Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A novel anti-geometric-attacking watermarking algorithm based on Harris feature points

This paper presents a new robust watermarking algorithm which could against Geometric Attack. This algorithm first inserts the watermark into the original image, and then construct a watermarking image feature description table (IFDT) by doing a serial of image operation, which including Harris corner detection, Delaunay trigonometry network generation and Hu invariant moments computation. With the help of IFDT, we can do geometric correction upon a geometric attacked image. Finally, the watermark can be extracted from the corrected image. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is robust and secure against a wide range of geometric attacks.
An Introduction to Counterfactual Regret Minimization

In 2000, Hart and Mas-Colell introduced the important game-theoretic algorithm of regret matching. Players reach equilibrium play by tracking regrets for past plays, making future plays proportional to positive regrets. The technique is not only simple and intuitive; it has sparked a revolution in computer game play of some of the most difficult bluffing games, including clear domination of annual computer poker competitions. Since the algorithm is relatively recent, there are few curricular materials available to introduce regret-based algorithms to the next generation of researchers and practitioners in this area. These materials represent a modest first step towards making recent innovations more accessible to advanced Computer Science undergraduates, graduate students, interested researchers, and ambitious practitioners. In Section 2, we introduce the concept of player regret, describe the regret-matching algorithm, present a rock-paper-scissors worked example in the literate programming style, and suggest related exercises. Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR) is introduced in Section 3 with a worked example solving Kuhn Poker. Supporting code is provided for a substantive CFR exercise computing optimal play for 1-die-versus-1-die Dudo. In Section 4, we briefly mention means of “cleaning” approximately optimal computed policies, which can in many cases improve results. Section 5 covers an advanced application of CFR to games with repeated states (e.g. through imperfect recall abstraction) that can reduce computational complexity of a CFR training iteration from exponential to linear. Here, we use our independently devised game of Liar Die to demonstrate application of the algorithm. We then suggest that the reader apply the technique to 1-die-versus-1-die Dudo with a memory of 3 claims. In Section 6, we briefly discuss an open research problem: Among possible equilibrium strategies, how do we compute one that optimally exploits opponent errors? The reader is invited to modify our Liar Die example code to so as to gain insight to this interesting problem. Finally, in Section 7, we suggest further challenge problems and paths for continued learning.
Draft Genome Sequence of Xanthomonas sacchari Strain LMG 476

ABSTRACT We report the high-quality draft genome sequence of Xanthomonas sacchari strain LMG 476, isolated from sugarcane. The genome comparison of this strain with a previously sequenced X. sacchari strain isolated from a distinct environmental source should provide further insights into the adaptation of this species to different habitats and its evolution.
Novel clues on the specific association of Streptococcus gallolyticus subsp gallolyticus with colorectal cancer.

BACKGROUND The prevalence of Streptococcus gallolyticus subsp gallolyticus ( Streptococcus bovis biotype I) endocarditis is in general low but very often linked to colorectal cancer. Therefore, this study aimed to reveal the virulence characteristics that distinguish this opportunistic pathogen from a panel of (closely related) intestinal bacteria. METHODS The route of infection was reconstructed in vitro with adhesion, invasion, and translocation assays on differentiated Caco-2 cells. Furthermore, cellular immune responses upon infection and bacterial biofilm formation were analyzed in a comparative manner. RESULTS S. gallolyticus subsp gallolyticus strains were demonstrated to have a relative low adhesiveness and could not internalize epithelial cells. However, these bacteria were uniquely able to paracellularly cross a differentiated epithelium without inducing epithelial interleukin 8 or 1β responses. Importantly, they had an outstanding ability to form biofilms on collagen-rich surfaces, which in vivo are found at damaged heart valves and (pre)cancerous sites with a displaced epithelium. CONCLUSIONS Together, these data show that S. gallolyticus subsp gallolyticus has a unique repertoire of virulence factors that facilitate infection through (pre)malignant colonic lesions and subsequently can provide this bacterium with a competitive advantage in (1) evading the innate immune system and (2) forming resistant vegetations at collagen-rich sites in susceptible patients with colorectal cancer.
Using Brain-Computer Interface to control an avatar in a Virtual Reality Environment

The proposal of this research is to present the development of a tool that might be useful in rehabilitation, for subjects with disability, that suffer from some kind of limbs movement limitation. This tool carries a 3D Virtual Reality Environment (VRE), which emulates the movement of a healthy person, using the immersion of the subject through an avatar. To do so, and test its feasibility, pre acquired motor imagery signals were used to test the VRE as an off-line Brain Computer Interface (BCI) feedback. The subject's brain waves were captured by an Electroencephalography (EEG) equipment. For training the classifier, 45 trials, 25 seconds long, were used, and 15 trials for its validation. Five mental tasks were tested with the BCI, and the one with the best results (imagination of the manipulation of a cube) was used to move the avatar through a virtual room.
A Case Study on Empathic Tendency of Academicians in the Context of Interpersonal Relations

The originating of this study is to examine the empathic tendency of academicians. Having empathic tendency means it is easy to understand the feelings of the others and keeping up with the rapidly globalizing world. The research consists of screening model. The Scale of Empathic Tendency (SET), developed by Dökmen, was used as the data collection tool in this case study. In spite of not being taught, it is true that the education, cultural surroundings play a big role for the self development. Due to the relationship between impulse and response, interpersonal relations functions as multiple dimensions, one of which leads to empathic tendency. This study aims to make a survey on lecturers since they are the ones who play an important role for the pupils to be more successful in their future career. Total field under survey is 70 lecturers: Half of them are working at State and the other half at Private Universities in Istanbul, in Turkey. In spite of not observing big statistical differences between the two group Universities, according to Mann Whitney “U” test, it is so clear that having empathic tendency as lecturers affects classroom communication as the most important factor. This is the reason for the achievement of the students in their major. Furthermore, it gives an opportunity to get through the perception view of the others. This can give the perspective view of problem solving skills.
GIMAP5 Deficiency Is Associated with Increased AKT Activity in T Lymphocytes

Long-term survival of T lymphocytes in quiescent state is essential to maintain their cell numbers in secondary lymphoid organs. In mice and in rats, the loss of functional GTPase of the immune associated nucleotide binding protein 5 (GIMAP5) causes peripheral T lymphopenia due to spontaneous death of T cells. The underlying mechanism responsible for the disruption of quiescence in Gimap5 deficient T cells remains largely unknown. In this study, we show that loss of functional Gimap5 results in increased basal activation of mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR), independent of protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A) or AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK). Our results suggest that the constitutive activation of the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) pathway may be one of the consequences of the absence of functional GIMAP5.
Nanometer design: what are the requirements for manufacturing test?

Nanometer technology enables manufacturing of very large SoC designs that have many cores originating from a variety of sources. The challenge here is to integrate different test solutions provided by suppliers of those cores into one comprehensive chip level test. The principal requirement is to reduce the cost of manufacturing test. The DFT methodologies requirement supports high-quality low-cost manufacturing test. The low cost ATE is used for reducing mixed signal test cost. The new fault structures that require detection is done by ATPG engines for test generation and diagnosis.
SHEEP: The Search for the High-Energy Extragalactic Population

We present the SHEEP survey for serendipitously detected hard X-ray sources in ASCA GIS images. In a survey area of ~40 deg2, 69 sources were detected in the 5-10 keV band to a limiting flux of ~10-13 ergs cm-2 s-1. The number counts agree with those obtained by the similar BeppoSAX High-Energy Large Area Survey (HELLAS), and both are in close agreement with ASCA and BeppoSAX 2-10 keV surveys. Spectral analysis of the SHEEP sample reveals that the 2-10 and 5-10 keV surveys do not sample the same populations, however, as we find considerably harder spectra, with an average Γ ~ 1.0, assuming no absorption. The implication is that the agreement in the number counts is coincidental, with the 5-10 keV surveys gaining approximately as many hard sources as they lose soft ones when compared to the 2-10 keV surveys. This is hard to reconcile with standard active galactic nucleus (AGN) "population synthesis" models for the X-ray background, which posit the existence of a large population of absorbed sources. We find no evidence of the population hardening at faint fluxes, with the exception that the few very brightest objects are anomalously soft. Fifty-three of the SHEEP sources have been covered by ROSAT in the pointed phase. Of these, 32 were detected. An additional three were detected in the RASS. As expected, the sources detected with ROSAT are systematically softer than those detected with ASCA alone and than the sample as a whole. Although they represent a biased subsample, the ROSAT positions allow relatively secure catalog identifications to be made. We find associations with a wide variety of AGNs and a few clusters and groups. At least two X-ray sources identified with high-z QSOs present very hard X-ray spectra indicative of absorption, despite the presence of broad optical lines. A possible explanation for this is that we are seeing relatively dust-free "warm absorbers" in high-luminosity/redshift objects. Color analysis indeed indicates that many of the spectra are not consistent with a simple, absorbed power law. The spectra are likely to be complex, with an absorbed hard power law and scattered or "leaky" component in the soft X-rays. Many are also consistent with a reflection-dominated spectrum. Our analysis defines a new, hard X-ray-selected sample of objects—mostly AGNs—that is less prone to bias due to obscuration than previous optical or soft X-ray samples. They are therefore more representative of the population of AGNs in the universe in general, and the SHEEP survey should produce bright examples of the sources that make up the hard X-ray background, the majority of which have recently been resolved by Chandra. This should help elucidate the nature of the new populations.
Using the Active Appearance Model to detect driver fatigue

Driver fatigue is a major cause of accidents on roads. We present a video-based driver fatigue detection system, which uses the Active Appearance Model as a means to track rigid and non-rigid motion of a face in an input video sequence. We propose an Active Appearance Model specific to the ocular region of the face to place greater focus on the eyes, as fatigue cues based on ocular features, such as blink rate, are considered robust indicators of fatigue. This specific model is used to estimate eye-blinks, and further, secondary cues such as head-nodding. Results show that the proposed model can effectively detect eye-blinks. Finally, we evaluate tracking performance and blink estimation on two test subjects.
On the Use of Control Packets for Intelligent Flooding in VANETs

Broadcasting will be extensively used in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET), mainly for spreading out safety messages. A number of Intelligent Flooding Schemes (IFSs) have been recently proposed to optimize message dissemination. Some of them exploit a distributed timer-based contention mechanism in order to allow the most suitable nodes to forward the packet and to suppress other potential forwarders. This paper deals with those schemes which are based on a handshake similar to RTS/CTS. This helps in avoiding potential forwarders, which should be suppressed, to uselessly rebroadcast a data packet. We aimed at identifying main problems which these schemes may encounter in optimizing message dissemination. To this objective, an analysis of the events which can cause the failure of the forwarding election procedure has been carried out. The analysis has also been the starting point for devising some different design choices.
The relationship between verbal fluency performance and grocery shopping in participants with and without moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury. An initial investigation

ABSTRACT Background: Individuals with moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) often report some degree of chronic and disabling cognitive-linguistic sequelae following injury. The presence of these deficits may impair a survivor’s ability to complete a functional task such as grocery shopping. Recently, researchers have suggested that performance on verbal fluency tasks is associated with greater independence in completing this type of task. Aims: To determine whether performance on tasks of verbal fluency is associated with greater independence in grocery shopping in younger participants with and without moderate-to-severe TBI. Methods & Procedures: Three participants with moderate-to-severe TBI and three participants without moderate-to-severe brain injury were asked to generate as many words as possible for the letters F, A, and S under the phonemic condition and for the categories of animals and boys’ names under the semantic condition, and complete a task of grocery shopping. Responses were analysed quantitatively. Outcomes & Results: Performance on the phonemic verbal fluency task was associated with greater speed and accuracy in completing the shopping task. Participants who generated a greater number of correct words for the letter A spent significantly less time shopping. Those who produced a greater number of repetition errors on the phonemic verbal fluency task required significantly more time to shop. Participants who produced a greater number of total correct words for the letters F, A, and S combined were significantly more efficient at shopping, with efficiency defined as the ability to locate all 10 items while visiting as few aisles and sections of the grocery store as possible. No significant correlations were observed between performance on the semantic verbal fluency task and the shopping task. Conclusions: Performance on a task of phonemic verbal fluency may be particularly useful in predicting who may or may not have difficulty in completing a functional task such as grocery shopping following moderate-to-severe TBI. The ability to produce a greater number of total correct words while inhibiting errors may be critical for efficacious performance on these types of tasks.
A feature terms extraction method based on polarity analysis of customer reviews for content-based recommendation

Our paper proposes a method for extracting feature terms expressing feelings regarding the use of a product from customer reviews on e-commerce sites, based on content-based recommendation. Considering previous research indicating that negative events and impressions have a greater impact than positive ones, we define terms relating to factors over which customers argue the pros and cons in reviews as features related to feelings regarding the use of a product. Our approach involves extracting sentences expressing opinions from customer reviews, and recognizing each evaluated term as a candidate for product features. Using the positive opinion ratio of each candidate to measure the extent of how divided the opinions of reviewers are, we extract feature terms for the selected product by considering a feature score based on the positive opinion ratio. We present an experiment to evaluate the utility of the feature terms extracted using our proposed method.
Business Process Fragmentation for Enhancing Process Modeling

Business Process Management (BPM) is accepted to be an efficient approach to capture processes in order to improve operational aspects of an enterprise. Business process modeling and design is the first step in BPM. This paper presents a process fragmentation approach that serves to generate process fragments ready for reuse during modeling in a semantic modeling tool. The fragmentation is based on the Refined Process Structure Tree which is an algorithm to decompose processes based on their workflow graphs.
ReconFS: a reconstructable file system on flash storage

Hierarchical namespaces (directory trees) in file systems are effective in indexing file system data. However, the update patterns of namespace metadata, such as intensive writeback and scattered small updates, exaggerate the writes to flash storage dramatically, which hurts both performance and endurance (i.e., limited program/erase cycles of flash memory) of the storage system. In this paper, we propose a reconstructable file system, ReconFS, to reduce namespace metadata writeback size while providing hierarchical namespace access. ReconFS decouples the volatile and persistent directory tree maintenance. Hierarchical namespace access is emulated with the volatile directory tree, and the consistency and persistence of the persistent directory tree are provided using two mechanisms in case of system failures. First, consistency is ensured by embedding an inverted index in each page, eliminating the writes of the pointers (indexing for directory tree). Second, persistence is guaranteed by compacting and logging the scattered small updates to the metadata persistence log, so as to reduce write size. The inverted indices and logs are used respectively to reconstruct the structure and the content of the directory tree on reconstruction. Experiments show that ReconFS provides up to 46.3% performance improvement and 27.1% write reduction compared to ext2, a file system with low metadata overhead.
“Regardless of Their Gender”: Descriptions of Sexual Identity among Bisexual, Pansexual, and Queer Identified Individuals

ABSTRACT The present research investigates the way individuals under the bisexual umbrella conceptualize their sexual identity. Participants included 172 adults who self-identified as bisexual, pansexual, and queer. Participants individually completed an online survey in which they were asked to describe their sexual identity. Qualitative responses were analyzed via thematic analysis. Four major themes were identified and found relevant to all three identity groups: (1) labeling sexual identity, (2) distinctions of attraction, (3) explicit use of binary/nonbinary language, and (4) identity transcendence. Each of the four major themes was further composed of subthemes, and one minor theme of questioning also emerged. Patterns of responses across sexual identity were analyzed via chi-square analyses. Individuals who self-identified as bisexual, pansexual, and queer demonstrated similarities and differences in the way they described their sexual identities. Of the 15 emergent subthemes, six differed in frequency across sexual identity. Discussion focuses on elucidating when grouping bisexual, pansexual, and queer identities together may prove useful, and when it may further distort an understanding of the range of plurisexual experience.
Identification of a novel nuclear domain

For most known nuclear domains (ND), specific functions have been identified. In this report we used murine mAbs and human autoantibodies to investigate precisely circumscribed structures 0.2-0.3 micron in diameter which appear as "nuclear dots" distributed throughout the nucleoplasm. Nuclear dots are metabolically stable and resistant to nuclease digestion and salt extraction. The localization of nuclear dots is separate from kinetochores, centromeres, sites of mRNA processing and tRNA synthesis, nuclear bodies, and chromosomes. The nuclear dots, therefore, represent a novel ND. Nuclear dots break down as cells enter metaphase and reassemble at telophase. In interphase cells, nuclear dots are frequently "paired," and some are visible as "doublets" when stained with one particular antiserum. The number of dot doublets increased when quiescent cells were stimulated with serum although the total number of dots did not change substantially. One of the antigens was identified as a protein with a molecular mass of approximately 55 kD showing three charge isomers in the pI range of 7.4 to 7.7. Autoantibodies affinity purified from this nuclear dot protein (NDP-55) show nuclear dots exclusively. Nuclear dot-negative rat liver parenchymal cells became positive after chemical hepatectomy, suggesting involvement of the NDP-55 in the proliferative state of cells.
Open Source Cloud Computing Platforms

With the popularization of cloud computing, several enterprises and open-source communities have developed their own cloud solutions. A number of factors weigh on user selection, as each one has peculiar characteristics and may target different usage scenarios. Considering such challenge, this paper focuses on giving the reader an understanding of some major existing open cloud computing solutions – XCP, Eucalyptus and Open Nebula. Hopefully, a deep comparison of such solutions can leverage the cloud computing research area providing a good starting point to research groups and interested readers.
Resistin expression in 3T3-L1 adipocytes is reduced by arachidonic acid Published, JLR Papers in Press, October 16, 2004. DOI 10.1194/jlr.M400348-JLR200

The resistin gene is expressed in adipocytes and encodes a protein proposed to link obesity and type 2 diabetes. Increased plasma FFA is associated with insulin resistance. We examined the effect of separate FFAs on the expression of resistin mRNA in cultured murine 3T3-L1 adipocytes. The FFAs tested did not increase resistin expression, whereas both arachidonic acid (AA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) reduced resistin mRNA levels. AA was by far the most potent FFA, reducing resistin mRNA levels to ∼20% of control at 60–250 μM concentration. Selective inhibitors of cyclooxygenase-1 and of mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase counteracted AA-induced reduction in resistin mRNA levels. Transient overexpression of sterol-regulatory element binding protein-1a (SREBP-1a) activated the resistin promoter, but there was no reduction in the abundance of ∼65 kDa mature SREBP-1 after AA exposure. Actinomycin D as well as cycloheximide abolished the AA-induced reduction of resistin mRNA levels, indicating dependence on de novo transcription and translation. Our data suggest that reductions in resistin mRNA levels involve a destabilization of the resistin mRNA molecule. An inhibitory effect of AA and EPA on resistin expression may explain the beneficial effect of ingesting PUFAs on insulin sensitivity.