of the probes fluorescence lifetime under application-relevant conditions.
Quantifying transport in crowded biochemical environments

Transport of cells and biochemical molecules often takes place in crowded, heterogeneous environments. As such, it is important we understand how to quantify crowded transport phenomena, and the possibilities of extracting transport coefficients from limited observations. We employ a volume-excluding random walk model on a square lattice where different fractions of lattice sites are filled with inert, immobile obstacles to investigate whether it is possible to estimate parameters associated with transport when crowding is present. By collecting and analysing data obtained on multiple spatial scales we demonstrate that commonly used models of motility within crowded environments can be used to reliably predict our random walk data. However, infeasibly large amounts of data are needed to estimate transport parameters, and quantitative estimates may differ depending on the spatial scale on which they are collected. We also demonstrate that in models of crowded environments there is a relatively large region of the parameter space within which it is difficult to distinguish between the “best fit” parameter values. This suggests commonly used descriptions of transport within crowded systems may not be appropriate, and that we should be careful in choosing models to represent the effects of crowding upon motility within biochemical systems.
Lung Cancer and Exposure to Nitrogen Dioxide and Traffic: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background and objective Exposure to traffic-related air pollutants is an important public health issue. Here, we present a systematic review and meta-analysis of research examining the relationship of measures of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and of various measures of traffic-related air pollution exposure with lung cancer. Methods We conducted random-effects meta-analyses of studies examining exposure to nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and NOx and its association with lung cancer. We identified 20 studies that met inclusion criteria and provided information necessary to estimate the change in lung cancer per 10-μg/m3 increase in exposure to measured NO2. Further, we qualitatively assessed the evidence of association between distance to roadways and traffic volume associated with lung cancer. Results The meta-estimate for the change in lung cancer associated with a 10-μg/m3 increase in exposure to NO2 was 4% (95% CI: 1%, 8%). The meta-estimate for change in lung cancer associated with a 10-μg/m3 increase in NOx was similar and slightly more precise, 3% (95% CI: 1%, 5%). The NO2 meta-estimate was robust to different confounding adjustment sets as well as the exposure assessment techniques used. Trim-and-fill analyses suggest that if publication bias exists, the overall meta-estimate is biased away from the null. Forest plots for measures of traffic volume and distance to roadways largely suggest a modest increase in lung cancer risk. Conclusion We found consistent evidence of a relationship between NO2, as a proxy for traffic-sourced air pollution exposure, with lung cancer. Studies of lung cancer related to residential proximity to roadways and NOx also suggest increased risk, which may be attributable partly to air pollution exposure. The International Agency for Research on Cancer recently classified outdoor air pollution and particulate matter as carcinogenic (Group 1). These meta-analyses support this conclusion, drawing particular attention to traffic-sourced air pollution. Citation Hamra GB, Laden F, Cohen AJ, Raaschou-Nielsen O, Brauer M, Loomis D. 2015. Lung cancer and exposure to nitrogen dioxide and traffic: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Environ Health Perspect 123:1107–1112; http://dx.doi. org/10.1289/ehp.1408882
Restoration of a Critical Mandibular Bone Defect Using Human Alveolar Bone-Derived Stem Cells and Porous Nano-HA/Collagen/PLA Scaffold

Periodontal bone defects occur in a wide variety of clinical situations. Adult stem cell- and biomaterial-based bone tissue regeneration are a promising alternative to natural bone grafts. Recent evidence has demonstrated that two populations of adult bone marrow mesenchymal stromal cells (BMSCs) can be distinguished based on their embryonic origins. These BMSCs are not interchangeable, as bones preferentially heal using cells that share the same embryonic origin. However, the feasibility of tissue engineering using human craniofacial BMSCs was unclear. The goal of this study was to explore human craniofacial BMSC-based therapy for the treatment of localized mandibular defects using a standardized, minimally invasive procedure. The BMSCs' identity was confirmed. Scanning electron microscopy, a cell proliferation assay, and supernatant detection indicated that the nHAC/PLA provided a suitable environment for aBMSCs. Real-time PCR and electrochemiluminescence immunoassays demonstrated that osteogenic markers were upregulated by osteogenic preinduction. Moreover, in a rabbit critical-size mandibular bone defect model, total bone formation in the nHAC/PLA + aBMSCs group was significantly higher than in the nHAC/PLA group but significantly lower than in the nHAC/PLA + preinduced aBMSCs. These findings demonstrate that this engineered bone is a valid alternative for the correction of mandibular bone defects.
Diagnostic approaches for inherited hemolytic anemia in the genetic era

Inherited hemolytic anemias (IHAs) are genetic diseases that present with anemia due to the increased destruction of circulating abnormal RBCs. The RBC abnormalities are classified into the three major disorders of membranopathies, hemoglobinopathies, and enzymopathies. Traditional diagnosis of IHA has been performed via a step-wise process combining clinical and laboratory findings. Nowadays, the etiology of IHA accounts for germline mutations of the responsible genes coding for the structural components of RBCs. Recent advances in molecular technologies, including next-generation sequencing, inspire us to apply these technologies as a first-line approach for the identification of potential mutations and to determine the novel causative genes in patients with IHAs. We herein review the concept and strategy for the genetic diagnosis of IHAs and provide an overview of the preparations for clinical applications of the new molecular technologies.
Sentiment Lexicons for Arabic Social Media

Existing Arabic sentiment lexicons have low coverage―with only a few thousand entries. In this paper, we present several large sentiment lexicons that were automatically generated using two different methods: (1) by using distant supervision techniques on Arabic tweets, and (2) by translating English sentiment lexicons into Arabic using a freely available statistical machine translation system. We compare the usefulness of new and old sentiment lexicons in the downstream application of sentence-level sentiment analysis. Our baseline sentiment analysis system uses numerous surface form features. Nonetheless, the system benefits from using additional features drawn from sentiment lexicons. The best result is obtained using the automatically generated Dialectal Hashtag Lexicon and the Arabic translations of the NRC Emotion Lexicon (accuracy of 66.6%). Finally, we describe a qualitative study of the automatic translations of English sentiment lexicons into Arabic, which shows that about 88% of the automatically translated entries are valid for English as well. Close to 10% of the invalid entries are caused by gross mistranslations, close to 40% by translations into a related word, and about 50% by differences in how the word is used in Arabic.
Secrecy Capacity Region of Some Classes of Wiretap Broadcast Channels

This paper investigates the secrecy capacity of the wiretap broadcast channel (WBC) with an external eavesdropper where a source wishes to communicate two private messages over a broadcast channel (BC) while keeping them secret from the eavesdropper. We derive a nontrivial outer bound on the secrecy capacity region of this channel which, in absence of security constraints, reduces to the best known outer bound to the capacity of the standard BC. An inner bound is also derived, which follows the behavior of both the best known inner bound for the BC and the wiretap channel. These bounds are shown to be tight for the deterministic BC with a general eavesdropper, the semideterministic BC with a more noisy eavesdropper, and the wiretap BC where users exhibit a less noisiness order between them. Finally, by rewriting our outer bound to encompass the characteristics of parallel channels, we also derive the secrecy capacity region of the product of two inversely less noisy BCs with a more noisy eavesdropper. We illustrate our results by studying the impact of security constraints on the capacity of the WBC with binary erasure and binary symmetric components.
FITNESS RECOVERY AND COMPENSATORY EVOLUTION IN NATURAL MUTANT LINES OF C. ELEGANS

Deleterious mutation accumulation plays a central role in evolutionary genetics, conservation biology, human health, and evolutionary medicine (e.g., methods of viral attenuation for live vaccines). It is therefore important to understand whether and how quickly populations with accumulated deleterious mutational loads can recover fitness through adaptive evolution. We used laboratory experimental evolution with four long‐term mutation–accumulation (MA) lines of Caenorhabditis elegans nematodes to study the dynamics of such fitness evolution. We previously showed that when homozygous mutant populations are evolved in large population sizes, they can rapidly achieve wild‐type fitness through the accumulation of new beneficial or compensatory epistatic mutations. Here, we expand this approach to demonstrate that when replicate lineages are initiated from the same mutant genotype, phenotypic evolution is only sometimes repeatable. MA genotypes that recovered ancestral fitness in the previous experiment did not always do so here. Further, the pattern of adaptive evolution in independently evolved replicates was contingent upon the MA genotype and varied among fitness‐related traits. Our findings suggest that new beneficial mutations can drive rapid fitness evolution, but that the adaptive process is rendered somewhat unpredictable by its susceptibility to chance events and sensitivity to the evolutionary history of the starting population.
Preference Modeling and Preference Elicitation: An Overview

Handling preferences [16] is important in a number of domains, including recommender systems, computational advertisement, personal cognitive assistants, systems for decision support (for example, in medicine) and robotics. Artificial intelligence has been dealing with preferences for quite some time. In order to get closer to the goal of realizing autonomous agents that can decide and act on behalf of humans, formal tools are needed in order to model preferences, represent preferences in a compact way, support reasoning, and elicit (or learn) them from the user (decision maker). Research on preference handling systems makes use of quite a variety of different tools, including formal logic, optimization techniques from operations research; there is also a substantial intersection with research in mathematical economics, especially in approaches based on utility. An additional challenge is brought by the realization that (differently from what assumed in classical economics) humans are not rational decision makers, and are prone to decision biases; this recognition is important especially if the aim is to produce systems that are meant to be used by real users. A thorough introduction to the topic of preferences in artificial intelligence, going much more in depth, can be found in [17].
What makes virtual agents believable?

ABSTRACT In this paper we investigate the concept of believability and make an attempt to isolate individual characteristics (features) that contribute to making virtual characters believable. As the result of this investigation we have produced a formalisation of believability and based on this formalisation built a computational framework focused on simulation of believable virtual agents that possess the identified features. In order to test whether the identified features are, in fact, responsible for agents being perceived as more believable, we have conducted a user study. In this study we tested user reactions towards the virtual characters that were created for a simulation of aboriginal inhabitants of a particular area of Sydney, Australia in 1770 A.D. The participants of our user study were exposed to short simulated scenes, in which virtual agents performed some behaviour in two different ways (while possessing a certain aspect of believability vs. not possessing it). The results of the study indicate that virtual agents that appear resource bounded, are aware of their environment, own interaction capabilities and their state in the world, agents that can adapt to changes in the environment and exist in correct social context are those that are being perceived as more believable. Further in the paper we discuss these and other believability features and provide a quantitative analysis of the level of contribution for each such feature to the overall perceived believability of a virtual agent.
Outage probability of the free-space optical channel with doubly stochastic scintillation

We study the asymptotic outage probability of multiple-input multiple-output free-space optical communication with pulse-position modulation. In particular, we consider doubly stochastic scintillation models, lognormal-Rice and I-K distributions. First we consider the case when channel state information is available at the receiver only. Then we consider the case when it is also available at the transmitter.
An automatic breast mass segmentation algorithm in digital mammography

Breast mass segmentation in digital mammography is one of the most significant methods of breast cancer prevention. An integrated approach for mammographic mass segmentation is proposed in this paper. Given a mammographic image, it is first eliminated interference and enhanced in the preprocessing states. Then, the preprocessed images are detected and segmented by level set method. A preliminary evaluation of the proposed method performs on a known public database, namely Mini Mammographic Image Analysis Society (MIAS) database. In order to present that our proposed algorithm is more excellent, we make comparison experiments to demonstrate that our proposed approach can potentially obtain better masses detection results.
Leisure and Risky Health Behaviors: A Review of Evidence about Smoking

Abstract The study of leisure and health has grown tremendously in the last decade. However, only limited attention has been given to the impact of leisure on participation in risky health behaviors. The purpose of this paper is to review research on the relationship between leisure and smoking. Searches of five major databases identified 105 relevant articles that dealt with smoking and physical activity (50 articles), smoking and sport participation (32), or smoking and various other aspects of leisure (23). The latter category included articles addressing the link between smoking and non-exercise leisure activities, leisure settings, and leisure identity formation. Primarily negative associations were found between smoking and both physically active leisure and sport participation. However, although some promising ideas and research on smoking and leisure settings, identity, and non-exercise activities were identified, increased conceptualization and investigation are needed. Suggestions for future research on leisure and smoking as well as on leisure's role in addressing risky health behaviors are discussed.