Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fault Space Transformation: A Generic Approach to Counter Differential Fault Analysis and Differential Fault Intensity Analysis on AES-Like Block Ciphers

Classical fault attacks, such as differential fault analysis(DFA) as well as biased fault attacks, such as the differential fault intensity analysis (DFIA), have been a major threat to cryptosystems in recent times. DFA uses pairs of fault-free and faulty ciphertexts to recover the secret key. DFIA, on the other hand, combines principles of side-channel analysis and fault attacks to try and extract the key using faulty ciphertexts only. Till date, no effective countermeasure that can thwart both DFA- as well as DFIA-based attacks has been reported in the literature to the best of our knowledge. In particular, traditional redundancy-based countermeasures that assume uniform fault distributions are found to be vulnerable against the DFIA due to its use of biased fault models. In this paper, we propose a novel generic countermeasure strategy that combines the principles of redundancy with that of fault space transformation to achieve security against both DFA- and DFIA-based attacks on AES-like block ciphers. As a case study, we have applied our proposed technique to obtain temporal and spatial redundancy-based countermeasures for AES-128, and have evaluated their security against both DFA and DFIA via practical experiments on a SASEBO-GII board. Results show that our proposed countermeasure makes it practically infeasible to obtain a single instance of successful fault injection, even in the presence of biased fault models.
How to approach humans?-strategies for social robots to initiate interaction

This paper proposes a model of approach behavior with which a robot can initiate conversation with people who are walking. We developed the model by learning from the failures in a simplistic approach behavior used in a real shopping mall. Sometimes people were unaware of the robot's presence, even when it spoke to them. Sometimes, people were not sure whether the robot was really trying to start a conversation, and they did not start talking with it even though they displayed interest. To prevent such failures, our model includes the following functions: predicting the walking behavior of people, choosing a target person, planning its approaching path, and nonverbally indicating its intention to initiate a conversation. The approach model was implemented and used in a real shopping mall. The field trial demonstrated that our model significantly improves the robot's performance in initiating conversations.
Neuroplasticity in addictive disorders

Compulsive drug-taking behavior develops in vulnerable individuals who ingest substances that activate the reward system. This intense activation produces learned associations to cues that predict drug availability. With repetition the reward system becomes reflexively activated by cues alone, leading to a drive toward drug-taking. The central nervous system changes underlying this conditioned behavior are just beginning to be understood. New treatments aimed at this neuroplasticity are being tested in animal models. The clinical significance of these brain changes is that addiction, once established, becomes a chronic illness with relapses and remissions, it therefore requires chronic treatment with medications and behavioral therapies based on an understanding of the fundamental nature of these changes in the brain.
Genetic Variation and Recent Positive Selection in Worldwide Human Populations: Evidence from Nearly 1 Million SNPs

Background Genome-wide scans of hundreds of thousands of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have resulted in the identification of new susceptibility variants to common diseases and are providing new insights into the genetic structure and relationships of human populations. Moreover, genome-wide data can be used to search for signals of recent positive selection, thereby providing new insights into the genetic adaptations that occurred as modern humans spread out of Africa and around the world. Methodology We genotyped approximately 500,000 SNPs in 255 individuals (5 individuals from each of 51 worldwide populations) from the Human Genome Diversity Panel (HGDP-CEPH). When merged with non-overlapping SNPs typed previously in 250 of these same individuals, the resulting data consist of over 950,000 SNPs. We then analyzed the genetic relationships and ancestry of individuals without assigning them to populations, and we also identified candidate regions of recent positive selection at both the population and regional (continental) level. Conclusions Our analyses both confirm and extend previous studies; in particular, we highlight the impact of various dispersals, and the role of substructure in Africa, on human genetic diversity. We also identified several novel candidate regions for recent positive selection, and a gene ontology (GO) analysis identified several GO groups that were significantly enriched for such candidate genes, including immunity and defense related genes, sensory perception genes, membrane proteins, signal receptors, lipid binding/metabolism genes, and genes involved in the nervous system. Among the novel candidate genes identified are two genes involved in the thyroid hormone pathway that show signals of selection in African Pygmies that may be related to their short stature.
Branchpoint and polypyrimidine tract mutations mediating the loss and partial recovery of the Moloney murine sarcoma virus MuSVts110 thermosensitive splicing phenotype

Balanced splicing of retroviral RNAs is mediated by weak signals at the 3' splice site (ss) acting in concert with other cis elements. Moloney murine sarcoma virus MuSVts110 shows a similar balance between unspliced and spliced RNAs, differing only in that the splicing of its RNA is, in addition, growth temperature sensitive. We have generated N-nitroso-N-methylurea (NMU)-treated MuSVts110 revertants in which splicing was virtually complete at all temperatures and have investigated the molecular basis of this reversion on the assumption that the findings would reveal cis-acting elements controlling MuSVts110 splicing thermosensitivity. In a representative revertant (NMU-20), we found that complete splicing was conferred by a G-to-A substitution generating a consensus branchpoint (BP) signal (-CCCUGGC- to -CCCUGAC- [termed G(-25)A]) at -25 relative to the 3' ss. Weakening this BP to -CCCGAC- [G(-25)A,U(-27)C] moderately reduced splicing at the permissive temperature and sharply inhibited splicing at the originally nonpermissive temperature, arguing that MuSVts110 splicing thermosensitivity depends on a suboptimal BP-U2 small nuclear RNA interaction. This conclusion was supported by results indicating that lengthening the short MuSVts110 polypyrimidine tract and altering its uridine content doubled splicing efficiency at permissive temperatures and nearly abrogated splicing thermosensitivity. In vitro splicing experiments showed that MuSVts110 G(-25)A RNA intermediates were far more efficiently ligated than RNAs carrying the wild-type BP, the G(-25)A,U (-27)C BP, or the extended polypyrimidine tract. The efficiency of ligation in vitro roughly paralleled splicing efficiency in vivo [G(-25)A BP > extended polypyrimidine tract > G(-25)A,U(-27)C BP > wild-type BP]. These results suggest that MuSVts110 RNA splicing is balanced by cis elements similar to those operating in other retroviruses and, in addition, that its splicing thermosensitivity is a response to the presence of multiple suboptimal splicing signals.
Radiolabelled somatostatin analogue(s) for peptide receptor scintigraphy and radionuclide therapy.

BACKGROUND Peptide receptor scintigraphy with the radioactive somatostatin analogue, [111In-DTPA0]octreotide, is a sensitive and specific technique to show in vivo the presence and abundance of somatostatin receptors on various tumours. AIM With this technique primary tumours and metastases of neuroendocrine cancers as well as of many other cancer-types can be localised. This technique is currently used to assess the possibility of peptide receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT) with repeated administrations of high doses of [111In-DTPA0)octreotide. 111In emits Auger and conversion electrons having a tissue penetration of 0.02-10 microns and 200 to 500 microns, respectively. PATIENTS AND METHODS Thirty end-stage patients with mostly neuroendocrine progressing tumours were treated with [111In-DTPA0]octreotide, up to a maximal cumulative patient dose of about 74 GBq, in a phase I trial. RESULTS There were no major clinical side effects after up to two years treatment, except that in a few patients a transient decline in platelets counts and lymphocyte subsets occurred. Promising beneficial effects on clinical symptoms, hormone production and tumour proliferation were found. Of the 21 patients who received a cumulative dose of more than 20 GBq, eight patients showed stabilisation of disease and six other patients a reduction in size of tumours. There is a tendency towards better results in patients whose tumours have a higher accumulation of the radioligand. CONCLUSIONS PRRT is feasible, also with 111In as radionuclide. Depending on the homogeneity of distribution of tumour cells expressing peptide receptors and the size of the tumour, beta-emitting radionuclides, e.g., 90Y, labelled to DOTA-chelated peptides, are also attractive candidates for PRRT. The first PRRT trials with [90Y-DOTA0,Tyr3]octreotide started recently.
Drain-bias dependence of threshold voltage stability of amorphous silicon TFTs

Amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) thin-film transistors (TFTs) used in emerging, nonswitch applications such as analog amplifiers or active loads, often have a bias at the drain terminal in addition to the gate that can alter their threshold voltage (V/sub T/) stability performance. At small gate stress voltages (0/spl les/V/sub ST//spl les/15 V) where the defect state creation instability mechanism is dominant, the presence of a bias at the TFT drain decreases the overall shift in V/sub T/(/spl Delta/V/sub T/) compared to the /spl Delta/V/sub T/ in the absence of a drain bias. The measured shift in V/sub T/ appears to agree with the defect pool model that the /spl Delta/V/sub T/ is proportional to the number of induced carriers in the a-Si:H channel.
Localization of wireless sensors using compressive sensing for manifold learning

In this paper, a novel compressive sensing for manifold learning protocol (CSML) is proposed for localization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Intersensor communication costs are reduced significantly by applying the theory of compressive sensing, which indicates that sparse signals can be recovered from far fewer samples than that needed by the Nyquist sampling theorem. We represent the pair-wise distance measurement as a sparse matrix. Instead of sending full pair-wise measurement data to a central node, each sensor transmits only a small number of compressive measurements. And the full pair-wise distance matrix can be well reconstructed from these noisy compressive measurements in the central node, only through an ℓ1-minimization algorithm. The proposed method reduces the overall communication bandwidth requirement per sensor such that it increases logarithmically with the number of sensors and linearly with the number of neighbors, while achieves high localization accuracy. CSML is especially suitable for manifold learning based localization algorithms. Simulation results demonstrate the performance of the proposed protocol on both the localization accuracy and the communication cost reduction.
Autobiographic agents in dynamic virtual environments - performance comparison for different memory control architectures

In this paper, we extend our previous work in investigating the performance of different autobiographic memory control architectures which are developed based on a basic subsumption control architecture for artificial life autonomous agents surviving in a dynamic virtual environment. In our previous work we showed how autonomous agents' survival in a static virtual environment can benefit from autobiographic memory, with a kind of communication of experiences in multi-agent experiments. In the current work we extend the existing memory architecture by enhancing its functionalities and introducing long-term autobiographic memory, which is derived from the inspiration of human memory schema - categorical rules or scripts that psychologists in human memory research believe all humans possess to interpret the word, A large-scale and dynamic virtual environment is created to compare the performance of various types of agents with various memory control architectures, and each agent's behaviour is observed and analyzed together with lifespan measurements. Results confirm our previous research hypothesis that autobiographic memory can prove beneficial - indicating increases in the lifespan of an autonomous, autobiographic, minimal agent. Furthermore, the utility of combining long-term memory with short-term memory is established. We finally discuss the environmental factors influencing the performance of each architecture and the areas for future work
Vegetation Change Analyses Considering Climate Variables and Anthropogenic Variables in the Three-River Headwaters Region

In the terrestrial biosphere, vegetation plays vital roles in providing food and habitats for humankind and animals. In general, vegetation activity is influenced by both climate drivers and anthropogenic drivers, and studies have tried to disentangle contributions of these multiple variables from each other. However, it remains largely unclear how climatic and anthropogenic effects work together to impact on vegetation dynamics. In this study, we analyzed the vegetation change from 1995 to 2014 in the Three-River Headwaters Region (TRHR) using Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). We applied partial correlation analyses to discriminate the contributions of climate variables and anthropogenic variables. The result indicates that the TRHR experiences a slightly greening trend from 1995 to 2014. The primary climatic driving factor is temperature for the southeast and south parts of the TRHR, precipitation in the west part, and a combination of precipitation, temperature and cloud cover for northeast part. The interaction between precipitation and cloud cover, precipitation and grazing activity, temperature and population activity, contribute to vegetation growth. The relationship between vegetation activity and the driving factors are evolving towards the direction which vegetation favors for the past two decades.
Foot-guided agile control of a biped robot through ZMP manipulation

A novel biped control is proposed. It enables a robust foot-guided maneuver and suits to the locomotion in complex environments. It treats ZMP as an indirect manipulation variable rather than the control variable, and does not need to observe the acceleration. ZMP behavior is only constrained to approach the pivot foot during a step, so that the robot can flexibly accelerate itself. The most distinctive point to the previous methods is that the motion stability is guaranteed based on the capture point only at landing, which improves agility. The optimal input, i.e., the desired position of ZMP, is analytically obtained immediately from the current state of COM, time to land, and the desired landing position, so that it can be implemented with even less computation cost. Though the limitation of the supporting region is not explicitly taken into account, it is guaranteed that the desired ZMP is confined within the region based on its convexity.
Automatic online news issue construction in web environment

In many cases, rather than a keyword search, people intend to see what is going on through the Internet. Then the integrated comprehensive information on news topics is necessary, which we called news issues, including the background, history, current progress, different opinions and discussions, etc. Traditionally, news issues are manually generated by website editors. It is quite a time-consuming hard work, and hence real-time update is difficult to perform. In this paper, a three-step automatic online algorithm for news issue construction is proposed. The first step is a topic detection process, in which newly appearing stories are clustered into new topic candidates. The second step is a topic tracking process, where those candidates are compared with previous topics, either merged into old ones or generating a new one. In the final step, news issues are constructed by the combination of related topics and updated by the insertion of new topics. An automatic online news issue construction process under practical Web circumstances is simulated to perform news issue construction experiments. F-measure of the best results is either above (topic detection) or close to (topic detection and tracking) 90%. Four news issue construction results are successfully generated in different time granularities: one meets the needs like "what's new", and the other three will answer questions like "what's hot" or "what's going on". Through the proposed algorithm, news issues can be effectively and automatically constructed with real-time update, and lots of human efforts will be released from tedious manual work.
A table!: improving temporal navigation in soccer ranking tables

This article introduces A Table! , an enhanced soccer ranking table providing temporal navigation by combining two novel interaction techniques. Ranking tables order soccer teams represented as rows, according to values of columns containing attributes e.g., accumulated points, or number of scored goals. Because they represent a snapshot of a championship at a time t, tables are regularly updated with new results. Such updates usually change the rows order, which makes the tracking of a specified team over time difficult. We observed that the tables available on the web do not support tracking such changes very well, are generally hard to read, and lack interactions. This contrasts with the extensive use of comments on temporal trends found in soccer analysts articles. To better support such analyzes, the two interactive techniques presented allow exploration of time, and are designed to preserve users' flow: DRAG-CELL is based on direct manipulation of values to browse ranks; VIZ-RANK uses a transient line chart of team ranks to visually explore a championship. An on-line evaluation with 143 participants shows that each technique efficiently supports a set of important temporal tasks not supported by current ranking tables. This paves the way for introducing efficient advanced visual exploration techniques to millions of soccer enthusiasts who use tables everyday.
Integrated Project Member of the FET Proactive Initiative Complex Systems

We consider the problem of identifying the rules conforming the local map of a cellular automaton; we explore the capabilities of a closure-based algorithm for this task. The algorithm has been previously proven to identify an optimal Horn-like formula true for the data, in a very precise mathematical sense. A key property of the algorithm is its ability to handle a sequential structure on the data and lift it to the Horn-like rules, thus making it apt to compare the rules it obtains with the ones that originated the data. The outcomes of the experimentation are described.
A lognormal tied mixture model of pitch for prosody based speaker recognition

Statistics of pitch have recently been used in speaker recognition systems with good results. The success of such systems depends on robust and accurate computation of pitch statistics in the presence of pitch tracking errors. In this work, we develop a statistical model of pitch that allows unbiased estimation of pitch statistics from pitch tracks which are subject to doubling and/or halving. We first argue by a simple correlation model and empirically demonstrate by QQ plots that “clean” pitch is distributed with a lognormal distribution rather than the often assumed normal distribution. Second, we present a probabilistic model for estimated pitch via a pitch tracker in the presence of doubling/halving, which leads to a mixture of three lognormal distributions with tied means and variances for a total of four free parameters. We use the obtained pitch statistics as features in speaker verification on the March 1996 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation data (subset of Switchboard) and report results on the most difficult portion of the database: the “one-session” condition with males only for both the claimant and imposter speakers. Pitch statistics provide 22% reduction in false alarm rate at 1% miss rate and 11% reduction in false alarm rate at 10% miss rate over the cepstrum-only system.
A Convex Hull Query Processing Method in MANETs

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), locationbased service (LBS) is a typical application. In a LBS, it is valuable for each node to grasp the convex hull of nodes which compose a network by using a convex hull query. However, if the query-issuing node acquires the information on all the nodes, the information on nodes which are not the vertexes of the convex hull is replied, which is unnecessary for a convex hull detection. In this paper, we propose a convex hull query processing method, which reduces traffic and also maintains high accuracy of the query result in MANETs. An experimental result shows that our proposed method reduces traffic and achieves high accuracy of the query result compared with a naive method.
The mood stabilizer valproic acid stimulates GABA neurogenesis from rat forebrain stem cells

Valproate, an anticonvulsant drug used to treat bipolar disorder, was studied for its ability to promote neurogenesis from embryonic rat cortical or striatal primordial stem cells. Six days of valproate exposure increased by up to fivefold the number and percentage of tubulin β III‐immunopositive neurons, increased neurite outgrowth, and decreased by fivefold the number of astrocytes without changing the number of cells. Valproate also promoted neuronal differentiation in human fetal forebrain stem cell cultures. The neurogenic effects of valproate on rat stem cells exceeded those obtained with the neurotrophins brain‐derived growth factor (BDNF) or NT‐3, and slightly exceeded the effects obtained with another mood stabilizer, lithium. No effect was observed with carbamazepine. Most of the newly formed neurons were GABAergic, as shown by 10‐fold increases in neurons that immunostained for GABA and the GABA‐synthesizing enzyme GAD65/67. Double immunostaining for bromodeoxyuridine and tubulin β III showed that valproate increased by four‐ to fivefold the proliferation of neuronal progenitors derived from rat stem cells and increased cyclin D2 expression. Valproate also regulated the expression of survival genes, Bad and Bcl‐2, at different times of treatment. The expression of prostaglandin E synthase, analyzed by quantitative RT‐PCR, was increased by ninefold as early as 6 h into treatment by valproate. The enhancement of GABAergic neuron numbers, neurite outgrowth, and phenotypic expression via increases in the neuronal differentiation of neural stem cell may contribute to the therapeutic effects of valproate in the treatment of bipolar disorder.