Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Particle physics in the sky and astrophysics underground : connecting the universe's largest and smallest scales

Particles have tremendous potential as astronomical messengers, and conversely, studying the universe as a whole also teaches us about particle physics. This thesis encompasses both of these research directions. Many models predict a diffuse flux of high energy neutrinos from active galactic nuclei and other astrophysical sources. The "Astrophysics Underground" portion of this thesis describes a search for this neutrino flux performed by looking for very high energy upward-going muons using the Super-K detector. In addition to using particles to do astronomy, we can also use the universe itself as a particle physics lab. The "Particle Physics in the Sky" portion of this thesis focuses on extracting cosmological information from galaxy surveys. To overcome technical challenges faced by the latest galaxy surveys, we produced a comprehensive upgrade to mangle, a software package that processes the angular masks defining the survey area on the sky. We added dramatically faster algorithms and new useful features that are necessary for managing complex masks of current and next-generation galaxy surveys. With this software in hand, we utilized SDSS data to investigate the relation between galaxies and dark matter by studying relative bias, i.e., the relation between different types of galaxies. Separating galaxies by their luminosities and colors reveals a complicated picture: red galaxies are clustered more strongly than blue galaxies, with both the brightest and the faintest red galaxies showing the strongest clustering. Furthermore, red and blue galaxies tend to occupy different regions of space. In order to make precise measurements from the next generation of galaxy surveys, it will be essential to account for this complexity.
Dual-Polarized Filtering Antenna With Printed Jerusalem-Cross Radiator

This paper presents a design of dual-polarized antenna with embedded filtering circuits by using a printed Jerusalem-cross radiator and a ring slot-coupled feed structure. A square ring slot has been adopted to implement the coupling mechanism. It is excited by two orthogonal microstrip feedlines to achieve dual polarizations. Meanwhile, the slot-coupled feed network and printed Jerusalem-cross radiator form a coupled-resonator circuit that realizes a second-order bandpass filtering performance. Consequently, a dual-polarized antenna with a filtering performance is obtained without using extra filtering circuits. To demonstrate the idea, an antenna prototype operating at LTE bands 42 and 43 (3.4–3.8 GHz) is designed, fabricated, and measured. Measured results show that the proposed antenna provides good filtering and dual-polarized radiation performances. Furthermore, a four-element dual-polarized linear array is designed for high-gain applications.
Differentiable Compound Optics and Processing Pipeline Optimization for End-to-end Camera Design

Most modern commodity imaging systems we use directly for photography—or indirectly rely on for downstream applications—employ optical systems of multiple lenses that must balance deviations from perfect optics, manufacturing constraints, tolerances, cost, and footprint. Although optical designs often have complex interactions with downstream image processing or analysis tasks, today’s compound optics are designed in isolation from these interactions. Existing optical design tools aim to minimize optical aberrations, such as deviations from Gauss’ linear model of optics, instead of application-specific losses, precluding joint optimization with hardware image signal processing (ISP) and highly parameterized neural network processing. In this article, we propose an optimization method for compound optics that lifts these limitations. We optimize entire lens systems jointly with hardware and software image processing pipelines, downstream neural network processing, and application-specific end-to-end losses. To this end, we propose a learned, differentiable forward model for compound optics and an alternating proximal optimization method that handles function compositions with highly varying parameter dimensions for optics, hardware ISP, and neural nets. Our method integrates seamlessly atop existing optical design tools, such as Zemax. We can thus assess our method across many camera system designs and end-to-end applications. We validate our approach in an automotive camera optics setting—together with hardware ISP post processing and detection—outperforming classical optics designs for automotive object detection and traffic light state detection. For human viewing tasks, we optimize optics and processing pipelines for dynamic outdoor scenarios and dynamic low-light imaging. We outperform existing compartmentalized design or fine-tuning methods qualitatively and quantitatively, across all domain-specific applications tested.
Stability of Wood Anatomy of Living and Holocene Thuja occidentalis L. Derived from Exposed and Submerged Portions of the Niagara Escarpment

Abstract Millennium-long tree-ring chronologies have recently been derived fromThuja occidentalis L. growing on the exposed cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment, Canada. Lengthening of these chronologies may be possible by incorporating tree-ring series from subaerially exposed and submerged subfossil wood, provided that its anatomy is not significantly influenced by time or treatment. In order to determine if Holocene-age samples would be suitable for incorporation into very long tree-ring chronologies, a study was undertaken comparing wood structure of living trees, dead trees exposed to the air during the late Holocene, and dead trees submerged since the early Holocene. The results show that the impact of time and environment on wood anatomy is considerably less than expected. The anatomy of annual rings in Holocene trees is similar to that found in modern specimens. High magnification scanning electron micrographs show that tracheid walls lose their rectangular appearance after 8000 yr, but few other signs of deterioration are present. The results mean that Holocene wood can be used to add to the long dendrochronological record that has already been produced from the Niagara Escarpment.
The MediaEval 2013 Affect Task: Violent Scenes Detection

This paper provides a description of the MediaEval 2013 Affect Task Violent Scenes Detection. This task, which is proposed for the third year to the research community, derives directly from a Technicolor use case which aims at easing a user's selection process from a movie database. This task will therefore apply to movie content. We provide some insight into the Technicolor use case, before giving details on the task itself, which has seen some changes in 2013. Dataset, annotations, and evaluation criteria as well as the required and optional runs are described.
The Future Center as an empowering ecology

Purpose – To present a generic empowerment ecology framework to guide the operation of Future Centers and to empower Future Center visitors to respond to the challenges facing them and develop and implement innovative solutions.Design/methodology/approach – An in‐depth case study was conducted in Be'er Sheva PISGA Future Center in the educational sector in Israel. Visits to a further 20 Future Centers around the world and a literature review helped to generalize the key findings and develop and validate the framework further.Findings – Although empowerment is not always explicitly discussed in Future Centers, it is an important underlying philosophy. The framework developed in this research helps to ensure empowerment issues are systematically addressed and contains four perspectives: operating principles; resources; supporters and processes. These combine to form the empowerment ecology.Research limitations/implications – The empowerment ecology framework has been developed from observation predominantly.
BIOINFORMATICS APPLICATIONS NOTE

Summary: The NARWHAL software pipeline has been developed to automate the primary analysis of Illumina sequencing data. This pipeline combines a new and ﬂexible de-multiplexing tool with open-source aligners and automated quality assessment. The entire pipeline can be run using only one simple sample-sheet for diverse sequencing applications. NARWHAL creates a sample-oriented data structure and outperforms existing tools in speed. Availability: https://trac.nbic. nl/narwhal/
Substorm current wedge driven by plasma flow vortices: THEMIS observations

[1] A multipoint analysis of conjugate magnetospheric and ionospheric flow vortices during the formation of the substorm current wedge (SCW) on 19 February 2008 is presented. During the substorm, four Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) spacecraft were located close to the neutral sheet in the premidnight region between 9 and 12 RE geocentric distance, of which three closely (∼1–2 RE) clustered at ∼23 MLT and one was farther west at ∼21 MLT. The closely clustered spacecraft were engulfed by a counterclockwise plasma flow vortex, while the single spacecraft recorded a clockwise plasma flow vortex. Simultaneously, a pair of conjugate flow vortices with clockwise and counterclockwise rotation appeared in the ionosphere, as inferred from equivalent ionospheric currents. The counterclockwise space vortex, which corresponded to a downward field-aligned current, was at least 1–2 RE in diameter and had rotational flow speeds of up to 900 km/s. Current density estimates associated with the formation of the space vortex in the first 30 s yielded 2.8 nA/m2 (14 μA/m2 mapped to the ionosphere), or a total current of 1.1 × 105 A. Model calculations based on midlatitude ground magnetometer data show a gradual increase of the field-aligned current, with 1–2 × 105 A within the first minute and a peak value of 7 × 105 A after 10 min, associated with the SCW, and a matching meridian of the downward current of the SCW and the downward current (counterclockwise) space vortex. The combined ground and space observations, together with the model results, present a scenario in which the space vortices generated the field-aligned current of the SCW at the beginning of the substorm expansion phase and coupled to the ionosphere, causing the ionospheric vortices.
Incoherent scatter measurements of E region conductivities and currents in the auroral zone

Data taken by the incoherent scatter radar facility at Chatanika, Alaska, have been used to investigate ionospheric conductivities and electrical currents. During quiet days the conductivities appear to vary in a way consistent with ionization arising from solar EUV radiation. At these times the ratio between the height-integrated Hall and Pedersen conductivities is close to 2. In the evening hours, enhancements in the northward electric field are found to precede small increases in the conductivities that, from analysis of electron density profiles, arise from precipitation of 3–10×106 el cm−2 s−1 sr−1 in the energy range 3–20 keV. Strong enhancements of the Hall conductivity relative to the Pedersen conductivity occur during negative bays when the electric field is in a southwestward direction. These enhancements are caused by a relatively strong flux of 1–3×107 el cm−2 s−1 sr−1 in the energy range 15–20 keV. The ionospheric currents calculated in the geomagnetic east-west direction are in good agreement with the H component measured by a nearby magnetometer; this result indicates that the current causing the ground level magnetic fluctuations is a broad horizontal sheet current. The north-south ionospheric current, however, consistently disagrees with the observed D component in a manner that cannot easily be explained unless currents parallel to the earth's magnetic field are present. The parallel currents needed in daytime, however, are directed opposite to the Sqp current system, often inferred to explain the quiet day variations in auroral zone magnetograms. Finally, it is found that the neutral wind is of considerable importance in driving currents during quiet days in the auroral zone. Often these wind-driven currents oppose the current driven by the static electric field.
Dynamic Coordinated Email Visualization

Many computer users receive hundreds (if not thousands) of emails per week; users often keep these emails and have many years of personal emails archived: users use their stored emails to manage appointments, to-do lists, and store useful information. In this paper we present an interactive email visualization tool (Mailview) that utilizes filter and coordination techniques to explore this archived data. The tool enables users to analyze and visualize hundreds of stored emails, it displays the emails on time-dependent plots enabling users to observe trends over time and perceive emails with similar features. Interaction is an important aspect of finding meaning within information, hence the tool utilizes focus+context views, dynamic filters, detail-on-demand techniques and coordinated views, finally, we discuss various methods that enable the system to be designed such that it can display hundreds of objects at interactive rates.
A criterion for identifying Asian dust events based on Al concentration data collected from northern Taiwan between 2002 and early 2007

[1] We attempted to identify Asian dust (AD) events between February 2002 and February 2007 in northern Taiwan using aerosol Al measurements. We subsequently used the results to propose a criterion for defining AD events. A total of 30 AD events were detected based on Al spiking concentrations, and these occurred frequently in 2002 and 2006. The dust plumes that were identified occurred between November and April, which were concentrated in February, March, and April. There were 35 dusty days, which accounted for 1.89% of the whole study period, and for 3.75% when considering only November through April. The seasonality of atmospheric Al is quite evident, reaching a maximum in spring and winter and a minimum in summer. This pattern is related to the long-range transport of AD in the northeasterly monsoon and the cease of AD contributions, the efficient removal by heavy rain, and effective mixing in summer. According to air-mass trajectory analysis, the primary dust regions are located in and around the Gobi Desert and Loess Plateau. The geometric mean concentration of the data set excluding the AD cases is 502 ng m−3 with a geometric standard deviation (GSD) of 2.8. On the basis of our success in identifying the major AD events, the “geometric mean ×2 GSD” (i.e., 2800 ng m−3 in our study area) is proposed as a straightforward criterion to define the significant AD event. As such, the statistic-based criterion could be applicable for other areas.
Pattern persistence in European trade Union density

Using annual data on aggregate union membership and density in fourteen European countries, the authors examine the short-term and long-term determinants of the postwar pattern of union growth anddecline in Western Europe since 1950. In an attempt to explain the observed convergence in trends and persistence in cross-national differences, most research has applied either business cycle models, using longitudinal data, or concentrated on political, structural or institutional factors, using cross-sectoral samples. Using a pooled (timeseries - cross-section) regression, in error-corrected form, the authors build and test an explanatory model that incorporates structural,cyclical and institutional determinants of union decline, and allows a distinction between short-term and long-term effects. The results suggest that the convergent trend to union decline during the 1980s and 1990s is entirely endogenous to labor market changes, the impact of which is mediated by a specific and limited set of labor market institutions.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol - HTTP/1.0

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol with the lightness and speed necessary for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. It is a generic, stateless, object-oriented protocol which can be used for many tasks, such as name servers and distributed object management systems, through extension of its request methods (commands). A feature of HTTP is the typing of data representation, allowing systems to be built independently of the data being transferred.
Behavioral Acoustic Emanations: Attack and Verification of PIN Entry Using Keypress Sounds

This paper explores the security vulnerability of Personal Identification Number (PIN) or numeric passwords. Entry Device (PEDs) that use small strings of data (PINs, keys or passwords) as means of verifying the legitimacy of a user. Today, PEDs are commonly used by personnel in different industrial and consumer electronic applications, such as entry at security checkpoints, ATMs and customer kiosks, etc. In this paper, we propose a side-channel attack on a 4–6 digit random PIN key, and a PIN key user verification method. The intervals between two keystrokes are extracted from the acoustic emanation and used as features to train machine-learning models. The attack model has a 60% chance to recover the PIN key. The verification model has an 88% accuracy on identifying the user. Our attack methods can perform key recovery by using the acoustic side-channel at low cost. As a countermeasure, our verification method can improve the security of PIN entry devices.
Decentralized Constraint-Coupled Optimization with Inexact Oracle

We propose an inexact decentralized dual gradient tracking method (iDDGT) for decentralized optimization problems with a globally coupled equality constraint. Unlike existing algorithms that rely on either the exact dual gradient or an inexact one obtained through single-step gradient descent, iDDGT introduces a new approach: utilizing an inexact dual gradient with controllable levels of inexactness. Numerical experiments demonstrate that iDDGT achieves significantly higher computational efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, it is proved that iDDGT can achieve linear convergence over directed graphs without imposing any conditions on the constraint matrix. This expands its applicability beyond existing algorithms that require the constraint matrix to have full row rank and undirected graphs for achieving linear convergence.
Interactive Crop Management in the Community Earth System Model (CESM1): Seasonal Influences on Land–Atmosphere Fluxes

AbstractThe Community Earth System Model, version 1 (CESM1) is evaluated with two coupled atmosphere–land simulations. The CTRL (control) simulation represents crops as unmanaged grasses, while CROP represents a crop managed simulation that includes special algorithms for midlatitude corn, soybean, and cereal phenology and carbon allocation. CROP has a more realistic leaf area index (LAI) for crops than CTRL. CROP reduces winter LAI and represents the spring planting and fall harvest explicitly. At the peak of the growing season, CROP simulates higher crop LAI. These changes generally reduce the latent heat flux but not around peak LAI (late spring/early summer). In midwestern North America, where corn, soybean, and cereal abundance is high, simulated peak summer precipitation declines and agrees better with observations, particularly when crops emerge late as is found from a late planting sensitivity simulation (LateP). Differences between the CROP and LateP simulations underscore the importance of simul.
An Early Carboniferous seep community and hydrocarbon-derived carbonates from the Harz Mountains, Germany

Early Carboniferous (latest Visean) seep deposits occur on top of the drowned Middle Devonian–Late Devonian Iberg atoll reef, Harz Mountains, Germany. These deposits include limestone with a low-diversity but high-abundance fauna of rhynchonellid brachiopods and rare solemyid bivalves, as well as microbial limestone. Rhynchonellids form dense, autochthonous shell accumulations and are generally articulated. They are closely associated with hydrocarbon-derived carbonates. The carbonates exhibit δ 13 C values as low as −32‰, relative to the Peedee belemnite standard, revealing that they are predominantly hydrocarbon derived. The fauna, carbonate fabrics, and isotope signatures provide unequivocal evidence for a seep origin of the Visean deposit. The occurrence of solemyid bivalves supports this interpretation as members of this family (1) are well known for their relationship with chemoautotrophic bacteria and (2) have been reported from ancient and modern seeps. Possible hydrocarbon sources are thermogenic methane derived from the volcanic base of the Iberg reef or methane from a petroleum reservoir.
Demonstration of a framework for enabling security services collaboration across multiple domains

Network virtualization technologies are creating a new era for information security, enabling the on demand creation and deployment of security appliances (generically called security service functions – SSF) for detecting and/or mitigating attacks. However, given the increasing size and complexity of contemporary attacks, it is usually hard for a single administrative domain to deal with several malicious flows by itself, which motivates the collaboration among SSFs from multiple domains. In this paper, we present a technical demonstration of a framework that leverages SDN (Software Defined Networking) and SFC (Service Function Chaining) to enhance the collaboration among different SSFs for mitigating large scale attacks. This framework allows SSFs from different domains to negotiate and dynamically control the amount of resources allocated for collaboration, in what we call a “best-effort” collaboration mode. The demonstration hereby presented consists in a video streaming service that is targeted by a volumetric denial-of-service attack, showing basically two situations: (1) after the attack reaches a certain volume, the SSF from the streaming service's domain becomes unable to handle the attack on its own, so packets are dropped and the video quality decreases; and (2) when there is a collaboration among SSFs, the amount of traffic dropped is considerably reduced, so the video quality is preserved even during the attack.
Review of boolean functions: theory, algorithms, and applications by Yves Crama and Peter L. Hammer

“[. ] any system of propositions may be expressed by equations involving symbols x,y,z, which, whenever interpretation is possible, are subject to laws identical in form with the laws of a system of quantitative symbols, susceptible only of the values 0 and 1. But as the formal processes of reasoning depend only upon the laws of the symbols, and not upon the nature of their interpretation, we are permitted to treat the above symbols, x, y, z, as if they were quantitative symbols of the kind above described. We may in fact lay aside the logical interpretation of the symbols in the given equation; convert them into quantitative symbols, susceptible only of the values 0 and 1; perform upon them as such all the requisite processes of solution; and finally restore to them their logical interpretation. And this is the mode of procedure which will actually be adopted [. ]—George Boole [1, Chapter V.6]. ”