Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
E-cclesia: Universally Composable Self-Tallying Elections

The technological advancements of the digital era paved the way for the facilitation of electronic voting (e-voting) in the promise of efficiency and enhanced security. In standard e-voting designs, the tally process is assigned to a committee of designated entities called talliers. Naturally, the security analysis of any e-voting system with tallier designation hinges on the assumption that a subset of the talliers follows the execution guidelines and does not attempt to breach privacy. As an alternative approach, Kiayias and Yung [PKC ’02] pioneered the self-tallying elections (STE) paradigm, where the post-ballot-casting (tally) phase can be performed by any interested party, removing the need for tallier designation. In this work, we explore the prospect of decentralized e-voting where security is preserved under concurrent protocol executions. In particular, we provide the first comprehensive formalization of STE in the universal composability (UC) framework introduced by Canetti [FOCS ’01] via an ideal functionality that captures required security properties such as voter privacy, eligibility, fairness, one-voter one-vote, and verifiability. We provide a concrete instantiation, called E-cclesia , that UC realizes our functionality. The design of E-cclesia integrates several cryptographic primitives such as signatures of knowledge for anonymous eligibility check, dynamic accumulators for scalability, time-lock encryption for fairness and anonymous broadcast channels for voter privacy. For the latter primitive, we provide the first UC formalization along with a construction based on mix-nets that utilises layered encryption, threshold secret sharing and equivocation techniques. Finally, we discuss deployment and scalability considerations for E-cclesia . We present preliminary benchmarks of the key operations (in terms of computational cost) of the voting client and demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal with readily available cryptographic tools for mid-sized elections (∼100,000 voters).
Real-world driving cycles for measuring cars pollutant emissions - Part A: The ARTEMIS European driving cycles

In the frame of the ARTEMIS European research project, a compilation and synthesis of previous works has been considered to derive a set of reference real-world driving cycles. These driving cycles should be used in the frame of the multiples campaigns of pollutant emission measurements, ensuring then the compatibility and integration of all the resulting emission data in the European systems of emission inventory. The available data regarding driving conditions and the various methodological approaches have been examined, discussed, compared and improved, to ensure and validate the representativity of the database and driving cycles. Specific steps have also been implemented. Three real-world driving cycles (urban, rural road and motorway) have been built-up to be representative of the actual conditions of vehicle usage and driving and to reproduce the diversity of the observed driving conditions. A structure in sub-cycles should enable a disaggregation of the emissions according to more specific driving conditions (congested and free-flow urban, etc.). Starting conditions and gearbox use are also taken into account. Such driving cycles present a real advantage as they are derived from a large database, using a methodology that was widely discussed and approved. They are probably the results of the most advanced works in that area. This report includes a second part dedicated to the construction of 2 sets of specific driving cycles, using the same principles and data, but build-up as a function of the technical characteristics of the vehicles, i.e. for low- and high-motorized vehicles.
Automatic Discovery Approach of Digital Image Topic

A topic discovery approach of the image has been proposed. First, the training images are segmented into some blocks. After clustering blocks, we obtained class set generated by cluster centers, and extracted all nouns from text annotation of each training image to obtain a keyword set. Secondly, the un-label testing image is also segmented into some blocks as same as training images, we calculated the correlation between the block and keyword, and the keyword set for each block may be obtained. Finally, the number of the same keyword appearing in the each block is calculated, we let the keywords with maximum to appear times be as the topics of the image. The experimental results confirm that proposed approach for the image is effectiveness and has good performance.
Shear Modulus Dispersion in Cracked and Fluid‐Saturated Quartzites: Experimental Observations and Modeling

The effect of pore fluids on acoustic wave dispersion in rocks with low aspect ratio crack porosity is important for the interpretation of laboratory and field observations in hard rock mineral exploration environments. Here we make laboratory measurements of shear modulus dispersion at frequencies 0.01–1 Hz and at 1 MHz with different saturating fluids (dry, argon, and water saturated) in two thermally cracked quartzite samples with ~2% total porosity. Measurements are made across a range of effective pressures (10–150 MPa), with the resulting very low permeabilities of the samples varying from 1–300 × 10−21 m2. Moduli across the 0.01–1 Hz band were typically independent of frequency. The shear moduli measured at sub‐Hz frequencies are unaffected by fluid saturation, as expected for the saturated isobaric (Gassmann) regime. In marked contrast, water saturation of the cracked rocks results in very large increases in the shear moduli measured at 1 MHz and low effective pressures, indicative of saturated isolated conditions. Thus, at an effective pressure of 20 MPa, the shear moduli for the two water‐saturated quartzites increase by 74% and 98% from 1 Hz to 1 MHz. The contrast in elastic moduli between dry and water‐saturated conditions is well represented by the theoretical model developed by Walsh and others. The observed dispersion highlights the need for care in seismological application of results obtained at MHz frequencies from laboratory ultrasonic measurements.
BENEFITS OF A TANGIBLE INTERFACE FOR COLLABORATIVE LEARNING AND INTERACTION

2 Table of contents . 3 Introduction . 5 Context: The Dual-t Project . 8 The Tinker Table . 9 What exactly is a Tangible User Interface? 11 How an Augmented Reality can be useful . 14 Theoretical context: what does tangibility bring? 16 The role of MER (multiple external representations) . 17 Collaboration. 20 Exploration . 22 Cognition and metacognition . 23 Playfulness . 24 Other empirical studies . 24 Summary . 25 Hypotheses . 26 Operational hypothesis . 29 Method . 30 Design-based research . 30 Population . 30 Procedure . 31 Material . 32
Experiencing Uncertainty: Lived Experience of Having Cancer among Patients in Vhembe District of Limpopo, South Africa

Abstract The purpose of this study was to explore and describe the experiences of patients diagnosed with cancer in Vhembe district, Limpopo Province. A qualitative, exploratory, descriptive and phenomenological design was used. A purposive theoretical sample of patients who were diagnosed with different cancers within 2-5 years in a regional hospital in Vhembe district of Limpopo Province was obtained. Data was collected through in-depth interviews with participants who were in remission phase or undergoing treatment and. data saturation occurred after in-depth interviews with eight participants. Field notes were also used during data collection to capture nonverbal communication from participants. The findings revealed that cancer patients experienced a sense of uncertainty, withdrawal and isolation, lack of proper communication and attitudes and adjusting to the existential body changes. Recommendations that are described focused on understanding what it is like to have cancer and filling the gaps of patient’s expectations and addressing emotional and physical needs.
Hardware/software codesign of on-chip communication architecture for application-specific multiprocessor system-on-chip

System-on-chip (SoC) is developing as a new paradigm in electronic system design. This allows an entire hardware/software system to be built on a single chip, using predesigned components. This paper examines the achievements and future of novel approach and flow for an efficient design of application-specific multiprocessor system-on-chip (called GAM-SoC). The approach is based on a generic architecture model, which is used as a template throughout the design process. The key characteristics of this model are its great modularity, flexibility and scalability, which make it reusable for a large class of applications. In the flow, architectural parameters are first extracted from a high-level system specification and then used to instantiate architectural components, such as processors, memory modules, IP-hardware blocks and on-chip communication networks. The flow includes the generation of hardware/software wrappers that adapts the processor to the on-chip communication network in an application-specific way. The feasibility and effectiveness of this approach are illustrated by significant demonstration examples.
Human-Related Ignitions Increase the Number of Large Wildfires across U.S. Ecoregions

Large fires account for the majority of burned area and are an important focus of fire management. However, ‘large’ is typically defined by a fire size threshold, minimizing the importance of proportionally large fires in less fire-prone ecoregions. Here, we defined ‘large fires’ as the largest 10% of wildfires by ecoregion (n = 175,222 wildfires from 1992 to 2015) across the United States (U.S.). Across ecoregions, we compared fire size, seasonality, and environmental conditions (e.g., wind speed, fuel moisture, biomass, vegetation type) of large human- and lighting-started fires that required a suppression response. Mean large fire size varied by three orders of magnitude: from 1 to 10 ha in the Northeast vs. >1000 ha in the West. Humans ignited four times as many large fires as lightning, and were the dominant source of large fires in the eastern and western U.S. (starting 92% and 65% of fires, respectively). Humans started 80,896 large fires in seasons when lightning-ignited fires were rare. Large human-started fires occurred in locations and months of significantly higher fuel moisture and wind speed than large lightning-started fires. National-scale fire policy should consider risks to ecosystems and economies by these proportionally large fires and include human drivers in large fire risk assessment.
Tech United Eindhoven RoboCup Adult Size Humanoid Team Description 2013

This document presents the 2013 Tech United Eindhoven adult size humanoid robot team from The Netherlands. In this descrip- tion paper we present the model, parameter estimation and simulator of our humanoid robot TUlip. We introduce the walking gait and contribute a feedback controller with feedforward dynamics compensation and it- erative learning control. We describe the vision system, localization and world model, which are used during the humanoid robot soccer games at the RoboCup 2013 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Finally, we contribute a new simulator of TUlip including a RoboCup scenario implemented as Robot Operating System (ROS) package in Gazebo.
Statistical Challenges with High Dimensionality: Feature Selection in Knowledge Discovery

Separate wall plates disposed perpendicularly to one another and with a seal between the abutting surfaces of the wall plates, form the mold cavity in a continuous casting mold. Each wall plate has a device for oscillating it in the radial direction of the mold cavity and another device for oscillating it in the plane of its contacting surface with the casting passing through the mold cavity. The wall plates are enclosed by a frame with abutment strips extending between the frame and the outer surface of the plates. Further, elastic elements are articulated to and extend between the wall plates and the frame. The elastic elements are adjustable for adapting to the tapering action of the casting as it moves through the mold.
Construction and Fabrication of Reversible Shape Transforms

construction. Furthermore, we add properly designed hinges and connectors to the shape pieces and fabricate them using a 3D printer so that they can be played as an assembly puzzle. With many interesting and fun RIOT pairs constructed from shapes found online, we demonstrate that our method significantly expands the range of shapes to be considered for RIOT, a seemingly impossible shape transform, and offers a practical way to construct and physically realize these transforms.
Regeneração natural do componente arbustivo-arbóreo e atributos do solo em áreas com diferentes altitudes no semiárido

Entender o que impulsiona essa heterogeneidade em uma microescala na fisionomia florestal e fundamental para prever como as florestas responderao as mudancas ambientais globais, bem como desenvolver estrategias de conservacao e manejo que maximizem os beneficios da biodiversidade. O objetivo dessa pesquisa foi caracterizar o estrato regenerante de comunidades arbutivas-arboreas, associando as condicoes ambientais a niveis de solo e gradiente topografico. Considerando a regiao do Araripe como uma paisagem estratificada em tres ambientes: Baixada (altitudes ≤ 600 m), Encosta (600 > a ≤ 750 m) e Chapada altitudes acima de 750 m. Para cada ambiente foram amostradas nove areas (B1, B2, B3, E1, E2, E3, C1, C2 e C3) com 20 parcelas de 5 x 10 m para mensuracao da regeneracao natural. Foram feitas analises dos atributos quimicos do solo das nove areas e a analise canonica para discriminar quais as variaveis mais contribuiram para a variância das especies, e que percentagem desta variância e explicada pelas variaveis ambientais. Na floristica das nove areas foram inventariados 4.974 individuos regenerantes, desses, 1.433 na Baixada, 1.303 na Encosta e 2.217 na Chapada, estes pertencentes a 131 especies botânicas. As areas estratificadas nos ambientes de Baixada, Encosta e Chapada representam uma variabilidade floristica e estrutural de fitofisionomias vegetais caracteristicas de florestas secas ou sazonalmente secas inseridas no semiarido Pernambucano com alta riqueza de especies arbustiva-arborea da regeneracao natural dessas comunidades. A regiao possui uma variabilidade de ambientes com caracteristicas microclimaticas distintas e que seguem um gradiente de altitude. As areas de Baixada possuem solos rasos, mais ferteis e com tipologias de vegetacao xerofila. Nas areas de Encosta, solos mais arenosos e baixa fertilidade, com vegetacao mais arbustiva de pequeno porte e com baixa diversidade e densidade. E por fim, na Chapada, ha uma variacao microclimatica maior, com areas mais umidas e variacao de vegetacao xerofila e de floresta estacional.
THE VALUE RELEVANCE OF ANNOUNCEMENTS OF TRANSFORMATIONAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INVESTMENTS 1

The value relevance of announcements of transformational information technology investments. " Mis Quarterly (2003): 637-656. Abstract In this paper, we examine the influence of IT strategic role to extend the findings of Im et al. Specifically, we demonstrate that IT strategic role can explain how IT investments in each of the IT strategic roles might affect the firm's competitive position and ultimately firm value. We find positive, abnormal returns to announcements ofl Tinvestments by firms making transformative IT investments, and with membership in industries with transform IT strategic roles. The results of previous research are not found to be significant when IT strategic role is included as an explanatory variable. These results provide support for the value of capturing the IT strategic role of a firm's IT-related competitive maneuvering in studies striving to understand the conditions under which IT investments are likely to produce out-of-the-ordinary, positive returns.
E cient Algorithms for Petersen ' s Matching

Petersen's theorem is a classic result in matching theory from 1891, stating that every 3-regular bridgeless graph has a perfect matching. Our work explores eecient algorithms for nding perfect matchings in such graphs. Previously, the only relevant matching algorithms were for general graphs, and the fastest algorithm ran in O(n 3=2) time. We have developed an O(n log 4 n)-time algorithm for matching in a 3-regular bridgeless graph. When the graph is also planar, we have as the main result of our paper an optimal O(n)-time algorithm. We present three applications of this result, terrain guarding , adaptive mesh reenement, and quadrangulation.
A refined performance characterization of longest-queue-first policy in wireless networks

One of the major challenges in wireless networking is how to optimize the link scheduling decisions under interference constraints. Recently, a few algorithms have been introduced to address the problem. However, solving the problem to optimality for general wireless interference models is known to be NP-hard. The research community is currently focusing on finding simpler, sub-optimal scheduling algorithms and on characterizing the algorithm performance. In this paper, we address the performance of a specific scheduling policy called Longest Queue First (LQF), which has gained significant recognition lately due to its simplicity and high efficiency in empirical studies. There has been a sequence of studies characterizing the guaranteed performance of the LQF schedule, culminating at the construction of the σ-local pooling concept by Joo et al. [10]. In this paper, we refine the notion of σ-local pooling and use the refinement to capture a larger region of guaranteed performance.
Traffic distribution over equal-cost-multi-paths

To effectively manage the traffic distribution inside a network, traffic splitting is needed for load sharing over a set of equal-cost-multi-paths (ECMPs). In this paper, a new traffic splitting algorithm, called Table-based Hashing with Reassignments (THR), is proposed. Based on the load sharing statistics collected, THR selectively reassigns some active flows from the over-utilized paths to under-utilized paths. The reassignment process takes place in such a way that the packet out-of-order problem is minimized. As compared with the existing traffic splitting algorithms, THR provides close-to-optimal load balancing performance, less than 2% of packets arrived out-of- order, and a very small end-to-end packet delay performance. Although additional traffic monitoring function is needed by THR, we show that the extra complexity incurred is marginal.
ODU Digital Commons ODU Digital Commons

People with low vision who use screen magnifiers to interact with computing devices find it very challenging to interact with dynamically changing digital content such as videos, since they do not have the luxury of time to manually move, i.e., pan the magnifier lens to different regions of interest (ROIs) or zoom into these ROIs before the content changes across frames. In this paper, we present SViM, a first of its kind screen-magnifier interface for such users that leverages advances in computer vision, particularly video saliency models, to identify salient ROIs in videos. SViM’s interface allows users to zoom in/out of any point of interest, switch between ROIs via mouse clicks and provides assistive panning with the added flexibility that lets the user explore other regions of the video besides the ROIs identified by SViM. Subjective and objective evaluation of a user study with 13 low vision screen magnifier users revealed that overall the participants had a better user experience with SViM over extant screen magnifiers, indicative of the former’s promise and potential for making videos accessible to low vision screen magnifier users.
A hidden markov model-based approach for face detection and recognition

The use of hidden Markov models (HMM) for faces is motivated by their partial invariance to variations in scaling and by the structure of faces. The most significant facial features of a frontal face include the hair, forehead, eyes, nose and mouth. These features occur in a natural order, from top to bottom, even if the images undergo small rotations in the image plane, and/or rotations in the plane perpendicular to the image plane. Therefore, the image of a face may be modeled using a one-dimensional HMM by assigning each of these regions to a state. The observation vectors are obtained from the DCT or KLT coefficients. A one-dimensional HMM may be generalized, to give it the appearance of a two-dimensional structure, by allowing each state in a one-dimensional HMM to be a HMM. In this way, the HMM consists of a set of super states, along with a set of embedded states. Therefore, this is referred to as an embedded HMM. The super states may then be used to model two-dimensional data along one direction, with the embedded HMM modeling the data along the other direction. Both the standard HMM and the embedded HMM were tested for face recognition and detection. Compared to other methods, our proposed system offers a more flexible framework for face recognition and detection, and can be used more efficiently in scale invariant systems.
POSTER: Evaluating Privacy Metrics for Graph Anonymization and De-anonymization

Many modern communication systems generate graph data, for example social networks and email networks. Such graph data can be used for recommender systems and data mining. However, because graph data contains sensitive information about individuals, sharing or publishing graph data may pose privacy risks. To protect graph privacy, data anonymization has been proposed to prevent individual users in a graph from being identified by adversaries. The effectiveness of both anonymization and de-anonymization techniques is usually evaluated using the adversary’s success rate. However, the success rate does not measure privacy for individual users in a graph because it is an aggregate per-graph metric. In addition, it is unclear whether the success rate is monotonic, i.e. whether it indicates higher privacy for weaker adversaries, and lower privacy for stronger adversaries. To address these gaps, we propose a methodology to systematically evaluate the monotonicity of graph privacy metrics, and present preliminary results for the monotonicity of 25 graph privacy metrics. ACM Reference Format: Yuchen Zhao and Isabel Wagner. 2018. POSTER: Evaluating Privacy Metrics for Graph Anonymization and De-anonymization. In ASIA CCS ’18: 2018 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, June 4– 8, 2018, Incheon, Republic of Korea. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3196494.3201586
“Let Everything Turn Well in Your Wife”: Generation of Adult Humor Using Lexical Constraints

We propose a method for automated generation of adult humor by lexical replacement and present empirical evaluation results of the obtained humor. We propose three types of lexical constraints as building blocks of humorous word substitution: constraints concerning the similarity of sounds or spellings of the original word and the substitute, a constraint requiring the substitute to be a taboo word, and constraints concerning the position and context of the replacement. Empirical evidence from extensive user studies indicates that these constraints can increase the effectiveness of humor generation significantly.