Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Differential Efficacy of Anti-VEGF Antibodies Based on Sex and Race in a Diverse Cohort of Advanced Nonsquamous Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer

Objectives: Bevacizumab with chemotherapy improved overall survival (OS) in the E4599 trial in metastatic nonsquamous non–small cell lung cancer (NS-NSCLC). A meta-analysis demonstrated an OS benefit with bevacizumab only in a subset of nonwhite patients. We explored the efficacy of antivascular endothelial growth factor antibodies (AVA) in a diverse cohort. Materials and Methods: Patients with advanced (stage IIIB/IV, American Joint Committee Cancer 7th edition) recurrent or metastatic NS-NSCLC diagnosed January 2006 to December 2017 at a single medical center were included. Survival analysis was performed with log-rank testing of the Kaplan-Meier estimator. Univariate models were constructed, and significant variables, age, sex, race were incorporated into a multivariate Cox proportional hazard model. Data analysis was performed on SAS. Results: A total of 171 patients, 80 were treated with AVA and 91 were untreated. Median age: 63 years, 55% females, 19% non-Hispanic whites, 44% blacks and 32% Hispanic whites; median 40 pack-years of smoking; 11.7% had sensitizing epidermal growth factor receptor mutations. Patients who received AVA had a survival benefit (26.6 vs. 19 mo, P=0.025). Adjusting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, epidermal growth factor receptor mutations, Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status and number of metastases; AVA therapy was associated with improved OS (adjusted hazard ratio=0.62; P=0.049). In a subgroup analysis, females had survival benefit with AVA (median survival: 29.1 vs. 14.2 mo, log-rank P=0.02) which was significant in the adjusted model (adjusted hazard ratio=0.52; P=0.049). Conclusions: In a diverse cohort of patients with advanced NS-NSCLC, a survival benefit was confirmed with AVA. The greatest magnitude of benefit was in blacks and non-Hispanic whites. A significant survival benefit was limited to female patients.
Development of a lifestyle-integrated physical exercise training and home modification intervention for older people living in a community with a risk of falling (Part 1): the FIT-at-Home fall prevention program

ABSTRACT: Purpose In this paper, we report on the development and refinement of a progressive physical exercise training and home modification intervention for older people with a risk of falling located in Germany by using the United Kingdom's Medical Research Council framework. Methods The process was iterative and six phases of development emerged: (1) establishing an intervention development group, (2) identifying the evidence on interventions, (3) identifying a theory to underpin the intervention, (4) designing the intervention components, (5) drafting the intervention manual and training course, and (6) piloting and refining of intervention components. Results The result was an evidence-based, theory-informed, and user-endorsed intervention: FIT-at-Home. This intervention comprised nine individual sessions over 12 weeks and two follow-up booster sessions delivered by trained occupational therapists. A feasibility study demonstrated the acceptance and feasibility of intervention delivery. Users responses were generally favorable and included recommendations about the intervention manual, mode of delivery of the home hazard assessment, and producing a manual for older people. Conclusions We developed a feasible home-based lifestyle-integrated physical exercise training and home modification intervention for older people with a risk of falling by using a systematic approach. Implications include how this intervention could enrich occupational therapy fall prevention strategy in older people living at home. IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATION Falls in older people represent a major public health concern and occupational therapists in rehabilitation practice are encouraged to apply evidence-based interventions that reduce the risk of falls in older people living in a community. Many physical and environmental fall risks are modifiable by lifestyle changes such as physical exercise training, home safety assessment, and home modification. We developed a home-based balance and strength exercise training and home modification intervention that aims to improve strength, balance, and home safety. This study indicates that older people, at risk of falling, with functional limitations, and limited mobility, who participated in the FIT-at-Home intervention, felt that exercising at home suited them best.
Milieux de vie et intégration sociale: caractéristiques organisationnelles des résidences pour aîné(e)s et vie sociale des personnes âgées

ABSTRACT This study examines the links between four organizational features of private housing for older persons (service level, perception of environmental control level, tolerance level of caregivers toward seniors and their input in decision making) and the social integration of seniors. This last variable is assessed according to four indicators: presence or absence of meaningful relationships, satisfaction with social life, feeling of loneliness and number of contacts with neighbours. The results obtained by analysing the logistic or ordinal regression and the odd ratio associate two of the four organizational variables studied to most of the social integration indicators irrespective of the subjects' vulnerability level. The two features are service level and perception of environmental control level. RÉSUMÉ Le présent article traite des associations qui existent entre quatre caractéristiques organisationnelles des résidences privées pour aîné(e)s (niveau de service, perception du niveau de contrôle environnemental, niveau de tolérance des intervenants et place accordée aux personnes âgées dans la prise de décision) et l'intégration sociale des personnes âgées. Cette dernière variable étant mesurée à partir de quatre indicateurs: présence ou absence de relations significatives, satisfaction face à la vie sociale, sentiment de solitude et nombre de voisins fréquentés. Les résultats obtenus à partir d'analyses utilisant la régression logistique ou ordinale et le rapport des cotes (RC) permettent d'identifier que deux des quatre variables organisationnelles étudiées sont associées à la plupart des indicateurs de l'intégration sociale et ce, indépendamment du niveau de vulnérabilité des sujets. Ces deux caractéristiques sont le niveau de service et la perception du niveau de contrôle environnemental.
Micrite: A Sub-100-Micron Distributed Sensor System

A novel distributed sensing platform is proposed that integrates image sensing, power generation, computation, and communication on to a monolithic device on the order of 100 microns in size. As a proof of concept, several subsystems of this proposed device are prototyped (in hardware or software) and characterized. A fully-integrated image sensor composed of metal diffractive optics over a CMOS active pixel sensor is implemented, demonstrating angular resolution of 0.2 radian with 450 nm blue light. Software models indicate that variants of this sensor are predicted to achieve resolution of 0.1 radian or better, and that deconvolution and noise-suppression techniques can be used to separate colour channels and to improve image resolution. An extremely low power analog to digital converter is implemented, performing log-scale digitization with 3 bits of precision in the log domain (5-10 codes) at a sampling rate of 18-36 kHz with a supply voltage of 0.8-1.2 V and a current draw of 6 μA. Simulations indicate that variants of this architecture can perform digitization using 1.7-4.7 pC of charge per conversion with a supply
VuLCAN: A Low-cost, Low-power Embedded Visible Light Communication And Networking Platform

Visible Light Communication (VLC) offers a key alternative to the spectrum-challenged Radio Frequency (RF)-based forms of data transmission by tapping an unutilized and unregulated frequency band. Carefully designed low-cost VLC devices have the potential to enable the Internet of Things (IoT) at scale by reducing the current RF spectrum congestion, which is one of the major obstacles to the pervasiveness of the IoT. Wide adoption of VLC devices is however hindered by their current shortcomings, including low data rate, very short range and inability to communicate in noisy environment. In this paper we describe a new software-defined VLC prototype named VuLCAN for Visible Light Communication And Networking that overcomes these limitations. VuLCAN is based on an ARM Cortex M7 core microcontroller with fast sampling analog-to-digital converter along with power-optimized Digital Signal Processing (DSP) libraries. Using BFSK modulation, the prototype achieves a data rate of 65 Kbps over a communication range of 4.5 m. VuLCAN also provides robust and reliable communications in highly illuminated environments (up to 800 lux) using only a low power Light Emitting Diode (LED), largely exceeding the capabilities of current state-of-the-art prototypes.
WooKey: designing a trusted and efficient USB device

The work presented in this paper takes place in the design initiatives that have emerged to thwart BadUSB threats [59]. Though many attempts were focusing on the host side, by enhancing the operating system's USB sub-module robustness [78, 80] or by adding a proxy between the host and the device [6, 53], we have chosen to focus our efforts on the device side. More specifically, our work presents the WooKey platform, a custom highly secure USB thumb drive with mass storage capabilities, designed for user data encryption and protection, and embedding a full-fledged set of in-depth defenses. The device encloses a firmware with a secure DFU (Device Firmware Update) implementation using up-to-date cryptography as well as an external and extractable authentication token based on a secure element. The runtime software security is built upon EwoK, an innovative open source microkernel designed for microcontrollers with advanced security and performance in mind. Finally, another strength of the project is its core guiding principle: provide an open source and open hardware platform [3] using off-the-shelf components.
CrowdSenSim 2.0: a Stateful Simulation Platform for Mobile Crowdsensing in Smart Cities

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) has become a popular paradigm for data collection in urban environments. In MCS systems, a crowd supplies sensing information for monitoring phenomena through mobile devices. Typically, a large number of participants is required to make a sensing campaign successful. For such a reason, it is often not practical for researchers to build and deploy large testbeds to assess the performance of frameworks and algorithms for data collection, user recruitment, and evaluating the quality of information. Simulations offer a valid alternative. In this paper, we present CrowdSenSim 2.0, a significant extension of the popular CrowdSenSim simulation platform. CrowdSenSim 2.0 features a stateful approach to support algorithms where the chronological order of events matters, extensions of the architectural modules, including an additional system to model urban environments, code refactoring, and parallel execution of algorithms. All these improvements boost the performances of the simulator and make the runtime execution and memory utilization significantly lower, also enabling the support for larger simulation scenarios. We demonstrate retro-compatibility with the older platform and evaluate as a case study a stateful data collection algorithm.
I know what you did last login: inconsistent messages tell existence of a target's account to insiders

Account security to protect user accounts against sensitive data breaches is a major mission for online service providers. Therefore, they exert tremendous effort in securing account authentication. Although threats from complete outsiders, such as account hijacking for monetization, still occur, recent studies have shed light on threats to privacy from insiders. This paper sheds light on the latter threats. Specifically, we present the first comprehensive study of an attack from insiders that identifies the existence of a target's account by using the target's email address and insecure login-related messages displayed. Such a threat may violate intimates' or acquaintances' privacy because the kinds of service accounts a user has implies his/her personal preferences or situation. We conducted surveys regarding user expectations and behaviors on online services and a measurement study of the login-related messages on online services that are considered sensitive. We found that over 80% of participants answered that there are sensitive services and that almost all services were vulnerable to our attack. Moreover, about half the participants who have sensitive services are insecurely registered on them and thus could be potential victims. Finally, we make recommendations on the basis of our findings for online service providers to improve login-related messages and for users to take appropriate defensive actions.
Android App Performance Detection Framework Based on Dynamic Analysis of Function Call Graphs

With the increasing market share of the Android platform, Android application marketplace is becoming highly competitive. User's experience plays a critical role in the popularity of an app. The slow running and more resource consumption in Android apps will make the user experience poor. Thus analysis and evaluation of the performance of Android apps are very important. In this paper, we propose an app performance detection framework based on dynamic analysis of function call graphs. We can measure some core indicators of an app with obtaining logs and drawing dynamic call graphs. In the experiment, we opened a URL with various browser APKs as an example to show the effect of our method.
Executive Social Network and Commercial Credit

This paper chose the sample of China's non-financial insurance listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen A share from 2010 to 2017 to assess the effect of executives' social network on the commercial credit of companies. In this study, the executive social network had a significantly positive impact on the commercial credit of listed companies, indicating that the stronger the executive social network, the more commercial credit the corporate receives. These results suggest that social network have an important governance role for commercial credit transactions.
Co-evaluation of pattern matching algorithms on IoT devices with embedded GPUs

Pattern matching is an important building block for many security applications, including Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS). As NIDS grow in functionality and complexity, the time overhead and energy consumption of pattern matching become a significant consideration that limits the deployability of such systems, especially on resource-constrained devices. On the other hand, the emergence of new computing platforms, such as embedded devices with integrated, general-purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), brings new, interesting challenges and opportunities for algorithm design in this setting: how to make use of new architectural features and how to evaluate their effect on algorithm performance. Up to now, work that focuses on pattern matching for such platforms has been limited to specific algorithms in isolation. In this work, we present a systematic and comprehensive benchmark that allows us to co-evaluate both existing and new pattern matching algorithms on heterogeneous devices equipped with embedded GPUs, suitable for medium- to high-level IoT deployments. We evaluate the algorithms on such a heterogeneous device, in close connection with the architectural features of the platform and provide insights on how these features affect the algorithms' behavior. We find that, in our target embedded platform, GPU-based pattern matching algorithms have competitive performance compared to the CPU and consume half as much energy as the CPU-based variants. Based on these insights, we also propose HYBRID, a new pattern matching approach that efficiently combines techniques from existing approaches and outperforms them by 1.4x, across a range of realistic and synthetic data sets. Our benchmark details the effect of various optimizations, thus providing a path forward to make existing security mechanisms such as NIDS deployable on IoT devices.
Analysis Method of Combustion-powered Actuators for Hopping Robots

The combustion-powered actuator shows a great performance on driving hopping robots. However, the analysis for driving hopping is limit due to its complex driving process interacting with dynamic and thermodynamic. In order that its analysis method could be obtained, two methods are conducted, and the merits of them are compared. First, the equations of combustion-powered actuators are obtained according to the combustion engine model. Second, the effects of the thermodynamic factors, including combustion duration, combustion quality index and combustion efficiency, are studied. The results show that the distance between the cylinder and piston changes little as these factors changes, when the pressure inside of the chamber is up to the maximum pressure. According to the conclusion, the combustion process during the driving process can be approximately considered as a constant volume combustion. Third, based on the constant volume combustion hypothesis, the pressure is expressed as the function of the stroke and diameter in a closed formation. To verify this hypothesis, the simulations with the two models are conducted, which shows that the results are consistency with each other. According to the constant volume hypothesis, the pressure can be expressed in the closed solution, which is convenient for designing the parameters of the actuator.
Investigation and Analysis of the Present Situation of Engineering Ethics Education for Masters of Engineering

Under the comprehensive background of the development of engineering education in the world today and the promotion of quality education in China, strengthening engineering ethics education of engineering masters meets the needs of engineering technology development, and is also an indispensable part of shaping high-quality engineers. However, engineering ethics awareness cannot be generated spontaneously. It needs to be cultivated and improved through engineering ethics education. Therefore, this paper designs a closed questionnaire from three aspects: school curriculum education, engineering ethics cognition and the application of ethical dilemma of driverless cars. The statistical data of the questionnaire shows that engineering masters do not pay enough attention to the engineering ethics curriculum and it is difficult to use the knowledge of engineering ethics to analyze and solve the actual ethical dilemmas. In addition, it is further found that there is a gap between professional masters and academic masters in the ethical awareness, and the reasons are related to the distribution of engineering ethics education courses offered by the school. This paper proposes three specific recommendations in response to the above problems.
Survivor: a fine-grained intrusion response and recovery approach for commodity operating systems

Despite the deployment of preventive security mechanisms to protect the assets and computing platforms of users, intrusions eventually occur. We propose a novel intrusion survivability approach to withstand ongoing intrusions. Our approach relies on an orchestration of fine-grained recovery and per-service responses (e.g., privileges removal). Such an approach may put the system into a degraded mode. This degraded mode prevents attackers to reinfect the system or to achieve their goals if they managed to reinfect it. It maintains the availability of core functions while waiting for patches to be deployed. We devised a cost-sensitive response selection process to ensure that while the service is in a degraded mode, its core functions are still operating. We built a Linux-based prototype and evaluated the effectiveness of our approach against different types of intrusions. The results show that our solution removes the effects of the intrusions, that it can select appropriate responses, and that it allows services to survive when reinfected. In terms of performance overhead, in most cases, we observed a small overhead, except in the rare case of services that write many small files asynchronously in a burst, where we observed a higher but acceptable overhead.
Private and public aspects of smart jewellery: a design exploration study

In recent years, design and form factors of wearables have converged towards traditional jewellery, such as rings, necklaces and bracelets. Even though the aesthetics of smart jewellery have been gradually improved, many current commercial pieces are still mainly functionality and technology-driven. In this paper, we take steps to better understand the design and wearing aspects of smart jewellery. We investigate how jewellery wearers associate functionalities with body locations in a design exploration session with industrial design students using the terms "private" and "public" as keys. Results suggest that with privacy in mind, smart jewellery designs move towards the wearer's hands and fingers and selected data sources originating from the wearer's body were preferred, while designs for "public" information presentation tended to be moved to higher locations on the body, i.e. head, neck and chest, and to be fed from external data sources.
Audio-augmented museum experiences using wearable visual-inertial odometry

The auditory sense is an intuitive and immersive channel to experience our surroundings, which motivates us to augment our perception of the real world with digital auditory content. We present a wearable audio augmented reality prototype that tracks the user with six degrees of freedom in a known environment, synthesizes 3D sounds, and plays spatialized audio from arbitrary objects to the user. Our prototype is built using head-mounted visual-inertial odometry, a sound simulation engine on a laptop, and off-the-shelf headphones. We demonstrate an application in a gallery scenario in which visitors can hear objects and scenes drawn in the paintings, feeling audio-visually engaged in the depicted surroundings. In a user study involving 26 participants, we observed that the audio-enhanced exhibition improved people's experience, as well as helped them remember more lively details of the artworks.