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1. When Push Comes to Ads: Measuring the Rise of (Malicious) Push Advertising

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3419394.3423631  

   Subramani, Karthika; Yuan, Xingzi; Setayeshfar, Omid; Vadrevu, Phani; Lee, Kyu Hyung; Perdisci, Roberto (October 2020, Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC))

   null (Ed.)

   The rapid growth of online advertising has fueled the growth of ad-blocking software, such as new ad-blocking and privacy-oriented browsers or browser extensions. In response, both ad publishers and ad networks are constantly trying to pursue new strategies to keep up their revenues. To this end, ad networks have started to leverage the Web Push technology enabled by modern web browsers. As web push notifications (WPNs) are relatively new, their role in ad delivery has not yet been studied in depth. Furthermore, it is unclear to what extent WPN ads are being abused for malvertising (i.e., to deliver malicious ads). In this paper, we aim to fill this gap. Specifically, we propose a system called PushAdMiner that is dedicated to (1) automatically registering for and collecting a large number of web-based push notifications from publisher websites, (2) finding WPN-based ads among these notifications, and (3) discovering malicious WPN-based ad campaigns. Using PushAdMiner, we collected and analyzed 21,541 WPN messages by visiting thousands of different websites. Among these, our system identified 572 WPN ad campaigns, for a total of 5,143 WPN-based ads that were pushed by a variety of ad networks. Furthermore, we found that 51% of all WPN ads we collected are malicious, and that traditional ad-blockers and URL filters were mostly unable to block them, thus leaving a significant abuse vector unchecked. 

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2. Push-Sum-Enabled Resilient Microgrid Control

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TSG.2021.3058853  

   Babahajiani, Pouya; Wang, Lizhi; Liu, Ji; Zhang, Peng (July 2021, IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid)

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3. Implementing Push-Pull Efficiently in GraphBLAS

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3225058.3225122  

   Yang, Carl; Buluc, Aydin; Owens, John D. (August 2018, Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel Processing)

   We factor Beamer's push-pull, also known as direction-optimized breadth-first-search (DOBFS) into 3 separable optimizations, and analyze them for generalizability, asymptotic speedup, and contribution to overall speedup. We demonstrate that masking is critical for high performance and can be generalized to all graph algorithms where the sparsity pattern of the output is known a priori. We show that these graph algorithm optimizations, which together constitute DOBFS, can be neatly and separably described using linear algebra and can be expressed in the GraphBLAS linear-algebra-based framework. We provide experimental evidence that with these optimizations, a DOBFS expressed in a linear-algebra-based graph framework attains competitive performance with state-of-the-art graph frameworks on the GPU and on a multi-threaded CPU, achieving 101 GTEPS on a Scale 22 RMAT graph. 

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4. pbqff: Push-Button Quartic Force Fields

   https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jctc.3c00129  

   Westbrook, Brent R; Fortenberry, Ryan C (May 2023, Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation)
5. Push-pull mechanics of E-cadherin ectodomains

   K. Nagendra, A. Izzet (April 2023, Biophysical journal)

   E-cadherin plays a central role in cell-cell adhesion. The ectodomains of wild type cadherins form a crystalline- like two dimensional lattice in cell-cell interfaces mediated by both trans (apposed cell) and cis (same cell) interactions. In addition to these extracellular forces, adhesive strength is further regulated by cytosolic phenomena involving 𝛼 and 𝛽- catenin–mediated interactions between cadherin and the actin cytoskeleton. Cell-cell adhesion can be further strengthened under tension through mechanisms that have not been definitively characterized in molecular detail. Here we quantitatively determine the role of the cadherin ectodomain in mechanosensing. To this end, we devise an E-cadherin-coated emulsion system, in which droplet surface tension is balanced by protein binding strength to give rise to stable areas of adhesion. To reach the honeycomb/cohesive limit, an initial emulsion compression by centrifugation facilitates E-cadherin trans-binding, while a high protein surface concentration enables the cis-enhanced stabilization of the interface. We observe an abrupt concentration dependence on recruitment into adhesions of constant crystalline density, reminiscent of a first-order phase transition. Removing the lateral cis-interaction with a "cis mutant" shifts this transition to higher surface densities leading to denser, yet weaker adhesions. In both proteins, the stabilization of progressively larger areas of deformation can be rationalized by a stiffening catch-bond, whose strength increases with tension. This catch bond may well correspond to one that has been identified in the cadherin “X-dimer". 

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