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

The cost of systemic corticosteroid-induced morbidity in severe asthma : a health economic analysis

The study data-set was supported by the Respiratory Effectiveness Group through their academic partnership with Optimum Patient Care. Ciaran O'Neill was funded under a HRB Research Leader Award (RL/13/16).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Meteoroid sensor material development Final report, 20 Sep. 1968 - 20 Sep. 1969

Dielectrics evaluated for use in micrometeoroid sensor capacitor

On the Unicity of Smartphone Applications

Prior works have shown that the list of apps installed by a user reveal a lot about user interests and behavior. These works rely on the semantics of the installed apps and show that various user traits could be learnt automatically using off-the-shelf machine-learning techniques. In this work, we focus on the re-identifiability issue and thoroughly study the unicity of smartphone apps on a dataset containing 54,893 Android users collected over a period of 7 months. Our study finds that any 4 apps installed by a user are enough (more than 95% times) for the re-identification of the user in our dataset. As the complete list of installed apps is unique for 99% of the users in our dataset, it can be easily used to track/profile the users by a service such as Twitter that has access to the whole list of installed apps of users. As our analyzed dataset is small as compared to the total population of Android users, we also study how unicity would vary with larger datasets. This work emphasizes the need of better privacy guards against collection, use and release of the list of installed apps.Comment: 10 pages, 9 Figures, Appeared at ACM CCS Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society (WPES) 201

Risk factors for chest infection in acute stroke: a prospective cohort study

<p><b>Background and Purpose:</b> Pneumonia is a major cause of morbidity and mortality after stroke. We aimed to determine key characteristics that would allow prediction of those patients who are at highest risk for poststroke pneumonia.</p> <p><b>Methods:</b> We studied a series of consecutive patients with acute stroke who were admitted to hospital. Detailed evaluation included the modified National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale; the Abbreviated Mental Test; and measures of swallow, respiratory, and oral health status. Pneumonia was diagnosed by set criteria. Patients were followed up at 3 months after stroke.</p> <p><b>Results:</b> We studied 412 patients, 391 (94.9%) with ischemic stroke and 21 (5.1%) with hemorrhagic stroke; 78 (18.9%) met the study criteria for pneumonia. Subjects who developed pneumonia were older (mean±SD age, 75.9±11.4 vs 64.9±13.9 years), had higher modified National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale scores, a history of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lower Abbreviated Mental Test scores, and a higher oral cavity score, and a greater proportion tested positive for bacterial cultures from oral swabs. In binary logistic-regression analysis, independent predictors (P<0.05) of pneumonia were age >65 years, dysarthria or no speech due to aphasia, a modified Rankin Scale score ≥4, an Abbreviated Mental Test score <8, and failure on the water swallow test. The presence of 2 or more of these risk factors carried 90.9% sensitivity and 75.6% specificity for the development of pneumonia.</p> <p><b>Conclusions:</b> Pneumonia after stroke is associated with older age, dysarthria/no speech due to aphasia, severity of poststroke disability, cognitive impairment, and an abnormal water swallow test result. Simple assessment of these variables could be used to identify patients at high risk of developing pneumonia after stroke.</p&gt

Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium Fertilization for Newly Established Tall Fescue

First-year spring yields of tall fescue in 2013 responded to phosphorus (P) fertilization, but lodging at the R5 growth stage in the spring with higher P fertilization rates may have influenced subsequent fall harvest yields, which declined with increasing P rates. As N rates increased, R5 yields declined but fall harvest yields increased

Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium Fertilization for Newly Established Tall Fescue

First-year production of tall fescue (Site 1 in 2013 and Site 2 in 2014) was affected by nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) but not potassium (K) fertilization. Environmental conditions likely influenced the growth of the fescue and the response to fertilizer N and P in the first year of production at the two sites

Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium Fertilization for Newly Established Tall Fescue

(Abstract only. Link to: http://newprairiepress.org/kaesrr/vol1/iss4/1/) Article is nearly identical to Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium Fertilization for Newly Established Tall Fescue previously published in Southeast Agricultural Research Center 2015, included in this PDF. First-year production of tall fescue (Site 1 in 2013 and Site 2 in 2014) was affected by nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), but not potassium (K) fertilization. Environmental conditions likely influenced the growth of the fescue and the response to fertilizer N and P in the first year of production at the two sites

A case study of sea breeze blocking regulated by sea surface temperature along the English south coast

The sensitivity of sea breeze structure to sea surface temperature (SST) and coastal orography is investigated in convection-permitting Met Office Unified Model simulations of a case study along the south coast of England. Changes in SST of 1 K are shown to significantly modify the structure of the sea breeze immediately offshore. On the day of the case study, the sea breeze was partially blocked by coastal orography, particularly within Lyme Bay. The extent to which the flow is blocked depends strongly on the static stability of the marine boundary layer. In experiments with colder SST, the marine boundary layer is more stable, and the degree of blocking is more pronounced. Although a colder SST would also imply a larger land–sea temperature contrast and hence a stronger onshore wind – an effect which alone would discourage blocking – the increased static stability exerts a dominant control over whether blocking takes place. The implications of prescribing fixed SST from climatology in numerical weather prediction model forecasts of the sea breeze are discussed

Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium Fertilization for Newly Established Tall Fescue

Tall fescue production was studied during a third year at two locations. In 2015, Site 1 was affected by an interaction between nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) fertilization rates; while in 2016, Site 2 mainly received production differences by N fertilization rates. Potassium (K) fertilization caused little effect at both sites. Third-year production of tall fescue was affected by an interaction between nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) fertilization rates at Site 1 in 2015, but mainly by N fertilization rates at Site 2 in 2016, with little effect from potassium (K) fertilization at either site