Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Utilization of Selection Indexes for Adaptive Responses of Black Poplar (Populus nigra L.) to Drought Stress

D etermination of drought adaptation strategies on plant species is highly important to develop resistant cultivars. Drought resistance mechanisms known as drought escape, avoidance and tolerance should be investigated and associated with several mathematical indices in especially tree species. Therefore, the major aim of this study was to identify drought adaptation strategies with these indices for tree species by using poplar as a model organism. Black poplar clone collection including 300 individuals collected from all around Turkey was tested in a field trial. The growth and biomass production capacities of these individuals with several physiological traits were measured and compared in rainy and drought periods. Mean Relative Performance (MRP) and Stress tolerance Index (STI) were used to identify adaptive responses of black poplar to drought stress. In the study, MRP favored drought tolerant genotypes having the highest biomass production. Genotypes with higher STI values exhibited drought avoidance mechanism which characterized with low productivity but much higher drought resistance. On the other hand, lower STI was associated to drought escape genotypes which revealed the lowest growth performance and the highest defoliation rates under drought. In the current study, relationship between antioxidant enzyme activities and drought adaptations were also investigated on the leaves of selected clones. Higher enzyme activates associated with drought escape strategy in the study.
Stability and performance analysis in an uncertain world

Classical control systems design uses fixed plant transfer functions, yet engineers have known for many years that there is often considerable uncertainty regarding the parameters used in a transfer function representation. A major breakthrough on systems with uncertain parameters was achieved by the Russian mathematician V.L. Kharitonov (1979), who extended the Routh stability criterion to interval polynomials, that is where the polynomial coefficients may be assumed to lie within a specific range rather than being fixed. Recently these ideas have been extended to frequency response representations, such as Nyquist and Bode plots, for interval plant transfer functions. This paper reviews some of these results, which can be easily understood and used by practising engineers.
Bioinks and Bioprinting Strategies for Skeletal Muscle Tissue Engineering

Skeletal muscles play important roles in critical body functions and their injury or disease can lead to limitation of mobility and loss of independence. Current treatments result in variable functional recovery, while reconstructive surgery, as the gold‐standard approach, is limited due to donor shortage, donor‐site morbidity, and limited functional recovery. Skeletal muscle tissue engineering (SMTE) has generated enthusiasm as an alternative solution for treatment of injured tissue and serves as a functional disease model. Recently, bioprinting has emerged as a promising tool for recapitulating the complex and highly organized architecture of skeletal muscles at clinically relevant sizes. Here, skeletal muscle physiology, muscle regeneration following injury, and current treatments following muscle loss are discussed, and then bioprinting strategies implemented for SMTE are critically reviewed. Subsequently, recent advancements that have led to improvement of bioprinting strategies to construct large muscle structures, boost myogenesis in vitro and in vivo, and enhance tissue integration are discussed. Bioinks for muscle bioprinting, as an essential part of any bioprinting strategy, are discussed, and their benefits, limitations, and areas to be improved are highlighted. Finally, the directions the field should expand to make bioprinting strategies more translational and overcome the clinical unmet needs are discussed.
Expert System for Equipment Selection for Earth-Moving Operations

Proper earth‐moving equipment selection is a major factor when trying to satisfy a project's budget and schedule requirements. The selection of the equipment is best performed by personnel with experience in earth‐moving operations. In this research project, a rule‐based expert system (i.e., VP‐Expert) was used to develop a system for selecting earth‐moving equipment. The system, with 930 rules, interprets information concerning a particular project's soil conditions, operator performance, and required earth‐moving operations. The knowledge for the development of the expert system was obtained from several experts working for two contractors, an equipment rental company, equipment manufacturers' sales representatives (e.g., Caterpillar, Case) and several geotechnical engineers. The system was tested, using the requirements for an actual project, by three contractors. The contractors' selections compared favorably with the developed expert system with regard to the size and type of equipment needed to perf.
3D-printed prostheses in developing countries: A systematic review

Background: According to the World Health Organization, only 5%–15% of people in lower-income countries have access to prostheses. This is largely due to low availability of materials and high costs of prostheses. 3D-printing techniques have become easily accessible and can offer functional patient-specific components at relatively low costs, reducing or bypassing the current manufacturing and postprocessing steps. However, it is not yet clear how 3D-printing can provide a sustainable solution to the low availability of limb prostheses for patients with amputations in lower-income countries. Objective: To evaluate 3D-printing for the production of limb prostheses in lower-income countries and lower–middle-income countries (LLMICs). Study design: Systematic Review. Methods: Literature searches, completed in April 2020, were performed in PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, and Cochrane Library. The search results were independently screened and reviewed by four reviewers. Only studies that examined interventions using prostheses in LLMICs for patients with limb amputations were selected for data extraction and synthesis. The web was also searched using Google for projects that did not publish in a scientific journal. Results: Eighteen studies were included. Results were reported regarding country of use, cost and weight, 3D-printing technology, satisfaction, and failure rate. Conclusion: Low material costs, aesthetic appearance, and the possibility of personalized fitting make 3D-printed prostheses a potential solution for patients with limb amputations in LLMICs. However, the lack of (homogeneous) data shows the need for more published (scientific) research to enable a broader availability of knowledge about 3D-printed prostheses for LLMICs.
A Bluetooth-Based Laser Pen Instruction-Aid System for Face-to-Face and Mobile Teaching

Laser pen instruction-aid system is intelligent equipment used to increase the interaction between lecturer and audience in the smart classrooms for face-to-face, mobile, or cloud learning. Lecturer can use the system to easily control presentation documents and to communicate with the audience. The system can function either as a mouse or a keyboard. And the system can draw a laser spot track and do path drawing on the presentation document, so as to make the presentation vivid and interesting. All these functions are supported by the Bluetooth communication mechanism, which sends control signal from the laser pen and receives the signal on the computer. The paper describes how Bluetooth devices enable the signal communications and the unique functions of the pen.
Validation of the LUMIPULSE automated immunoassay for the measurement of core AD biomarkers in cerebrospinal fluid

Abstract Objectives The core cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers; total tau (tTau), phospho-tau (pTau), amyloid β 1-42 (Aβ 1-42), and the Aβ 1-42/Aβ 1-40 ratio have transformed Alzheimer’s disease (AD) research and are today increasingly used in clinical routine laboratories as diagnostic tools. Fully automated immunoassay instruments with ready-to-use assay kits and calibrators has simplified their analysis and improved reproducibility of measurements. We evaluated the analytical performance of the fully automated immunoassay instrument LUMIPULSE G (Fujirebio) for measurement of the four core AD CSF biomarkers and determined cutpoints for AD diagnosis. Methods Comparison of the LUMIPULSE G assays was performed with the established INNOTEST ELISAs (Fujirebio) for hTau Ag, pTau 181, β-amyloid 1-42, and with V-PLEX Plus Aβ Peptide Panel 1 (6E10) (Meso Scale Discovery) for Aβ 1-42/Aβ 1-40, as well as with a LC-MS reference method for Aβ 1-42. Intra- and inter-laboratory reproducibility was evaluated for all assays. Clinical cutpoints for Aβ 1-42, tTau, and pTau was determined by analysis of three cohorts of clinically diagnosed patients, comprising 651 CSF samples. For the Aβ 1-42/Aβ 1-40 ratio, the cutpoint was determined by mixture model analysis of 2,782 CSF samples. Results The LUMIPULSE G assays showed strong correlation to all other immunoassays (r>0.93 for all assays). The repeatability (intra-laboratory) CVs ranged between 2.0 and 5.6%, with the highest variation observed for β-amyloid 1-40. The reproducibility (inter-laboratory) CVs ranged between 2.1 and 6.5%, with the highest variation observed for β-amyloid 1-42. The clinical cutpoints for AD were determined to be 409 ng/L for total tau, 50.2 ng/L for pTau 181, 526 ng/L for β-amyloid 1-42, and 0.072 for the Aβ 1-42/Aβ 1-40 ratio. Conclusions Our results suggest that the LUMIPULSE G assays for the CSF AD biomarkers are fit for purpose in clinical laboratory practice. Further, they corroborate earlier presented reference limits for the biomarkers.
Automatic English Inflection

This paper is a description of a system for classifying English nouns and verbs into inflectional classes semi-automatically, and for inflecting English automatically, using these inflectional classes. The inflectional classification system has been applied to the English correspondents in the Harvard automatic dictionary file, and the inflection process itself is intended to be a part of the English synthesis procedure in translation. The inflectional classes were developed by Grant and Matejka [ 1] . In their system each noun paradigm has two members, singular and plural; each verb paradigm has five members, infinitive, third-person singular present, past, past participle, and present participle. There are six noun inflectional classes and eight verb classes in the system. A summary of the noun classes is given in Figure 1. For example, the plural of class 1 nouns is formed simply by adding "s" to the singular, the plural of class 2 nouns by adding "es", and the plural of class 4 nouns by changing "y" to "i" and adding "es". In verb class 1, for example, the principal parts are formed by adding "s", "ed", "ed", and "ing" to the infinitive base; in verb class 6 "es", "ed", "ed", and "ing" are added.
Infective Endocarditis in the 21st Century

Infective endocarditis (IE) continues to be a disease characterized by high mortality and morbidity that has not been affected by significant advances in the last century. Despite considerable improvements in diagnosis and medical and surgical therapy, mortality has remained high for the past 25 years, in contrast to the majority of cardiovascular diseases such as heart failure and acute coronary syndromes, which have demonstrated noticeable improvements in terms of prognosis. IE has an exceptionally varied clinical presentation, from a severely ill patient with symptoms of acute infection and sepsis to an apparently healthy individual with only occasional night sweats, weight loss, and low-grade fever. Clinical manifestations of IE can be caused by symptoms or complications of the infection or by its frequent non-infectious complications, such as vascular and immunologic phenomena. IE remains a deadly disease, frequently associated with a difficult diagnosis. Significant changes in epidemiology and microbiology have increased the differences between patients seen in the US and Europe and those in countries with a higher incidence of rheumatic heart disease, such as South America and India. Therefore, specific regional approaches to IE are necessary.
An Inside Look into the Practice of Malware Analysis

Malware analysis aims to understand how malicious software carries out actions necessary for a successful attack and identify the possible impacts of the attack. While there has been substantial research focused on malware analysis and it is an important tool for practitioners in industry, the overall malware analysis process used by practitioners has not been studied. As a result, an understanding of common malware analysis workflows and their goals is lacking. A better understanding of these workflows could help identify new research directions that are impactful in practice. In order to better understand malware analysis processes, we present the results of a user study with 21 professional malware analysts with diverse backgrounds who work at 18 different companies. The study focuses on answering three research questions: (1) What are the different objectives of malware analysts in practice? , (2) What comprises a typical professional malware analyst workflow, and (3) When analysts decide to conduct dynamic analysis, what factors do they consider when setting up a dynamic analysis system? Based on participant responses, we propose a taxonomy of malware analysts and identify five common analysis workflows. We also identify challenges that analysts face during the different stages of their workflow. From the results of the study, we propose two potential directions for future research, informed by challenges described by the participants. Finally, we recommend guidelines for developers of malware analysis tools to consider in order to improve the usability of such tools.
Verifying Table-Based Elections

Verifiability is a key requirement for electronic voting. However, the use of cryptographic techniques to achieve it usually requires specialist knowledge to understand; hence voters cannot easily assess the validity of such arguments themselves. To address this, solutions have been proposed using simple tables and checks, which require only simple verification steps with almost no cryptography. This simplicity comes at a cost: numerous verification checks must be made on the tables to ensure their correctness, raising the question whether the success of all the small verification steps entails the overall goal of end-to-end verifiability while preserving vote secrecy. Do the final results reflect the voters' will? Moreover, do the verification steps leak information about the voters' choices? In this paper, we provide mathematical foundations and an associated methodology for defining and proving verifiability and voter privacy for table-based election protocols. We apply them to three case studies: the Eperio protocol, Scantegrity, and Chaum's Random-Sample Election protocol. Our methodology helps us, in all three cases, identify previously unknown problems that allow an election authority to cheat and modify the election outcome. Furthermore, it helps us formulate and verify the corrected versions.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Detecting Orphaned Web Pages at Internet-Scale

Security misconfigurations and neglected updates commonly lead to systems being vulnerable. Especially in the context of websites, we often find pages that were forgotten, that is, they were left online after they served their purpose and never updated thereafter. In this paper, we introduce new methodology to detect such forgotten or orphaned web pages. We combine historic data from the Internet Archive with active measurements to identify pages no longer reachable via a path from the index page, yet stay accessible through their specific URL. We show the efficacy of our approach and the real-world relevance of orphaned web-pages by applying it to a sample of 100,000 domains from the Tranco Top 1M. Leveraging our methodology, we find 1,953 pages on 907 unique domains that are orphaned, some of which are 20 years old. Analyzing their security posture, we find that these pages are significantly ((p < 0.01) using (χ2)) more likely to be vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection (SQLi) vulnerabilities than maintained pages. In fact, orphaned pages are almost ten times as likely to suffer from XSS (19.3%) than maintained pages from a random Internet crawl (2.0%), and maintained pages of websites with some orphans are almost three times as vulnerable (5.9%). Concerning SQLi, maintained pages on websites with some orphans are almost as vulnerable (9.5%) as orphans (10.8%), and both are significantly more likely to be vulnerable than other maintained pages (2.7%). Overall, we see a clear hierarchy: Orphaned pages are the most vulnerable, followed by maintained pages on websites with orphans, with fully maintained sites being least vulnerable. We share an open source implementation of our methodology to enable the reproduction and application of our results in practice.
Decentralizing Computation with Edge Computing: Potential and Challenges

Edge computing promises to bring computation close to the end-users to support emergent applications such as virtual reality. However, the computational capacity at the edge of the network is currently limited. To become a pervasive paradigm, edge computing needs highly dispersed decentralized deployments, that, contrary to cloud, cannot benefit from economies of scale. In this situation, crowdsourcing appears attractive - there are plenty of computing devices at the disposal of the general public, and these devices are located exactly where computing power is needed the most - at the edge of the network. Crowdsourcing has been a success maker for scientific computing projects, e.g., SETI@home, or distributed ledger systems empowering decentralized finance. However, as of now, there is no crowdsourced system that addresses the needs of edge computing. In this position paper, we aim to identify the causes of this shortcoming, analyze the potential ways to overcome it, and outline future directions.
Controller-in-the-Middle: Attacks on Software Defined Networks in Industrial Control Systems

Programmable networks are an area of increasing research activity and real-world usage. The most common example of programmable networks is software defined networking (SDN), in which the control and data planes are separated, with switches only acting as forwarding devices controlled by software in the form of an SDN controller. As well as routing, this controller can perform other network functions such as load balancing and firewalls. There is an increasing amount of work proposing the use of SDN in industrial control systems (ICS) environments. The ability of SDN to dynamically control the network provides many potential benefits, including to security, utilising the dynamic orchestration of security controls. However, the centralisation of network control results in a single point of failure within the system, and thus potentially a major target of attack. An attacker who is capable of controlling the SDN controller gains near full control of the network. In this paper, we describe and analyse this very scenario. We demonstrate a number of simple, yet highly effective, attacks from a compromised SDN controller within an ICS environment which can break the real-time properties of industrial protocols, and potentially interfere with the operation of physical processes.
Macroscopic diversity performance measured in the 800-MHz portable radio communications environment

Analysis of 816 MHz residential propagation data is presented, demonstrating the usefulness of macroscopic selection diversity in combatting shadow fading produced by buildings and other large geographic features in the portable radio communication environment. Macroscopic diversity can reduce the link margin needed for 99% reliability by 10 dB. The analysis of these data indicates that log-normal shadow fading is partially correlated on the paths between a portable user and several surrounding ports. A two-component shadow-fading model duplicates this behavior. One log-normal term is identical for all paths from a given location and characterizes the propagation losses associated with the location. A second log-normal component is independent for each path and characterizes the remainder of the path to the port. The model fits the propagation data as well. A standard deviation of 8 dB for the path-specific term fits subsets of the available data well and is consistent with the standard deviation of shadow fading in the mobile (vehicular) communication environment. >
PRISM based Transport: How Networks can Boost QoS for Advanced Video Services?

Future applications and services will challenge the network infrastructure with unprecedented demands for high bandwidth, low latency and reliable communication. Moreover, popularity of applications requiring several function-alities such as control, telemetry, video and audio, each with its own requirements, is constantly increasing. For example, an interactive video service control requires low bandwidth and low latency while its 4K video flows require high bandwidth and moderate latency. Today's transport protocols do not address heterogeneous requirements. Instead, only bandwidth allocation is provided by congestion control schemes, which support up to two priorities. This limitation impairs Quality of Service (QoS) since it does not satisfy flow latency and bandwidth requirements in parallel. The overall QoS assurance is mainly handled by the application layer that usually reduce the video stream quality. We present PRISM, a new transport protocol on top of IP, which provides per flow granular and dynamic quality of service. PRISM applies state-of-the-art congestion control schemes (such as BBR, Proteus, Cubic) to allocate bandwidth. In addition, PRISM addresses reliability and latency requirements and couples flows from the same application together, enabling inter-flow synchronization. In experiments with a kernel implementation on emulated networks, dense camera grid applications' requirements were fulfilled by using PRISM, while the current transport protocols failed to satisfy all requirements. Furthermore, PRISM reduced establishment latency by a factor of up to 1000 compared to multiple TCP.