Profiling user activities with minimal traffic traces

Understanding user behavior is essential to personalize and enrich a user's online experience. While there are significant benefits to be accrued from the pursuit of personalized services based on a fine-grained behavioral analysis, care must be taken to address user privacy concerns. In this paper, we consider the use of web traces with truncated URLs - each URL is trimmed to only contain the web domain - for this purpose. While such truncation removes the fine-grained sensitive information, it also strips the data of many features that are crucial to the profiling of user activity. We show how to overcome the severe handicap of lack of crucial features for the purpose of filtering out the URLs representing a user activity from the noisy network traffic trace (including advertisement, spam, analytics, webscripts) with high accuracy. This activity profiling with truncated URLs enables the network operators to provide personalized services while mitigating privacy concerns by storing and sharing only truncated traffic traces. In order to offset the accuracy loss due to truncation, our statistical methodology leverages specialized features extracted from a group of consecutive URLs that represent a micro user action like web click, chat reply, etc., which we call bursts. These bursts, in turn, are detected by a novel algorithm which is based on our observed characteristics of the inter-arrival time of HTTP records. We present an extensive experimental evaluation on a real dataset of mobile web traces, consisting of more than 130 million records, representing the browsing activities of 10,000 users over a period of 30 days. Our results show that the proposed methodology achieves around 90% accuracy in segregating URLs representing user activities from non-representative URLs

Noncitizens\u27 Rights in the Face of Prolonged Detention: Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (the INA ), codified in part at 8 U.S.C. § 1231, the federal government generally has ninety days to successfully deport a detained noncitizen who has reentered illegally after being removed once before. While exceptions to this time limit exist, the United States Supreme Court determined in 2001 that detention under Section 1231 cannot be indefinite.[1] Now, more than two decades later, the Court must elaborate further. In Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez, the Court must decide how long a detainment can last beyond the ninety-day statutory limit while a detainee seeks relief from deportation through a procedure called a \u27withholding of removal\u27 (also known as withholding-only relief ). An immigration judge determines the outcome of a withholding of removal claim, and if granted, withholding-only relief provides that a person cannot be deported to their home country.[2] To secure withholding-only relief, a noncitizen must establish a fear of violence in their home country. Once established, the United States government cannot deport the noncitizen to their home country without violating the United Nations Convention against Torture. [1]. Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678, 690 (2001). [2]. American Immigration Counsel and National Immigrant Justice Center, The Difference Between Asylum and Withholding of Removal 2 (2020)

Upholding the Domestic Violence Firearm Prohibitors Under Bruen’s Second Amendment

Federal law prohibits individuals subject to a domestic violence protective order (§ 922(g)(8)) or convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors (§ 922(g)(9)) from possessing firearms. Before New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, these commonsense gun laws had generally been considered uncontroversial, both in terms of their broad popular support and their constitutionality under the Second Amendment. In Bruen, however, the Supreme Court held that when a regulation burdens a Second Amendment right, the regulation must be consistent with American historical tradition, meaning that the regulation must be analogous to a pattern of historical firearm regulation. After Bruen, the domestic violence firearm prohibitors have faced Second Amendment constitutional challenges in courts around the country. The most noteworthy of these cases is a Fifth Circuit case, United States v. Rahimi, which held that the domestic violence misdemeanor firearm ban was unconstitutional because it was not sufficiently analogous to American historical firearm regulation. The Fifth Circuit is the first federal appeals court to examine one of the domestic violence firearm prohibitors after Bruen, and the government swiftly announced its intent to appeal the decision. Because Congress only began regulating domestic violence in the twentieth century, a time period explicitly carved out of the Bruen historical analysis, courts must perform an analysis based in analogy to uphold the constitutionality of the domestic violence firearms prohibitors. Although these complications under the Bruen standard may spark discussion of the decision\u27s logic, this Note meets the law where it is and aims to argue for the constitutionality of these prohibitors within the Bruen framework. Indeed, for Bruen to remain internally consistent and instruct a workable doctrine, domestic violence restrictions on firearm ownership must survive Second Amendment constitutional scrutiny, as they have since their inception

Children reason about shared preferences

Two-year-old children’s reasoning about the relation between their own and others’ preferences was investigated across two studies. In Experiment 1, children first observed 2 actors display their individual preferences for various toys. Children were then asked to make inferences about new, visually inaccessible toys and books that were described as being the favorite of each actor, unfamiliar to each actor, or disliked by each actor. Children tended to select the favorite toys and books from the actor who shared their own preference but chose randomly when the new items were unfamiliar to or disliked by the two actors. Experiment 2 extended these findings, showing that children do not generalize a shared preference across unrelated categories of items. Taken together, the results suggest that young children readily recognize when another person holds a preference similar to their own and use that knowledge appropriately to achieve desired outcomes

Role of chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans (CSPGs) in synaptic plasticity and neurotransmission in mammalian spinal cord.

Chronic unilateral hemisection (HX) of the adult rat spinal cord diminishes conduction through intact fibers in the ventrolateral funiculus (VLF) contralateral to HX. Intraspinal injections of Chondroitinase-ABC, known to digest chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans (CSPGs) in the vicinity of injury, prevented this decline of axonal conduction. This was associated with improved locomotor function. We further injected three purified CSPGs into the lateral column of the uninjured cord at T10: NG2 and neurocan, which increase in the vicinity of a spinal injury, and aggrecan, which decreases. Intraspinal injection of NG2 acutely depressed axonal conduction through the injection region in a dose dependent manner. Similar injections of saline, aggrecan, or neurocan had no significant effect. These results identify a novel acute action of CSPGs on axonal conduction in spinal cord, and suggest that antagonism of proteoglycans reverses or prevents the decline of axonal conduction, in addition to stimulating axonal growth

Long-term Tracking in the Wild: A Benchmark

We introduce the OxUvA dataset and benchmark for evaluating single-object tracking algorithms. Benchmarks have enabled great strides in the field of object tracking by defining standardized evaluations on large sets of diverse videos. However, these works have focused exclusively on sequences that are just tens of seconds in length and in which the target is always visible. Consequently, most researchers have designed methods tailored to this "short-term" scenario, which is poorly representative of practitioners' needs. Aiming to address this disparity, we compile a long-term, large-scale tracking dataset of sequences with average length greater than two minutes and with frequent target object disappearance. The OxUvA dataset is much larger than the object tracking datasets of recent years: it comprises 366 sequences spanning 14 hours of video. We assess the performance of several algorithms, considering both the ability to locate the target and to determine whether it is present or absent. Our goal is to offer the community a large and diverse benchmark to enable the design and evaluation of tracking methods ready to be used "in the wild". The project website is http://oxuva.netComment: To appear at ECCV 201