Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Metamaterial Antenna: A Novel Miniaturized Dual-Band Coplanar Waveguide-Fed Antenna with Backed Ground Plane

A miniaturized dual-band coplanar waveguide (CPW)-fed metamaterial (MTM) antenna is presented and developed in this article. The antenna is an asymmetric structure composed of two identical elements and one backed ground plane. Each element consists of an interdigital capacitor (IDC) connected with a radial stub by means of a thin strip. These stubs act as virtual ground planes because they offer high capacitance at higher frequencies. The proposed antenna shows a compact nature with an overall electrical size of 0.145 &lambda;<sub>0</sub> &times; 0.20 &lambda;<sub>0</sub> &times; 0.018 &lambda;<sub>0</sub> and a radiating element size of 0.043 &lambda;<sub>0</sub> &times; 0.073 &lambda;<sub>0</sub> &times; 0.018 &lambda;<sub>0</sub> at <italic>f</italic><sub>0</sub = 3.52 GHz, which is attributed to eliminating the ground plane on one side. This antenna offers two resonant modes at 3.52 and 5.17 GHz with 6.6% and 4.25% fractional bandwidths, respectively. The first mode is originated by the combination of a patch and a backed ground plane at &lambda;/4 resonance, while the second resonance is the zeroth-order resonance (ZOR). In addition, the proposed antenna exhibits a simulated gain of 1.44 and 2.70 dBi at 3.52 and 5.17 GHz, respectively, in the boresight direction. The antenna can be applicable for worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) and wireless local area network (WLAN)/Wi-Fi applications because of the ease of fabrication and compactness.
Simple versus Optimal Contracts

We consider the classic principal-agent model of contract theory, in which a principal designs an outcome-dependent compensation scheme to incentivize an agent to take a costly and unobservable action. When all of the model parameters---including the full distribution over principal rewards resulting from each agent action---are known to the designer, an optimal contract can in principle be computed by linear programming. In addition to their demanding informational requirements, however, such optimal contracts are often complex and unintuitive, and do not resemble contracts used in practice. This paper examines contract theory through the theoretical computer science lens, with the goal of developing novel theory to explain and justify the prevalence of relatively simple contracts, such as linear (pure commission) contracts. First, we consider the case where the principal knows only the first moment of each action's reward distribution, and we prove that linear contracts are guaranteed to be worst-case optimal, ranging over all reward distributions consistent with the given moments. Second, we study linear contracts from a worst-case approximation perspective, and prove several tight parameterized approximation bounds.
Modular Convolutional Neural Network for Discriminating between Computer-Generated Images and Photographic Images

Discriminating between computer-generated images (CGIs) and photographic images (PIs) is not a new problem in digital image forensics. However, with advances in rendering techniques supported by strong hardware and in generative adversarial networks, CGIs are becoming indistinguishable from PIs in both human and computer perception. This means that malicious actors can use CGIs for spoofing facial authentication systems, impersonating other people, and creating fake news to be spread on social networks. The methods developed for discriminating between CGIs and PIs quickly become outdated and must be regularly enhanced to be able to reduce these attack surfaces. Leveraging recent advances in deep convolutional networks, we have built a modular CGI--PI discriminator with a customized VGG-19 network as the feature extractor, statistical convolutional neural networks as the feature transformers, and a discriminator. We also devised a probabilistic patch aggregation strategy to deal with high-resolution images. This proposed method outperformed a state-of-the-art method and achieved accuracy up to 100%.
An Extensive Formal Analysis of Multi-factor Authentication Protocols

Passwords are still the most widespread means for authenticating users, even though they have been shown to create huge security problems. This motivated the use of additional authentication mechanisms used in so-called multi-factor authentication protocols. In this paper we define a detailed threat model for this kind of protocols: while in classical protocol analysis attackers control the communication network, we take into account that many communications are performed over TLS channels, that computers may be infected by different kinds of malwares, that attackers could perform phishing, and that humans may omit some actions. We formalize this model in the applied pi calculus and perform an extensive analysis and comparison of several widely used protocols — variants of Google 2-step and FIDO’s U2F. The analysis is completely automated, generating systematically all combinations of threat scenarios for each of the protocols and using the P ROVERIF tool for automated protocol analysis. Our analysis highlights weaknesses and strengths of the different protocols, and allows us to suggest several small modifications of the existing protocols which are easy to implement, yet improve their security in several threat scenarios.
The effect of Tmem135 overexpression on the mouse heart

Tissues with high-energy demand including the heart are rich in the energy-producing organelles, mitochondria, and sensitive to mitochondrial dysfunction. While alterations in mitochondrial function are increasingly recognized in cardiovascular diseases, the molecular mechanisms through which changes in mitochondria lead to heart abnormalities have not been fully elucidated. Here, we report that transgenic mice overexpressing a novel regulator of mitochondrial dynamics, transmembrane protein 135 (Tmem135), exhibit increased fragmentation of mitochondria and disease phenotypes in the heart including collagen accumulation and hypertrophy. The gene expression analysis showed that genes associated with ER stress and unfolded protein response, and especially the pathway involving activating transcription factor 4, are upregulated in the heart of Tmem135 transgenic mice. It also showed that gene expression changes in the heart of Tmem135 transgenic mice significantly overlap with those of aged mice in addition to the similarity in cardiac phenotypes, suggesting that changes in mitochondrial dynamics may be involved in the development of heart abnormalities associated with aging. Our study revealed the pathological consequence of overexpression of Tmem135, and suggested downstream molecular changes that may underlie those disease pathologies.
A Hardware-Efficient Implementation of CLOC for On-chip Authenticated Encryption

With the huge number of candidates for the CAESAR competition for authenticated encryption, the task of designing efficient implementations for these candidates becomes a big challenge. The main goal of this competition is to find smaller, faster and energy-efficient authenticated encryption schemes. In this paper, an area efficient hardware implementation of CLOC, one of the 15 candidates for the third round of CAESAR competition is presented. CLOC represents a new mode of using AES, in order to provide both encryption/decryption and MAC functionalities. Since the hardware design of AES is a well studied problem, the challenge is to accommodate the mode functionality with small area, high performance and low power overhead. The proposed hardware implementation for the CLOC is developed by sharing the AES core by applying a pipeline technique. By using commercial synthesis flows and 65 nm ASIC technology, it shows, for low power applications, that proposed hardware architecture of CLOC saves the area by 42.85% and consumes 37.8% less power when compared with the existing high throughput implementation of CLOC. In addition, area efficiency of the proposed design is also improved by 17.6% and the proposed design consumes only 2.6 μW.
ISAR Image Resolution Enhancement: Compressive Sensing Versus State-of-the-Art Super-Resolution Techniques

The applicability of compressive sensing (CS) to inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imagery has been widely discussed over the past few years. In particular, CS-based ISAR image-reconstruction algorithms have been developed and their effectiveness proven when dealing with incomplete ISAR data. Resolution enhancement has also been identified as a case for which CS can be effectively applied to ISAR imagery. In this case, the acquired signal can be interpreted as incomplete data in the frequency/slow-time domain and CS used to reconstruct the super-resolved ISAR image. In this paper, an exhaustive performance analysis is carried out along with a comparison between CS and conventional super-resolution techniques. Several concepts and methods have been introduced in order to effectively define the performance, which is not simply based on visual inspection.
Health practices of immigrant women: Indigenous knowledge in an urban environment

This qualitative study of folk health practices of an indigenous Mexican immigrant community in New Brunswick, New Jersey investigates the barriers this community faces, and their effects on its members’ everyday practice of health in a new urban environment. Facilitated by local community organizations, two focus group interviews were conducted with women from this community, along with a questionnaire and multiple field visits. Analysis revealed several themes related to health practices, including the role of food, and how indigenous knowledge influences the community's beliefs about, and practices of, health. Additionally, several environmental, communication, and systemic barriers also appeared to affect the community's health practices. This research indicates that providing healthcare access to immigrant communities is a complex issue extending beyond the availability of services and resources. A better understanding of immigrant communities’ socio‐cultural health practices may be a key to improving the community's healthy living and overall quality of life.
Towards a 5G Security Architecture: Articulating Software-Defined Security and Security as a Service

5G is envisioned as a transformation of the communications architecture towards multi-tenant, scalable and flexible infrastructure, which heavily relies on virtualised network functions and programmable networks. In particular, orchestration will advance one step further in blending both compute and data resources, usually dedicated to virtualisation technologies, and network resources into so-called slices. Although 5G security is being developed in current working groups, slice security is seldom addressed. In this work, we propose to integrate security in the slice life cycle, impacting its management and orchestration that relies on the virtualization/softwarisation infrastructure. The proposed security architecture connects the demands specified by the tenants through as-a-service mechanisms with built-in security functions relying on the ability to combine enforcement and monitoring functions within the software-defined network infrastructure. The architecture exhibits desirable properties such as isolating slices down to the hardware resources or monitoring service-level performance.
Application of Additive Manufacturing Technologies for Realization of Multilayer Microstrip Directional Filter

In this paper, an application of additive manufacturing technologies for realization of multilayer microwave circuits in microstrip transmission line technique is presented for the first time. An example of a second-order cascaded loops directional filter allowing to separate 2100 MHz LTE band was designed in suspended microstrip with three metal layers, manufactured using a combination of PolyJet 3D printing with UV cured VeroWhitePlus polymer material and magnetron sputtering of copper, and assembled out of two parts using a "lego-like" process. The obtained results for the manufactured circuit confirmed that the proposed approach is of potential use for circuits and systems operating within the microwave frequency range.
DisasterBox: Designing social media for disaster relief

Natural disasters are a period of uncertainty and instability for those affected. It becomes important for members of the public in a disaster zone to access up‐to‐date information about their environment. Currently, solutions are only set up for information from official sources to flow through existing infrastructure to members of the public. This approach has been criticized for being incomplete and slow to respond. The authors propose an integrated communications solution that would leverage the networked potential of localized actors, whether they are affected members of the public, aid workers, or official agencies sent to provide support.
Robust Estimation of Resource Consumption for SQL Queries using Statistical Techniques

The ability to estimate resource consumption of SQL queries is crucial for a number of tasks in a database system such as admission control, query scheduling and costing during query optimization. Recent work has explored the use of statistical techniques for resource estimation in place of the manually constructed cost models used in query optimization. Such techniques, which require as training data examples of resource usage in queries, offer the promise of superior estimation accuracy since they can account for factors such as hardware characteristics of the system or bias in cardinality estimates. However, the proposed approaches lack robustness in that they do not generalize well to queries that are different from the training examples, resulting in significant estimation errors. Our approach aims to address this problem by combining knowledge of database query processing with statistical models. We model resource-usage at the level of individual operators, with different models and features for each operator type, and explicitly model the asymptotic behavior of each operator. This results in significantly better estimation accuracy and the ability to estimate resource usage of arbitrary plans, even when they are very different from the training instances. We validate our approach using various large scale real-life and benchmark workloads on Microsoft SQL Server.
Towards an Automatic Generation of Low-Interaction Web Application Honeypots

Low-interaction honeypots (LIHPs) are a well-established tool to monitor malicious activities by emulating the appearance and behavior of a real system. However, existing honeypots share a common problem: Anyone aware of their existence can easily fingerprint and subsequently avoid them. In this paper, we present Chameleon, our work towards an automatic generation of LIHPs for web applications. Chameleon creates honeypot versions of existing systems through automatic network interaction with the real application and builds response templates from the observed response traffic. By comparing similar responses, variable parts are identified and imitated with these templates. On run-time, the best matching template is chosen to respond to an incoming network request. This approach allows a large-scale deployment of Honeypots in a highly scalable fashion: No manual effort is needed in honeypot generation and a single instance of Chameleon can emulate a large number of heterogeneous systems simultaneously. Thus, a LIHP infrastructure for a company's full application landscape can be created, deployed and operated automatically with little effort and minimal technical resource requirements in a timely fashion. We document our prototypical implementation for HTTP(S) and our practical experiments with the generated honeypots in the wild. The results are promising: The generated honeypots are indistinguishable for popular fingerprinting tools and the received traffic shows no difference to traffic directed at real systems.
InGaAs Junctionless FinFETs With Self-Aligned Ni-InGaAs S/D

In this paper, the InGaAs junctionless (JL) FinFET with notable electrical performance is demonstrated. The device with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$W_{\mathrm{ fin}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> down to 20 nm, EOT of 2.1 nm, and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$L_{G} = 60$ </tex-math></inline-formula> nm shows high <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$I_{\mathrm{ ON}} = 188~\mu \text{A}/\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> at <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{DD} = 0.5$ </tex-math></inline-formula> V and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$I_{\mathrm{ OFF}} = 100$ </tex-math></inline-formula> nA/<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$I_{\mathrm{ ON}}/I_{\mathrm{ OFF}} = 5 \times 10^{5}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, DIBL = 106 mV/V and SS = 96 mV/dec. The device also exhibits a decent extrinsic transconductance (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$G_{\mathrm{ m}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) of 1142 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{S}/\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> at <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{\mathrm{ DS}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of 0.5 V. This high performance is attributed to the moderate doping concentration to ensure the channel carriers could be effectively depleted and the low <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$R_{\mathrm{ SD}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> realized by self-aligned Ni-InGaAs alloy S/D. Furthermore, we also examine the temperature dependence of the main electrical parameters of the JL transistor.
Modeling System of Systems configurations

System of Systems (SoS) engineering is a challenging research direction because an SoS has distinctive characteristics in comparison to distributed systems. UPMD and SysML provide adequate frameworks and notations which help in the process of modeling and architecting SoS. Projects such as DANSE and COMPASS have selected the most relevant views among the numerous views of UPDM. By nature, an SoS evolves after its initial deployment. To deal with evolutions, the architect needs to model configurations, what was not considered in previous state of the art. Modeling configuration is indeed key before we can model the evolution itself. In this paper, our contribution is a new modeling process, based on UPDM and SysML, that helps the architect in designing the configuration of an SoS. The proposed process is illustrated with the case study of the French emergency service.
Replisome‐Cohesin Interfacing: A Molecular Perspective

Cohesion is established in S‐phase through the action of key replisome factors as replication forks engage cohesin molecules. By holding sister chromatids together, cohesion critically assists both an equal segregation of the duplicated genetic material and an efficient repair of DNA breaks. Nonetheless, the molecular events leading the entrapment of nascent chromatids by cohesin during replication are only beginning to be understood. The authors describe here the essential structural features of the cohesin complex in connection to its ability to associate DNA molecules and review the current knowledge on the architectural‐functional organization of the eukaryotic replisome, significantly advanced by recent biochemical and structural studies. In light of this novel insight, the authors discuss the mechanisms proposed to assist interfacing of replisomes with chromatin‐bound cohesin complexes and elaborate on models for nascent chromatids entrapment by cohesin in the environment of the replication fork.
Language Structures May Adapt to the Sociolinguistic Environment, but It Matters What and How You Count: A Typological Study of Verbal and Nominal Complexity

In this article we evaluate claims that language structure adapts to sociolinguistic environment. We present the results of two typological case studies examining the effects of the number of native (=L1) speakers and the proportion of adult second language (=L2) learners on language structure. Data from more than 300 languages suggest that testing the effect of population size and proportion of adult L2 learners on features of verbal and nominal complexity produces conflicting results on different grammatical features. The results show that verbal inflectional synthesis adapts to the sociolinguistic environment but the number of genders does not. The results also suggest that modeling population size together with proportion of L2 improves model fit compared to modeling them independently of one another. We thus argue that surveying population size alone may be insufficient to detect possible adaptation of linguistic structure to the sociolinguistic environment. Rather, other features, such as proportion of L2 speakers, prestige and social network density, should be studied, and if demographic numeric data are used, they should not be used in isolation but rather in competition with other sociolinguistic features. We also suggest that not all types of language structures within a given grammatical domain are equally sensitive to the effect of sociolinguistic variables, and that more exploratory studies are needed before we can arrive at a reliable set of grammatical features that may be potentially most (and least) adaptive to social structures.
Copper Binding Features of Tropomyosin-Receptor-Kinase-A Fragment: Clue for Neurotrophic Factors and Metals Link

The nerve growth factor (NGF) is a neurotrophin essential for the development and maintenance of neurons, whose activity is influenced by copper ions. The NGF protein exerts its action by binding to its specific receptor, TrkA. In this study, a specific domain of the TrkA receptor, region 58–64, was synthesized and its copper(II) complexes characterized by means of potentiometric and spectroscopic studies. The two vicinal histidine residues provide excellent metal anchoring sites and, at physiological pH, a complex with the involvement of the peptide backbone amide nitrogen is the predominant species. The TrkA peptide is competitive for metal binding with analogous peptides due to the N-terminal domain of NGF. These data provide cues for future exploration of the effect of metal ions on the activity of the NGF and its specific cellular receptor.
Análise por Pontos de Função: Uma Técnica para Dimensionamento de Sistemas de Informação

Este artigo aborda a tecnica de Analise por Ponto de Funcao (APF) como ferramenta adequada para auxiliar no processo de gestao de Tecnologia da Informacao (TI). Gerentes de TI podem medir a produtividade relacionada com o esforco realizado no processo de desenvolvimento, otimizacao e manutencao de sistemas de informacao. Atraves desta tecnica e possivel calcular o esforco despendido por unidade, ou por atividade no departamento de TI, independente do tipo do sistema, da tecnologia utilizada para desenvolver o produto, e da habilidade dos desenvolvedores, e ainda, fornecer subsidios para melhor compreensao das correcoes, falhas e dos problemas de planejamento dos projetos ja concluidos ou em andamento. Permite criar ambiente padrao na area de TI com possibilidade de comparacao de seu desempenho com o mercado.