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Recent research shows that website fingerprinting (WF) is a growing threat to privacy-sensitive web users, especially when using machine learning techniques such as deep learning or machine learning (DL / ML) to attack website fingerprint, reducing the effectiveness of the previous defense strategies. The reason is that the features targeted by the previous defense countermeasures are manually extracted, the range of it can’t be large enough to cover the range of features automatically extracted by DL / ML-based attacks. This paper proposes a black box defense countermeasure based on decision boundary confusion. Instead of manually extracting features, it uses the classification results of the classifier to determine the decision boundary of the classifier then automatically find the adversarial traffic that may cause the classifier to be confused. At the same time, to solve the retraining problem caused by adversarial traffic, we also utilize Monte Carlo estimation to modify adversarial traffic, to confuse decision boundary, improve the retraining resistance of adversarial traffic. Therefore, it is difficult for the classifier to form a stable and effective decision boundary after training the adversarial traffic. Results shows that our method gets a average defense success rate of 78.2% when facing the baseline WF Attacks, outperforming existing SOTA method Walkie-Talkie’s 63.6% average defense success rate. At the same time, our method improves the ability of the adversarial traffic to resist retrain, increased the retrain defense success rate from 12% to 78.2% under 31% overhead.

Machine learning (ML) is widely applied to network traffic classification (NTC), which is an essential component for network management and security. While the imbalance distribution exhibiting in real-world network traffic degrades the classifier’s performance and leads to prediction bias towards majority classes, which is always ignored by exiting ML-based NTC studies. Some researches have proposed solutions such as resampling for imbalanced traffic classification. However, most methods don’t take traffic characteristics into account and consume much time, resulting in unsatisfactory results. In this paper, we analyze the imbalanced traffic data and propose the focal loss based adaptive gradient boosting framework (FLAGB) for imbalanced traffic classification. FLAGB can automatically adapt to NTC tasks with different imbalance levels and overcome imbalance without the prior knowledge of data distribution. Our comprehensive experiments on two network traffic datasets covering binary and multiple classes prove that FLAGB outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Its low time consumption during training also makes it an excellent choice for highly imbalanced traffic classification.

A low-cost Co-based alloy was employed to fabricate friction stir welding (FSW) tools to weld TA5 alloy under different welding speeds. The tool wear characteristics, tool degradation mechanisms and effects of tool wear behavior on the microstructure and mechanical properties of joints were investigated in detail. Results reveal that the heat input near weld root decreases with the increase of welding speed and the tool wears more extensively under lower heat input when the deterioration rates of tool sizes are considered. Furthermore, the tool wears out mainly by mechanical abrasion near pin tip, leading to a large number of tool particles in mixed regions accompanied by severe material loss. The tool wears less severely near pin root and shoulder, since the adhesion layer caused by adhesive and diffusional wear mechanisms is the main cross-sectional wear morphology, and the interlayer rich in W and Cr between adhesion layer and intact part of tool may protect the tool from serious diffusional wear. The foreign β-stable tool compositions were introduced to the weld, reducing the transus temperature. Therefore, transformed acicular α and retained β phases were detected in contaminated zone (CZ) inside stir zone (SZ) compared with the untransformed equiaxed α grains in non-contaminated zone (NCZ). In addition, the acicular α and β phases result in much higher strength and microhardness than base material (BM).

Breast cancer is one of the most deadly forms of cancer in women worldwide. Better prediction of breast cancer prognosis is essential for more personalized treatment. In this study, we aimed to infer patient‐specific subpathway activities to reveal a functional signature associated with the prognosis of patients with breast cancer. We integrated pathway structure with gene expression data to construct patient‐specific subpathway activity profiles using a greedy search algorithm. A four‐subpathway prognostic signature was developed in the training set using a random forest supervised classification algorithm and a prognostic score model with the activity profiles. According to the signature, patients were classified into high‐risk and low‐risk groups with significantly different overall survival in the training set (median survival of 65 vs 106 months, P = 1.82e‐13) and test set (median survival of 75 vs 101 months, P = 4.17e‐5). Our signature was then applied to five independent breast cancer data sets and showed similar prognostic values, confirming the accuracy and robustness of the subpathway signature. Stratified analysis suggested that the four‐subpathway signature had prognostic value within subtypes of breast cancer. Our results suggest that the four‐subpathway signature may be a useful biomarker for breast cancer prognosis.

A low power and high linearity merged analog baseband (MABB) with tunable bandwidth (BW) and programmable gain is proposed for multi-standard integrated wireless receivers in this paper. The MABB consists of an Active-RC low-pass filter and a programmable gain amplifier (PGA). An operational amplifier (op amp) for high gain-bandwidth (GBW) product under low supply voltage is proposed. A R-kR resistor ladder is used in the PGA to achieve a closed-loop gain independent of bandwidth and 3dB gain step. The proposed MABB covers a bandwidth range from 1.6MHz to 6.4MHz and the gain could be tuned from 6 to 27dB. The MABB, designed in 40nm CMOS, achieves >94 dB SFDR for 27dB gain and a 570-mV pp-diff output signal amplitude, while consuming 1.147mW under a 0.9V supply voltage.

The major wind turbine performance assessment methodology established in the field of wind energy is observing and comparing wind turbine power curves (WTPC) of multiple wind turbines. In this paper, adjustments to this method are proposed to improve overall accuracy of the assessment. While preprocessing the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) data points, density peak clustering (DPC) filters out invalid points such as maintenance and peak-power limitation for a more accurate WTPC. This paper introduces a new variable, performance index "S", to evaluate both overall and segmented wind turbine performance without the influence of wind distribution. Further researches are also discussed in this paper.

Programming languages, libraries, and development tools have transformed the application development processes for mobile computing and machine learning. This paper introduces the CyPhyHouse - a toolchain that aims to provide similar programming, debugging, and deployment benefits for distributed mobile robotic applications. Users can develop hardware-agnostic, distributed applications using the high-level, event driven Koord programming language, without requiring expertise in controller design or distributed network protocols. The modular, platform-independent middleware of CyPhyHouse implements these functionalities using standard algorithms for path planning (RRT), control (MPC), mutual exclusion, etc. A high-fidelity, scalable, multi-threaded simulator for Koord applications is developed to simulate the same application code for dozens of heterogeneous agents. The same compiled code can also be deployed on heterogeneous mobile platforms. The effectiveness of CyPhyHouse in improving the design cycles is explicitly illustrated in a robotic testbed through development, simulation, and deployment of a distributed task allocation application on in-house ground and aerial vehicles.

Remote desktop enables users to remotely access their computers via the Internet, which is widely used as a basic tool in areas such as remote work, remote assistance and remote administration. However, existing remote desktop is designed to work in the mode of updating user’s real-time command and remote screen’s state interactively for a better user experience, such working mode may cause serious side-channel information leakage problem in spite of encryption of the traffic, as revealed in this paper. We carry out an experimental research to assess the side-channel information leakage of six most popular remote desktop softwares in Windows 10 & 7 platforms: Anydesk, ConnectWise, MicroRDS, RealVNC, Teamviewer, and Zoho Assist. With the help of machine learning techniques including logistic regression, support vector machine, gradient boosting decision tree, random forest as well as statistic features of flow burst, we observe that an adversary can excellently uncover (top at 99.26% TPR, 0.57% FPR, 97.17% F1-score) 5 rough kinds of daily activities covering editing documents, reading documents, surfing webs, watching videos and installing softwares and even worse precisely classify 4 fine activities predefined as editing documents with Microsoft Office Word and the other three edit tools with high true positive rate and low false positive rate. Our results prove the fact for remote desktop traffic encryption mechanism is nothing sufficient to prevent side-channel information leakage and both users and providers of remote desktop should pay more attention to such serious privacy leakage problem.

Melanoma is a very malignant disease and there are still no effective treatments. CD147 participates in the carcinogenesis of multiple human cancers and GLUT-1, as a glucose transporter, is associated with tumor growth. However, the function of CD147 and GLUT-1 in melanoma have not been completely understood. Thus, in this study we investigated the expression of CD147 and GLUT-1 in melanoma tissue, which were overexpressed compared with that in nevus tissue. In addition, CD147 and GLUT-1 were co-localized in the cytoplasm of human melanoma A375 cells. Immunoprecipitation proved that CD147 interacted with GLUT-1 at D105-199. Silencing CD147 by specific siRNA could downregulate GLUT-1 level via inhibiting PI3K/Akt signaling and decrease glucose uptake in A375 cells. In vivo experiments also supported that CD147 knockdown suppressed the tumor growth in melanoma subcutaneous mice model, observed by micro PET/CT. Our results could help validate CD147 as a new therapeutic target for treating melanoma.

In this study, efficient and sensitive analytical methods based on liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry were established to evaluate the degradation behavior of prothioconazole and prothioconazole-desthio along with mycotoxin contamination in wheat samples. The mean recoveries of prothioconazole and prothioconazole-desthio ranged from 76.05% to 96.17% with intraday relative standard deviations (RSDs) of 0.84%-14.38%. Mean recoveries of the five mycotoxins were 85.82%-103.24% with RSDs of 1.82%-7.03%. The residue and degradation behavior of prothioconazole was studied in wheat plant and grain under field conditions with different spraying equipment and prothioconazole formulations. Both application method and formulation affected prothioconazole degradation, and the content of all mycotoxin was lower than the national standards. The proposed analytic methods can be used to systematically evaluate prothioconazole and prothioconazole-desthio along with mycotoxin contamination in food. These results suggest that prothioconazole is safe for the control Fusarium head blight in wheat.

We present a demo of DryVR 2.0, a framework for verification and controller synthesis of cyber-physical systems composed of black-box simulators and white-box automata. For verification, DryVR 2.0 takes as input a black-box simulator, a white-box transition graph, a time bound and a safety specification. As output it generates over-approximations of the reachable states and returns "Safe" if the system meets the given bounded safety specification, or it returns "Unsafe" with a counter-example. For controller synthesis, DryVR 2.0 takes as input black-box simulator(s) and a reach-avoid specification, and uses RRTs to find a transition graph such that the combined system satisfies the given specification.

// Qingling Li 1 , Jie Li 1 , Ting Wen 2 , Weiqi Zeng 1 , Cong Peng 1 , Siyu Yan 1 , Jieqiong Tan 3 , Keda Yang 4 , Shuang Liu 1 , Aiyuan Guo 1 , Chong Zhang 1 , Juan Su 1 , Minghao Jiang 5 , Zhaoqian Liu 6 , Honghao Zhou 6 , Xiang Chen 1 1 Department of Dermatology, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, 410008, China 2 Department of Orthopaedics, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, 410008, China 3 State Key Laboratory of Medical Genetics, Xiangya Medical School, Central South University, Changsha, 410008, China 4 Department of Pathology, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, 410008, China 5 Department of Anesthesiology, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, 410013, China 6 Institute of Clinical Pharmacology, Xiangya School of Medicine, Central South University, Changsha, 410008, China Correspondence to: Dr. Xiang Chen, e-mail: chenxiangck@gmail.com Dr. Jie Li, e-mail: lijie82@yahoo.com Key words: high mobility group box 1; p53; p21; Sp1; melanoma Received: April 25, 2014 Accepted: July 09, 2014 Published: July 15, 2014 ABSTRACT: Although laboratory studies have implicated the high mobility group box 1 (HMGB1) in melanoma, its clinical relevance remains unclear. We analyzed nearly 100 cases of human melanoma and found that HMGB1 was highly overexpressed in melanoma samples relative to normal skin and nevi tissues. Significantly, higher levels of HMGB1 correlated with more advanced disease stages and with poorer survival in melanoma patients. Unlike the well-documented pro-inflammatory role of the extracellular HMGB1, we found that its intracellular activity is necessary for melanoma cell proliferation. An absolute dependency of melanoma cell proliferation on HMGB1 was underscored by the marked response of cell cycle arrest and senescence to HMGB1 knockdown. We demonstrated that HMGB1 deficiency-induced inhibition of cell proliferation was mediated by p21, which was induced via a Sp1-dependent mechanism. Taken together, our data demonstrate a novel oncogenic role of HMGB1 in promoting human melanoma cell proliferation and have important implications in melanoma patient care.

To understand the in vivo function of the amyloid precursor protein (APP) we generated an APP null mutation in mice by homologous recombination in embryonic stem (ES) cells. We show here that homozygous APP deficient mice were produced at expected frequencies. Neither APP mRNA nor protein could be detected in these animals. Yet the homozygous APP mutant mice are fertile and do not show overt abnormalities at up to 12 weeks of age. Neuroanatomical studies of the brain did not reveal significant differences in the knockout mice as compared to the wild-type controls. These results argue against an essential function of APP in mouse embryonic and early neuronal development.

Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory skin disease with multifactorial etiology. Connexin 26 (Cx26), an important gap junction protein, has been found highly expressed in plaques of psoriasis. Recently, genome wide association studies (GWAS) identified one new single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in GJB2 gene coding for Cx26 protein associated with psoriasis in Chinese Han population. In this paper, we verified the GWAS data in Chinese Han population. Here we genotyped the polymorphism of GJB2 rs3751385:C>T in 371 psoriasis patients and 330 healthy controls in Chinese Han population using polymerase chain reaction restriction fragment length polymorphism assay (PCR–RFLP). Our case–control assay indicated decreased frequency of the GJB2 rs3751385 C allele in psoriasis patients compared with that in the healthy controls [p = 6.02 × 10−5, Odds ratio (OR) = 0.793, 95 % confidence interval (CI) 0.706–0.889]. The result suggested that GJB2 gene polymorphism rs3751385:C>T was associated with psoriasis susceptibility of Chinese Han population.

"Cloud Computing" offers many potential benefits, including cost savings, the ability to deploy applications and services quickly, and the ease of scaling those application and services once they are deployed. A key barrier for enterprise adoption is the confidentiality of data stored on Cloud Computing Infrastructure. Our simple technique implemented with Open Source software solves this problem by using public key encryption to render stored data at rest unreadable by unauthorized personnel, including system administrators of the cloud computing service on which the data is stored. We validate our approach on a network measurement system implemented on PlanetLab. We then use it on a service where confidentiality is critical --- a scanning application that validates external firewall implementations.

The peptides alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone (alpha-MSH) and oxytocin have very similar effects on several behaviours, including male sexual behaviour. Both induce penile erection and enhance copulatory behaviour when given centrally, suggesting that their central actions are not independent. Here, we used intromission as a physiological stimulus to investigate whether some central effects of alpha-MSH during male sexual behaviour are mediated by oxytocin neurones. We used the expression of the immediate-early gene product Fos to investigate oxytocin neurone activation at intromission and after intracerebroventricular (i.c.v.) administration of alpha-MSH (1 microg/5 microl) and studied the effects of i.c.v. administration of a MC4 receptor antagonist on Fos expression and on the latency of male rats to exhibit sexual behaviour in the presence of a receptive female. In rats that showed intromission, Fos was expressed in magnocellular oxytocin neurones in both the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) and the supraoptic nucleus (SON), but there was no significant activation of parvocellular oxytocin neurones of the PVN. Similarly, alpha-MSH increased Fos expression in magnocellular oxytocin neurones but had little or no effect in parvocellular oxytocin neurones. In male rats that achieved intromission, central injection of a MC4 receptor antagonist significantly attenuated the increase in Fos expression in magnocellular oxytocin neurones in both the PVN and the SON and increased mount and intromission latencies compared to vehicle-injected controls. Together, the results indicate that magnocellular oxytocin neurones are involved in the central regulation of male sexual behaviour, and that some of the central effects of alpha-MSH are likely to be mediated by magnocellular oxytocin neurones.

The pulsatile nature of GH release is apparently regulated by alternating sequential changes in two hypothalamic hormones, GH releasing hormone (GHRH) and somatostatin. Entrainment of this pulsatility appears to involve GH-mediated negative feedback. Recently a new receptor involved in GH release was cloned. Activation of this receptor by GH-releasing peptides and MK-0677 initiates and amplifies GH pulsatility and is associated with increased Fos immunoreactivity and electrical activity in GHRH containing arcuate neurons. We show that pretreating mice with GH blocks activation of these neurons by MK-0677. Similarly, octreotide inhibited the action of MK-0677. To determine whether this GH-mediated negative feedback on GHRH neurons was direct, or by GH stimulation of somatostatin release from periventricular neurons, we selectively inactivated the gene for one of the five specific somatostatin receptor subtypes (subtype 2). In the knockout mice, both GH and octreotide failed to inhibit MK-0677 activation of arcuate neurons. GH did, however, increase Fos immunoreactivity in the periventricular nucleus, consistent with GH stimulation of somatostatin release from periventricular neurons. Thus, GH-mediated negative feedback involves signaling between periventricular and arcuate neurons with the signal being transduced specifically through somatostatin subtype 2 receptors.

Theβ-amyloid peptide (Aβ), the major component of the neuritic plaques characterizing Alzheimer’s disease (AD), is a 39 to 43 amino acid peptide derived from proteolytic cleavage of a larger β-amyloid precursor protein (APP). Mutations in the APP gene have been identified which cause familial, early onset AD, suggesting that APP metabolism is a central event in AD progression (Mullan & Crawford, 1993). APP is an abundant protein in the brain and Aβ is produced not only in AD patients, but also in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of normal individuals (Selkoe, 1994). APP has been implicated in numerous activities based on in vitro studies, such as regulation of cell adhesion, neurite outgrowth and intraneuronal calcium (Selkoe, 1994). However, the in vivo function of APP remains unclear.

We used gene targeting in embryonic stem cells to introduce an IL-1 beta null allele in mice. The IL-1 beta-deficient mice develop normally and are apparently healthy and fertile. The IL-1 beta null mice responded normally in models of contact and delayed-type hypersensitivity or following bacterial endotoxin LPS-induced inflammation. The IL-1 beta-deficient mice showed equivalent resistance to Listeria monocytogenes compared with wild-type controls. In contrast, when challenged with turpentine, which causes localized inflammation and tissue injury, the IL-1 beta mutant mice exhibited an impaired acute-phase inflammatory response and were completely resistant to fever development and anorexia. These results highlight a central role for IL-1 beta as a pyrogen and a mediator of the acute-phase response in a subset of inflammatory disease models, and support the notion that blocking the action of a single key cytokine can alter the course of specific immune and inflammatory responses.

In several pedigrees of early onset familial Alzheimer's disease (FAD), point mutations in the β-amyloid precursor protein (APP) gene are genetically linked to the disease. This finding implicates APP in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease in these individuals. To understand the in vivo function of APP and its processing, we have generated an APP-null mutation in mice. Homozygous APP-deficient mice were viable and fertile. However, the mutant animals weighed 15%-20% less than age-matched wild-type controls. Neurological evaluation showed that the APP-deficient mice exhibited a decreased locomotor activity and forelimb grip strength, indicating a compromised neuronal or muscular function. In addition, four out of six homozygous mice showed reactive gliosis at 14 weeks of age, suggesting an impaired neuronal function as a result of the APP-null mutation.