Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Watermarking, Tamper-proong, and Obfuscation { Tools for Software Protection Watermarking, Tamper-prooong, and Obfuscation { Tools for Software Protection Module Reuse Sell Copy Buy One

We identify three types of attack on the intellectual property contained in software, and three corresponding technical defenses. A potent defense against reverse engineering is obfuscation, a process that renders software unintelligible but still functional. A defense against software piracy is watermarking, a process that makes it possible to determine the origin of software. A defense against tampering is tamper-proong, so that unauthorized modiications to software (for example to remove a watermark) will result in non-functional code. We brieey survey the available technology for each type of defense. 1 Background { Malicious Clients vs. Malicious Hosts Until recently, almost all computer security research was concerned with protecting the integrity of a benign host from attacks by malicious client programs (Figure 1(a)). The Java security model, for example, is designed to protect a host from attacks by a potentially malicious downloaded applet or a virus-infested installed application. These attacks usually take the form of destroying or otherwise compromising local data on the host machine. Figure 1: Attacks by malicious clients and hosts. (a) Attack by a malicious client. Download/ Install Benign host Malicious client program/applet C (b) Attack by a malicious host. program/applet Malicious host Benign client Download/ Install C To defend itself against a malicious client, a host will typically restrict the actions that the client is allowed to perform. In the Java security model the host uses bytecode veriication to ensure the type safety of the untrusted client. Additionally, untrusted code (such as applets) 1 is prevented from performing certain operations, such as writing to the local le system. A similar technique is Software Fault Isolation 29, 50, 51], which modiies the client code so that it is unable to write outside its designated area (the \sandbox"). Recently, researchers have begun to consider a fundamentally diierent kind of security threat, which we shall term a malicious host attack (Figure 1(b)). In a malicious host scenario, a benign client is under threat from the host on which it has been downloaded or installed. These attacks typically take the form of intellectual property violations. The client code may contain trade secrets or copyrighted material that, should the integrity of the client be violated, will incur nancial losses to the owner of the client. We will next consider three such scenarios. 1.1 Malicious host attacks Software piracy, the illegal copying and resale of applications, is a 15 billion dollar per year industry …
Multi-valued Abstraction Using Lattice Operations

In model checking, abstractions can cause spurious results, which need to be verified in the concrete system to gain conclusive results. Verification based on a multi-valued logic can distinguish between conclusive and inconclusive results, provides increased precision, and allows for encoding additional information into the model, which gives rise to new applications. To ensure a correct abstraction, one can use a mixed simulation [1] to relate a multi-valued model to its abstraction. In this paper we extend the notion of mixed simulation to include inconsistent values, thereby resolving an asymmetry in the definition and allowing for abstractions with increased precision when inconsistent values are available.
FPGA Verification Module

This paper addresses verification and debugging tool for development of FPGA modules. Proposed tool is developed for educational purposes in teaching students on Digital Design and VHDL programming language. Main goal of the debugging module is to get/set signal values while the FPGA board is running the module of interest. Two PicoBlaze CPUs are used in order to synchronize the input and output signals between PC and the FPGA. Debugging and verification tool is wrapped around the testing module, and it occupies 14% of the Spartan 3 XC3S200 FPGA device. While using proposed tool, students are getting the knowledge about the PicoBlaze CPU, assembly language, FPGA, VHDL. When using proposed tool, students get deeper understanding of the hardware-software co- design concept. Finally, individual tasks are assigned to student workgroups. Some typical tasks are illustrated in this paper.
Investigating the Role of Auditory and Tactile Modalities in Violin Quality Evaluation

The role of auditory and tactile modalities involved in violin playing and evaluation was investigated in an experiment employing a blind violin evaluation task under different conditions: i) normal playing conditions, ii) playing with auditory masking, and iii) playing with vibrotactile masking. Under each condition, 20 violinists evaluated five violins according to criteria related to violin playing and sound characteristics and rated their overall quality and relative preference. Results show that both auditory and vibrotactile feedback are important in the violinists’ evaluations but that their relative importance depends on the violinist, the violin and the type of evaluation (different criteria ratings or preference). In this way, the overall quality ratings were found to be accurately predicted by the rating criteria, which also proved to be perceptually relevant to violinists, but were poorly correlated with the preference ratings; this suggests that the two types of ratings (overall quality vs preference) may stem from different decision-making strategies. Furthermore, the experimental design confirmed that violinists agree more on the importance of criteria in their overall evaluation than on their actual ratings for different violins. In particular, greater agreement was found on the importance of criteria related to the sound of the violin. Nevertheless, this study reveals that there are fundamental differences in the way players interpret and evaluate each criterion, which may explain why correlating physical properties with perceptual properties has been challenging so far in the field of musical acoustics.
When Sex Doesn't Sell: Using Sexualized Images of Women Reduces Support for Ethical Campaigns

Images of scantily clad women are used by advertisers to make products more attractive to men. This “sex sells” approach is increasingly employed to promote ethical causes, most prominently by the animal-rights organization PETA. Yet sexualized images can dehumanize women, leaving an unresolved paradox – is it effective to advertise an ethical cause using unethical means? In Study 1, a sample of Australian male undergraduates (N = 82) viewed PETA advertisements containing either sexualized or non-sexualized images of women. Intentions to support the ethical organization were reduced for those exposed to the sexualized advertising, and this was explained by their dehumanization of the sexualized women, and not by increased arousal. Study 2 used a mixed-gender community sample from the United States (N = 280), replicating this finding and extending it by showing that behaviors helpful to the ethical cause diminished after viewing the sexualized advertisements, which was again mediated by the dehumanization of the women depicted. Alternative explanations relating to the reduced credibility of the sexualized women and their objectification were not supported. When promoting ethical causes, organizations may benefit from using advertising strategies that do not dehumanize women.
Cross institutional collaboration in assessment: a case on progress testing

The practice of assessment is governed by an interesting paradox. On the one hand good assessment requires substantial resources which may exceed the capacity of a single institution and we have reason to doubt the quality of our in-house examinations. On the other hand, our parsimonity with regard to our resources makes us reluctant to pool efforts and share our test material. This paper reports on an initiative to share test material across different medical schools. Three medical schools in The Netherlands have successfully set up a partnership for a specific testing method: progress testing. At present, these three schools collaboratively produce high-quality test items. The jointly produced progress tests are administered concurrently by these three schools and one other school, which buys the test. The steps taken in establishing this partnership are described and results are presented to illustrate the unique sort of information that is obtained by cross-institutional assessment. In addition, plans to improve test content and procedure and to expand the partnership are outlined. Eventually, the collaboration may even extend to other test formats. This article is intended to give evidence of the feasibility and exciting potential of between school collaboration in test development and test administration. Our experiences have demonstrated that such collaboration has excellent potential to combine economic benefit with educational advantages, which exceed what is achievable by individual schools.
Application of Public-Domain Market Information to Forecast Ontario's Wholesale Electricity Prices

This paper evaluates the usefulness of publicly available electricity market information in forecasting the hourly Ontario energy price (HOEP). In order to do so, relevant data from Ontario and its neighboring electricity markets, namely, New York, New England, and PJM electricity markets, are investigated, and a final set of explanatory variable candidates that are available before real-time are selected. Multivariate transfer function and dynamic regression models are employed to relate HOEP behavior to the selected explanatory variable candidates. Univariate ARIMA models are also developed for the HOEP. The HOEP models are developed on the basis of two forecasting horizons, i.e., 3 h and 24 h, and forecasting performance of the multivariate models is compared with that of the univariate models. The outcomes show that the market information publicly available before real-time can be used to improve HOEP forecast accuracy to some extent; however, unusually high or low prices remain unpredictable, and hence, the available data cannot lead to significantly more accurate forecasts. Nevertheless, the generated forecasts in this paper are significantly more accurate than currently available HOEP forecasts. To analyze the relatively low accuracy of the HOEP forecasts, comparisons are made with respect to ARIMA models developed for locational marginal prices (LMPs) of Ontario's three neighboring markets, and price volatility analyses are presented
Regional Social Contexts and Individual Fertility Decisions: A Multilevel Analysis of First and Second Births in Western Germany

This paper investigates whetherand how regional social contexts influencefertility decisions of women living in westernGermany during the 1980s and 1990s. It isargued that regional opportunity structures aswell as local patterns of social interactionand culture may translate into parameters thatdirectly affect individual behaviour. Data fromthe German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) arelinked with a set of regional indicators toestimate multilevel discrete-time logit modelsfor the transition to the first and secondchild. The empirical analysis provides noevidence that fertility differentials observedat the regional level are due to autonomouscontextual effects. Rather, it is suggestedthat most of the observed regional variationresults from differences in the spatialdistribution of individual characteristics.
Application of the theory of reasoned action to promoting breakfast consumption

Background: Breakfast is the most important daily meal, but neglected more than other meals by children and adolescents. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an educational intervention, based on the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) to increase breakfast consumption among school children in Bandar Abbas, Iran. Methods: In this quasi experimental study which was conducted in 2012, 88 students of four secondary schools in Bandar Abbas, south of Iran, were enrolled. Multi-stage cluster sampling was performed with random allocation of interventional and control groups. The study tool was a questionnaire which was filled by the students before and two months after the educational intervention. For data analysis, statistical tests including paired-samples t-test, independent samples t-test, Wilcoxon test, and Mann-Whitney test were used through SPSS v.18 software. Results: The result of the study showed that application of TRA significantly increased scores of behavior of breakfast consumption (p<0.01). After the intervention, a significant increase was revealed in all nutrition intakes, except for fat and sugar (p<0.01). Conclusion: The findings support application of the TRA in improving the intention and behavior of breakfast consumption. Applying this theory for designing interventions to increase breakfast eating is recommended.
Detection of submitters suspected of pretending to be someone else in a community site

One of the essential factors in community sites is anonymous submission. This is because anonymity gives users chances to submit messages (questions, problems, answers, opinions, etc.) without regard to shame and reputation. However, some users abuse the anonymity and disrupt communications in a community site. These users and their submissions discourage other users, keep them from retrieving good communication records, and decrease the credibility of the communication site. To solve this problem, we conducted an experimental study to detect submitters suspected of pretending to be someone else to manipulate communications in a community site by using machine learning techniques. In this study, we used messages in the data of Yahoo! chiebukuro for data training and examination.
A Loosely-Coupled Full-System Multicore Simulation Framework

Full-system simulation is critical in evaluating design alternatives for multicore processors. However, state-of-the-art multicore simulators either lack good extensibility due to their tightly-coupled design between functional model (FM) and timing model (TM), or cannot guarantee cycle-accuracy. This paper conducts a comprehensive study on factors affecting cycle-accuracy and uncovers several contributing factors less studied before. Based on these insights, we propose a loosely-coupled functional-driven full-system simulator for multicore, namely Transformer. To ensure extensibility and cycle-accuracy, Transformer leverages an architecture-independent interface between FM and TM and uses a lightweight scheme to detect and recover from execution divergence between FM and TM. Built upon Transformer and its foundational simulator components, a graduate student only needed to write about 180 lines of code to extend an X86 functional model (QEMU) in Transformer. Moreover, the loosely-coupled design also removes the complex interaction between FM and TM and opens the opportunity to parallelize FM and TM to improve performance. Experimental results show that Transformer achieves an average of 8.4 and 7.0 percent performance improvement over GEMS in 4-core and 8-core configuration while guaranteeing cycle-accuracy. A further parallelization between FM and TM leads to 35.3 and 29.7 percent performance improvement respectively.
A Virtual View Synthesis Algorithm Based on Image Inpainting

The virtual view synthesis is a key technique in 3D video applications. In this paper, a new algorithm based on image in painting is proposed. Firstly, the depth image is processed by automatic segmentation to recognize the foreground and background. In order to reduce the big holes generated by view warping, in painting is processed on the edge between foreground and background according to the disparity. Then depth image based rendering(DIBR) is processed to foreground image. Finally the two generated images are merged to obtain the virtual view image. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain satisfactory rendering results.
THD Reduction in Multilevel Inverters Using Real-Time Algorithm

Multilevel inverters have been widely applied industries. A family of optimal puisewidth modulation (PWM) methods for multilevel inverters, such as step modulation, can generate output voltage with less harmonic distortion than popular modulation strategies, such as the carrier-based sinusoidal PWM or the space vector PWM. However, some drawbacks limit the application of optimal PWM. One of such crucial drawback is that the optimal switching angles could not be calculated in real-time and one has to rely on lookup tables with precalculated angles. We propose a novel real-time algorithm for calculating switching angles that minimizes total harmonic distortion (THD) for step modulation. We give a mathematical proof that the output voltage has the minimum THD. We implemented the algorithm on a digital signal processor and provide experimental results that verify the performance of the proposed algorithm. Keywords—Multilevel inverter, optimal puisewidth modulation (PWM), power conversion, Total Harmonic Distortion (THD), Digital Signal Processing (DSP).
A METHOD FOR EXEMPLAR BASED INPAINTING BY COMBINING GRAPH BASED SEGMENTATION AND EXPECTATION MAXIMIZATION ALGORITHM

Image inpainting is a process of restoring lost, damaged or selected portion of an image based on the neighboring information. The inpainted result should be such that, when viewed by any ordinary observer should feel a visually pleasing flow of data in and around the hole (selected region). Image Inpainting algorithm have a number of applications such as rebuilding of damaged photographs & films, removal of stamped date from photographs, removal of unwanted objects, red eye correction etc. This paper proposes a method for image inpainting using DEMA (Diffused Expectation Maximization Algorithm) and GBS (Graph Based Segmentation). Here an Exemplar-based in-painting algorithm is adopted, which iteratively search the neighboring region (source region) and fill the missing region (target region), with the most suited patches from the source region. Here the proposed method uses segmentation map along with diffused expectation maximization algorithm to improve the performance of inpainting. In Graph Based Segmentation method the spatial information in the source region is utilized . This method selects the parameter values of the robust priority function and thereby determines the most suited patch size and reduces the search region. The number of segments obtained from GBS is used in DEMA thereby we get a DEMA segmented image which is once again graph based segmented in order to get the parameter value of the DEMA segmented image. This parameter value along with the segmented image is passed through an exemplar based inpainting algorithm forming a better inpainted image. Certain parameters to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm is also done. Experimental results with a number of test images shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Fractional anisotropy shows differential reduction in frontal-subcortical fiber bundles—A longitudinal MRI study of 76 middle-aged and older adults

Motivated by the frontal- and white matter (WM) retrogenesis hypotheses and the assumptions that fronto-striatal circuits are especially vulnerable in normal aging, the goal of the present study was to identify fiber bundles connecting subcortical nuclei and frontal areas and obtain site-specific information about age related fractional anisotropy (FA) changes. Multimodal magnetic resonance image acquisitions [3D T1-weighted and diffusion weighted imaging (DWI)] were obtained from healthy older adults (N = 76, range 49–80 years at inclusion) at two time points, 3 years apart. A subset of the participants (N = 24) was included at a third time-point. In addition to the frontal-subcortical fibers, the anterior callosal fiber (ACF) and the corticospinal tract (CST) was investigated by its mean FA together with tract parameterization analysis. Our results demonstrated fronto-striatal structural connectivity decline (reduced FA) in normal aging with substantial inter-individual differences. The tract parameterization analysis showed that the along tract FA profiles were characterized by piece-wise differential changes along their extension rather than being uniformly affected. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first longitudinal study detecting age-related changes in frontal-subcortical WM connections in normal aging.
Immunogens Modeling a Fusion-Intermediate Conformation of gp41 Elicit Antibodies to the Membrane Proximal External Region of the HIV Envelope Glycoprotein

The membrane proximal external region (MPER) of the gp41 subunit of the HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein (Env) contains determinants for broadly neutralizing antibodies and has remained an important focus of vaccine design. However, creating an immunogen that elicits broadly neutralizing antibodies to this region has proven difficult in part due to the relative inaccessibility of the MPER in the native conformation of Env. Here, we describe the antigenicity and immunogenicity of a panel of oligomeric gp41 immunogens designed to model a fusion-intermediate conformation of Env in order to enhance MPER exposure in a relevant conformation. The immunogens contain segments of the gp41 N- and C-heptad repeats to mimic a trapped intermediate, followed by the MPER, with variations that include different N-heptad lengths, insertion of extra epitopes, and varying C-termini. These well-characterized immunogens were evaluated in two different immunization protocols involving gp41 and gp140 proteins, gp41 and gp160 DNA primes, and different immunization schedules and adjuvants. We found that the immunogens designed to reduce extension of helical structure into the MPER elicited the highest MPER antibody binding titers, but these antibodies lacked neutralizing activity. The gp41 protein immunogens also elicited higher MPER titers than the gp140 protein immunogen. In prime-boost studies, the best MPER responses were seen in the groups that received DNA priming with gp41 vectors followed by gp41 protein boosts. Finally, although titers to the entire protein immunogen were similar in the two immunization protocols, MPER-specific titers differed, suggesting that the immunization route, schedule, dose, or adjuvant may differentially influence MPER immunogenicity. These findings inform the design of future MPER immunogens and immunization protocols.
Nominal Wage Flexibility in a Monetary Union

Membership in a monetary union reduces the possibilities to counteract fluctuations in productivity by monetary policy. One condition for entrance not to lead to adverse unemployment performance is that wages are flexible with respect to productivity. Here I show that, depending on workers’ risk aversion, the incentive for workers to choose more nominal wages flexibility may increase after entrance in a monetary union. The reason is that if nominal wages are fixed in long-term contracts, the abolishment of exchange rates decreases the risk in real wages. On the other hand, the common monetary policy increases the employment risk. Assuming that individuals’ preferences do not change, the institutional change in monetary policy may increase wage flexibility in a monetary union.