query: Extended Tracking Powers: Measuring the Privacy Diffusion Enabled by Browser Extensions

positive:
The Web Never Forgets: Persistent Tracking Mechanisms in the Wild We present the first large-scale studies of three advanced web tracking mechanisms - canvas fingerprinting, evercookies and use of "cookie syncing" in conjunction with evercookies. Canvas fingerprinting, a recently developed form of browser fingerprinting, has not previously been reported in the wild; our results show that over 5% of the top 100,000 websites employ it. We then present the first automated study of evercookies and respawning and the discovery of a new evercookie vector, IndexedDB. Turning to cookie syncing, we present novel techniques for detection and analysing ID flows and we quantify the amplification of privacy-intrusive tracking practices due to cookie syncing.
 Our evaluation of the defensive techniques used by privacy-aware users finds that there exist subtle pitfalls --- such as failing to clear state on multiple browsers at once - in which a single lapse in judgement can shatter privacy defenses. This suggests that even sophisticated users face great difficulties in evading tracking techniques.

positive: Detecting and Defending Against Third-Party Tracking on the Web While third-party tracking on the web has garnered much attention, its workings remain poorly understood. Our goal is to dissect how mainstream web tracking occurs in the wild. We develop a client-side method for detecting and classifying five kinds of third-party trackers based on how they manipulate browser state. We run our detection system while browsing the web and observe a rich ecosystem, with over 500 unique trackers in our measurements alone. We find that most commercial pages are tracked by multiple parties, trackers vary widely in their coverage with a small number being widely deployed, and many trackers exhibit a combination of tracking behaviors. Based on web search traces taken from AOL data, we estimate that several trackers can each capture more than 20% of a user’s browsing behavior. We further assess the impact of defenses on tracking and find that no existing browser mechanisms prevent tracking by social media sites via widgets while still allowing those widgets to achieve their utility goals, which leads us to develop a new defense. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the most complete study of web tracking to date.

positive: Cookieless Monster: Exploring the Ecosystem of Web-Based Device Fingerprinting The web has become an essential part of our society and is currently the main medium of information delivery. Billions of users browse the web on a daily basis, and there are single websites that have reached over one billion user accounts. In this environment, the ability to track users and their online habits can be very lucrative for advertising companies, yet very intrusive for the privacy of users. In this paper, we examine how web-based device fingerprinting currently works on the Internet. By analyzing the code of three popular browser-fingerprinting code providers, we reveal the techniques that allow websites to track users without the need of client-side identifiers. Among these techniques, we show how current commercial fingerprinting approaches use questionable practices, such as the circumvention of HTTP proxies to discover a user's real IP address and the installation of intrusive browser plugins. At the same time, we show how fragile the browser ecosystem is against fingerprinting through the use of novel browser-identifying techniques. With so many different vendors involved in browser development, we demonstrate how one can use diversions in the browsers' implementation to distinguish successfully not only the browser-family, but also specific major and minor versions. Browser extensions that help users spoof the user-agent of their browsers are also evaluated. We show that current commercial approaches can bypass the extensions, and, in addition, take advantage of their shortcomings by using them as additional fingerprinting features.

positive: Understanding Malvertising Through Ad-Injecting Browser Extensions Malvertising is a malicious activity that leverages advertising to distribute various forms of malware. Because advertising is the key revenue generator for numerous Internet companies, large ad networks, such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, invest a lot of effort to mitigate malicious ads from their ad networks. This drives adversaries to look for alternative methods to deploy malvertising. In this paper, we show that browser extensions that use ads as their monetization strategy often facilitate the deployment of malvertising. Moreover, while some extensions simply serve ads from ad networks that support malvertising, other extensions maliciously alter the content of visited webpages to force users into installing malware. To measure the extent of these behaviors we developed Expector, a system that automatically inspects and identifies browser extensions that inject ads, and then classifies these ads as malicious or benign based on their landing pages. Using Expector, we automatically inspected over 18,000 Chrome browser extensions. We found 292 extensions that inject ads, and detected 56 extensions that participate in malvertising using 16 different ad networks and with a total user base of 602,417.

positive: Trends and Lessons from Three Years Fighting Malicious Extensions In this work we expose wide-spread efforts by criminals to abuse the Chrome Web Store as a platform for distributing malicious extensions. A central component of our study is the design and implementation of WebEval, the first system that broadly identifies malicious extensions with a concrete, measurable detection rate of 96.5%. Over the last three years we detected 9,523 malicious extensions: nearly 10% of every extension submitted to the store. Despite a short window of operation—we removed 50% of malware within 25 minutes of creation— a handful of under 100 extensions escaped immediate detection and infected over 50 million Chrome users. Our results highlight that the extension abuse ecosystem is drastically different from malicious binaries: miscreants profit from web traffic and user tracking rather than email spam or banking theft.

negative: Study of Lightning Surge Overvoltages at Substations Due to Direct Lightning Strokes to Phase Conductors Accurate predictions of lightning surge overvoltages are essential to power equipment insulation design. Recent observations of lightning strokes to ultra-high-voltage designed transmission lines confirmed direct lightning strokes caused by shielding failure and found phenomena unexplainable by conventional shielding theories. However, there are few detailed studies of direct lightning surge overvoltages. This study assumed direct lightning stroke currents based on observational data and performs electromagnetic transient program analysis of the gas-insulated switchgear (GIS) and transformer overvoltages at substations to study the basic characteristics of overvoltages due to direct lightning strokes and evaluate lightning protection design. Consequently, the maximum GIS overvoltages were found during back-flashovers, and the locations of maximum overvoltages from direct lightning strokes and back-flashovers differ. Direct lightning strokes may be more severe than back-flashovers for transformers. This paper also studied the overvoltage generation mechanism and showed the relationship of the maximum voltage to lightning stroke current and transformer capacitance.

negative: A ZigBee -wireless wearable remote physiological monitoring system Wearable health monitoring systems use integrated sensors to monitor vital physiological parameters of the wearer. The paper discusses the preliminary results of a prototype wearable physiological monitoring system to monitor physiological parameters such as Electrocardiogram (ECG), Heart Rate (HR), Electroencephalogram (EEG) and Body Temperature. The ECG and EEG signals are acquired using a textile electrodes integrated into the fabric of the wearer. The acquired ECG and EEG signals are processed to remove noises and the parameters are extracted and trend analysis is carried out. The physiological parameters are monitored at the remote monitoring station using a ZigBee wireless communication.

negative: GISMO: a Graphical Interactive Student Monitoring Tool for Course Management Systems This paper presents GISMO, a graphical interactive student monitoring and tracking system tool that extracts tracking data from an on-line course maintained with a Course Management System, and generates graphical representations that can be explored by course instructors to examine various aspects of distance students. GISMO uses techniques from Information Visualisation to render into an appropriate graphical manner the complex multidimensional student tracking data provided by the Course Management System. GISMO aims to help instructors to become aware of what is happening in their classes and provide a better support to their learners.

negative: Mapping learning and game mechanics for serious games analysis While there is a consensus on the instructional potential of Serious Games (SGs), there is still a lack of methodologies and tools not only for design but also to support analysis and assessment. Filling this gap is one of the main aims of the Games and Learning Alliance (GALA, www.galanoe.eu) European Network of Excellence on Serious Games (SGs), which has a focus upon pedagogy-driven SGs. This paper relies on the assumption that the fundamental aspect of SG design consists in the translation of learning goals/practices into mechanical element of game-play, serving to an instructional purpose beside that of play and fun. This paper proposes the Learning Mechanics-Game Mechanics (LM-GM) model, which supports SG analysis and design by allowing reflection on the various pedagogical and game elements in a SG. The LM-GM model includes a set of pre-defined game mechanics and pedagogical elements that we have abstracted from literature on game studies and learning theories. Designers and analysts can exploit these mechanics to draw the LM-GM map for a game, so as to identify and highlight its main pedagogical and entertainment features, and their interrelations. The tool may also be useful for teachers to evaluate the effectiveness of a given game and better understand how to implement it in educational settings. A case study is reported to illustrate the framework’s support in determining how game-play and pedagogy intertwine in a SG. Finally, the paper presents the results of two comparative user tests demonstrating the advantages of the proposed model with respect to a similar state-of-the-art framework.

negative: Colyseus: A Distributed Architecture for Online Multiplayer Games This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of Colyseus, a distributed architecture for interactive multiplayer games. Colyseus takes advantage of a game’s tolerance for weakly consistent state and predictable workload to meet the tight latency constraints of game-play and maintain scalable communication costs. In addition, it provides a rich distributed query interface and effective pre-fetching subsystem to help locate and replicate objects before they are accessed at a node. We have implemented Colyseus and modified Quake II, a popular first person shooter game, to use it. Our measurements of Quake II and our own Colyseus-based game with hundreds of players shows that Colyseus effectively distributes game traffic across the participating nodes, allowing Colyseus to support low-latency game-play for an order of magnitude more players than existing single server designs, with similar per-node bandwidth costs.

negative: AskWorld: Budget-Sensitive Query Evaluation for Knowledge-on-Demand Recently, several Web-scale knowledge harvesting systems have been built, each of which is competent at extracting information from certain types of data (e.g., unstructured text, structured tables on the web, etc.). In order to determine the response to a new query posed to such systems (e.g., is sugar a healthy food?), it is useful to integrate opinions from multiple systems. If a response is desired within a specific time budget (e.g., in less than 2 seconds), then maybe only a subset of these resources can be queried. In this paper, we address the problem of knowledge integration for on-demand time-budgeted query answering. We propose a new method, AskWorld, which learns a policy that chooses which queries to send to which resources, by accommodating varying budget constraints that are available only at query (test) time. Through extensive experiments on real world datasets, we demonstrate AskWorld’s capability in selecting most informative resources to query within test-time constraints, resulting in improved performance compared to competitive baselines.

negative: Model-free control Model-free control” and the corresponding “intelligent” PID controllers (iPIDs), which already had many successful concrete applications, are presented here for the first time in an unified manner, where the new advances are taken into account. The basics of model-free control is now employing some old functional analysis and some elementary differential algebra. The estimation techniques become quite straightforward via a recent online parameter identification approach. The importance of iPIs and especially of iPs is deduced from the presence of friction. The strange industrial ubiquity of classic PID’s and the great difficulty for tuning them in complex situations is deduced, via an elementary sampling, from their connections with iPIDs. Several numerical simulations are presented which include some infinite-dimensional systems. They demonstrate not only the power of our intelligent controllers but also the great simplicity for tuning them.

negative: A Distributed Test System Architecture for Open-source IoT Software In this paper, we discuss challenges that are specific to testing of open IoT software systems. The analysis reveals gaps compared to wireless sensor networks as well as embedded software. We propose a testing framework which (a) supports continuous integration techniques, (b) allows for the integration of project contributors to volunteer hardware and software resources to the test system, and (c) can function as a permanent distributed plugtest for network interoperability testing. The focus of this paper lies in open-source IoT development but many aspects are also applicable to closed-source projects.

negative: On Poisson Graphical Models Undirected graphical models, such as Gaussian graphical models, Ising, and multinomial/categorical graphical models, are widely used in a variety of applications for modeling distributions over a large number of variables. These standard instances, however, are ill-suited to modeling count data, which are increasingly ubiquitous in big-data settings such as genomic sequencing data, user-ratings data, spatial incidence data, climate studies, and site visits. Existing classes of Poisson graphical models, which arise as the joint distributions that correspond to Poisson distributed node-conditional distributions, have a major drawback: they can only model negative conditional dependencies for reasons of normalizability given its infinite domain. In this paper, our objective is to modify the Poisson graphical model distribution so that it can capture a rich dependence structure between count-valued variables. We begin by discussing two strategies for truncating the Poisson distribution and show that only one of these leads to a valid joint distribution. While this model can accommodate a wider range of conditional dependencies, some limitations still remain. To address this, we investigate two additional novel variants of the Poisson distribution and their corresponding joint graphical model distributions. Our three novel approaches provide classes of Poisson-like graphical models that can capture both positive and negative conditional dependencies between count-valued variables. One can learn the graph structure of our models via penalized neighborhood selection, and we demonstrate the performance of our methods by learning simulated networks as well as a network from microRNA-sequencing data.

negative: Different voltage-dependent thresholds for inducing long-term depression and long-term potentiation in slices of rat visual cortex IN the hippocampus and neocortex, high-frequency (tetanic) stimu-lation of an afferent pathway leads to long-term potentiation (LTP) of synaptic transmission1–5. In the hippocampus it has recently been shown that long-term depression (LTD) of excitatory transmission can also be induced by certain combinations of synaptic activation6,7. In most hippocampal8 and all neocortical pathways4,9–11 studied so far, the induction of LTP requires the activation of JV-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptorgated conductances. Here we report that LTD can occur in neurons of slices of the rat visual cortex and that the same tetanic stimulation can induce either LTP or LTD depending on the level of depolarization of the postsynaptic neuron. By applying intracellular current injections or pharmacological disinhibition to modify the depolarizing response of the postsynaptic neuron to tetanic stimulation, we show that the mechanisms of induction of LTD and LTP are both postsynaptic. LTD is obtained if postsynaptic depolarization exceeds a critical level but remains below a threshold related to NMDA receptorgated conductances, whereas LTP is induced if this second threshold is reached.

negative: Identifying adverse drug events from patient social media: A case study for diabetes Patient social media sites have emerged as major platforms for discussion of treatments and drug side effects, making them a promising source for listening to patients' voices in adverse drug event reporting. However, extracting patient reports from social media continues to be a challenge in health informatics research. In light of the need for more robust extraction methods, the authors developed a novel information extraction framework for identifying adverse drug events from patient social media. They also conducted a case study on a major diabetes patient social media platform to evaluate their framework's performance. Their approach achieves an f-measure of 86 percent in recognizing discussion of medical events and treatments, an f-measure of 69 percent for identifying adverse drug events, and an f-measure of 84 percent in patient report extraction. Their proposed methods significantly outperformed prior work in extracting patient reports of adverse drug events in health social media.

negative: Slip detection and prediction in human walking using only wearable inertial measurement units (IMUs) Slip and fall is one of the major causes for human injuries for elders and professional workers. Real-time detection and prediction of the foot slip is critical for developing effective assistive and rehabilitation devices to prevent falls and train balance disorder patients. This paper presents a novel real-time slip detection and prediction scheme with wearable inertial measurement units (IMUs). The slip-detection algorithm is built on a new dynamic model for bipedal walking with slips. An extended Kalman filter is designed to reliably predict the foot slip displacement using the wearable IMU measurements and kinematic constraints. The proposed slip detection and prediction scheme has been demonstrated by extensive experiments.

negative: Graphite: Iterative Generative Modeling of Graphs Graphs are a fundamental abstraction for modeling relational data. However, graphs are discrete and combinatorial in nature, and learning representations suitable for machine learning tasks poses statistical and computational challenges. In this work, we propose Graphite an algorithmic framework for unsupervised learning of representations over nodes in a graph using deep latent variable generative models. Our model is based on variational autoencoders (VAE), and uses graph neural networks for parameterizing both the generative model (i.e., decoder) and inference model (i.e., encoder). The use of graph neural networks directly incorporates inductive biases due to the spatial, local structure of graphs directly in the generative model. We draw novel connections of our framework with approximate inference via kernel embeddings. Empirically, Graphite outperforms competing approaches for the tasks of density estimation, link prediction, and node classification on synthetic and benchmark datasets.

negative: Personalized Dialogue Generation with Diversified Traits Endowing a dialogue system with particular personality traits is essential to deliver more human-like conversations. However, due to the challenge of embodying personality via language expression and the lack of large-scale persona-labeled dialogue data, this research problem is still far from well-studied. In this paper, we investigate the problem of incorporating explicit personality traits in dialogue generation to deliver personalized dialogues. To this end, firstly, we construct PersonalDialog, a large-scale multi-turn dialogue dataset containing various traits from a large number of speakers. The dataset consists of 20.83M sessions and 56.25M utterances from 8.47M speakers. Each utterance is associated with a speaker who is marked with traits like Age, Gender, Location, Interest Tags, etc. Several anonymization schemes are designed to protect the privacy of each speaker. This large-scale dataset will facilitate not only the study of personalized dialogue generation, but also other researches on sociolinguistics or social science. Secondly, to study how personality traits can be captured and addressed in dialogue generation, we propose persona-aware dialogue generation models within the sequence to sequence learning framework. Explicit personality traits (structured by key-value pairs) are embedded using a trait fusion module. During the decoding process, two techniques, namely persona-aware attention and persona-aware bias, are devised to capture and address trait-related information. Experiments demonstrate that our model is able to address proper traits in different contexts. Case studies also show interesting results for this challenging research problem.

negative: Two-dimensional Disjunctively Constrained Knapsack Problem: Heuristic and exact approaches

negative: Realizing underwater communication through magnetic induction The majority of the work on underwater communication has mainly been based on acoustic communication. Acoustic communication faces many known problems, such as high propagation delays, very low data rates, and highly environment-dependent channel behavior. In this article, to address these shortcomings, magnetic induction is introduced as a possible communication paradigm for underwater applications. Accordingly, all research challenges in this regard are explained. Fundamentally different from the conventional underwater communication paradigm, which relies on EM, acoustic, or optical waves, the underwater MI communications rely on the time varying magnetic field to covey information between the transmitting and receiving parties. MI-based underwater communications exhibit several unique and promising features such as negligible signal propagation delay, predictable and constant channel behavior, sufficiently long communication range with high bandwidth, as well as silent and stealth underwater operations. To fully utilize the promising features of underwater MI-based communications, this article introduces the fundamentals of underwater MI communications, including the MI channel models, MI networking protocols design, and MI-based underwater localization.

negative: Integrating Configuration Management with Model-driven Cloud Management based on TOSCA The paradigm of Cloud computing introduces new approaches to manage IT services going beyond concepts originating in traditional IT service management. The main goal is to automate the whole management of services to reduce costs and to make management tasks less error-prone. Two different service management paradigms are used in practice: configuration management and model-driven Cloud management. The latter one aims to be a holistic management approach for services in the Cloud. However, both management paradigms are originating in different backgrounds, thus model-driven Cloud management does not cover all aspects of configuration management that are key for Cloud services. This paper presents approaches for integrating configuration management with model-driven Cloud management and how they can be realized based on the OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications and Chef, a popular configuration management tool. These approaches enable the creation of holistic and highly portable service models.

negative: The BeiHang Keystroke Dynamics Authentication System Keystroke Dynamics is an important biometric solution for person authentication. Based upon keystroke dynamics, this paper designs an embedded password protection device, develops an online system, collects two public databases for promoting the research on keystroke authentication, exploits the Gabor filter bank to characterize keystroke dynamics, and provides benchmark results of three popular classification algorithms, one-class support vector machine, Gaussian classifier, and nearest neighbour classifier.

negative: Google Web 1T 5-Grams Made Easy (but not for the computer) This paper introduces Web1T5-Easy, a simple indexing solution that allows interactive searches of the Web 1T 5-gram database and a derived database of quasi-collocations. The latter is validated against co-occurrence data from the BNC and ukWaC on the automatic identification of non-compositional VPC.

negative: A Face in any Form: New Challenges and Opportunities for Face Recognition Technology Despite new technologies that make face detection and recognition more sophisticated, long-recognized problems in security, privacy, and accuracy persist. Refining this technology and introducing it into new domains will require solving these problems through focused interdisciplinary efforts among developers, researchers, and policymakers.

negative: Practical Lattice-Based Cryptography: A Signature Scheme for Embedded Systems Nearly all of the currently used and well-tested signature schemes (e.g. RSA or DSA) are based either on the factoring assumption or the presumed intractability of the discrete logarithm problem. Further algorithmic advances on these problems may lead to the unpleasant situation that a large number of schemes have to be replaced with alternatives. In this work we present such an alternative – a signature scheme whose security is derived from the hardness of lattice problems. It is based on recent theoretical advances in lattice-based cryptography and is highly optimized for practicability and use in embedded systems. The public and secret keys are roughly 12000 and 2000 bits long, while the signature size is approximately 9000 bits for a security level of around 100 bits. The implementation results on reconfigurable hardware (Spartan/Virtex 6) are very promising and show that the scheme is scalable, has low area consumption, and even outperforms some classical schemes.

negative: A new primary power regulation method for contactless power transfer This paper presents a new power regulation method for contactless power transfer systems that combines current magnitude control of a series tuned resonant converter with energy injection concepts suitable for constant load or single pick-up applications. In the latter, the control of the primary converter operates with asymmetrical control, to regulate the magnitude of the high frequency primary track current according to the load requirement of the secondary power pickup. The feedback control algorithm is developed by monitoring the output voltage of the secondary power pickup. Switching losses and EMI are reduced due to the ZCS (Zero Current Switching) operation of the converter. Simulation and experimental results show that the primary converter has a fast and smooth start-up transient response, and the magnitudes of the primary current and the output voltage of a secondary power pickup are both fully controllable against load variations.

negative: Clustering Web pages based on their structure Several techniques have been recently proposed to automatically generate Web wrappers, i.e., programs that extract data from HTML pages, and transform them into a more structured format, typically in XML. These techniques automatically induce a wrapper from a set of sample pages that share a common HTML template. An open issue, however, is how to collect suitable classes of sample pages to feed the wrapper inducer. Presently, the pages are chosen manually. In this paper, we tackle the problem of automatically discovering the main classes of pages offered by a site by exploring only a small yet representative portion of it. We propose a model to describe abstract structural features of HTML pages. Based on this model, we have developed an algorithm that accepts the URL of an entry point to a target Web site, visits a limited yet representative number of pages, and produces an accurate clustering of pages based on their structure. We have developed a prototype, which has been used to perform experiments on real-life Web sites. 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

negative:
Characterizing gene sets using discriminative random walks with restart on heterogeneous biological networks MOTIVATION
Analysis of co-expressed gene sets typically involves testing for enrichment of different annotations or 'properties' such as biological processes, pathways, transcription factor binding sites, etc., one property at a time. This common approach ignores any known relationships among the properties or the genes themselves. It is believed that known biological relationships among genes and their many properties may be exploited to more accurately reveal commonalities of a gene set. Previous work has sought to achieve this by building biological networks that combine multiple types of gene-gene or gene-property relationships, and performing network analysis to identify other genes and properties most relevant to a given gene set. Most existing network-based approaches for recognizing genes or annotations relevant to a given gene set collapse information about different properties to simplify (homogenize) the networks.

RESULTS
We present a network-based method for ranking genes or properties related to a given gene set. Such related genes or properties are identified from among the nodes of a large, heterogeneous network of biological information. Our method involves a random walk with restarts, performed on an initial network with multiple node and edge types that preserve more of the original, specific property information than current methods that operate on homogeneous networks. In this first stage of our algorithm, we find the properties that are the most relevant to the given gene set and extract a subnetwork of the original network, comprising only these relevant properties. We then re-rank genes by their similarity to the given gene set, based on a second random walk with restarts, performed on the above subnetwork. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this algorithm for ranking genes related to Drosophila embryonic development and aggressive responses in the brains of social animals.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION
DRaWR was implemented as an R package available at veda.cs.illinois.edu/DRaWR.

CONTACT
blatti@illinois.edu

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

negative: The Most Dangerous Code in the Browser Browser extensions are ubiquitous. Yet, in today’s browsers, extensions are the most dangerous code to user privacy. Extensions are third-party code, like web applications, but run with elevated privileges. Even worse, existing browser extension systems give users a false sense of security by considering extensions to be more trustworthy than web applications. This is because the user typically has to explicitly grant the extension a series of permissions it requests, e.g., to access the current tab or a particular website. Unfortunately, extensions developers do not request minimum privileges and users have become desensitized to install-time warnings. Furthermore, permissions offered by popular browsers are very broad and vague. For example, over 71% of the top-500 Chrome extensions can trivially leak the user’s data from any site. In this paper, we argue for new extension system design, based on mandatory access control, that protects the user’s privacy from malicious extensions. A system employing this design can enable a range of common extensions to be considered safe, i.e., they do not require user permissions and can be ensured to not leak information, while allowing the user to share information when desired. Importantly, such a design can make permission requests a rarity and thus more meaningful.

negative: Multiple extended object tracking using Gaussian processes The goal of multi-object tracking is to estimate the number of objects and their states recursively over time. In the presence of extended objects, i.e. objects with an extent that is not negligible in comparison to sensor resolution and which give rise to multiple measurements per time step, the tracking task is even more challenging: To fully utilize all available information and to achieve accurate estimation results, measurement models that are able to represent the object shape as well as algorithms that tackle the aggravated track-to-measurements association problem are necessary. In this work, the Gaussian process measurement model is integrated in the recently developed labeled multi-Bernoulli filter for extended objects. Thus, the ability of Gaussian processes to estimate and represent a wide range of free-from shapes is combined with a principled approach to the multiple extended objects tracking problem. The filter performance is demonstrated for simulated and experimental vehicle tracking using a laser scanner. For this particular application, a new, approximately axis-symmetric covariance function is additionally introduced.

negative: Chrome Extensions: Threat Analysis and Countermeasures The widely popular browser extensions now become one of the most commonly used malware attack vectors. The Google Chrome browser, which implements the principles of least privileges and privilege separation by design, offers a strong security mechanism to protect malicious websites from damaging the whole browser system via extensions. In this study, we however reveal that Chrome’s extension security model is not a panacea for all possible attacks with browser extensions. Through a series of practical bot-based attacks that can be performed even under typical settings, we demonstrate that malicious Chrome extensions pose serious threats, including both information dispersion and harvesting, to browsers. We further conduct an in-depth analysis of Chrome’s extension security model, and conclude that its vulnerabilities are rooted fro m the violation of the principles of least privileges and priv ilege separation. Following these principles, we propose a set of countermeasures that enforce the policies of microprivilege management and differentiating DOM elements. Using a prototype developed on the latest Chrome browser, we show that they can effectively mitigate the threats posed by malicious Chrome extensions with little effect on normal browsing experience.

negative: Optimized, Direct Sale of Privacy in Personal-Data Marketplaces Very recently, we are witnessing the emergence of a number of start-ups that enables individuals to sell their private data directly to brokers and businesses. While this new paradigm may shift the balance of power between individuals and companies that harvest data, it raises some practical, fundamental questions for users of these services: how they should decide which data must be vended and which data protected, and what a good deal is. In this work, we investigate a mechanism that aims at helping users address these questions. The investigated mechanism relies on a hard-privacy model and allows users to share partial or complete profile data with broker companies in exchange for an economic reward. The theoretical analysis of the trade-off between privacy and money posed by such mechanism is the object of this work. We adopt a generic measure of privacy although part of our analysis focuses on some important examples of Bregman divergences. We find a parametric solution to the problem of optimal exchange of privacy for money, and obtain a closed-form expression and characterize the trade-off between profile-disclosure risk and economic reward for several interesting cases.

negative: CYCLOSA: Decentralizing Private Web Search through SGX-Based Browser Extensions By regularly querying Web search engines, users (unconsciously) disclose large amounts of their personal data as part of their search queries, among which some might reveal sensitive information (e.g. health issues, sexual, political or religious preferences). Several solutions exist to allow users querying search engines while improving privacy protection. However, these solutions suffer from a number of limitations: some are subject to user re-identification attacks, while others lack scalability or are unable to provide accurate results. This paper presents CYCLOSA, a secure, scalable and accurate private Web search solution. CYCLOSA improves security by relying on trusted execution environments (TEEs) as provided by Intel SGX. Further, CYCLOSA proposes a novel adaptive privacy protection solution that reduces the risk of user re-identification. CYCLOSA sends fake queries to the search engine and dynamically adapts their count according to the sensitivity of the user query. In addition, CYCLOSA meets scalability as it is fully decentralized, spreading the load for distributing fake queries among other nodes. Finally, CYCLOSA achieves accuracy of Web search as it handles the real query and the fake queries separately, in contrast to other existing solutions that mix fake and real query results.

negative: BatTracker: High Precision Infrastructure-free Mobile Device Tracking in Indoor Environments Continuous tracking of the device location in 3D space is a popular form of user input, especially for virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR), video games and health rehabilitation. Conventional inertial based approaches are well known for inaccuracy caused by large error drifts. Computer vision approaches can produce accuracy tracking but have privacy concerns and are subject to lighting conditions and computation complexity. Recent work exploits accurate acoustic distance measurements for high precision tracking. However, they require additional hardware (e.g., multiple external speakers), which adds to the costs and installation efforts, thus limiting the convenience and usability. In this paper, we propose BatTracker, which incorporates inertial and acoustic data for robust, high precision and infrastructure-free tracking in indoor environments. BatTracker leverages echoes from nearby objects and uses distance measurements from them to correct error accumulation in inertial based device position prediction. It incorporates Doppler shifts and echo amplitudes to reliably identify the association between echoes and objects despite noisy signals from multi-path reflection and cluttered environment. A probabilistic algorithm creates, prunes and evolves multiple hypotheses based on measurement evidences to accommodate uncertainty in device position. Experiments in real environments show that BatTracker can track a mobile device's movements in 3D space at sub-cm level accuracy, comparable to the state-of-the-art infrastructure based approaches, while eliminating the needs of any additional hardware.

negative:
How to Train Your Browser: Preventing XSS Attacks Using Contextual Script Fingerprints Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is one of the most common web application vulnerabilities. It is therefore sometimes referred to as the “buffer overflow of the web.” Drawing a parallel from the current state of practice in preventing unauthorized native code execution (the typical goal in a code injection), we propose a script whitelisting approach to tame JavaScript-driven XSS attacks. Our scheme involves a transparent script interception layer placed in the browser’s JavaScript engine. This layer is designed to detect every script that reaches the browser, from every possible route, and compare it to a list of valid scripts for the site or page being accessed; scripts not on the list are prevented from executing. To avoid the false positives caused by minor syntactic changes (e.g., due to dynamic code generation), our layer uses the concept of contextual fingerprints when comparing scripts.
 Contextual fingerprints are identifiers that represent specific elements of a script and its execution context. Fingerprints can be easily enriched with new elements, if needed, to enhance the proposed method’s robustness. The list can be populated by the website’s administrators or a trusted third party. To verify our approach, we have developed a prototype and tested it successfully against an extensive array of attacks that were performed on more than 50 real-world vulnerable web applications. We measured the browsing performance overhead of the proposed solution on eight websites that make heavy use of JavaScript. Our mechanism imposed an average overhead of 11.1% on the execution time of the JavaScript engine. When measured as part of a full browsing session, and for all tested websites, the overhead introduced by our layer was less than 0.05%. When script elements are altered or new scripts are added on the server side, a new fingerprint generation phase is required. To examine the temporal aspect of contextual fingerprints, we performed a short-term and a long-term experiment based on the same websites. The former, showed that in a short period of time (10 days), for seven of eight websites, the majority of valid fingerprints stay the same (more than 92% on average). The latter, though, indicated that, in the long run, the number of fingerprints that do not change is reduced. Both experiments can be seen as one of the first attempts to study the feasibility of a whitelisting approach for the web.


query: Chapter 1 . Principles of Synthetic Aperture Radar

positive: Synthetic aperture radar interferometry Synthetic aperture radar interferometry is an imaging technique for measuring the topography of a surface, its changes over time, and other changes in the detailed characteristic of the surface. By exploiting the phase of the coherent radar signal, interferometry has transformed radar remote sensing from a largely interpretive science to a quantitative tool, with applications in cartography, geodesy, land cover characterization, and natural hazards. This paper reviews the techniques of interferometry, systems and limitations, and applications in a rapidly growing area of science and engineering.

positive: The evolution of synthetic aperture radar systems and their progression to the EOS SAR The spaceborne imaging radar program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has evolved primarily through Seasat and the Shuttle Imaging Radar (SIR) to a multifrequency, multipolarization system capable of monitoring the Earth with a variety of imaging geometries, resolutions, and swaths. In particular, the ability to digitally process and calibrate the data has been a key factor in developing the algorithms which will operationally provide geophysical and biophysical information about the surface of the Earth using synthetic aperture radar (SAR). This paper describes the evolution of the spaceborne imaging radar starting with the Seasat SAR, through the SIR-A, SIR-B, and SIR-CI X-SAR missions, to the EOS SAR which is scheduled for launch as part of the Earth Observing System (EOS) at the end of the 1990s. A summary of the planned international missions, which may produce a permanent active microwave capability in space starting as early as 1991, is also presented, along with a description of the airborne systems which will be essential to the algorithm development and long-term calibration of the spaceborne data. Finally, a brief summary of the planetary missions utilizing SAR and a comparison of their imaging capabilities with those available on Earth is presented.

positive: On the derivation of coseismic displacement fields using differential radar interferometry: The Landers earthquake We present a map of the coseismic displacement field resulting from the Landers, California, June 28, 1992, earthquake derived using data acquired from an orbiting high-resolution radar system. We achieve results more accurate than previous space studies and similar in accuracy to those obtained by conventional field survey techniques. Data from the ERS 1 synthetic aperture radar instrument acquired in April, July, and August 1992 are used to generate a high-resolution, wide area map of the displacements. The data represent the motion in the direction of the radar line of sight to centimeter level precision of each 30-m resolution element in a 113 km by 90 km image. Our coseismic displacement contour map gives a lobed pattern consistent with theoretical models of the displacement field from the earthquake. Fine structure observed as displacement tiling in regions several kilometers from the fault appears to be the result of local surface fracturing. Comparison of these data with Global Positioning System and electronic distance measurement survey data yield a correlation of 0.96; thus the radar measurements are a means to extend the point measurements acquired by traditional techniques to an area map format. The technique we use is (1) more automatic, (2) more precise, and (3) better validated than previous similar applications of differential radar interferometry. Since we require only remotely sensed satellite data with no additional requirements for ancillary information, the technique is well suited for global seismic monitoring and analysis.

positive: Accuracy of topographic maps derived from ERS-1 interferometric radar A interferometric radar technique for topographic mapping of surfaces promises a high-resolution approach to the generation of digital elevation models. We present here analyses of data collected by the synthetic aperture radar instrument on-board the ERS-1 satellite on successive orbits. Use of a single satellite in a nearly repeating orbit is attractive for reducing cost and spaceborne hardware complexity; also it permits inference of changes in the surface from the correlation properties of the radar echoes. The data have been reduced to correlation maps and digital elevation models. The correlation maps show that temporal correlation decreases significantly with time, but not necessarily at a constant well-defined rate, likely depending on environmental factors. When correlation among passes remains high, however, it is possible to form digital elevation models. Analyses of noise expected in ERS-1 interferometric data collected over Alaska and the southwestern United States indicate that maps with relative errors less than 5 m rms are possible in some regions. However, orbit uncertainties imply that tie points are required in order to reduce absolute height errors to a similar magnitude. We find that about 6 tie points per 40 X 40 km scene with 5 m rms or better height accuracy are needed to keep systematic map height errors below 5 m rms. The performance of the ERS-1 radar system for topographic applications, though useful for a variety of regional and local discipline studies, may be improved with respect to temporal decorrelation errors and absolute height acuity by modifying the orbit repeat period and incorporating precise orbit determination techniques. The resulting implementation will meet many, but not all, objectives of a global mapping mission.

positive: Satellite radar interferometry for monitoring ice sheet motion: application to an antarctic ice stream. Satellite radar interferometry (SRI) provides a sensitive means of monitoring the flow velocities and grounding-line positions of ice streams, which are indicators of response of the ice sheets to climatic change or internal instability. The detection limit is about 1.5 millimeters for vertical motions and about 4 millimeters for horizontal motions in the radar beam direction. The grounding line, detected by tidal motions where the ice goes afloat, can be mapped at a resolution of approximately 0.5 kilometer. The SRI velocities and grounding line of the Rutford Ice Stream, Antarctica, agree fairly well with earlier ground-based data. The combined use of SRI and other satellite methods is expected to provide data that will enhance the understanding of ice stream mechanics and help make possible the prediction of ice sheet behavior.

negative: Towards the enhancement of e-democracy: identifying the notion of the 'middleman paradox' The challenge towards e-democracy, through the electronic transformation of political systems, has become increasingly evident within developed economies. It is regarded as an approach for increased and better quality citizen participation in the democratic processes. E-democracy forms a component of overall e-government initiatives where technology adoption and diffusion, to enhance wider access to, and the delivery of, government services, are apparent. However, previous research demonstrates that very few e-democracy proposals survive the stage of formal political decision-making to become substantive egovernment projects within national or international agendas. Furthermore, the implementation of e-democracy projects is undertaken at a much slower pace and with dramatically less support than the implementation of other, so-called e-administration, activities in the public sector. The research in this paper considers the notion of the ‘middleman paradox’, presenting theoretical and empirical evidence that further investigates the phenomenon associated with potential e-democracy improvements. Specifically, the paper adds a new dimension to existing theories on the hesitant evolution of e-democracy that clearly identifies politicians as an inhibiting factor. Proposals are made for an enhancement of these processes, and suggestions for further applicable research are demonstrated.

negative:
Burden of Depressive Disorders by Country, Sex, Age, and Year: Findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 BACKGROUND
Depressive disorders were a leading cause of burden in the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 1990 and 2000 studies. Here, we analyze the burden of depressive disorders in GBD 2010 and present severity proportions, burden by country, region, age, sex, and year, as well as burden of depressive disorders as a risk factor for suicide and ischemic heart disease.

METHODS AND FINDINGS
Burden was calculated for major depressive disorder (MDD) and dysthymia. A systematic review of epidemiological data was conducted. The data were pooled using a Bayesian meta-regression. Disability weights from population survey data quantified the severity of health loss from depressive disorders. These weights were used to calculate years lived with disability (YLDs) and disability adjusted life years (DALYs). Separate DALYs were estimated for suicide and ischemic heart disease attributable to depressive disorders. Depressive disorders were the second leading cause of YLDs in 2010. MDD accounted for 8.2% (5.9%-10.8%) of global YLDs and dysthymia for 1.4% (0.9%-2.0%). Depressive disorders were a leading cause of DALYs even though no mortality was attributed to them as the underlying cause. MDD accounted for 2.5% (1.9%-3.2%) of global DALYs and dysthymia for 0.5% (0.3%-0.6%). There was more regional variation in burden for MDD than for dysthymia; with higher estimates in females, and adults of working age. Whilst burden increased by 37.5% between 1990 and 2010, this was due to population growth and ageing. MDD explained 16 million suicide DALYs and almost 4 million ischemic heart disease DALYs. This attributable burden would increase the overall burden of depressive disorders from 3.0% (2.2%-3.8%) to 3.8% (3.0%-4.7%) of global DALYs.

CONCLUSIONS
GBD 2010 identified depressive disorders as a leading cause of burden. MDD was also a contributor of burden allocated to suicide and ischemic heart disease. These findings emphasize the importance of including depressive disorders as a public-health priority and implementing cost-effective interventions to reduce its burden. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary.

negative: Enhance emotional and social adaptation skills for children with autism spectrum disorder: A virtual reality enabled approach Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, one of the diagnostic criteria of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), greatly hinders children with ASD from responding appropriately and adapting themselves in various social situations. Although evidences have shown that virtual reality environment is a promising tool for emotional and social adaptation skills training on ASD population, there is a lack of large-scale trials with intensive evaluations to support such findings. This paper presents a virtual reality enabled program for enhancing emotional and social adaptation skills for children with ASD. Six unique learning scenarios, of which one focuses on emotion control and relaxation strategies, four that simulate various social situations, and one that facilitates consolidation and generalization, are designed and developed with corresponding psychoeducation procedures and protocols. The learning scenarios are presented to the children via a 4-side immersive virtual reality environment (a.k.a., half-CAVE) with non-intrusive motion tracking. A total number of 94 children between the ages of 6 to 12 with clinical diagnosis of ASD participated in the 28-session program that lasted for 14 weeks. By comparing preand post-assessments, results reported in this paper show significant improvements in the project’s primary measures on children’s emotion expression and regulation and social-emotional reciprocity but not on other secondary measures.

negative: Real time Sign Language Recognition using PCA The Sign Language is a method of communication for deaf-dumb people. This paper presents the Sign Language Recognition system capable of recognizing 26 gestures from the Indian Sign Language by using MATLAB. The proposed system having four modules such as: pre-processing and hand segmentation, feature extraction, sign recognition and sign to text and voice conversion. Segmentation is done by using image processing. Different features are extracted such as Eigen values and Eigen vectors which are used in recognition. The Principle Component Analysis (PCA) algorithm was used for gesture recognition and recognized gesture is converted into text and voice format. The proposed system helps to minimize communication barrier between deaf-dumb people and normal people.

negative: Noninvasive diagnosis of fetal aneuploidy by shotgun sequencing DNA from maternal blood. We directly sequenced cell-free DNA with high-throughput shotgun sequencing technology from plasma of pregnant women, obtaining, on average, 5 million sequence tags per patient sample. This enabled us to measure the over- and underrepresentation of chromosomes from an aneuploid fetus. The sequencing approach is polymorphism-independent and therefore universally applicable for the noninvasive detection of fetal aneuploidy. Using this method, we successfully identified all nine cases of trisomy 21 (Down syndrome), two cases of trisomy 18 (Edward syndrome), and one case of trisomy 13 (Patau syndrome) in a cohort of 18 normal and aneuploid pregnancies; trisomy was detected at gestational ages as early as the 14th week. Direct sequencing also allowed us to study the characteristics of cell-free plasma DNA, and we found evidence that this DNA is enriched for sequences from nucleosomes.

negative: Design and Implementation of Phalanges Based on Iteration of a Prosthesis In this work an electromechanical hand is implemented based on the study and implementation of the phalanges of the five fingers of the hand, a control system based on a microcontroller was implemented that takes as feedback signals coming from flexosensors and strain gauges. The movement of the fingers was made based on myoelectric signals in real time, these signals were acquired through an innovative method of acquisition based on patterns. The tests performed were measurements with extended hand, closed hand and pressing an object that validates the present proposal.

negative: Resilience and Sustainable Development : Theory of resilience , systems thinking and adaptive governance  Basic information on SD  Country profiles  Quarterly reports  Policy briefs  Case studies  Conference papers  Workshop papers  Getting in touch with us The European Sustainable Development Network (ESDN) is an informal network of public administrators and other experts who deal with sustainable development strategies and policies. The network covers all 27 EU Member States, plus other European countries. The ESDN is active in promoting sustainable development and facilitating the exchange of good practices in Europe and gives advice to policy-makers at the European and national levels. This ESDN Quarterly Report (QR) provides a condensed overview of the concept of resilience. Despite the complexity of the theory behind resilience, this QR tries to communicate the main notions behind this concept in a way that is understandable and not overly technical. The intention of this QR is to serve as a guide through the concept of resilience. The report does not aim at being exhaustive but intends to provide an overview on the links which are particularly relevant for sustainable development (SD) in general and SD governance in particular. A multitude of diverse sources have been used, mainly from the academic literature. It has to be mentioned the significant and decisive role that the Resilience Alliance has in providing extensive knowledge: the website that they are running, is an exceptionally good source of information for those who are interested and want to deepen their knowledge of resilience. Additionally, among all the scientific publications cited throughout the report, a special mention goes to the book by Walker and Salt (2006) entitled " Resilience thinking: sustaining ecosystems and people in a changing world " , which is very much suggested as a practical source of information on resilience. As a first chapter, an executive summary is provided with a short overview of the report with the essential notions that are depicted throughout the QR. The second chapter then introduces the concept of resilience and gives an extensive background on the notions behind it. It intends to provide guidance, especially to understand the linkages between the concept of resilience and sustainable development, and the importance of resilience and systems thinking for policy-makers and for those who work on SD governance. The third chapter summarizes the relationships among resilience, society, governance and policy. Therefore, the concept of 'adaptive governance' is advanced as a more appropriate way to deal with …

negative: GRID-CLUSTERING: A FAST HIERARCHICAL CLUSTERING METHOD FOR VERY LARGE DATA SETS This paper presents a new approach to hierarchical clustering of very large data sets, named GridClustering. The method organizes unlike the conventional methods the space surrounding the patterns and not the patterns. It uses a multidimensional grid data structure. The resulting block partitioning of the value space is clustered via a topological neighbor search. The Grid-Clustering method is able to deliver structural pattern distribution information for very large data sets. It superceeds all conventional hierarchical algorithms in runtime behavior and memory space requirements. The algorithm was analyzed within a testbed and suitable values for the tunable parameters of the algorithm are proposed. A comparison of the executions times to other commonly used clustering algorithms and a heuristic runtime analysis is given.

negative: Optimal Parallel Algorithms for Computing the Sum, the Prefix-Sums, and the Summed Area Table on the Memory Machine Models The main contribution of this paper is to show optimal parallel algorithms to compute the sum, the prefix-sums, and the summed area table on two memory machine models, the Discrete Memory Machine (DMM) and the Unified Memory Machine (UMM). The DMM and the UMM are theoretical parallel computing models that capture the essence of the shared memory and the global memory of GPUs. These models have three parameters, the number p of threads, and the width w of the memory, and the memory access latency l. We first show that the sum of n numbers can be computed in O(n w + nl p + l log n) time units on the DMM and the UMM. We then go on to show that Ω(n w + nl p + l log n) time units are necessary to compute the sum. We also present a parallel algorithm that computes the prefix-sums of n numbers in O( n w + nl p + l log n) time units on the DMM and the UMM. Finally, we show that the summed area table of size √ n × √n can be computed in O( n w + nl p + l log n) time units on the DMM and the UMM. Since the computation of the prefix-sums and the summed area table is at least as hard as the sum computation, these parallel algorithms are also optimal. key words: Memory machine models, prefix-sums computation, parallel algorithm, GPU, CUDA

negative: From checking on to checking in: designing for low socio-economic status older adults In this paper we describe the design evolution of a novel technology that collects and displays presence information to be used in the homes of older adults. The first two iterations, the Ambient Plant and Presence Clock, were designed for higher socio-economic status (SES) older adults, whereas the Check-In Tree was designed for low SES older adults. We describe how feedback from older adult participants drove our design decisions, and give an in-depth account of how the Check-In Tree evolved from concept to a final design ready for in situ deployment.

negative: Design of dual-polarized waveguide slotted antenna array for Ka-band application A dual polarized waveguide slotted array for Ka band application is designed. Vertical polarization (VP) is realized by longitudinal slots on broad wall of the ridge waveguide sub array, while horizontal polarization (HP) is realized by tilted slot pairs in the narrow wall of the rectangular waveguide sub array. The feed networks are also designed for each polarization. Especially that for VP, a method to improve the coupling is presented. The antenna has low cross-polarization level and high degree of isolation between two ports.

negative: Analysis and Support of Lifestyle via Emotions Using Social Media Using recent insights from Cognitive, Affective and Social Neuroscience this paper addresses how affective states in social interactions can be used through social media to analyze and support behaviour for a certain lifestyle. A computational model is provided integrating mechanisms for the impact of one’s emotions on behaviour, and for the impact of emotions of others on one’s own emotion. The model is used to reason about and assess the state of a user with regard to a lifestyle goal (such as exercising frequently), based on extracted information about emotions exchanged in social interaction. Support is provided by proposing ways to affecting these social interactions, thereby indirectly influencing the impact of the emotions of others. An ambient intelligent system incorporating this has been implemented for the social medium Twitter.

negative: Is Proof More Cost-Effective Than Testing? ÐThis paper describes the use of formal development methods on an industrial safety-critical application. The Z notation was used for documenting the system specification and part of the design, and the SPARK subset of Ada was used for coding. However, perhaps the most distinctive nature of the project lies in the amount of proof that was carried out: proofs were carried out both at the Z levelÐapproximately 150 proofs in 500 pagesÐand at the SPARK code levelÐapproximately 9,000 verification conditions generated and discharged. The project was carried out under UK Interim Defence Standards 00-55 and 00-56, which require the use of formal methods on safety-critical applications. It is believed to be the first to be completed against the rigorous demands of the 1991 version of these standards. The paper includes comparisons of proof with the various types of testing employed, in terms of their efficiency at finding faults. The most striking result is that the Z proof appears to be substantially more efficient at finding faults than the most efficient testing phase. Given the importance of early fault detection, we believe this helps to show the significant benefit and practicality of large-scale proof on projects of this kind. Index TermsÐSafety-critical software, formal specification, SPARK, specification proof, code proof, proof vs. testing, industrial case study.

negative: An Immune Genetic Algorithm for Software Test Data Generation This paper aims at incorporating immune operators in genetic algorithms as an advanced method for solving the problem of test data generation. The new proposed hybrid algorithm is called immune genetic algorithm (IGA). A full description of this algorithm is presented before investigating its application in the context of software test data generation using some benchmark programs. Moreover, the algorithm is compared with other evolutionary algorithms.

negative: High speed and low power preset-able modified TSPC D flip-flop design and performance comparison with TSPC D flip-flop Positron emission tomography (PET) is a nuclear functional imaging technique that produces a three-dimensional image of functional organs in the body. PET requires high resolution, fast and low power multichannel analog to digital converter (ADC). A typical multichannel ADC for PET scanner architecture consists of several blocks. Most of the blocks can be designed by using fast, low power D flip-flops. A preset-able true single phase clocked (TSPC) D flip-flop shows numerous glitches (noise) at the output due to unnecessary toggling at the intermediate nodes. Preset-able modified TSPC (MTSPC) D flip-flop have been proposed as an alternative solution to alleviate this problem. However, the MTSPC D flip-flop requires one extra PMOS to suspend toggling of the intermediate nodes. In this work, we designed a 7-bit preset-able gray code counter by using the proposed D flip-flop. This work involves UMC 180 nm CMOS technology for preset-able 7-bit gray code counter where we achieved 1 GHz maximum operation frequency with most significant bit (MSB) delay 0.96 ns, power consumption 244.2 μW (micro watt) and power delay product (PDP) 0.23 pJ (Pico joule) from 1.8 V power supply.

negative: Multifocal planes head-mounted displays. Stereoscopic head-mounted displays (HMD's) provide an effective capability to create dynamic virtual environments. For a user of such environments, virtual objects would be displayed ideally at the appropriate distances, and natural concordant accommodation and convergence would be provided. Under such image display conditions, the user perceives these objects as if they were objects in a real environment. Current HMD technology requires convergent eye movements. However, it is currently limited by fixed visual accommodation, which is inconsistent with real-world vision. A prototype multiplanar volumetric projection display based on a stack of laminated planes was built for medical visualization as discussed in a paper presented at a 1999 Advanced Research Projects Agency workshop (Sullivan, Advanced Research Projects Agency, Arlington, Va., 1999). We show how such technology can be engineered to create a set of virtual planes appropriately configured in visual space to suppress conflicts of convergence and accommodation in HMD's. Although some scanning mechanism could be employed to create a set of desirable planes from a two-dimensional conventional display, multiplanar technology accomplishes such function with no moving parts. Based on optical principles and human vision, we present a comprehensive investigation of the engineering specification of multiplanar technology for integration in HMD's. Using selected human visual acuity and stereoacuity criteria, we show that the display requires at most 27 equally spaced planes, which is within the capability of current research and development display devices, located within a maximal 26-mm-wide stack. We further show that the necessary in-plane resolution is of the order of 5 microm.

negative: The dynamic kinetochore-microtubule interface. The kinetochore is a control module that both powers and regulates chromosome segregation in mitosis and meiosis. The kinetochore-microtubule interface is remarkably fluid, with the microtubules growing and shrinking at their point of attachment to the kinetochore. Furthermore, the kinetochore itself is highly dynamic, its makeup changing as cells enter mitosis and as it encounters microtubules. Active kinetochores have yet to be isolated or reconstituted, and so the structure remains enigmatic. Nonetheless, recent advances in genetic, bioinformatic and imaging technology mean we are now beginning to understand how kinetochores assemble, bind to microtubules and release them when the connections made are inappropriate, and also how they influence microtubule behaviour. Recent work has begun to elucidate a pathway of kinetochore assembly in animal cells; the work has revealed that many kinetochore components are highly dynamic and that some cycle between kinetochores and spindle poles along microtubules. Further studies of the kinetochore-microtubule interface are illuminating: (1) the role of the Ndc80 complex and components of the Ran-GTPase system in microtubule attachment, force generation and microtubule-dependent inactivation of kinetochore spindle checkpoint activity; (2) the role of chromosomal passenger proteins in the correction of kinetochore attachment errors; and (3) the function of microtubule plus-end tracking proteins, motor depolymerases and other proteins in kinetochore movement on microtubules and movement coupled to microtubule poleward flux.

negative: Active compensation of current unbalance in paralleled silicon carbide MOSFETs Current unbalance in paralleled power electronic devices can affect the performance and reliability of them. In this paper, the factors causing current unbalance in parallel connected silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs are analyzed, and the threshold mismatch is identified as the major factor. Then the distribution and temperature dependence of SiC MOSFETs' threshold voltage are studied experimentally. Based on the analysis and study, an active current balancing (ACB) scheme is presented. The scheme directly measures the unbalance current, and eliminates it in closed loop by varying the gate delay to each device. The turn-on and turn-off current unbalance are sensed and independently compensated to yield an optimal performance at both switching transitions. The proposed scheme provides robust compensation of current unbalance in fast-switching wide-band-gap devices while keeping circuit complexity and cost low. The performance of the proposed ACB scheme is verified by both simulation and experimental results.

negative: Assessing The Impact Of Gender And Personality On Film Preferences In this paper, the impact of gender and Big Five personality factors (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism) on visual media preferences (for comedy, horror, action, romance and fantasy film genres) was examined. The analyses were carried out using data collected by Stillwell’s (2007) myPersonality application on Facebook; and focused on a sub-sample of British residents aged 16-25 (n=29,197). It was confirmed that females prefer romantic films, whereas males favour action films. As predicted, there was also a marked interaction between gender and personality characteristics: females score higher on Neuroticism and Agreeableness than males. Individuals scoring high on the dimension of Openness were more likely to prefer comedy and fantasy films than romantic films. Conscientious individuals were more inclined to enjoy action and romance genres. Individuals scoring high on Neuroticism tended to prefer romantic films. Finally, significant interactions were noted between gender and Openness with regard to preferences for comedy, action and romance genres. Overall, it is certain that the combination of gender and Big Five personality factors contributes substantially to an understanding of people’s film preferences. GENDER, PERSONALITY AND FILM PREFERENCES 3 Assessing the impact of Gender and Personality on Film Preferences Do comedies have a sexually differentiated public? Are males and females who enjoy horror films similar in terms of personality? Regardless of gender, do personality characteristics influence preference for the fantasy genre? In the present study, we have attempted to provide a meaningful answer to the aforementioned set of questions, based on the analysis of gender and personality interactions with regard to film preferences. In an attempt to complement previous research findings, we focused our analysis on the role of sex and personality in film preferences for British Facebook users aged 16-25. We paid attention to their scores on online Big Five personality questionnaires and their stated gender, using both single and multivariate measures to relate the two variables to film preferences, also listed on their profiles. The following hypotheses were tested: 1. Females and males differ with regard to film preferences. 2. Personality characteristics differ according to gender. 3. Film preferences vary in accordance with personality characteristics. 4. There is a significant interaction between gender and personality with regard to film preferences. the explanatory potential of online social networks Online social networks are mass repositories of valuable social and psychological information for researchers. Facebook, ranked as the most popular social network by worldwide monthly users, hosts for instance more than 400 million user profiles, in which individuals’ number of friends, media content preferences and socio-demographic background– amongst other things are displayed. Their systematic use for data collection purposes is a relatively recent trend in social psychological research; Stillwell’s creation of the myPersonality application (2007) on Facebook is a striking exemplar of the considerable explanatory potential of those online social networks. With myPersonality, users can take an online version of the Big Five personality questionnaire and agree to share their profile information for research purposes. As such, users’ personalities can be matched to any other single or collection of individual information available on Facebook, opening up an array of possible areas of investigation. GENDER, PERSONALITY AND FILM PREFERENCES 4 the predominance of visual media The appeal of visual media is easily demonstrated in terms of the importance it has in the lives of most individuals. Data from the National Survey of Culture, Leisure and Sport (2007) indicates that watching television is the most common leisure activity for over eight out of ten men and women in England, taking precedence over spending time with friends and family, sport, etc. Another intriguing finding relates to TV and movie watching online: the number of Britons visiting such websites reached 21 million in 2007. Although it is clear that many people enjoy visual media offerings, it is much more difficult to pinpoint the specific viewer characteristics that predict genre enjoyment. In other words, who prefers which type of content? visual media content: an explanation of viewer preferences Initially the domain of inquiry of communication theorists, media preferences and their determinants are increasingly studied from the vantage point of a variety of disciplines, amongst which psychology and sociology feature predominantly (Kraaykamp et al, 2005). Their combined explanatory potential finds its articulation in the uses and gratification approach (Blumler & Katz, 1974; Rosengreen & Windhal, 1989), according to which preferences for specific media and/or specific content result from an individual’s psychological and social attributes. gender differences in media content preferences Research on media preferences has paid notable attention to sex differences in responses to different types of film. It has been established that various movie genres elicit differentiated affective responses between the two sexes. Rather interestingly, the widespread gender – stereotyping running through entertainment products seems to correspond to actual viewer preferences. Males indeed prefer action/adventure genres typically associated with the masculine sex, whilst females have a soft spot for romance/drama. Oliver et al. (2000) point to the explanatory potential of differential gender-linked expectations, which can be conceptualized along two dimensions: (1) communality, typically associated with females and (2) agency, often associated with males (Eagly, 1987). Depending on whether they are communal or agency-consistent, the themes preponderant in each genre make up for a sexually differentiated public. A number of studies highlighted the importance of sex in social affiliation with media characters: viewers tend to affiliate more strongly with and GENDER, PERSONALITY AND FILM PREFERENCES 5 experience more intense emotional responses to same-sex characters (e.g. Deutsch, 1975; Hoffner & Cantor, 1991). Another potential explanation is that of sex differences in mean personality levels, which remain fairly constant across the lifespan (Feingold, 1994; McCrae & Costa, 1984). personality differences in media preferences Theorists have also focused considerable attention on the role of personality characteristics in modern mass communication theory (Blumler & Katz, 1974; Wober, 1986). In most personality/media use models, personality is conceptualized as the nexus of attitudes, beliefs and values that guide one’s cognitive and affective interactions with the social environment (Weaver et al, 1993). Personality characteristics are thus believed to influence media preferences, which are essentially evaluative judgements pertaining to the gratifications consumers anticipate from their interaction with the media (Palmgreen, 1984). The Big Five framework of personality is most frequently employed by researchers seeking to demonstrate empirical connections between media gratifications and their psychological roots (e.g. Kraaykamp, 2001; Kraaykamp et al, 2005). It includes the following domains: Openness (traits like originality and open-mindedness), Conscientiousness (traits like hardworking and orderly), Extraversion (traits like energetic and sociable), Agreeableness (traits like affectionate and considerate) and Neuroticism (traits like nervous and tense) (Donellan & Lucas, 2008). With regard to media preferences, individuals scoring high on the dimension of Openness seem to prefer original and serious media content, whilst conscientious individuals like predictable and structured formats (Kraaykamp et al, 2005). The findings for extroverts are less straightforward: they seemingly favour sensory stimulation because of relatively high arousal levels (Costa & McCrae, 1988). Agreeableness appears to be the second most important personality trait, after Openness, in predicting visual preferences. Friendly individuals tend to watch popular content, devoid of upsetting and unconventional images (Kraykaamp, 2001). Finally, emotionally unstable individuals are thought to find easy means of escape from feelings of tension and stress in watching TV (Conway & Rubin, 1991). Most studies on personality effects in media preferences tend to either overlook or control for participants’ gender (e.g. Weaver et al, 1993; Kraaykamp, 2001). As a result, it is difficult to tell in the former case whether the differentiated association between media GENDER, PERSONALITY AND FILM PREFERENCES 6 preferences and personality characteristics is partially caused by the fact that personality traits differ systematically between people of different sexes (Kraaykamp & Van Eijck, 2005). The latter design precludes the possibility of assessing the interaction between gender and personality when it comes to predicting media taste. It seemed to us as though no one has investigated gendered differences in personality in the context of similar genre preferences.

negative: The Open University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Learning analytics : drivers , developments and challenges Learning analytics is a significant area of technology-enhanced learning that has emerged during the last decade. This review of the field begins with an examination of the technological, educational and political factors that have driven the development of analytics in educational settings. It goes on to chart the emergence of learning analytics, including their origins in the 20th century, the development of data-driven analytics, the rise of learningfocused perspectives and the influence of national economic concerns. It next focuses on the relationships between learning analytics, educational data mining and academic analytics. Finally, it examines developing areas of learning analytics research, and identifies a series of future challenges.

negative: Color , Shape and Texture based Fruit Recognition System The paper presents an automated system for classification of fruits. A dataset containing five different fruits was constructed using an ordinary camera. All the fruits were analyzed on the basis of their color (RGB space), shape and texture and then classified using different classifiers to find the classifier that gives the best accuracy. Gray Level Cooccurance Matrix(GLCM) is used to calculate texture features .Best accuracy was achieved by support vector machine (svm). All the processing was carried out in Matlab. Keywords—computer vision, pattern recognition, support vector machine, texture features.

negative: Exploring the relationships between college students' cell phone use, personality and leisure

negative: A New ADS-B Authentication Framework Based on Efficient Hierarchical Identity-Based Signature with Batch Verification Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) has become a crucial part of next generation air traffic surveillance technology and will be mandatorily deployed for most of the airspaces worldwide by 2020. Each aircraft equipped with an ADS-B device keeps broadcasting plaintext messages to other aircraft and the ground station controllers once or twice per second. The lack of security measures in ADS-B systems makes it susceptible to different attacks. Among the various security issues, we investigate the integrity and authenticity of ADS-B messages. We propose a new framework for providing ADS-B with authentication based on three-level hierarchical identity-based signature (HIBS) with batch verification. Previous signature-based ADS-B authentication protocols focused on how to generate signatures efficiently, while our schemes can also significantly reduce the verification cost, which is critical to ADS-B systems, since at any time an ADS-B receiver may receive lots of signatures. We design two concrete schemes. The basic scheme supports partial batch verification and the extended scheme provides full batch verification. We give a formal security proof for the extended scheme. Experiment results show that our schemes with batch verification are tremendously more efficient in batch verifying <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$ </tex-math><alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:href="yang-ieq1-2459709.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> signatures than verifying <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="yang-ieq2-2459709.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula> signatures independently. For example, the running time of verifying 100 signatures is 502 and 484 ms for the basic scheme and the extended scheme respectively, while the time is 2500 ms if verifying the signatures independently.

negative: Dual-Band and Dual-Polarized SIW-Fed Microstrip Patch Antenna A new dual-band and dual-polarized antenna is investigated in this letter. Two longitudinal and transverse slots on the broad wall of the substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) are responsible for creating two different frequency bands with distinct polarization. A frequency selective surface (FSS) is placed on top of the microstrip patches to reduce the cross-polarization level of the antenna. The resonance frequencies of the patch and slot are set near to each other to get a wider impedance bandwidth. Bandwidth of more than 7% is achieved in each band. SIW feeding network increases the efficiency of the antenna. The simulated radiation efficiency of the antenna is better than 87% over the impedance bandwidth .

negative: Simulation of lightning impulse voltage stresses in underground cables The goal of this work is to study the transient behavior of the cable against the application of standard and non-standard lightning impulse voltage waveforms. A 66 kV cable model has been developed in MATLAB Simulink and standard and non-standard impulse voltages are applied to it. A preliminary comparative study on the obtained voltages indicated that non-standard impulse voltage waveform developed higher voltage stress in the cable. Simulation results helped to investigate which impulses (standard or non-standard) represent the worst possible voltage stresses on the cables. This study provides the basis for further study of effects of non-standard impulse voltage waveforms and make necessary correction in the existing impulse testing standards.

negative: Support Vector Machines For Synthetic Aperture Radar Automatic Target Recognition Algorithms that produce classifiers with large margins, such as support vector machines (SVMs), AdaBoost, etc. are receiving more and more attention in the literature. This paper presents a real application of SVMs for synthetic aperture radar automatic target recognition (SAR/ATR) and compares the result with conventional classifiers. The SVMs are tested for classification both in closed and open sets (recognition). Experimental results showed that SVMs outperform conventional classifiers in target classification. Moreover, SVMs with the Gaussian kernels are able to form a local " bounded " decision region around each class that presents better rejection to confusers.

negative: Synthetic aperture radar at millimeter wavelength for UAV surveillance applications The airborne monitoring of scenes using unmanned aircrafts is becoming increasingly important. Several types of airborne sensors - in the optical, infrared or millimeter wave spectrum - are available for the different platforms. Beside the all-weather suitability of the sensors, the deployment scenarios, often also demand for the ability to look through dust clouds, smoke, and fog. The only sensor, which is capable to cope with such environmental restrictions and is able to deliver high-resolution images, is the synthetic aperture radar (SAR). In this paper we focus on miniaturized SAR systems which were developed and optimized for utilization in a UA V (unmanned aerial vehicle) with a low loading capacity. This not only requires a compact and light radar sensor but the processing also has to cope with the unstable flight conditions of a small aircraft. Therefore, a high-precision inertial measurement unit (IMU) and motion compensating SAR-algorithms are needed. Thanks to the utilization of a high transmit frequency of either 35 GHz or 94 GHz, the sensors are suitable for the detection of small-scale objects. A very high resolution of 15 cm × 15 cm can be achieved when using modern FMCW (frequency modulated continuous wave) generation with a high bandwidth (up to 1 GHz) in combination with small antennas.

negative: Automated Non-Gaussian Clustering of Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar Images This paper presents an automatic image segmentation method for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data. It utilizes the full polarimetric information and incorporates texture by modeling with a non-Gaussian distribution for the complex scattering coefficients. The modeling is based upon the well-known product model, with a Gamma-distributed texture parameter leading to the K-Wishart model for the covariance matrix. The automatic clustering is achieved through a finite mixture model estimated with a modified expectation maximization algorithm. We include an additional goodness-of-fit test stage that allows for splitting and merging of clusters. This not only improves the model fit of the clusters, but also dynamically selects the appropriate number of clusters. The resulting image segmentation depicts the statistically significant clusters within the image. A key feature is that the degree of sub-sampling of the input image will affect the detail level of the clustering, revealing only the major classes or a variable level of detail. Real-world examples are shown to demonstrate the technique.

negative: Ship Classification in TerraSAR-X Images With Feature Space Based Sparse Representation Ship classification is the key step in maritime surveillance using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. In this letter, we develop a new ship classification method in TerraSAR-X images based on sparse representation in feature space, in which the sparse representation classification (SRC) method is exploited. In particular, to describe the ship more accurately and to reduce the dimension of the dictionary in SRC, we propose to employ a representative feature vector to construct the dictionary instead of utilizing the image pixels directly. By testing on a ship data set collected from TerraSAR-X images, we show that the proposed method is superior to traditional methods such as the template matching (TM), K-nearest neighbor (K-NN), Bayes and Support Vector Machines (SVM).

negative: Design of a Wideband Waveguide Slot Array Antenna and its Decoupling Method for Synthetic Aperture Radar For the synthetic aperture radar systems, there is an increasing demand for achieving resolutions of 0.2 mtimes0.2 m. As the range resolution and system bandwidth are inversely proportional, the system bandwidth is expected to be greater than 1 GHz. Thus an antenna with wider band needs to be developed. Waveguide slot antennas have been implemented on several SAR satellites due to its inherent advantages such as high efficiency and power handling capacity, but its bandwidth is quite limited. To avoid the manufacture difficulties of the ridge waveguide, which is capable of broadening the bandwidth of slot antennas, a novel antenna element with conventional waveguide is designed. The bandwidth of VSWR les1.5 is greater than 1 GHz at X-band. To reduce the mutual coupling of closely placed antenna elements, a decoupling method with cavity-like walls inserted between adjacent elements is adopted and their effects on the performance of the antenna are summarized.

negative: A multi-temporal InSAR method incorporating both persistent scatterer and small baseline approaches [1] Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) interferometry is a technique that provides high-resolution measurements of the ground displacement associated with many geophysical processes. Advanced techniques involving the simultaneous processing of multiple SAR acquisitions in time increase the number of locations where a deformation signal can be extracted and reduce associated error. Currently there are two broad categories of algorithms for processing multiple acquisitions, persistent scatterer and small baseline methods, which are optimized for different models of scattering. However, the scattering characteristics of real terrains usually lay between these two end-member models. I present here a new method that combines both approaches, to extract the deformation signal at more points and with higher overall signal-to-noise ratio than can either approach alone. I apply the combined method to data acquired over Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland, and detect time-varying ground displacements associated with two intrusion events. Citation: Hooper, A., (2008), A multi-temporal InSAR method incorporating both persistent scatterer and small baseline approaches, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L16302, doi:10.1029/ 2008GL034654.

negative: PALSAR Radiometric and Geometric Calibration This paper summarizes the results obtained from geometric and radiometric calibrations of the Phased-Array L-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) on the Advanced Land Observing Satellite, which has been in space for three years. All of the imaging modes of the PALSAR, i.e., single, dual, and full polarimetric strip modes and scanning synthetic aperture radar (SCANSAR), were calibrated and validated using a total of 572 calibration points collected worldwide and distributed targets selected primarily from the Amazon forest. Through raw-data characterization, antenna-pattern estimation using the distributed target data, and polarimetric calibration using the Faraday rotation-free area in the Amazon, we performed the PALSAR radiometric and geometric calibrations and confirmed that the geometric accuracy of the strip mode is 9.7-m root mean square (rms), the geometric accuracy of SCANSAR is 70 m, and the radiometric accuracy is 0.76 dB from a corner-reflector analysis and 0.22 dB from the Amazon data analysis (standard deviation). Polarimetric calibration was successful, resulting in a VV/HH amplitude balance of 1.013 (0.0561 dB) with a standard deviation of 0.062 and a phase balance of 0.612deg with a standard deviation of 2.66deg .