Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Graphical analysis of captured network packets for detection of suspicious network nodes

The advent of the Internet has yielded the rapid development of Information Technology related applications over the past two decades. Most organizations have adopted the use of a computer network to make accessibility and sharing of network applications and devices possible. However, currently, network security has been one of the critical things most organization and corporation has to handle. Each day, attacks are continually being executed into professional secured corporate or organization networks and sometimes into private networks. Wireshark is a tool generally used for network packet capture however, it is very tedious sometimes to filter and follow TCP streams. This problem exacerbates in a situation where colossal network data or traffic needs to be analyzed for suspicious traffic. This paper leverages the use of Python libraries and Data Science techniques to ease the packet capturing and graphical analysis process on a live network. Using these techniques will enhance the gleaning out more interesting attributes of network packet and fish out the suspicious IP address, network ports or malicious data readily within the shortest possible time. The research conducted showed how a broadcast IP address 255.255.255.255 might be suspicious within the internal network of the live university network. The suspicion was based on the payload data sent to this address and a possible error or misconfiguration on the Ubiquiti UniFi access point.
A Highly Efficient Dynamical Core of Atmospheric General Circulation Model based on Leap-Format

The finite-difference dynamical core based on the equal-interval latitude-longitude mesh has been widely used for numerical simulations of the Atmospheric General Circulation Model (AGCM). Previous work utilizes different filtering schemes to alleviate the instability problem incurred by the unequal physical spacing at different latitudes, but they all incur high communication and computation overhead and become a scaling bottleneck. This paper proposes a new leap-format finite-difference computing scheme. It generalizes the usual finite-difference format with adaptive wider intervals and is able to maintain the computational stability in the grid updating. Therefore, the costly filtering scheme is eliminated. The new scheme is parallelized with a shifting communication method and implemented with fine communication optimizations based on a 3D decomposition. With the proposed leap-format computation scheme, the communication overhead of the AGCM is significantly reduced and good load balance is exhibited. The simulation results verify the correctness of the new leap-format scheme. The new scheme achieves the speed of 16.6 simulation-year-per-day (SYPD) and up to 3.3x speedup over the latest implementation.
Construction of a Low-cost Wheeled Mobile Robot for Testing Automatic Control Techniques

This paper presents the construction of a low-cost wheeled mobile robot, of the differential type, for testing automatic control techniques. The elements integrating the robot can be grouped in hardware and software. The hardware can be divided in primary and secondary one. The primary hardware refers to an Arduino UNO board and a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ single board computer, which shall execute control techniques. The secondary hardware is associated with the sensors, DC motors, power stage, and chassis of the robot. It is important to stress that hardware was selected by considering price, capabilities, features, and suppliers or distributors. In the case of the primary hardware, the elements were chosen by taking into account the programming languages that support. Hence, all the hardware elements of the robot are relatively cheap, have mid-range features, and can be easily acquired. The primary hardware supports languages as C++, Python, and Java. Therefore, free software was used to program the Arduino UNO and Raspberry Pi 3 B+ boards. Lastly, in order to validate that the proposed low-cost robot is useful to test control techniques, a trajectory tracking control is successfully implemented. The obtained results motivate authors to use the built robot as didactic material to teach science, technology, engineering, and mathematics subjects in high-school and university, with the intention of improving the skills of students.
Studies on the effect of methanolic extract of Carica papaya stalk on hepatotoxicity induced in albino rat

The hepatoprotective properties of methanolic extract of Carica papaya stalk on albino rat were evaluated. To achieve this, the phytochemical screening of the extract was carried out and carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) (i.p) was injected into albino rats to liver damage. The rats were simultaneously given oral doses of 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100 mg/kg (p.o) of methanolic extract of C. papaya stalk. The effects of this extract on liver total protein concentration, alanine aminotransferase, aspartate aminotranferase, and gamma-glutamyltransferase activities of the rats were studied after 7 days period of the experiment. Administration of CCl4 alone to rats significantly increased (p < 0.05) total protein concentration and the activities of the transferases studied in the serum when compared with controls which received distilled water (p.o). Simultaneous treatment of CCl4 injection and oral administration of different doses of the C. papaya stalk extract significantly reduced (p < 0.05) total protein concentration, activities of liver transferases studied. However, the lowest significant reduction (p < 0.05) of total protein concentration and the transferases was observed with simultaneous administration of 100 mg/kg of the extract on the rats. This study suggests that the extract of C. papaya stalk possesses the phytochemicals with antioxidant properties which might be responsible for it capacity to protect the liver from oxidative damage. Key words: Hepatotoxicity, phytochemical, liver, Carica papaya, rat.
Analysis and Optimization of TLS-based Security Mechanisms for Low Power IoT Systems

Security has been valued as one of the most critical issues in the Internet of Things (IoT). The usage of cryptographic hardware accelerators is state of the art to improve the energy efficiency of security-related protocols like TLS. This way, feasible battery runtimes are ensured for resource-constrained IoT edge devices.However, the enhancement provided by the accelerator is not propagated in the same magnitude to the TLS handshake process.Hence, to further improve the security mechanism at TLS level, a holistic analysis of the IoT system is required to track down bottlenecks that have been revealed due to unilateral cryptographic optimization.In this paper, we present appropriate methods to identify further limiting factors and propose corresponding optimizations. We show how that overall energy demand for ephemeral TLS handshakes can be reduced by 50% and the related latency by about one order of magnitude compared to related work.
A Heterogeneous PIM Hardware-Software Co-Design for Energy-Efficient Graph Processing

Processing-In-Memory (PIM) is an emerging technology that addresses the memory bottleneck of graph processing. In general, analog memristor-based PIM promises high parallelism provided that the underlying matrix-structured crossbar can be fully utilized while digital CMOS-based PIM has a faster single-edge execution but its parallelism can be low. In this paper, we observe that there is no absolute winner between these two representative PIM technologies for graph applications, which often exhibit irregular workloads. To reap the best of both worlds, we introduce a new heterogeneous PIM hardware, called Hetraph, to facilitate energy-efficient graph processing. Hetraph incorporates memristor-based analog computation units (for high-parallelism computing) and CMOS-based digital computation cores (for efficient computing) on the same logic layer of a 3D die-stacked memory device. To maximize the hardware utilization, our software design offers a hardware heterogeneity-aware execution model and a workload offloading mechanism. For performance speedups, such a hardware-software co-design outperforms the state-of-the-art by 7.54 ×(CPU), 1.56 ×(GPU), 4.13× (memristor-based PIM) and 3.05× (CMOS-based PIM), on average. For energy savings, Hetraph reduces the energy consumption by 57.58× (CPU), 19.93× (GPU), 14.02 ×(memristor-based PIM) and 10.48 ×(CMOS-based PIM), on average.
Analysis of Event-Based PI Controller and Some Proposed Improvements

Event-based control is an alternative to classical discrete control system. Event-based controller only calculates new control signal when system’s error reach specific threshold. This is contrary with conventional time-triggered controller where control signal is updated with fixed sampling time. This method manages to reduce the computation iteration but at the cost of extra computation in control algorithm. A good event-based controller must be able to reduce the computation iteration and has a low control algorithm computation. This paper proposed new improvement to the simple event-based PI controller. This improved algorithm gives good performance without the need of complex control algorithm, and low in computation. Extensive simulations are tested to the proposed approach to study its effectiveness toward different sampling periods and error limits. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm able to outperforms others complex approach in event-based PI control.
Experimental Validation of Tuning Mechanisms Applied on AIN Piezoelectric Contour Mode MEMS Resonators

This paper presents finite element simulation and experimental results for a 60 MHz contour-mode piezoelectric MEMS resonator. The device which operates at the 5th order lateral bulk modal frequency was fabricated using the PiezoMUMPs MPW process which consists of a $0.5 \mu \mathrm{m}$ AlN layer over an SOI structure having a thickness of $10 \mu \mathrm{m}$. The simulated and experimental values for the quality factor are 2,824 and 3,153 respectively, which compare favorably with similar contour mode resonator designs employing AlN as a piezoelectric material. The effect of temperature on the resonant frequency and the quality factor has been analyzed in detail. The viability of implementing thermal and voltage tuning techniques has been investigated and a comparison of results is presented. Experimental results indicate a frequency variation of 162 kHz over a temperature range of 278-358 K for thermal tuning, while a frequency variation of 30 kHz is obtained over a voltage range of 9 V in the case of voltage tuning.
Solving the Interdependency Problem: A Secure Virtual Machine Allocation Method Relying on the Attacker’s Efficiency and Coverage

Cloud computing dominates the information communication and technology landscape despite the presence of lingering security issues such as the interdependency problem. The latter is a co-residence conundrum where the attacker successfully compromises his target virtual machine by first exploiting the weakest (in terms of security) virtual machine that is hosted in the same server. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel virtual machine allocation policy that is based on the attacker’s efficiency and coverage. By default, our allocation policy considers all legitimate users as attackers and then proceeds to host the users’ virtual machines to the server where their efficiency and/or coverage are the smallest. Our simulation results show that our proposal performs better than the existing allocation policies that were proposed to tackle the same issue, by reducing the attacker’s possibilities to zero and by using between 30 - 48% less hosts.
Adapting STPA-sec for Socio-technical Cyber Security Challenges in Emerging Nations: A Case Study in Risk Management for Rwandan Health Care

Healthcare is increasingly dependent on digital systems. In emerging nations, it can be particularly hard for hospital administrators to maximize the benefits of these advances and at the same time mitigate the potential cyber security risks associated with healthcare information systems. This paper argues that limited resources, rising demand and rapidly evolving organizational structures create a pressing need for holistic approaches to address socio-technical security challenges in healthcare. We do not underestimate the technological challenges of cyber security in these countries; equally technical solutions are unlikely to be effective unless supported by holistic risk assessment. We address these problems by the use of STAMP (Systems Theoretic Accident Model and Processes) for cyber security analysis, STPA-sec. Our results show that this open-ended analytical technique requires additional methodological structure in countries where there are significant shortages of trained analysts; to guide the application of STPA-sec and also to provide common reference when individual analysts must justify their findings. It is for this reason that we explicitly integrate the US National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) controls into STPA-sec. This provided our stakeholders with a starting point for the application of socio-technical analysis and enhanced the mainstream cyber security and risk management to provide a better fit within healthcare from emerging nations; further studies are required to determine whether such support becomes superfluous as analysts become familiar with socio-technical methods. Our arguments have been validated through extensive observation, interviews and document reviews with healthcare providers in Rwanda. In particular, we focus on an initiative to improve the cyber security of a hospital Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS). It is our hope that the lessons learned in one country might inform cyber security risk management for healthcare across other emerging nations who face limited resources, significant public demand and an increasing range of threats.
Modeling of Carbon Nanotube-Based Differential Through-Silicon Vias in 3-D ICs

This article proposes a novel differential through-silicon via (D-TSV) structure, which is filled with vertically aligned carbon nanotube (VACNT) array. Two metal pads are deposited on the sides of the surface of the proposed D-TSV to form differential signal transmission paths. The equivalent circuit model is established for the proposed D-TSV, with the frequency-dependent impedance extracted using partial-element equivalent-circuit (PEEC) method. By virtue of the equivalent circuit model, the electrical performance of the proposed D-TSV is investigated, with some design guidance presented.
Robustness-oriented k Edge Server Placement

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging and prospective computing paradigm that supports low-latency content delivery. In a MEC environment, edge servers are attached to base stations or access points in closer proximity to end-users to reduce the end-to-end latency in their access to online content. From an edge infrastructure provider’s perspective, a cost-effective k edge server placement (kESP) places k edge servers within a particular geographic area to maximize their coverage. However, in the distributed MEC environment, edge servers are often subject to failures due to various reasons, e.g., software exceptions, hardware faults, cyberattacks, etc. End-users connected to a failed edge server have to access online content from the remote cloud if they are not covered by any other edge servers. This significantly jeopardizes end-users’ quality of experience. Thus, the robustness of an edge server network must be considered in edge server placement. In this paper, we formally model this Robustness-oriented k Edge Server Placement (RkESP) problem, and prove that finding the optimal solution to this problem is $\mathcal{N}\mathcal{P}$-hard. Thus, we firstly propose an integer programming based optimal approach, namely Opt, to find optimal solutions to small-scale RkESP problems. Then, we propose an approximate approach, namely Approx, for solving large-scale RkESP problems efficiently with an O(k)-approximation ratio. Finally, the performance of the two approaches is experimentally evaluated against five state-of-the-art approaches on a real-world dataset and a large-scale synthesized dataset.
EdgeIso: Effective Performance Isolation for Edge Devices

Edges enable cloud services to be provided at low-latency and efficiently reduce the amount of transferred data by placing latency-critical tasks close to users. However, multi-tasking results in resource contention on edge devices, making it challenging to meet the service level objectives (SLOs) of tasks. Compared to the clouds, edges have relatively limited resources, but their tasks are required to meet a higher level of SLOs than clouds. Furthermore, modern edge devices equipped with additional accelerators (e.g., GPU) may worsen the resource contention due to the edge's integrated architecture, sharing the memory bandwidth between CPUs and accelerators. To address these challenges, we present EdgeIso, a light-weight scheduler that dynamically isolates the performance of tasks on edges. EdgeIso periodically monitors the resource contention and mitigates the contention to meet the SLOs of tasks by efficiently enforcing several isolation techniques (e.g., DVFS and core allocation) in an incremental manner. Moreover, it detects the changes of task executions or offered loads for tasks, thus handling high load fluctuations adaptively. We implement EdgeIso as a user-level scheduler on the Linux integrates into an NVIDIA Jetson TX2. Our experimental results show that EdgeIso improves the performance of the low-latency tasks significantly while improving resource efficiency compared with both the offloading and reservation scheme used in clouds.
Dispersal, feeding and parasitism of adult stoneflies (Plecoptera) at a New Zealand forest stream

Abstract The temporal occurrence and dispersal of stoneflies were investigated at a forest stream in the South Island, New Zealand. Although 12 species were taken in Malaise traps, only Spaniocerca zelandica and Cristaperla fimbria (Notonemouridae) were abundant. Adults of S. zelandica were present throughout the year and a wide range of different-sized nymphs, including very small individuals, was also found in all months. In contrast, the emergence period of C. fimbria was limited to about four months in summer and as nymphs are mainly hyporheic, few were taken in Surber samples. Malaise trapping on a 16 m long transect away from the stream and with more distantly located traps in forest and grassland resulted in a very high proportion of males and females of both species being caught within 1 m of the stream edge. Captured females of both species included immature, gravid, and spent individuals. Males and females of both species had almost identical diets dominated by sooty mould fungi, fungal spores, pollen and fine particulate organic matter. High proportions of them were also infected by the encysted larvae of a gordian worm (Nematomorpha) and may be important vectors in its life cycle.
Characterization of Traffic in Mobile Devices: Web and Applicational

The data plans offered by mobile network operators to users are limited, with costs increasing proportionally to post-limit usage. Thus, users of mobile devices need to manage data plan consumption on a regular basis. In this paper, a comparative study of web and applicational platforms on mobile devices is performed in order to assess which one leads to low data consumption. The methodology used is based on the collection of traffic from each platform for comparison purposes. For this, an architecture was developed, and appropriate metrics were established. Considering Youtube as case study, the results show that the web platform uses less data for the average case, but that the recommendation based on the user profile, whether active or passive, will result in a consistently lower data usage.
SatEdgeSim: A Toolkit for Modeling and Simulation of Performance Evaluation in Satellite Edge Computing Environments

Along with the progress of satellite technology, satellites are becoming more and more powerful, making emerging technologies such as mist computing and edge computing considered in the future development of satellite networks. Satellite networks will use mist/edge computing to provide low-latency, highly reliable information transmission capabilities. However, despite much research in the area of satellite edge computing, there is still a lack of simulation tools with satellite edge computing environments. Here, we propose a satellite edge computing simulator-SatEdgeSim, which is an extension of PureEdgeSim and utilizes the effectiveness of it in simulating cloud, mist and edge computing environments to evaluate the satellite edge computing environment. Finally, we use SatEdgeSim to simulate the impact of different task deployment strategies in satellite edge computing scenarios. Simulation results show that SatEdgeSim is effective in satellite edge computing environment. Compared with the traditional task deployment strategy, the proposed deployment strategy designed in this paper can reduce delay and energy consumption, and improve the task success rate.
Self-powered wireless IoT nodes for emergency management

Expected and unexpected events affect road infrastructure leading to several issues that require maintenance interventions or prompt actions. In order to face the issues mentioned above, specially designed platforms can be used. Despite the high number of solutions presented in the last decades, it is difficult to find real applications of systems deputed to the emergency management of the abovementioned infrastructures. This paper aims at describing an innovative platform and the results of its first application. The platform consists of a system and algorithms that allow environmental and structural monitoring and emergency management. The proposed system consists of a network of wireless sensor nodes that are self-powered by mean of photovoltaic energy harvesters. Two different types of algorithms were designed to monitor the environmental and structural condition (i.e., the vibro-acoustic signature) of different types of structures and infrastructures, and to display, thanks to a dashboard, several predefined alarms, escape routes, safe place, and gathering points. The results presented in the paper refers to the first application of the platform, here tailored for an Italian theme park in the framework of the project "SICURVIA" funded by Regione Calabria, Italy. These results, presented for the first time, show that the platform is able to extract crucial information about the conditions of the thematic park’s assets, and, at the same time, this information are used to recognize an emergency, trigger the related alarm, and provide a plan to manage the extraordinary event happened.
Accuracy and power in fluctuating asymmetry studies: effects of sample size and number of within‐subject repeats

This paper presents results from simulations investigating the effect of sample size, number of within‐subject repeats and relative degree of measurement error on the power and accuracy of test for fluctuating asymmetry (FA). These data confirm that sampling variation of population‐level FA‐estimates is large and that high sample size is required to obtain reasonably high power when testing for FA or comparing FA levels between populations. The results also clearly show that increasing the number of within‐subject repeats can dramatically increase accuracy and power when measurement error is relatively high.