Abstract Recent years have witnessed the great success of self-supervised learning (SSL) in recommendation systems. However, SSL recommender models are likely to suffer from spurious correlations, leading poor generalization. To mitigate existing work usually pursues ID-based or utilizes feature engineering identify features. Nevertheless, approaches sacrifice positive impact invariant features...

BACKGROUND Influenza viruses are a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Vaccination remains a powerful tool for preventing or mitigating influenza outbreaks. Yet, vaccine supplies and daily administration capacities are limited, even in developed countries. Understanding how such constraints can alter the mitigating effects of vaccination is a crucial part of influenza preparedness...

Oak decline is a process induced by complex interactions of predisposing factors, inciting factors, and contributing factors operating at tree, stand, and landscape scales. It has greatly altered species composition and stand structure in affected areas. Thinning, clearcutting, and group selection are widely adopted harvest alternatives for reducing forest vulnerability to oak decline by removi...

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This study is concerned with the reliability of biometric verification systems when used in forensic applications. In particular, when such systems are subjected to targeted impersonation attacks. The authors expand on the existing work in targeted impersonation, focusing on how best to measure the reliability of verification systems in forensic contexts. It identifies two scenarios in which ta...

The future of tactical networks encompasses multi-hop digitised voice and data communications using VHF/UHF-band radios. While this radio band has excellent propagation properties, their relatively low bandwidth, high error rates and node mobility makes tactical radios less than ideal as a robust networking platform. Since networking is new to tactical communications, the security implications ...

Epidemics of infectious diseases are among the largest threats to the quality of life and the economic and social well-being of developing countries. The arsenal of measures against such epidemics is well-established, but costly and insufficient to mitigate their impact. In this paper, we argue that mobile technology adds a powerful weapon to this arsenal, because (a) mobile devices endow us wi...

This tutorial describes what Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are, how they can be carried out in IP networks, and how one can defend against them. Distributed DoS (DDoS) attacks are included here as a subset of DoS attacks. A DoS attack has two phases: a deployment and an attack phase. A DoS program must first be deployed on one or more compromised hosts before an attack is possible. Mitigation...