Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards classification of DNS erroneous queries

We analyze domain name system (DNS) errors (i.e., ServFail, Refused and NX Domain errors) in DNS traffic captured at an external connection link of an academic network in Japan and attempt to understand the causes of such errors. Because DNS errors that are responses to erroneous queries have a large impact on DNS traffic, we should reduce as many of them as possible. First, we show that ServFail and Refused errors are generated by queries from a small number of local resolvers and authoritative nameservers that do not relate to ordinary users. Second, we demonstrate that NX Domain errors have several query patterns due to mostly anti-virus/anti-spam systems as well as meaningless queries (i.e., mis-configuration). By analyzing erroneous queries leading to NX Domain errors with the proposed heuristic rules to identify the main causes of such errors, we successfully classify them into nine groups that cover approximately 90% of NX Domain errors with a low false positive rate. Furthermore, we find malicious domain names similar to Japanese SNS sites from the results. We discuss the main causes of these DNS errors and how to reduce them from the results of our analysis.
Models of bottom-up and top-down visual attention

When we observe our visual environment, we do not perceive all its components as being equally interesting. Some objects automatically and effortlessly “pop-out” from their surroundings, that is, they draw our visual attention, in a “ bottom-up” manner, towards them. In a first approximation, focal visual attention acts as a rapidly shiftable “spotlight,” which allows only the selected information to reach higher levels of processing and representation. Most models of the bottom-up control of attention are based on the concept of a saliency map, that is, an explicit two-dimensional map that encodes the conspicuity of objects in the visual environment. Competition among neurons in this map gives rise to a single winning location that corresponds to the next attended target. Inhibiting this location automatically allows the system to attend to the next most salient location. A first body of work in this thesis describes a detailed computer implementation of such a scheme, focusing on the problem of combining information across modalities, here orientation, intensity and color information, in a purely stimulus-driven manner. The model is applied to common psychophysical stimuli as well as to very demanding visual search tasks. Its successful performance is used to address the extent to which the primate visual system carries out visual search via one or more such saliency maps and how this can be tested. We next address the question of what happens once our attention is focused onto a restricted part of our visual field. There is mounting experimental evidence that attention is far more sophisticated than a simple feed-forward spatially-selective filtering process. Indeed, visual processing appears to be significantly different inside the attentional spotlight than outside. That is, in addition to its properties as a feed-forward information processing and transmission bottleneck, focal visual attention feeds back and locally modulates, in a “top-down” manner, the visual processing and representation of selected objects. The second body of work presented in this thesis is concerned with a detailed computational model of basic pattern vision in humans and its modulation by top-down attention. We start by acquiring a complete dataset of five different simple psychophysical experiments, including discriminations of contrast, orientation and spatial frequency of simple pattern stimuli by human observers. This experimental dataset places strict constraints on our model of early pattern vision. The model, however, is eventually able to reproduce the entire dataset while assuming plausible neurobiological components. The model is further applied to existing psychophysical data which demonstrates how top-down attention alters performance in these simple psychophysical discrimination experiments. Our model is able to quantitatively account for all observations by assuming that attention strengthens the non-linear cortical interactions among visual neurons.
Extracellular Ca2+ modulates ADP-evoked aggregation through altered agonist degradation: implications for conditions used to study P2Y receptor activation

ADP is considered a weak platelet agonist due to the limited aggregation responses it induces in vitro at physiological concentrations of extracellular Ca2+ [(Ca2+)o]. Lowering [Ca2+]o paradoxically enhances ADP‐evoked aggregation, an effect that has been attributed to enhanced thromboxane A2 production. This study examined the role of ectonucleotidases in the [Ca2+]o‐dependence of platelet activation. Reducing [Ca2+]o from millimolar to micromolar levels converted ADP (10 μmol/l)‐evoked platelet aggregation from a transient to a sustained response in both platelet‐rich plasma and washed suspensions. Blocking thromboxane A2 production with aspirin had no effect on this [Ca2+]o‐dependence. Prevention of ADP degradation abolished the differences between low and physiological [Ca2+]o resulting in a robust and sustained aggregation in both conditions. Measurements of extracellular ADP revealed reduced degradation in both plasma and apyrase‐containing saline at micromolar compared to millimolar [Ca2+]o. As reported previously, thromboxane A2 generation was enhanced at low [Ca2+]o, however this was independent of ectonucleotidase activity. P2Y receptor antagonists cangrelor and MRS2179 demonstrated the necessity of P2Y12 receptors for sustained ADP‐evoked aggregation, with a minor role for P2Y1. In conclusion, Ca2+‐dependent ectonucleotidase activity is a major factor determining the extent of platelet aggregation to ADP and must be controlled for in studies of P2Y receptor activation.
Contrast-enhanced harmonic endoscopic ultrasonography for assessment of lymph node metastases in pancreatobiliary carcinoma.

AIM To assess the usefulness of contrast-enhanced harmonic endoscopic ultrasonography (CH-EUS) for lymph node metastasis in pancreatobiliary carcinoma. METHODS All patients suspected of pancreatobiliary carcinoma with visible lymph nodes after standard EUS between June, 2009 and January, 2012 were enrolled. In the primary analysis, patients with successful EUS-fine needle aspiration (FNA) were included. The lymph nodes were assessed by several standard EUS variables (short and long axis lengths, shape, edge characteristic and echogenicity), color Doppler EUS variable [central intranodal blood vessel (CIV) presence] and CH-EUS variable (heterogeneous/homogeneous enhancement patterns). The diagnostic accuracy relative to EUS-FNA was calculated. In the second analysis, N-stage diagnostic accuracy of CH-EUS was compared with EUS-FNA in patients who underwent surgical resection. RESULTS One hundred and nine patients (143 lymph nodes) fulfilled the criteria. The short axis cut-off ≥ 13 mm predicted malignancy with a sensitivity and specificity of 72% and 85%, respectively. These values were 72% and 63% for the long axis cut-off ≥ 20 mm, 62% and 75% for the round shape variable, 81% and 30% for the sharp edge variable, 66% and 61% for the hypoechogenicity variable, 70% and 72% for the CIV-absent variable, and 83% and 91% for the heterogeneous CH-EUS-enhancement variable, respectively. CH-EUS was more accurate than standard and color Doppler EUS, except the short axis cut-off. Notably, three patients excluded because of EUS-FNA failure were correctly N-staged by CH-EUS. CONCLUSION CH-EUS complements standard and color Doppler EUS and EUS-FNA for assessment of lymph node metastases.
Modulation of the Parieto-Occipital Alpha Rhythm during Object Detection

Changes in the human neuromagnetic alpha rhythm were monitored during an object detection task to study the effects of visual shape processing on the parieto-occipital activity. Pictures of coherent meaningful objects, which the observers had to detect, and of disorganized meaningless non-objects were presented briefly between masks. The non-objects were systematically followed by a higher level of alpha than the objects, the difference emerging on average 400 msec after the stimulus, with a median delay of 130 msec after evoked response onsets in the occipital, temporal, and parietal cortices. Without attention to visual shape, the alpha levels did not differ between objects and non-objects. The alpha level was higher after non-objects than missed objects, and higher after missed than correctly detected objects, suggesting that the alpha level is inversely related to saliency or familiarity of the object and does not directly reflect visual awareness. The reactive alpha rhythm was generated in the parieto-occipital sulcus, which in several primate species includes areas belonging to the dorsal visual pathway. According to current views, the parietal cortex produces attentional signals that filter out irrelevant information in the ventral visual stream. Our results reinforce the idea of bidirectional interaction: information derived from visual shape can rapidly modify activity in the parieto-occipital region. The synchronized alpha oscillations may reflect attenuation of occipito-parietal information transfer and disengagement of parietal cortex from object selection.
Comparing prevalence rates of depressive symptoms in postpartum and nonpostpartum samples in a low-income community

Within the medical models, postpartum depression is constructed as a mental illness, that women are predisposed to during the postpartum period because of the biological and physiological changes that occur before, during and after childbirth. The present study aimed to determine whether childbirth increases the risk of developing depressive symptomatology in the first six months after delivery. The objective of the study was to examine the concept of postpartum depression by analyzing the difference in depressive symptom rates between 41 postpartum women and 254 male and female (who had not given birth in the previous six months) community members residing in a semi-rural area of South Africa. This objective was reached by using a cross-sectional survey research design. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was used to elicit the quantitative data. Several independent t-tests were conducted to determine the following (i) whether low-income women three months postpartum had higher BDI scores in comparison to a combined gendered community sample, and (ii) whether low-income women six months postpartum had higher BDI scores in comparison to a combined gendered community sample. The results indicated that the postpartum women did not experience elevated rates of depressive symptoms at three months or at six months in comparison to the community sample. Men in the 2003 community sample displayed significantly higher levels of depressive symptoms than the sixmonth postpartum women. These findings do not support the assumption that childbirth predisposes women to psychological vulnerability during the postpartum period.
Efficient iris segmentation method with support vector domain description

With the aim to improve the performance of iris segmentation method to process images with heterogeneous characteristics, the authors introduce a new method inspired by the support vector domain description (SVDD). A local geometric moment function is used to extract shape features of the iris borders. Then, these features are fed into the trained SVDD classifier for borders recognition followed by the application of Hough transform to solve circumference parameters of iris. The performance of the proposed method and the most cited methods, Daugman’s method and Wilders’ method, had been tested on the UBIRIS database. Compared with the two existing methods, our proposal is not only comparable to them when the iris image has good quality, but has better segmentation performance in the case of poor quality images. The experimental results show that the method proposed does have a higher robustness and is less dependent on the quality of raw iris image.
Wnt signaling regulates the sequential onset of neurogenesis and gliogenesis via induction of BMPs

In the mammalian central nervous system, neurogenesis precedes gliogenesis; neurons are primarily generated at the neural stage, whereas most glial cells are generated perinatally and postnatally. However, the signals that regulate this sequence of events remain unclear. Here we show that Wnt signaling induces neuronal and astroglial differentiation but suppresses oligodendroglial differentiation. We observed that precursor cells infected with a retrovirus encoding β‐catenin differentiated into neurons, while astrocytes developed from uninfected precursor cells surrounding infected cells. As neurogenesis proceeded, expression of the bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs), BMP2, 4 and 7, progressively increased in the cells infected with the retrovirus encoding β‐catenin. Furthermore, treatment of cells with Noggin, a BMP antagonist, completely inhibited astroglial differentiation but partially restored oligodendroglial differentiation. These results suggest that Wnt signaling indirectly regulates gliogenesis by inducing BMPs in neuronal cells. Thus, cooperation between Wnt and BMP signaling may play a key role in determining the sequence of neurogenesis and gliogenesis.
BAF250B‐Associated SWI/SNF Chromatin‐Remodeling Complex Is Required to Maintain Undifferentiated Mouse Embryonic Stem Cells

Whether SWI/SNF chromatin remodeling complexes play roles in embryonic stem (ES) cells remains unknown. Here we show that SWI/SNF complexes are present in mouse ES cells, and their composition is dynamically regulated upon induction of ES cell differentiation. For example, the SWI/SNF purified from undifferentiated ES cells contains a high level of BAF155 and a low level of BAF170 (both of which are homologs of yeast SWI3 protein), whereas that from differentiated cells contains nearly equal amounts of both. Moreover, the levels of BAF250A and BAF250B decrease during the differentiation of ES cells, whereas that of BRM increases. The altered expression of SWI/SNF components hinted that these complexes could play roles in ES cell maintenance or differentiation. We therefore generated ES cells with biallelic inactivation of BAF250B and found that these cells display a reduced proliferation rate and an abnormal cell cycle. Importantly, these cells are deficient in the self‐renewal capacity of undifferentiated ES cells and exhibit certain phenotypes of differentiated cells, including reduced expression of several pluripotency‐related genes and increased expression of some differentiation‐related genes. These data suggest that the BAF250B‐associated SWI/SNF is essential for mouse ES cells to maintain their normal proliferation and pluripotency. The work presented here underscores the importance of SWI/SNF chromatin remodeling complexes in pluripotent stem cells.
Extracting, Assimilating, and Sharing the Results of Image Analysis on the FSA/OWI Photography Collection

This paper reports on the continued work on image analysis of the Farm Security Administration -- Office of War Information Photography Collection team, supported through an XSEDE grant (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) and Extended Collaborative Support Service (ECSS). The team is refining existing algorithms, developing new algorithms and executing them on the Comet supercomputer to analyze the FSA-OWI corpus from 1935-1944, held by the Library of Congress (LOC). The project spans many fields within the humanities and beyond, including photography, art, visual rhetoric, linguistics, American history, anthropology, and geography, as well as appealing to the general public. Progress includes refining image, metadata, and lexical semantics analysis, as well as developing a search, retrieval, and sorting interface through Clowder, which will serve as the public portal. Methods and tool refinement for this project are suitable for use on other large image corpora.
Calibration of vision systems based on pseudo-random patterns

Solving visual features' correspondence and dealing with missing data are two factors of limitations for points registration techniques. To tackle this problem, we conceived a pattern, primarily designed for structured lighting vision systems, which may also be used for camera calibration purposes. The pattern design previously presented in [1] provides a huge of benefits. Among them, we firstly present a new calibration technique of a structured lighting system and secondly an automatic distortion compensation based on a printed pattern. These two well-known issues are very useful in 3D vision-based metrology with range data, for instance for model-based visual robot control, especially when the model is incrementally built with a real-time 3D reconstruction of moving surfaces. Perhaps, one of the most significant profit with a high Hamming distance pattern is the ability to reliably decode its projected individual elements even if several of items are missing, as it greatly extends the range of measurements volume. A technique which solves the distortion parameters by means of a robust M-estimator algorithm is presented. It uses a printed pattern and it allows the distortion be corrected with a single view and without the computation of other (intrinsic/extrinsic) parameters, even in presence of occlusions. Experimental results, in one hand by means of a printed pattern for the distortion compensation of a rigid endoscope and on the other hand by means of a projected pattern for the calibration of the structured lighting system, show very good performance for the 3-D reconstruction.
The Citation Impact of German Sociology Journals: Some Problems with the Use of Scientometric Indicators in Journal and Research Evaluations

We analyze the citation impacts (‘cited’) and citation practices (‘citing’) of sociological journals which publish in German, and discuss drawbacks of using the journal impact factor (IF) to assess the quality of these journals. Whereas journal impact factors measure short-term (2-year) impacts at research fronts, sociological literature moves slowly in terms of citations: the median age of citations to sociology journals is mostly longer than ten years. Citation in a field without a research front may indicate codification with a different dynamics. For example, Merton’s (1968) Matthew Effect is frequently cited by network analysts as an example of preferential attachment. Secondly, circulation can be impeded due to a language barrier. Thirdly, citation distributions are heavily skewed because of the positive loops (preferential attachment). Given this skewness one should not use quasi-averages (such as the IF). Using non-parametric statistics (e.g., percentiles), however, requires delineation of field-specific reference sets. What would be a relevant reference set in the case we examine: other sociological journals or other social-science journals in German? The German sociology journals are cited by the latter, but are citing the former as the knowledge bases. Fourth, the attribution of journal measures to individual paper implies an ecological fallacy: inferences about the nature of single records (here: papers) are deduced from inferences for the groups to which these records belong (here: the journal where the papers were published). Finally, algorithmic constructs (e.g., the various rankings) cannot be used for policy or management purposes without validation or specification of statistical error.
Towards Visual Sensor Networks Related Research on Micro Air Vehicles

The increased performance of small scale computing platforms enables the use of a growing number of computer vision algorithms previously limited to desktop computers. This makes visual sensor networks feasible in the close future and could lead to a convergence between distributed sensing and computer vision research fields. This paper provides an introduction to efficient computer vision approaches suitable for small scale platforms using the example of Micro Air Vehicles (MAV). The PIXHAWK MAV computer vision project is described in detail to show the technical implications as well as the resulting research challenges.
Cyberbullying definition and measurement: Some critical considerations

This definition implies that cyberbullying is similar to traditional bullying, but involving the use of new communication technologies. Its hostile trait derives from the aggressive nature of the behavior. The intention refers to the degree of awareness of harming others, although we might argue to what extent perpetrators are aware of the seriousness of their acts. The indirect nature of cyberbullying makes it difficult to evaluate the intentional or reactive nature of the attack. Moreover some authors stated that cyberbullying, even if a single individual act, can be circulated widely or copied by others meeting the criteria of repetition and frequently creating an imbalance of power. It is hard to detail the concept of imbalance of power in the cyber context, since in face-to-face bullying it was derived by the higher physical or psychological strength of the bully or by a numeric criterion (the number of bullies in comparison with just one victim). How can we define in the cyber context? Can we refer just to a higher technological ability of the bully or, conversely, to a higher rank position of the bullies in the virtual community? Wolak, Finkelhor, Mitchell, and Ybarra (2007) and Ybarra and Mitchell (2004), showed that in many cases youth harassed online or by phone were not distressed or could easily block the harasser. The easy termination of these episodes suggests that part of online harassment may not involve imbalance of power in which victims have difficulty defending themselves from aggressors. It also involves other criteria to distinguish between bullying and harassment such as the number of incidents and the degree of reported distress by the victim. In relation to this issue scholars have proposed alternative terms, such as online, cyber, Internet harassment, or attacks (Dooley, Py_ zalski, & Cross, 2009; Patchin & Hinduja, 2006; Wolak et al., 2007). Measurement
Antiviral protective immunity induced by major histocompatibility complex class I molecule-restricted viral T-lymphocyte epitopes inserted in various positions in immunologically self and nonself proteins

Injection into mice of chimeric proteins consisting of a portion of either the simian virus 40 large tumor antigen or nonstructural protein 1 of influenza A virus or of the murine tumor suppressor p53 on one hand and T-cell epitopes of lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus on the other resulted in antiviral protective immunity, which was independent of the epitopes' position in the protein and the same whether the latter was immunologically nonself or self. Mice of different haplotypes were protected when the corresponding class I molecule-restricted epitopes had been inserted close to each other in one carrier protein.