Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Generalization of independent faults for transition faults

Independent faults were shown to he effective in computing small test sets for stuck-at faults. An efficient procedure for computing a maximal set of independent stuck-at faults is proposed. The notion of independent faults is then extended to other fault models, specifically, transition faults, that require two-pattern tests. Experimental results are presented to show that the computation of independent faults can be practically performed. <<ETX>>
Topical interests and the mitigation of search engine bias

Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the web despite its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users according to their page ranking strategies, and it has been argued that they create a vicious cycle that amplifies the dominance of established and already popular sites. This bias could lead to a dangerous monopoly of information. We show that, contrary to intuition, empirical data do not support this conclusion; popular sites receive far less traffic than predicted. We discuss a model that accurately predicts traffic data patterns by taking into consideration the topical interests of users and their searching behavior in addition to the way search engines rank pages. The heterogeneity of user interests explains the observed mitigation of search engines’ popularity bias.
Cytomegalovirus pp65 antigenemia-guided early treatment with ganciclovir versus ganciclovir at engraftment after allogeneic marrow transplantation: a randomized double-blind study.

To determine whether cytomegalovirus (CMV) antigenemiaguided ganciclovir treatment may be as effective, may require less treatment, and thus may cause less marrow toxicity than ganciclovir administered at engraftment, 226 marrow transplant recipients were randomized at engraftment to receive placebo (antigenemia-ganciclovir group) or ganciclovir (ganciclovir group) until day 100 in a double-blind study. In patients with antigenemia of 3 or more positive cells in 2 slides and/or viremia, study drug was discontinued and ganciclovir was started for at least 3 weeks or until negative CMV antigenemia and resumed only if antigenemia recurred. More patients in the antigenemia-ganciclovir group developed CMV disease before day 100 after transplantation compared with the ganciclovir group (14% v 2.7%, P = .002). Of the 16 patients with CMV disease before day 100 in the antigenemia-ganciclovir group, 10 (8.8%) had disease before or during the first episode of antigenemia and 6 (5.3%) developed disease after discontinuation of ganciclovir. Untreated low-grade antigenemia progressed to CMV disease in 19% of patients with grade 3-4 compared with 0% of patients with grade 0-2 acute graft-versus-host disease (P = .04). There was no significant difference in CMV disease by day 180 after transplantation and thereafter. CMV-related death, transplant survival, and neutropenia were not significantly different between the groups. In the ganciclovir group, more invasive fungal infections occurred (P = .03) and more ganciclovir was used (P < .0001). Thus, delaying the start of ganciclovir until highgrade antigenemia and discontinuing ganciclovir based on negative antigenemia results in more CMV disease by day 100 than ganciclovir administered at engraftment. However, ganciclovir at engraftment is associated with more early invasive fungal infections and more late CMV disease resulting in similar survival rates.
A study on prediction of user's tendency toward purchases in websites based on behavior models

Nowadays customers would rather buy their needs online than visiting a retail store because of many reasons such as saving time. Therefore, in order to increase efficiency of online shopping websites, many companies have invested in researches toward prediction of users purchases and recommendation systems that may help and motivate a user to buy products that he may be interested in. However, most efforts in this area has been around classification and predictions based on users interests in specific types of products. In this paper, we have studied efficiency of numerous algorithms toward building a classification model to predict the probability of a complete purchase by users only based on their behavior models in the system and regardless of their interest. Therefore, we experimented accuracy of different algorithms and proposed a novel classification model that is able to predict whether a user will be interested in buying a certain set of products that are placed in the online shopping cart or not.
SECURITY Dowser : A Guided Fuzzer for Finding Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities and inspircd

Herbert Bos is a full professor in Systems and Network Security at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He obtained his PhD from Cambridge University Computer Laboratory (UK). He is proud of all his (former) students, three of whom have won the Roger Needham PhD Award for best PhD thesis in systems in Europe. In 2010, Herbert was awarded an ERC Starting Grant for a project on reverse engineering that is currently keeping him busy. herbertb@few.vu. nl Buffer overflows have long plagued existing software systems, making them vulnerable to attackers. Our tool, Dowser, aims to tackle this issue using efficient and scalable software testing. Dowser builds on a new software testing paradigm, which we call dowsing, that focuses the testing effort around relevant application components. This paradigm proved successful in practice, as Dowser found real bugs in complex applications such as the nginx Web server and the ffmpeg multimedia framework.
A Clinically Useful Method for Detecting Gonadotropins in Children: Assessment of Luteinizing Hormone and Follicle-Stimulating Hormone from Urine as an Alternative to Serum by Ultrasensitive Time-Resolved Immunofluorometric Assays

ABSTRACT: To study the feasibility of noninvasive sampling in pediatric patients, we examined the concentrations of LH and FSH in paired serum and urine samples from 65 children (age 0–15 y) with highly sensitive time-resolved immunofluorometric assays. The detection limits of the assays were 0.015 lU/L for LH and 0.018 lU/L for FSH. These sensitivity levels allowed quantification of the low prepubertal LH and FSH concentrations. The correlation between serum and urine gonadotropin values was very good (r = 0.751, p < 0.001 for FSH; and r = 0.720, p < 0.001 for LH), and the urine and serum concentrations were very similar. Correction of urinary gonadotropin concentrations for changes in urinary flow by standard methods using density [concentration × (0.02/density – 1)] or creatinine (concentration/creatinine) did not improve the correlation. Therefore, measurement of urinary gonadotropins without correction can simply be used in the pediatric outpatient setting as a noninvasive alternative to serum determinations.
LPC, LPCC and MFCC parameterisation applied to the detection of voice impairments

There is an increased risk for vocal and voice diseases due to the modern way of life. It is well known that most of the vocal and voice diseases cause changes in the acoustic voice signal. These diseases have to be diagnosed and treated during an early stage. Acoustic analysis is a non-invasive technique based on digital processing of speech signal. Acoustic analysis can be a useful tool to diagnose this kind of diseases, furthermore it presents several advantages: it is a non-invasive tool, an objective diagnostic and, also, it can be used for the evaluation of surgical and pharmacological treatments and rehabilitation processes. ENT clinicians use acoustic voice analysis to characterise pathological voices. In this paper, we study threee well known parameterisation approaches applied to the automatic detection of voice disorders. Former and actual works demonstrate that impaired voice detection can be carried out by means of supervised neural nets: MLP (Multilayer perceptron). We have focused our task in detection of impaired voices by means of neural network technology (ANN) and parameters such a LPC, LPCC and MFCC extracted from the voice signal. The performance of the neural network based detector is compared with that using acoustic parameters such a Fo, NHR, NNE, Shimmer, Jitter. as input variables. The aim of this paper is to study and compare those widely used parameterisation method in speech technology applied to the detection of impaired voices.
Cannabis use and violent behaviour: a psychiatric patients cohort study in Southern Italy.

UNLABELLED An ample volume of research evidence supports the conclusion that drug use/abuse is correlated with violent behavior. Some studies have shown that co-morbidity also appears to be predictive of violent behavior. The research evidence indicates gender differences, while socio-economic and familial factors play a role, too. METHOD We conducted a retrospective study of the clinical files of four public psychiatric outpatient facilities during five years. The objectives of the research were to identify and analyze relationships between: a) cannabis use/abuse and violent behavior and b) cannabis use/abuse, psychopathology, and violent behavior. The study sample consisted of 1,582 subjects. The data, gathered in a dedicated database, were processed by applying univariate and multivariate analysis models. RESULTS Subjects who used/abused cannabis showed a high prevalence of violent behavior, Regardless of the type of psychiatric disorder, the use of cannabis appears to be an evident risk factor. Significant correlations also emerged between cannabis use/abuse and the type of violent behavior, especially self-inflicted injury. Evidence also emerged that other factors are implicated. This is consistent with the current literature proposing multi-casual explanations of violent behavior.
Is anyone there? Drawings as a tool to detect deceit in occupation interviews

Abstract In the present experiment 17 truth tellers and 16 liars were asked to verbally describe and sketch their workplace. We measured (i) the amount of detail included in the verbal description/sketch; (ii) the plausibility of the verbal description/sketch; (iii) the number of people verbally described/sketched; and (iv) the level of detail in which these people were verbally described/sketched. Differences between truth tellers and liars emerged on all four variables in the drawings whereas only one difference (the number of people described) emerged in the verbal accounts. Two possible explanations for the efficiency of drawings as a veracity assessment tool in this experiment are discussed. First, the request to sketch came as a surprise to participants and, second, sketching creates a unique problem for liars: more so than a verbal request, the request to sketch forces an interviewee to convey spatial information.
Comparison of XTAG and LEXSYS grammars

We use the Lexicalised D-Tree Grammar (LDTG) formalism (Rambow et al. 95), which is based on the Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) formalism. In LDTG, there are two types of edges between nodes: d-edges, represented with a broken line, and p-edges, represented by a solid line. Trees are combined by two substitution-like operations, both of which involve combining two descriptions, by equating exactly one node from each description. One of the operations is always used to add complements, and involves equating a frontier node (in the d-tree that is getting the complement) with the root of some component (in the d-tree that is providing the complement ), such that the two nodes being equated are compatible . An example of substitution is shown in Figure 1.
Komorbidität von Abhängigkeits-erkrankungen, affektiven Störungen und Angststörungen

Zusammenfassung Aufgrund der häufigen Komorbidität von Suchterkrankungen und affektiven Störungen bzw. Angsterkrankungen und der erschwerten Behandlung bei Vorliegen beider Störungsbilder, ist es das Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit, einen aktuellen Überblick über die Komorbidität der Erkrankungen mit besonderem Fokus auf Epidemiologie, Ursachen und Therapie zu vermitteln. Dazu wurde eine systematische Literaturrecherche durchgeführt, wobei wir uns aufgrund der Datenmenge auf ausgewählte, klinisch relevante Publikationen beschränkten. Zwischen 45 und 72% der Patienten mit einer Suchterkrankung leiden an mindestens einer weiteren psychiatrischen Erkrankung, darüber hinaus ist die Komorbidität mit einer schlechteren Prognose und einem erhöhten Suizidrisiko assoziiert. Für die Ursache der sich teilweise wechselseitig beeinflussenden Krankheitssymptome sind neben gemeinsamen und spezifischen genetischen auch umweltbedingte Faktoren und substanzspezifische Effekte von Bedeutung. Eine antidepressive Pharmakotherapie ist zwar bei komorbider Substanzstörung wirksam, besitzt jedoch nur eine geringe Wirksamkeit in Bezug auf die Suchterkrankung, sodass zusätzlich auch suchtspezifische pharmakologische und psychotherapeutische Behandlungsverfahren zum Einsatz kommen.
Tau mis-splicing in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative disorders

Tau proteins, which stabilize the structure and regulate the dynamics of microtubules, also play important roles in axonal transport and signal transduction. Tau proteins are missorted, aggregated, and found as tau inclusions under many pathological conditions associated with neurodegenerative disorders, which are collectively known as tauopathies. In the adult human brain, tau protein can be expressed in six isoforms due to alternative splicing. The aberrant splicing of tau pre-mRNA has been consistently identified in a variety of tauopathies but is not restricted to these types of disorders as it is also present in patients with non-tau proteinopathies and RNAopathies. Tau mis-splicing results in isoform-specific impairments in normal physiological function and enhanced recruitment of excessive tau isoforms into the pathological process. A variety of factors are involved in the complex set of mechanisms underlying tau mis-splicing, but variation in the cis-element, methylation of the MAPT gene, genetic polymorphisms, the quantity and activity of spliceosomal proteins, and the patency of other RNA-binding proteins, are related to aberrant splicing. Currently, there is a lack of appropriate therapeutic strategies aimed at correcting the tau mis-splicing process in patients with neurodegenerative disorders. Thus, a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between tau mis-splicing and neurodegenerative disorders will aid in the development of efficient therapeutic strategies for patients with a tauopathy or other, related neurodegenerative disorders. [BMB Reports 2016; 49(8): 405-413]
Alpha-catenin-Dependent Recruitment of the Centrosomal Protein CAP350 to Adherens Junctions Allows Epithelial Cells to Acquire a Columnar Shape

Epithelial morphogenesis involves a dramatic reorganisation of the microtubule cytoskeleton. How this complex process is controlled at the molecular level is still largely unknown. Here, we report that the centrosomal microtubule (MT)-binding protein CAP350 localises at adherens junctions in epithelial cells. By two-hybrid screening, we identified a direct interaction of CAP350 with the adhesion protein α-catenin that was further confirmed by co-immunoprecipitation experiments. Block of epithelial cadherin (E-cadherin)-mediated cell-cell adhesion or α-catenin depletion prevented CAP350 localisation at cell-cell junctions. Knocking down junction-located CAP350 inhibited the establishment of an apico-basal array of microtubules and impaired the acquisition of columnar shape in Madin-Darby canine kidney II (MDCKII) cells grown as polarised epithelia. Furthermore, MDCKII cystogenesis was also defective in junctional CAP350-depleted cells. CAP350-depleted MDCKII cysts were smaller and contained either multiple lumens or no lumen. Membrane polarity was not affected, but cortical microtubule bundles did not properly form. Our results indicate that CAP350 may act as an adaptor between adherens junctions and microtubules, thus regulating epithelial differentiation and contributing to the definition of cell architecture. We also uncover a central role of α-catenin in global cytoskeleton remodelling, in which it acts not only on actin but also on MT reorganisation during epithelial morphogenesis.
Optimal downtilts for 3D beamforming in massive MIMO networks with imperfect CSI

Massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) can provide high throughput improvements by using a large number of antennas to serve a small number of terminals simultaneously. Due to channel hardening of massive MIMO, this paper directly investigates the approximate network throughput with zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) and conjugate beamforming (CBF) schemes when channel state information (CSI) acquisition is imperfect. In addition, we investigate downtilts of antenna patterns at the base stations. To further improve the throughput of massive MIMO networks, we propose a beam switching tilting strategy which adopts different downtilts to serve each divided vertical region. A partition time-slots algorithm is developed according to the number of users in each region. Our results show the performance by using our proposed algorithm, and also reveal that ZFBF outperforms CBF due to less intra-cell interference.
Vasoconstriction and Hypersensitivity to Vasoactive Substances After Acute Volume Expansion in Dogs

In a search for factors contributing to the sustained Mood pressure (BP) elevation in acutely volume-loaded animals, dextran dissolved in lactated Ringer's solution (20 ml/kg) was infused into 34 mongrel dogs over a period of 1 hour under pentobarbital anesthesia and changes in bemodynamic and humoral variables were monitored during its infusion and for 3 hours after its infusion. BP elevation during volume loading (from 114 ± 3 to 128 ± 3 [SEM] mm Hg) was attributed to an increase in cardiac output. After volume loading, some dogs maintained BP elevation whereas others did not. The former group showed an increase in total peripheral resistance, demonstrating a transformation of cardiac output to total peripheral resistance as a responsible factor in maintenance of the elevated BP. The plasma levels of norepinephrine, vasopressin, and plasma renin activity were not elevated, indicating that these vasoactive factors were not responsible for elevation of the BP or total peripheral resistance. The changes in the hematocrit, atrial natriuretk factor, urine volume, and urinary sodium excretion were identical in the two groups, and natrluresis was not prominent when total peripheral resistance was high. Pressor responses to norepinephrine and angiotensin II were potentiated 3 hours after stopping Infusion in both groups, but this potentiation was not correlated with the Increase in total peripheral resistance or mean BP. Thus, acute volume expansion produced resistance-dependent hypertension following the initial volume-dependent hypertension. It is unlikely that a vascular sensitizing natriuretk factor plays a role in the resistance-dependent BP elevation. The mechanism and physiological importance of hypersensitivity to vasoactive substances remain to be elucidated.
New approaches for computer-assisted skin cancer diagnosis

With the wide-spread availability of advanced digital cameras dermoscopy has become nowadays a standard technique to help the doctors taking diagnosis for many types of skin lesions. Further, computer-assisted techniques and image processing methods can be used for image filtering and for feature extraction and pattern recognition in the selected images. Apart from standard approaches based on geometrical features and color/pattern analysis we propose to enhance the computer-aided diagnostic tools by adding non-standard image decompositions and applying classification techniques based on statistical learning and model ensembling. Ensembles of classifiers based on the extended feature set show improved performance figures suggesting that the proposed approach could be used as powerful tool assisting medical diagnosis.
Mapping integral quadratic constraints into parameter space

This paper presents the mapping equations for integral quadratic constraints (IQCs). In particular it is shown that IQCs with bounded rational multipliers can be mapped into parameter space. Using IQCs not only provides a uniform framework to map specifications into parameter space, but provides a unified approach to parameter space based robustness analysis and synthesis with respect to nonlinearities, time variations, and uncertain parameters. The exploitation of additional degrees of freedom contained in the multipliers is also addressed. To this end convex optimization problems in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) can be formulated and solved during the mapping process.
Too Much Choice: End-User Privacy Decisions in the Context of Choice Proliferation

Choice proliferation, a research stream in psychology, studies adverse effects of human decision-making as the number of options to choose from increases. We test if these effects can be elicited in a privacy context. Decision field theory suggests two factors that potentially affect end-users’ reflection of disclosure decisions: (1) choice amount, which we test by changing the number of checkboxes in a privacy settings dialog; and (2) choice structure, tested by varying the sensitivity of personal data items which are jointly controlled by each checkbox. We test both factors in a quantitative 2 × 2 between-subject experiment with stimuli calibrated in a pre-study with 60 respondents. In the main experiment, 112 German-speaking university students were asked to enter personal data into an ostensible business networking website and decide if and with whom it should be shared. Using an established item battery, we find that participants who are confronted with a larger amount of privacy options subsequently report more negative feelings, experience more regret, and are less satisfied with the choices made. We observe a similar tendency, albeit weaker and statistically insignificant in our small sample, for the complexity of the choice structure if the number of options remains constant.
1 Gifted Students ’ Individual Differences in Computer-Based Algebra and Precalculus Courses

In this article we summarize data from mathematically gifted middle school students working through home-computer-based first-year algebra, second-year algebra, and precalculus courses. Although these students represented only the extreme upper end of the full range of mathematical ability, they nevertheless displayed considerable individual variation on all observed outcomes with little relation to psat score, sex or age. About equal numbers of students accelerated and decelerated through each course. Any particular student’s probability of ending a computer session at any point was largely independent of the number of instructional units already worked in that session; however, the value of that probability differed dramatically across students. A gamma model fit the observed distribution of latencies fairly well. Implications are discussed.