Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using MaxSAT to Correct Errors in AES Key Schedule Images

Cold boot attack is a side channel attack that recovers data from memory, which persists for a short period after power is lost. In the course of this attack, the memory gradually degrades over time and only a corrupted version of the data may be available to the attacker. Recently, great efforts have been devoted to reconstructing the original data from a corrupted version of AES key schedules, based on the assumption that all bits in the charged states tend to decay to the ground states while no bit in the ground state ever inverts. However, in practice, there is a small number of bits flipping in the opposite direction, called reverse flipping errors. In this paper, motivated by the latest work that formulates the relations of AES key bits as a Boolean Satisfiability problem, we move one step further by taking the reverse flipping errors into consideration and employing an off-the-shelf MaxSAT solver to accomplish the key recovery of AES-128 key schedules from decayed memory images. Specifically, a MaxSAT solver takes the relations of key bits as hard constraints and the bits in the charged states as soft constraints, then it tries to satisfy all the hard constraints and as many soft constraints as possible by eliminating the unsatisfied minority. Experimental results show that, in the presence of reverse flipping errors, the MaxSAT approach enables reliable recovery of key schedules with significantly less time, compared with the SAT approach that relies on brute force search to find out the target errors.
Do Teacher Financial Awards Improve Teacher Retention and Student Achievement in an Urban Disadvantaged School District?

Teacher performance pay programs are theorized to improve student achievement by incentivizing teachers, but opponents counter that teachers are not motivated by money. We used regression discontinuity techniques and data on a census of the students, teachers, and schools in a large urban minority-majority school district to show receipt of a financial award did not consistently relate to higher mean student test score gains or teachers’ likelihood of retention. This study contributes to the literature by focusing on the effects of award receipt rather than award eligibility, differentiating by award amount, and using data from a large district serving predominantly disadvantaged students.
Students' perceptions of a flipped classroom approach to paramedic theory

Introduction: The flipped classroom is a pedagogical model in which the typical lecture and homework/self-study elements of a course are reversed or ‗flipped‘. The flipped model differs from distance and online learning, since students still have face-to-face contact with tutors. Studies have shown that the flipped classroom approach can be effective with clinical skills learning by paramedics, but it is not clear whether anatomy, physiology, pathophysiology and pharmacology can effectively be taught using a flipped approach. Methods: A flipped classroom approach was taken for a three-hour theory session on the Diploma of Higher Education in Paramedic Practice that would usually have been taught by traditional lecture. Participants, 20 student paramedics already employed by the Ambulance Service as Emergency Care Assistants, completed a two-part questionnaire after the session. Part one comprised 22 Likert style questions, with part two allowing qualitative data with five open ended questions. Results: All students preferred the traditional lecture over a flipped approach. Time constraints and preparation were seen as major disadvantages of the flipped classroom, as was being unable to ask questions in real time. Flexibility was seen to be an advantage of online lectures, and a blended/combination approach of online resources and traditional lecture was seen as valuable. Conclusion: The demographic of students may have had an impact upon the results of the study and the lack of popularity of the flipped approach. Employed students have the added pressure of full-time work, and further research is needed into whether different methods should be employed when choosing how to educate employed paramedic students versus those who enter via the undergraduate route and study full time.
International Financial Crises and Public Policy: Some Welfare Analysis

This article describes a model of financial crisis and explores its implications for public policy. The framework nests the key features of earlier models but is better able to address international architecture questions in a welfare setting. In particular, this framework is used to assess the welfare costs of creditor coordination failure and several recent public policy proposals on reforming the international financial architecture. The costs of creditor coordination failures are found to be high. But policies that improve sovereign liquidity management or that stall creditor runs - such as payments standstills - can mitigate these costs.
Separable Lyapunov functions for monotone systems

Separable Lyapunov functions play vital roles, for example, in stability analysis of large-scale systems. A Lyapunov function is called max-separable if it can be decomposed into a maximum of functions with one-dimensional arguments. Similarly, it is called sum-separable if it is a sum of such functions. In this paper it is shown that for a monotone system on a compact state space, asymptotic stability implies existence of a max-separable Lyapunov function. We also construct two systems on a non-compact state space, for which a max-separable Lyapunov function does not exist. One of them has a sum-separable Lyapunov function. The other does not.
Self-Generated Road Status Maps based on Vehicular Ad Hoc Communication

The instantaneous knowledge of road course, condition and traffic situation ahead of the vehicle is of major value for all kinds of driver assistance systems. In this paper, a method for self-generating an up-to-date road status map of the local area onboard a driving vehicle is presented. A commercial digital road map is not required, since vehicles generate the map based upon satellite based positioning (e.g. GPS) and vehicular ad hoc communication. The vehicles record Geo-Reference Points (GRP) for the driven track, which – besides their geographic location – also include dynamic information recorded by the vehicle, such as road condition, temperature and traffic status. A number of GRPs is combined to form a Geo-Reference List (GRL) which is broadcasted using vehicular ad hoc communication. By integrating received GRLs in the local data basis, a dynamic road status map of the local area can be created. The required market penetration is low (<5%) since only occasional communication with a vehicle on the opposite lane is required. In addition to the proposed scheme for self-generated maps, the paper presents first simulative and experimental results.
Emergence of the use of pronouns and names in triadic human-robot spoken interaction

We present here a system capable of learning to extract the correct comprehension and production of personal pronouns and proper nouns during Human-Robot or Human-Human interactions. We use external 3D spatial and acoustic sensors with the robot iCub to allow the system to learn the proper mapping between different pronouns and names to their properties in different interaction contexts. The properties are Subject (Su), Speaker (Sp), Addressee (Ad) and Agent (Ag). A fast mapping system is used to extract correlation between the different properties. After a learning phase, the robot is able to find the missing property when only 3 out of 4 are known, or at least to discriminate which word cannot be used to be the lacking property. We present results from a set of experiments that provide some insight into aspects of human development.
Can we explain the trends in European ozone levels

Ozone levels in Europe are changing. Emis- sions of ozone precursors from Europe (NOx, CO and non- methane hydrocarbons) have been substantially reduced over the last 10-15 years, but changes in ozone levels cannot be explained by changes in European emissions alone. The ob- served ozone trends at many European sites are only par- tially reproduced by global or regional photochemistry mod- els, and possible reasons for this are discussed. In order to further explain the European trends in ozone since 1990, the EMEP regional photochemistry model has been run for the years 1990 and 1995-2002. The EMEP model is a regional model centred over Europe but the model domain also includes most of the North Atlantic and the po- lar region. Climatological ozone data are used as initial and lateral boundary concentrations. Model results are compared to measurements over this timespan of 12 years. Possible causes for the measured trends in European surface ozone have been investigated using model sensitivity runs perturb- ing emissions and lateral boundary concentrations. The in- crease in winter ozone partially, and the decrease in the mag- nitude of high ozone episodes, is attributed to the decrease in ozone precursor emissions since 1990 by the model. Further- more, the model calculations indicate that the emission re- ductions have resulted in a marked decrease in summer ozone in major parts of Europe, in particular in Germany. Such a trend in summer ozone is likely to be difficult to identify from the measurements alone because of large inter-annual variability.
Comparator Mining Lead to Better Alternatives for Making Better Decision

Today internet has become easily accessible which allows the user to perform multiple tasks such as access information, do study, make friends, online shopping, search for anything they want and many more. Similarly people do use internet to know the better options and find out relevant alternatives of product, services, places like wise. But searching for better choices may become frustrating and time eating process as search engines shows many links for single thing. Therefore, this paper precisely gives the better result and better alternatives. For this, a weakly supervised bootstrapping approach is used, by which we can identify comparative questions and at the same time evaluate comparable items. It also shows better options for the general term entities and for ambiguous entities in different classes if the specific class is not specified. It also gives the better resultant alternatives for the single entity by categories. The weakly supervised bootstrapping approach is very potential to know better alternatives of any product, place or any services. The experiment result shows the better performance of this method by measuring the Recall, Precision and F-Score. The method works better, effective and efficient in showing the better result and alternative for any single entity, comparable entities and entities that are ambiguous.
Floating Constraints in Lexical Choice

Lexical choice is a computationally complex task, requiring a generation system to consider a potentially large number of mappings between concepts and words. Constraints that aid in determining which word is best come from a wide variety of sources, including syntax, semantics, pragmatics, the lexicon, and the underlying domain. Furthermore, in some situations, different constraints come into play early on, while in others, they apply much later. This makes it difficult to determine a systematic ordering in which to apply constraints. In this paper, we present a general approach to lexical choice that can handle multiple, interacting constraints. We focus on the problem of floating constraints, semantic or pragmatic constraints that float, appearing at a variety of different syntactic ranks, often merged with other semantic constraints. This means that multiple content units can be realized by a single surface element, and conversely, that a single content unit can be realized by a variety of surface elements. Our approach uses the Functional Unification Formalism (FUF) to represent a generation lexicon, allowing for declarative and compositional representation of individual constraints.
Towards an Interaction Model for Multi-Surface Personal Computing Spaces

The prototype Curve was developed at our lab and its basic effects on touch interaction as well as elementary applications were explored in the recent dissertation of Hennecke [3]. My work is concerned with the concretion of his initial findings. In particular I am interested in (1) contextualizing the device by exploring specific application scenarios and (2) finding adequate interaction models that allow people using the display's input and output capabilities effectively and conveniently. In my thesis I want to provide guidelines that help user interface designers to develop interaction techniques for multi-surface personal computing spaces that comprise both horizontal and vertical touchscreens and show potential benefits of a seamless connection between them (e.g. a curved display segment).
High-Resolution Chandra HETGS and Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer Observations of GRS 1915+105: A Hot Disk Atmosphere and Cold Gas Enriched in Iron and Silicon

The time-averaged 30 ks Chandra AO1 High Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer observation of the microquasar GRS 1915+105 in the low hard state reveals for the first time in this source neutral K absorption edges from iron, silicon, magnesium, and sulphur. Ionized resonance (r) absorption from H- and He-like species of Fe (XXV, XXVI) and possibly Ca XX are also seen as well as possible emission from neutral Fe Kα and ionized Fe XXV (forbidden or the resonance emission component of a P Cygni profile). We report the tentative detection of the first astrophysical signature of X-ray absorption fine structure in the photoelectric edge of Si (and possibly Fe and Mg) attributed to material in grains. The large column densities measured from the neutral edges reveal anomalous Si and Fe abundances and illustrate the importance of high-resolution X-ray measurements for assessing material that surrounds bright X-ray sources, especially if depletion onto grains plays a prominent role. Scenarios for which the anomalous abundances can be attributed to surrounding cold material associated with GRS 1915+105 and/or for which the enrichment may signify either a highly unusual supernova/hypernova or external supernova activity local to the binary are discussed. We attribute the ionized features to a hot disk, disk wind, or corona environment. Based on H- and He-like Fe (XXV, XXVI), we estimate constraints on the ionization parameter (log ξ ≳ 4.15), temperature (T > 2.4 × 106 K), and hydrogen equivalent number density (n ≳ 1012 cm-3) for this region. Variability studies with the simultaneous RXTE data show that the light-curve count rate tracks the changes in the disk blackbody as well as the power-law flux, with the most significant variations observed in the former. The Chandra data show spectral changes that also track the behavior of the light curve and may point to changes in both the ionizing flux and density of the absorber. A 3.69 Hz quasi-periodic oscillation and weak first harmonic are seen in the RXTE data.
DEVELOPMENT OF APPLICATION-LEVEL FAULT TOLERANCE IN A REAL-TIME BENCHMARK

As multiprocessor systems become more complex their reliability will need to increase as well In this paper we propose a novel technique which is applicable to a wide variety of distributed real time systems especially those exhibiting data parallelism We assert that for high reliability a combination of system level fault tolerance and application level fault tolerance works best In many systems application level fault tolerance can be used to bridge the gap when system level fault tolerance alone does not provide the required reliability We exemplify this with the RTHT target tracking benchmark
3-Way-Trees: A Similarity Search Method for High-Dimensional Descriptor Matching

In this paper we look into the problem of high-dimensional local descriptor matching for image identification on cultural databases, presenting an important improvement over a classic method, the KD-tree. Our method, the 3-way tree, uses redundant, overlapping sub-trees, in order to avoid the boundary effects that disrupt the KD-tree in higher dimensionalities, achieving more precision for the same querying times.
The Persistence of Memory in Freenet

Most peer-to-peer systems are either unstructured ﬁle sharing networks that oﬀer no data availability guarantees or tightly-structured ﬁle storage networks that do. The Freenet network occupies a middle ground in providing a loosely-structured ﬁle storage service but not guaranteeing data persistence absolutely. We present simulation results showing that in practice not that many ﬁles ever do get dropped from the system, even with very small datastores. Sur-prisingly, medium popularity ﬁles are more vulnerable than the least popular ones
Towards indoor localization and navigation independent of sensor based technologies

Many sensor based technologies exist to assist localization and navigation tasks in indoor space. Their success is hindered by limitations in their technology, accuracy and cost. This research provides an approach for localization and navigation based on the topological property of connectivity between spatial entities combined with qualitative information gathered from the user. In the research, a model and an algorithm is developed for localization and navigation in indoor space. It provides the user with the information necessary to express their unique location qualitatively using properties of spatial entities. The spatial entities and the accessibility property between them are stored in a graph-based data structure. The user's location and navigation path are derived using spatial queries that combine qualitative user input with the stored properties. Localization is provided only when the user provides input and is, therefore, an alternative solution to when sensor based technologies are limited or costly. A proof of concept application is implemented using the algorithm for a selected floor plan of a shopping mall.
Using English Phoneme Models for Chinese Speech Recognition

To build a speech recognizer, database design, collection and transcription is the most time consuming and tedious job. This paper proposes some fast and easy methods to use English phoneme models for Mandarin and Cantonese speech recognition with little to no training data in Mandarin and Cantonese. While a recognizer built with such transformed models might not perform as ideally as one that is trained on a large database, we demonstrate that its performance is good in constrained applications such as speech-based Web browsing and searching. The web link recognition rate is 83% for Mandarin and 92.5% for Cantonese.
Edinburgh Research Explorer Genetic Relationships and Linear Model Comparisons between United States and Canadian Ayrshire and Jersey Bull Populations Genetics and Breeding Genetic Relationships and Linear Model Comparisons between United States and Canadian Ayrshire and Jersey Bull Populations

General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact openaccess@ed.ac. uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. ABSTRACT The ties and relationships within the Ayrshire and Jersey bull populations from the United States and Canada were investigated. Twenty-two percent of genes in the United States Ayrshire bull population were of Canadian origin, whereas 22% of genes in the Canadian Jersey bull population were of United States origin. Average genetic relationships among bulls between countries were comparable with the within country relationships. The BLUP animal model bull proofs for milk and fat production from each bull's country of evaluation were subsequently used to rank bulls across countries with a linear model. Genetic differences, differences in reference bases, and relative genetic progress in the various bull populations were also estimated. On the average in the last 20 yr the United States and Canada have produced and evaluated Ayrshire bulls of equal genetic merit for milk and fat, but the United States has produced and evaluated better Jersey bulls than Canada by . 7 SD of milk and . 6 SD of fat. The rate of genetic progress for either trait over that time, however, was similar in both countries and both breeds and ranged from . 07 to . 09 SD/yr. Across country proofs by the linear model were highly correlated with domestic animal model proofs and converted foreign proofs.
The Role of Non-Governmental Organizations in the Business and Human Rights Treaty Negotiations

In June 2014, the UN Human Rights Council established an intergovernmental working group to elaborate a treaty on business and human rights. In July 2015, the working group held its first session launching the negotiations process—the culmination of a global movement of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that over the last four decades have called for greater corporate accountability for human rights violations. The advocacy activities of the Treaty Alliance, an alliance of NGOs that supports the development of the treaty, were pivotal to the tabling of the resolution establishing the working group. These organizations now have the opportunity to engage with the negotiations process, both formally and informally, through consultations, advocacy, and lobbying. This article considers the impact NGOs may have in the drafting negotiations of the proposed treaty. It identifies several lobbying and advocacy strategies that were successful in previous international law-making processes and discusses the extent to which they could be applied to the current negotiations. It presents the benefits of an NGO coalition, of formal and informal lobbying strategies, and of the development of a common NGOs and friendly states framework. It analyses the reasons for Western states’ opposition and suggests lobbying strategies that may overcome it. Recognizing the unique subject matter of this treaty, it also focuses on lobbying corporate actors, and explores the complementarity between the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the treaty and the need for NGOs to support both. The article concludes on the necessity to compromise on essential points if a treaty is ever to emerge.
Stochastic Text Structuring Using the Principle of Continuity

This paper explores the feasibility of implementing an evolutionary algorithm for text structuring using the heuristic of continuity as a fitness function, chosen over other more complicated metrics of text coherence. Using MCGONAGALL (Manurung et al., 2000) as our experimental platform, we show that by employing an elitist strategy for stochastic search it is possible to quickly reach the global optimum of minimal violations of continuity.