Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MGB-3 but system: Low-resource ASR on Egyptian YouTube data

This paper presents a series of experiments we performed during our work on the MGB-3 evaluations. We both describe the submitted system, as well as the post-evaluation analysis. Our initial BLSTM-HMM system was trained on 250 hours of MGB-2 data (Al-Jazeera), it was adapted with 5 hours of Egyptian data (YouTube). We included such techniques as diarization, n-gram language model adaptation, speed perturbation of the adaptation data, and the use of all 4 ‘correct’ references. The 4 references were either used for supervision with a ‘confusion network’, or we included each sentence 4x with the transcripts from all the annotators. Then, it was also helpful to blend the augmented MGB-3 adaptation data with 15 hours of MGB-2 data. Although we did not rank with our single system among the best teams in the evaluations, we believe that our analysis will be highly interesting not only for the other MGB-3 challenge participants.
A High-Order-Accurate GPU-Based Radiative Transfer Equation Solver for Combustion and Propulsion Applications

In this article we present a high-order-accurate solver for the radiative transfer equation (RTE) which uses the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method and is designed for graphics processing units (GPUs). The compact nature of the high-order DG method enhances scalability, particularly on GPUs. High-order spatial accuracy can be used to reduce discretization errors on a given computational mesh, and can also reduce the mesh size needed to achieve a desired error tolerance. Computational efficiency is a key concern in solutions to radiative heat transfer problems, due to potentially large problem sizes created by (a) the presence of participating nongray media in a full-spectrum analysis, (b) the need to resolve a large number of angular directions and spatial extent of the domain for an accurate solution, and (c) potentially large variations in material and flow properties in the domain. We present here a simulation strategy, as well as a set of physical models, accompanied by a number of case studies, demonstrating the accuracy and superior performance in terms of computational efficiency of this approach.
A new assessment in total and extreme rainfall trends over central and southern Peruvian Andes during 1965–2010

Understanding the spatio‐temporal variability of rainfall over mountainous regions such as the Andes is crucial for the maintenance of water resources and ecosystems. This study provided a comprehensive analysis of the signal, statistical significance and spatial pattern of rainfall trends in central and southern Peruvian Andes (CSPA) from 1965 to 2010. Rainfall from 47 quality‐controlled rain gauge stations was examined using the hydrologic calendar year. Total and extreme rainfall indices proposed by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI) were calculated and trends were examined with Mann–Kendall test and Sen's slope estimator. Significant regional patterns of changes in rainfall extremes were investigated and compared with previous studies. Four major regions of stations were identified based on principal component analysis and clustering techniques: Amazon, central Pacific, southern Pacific and Titicaca basins. Statistically significant trend patterns showed that the annual total rainfall has decreased in the Amazon basin, despite the increase in the number of rainy days and some extreme rainfall indices. Decrease in 1‐day and 5‐day yearly maximum rainfall was observed in central Pacific, along with an increase in the number of wet days. Positive trends in indices related to the intensity of very strong daily rainfall were detected in southern Pacific. Titicaca basin showed an increase in the intensity of rainfall extremes. Rainfall variability and trends were evaluated during contrasting El Niño‐Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). Most stations in the CSPA exhibited positive (negative) anomaly of total and extreme rainfall indices (consecutive dry days) during La Niña (El Niño) years. Positive (negative) anomalies of annual total rainfall and consecutive dry days during positive (negative) PDO occurred in the Amazon, southern Pacific and Titicaca basins, respectively. The ENSO–PDO conditions may have influenced the complex and mostly non‐statistically significant long‐term trends in CSPA.
Optimal placement of nodes in large sensor networks under a general physical layer model

We study a setting in which a spatially distributed set of sources is creating data that must be delivered to a spatially distributed set of sinks. A network of wireless nodes is responsible for sensing the data, transporting them over a wireless channel to the sink locations, and delivering them to the sinks. The problem is to find the optimal placement of these nodes, so that the minimum number of nodes is needed. Our approach is to assume a massively dense network, in which there are so many sources, sinks, and wireless nodes, that it does not make sense to model the network in terms of microscopic parameters, such as their individual placements, but rather in terms of macroscopic parameters, such as their spatial densities. We use calculus of variations to describe the optimal spatial density of nodes, that minimizes their total number but can still support the whole traffic, in terms of a scalar, nonlinear, partial differential equation. The derivation is under a general model for the physical layer, that encompasses many cases of interest. Our work can help in the design of networks that are deployed in the most efficient manner, not only avoiding the formation of bottlenecks, but also striking the optimal balance between avoiding congestion and having the data packets follow short routes.
Not in My Back Yard: A Comparative Analysis of Crime Around Publicly Funded Drug Treatment Centers, Liquor Stores, Convenience Stores, and Corner Stores in One Mid-Atlantic City.

OBJECTIVE This research examined whether publicly funded drug treatment centers (DTCs) were associated with violent crime in excess of the violence happening around other commercial businesses. METHOD Violent crime data and locations of community entities were geocoded and mapped. DTCs and other retail outlets were matched based on a Neighborhood Disadvantage score at the census tract level. Street network buffers ranging from 100 to 1,400 feet were placed around each location. Negative binomial regression models were used to estimate the relationship between the count of violent crimes and the distance from each business type. RESULTS Compared with the mean count of violent crime around drug treatment centers, the mean count of violent crime (M = 2.87) was significantly higher around liquor stores (M = 3.98; t test; p < .01) and corner stores (M = 3.78; t test; p < .01), and there was no statistically significant difference between the count around convenience stores (M = 2.65; t test; p = .32). In the adjusted negative binomial regression models, there was a negative and significant relationship between the count of violent crime and the distance from drug treatment centers (β = -.069, p < .01), liquor stores (β = -.081, p < .01), corner stores (β = -.116, p < .01), and convenience stores (β = -.154, p < .01). CONCLUSIONS Violent crime associated with drug treatment centers is similar to that associated with liquor stores and is less frequent than that associated with convenience stores and corner stores.
MR angiography at 3T versus digital subtraction angiography in the follow-up of intracranial aneurysms treated with detachable coils.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Digital subtraction angiography (DSA) is used to follow-up intracranial aneurysms treated with detachable coils to identify recurrence and determine need for additional treatment. However, DSA is invasive and involves a small risk of neurologic complications. We assessed the feasibility and usefulness of 3D time-of-flight (TOF) MR angiography (MRA) performed at 3T compared with DSA for the follow-up of coil-treated intracranial aneurysms. METHODS In a prospective study, 20 consecutive patients with 21 intracranial aneurysms treated with coils underwent DSA and nonenhanced and enhanced multiple overlapping thin-slab acquisition 3D TOF MRA at 3T on the same day at a mean follow-up of 6 months (range, 4-14 months) after coil placement. MRA images were evaluated for presence of artifacts, presence and size of aneurysm remnants and recurrences, patency of parent and branch vessels, and added value of contrast material enhancement. MRA and DSA findings were compared. RESULTS Interobserver agreement of MRA was good, as was agreement between MRA and DSA. All three recurrences that needed additional treatment were detected with MRA. Minor disagreement occurred in four cases: three coil-treated aneurysms were scored on MRA images as having a small remnant, whereas on DSA images these aneurysms were occluded; the other aneurysm was scored on MRA images as having a small remnant, whereas on DSA images this was a small recurrence. Use of contrast material had no additional value. Coil-related MR imaging artifacts were minimal and did not interfere with evaluation of the occlusion status of the aneurysm. CONCLUSION High-spatial-resolution 3D TOF MRA at 3T is feasible and useful in the follow-up of patients with intracranial aneurysms treated with coil placement.
Governing Knowledge in the Scientific Community: Exploring the Role of Retractions in Biomedicine

Although the validity of knowledge is critical to scientific progress, substantial concerns exist regarding the governance of knowledge production. While as or more important to the knowledge economy as defects are in the manufacturing economy, mechanisms to identify and signal “defective” or false knowledge are poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate one such institution – the system of scientific retractions. By analyzing the universe of peer-reviewed scientific articles retracted from the biomedical literature between 1972-2006 and comparing with a matched control sample, we identify the correlates, timing, and causal impact of scientific retractions, thus providing insight into the workings of a distributed, peer-based system for the governance of validity in scientific knowledge. Our findings suggest that attention is a key predictor of retraction – retracted articles arise most frequently among highly-cited articles. The retraction system is expeditious in uncovering knowledge that is ever determined to be false (the mean time to retraction is less than two years) and democratic (retraction is not systematically affected by author prominence). Lastly, retraction causes an immediate, severe, and long-lived decline in future citations. Conditional on the obvious limitation that we cannot measure the absolute amount of false science in circulation, these results support the view that distributed governance systems can be designed to relatively swiftly to uncover false knowledge and to mitigate the costs that false knowledge for future generations of producers.
Chromophore Photoreduction in Red Fluorescent Proteins Is Responsible for Bleaching and Phototoxicity

Red fluorescent proteins (RFPs) are indispensable tools for deep-tissue imaging, fluorescence resonance energy transfer applications, and super-resolution microscopy. Using time-resolved optical spectroscopy this study investigated photoinduced dynamics of three RFPs, KillerRed, mRFP, and DsRed. In all three RFPs, a new transient absorption intermediate was observed, which decays on a microsecond–millisecond time scale. This intermediate is characterized by red-shifted absorption at 1.68–1.72 eV (λmax = 720–740 nm). On the basis of electronic structure calculations, experimental evidence, and published literature, the chemical nature of the intermediate is assigned to an unusual open-shell dianionic chromophore (dianion-radical) formed via photoreduction. A doubly charged state that is not stable in the isolated (gas phase) chromophore is stabilized by the electrostatic field of the protein. Mechanistic implications for photobleaching, blinking, and phototoxicity are discussed.
WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS COVERAGE-ENERGY ALGORITHMS BASED ON PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION

ﻟا ـ algorithms In wireless sensor networks (WSN) coverage is an important aspect in measuring the quality of service of the network. Network with mobile WSN is able to improve its coverage by moving the sensor nodes so that a better arrangement is achieved. However sensors movement consumes energy. In this paper three algorithms are presented to optimize coverage of mobile WSN while at the same time taking energy usage into consideration. The algorithms proposed are based on particle swarm optimization (PSO). PSO is chosen due to its good performance record. Based on the tests conducted, the algorithms successfully achieve their objective.
Distinct Mutations in IRAK-4 Confer Hyporesponsiveness to Lipopolysaccharide and Interleukin-1 in a Patient with Recurrent Bacterial Infections

We identified previously a patient with recurrent bacterial infections who failed to respond to gram-negative LPS in vivo, and whose leukocytes were profoundly hyporesponsive to LPS and IL-1 in vitro. We now demonstrate that this patient also exhibits deficient responses in a skin blister model of aseptic inflammation. A lack of IL-18 responsiveness, coupled with diminished LPS and/or IL-1–induced nuclear factor–κB and activator protein-1 translocation, p38 phosphorylation, gene expression, and dysregulated IL-1R–associated kinase (IRAK)–1 activity in vitro support the hypothesis that the defect lies within the signaling pathway common to toll-like receptor 4, IL-1R, and IL-18R. This patient expresses a “compound heterozygous” genotype, with a point mutation (C877T in cDNA) and a two-nucleotide, AC deletion (620–621del in cDNA) encoded by distinct alleles of the IRAK-4 gene (GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ accession nos. AF445802 and AY186092). Both mutations encode proteins with an intact death domain, but a truncated kinase domain, thereby precluding expression of full-length IRAK-4 (i.e., a recessive phenotype). When overexpressed in HEK293T cells, neither truncated form augmented endogenous IRAK-1 kinase activity, and both inhibited endogenous IRAK-1 activity modestly. Thus, IRAK-4 is pivotal in the development of a normal inflammatory response initiated by bacterial or nonbacterial insults.
Wikification via link co-occurrence

Wikification, which stands for the process of linking terms in a plain text document to Wikipedia articles which represent the correct meanings of the terms, can be thought of as a generalized Word Sense Disambiguation problem. It disambiguates multi-word expressions (MWEs) in addition to single words. Existing Wikification techniques either models the context of a given term as well as the Wikipedia article as bags of words, or compute global constraints among Wikipedia concepts by the link graph or link distributions. The first method doesn't achieve good results because the MWEs can have very different meanings than its constituent words which themselves are ambiguous. The second method doesn't produce high accuracy because the link structure or link distribution is often biased or incomplete by themselves due to the fact that Wikipedia pages are often sparsely linked. In this paper, we present a simple but powerful framework of sense disambiguation using co-occurrences of Wikipedia links in the Wikipedia corpus. We propose an iterative method to enrich the sparsely-linked articles by adding more links and then use the resulting link co-occurrence matrix to disambiguate an input document by a sliding window algorithm. Our prototype system achieves 89.97% precision and 76.43% recall on average for three benchmark data and compares favorably against four state-of-the-art wikification techniques.
From network-level measurements to expected quality of experience: The Skype use case

Modern Internet applications rely on rich multimedia contents making the quality of experience (QoE) of end users sensitive to network conditions. Several models were developed in the literature to express QoE as a function of measurements carried out on the traffic of the applications themselves. In this paper, we propose a new methodology based on machine learning able to link expected QoE to network and device level measurements outside the applications' traffic. This direct linking to network and device level measurements is important for the prediction of QoE. We prove the feasibility of the approach in the context of Skype. In particular, we derive and validate a model to predict the Skype QoE as a function of easily measurable network performance metrics. One can see our methodology as a new way of performing measurements in the Internet, where instead of expressing the expected performance in terms of network and device level measurements that only specialists can understand, we express performance in clear terms related to expected quality of experience for different applications.
Intraspecific chemical variability of essential oil from leaves of Cupressus atlantica Gaussen, an endemic and endangered coniferous species in Morocco

The composition of essential oils isolated from leaves of 11 natural populations of Cupressus atlantica, an endemic and endangered coniferous species from Morocco, was investigated by GC-MS. In total, 42 essential oil components were identified, accounting for 73.1–97.7% of the total oil. Monoterpene (25.2–84.9%) and sesquiterpene hydrocarbons (12.2–46.8%) were the principal subclasses of compounds, with α-pinene (15–65.4%), germacrene D (5.9–30.5%), δ-3-carene (2–16.6%) and γ-cadinene (1.3–9.8%) as the main constituents. The results of the oil composition were analysed by hierarchical cluster and principal component analysis that established three main groups of essential oils. These oils were differentiated by the content of the major constituents (α-pinene, germacrene D, δ-3-carene and γ-cadinene), geographical location and climatic characteristics.
Saliency-Guided Perceptual Grouping Using Motion Cues in Region-Based Artificial Visual Attention

Region-based artificial attention constitutes a framework for bio-inspired attentional processes on an intermediate abstraction level for the use in computer vision and mobile robotics. Segmentation algorithms produce regions of coherently colored pixels. These serve as proto-objects on which the attentional processes determine image portions of relevance. A single region---which not necessarily represents a full object---constitutes the focus of attention. For many post-attentional tasks, however, such as identifying or tracking objects, single segments are not sufficient. Here, we present a saliency-guided approach that groups regions that potentially belong to the same object based on proximity and similarity of motion. We compare our results to object selection by thresholding saliency maps and a further attention-guided strategy.
Effect of Regulation of the Inlet Channel on Tides and Water Levels in Lake Hamana, Japan

Hamanako is an economically and culturally important tidal lake on the Pacific coast of Honshu, Japan. Between 1954 and 1973, entrance works were constructed to regulate the channel to the lake. In a previous paper, the tidal records from Maisaka just inside the lake, prior to regulation, were analyzed to explain the responses of the lake to the ocean tide and other water level changes. The present paper compares water level responses with those following regulation of the entrance. The principal differences are that at Maisaka the tidal range increased up to 1965, following the first stages of regulation, but it has been constant since then. In the inner part of the lake, regulation has increased the tidal range but reduced its variability and has reduced the mean water level in the lake. The southern sand shoal divides the lake into two tidal basins, with Maisaka lying in the smaller outer basin. Studies of the inner basin have shown that its tidal range continues to increase. A hydrodynamic model has been used to show that this increase is primarily due to scouring of the inner channel through the southern shoal. The model has also shown that the constancy of the Maisaka tidal amplitude since 1965 is not a static equilibrium, but is a balance between the effects of the outer entrance channel scouring and increasing the Maisaka tide, offset by the inner channel scouring and reducing the Maisaka tide.
Powered wheelchair driving using a 3D haptic device

We address the problem of driving a powered wheelchair (PW) using the 3D haptic device PHANToM Omni. The driver uses this force feedback device to designate the desired speed and rate of turn for the PW. A sensor on the wheelchair is used to measure obstacle distance. We describe a strategy to convert distance into forces which are reflected to the operator's hand, via the haptic interface. This haptic information provides feedback to the driver in addition to the view he has on the environment. Experiments show that this haptic feedback significantly improves operator's performance in terms of reduction in navigation time, collisions and workload.
Quantitation of articular cartilage using magnetic resonance imaging and three‐dimensional reconstruction

A quadrature knee coil was used in conjunction with a magnetic resonance imaging scanner for quantitation of test phantom volumes, ex vivo bovine cartilage thickness, and in vivo human articular cartilage volumes. Optimal magnetic resonance parameters were obtained by testing a series of spin‐echo and gradient‐echo pulse sequences to determine the sequence that provided the highest resolution of articular cartilage and best defined the cartilage interfaces with synovial fluid and subchondral bone. Extensive testing revealed that two sequences were required to define articular cartilage accurately: a spoiled gradient‐echo sequence and a steady state free‐precession sequence. Three‐dimensional reconstruction and statistical analyses of test phantoms and of bovine and human cartilage images were performed. Differences between actual phantom volumes and three‐dimensional measurements demonstrated that, as magnetic resonance slice thickness was increased, the measurement variability also increased (coefficient of variation ranging from 1.7 ± 1.3% for 1.0 mm slice thickness to 22.7 ± 1.9% for 3.0 mm slice thickness). When the phantom volume was greater than 1,800 mm3, the intraobserver, interobserver and interscan accuracies were greater than 97, 98, and 96%, respectively. This high degree of reproducibility pertained for the data on in vivo human cartilage data also. For experienced observers, the intraobserver and interobserver reproducibility were greater than 98 and 97%, respectively. The interscan reproducibility was greater than 98%. These data demonstrate that improved magnetic resonance pulse sequencing, in conjunction with three‐dimensional reconstruction and measurement techniques, can accurately and reproducibly measure the volume of articular cartilage. Clinical application of this approach offers the potential for early diagnosis of osteoarthritis and for serial, noninvasive assessment of changes in articular cartilage volume in response to therapeutic modalities.
Autonomous hip exoskeleton saves metabolic cost of walking uphill

We have developed a hip joint exoskeleton to boost gait function in the elderly and rehabilitation of post-stroke patients. To quantitatively evaluate the impact of the power and mass of the exoskeleton, we measured the metabolic cost of walking on slopes of 0, 5, and 10% grade, once not wearing the exoskeleton and then wearing it. The exoskeleton reduced the metabolic cost by 13.5,15.5 and 9.8% (31.9, 51.6 and 45.6 W) at 0, 5, and 10% grade, respectively. The exoskeleton performance index was computed as 0.97, 1.24, and 1.24 at each grade, implicating that the hip exoskeleton was more effective on slopes than level ground in saving the metabolic cost.