Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multi-timescale Electricity Theft Detection and Localization in Distribution Systems Based on State Estimation and PMU Measurements

Electricity theft is a serious issue for distribution companies around the world. Often linked to criminal activities, it is dangerous for the grid and the neighborhoods. While placing measurement points at each bus would allow an easy detection, it is not a practical approach. In this paper, a multi-timescale theft estimation (MISTE) method that takes advantage of smart-meters as well as the sparse grid sensing infrastructure that is being envisaged for state estimation is proposed. It combines power and voltage measurement across time to detect any inconsistency caused by electricity theft. Contrary to existing approaches which are snapshot-based and assume smart-meters to be able to measure instantaneous power consumption, the proposed method models smart-meters as energy measurement devices and combines the measurement timescales of the smart-meters and the PMUs in the computations. The detection performance of the proposed approach is compared to the state of the art theft detection methods. Both the true positive rate as well as the false negative rate are considered, which few papers have discussed previously. Insights on the impact of theft location on theft detection are also given.
Visual insight of spatiotemporal IoT-generated contents

The rapid evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data technology has been generating a large amount and variety of sensing contents, including numeric measured values (e.g., timestamps, geolocations, or sensor logs) and multimedia (e.g., images, audios, and videos). In analyzing and understanding heterogeneous types of IoT-generated contents better, data visualization is an essential component of exploratory data analyses to facilitate information perception and knowledge extraction. This study introduces a holistic approach of storing, processing, and visualizing IoT-generated contents to support context-aware spatiotemporal insight by combining deep learning techniques with a geographical map interface. Visualization is provided under an interactive web-based user interface to help the an efficient visual exploration considering both time and geolocation by easy spatiotemporal query user interface1.
Child designers creating personas to diversify design perspectives and concepts for their own technology enhanced library

We report on a participatory design project that explored the use of child-created Personas to enable child designers to empathize with other children thereby contributing multiple divergent perspectives. The ongoing project aims to promote reading and creative writing skills among young children in Namibia. For decades libraries worldwide have been the key actors in fostering reading. Hence, in order to maintain their relevance, they are being re-conceptualized to cater for new needs and aspirations in the 21st century. In Namibia, dysfunctional public and school library services are lagging behind in this renovation effort, and are not contributing to the promotion of a reading culture. In an ongoing collaboration with a school in Windhoek, to design and implement an interactive tech library, 19 young learners engaged in weekly participatory design workshops to redesign their own school library. The children first created four distinct Personas for which they then modelled spaces and technologies. This paper reflects on the techniques used to enable children to become active design partners and to gain an understanding of designing for other children.
Secure Similar Sequence Query on Outsourced Genomic Data

The growing availability of genomic data is unlocking research potentials on genomic-data analysis. It is of great importance to outsource the genomic-analysis tasks onto clouds to leverage their powerful computational resources over the large-scale genomic sequences. However, the remote placement of the data raises personal-privacy concerns, and it is challenging to evaluate data-analysis functions on outsourced genomic data securely and efficiently. In this work, we study the secure similar-sequence-query (SSQ) problem over outsourced genomic data, which has not been fully investigated. To address the challenges of security and efficiency, we propose two protocols in the mixed form, which combine two-party secure secret sharing, garbled circuit, and partial homomorphic encryptions together and use them to jointly fulfill the secure SSQ function. In addition, our protocols support multi-user queries over a joint genomic data set collected from multiple data owners, making our solution scalable. We formally prove the security of protocols under the semi-honest adversary model, and theoretically analyze the performance. We use extensive experiments over real-world dataset on a commercial cloud platform to validate the efficacy of our proposed solution, and demonstrate the performance improvements compared with state-of-the-art works.
Snap-changes: a dynamic editing strategy for directing viewer's attention in streaming virtual reality videos

Cinematic Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential of touching the masses with new exciting experiences, but faces two main hurdles: one is the ability to stream these videos, another is their design and creation. Indeed, rates are much higher and in addition to discomfort and sickness that might arise in fully immersive experience with a headset, users might get lost when exploring a 360° videos and miss main elements required to understand the underlying plot. We take an innovative approach by addressing jointly the creation and streaming problems. We introduce a technique called snap-changes, aimed at directing viewers to points of interest pre-defined by the content producer. We design a VR editing tool and a custom 360° video player, to provide the content creator with the ability to drive the user's attention, and report results from two sets of user experiments that indicate that snap-changes indeed help reduce user's head motion.
POSTER: A Framework for Phylogenetic Analysis in Mobile Environment

To maximize the probability of successful attacks and reduce the odds of being detected, malware developers implement different versions of the same malicious payloads. As a matter of fact, malware writers often generate new malicious code starting from existing ones, adding small programmed variations, or applying obfuscation mechanisms, that change the code structure, without altering the malicious functionalities. For these reasons phylogenetic analysis is becoming of interest as instrument for malware analysts in order to understand the derivation of a malicious payload, being thus able to reconduct a derived piece of code to its original, known originator. In this poster we describe a framework designed to infer and shape the phylogenetic tree of mobile malicious applications. The framework considers multi-level features with rule-based machine learning algorithm to retrieve antecedents and descendants of malicious samples.
Trigger-action programming for context-aware elderly support in practice

Remote monitoring services should be strongly personalised to the specific needs, preferences, abilities and motivations of elderly, a population segment whose characteristics can largely vary and even dynamically evolve over time for the same individual, depending on changing needs and usage contexts. We present a demo showing how a platform supporting End User Development (EUD) of context-dependent applications has been customized for remotely assisting elderly people at home. The user-editable personalisation features are specified by using trigger-action rules. The platform has been integrated with various sensors and appliances, and an application for remotely monitoring older adults at home. The resulting environment supports the possibility of creating trigger-action rules that can actually be executed when relevant sensors indicate that specific events or conditions occurred.
The importance of empowerment goals in elderly-centered interaction design

This paper deals with the problem of empowering elderly people through adequate interactive applications. We describe a user-centered iterative design methodology which is oriented towards empowerment goals. We present the results of a preliminary study that has involved the project work activities performed by groups of computer science students from the course of human-computer interaction. The projects cover different areas of elderly people's life and the adopted approach has provided interesting insight into the empowerment goals which prevail in each area. The results of the study suggest that, especially when dealing with categories of disadvantaged users, empowerment goals are paramount to gain true usability of a given application.
Cybercrime After the Sunrise: A Statistical Analysis of DNS Abuse in New gTLDs

To enhance competition and choice in the domain name system, ICANN introduced the new gTLD program, which added hundreds of new gTLDs (e.g. .nyc, .io) to the root DNS zone. While the program arguably increased the range of domain names available to consumers, it might also have created new opportunities for cybercriminals. To investigate that, we present the first comparative study of abuse in the domains registered under the new gTLD program and legacy gTLDs (18 in total, such as .com, .org). We combine historical datasets from various sources, including DNS zone files, WHOIS records, passive and active DNS and HTTP measurements, and 11 reputable abuse feeds to study abuse across gTLDs. We find that the new gTLDs appear to have diverted abuse from the legacy gTLDs: while the total number of domains abused for spam remains stable across gTLDs, we observe a growing number of spam domains in new gTLDs which suggests a shift from legacy gTLDs to new gTLDs. Although legacy gTLDs had a rate of 56.9 spam domains per 10,000 registrations (Q4 2016), new gTLDs experienced a rate of 526.6 in the same period-which is almost one order of magnitude higher. In this study, we also analyze the relationship between DNS abuse, operator security indicators and the structural properties of new gTLDs. The results indicate that there is an inverse correlation between abuse and stricter registration policies. Our findings suggest that cybercriminals increasingly prefer to register, rather than hack, domain names and some new gTLDs have become a magnet for malicious actors. ICANN is currently using these results to review the existing anti-abuse safeguards, evaluate their joint effects and to introduce more effective safeguards before an upcoming new gTLD rollout.
Designing to illuminate children's scientific funds of knowledge through social media sharing

The ubiquitous use of social media by children offers a unique opportunity to view diverse funds of knowledge that may otherwise be overlooked. To leverage this insight, we have coupled the iterative development of our community-focused, Science Everywhere life-relevant science learning program together with an integrated social media app to engage learners aged 6--16 in science with parents, teachers, and mentors throughout their community. We found that learners' scientific funds of knowledge were often not evident in their posts alone; rather, they emerged through our triangulation of posts, interviews with youth and their parents, and observations of their learning experiences in our life-relevant science education program. Our findings suggest that leveraging new social media features to support contextual information, scientific scaffolds and creative expression may make children's implicit and more unconventional scientific funds of knowledge more apparent. Additionally, social media sharing in conjunction with other practices, such as discussing posts with learners and encouraging non-science posts, can uncover the rich contexts of children's social media sharing, which can illuminate their scientific thinking.
Keyboard with tactile feedback on smartphone touch screen

Pressing buttons on a smartphone touch screen is difficult if you are not looking at the screen. We developed a numerical keyboard that provides a tactile feedback using phone short vibrations. The feedback is provided both when the user swipes the keyboard and when he presses keys. We describe how we implemented it on iPhone7, using the iPhone 3Dtouch capability and the UIFeedbackGenerator.
Towards a construction kit for visual search interfaces

In recent years, many novel approaches have been propsed to exploring complex data sets. However, little guidance is available for designers to create similar solutions and to reuse established patterns. This paper is building upon our previous work that covers the development of a construction kit to support designers in creating new visual search interfaces. It provides a set of elements and patterns that can be easily combined with each other. In this paper, we present different application scenarios for using the construction kit within the design process.
A TMS320C53 based enhanced forward error correction scheme for US digital cellular radio

An enhanced forward error correction scheme is presented that complies with the USA digital cellular (USDC) standard. The proposed scheme use a generalized Viterbi algorithm (GVA) based on the work of N. Seshadri and C. -E.W. Sundberg (see Proc. GLOBECOMM 89, p43.3.1-4, 1989) that produces an ordered list of N global best estimates of the transmitted sequence. An algorithm is described that uses GVA to enhance performance of the USDC voice channel decoder. The algorithm is implemented on a fixed-point digital signal processor, TMS320C53. It is shown that the TMS320C53 implementation of the algorithm does not require significant increase in computational overhead when compared to a standard Viterbi algorithm. <<ETX>>
Muscle mass drives cost in sexually selected arthropod weapons

Sexually selected weapons often function as honest signals of fighting ability. If poor-quality individuals produce high-quality weapons, then receivers should focus on other, more reliable signals. Cost is one way to maintain signal integrity. The costs of weapons tend to increase with relative weapon size, and thereby restrict large weapons to high-quality individuals who can produce and maintain them. Weapon cost, however, appears to be unpredictably variable both within and across taxa, and the mechanisms underlying this variation remain unclear. We suggest variation in weapon cost may result from variation in weapon composition—specifically, differences in the amount of muscle mass directly associated with the weapon. We test this idea by measuring the metabolic cost of sexually selected weapons in seven arthropod species and relating these measures to weapon muscle mass. We show that individuals with relatively large weapon muscles have disproportionately high resting metabolic rates and provide evidence that this trend is driven by weapon muscle mass. Overall, our results suggest that variation in weapon cost can be partially explained by variation in weapon morphology and that the integrity of weapon signals may be maintained by increased metabolic cost in species with relatively high weapon muscle mass.
Contextualized Translations of Phrasal Verbs with Distributional Compositional Semantics and Monolingual Corpora

This paper describes a compositional distributional method to generate contextualized senses of words and identify their appropriate translations in the target language using monolingual corpora. Word translation is modeled in the same way as contextualization of word meaning, but in a bilingual vector space. The contextualization of meaning is carried out by means of distributional composition within a structured vector space with syntactic dependencies, while the bilingual space is created by means of transfer rules and a bilingual dictionary. A phrase in the source language, consisting of a head and a dependent, is translated into the target language by selecting both the nearest neighbor of the head given the dependent, and the nearest neighbor of the dependent given the head. This process is expanded to larger phrases by means of incremental composition. Experiments were performed on English and Spanish monolingual corpora in order to translate phrasal verbs in context. A new bilingual dataset to evaluate strategies aimed at translating phrasal verbs in restricted syntactic domains has been created and released.
Ketogenic diet attenuates cerebellar atrophy progression in a subject with a biallelic variant at the ATAD3A locus

Abstract The ATPase AAA-domain protein 3 (ATAD3) is a ubiquitously expressed mitochondrial protein involved in mitochondrial dynamics, DNA-nucleoid structural organization, cholesterol transport and steroidogenesis. Mutations within the ancestral ATAD3A gene are strongly associated with neurological abnormalities due to alterations in the mitochondrial function and homeostasis. Here, we report the case of a subject diagnosed with developmental delay associated with ataxia and progressive atrophy of both cerebellar hemispheres and cerebellar vermis, despite exhibiting a normal biochemical profile. By whole exome sequencing, we identified two biallelic single nucleotide variants within the coding region of ATAD3A in the affected subject. Both variants were previously reported as monoallelic variants with uncertain clinical significance. Importantly, the variant ATAD3A c.251T>C leads to an amino acid change of a highly conserved residue across species and in silico analysis revealed structural alteration in the ATAD3A protein. Ketogenic diet was administered to the subject as a novel therapeutic approach. Notably, the treatment correlated with a reduction in cerebellum atrophy progression and the gradual enhancement of the subject’s physical skills, vitality and personal interactions. Thus, we report the first subject with a homozygous status for the ATAD3A c.251T>C (p.Thr84Met) variant. We propose that this mutation led to an alteration of the mitochondrial function, causing the neurological symptoms observed in the subject. The symptoms were partially alleviated following ketogenic diet, improving the subject’s quality of life.
Evidence-based review of data on the combination inhaler umeclidinium/vilanterol in patients with COPD

Abstract The use of inhaled, fixed-dose, long-acting muscarinic antagonists (LAMA) combined with long-acting, beta2-adrenergic receptor agonists (LABA) has become a mainstay in the maintenance treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). One of the fixed-dose LAMA/LABA combinations is the dry powder inhaler (DPI) of umeclidinium bromide (UMEC) and vilanterol trifenatate (VI) (62.5 µg/25 µg) approved for once-a-day maintenance treatment of COPD. This paper reviews the use of fixed-dose combination LAMA/LABA agents focusing on the UMEC/VI DPI inhaler in the maintenance treatment of COPD. The fixed-dose combination LAMA/LABA inhaler offers a step beyond a single inhaled maintenance agent but is still a single device for the COPD patient having frequent COPD exacerbations and persistent symptoms not well controlled on one agent. Currently available clinical trials suggest that the once-a-day DPI of UMEC/VI is well-tolerated, safe and non-inferior or better than other currently available inhaled fixed-dose LAMA/LABA combinations for COPD.
Fibrinogen levels measured by the dry hematology method are lower than those measured by the Clauss method under a high concentration of heparin

ABSTRACT The activity of fibrinogen has been reported to decrease soon after the onset of major bleeding and to be an important determinant of the final extent of bleeding and postoperative outcome. A device that measures the perioperative fibrinogen level using the dry hematology (DH) method has recently become available. The aim of this study was to compare perioperative fibrinogen levels measured by the DH method with those measured by the conventional Clauss method and to assess the effects of heparin on these measurements. The study included 206 samples from 36 patients undergoing major surgery who received high-dose heparin (HH group, 23 samples), low-dose heparin (LH group, 57 samples), or no heparin (C group, 126 control samples). Each sample was measured using the DH and Clauss methods. After excluding samples outside the effective measurement range, the three study groups (HH group, n=23; LH group, n=49; C group, n=115) were compared. The mean fibrinogen level measured by the DH method in the HH group (87.9 ± 3.1%) was significantly lower than that measured by the Clauss method. There were no significant differences between the fibrinogen measurements obtained by the two methods between the LH and C groups. In patients on high-dose heparin, the mean fibrinogen level measured by the DH method was significantly lower than that measured by the Clauss method. When hemorrhage requires emergency treatment, a method that can measure the fibrinogen level rapidly is important. The DH method may be useful for decision-making with regard to perioperative coagulation factor replacement.
Usefulness of patellar cartilage cross-sectional area for knee tibiofemoral osteoarthritis in elderly

Purpose Knee tibiofemoral osteoarthritis (KOA) is a major health problem, affecting approximately 30% of elderly. Several studies have reported that the loss of patellar cartilage is associated with an increased risk of KOA. However, no study has reported the optimal cut off value of patellar cartilage cross-sectional area (PCA) in KOA. We hypothesize that PCA is a new sensitive morphologic parameter in the diagnosis of KOA. The purpose of this study was to determine whether PCA could be used as an important adjuvant morphological parameter in the diagnosis of KOA. Patients and methods Data regarding PCA were collected from 88 subjects with KOA. A total of 77 subjects in the control group underwent knee MRI as part of nonsymptomatic medical examination. T2-weighted axial images were acquired from both groups. Using a picture archiving communications system, we analyzed the cross-sectional area of the patellar cartilage on MRI. Results The average PCA was 98.66±22.18 mm2 in the control group, which was significantly (p<0.001) higher than that (59.43±16.11 mm2) in the KOA group. Receiver operator haracteristic curve analysis was computed to determine the validity of PCA as a predictor of KOA. In the KOA group, the optimal cut offpoint was 76.06 mm2, with sensitivity of 83.0%, specificity of 83.1%, and AUC of 0.94 (95% CI: 0.90–0.97). Conclusions Lower PCA values were associated with a higher possibility of KOA. The optimal cutoff score of PCA might be used to facilitate the evaluation of patients with KOA.