Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dynamics of Plant Litter Storage in a Subtropical Forest Headwater Stream During the Rainy Season

ABSTRACT Plant litter is not only the major source of carbon (C) and nutrients for heterotrophic organisms in forest headwater streams, but also an important component of stream C storage. The dynamics of stream litter storage (i.e., the standing stock) are thus closely related to forest C fluxes, but has not been well assessed in the literature. To fill this gap, we investigated the monthly dynamics of plant litter storages at 17 reaches of a subtropical headwater stream from stream source to mouth during the rainy season (from March to August) of 2021. We found that (1), across sampling reaches, the mean litter storages of leaves, twigs (< 1 cm in diameter), fine woody debris (FWD, < 10 cm in diameter), reproductive parts (flowers and/or fruits), and barks in the stream during the rainy season were 25.6, 11.9, 16.7, 0.3, and 0.6 g/m2, respectively, and the storage peak of total litter was in May, while the storage peaks at most of the sampling reaches were in April and May; (2) litter storage, especially leaf litter, at the stream source reach (i.e., reach 1) was significantly higher than those in the other reaches, and riparian forest type affected the storages of twig and FWD litter, with higher values in reaches with broad-leaved than mixed riparian forests; and (3) stream physicochemical characteristics, especially channel gradient, channel width, and water discharge and alkalinity, had significant effects on litter storage, but their effects varied among different litter types. Overall, our study clearly assessed the dynamics of plant litter storages in a headwater stream of subtropical forests, which will help us to better understand the role of headwater streams in forest carbon storage and cycling.
Patterns of Aquatic Insect Biodiversity in the Highly Urbanized Bronx River, NY

Abstract - Aquatic insects are important components of stream food webs and are greatly impacted by anthropogenic disturbances, including urbanization. Successful restoration of urban rivers is contingent on the growth of aquatic insect populations from colonizers from local, less-disturbed streams. However, rivers in highly urbanized watersheds may not have nearby source populations, and therefore must rely only on individuals already surviving in the river. At the regional level, urbanization is a homogenizing process, but the impacts could be heterogeneous at the local level. Therefore, some sites within highly urban rivers might support higher local biodiversity and provide source populations for restoration projects focused on other sites in the river. In this study, we collected aquatic insects from sites within the Bronx River, a highly urbanized river in the New York City metropolitan area, NY, in the summers of 2021 and 2022. We found that while taxonomic richness was similar among sites, insect abundance and dominant taxa, particularly members of Hydropsychidae (Trichoptera), varied significantly among sites. These findings suggest sites within the Bronx River are not homogenous and that some sites within the river harbor larger populations of aquatic insects and may be integral to the success of future conservation projects. This pattern of within-river heterogeneity may exist in other urban rivers and deserves consideration in determining conservation goals and the planning of stream-restoration projects.
When F2FS Meets Compression-Based SSD!

Compression-based schemes have been widely studied to improve the lifetime and performance of solid-state drives (SSDs). Recently, the most popular flash-friendly file system (F2FS) started supporting compression to maximize the lifetime of NAND flash-based storage. Also, compression-based computational SSDs (CSDs) are developed due to their high performance, transparency, and easy adoption. This paper will first study the compression of F2FS and CSD to understand their features. Then, cooperative compression (COCO) is proposed to optimize performance and power consumption based on the combination of F2FS and CSD. Experiments on real devices show that COCO has encouraged optimization.
Policy guidelines to facilitate collective action towards quantum-safety: Recommended policy guidelines to aid and facilitate collective action in migration towards quantum-safe public key infrastructure systems

As the development of quantum computers advances, actors relying on public key infrastructures (PKI) for secure information exchange are becoming aware of the disruptive implications. Currently, governments and businesses employ PKI for many core processes that may become insecure or unavailable when quantum computers break the cryptographic algorithms foundational to PKI. While standardization institutes are currently testing quantum safe cryptographic algorithms, there are no globally agreed-upon cryptographic solutions available. Actors looking to prepare for the implementation of quantum safe cryptographic algorithms lack methods that allow for collective planning and action across organizations, sectors, and nations. The goal of this policy paper is to elicit requirements for a serious game on QS PKI, and derive policy guidelines that actors can use to prepare and formulate governance arrangements. We followed a two-step approach, drawing on technology threat avoidance theory and collective action theory, followed by empirical grounding through a focus group. The results from the literature confirm that a serious game could be a suitable governance mechanism for QS PKI. The focus group results discussed 12 requirements and the requirement's relation to the theoretical background. From this, the findings section arrived at four policy guidelines derived from the requirements that can function as focus areas for further requirement development and as input for policy makers. The policy guidelines concluded are (1) prioritize increasing collective awareness through emphasizing social networks, (2) acknowledge the interdependencies in migrating towards QS PKI, (3) create an understanding of the technical standards in the field and their issuers, and (4) being highly realistic with both negative and positive scenarios to center the players’ understanding of real-world impact.
Excessive SSD-Internal Parallelism Considered Harmful

Modern SSDs achieve high throughput by utilizing multiple independent channels and chips in parallel. However, we find that excessive parallelism inadvertently amplifies the garbage collection (GC) overhead due to the larger unit of space reclamation. Based on this observation, we design PLAN, a novel SSD parallelism management and data placement scheme that allocates different levels of parallelism to different workloads with different needs to minimize the GC overhead. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PLAN by evaluating it against other state-of-the-art designs across various real-world workloads. PLAN reduces write amplification with comparable or better performance to the other designs that are always at full parallelism.
RF-SIFTER: Sifting Signals at Layer-0.5 to Mitigate Wideband Cross-Technology Interference for IoT

IoT uplink performance is crucial for a wide variety of IoT applications such as health sensing and industrial control, which demand reliable delivery of sensor data to the cloud. However, due to the limited transmission power budget imposed on many power-constrained IoT devices, IoT uplinks are highly susceptible to cross-technology interference (CTI) caused by coexisting networks. Previous approaches to mitigating CTI have relied on MAC/PHY designs. They suffer from poor performance and limited generality in the presence of wideband CTI sources such as Wi-Fi and RF jammer, which transmit aggressively on large spectrum chunks using diverse radio technologies. This paper introduces RF-SIFTER, a general and highly-effective system that protects low-power IoT uplinks against intensive wideband CTI. RF-SIFTER enables technology-agnostic blind beamforming to sift signals based on bandwidth, allowing IoT signals to pass through while rejecting interference wider than the IoT band. RF-SIFTER is designed as a Layer-0.5 that is transparent to IoT MAC/PHY, ensuring general applicability and practical deployability across a wide range of coexistence scenarios. RF-SIFTER is implemented on an FPGA-based software radio platform. Extensive experiments show that RF-SIFTER can improve the SINR of IoT uplink signals by up to 29 dB and increase packet delivery ratio by 2× to 5× for ZigBee, BLE, and RFID in the presence of wideband CTI caused by 802.11ac networks and RF jamming.
Ironies of Public Service Automation – Bainbridge Revisited

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and similar digital technologies are currently being implemented for automation of work processes in public service provision. Although RPA enables new empirical phenomena in the digital government context, automation of work is not a new and understudied phenomenon. In this paper, I claim that there is a risk that digital government researchers treat this phenomenon as being entirely new, omitting years of experiences made in other, related, fields of research. To prevent this risk, I call for digital government researchers to learn from adjacent research disciplines. I follow this call and present four ironies of automation, extracted from Lisanne Bainbridge's iconic work from 1983, and relate these to the public service automation context, using examples of RPA in local government organizations. The ironies concern contradictions in the underlying views on humans and human error in the design of automated systems and human-automation interaction, as well as the consequences of human-automation interaction in terms of new tasks (monitoring and take-over), re-configurations of responsibilities, and de- and re-skilling of humans interacting with automated systems. These findings can guide digital government theorization and empirical research on public service automation. Learning from adjacent fields of research is important to better understand and cumulatively build knowledge on the characteristics and effects of public service automation. Learning from an established knowledge base is also important to avoid foreseeable project and implementation failures. The paper is concluded with suggestions on future research topics for digital government researchers interested in public service automation.
Experience: A Three-Year Retrospective of Large-scale Multipath Transport Deployment for Mobile Applications

Multipath transport allows the simultaneous use of diverse paths on mobile devices to maximize mobile resource usage. Over the years, we have witnessed several mobile multipath deployment examples by network operators and mobile app providers. However, existing deployment methods require modifications to either the network infrastructure or both endpoints. To lower the bar of the deployment, we present Fleety, a mobile system service that provides the multi-path transport capability with client-only modification. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to carry out a large-scale mobile multipath deployment that can support hundreds of mobile applications in the cross-ISP setting. This paper is a retrospective of our experience in building and deploying multipath transport for mobile applications. We reveal several practical deployment challenges and share our experience in dealing with them.
Cache in Hand: Expander-Driven CXL Prefetcher for Next Generation CXL-SSD

Integrating compute express link (CXL) with SSDs allows scalable access to large memory but has slower speeds than DRAMs. We present ExPAND, an expander-driven CXL prefetcher that offloads last-level cache (LLC) prefetching from host CPU to CXL-SSDs. ExPAND uses a heterogeneous prediction algorithm for prefetching and ensures data consistency with CXL.mem's back-invalidation. We examine prefetch timeliness for accurate latency estimation. ExPAND, being aware of CXL multi-tiered switching, provides end-to-end latency for each CXL-SSD and precise prefetch timeliness estimations. Our method reduces CXL-SSD reliance and enables direct host cache access for most data. ExPAND enhances graph application performance by 3.5x, surpassing CXL-SSD pools with diverse prefetching strategies.
HiPeR - Early Detection of a Ransomware Attack using Hardware Performance Counters

Ransomware has been one of the most prevalent forms of malware over the previous decade, and it continues to be one of the most significant threats today. Recently, ransomware strategies such as double extortion and rapid encryption have encouraged attacker communities to consider ransomware as a business model. With the advent of Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) models, ransomware spread and operations continue to increase. Even though machine learning and signature-based detection methods for ransomware have been proposed, they often fail to achieve very accurate detection. Ransomware that evades detection moves to the execution phase after initial access and installation. Due to the catastrophic nature of a ransomware attack, it is crucial to detect in its early stages of execution. If there is a method to detect ransomware in its execution phase early enough, then one can kill the processes to stop the ransomware attack. However, early detection with dynamic API call analysis is not an ideal solution, as the contemporary ransomware variants use low-level system calls to circumvent the detection methods. In this work, we use hardware performance counters (HPC) as features to detect the ransomware within 3-4 seconds - which may be sufficient, at least in the case of ransomware that takes longer to complete its full execution.
A Free-Space Adaptive Runtime Zone-Reset Algorithm for Enhanced ZNS Efficiency

While the state-of-the-art runtime zone-reset algorithm of the ZenFS in RocksDB is optimized for the performance of Zone Namespace (ZNS) SSDs, it does not take into account the lifetime constraint of ZNS SSDs. To address this issue, we present FAR, a Free-space Adaptive Runtime Zone-Reset algorithm for ZenFS, which dynamically adjusts the frequency of runtime zone-reset calls based on the available free-space in the ZNS SSD. We developed FAR with the ZenFS of RocksDB using a ZNS SSD prototype based on the Cosmos+ OpenSSD platform and compared it with the state-of-the-art runtime zone-reset algorithm used in ZenFS. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that FAR improves the lifetime of ZNS SSD by 2x without compromising performance.
Assessing the Implementation of Personal data Protection Awareness and User Satisfaction on the MyData Platform in Taiwan: Assessing User Satisfaction on the MyData Service in Taiwan

The utilization of personal data for self-application has emerged as a novel trend in government's provision of public services to citizens. MyData services, for instance, are a prime example of online application services that have been implemented in Finland and Taiwan. In the past, government online services were relatively limited in scope and lacked platforms. MyData is a revolutionary platform that has the potential to transform the way government-provided public services are delivered to citizens. With its one-stop service, it offers a wide range of G2C2B services, making it a true game changer in the field of public service delivery. Since 2020, MyData platform in Taiwan has been utilized by more than 46,000 individuals, must be surveyed for user satisfaction as a reference for future improvements. Secondly, this study aims to understand whether citizens who use innovative public services have a higher awareness of personal data protection and therefore will use the platform. This includes the level of trust in the government and the level of trust in online services; thirdly, in addition to the MyData platform, under what circumstances will citizens transmit personal data. In order to understand the above research goals, this study collected 879 questionnaires using questionnaire survey, and finally, there were 483 valid questionnaires. The results found that more than 70% of the respondents gave a rating of satisfied or above; more than 80% of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the MyData platform's identity verification mechanism is enough security; more than 85% of people are willing to continue to use the platform; and 81.16% of people are willing to recommend it to their friends and family.
A relational view of knowledge sharing in public-private IT outsourcing relationships

This article examines the factors determining the quality of the outcomes of public-private IT outsourcing (ITO) to create public value. We elaborated a model based on the relational view of interorganizational relations, complemented by the theory of boundary objects. We provide an empirical validation of this model from a sample of IT managers in state and local governments in Mexico. We found that public-private ITO can generate public value thanks to a high quality of the information system produced in related projects. Information system quality is supported by effective knowledge sharing between project partners. The quality of knowledge sharing is expressed by the quality of the contract and other artifacts that facilitate building shared understanding and by conflict resolution processes developed during the partnership. The quality of knowledge sharing depends on the level of two trust-related dimensions: benevolence and competence between outsourcing partners. In our model, we relate in a novel way trust, knowledge sharing, the quality of IT services produced and public value in the context of public-private ITO. We also propose an original formulation and validation of knowledge sharing dimensions, looking at the importance of specific knowledge interfaces to bridge semantic and pragmatic boundaries in public-private ITO.
SoftRefresh: Targeted refresh for Energy-efficient DRAM systems via Software and Operating Systems support

Due to its capacitive nature, DRAM cells must be refreshed regularly to retain their information. However, due to the scale of DRAM deployment in modern computer systems, the energy overhead of DRAM refresh operations is becoming significant. The crux in managing DRAM refresh is knowing if the data in particular cells are valid or not. Previous works have suggested many hardware schemes that effectively try to guess this. In this paper, we propose modifications to allow software involvement in regulating refresh operations. This opens the door for targeted, and hence minimal, refresh operations. Only valid pages having potential bit errors will be refreshed. Compared to conventionally refreshing the whole DRAM, our SoftRefresh saves up to 43% energy on average. Our proposal can work on all types of modern DRAM with only minor modifications to the existing hardware and software systems.
Multilectic Forums in Digital Service Ecosystems

Digital public service development toward human-centric service portfolios requires radical changes and innovative collaboration among multiple actors. Such a collaboration involving public and private service providers and NGOs has turned out to be challenging. On the organizational level, long-term sustainability requires dialectical reasoning and synthesis between innovation and efficiency toward organizational ambidexterity. However, public organizations face the need for mandated efficiency, which hinders innovativeness. In addition, the need for interoperable human-centric services at the ecosystem level introduces additional complexity. To evaluate how to address the emerging tensions in complex public service ecosystems in developing interoperable human-centric digital service portfolios, we conducted a single-case study with multilevel analysis in a large-scale public service ecosystem in Finland. We found that dialectical tensions emerging on various forums, where differing goals, views, and values meet, are intertwined within and across multiple ecosystem levels and that the synthesis of these tensions can be more than the sum of their parts. We introduce the concept of multilectic forums and theorize how they emerge continuously and simultaneously in public service ecosystems between the public and private service providers and NGOs while human-centric digital service portfolios are developed. We propose that governing intertwined tensions on multilectic forums can result in innovative and efficient digital services and collectively ambidextrous ecosystems.
Arctic Sea Ice Causes Seasonal Differences in the Response of Arctic Water Vapor to Climate Warming in the CMIP6 Model, HadGEM3‐GC3.1

Water vapor in the Arctic can be attributed to local evaporation and transport from mid‐latitudes. Here we investigate the response of Arctic water vapor to declining sea ice in a climate model, using an idealized warming scenario in which the Arctic becomes ice free year‐round. We find distinct monthly patterns in water vapor change with warming, with a strong influence of sea ice loss on changes to evaporation, except in summer when transports dominate. Before the Arctic becomes ice‐free, total column water increases at a rate slower than that indicated by the Clausius‐Clapeyron relationship; once ice‐free, total column water increases at a rate equal to Clausius‐Clapeyron. The exception is summer when the increase is initially faster then becomes slower when ice‐free. The boundary layer structure changes, under global warming, from stratified to well mixed in all seasons except summer, which remains largely unchanged throughout the ice‐free transition.
The Energetic 2022 Seismic Unrest Related to Magma Intrusion at the North Mid‐Atlantic Ridge

A seismic swarm affected the 53.3°–54.3° Latitude North section of the Mid‐Atlantic Ridge from 26 September to 10 December 2022. We rely on regional, teleseismic and array data to relocate 61 hypocenters and derive 77 moment tensors. The 2022 swarm released a cumulative moment equivalent to Mw 6.3. Seismicity was shallow (7 ± 3 km depth). Most earthquakes are located along the ridge axis with typical, NS oriented normal faulting mechanisms, but a few among the largest and latest earthquakes have unusual thrust mechanisms and locations as far as ∼25 km from the ridge. We attribute the swarm to a shallow magmatic intrusion, with a vertical dike first propagating ∼60 km along axis, accompanied by shallow normal faulting, and then thickening and triggering thrust earthquakes off the ridge, in response to compressive stress buildup. The unrest provides a rare example of an energetic, magmatic driven swarm episode at the mid‐ocean ridge.
How Important Are Horizontal Eddy Moisture Transports for the MJO's Eastward Propagation?

The eastward propagation of the Madden‐Julian oscillation (MJO) is known to hinge crucially on the effects of horizontal moisture advection, which involve two main types of circulation anomalies. The first are those of the MJO itself, while the second are those of embedded Rossby‐type “eddies,” which tend to be most active to the west of the MJO's convective center. To quantify the relative importance of the eddies, a novel approach is taken in which their formal definition is given by the residual of a least‐squares fit to an observed bivariate MJO index. Results show that the eddies, when defined in this way, are generally of leading importance for fostering the MJO's eastward propagation in terms of column‐integrated moisture. The picture is seen to be reversed, however, when using a traditional filter‐based method to define the eddies, which are then strictly “high‐frequency” in nature.