Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Depending on HTTP/2 for Privacy? Good Luck!

HTTP/2 introduced multi-threaded server operation for performance improvement over HTTP/1.1. Recent works have discovered that multi-threaded operation results in multiplexed object transmission, that can also have an unanticipated positive effect on TLS/SSL privacy. In fact, these works go on to design privacy schemes that rely heavily on multiplexing to obfuscate the sizes of the objects based on which the attackers inferred sensitive information. Orthogonal to these works, we examine if the privacy offered by such schemes work in practice. In this work, we show that it is possible for a network adversary with modest capabilities to completely break the privacy offered by the schemes that leverage HTTP/2 multiplexing. Our adversary works based on the following intuition: restricting only one HTTP/2 object to be in the server queue at any point of time will eliminate multiplexing of that object and any privacy benefit thereof. In our scheme, we begin by studying if (1) packet delays, (2) network jitter, (3) bandwidth limitation, and (4) targeted packet drops have an impact on the number of HTTP/2 objects processed by the server at an instant of time. Based on these insights, we design our adversary that forces the server to serialize object transmissions, thereby completing the attack. Our adversary was able to break the privacy of a real-world HTTP/2 website 90% of the time, the code for which will be released. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first privacy attack on HTTP/2.
Teaching Through Mobile Technology

The use of mobile technology to support teaching and learning in schools, has extended technology learning tools in schools across different socio economic divides. There have been various studies throughout the world which reflect the improvement of such technology in schools. In this chapter we reflect on a series of studies conducted in developing countries with focus on Jantjies and Joy (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015) studies. The studies were conducted in schools with the objective of providing teachers and learners with multilingual mobile learning content specifically designed to support teaching and learning in their science and mathematics classrooms and beyond. This chapter provides a culmination of lessons learnt from all studies reflecting on the journey of mobile learning in schools across South Africa. The use of mobile technology to support teaching and learning in schools, has extended technology learning tools in schools across different socio economic divides. There have been various studies throughout the world which reflect the improvement of such technology in schools. In this chapter we reflect on a series of studies conducted in developing countries. The studies were conducted in schools with the objective of providing teachers and learners with multilingual mobile learning content specifically designed to support teaching and learning in their science and mathematics classrooms and beyond. This chapter provides a culmination of lessons learnt from all studies reflecting on the journey of mobile learning in schools across South Africa.
Designing Seamless Learning Using Role-Playing Experiences

This chapter examines seamless learning in the context of three case studies that incorporate role-play as a pedagogical approach to integrate contextually aware learning from the formal classroom to informal spaces both face-to face and online. The research question explored is whether role-playing design in seamless mobile learning can cultivate the learners' intrinsic motivation to engage with the course and collaborate with others. In all three case studies, a variety of technologies, such as web 2.0 and mobile devices, were employed to offer learners a seamless learning experience. The studies revealed that majority of the learners were more invested and engaged in the course experience by participating in technology-mediated role-playing activities. We conclude that role-playing should be part of the seamless learning approach, since role-playing can mediate learners' access to different knowledge areas through various perspectives, just as technology can serve as mediators in the seamless learning paradigm.
Self-Attention based Temporal Intrinsic Reward for Reinforcement Learning

This paper proposes a self-attention based temporal intrinsic reward model for reinforcement learning (RL), to synthesize the control policy for the agent constrained by the sparse reward in partially observable environments. This approach can solve the problem of temporal credit assignment to some extent and deal with the low efficiency of exploration. We first introduce a sequence-based self-attention mechanism to generate the temporary features, which can effectively capture the temporal property of the task for the agent. During the training process, the temporary features are employed in each sampled episode to elaborate the intrinsic rewards, which is combined with the extrinsic reward to help the agent learn a feasible policy. Then we use the meta-gradient to update this intrinsic reward model in order that the agent can achieve better performance. Experiments are given to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.
Authorship Characterization

A problem of authorship characterization is to determine the sociolinguistic characteristics of the potential author of a given anonymous text message. Unlike the problems of authorship attribution, where the potential suspects and their training samples are accessible for investigation, no candidate list of suspects is available in authorship characterization. Instead, the investigator is given one or more anonymous documents and is asked to identify the sociolinguistic characteristics of the potential author of the documents in question. Sociolinguistic characteristics include ethnicity, age, gender, level of education, and religion [153].
Anti-Swing and Position Control of Single Wheeled Inverted Pendulum Robot (SWIPR)

This article presents a fuzzy logic based offline control strategy for the stabilisation of a single-wheeled inverted pendulum robot (SWIPR). A SWIPR comprises of robot chassis mounted on a single wheel. A Matlab-Simulink model of the system has been built from mathematical equations derived using Newton's second law of motion. The study considers three different shape membership functions (MFs) i.e. gaussian, gbell and trapezoidal for designing of fuzzy logic controllers (FLCs). The performance parameters considered for comparison of controllers were rising time, settling time, steady state error and maximum overshoot. The simulation results proved the superiority of gbell MFs over other MFs.
ML-Stealer: Stealing Prediction Functionality of Machine Learning Models with Mere Black-Box Access

Machine Learning (ML) models are progressively deployed in many real-world applications to perform a wide range of tasks, but are exposed to the security and privacy threats which aim to infer the details and even steal the functionality of the ML models. Despite extensive attacking efforts which rely on white-box or gray-box access, how to perform attacks with black-box access continues to be elusive. Aspiring to fill this gap, we move one step further and present ML-Stealer that can steal the functionality of any type of ML models with mere black-box access. With two algorithm designs, namely, synthetic data generation and replica model construction, ML-Stealer can construct a deep neural network (DNN)-based replica model which has the similar prediction functionality to the victim ML model. ML-Stealer does not require any knowledge about the victim model, nor does it enforce the access to statistical information or samples of the victim's training data. Experiment results demonstrate that ML-Stealer can achieve the consistent prediction results with the victim model of an averaged testing accuracy of 85.6%, and up to 93.6% at best.
The Role of Value Facilitation Regarding Cloud Service Provider Profitability in the Cloud Ecosystem

With the increasing maturity of cloud technologies and the growing demand from customers, the cloud computing ecosystem has been expanding continuously with both incumbents and new entrants, whereby it has become more distributed and less transparent. For cloud service providers previously focusing on growth strategies, it is now necessary to shift the attention to providing service efficiently, as well as profitably. Based on 14 explorative interviews with cloud service experts, the relationship between cloud service provider profitability and value facilitation, which stands for the capability to build up resources in advance of future customer engagements, is investigated. The results indicate a positive relationship between cloud service profitability and value facilitation and deliver valuable insights for both researchers and practitioners. In particular, guidelines on how to design profitable cloud service offerings are discussed.
No Silver Bullet Reloaded

At XP2017 in Köln, a panel was convened to discuss the classic 1987 IEEE Software paper by Frederick P. Brooks, "No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents in Software Engineering." The ideas presented in his paper have influenced several generations of software developers. Brooks emphasized the notions of essential complexity and accidental complexity, and he offered suggestions for promising approaches to software development. While his approaches are linked to what we now recognize as "agile practices," panelists offered an implicit caveat that they must be done with discipline to avoid increased accidental complexity. Panelists also observed that agile development itself is not a "silver bullet".
Spamex: A Multi Array Methodology to Detect Computerized Spammers in Twitter social media

The Twitter interpersonal organizations give an approach to clients to keep up contact with others. Expanding of the informal organization's quality allows every one of them to accumulate monstrous measures of nonpublic information with respect to their clients. Tragically, this data riches just as its straightforwardness to get to clients' data could draw in malevolent gathering's consideration. That is the reason these systems have been attacked by spammers while, there have been a great deal of work to analyze and fix them. With reference to this issue spammers look for new ways that to concentrate on these systems every day, there have being nonstop activities to distinguish spammers and malignant email. The point of this paper is to take a gander at past works inside the field of spam identification in informal communities. In late time, on-line interpersonal organizations are loaded with differed undesirable dangers. Despite the fact that they gave us an open stage to impart our contemplations to other people, notwithstanding, because of abuse of this incredible asset, general clients are in jeopardized condition. For instance, YouTube has been utilized as a limited time ground by different craftsman to transfer their music recordings, film trailers, and so on and watchers can post their supposition on them. Tragically, regularly malevolent clients use to post phishing site connections, promotions, and deceitful data in the remarks segment, which may transmit infections or malwares.
MVGNet: 3D object detection using Multi-Volume Grid representation in urban traffic scenarios

Recent advances in 3D object detection focus on combining multiple 3D data representations in order to leverage each 3D representation. However, this opens a new issue: increased need for hardware memory and computational resources which are unfortunately limited.In this paper we explore a new 3D data representation, the Multi-Volume Grid representation for detecting 3D objects in traffic scenes. The MVG structure efficiently maps free and occupied space from complex environments, where hanging and protruding objects are present. In order to integrate the MVG structure, we design MVGNet, a multi-branch network. We capture the essence of the MVG’s dynamic sized pillar structures by proposing two new input point descriptors and by using simple yet efficient spatial and channel based attention mechanisms throughout our network. We evaluate our method on KITTI dataset on three classes: pedestrian, cyclist, car. Our method achieves state of the art results with a significant improvement for the pedestrian and cyclist classes.
Exploratory Analysis in Information Systems Area

Providing an overview of grounded theory (GT)'s approaches to information systems (IS) research to IS researchers who are now interested in applying GT is the goal of the chapter. Also, research contributions about the application of GT in IS, qualitative perspectives on IS research, the types of GT approaches used in IS research, and the GT study guidelines in IS are presented in this chapter. Examples of GT in IS research, which provide a description of the methodology and references to more detailed presentations, are also included, especially from the field of software engineering and system development. It should be noted that using the GT methodology is time consuming and requires high accuracy, and it starts with a phenomenon that the researcher finds is not well explained by existing theories. In such research, data sampling should provide a broad, in-depth, and pluralist view of the phenomenon under study, and a literature review on the phenomenon should be provided.
Enabling Pointing Assistance in Adaptive Interfaces Using Mouse Pointing Intention Prediction

Understanding pointing intention and providing corresponding support when the user performs pointing tasks are helpful to enhance the input efficiency of graphical user interfaces and improve the experience of user-machine interaction. Existing solutions include pointing facilitation techniques and adaptive interfaces may become impractical because they do not reliably predict mouse click intention well. This paper proposes a new method to enable pointing assistance in adaptive interfaces by predicting mouse pointing intention based on mouse movements. We model the mouse movement trajectory as a multivariate time series and adopt sequence learning models to predict the intended pointing target in real-time. The pointing areas in the adaptive interfaces will make adaptive changes when the number of prediction results in the possible targets queue reaches the set threshold. Analyses and evaluations were conducted using data from 10 subjects through our built prototype system. Experiments indicate that our method was able to predict the target within 600 milliseconds before completing the pointing task with an accuracy of over 90%. Participants felt that the adaptive system could bring convenience when performing pointing tasks without high adaptation costs.
The World is Polluted With Leaked Cyber Data

Data breaches are becoming more common and numerous every day, where huge amount of data (corporate and personal) are leaked more frequently than ever. Corporate responses to data breaches are insufficient, when commonly remediation is minimal. This research proposes that a similar approach to physical pollution (environmental pollution) can be used to map and identify data leaks as Cyber pollution. Thus, IT institutions should be made aware of their contribution to Cyber pollution in a more measurable method. This article defines the concept of cyber pollution as: security vulnerable (such as unmaintained or obsolete) devices that are visible through the Internet and corporate networks. This paper analyses the recent state of data breach disclosures Worldwide by providing statistics on significant scale data breach disclosures from 2014/01 to 2016/12. Ivan Burke and Renier van Heerden model security threat levels similar to that of pollution breaches within the physical environment. Insignificant security openings or vulnerabilities can lead to massive exploitation of entire systems. By modelling these breaches as pollution, the aim is to introduce the concept of cyber pollution. Cyber pollution is a more tangible concept for IT managers to relay to staff and senior management. Using anonymised corporate network traffic with Open Source penetration testing software, the model is validated.
Surveillance Alarm Making

Surveillance systems are monitoring human behaviors (walking, running, jumping, etc.) as well as natural disasters of this world (wide fire, flooding, tsunami, earthquake on earth, etc.) for the sake of safety and security. Correspondingly, alarming of surveillance systems should be set at everywhere in any time. Particularly, well-designed algorithms will trigger alarms and reduce the annoying false alarms. In this chapter, we will critically review and justify surveillance alarming algorithms using decision-making approaches so as to save security staff’s workload.
New Experimentalism

This book has argued that the heart of constructive design research is usually a design experiment; it is a key vehicle of knowledge creation. In this chapter we study design experiments through a fairly recent philosophical debate that has been targeted against the theory-centric view of research. It is called ‘new experimentalism,’ which argues that experiments often create knowledge regardless of theory. Following new experimentalism, the hypothesis we explore in this chapter is that design experiments generate knowledge, but also that there are several kinds of experimental protocols in constructive design research.
Crisis Response and Management

Information technology is critically dependent on a number of technological and human factors. Software engineering processes are multi-sided; they include customer and developer parties. Conceptual misunderstanding by either party often results in the products which do not meet customer's expectations. This misconception of the software product scope usually leads to a crisis of software product delivery. To adequately manage and efficiently respond to this crisis, the authors recommend using software engineering models, methods, techniques, practices, and tools. Software engineering is a discipline which started in the 1960s as a response to the so-called “software crisis”; it combines technical and human-related skills. To manage the crisis, the authors suggest architecture patterns and instantiate them by implementation examples.
Research and application of smart traceability online service platform through internet of things and blockchain technology

Aiming at the situation that the timeliness and information abundance of the traditional agricultural "post-tracing" system cannot meet the needs of consumers, this article takes the high mountain bayberry products in Wencheng County, Wenzhou City as the research object, and builds a bayberry traceability service platform. Use the "Internet +" thinking to realize a complete set of traceability and supervision mechanisms such as pre-risk assessment and warning for the quality and safety of alpine bayberry products, all-round supervision during the entire process, and crisis handling after the incident. The research results show that the system has good effects in terms of storage protection, supervision, transaction reliability, and the interaction between various links in the supply chain.
The role of the media in solving the adaptation problems of foreign students to the conditions of a Russian higher educational institution

The article highlights the issues related to the problems of adaptation of foreign students to cultural norms and values cultivated in Russia. As one of the alternatives for overcoming adaptation problems, the authors suggested using the media. Based on the results of a questionnaire survey conducted with a study group of foreign students from the Ulyanovsk State Pedagogical University named after I. N. Ulyanov, the main adaptation problems are described, and the role of the media in their solution is indicated. In the process of researching the topic, the authors of the article came to the conclusion that the impact of media institutions on the foreign students’ problems of adaptation contributes to their resolution.
Nginx-Based Combined Dynamic and Static Load Balancing Algorithm Research

To solve the problem that traditional Web cluster load balancing algorithm processes low efficiency under low network load and uneven load distribution under high load, based on the analysis of several common load balancing algorithm and combined with their advantages and disadvantages, a new load balancing algorithm which combines dynamic and static status was presented. In this algorithm, the threshold calculated by simulated annealing algorithm was used as interval partition. In the meanwhile, a static weighted polling algorithm under the base of the weight of each load index such as the performance of CPU, Memory, Disk IO and network bandwidth and a dynamic weight adjusted algorithm which collected real-time load information according to feedback from each server node were accepted. And through the comparative experiments of several algorithms, it is verified that the new algorithm proposed in this paper processes more reasonable load balancing, which has more advantages in the average response time and the actual number of concurrent. All in all, it meets the design requirements.
Introduction

This chapter starts describing the motivation of the thesis, that aims to provide useful tools/algorithms for target search missions performed by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with the purpose of reducing operators workload. Next, it describes the main objectives of the thesis and how they are approached. Finally, the main contributions are listed and the thesis structure outlined.
Visualization

Presenting conclusions with the help of a graph can greatly improve your communication and convincing skills. R is a proficient tool for data visualization and in this chapter we explore some of the most well known plotting packages. First, with the R base graphics one can elaborate most of the fundamental graph styles with great level of customization. This package is commonly used to produce explanatory graphs, being a valuable help to visualize the properties of a dataset. Second, the widely used ggplot2 package can be used to produce highly aesthetic graphs with ease. This exceptional tool processes input data into a final plot which displays new conclusions in an understandable fashion. Finally, and for an extra domain on data visualization, the packages plotly and leaflet, specialized in the construction of interactive plots and maps respectively, are introduced.
Perceived Factors Influencing Instructors' Use of E-Textbooks in Higher Education

As a form of digital content, e-Textbooks make learning content portable, transferrable, and searchable. Such technology increases students' engagement in learning and make learning highly interactive. However, the adoption of using e-Textbooks in higher education is far from its confirmation stage. This study examines the relationship between perceived attributes of using e-Textbooks by instructors and their actual use of e-Textbooks in higher education. A survey study has been conducted to measure how instructors from public universities in colleges of education perceive using e-Textbooks in higher education. The findings suggest that instructors, institutions, and e-Textbooks publishers should work collaboratively to enhance the use of e-Textbooks in higher education.
Mathematical Induction and Recursion

This chapter discusses mathematical induction and recursion. Induction is a common proof technique in mathematics, and there are two parts to a proof by induction (the base case and the inductive step). We discuss strong and weak induction, and we discuss how recursion is used to define sets, sequences and functions. This leads us to structural induction, which is used to prove properties of recursively defined structures.