Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fast HOS based simultaneous voiced/unvoiced detection and pitch estimation using 3-level binary speech signals

A new fast and robust HOS based algorithm for simultaneous voiced/unvoiced detection and pitch estimation using 3-level binary speech signals is presented. An accurate and reliable voiced/unvoiced detection of a speech signal and associated pitch period estimation from the voiced part is made in coloured noise environments with low SNR. The use of the 3-level binary speech signals dramatically reduces the computational effort required in evaluating the third order cumulant. The superior performance of the new algorithm to the conventional autocorrelation method using real speech signals in low SNR environments is demonstrated.
The influence of land usage on UHF wave propagation in the receiver near range

Scattering, diffraction, and attenuation of UHF wave propagation in the receiver near range (RNR) may cause significant additional path loss. Wave-propagation models for rural areas consider mainly the influence of topography and often ignore the effects due to land usage in the vicinity of mobile receivers. In some models, this path loss is accounted for either by empirical corrections or by additional knife edges. In this paper, new ray optical approaches for the calculation of the additional path loss for receiver sites within forested and suburban environments are presented. Typical macro situations are defined to describe the RNR. For urban areas, the additional path loss is determined by means of the uniform theory of diffraction (UTD), whereas in forested areas, a lateral wave-propagation approach is used. The resulting RNR model is tested in an operating global system for mobile communication (GSM) network. The results show good agreement with both wide- and narrow-band measurements.
AQUAD 7 Manual - R Integration

This manual describes how R is integrated into AQUAD 7. Besides general remarks about the use of Mixed Methods the interplay of AQUAD 7 and R will be explained. Then basic information will follow of how to work with R and how to use the scripts tailored for the use in AQUAD 7. The statistical resp. logical chapters elaborate the R-scripts, their theoretical background, input and output as well as results, and their interpretation. A data example is supplied for each of these procedures. The appendix contains a list of settings for the R-scripts.
The Assessment of Turkish Written Examination Questions Based on the Text in Accordance with the Barrett's Taxonomy.

In this study, Turkish text-based written examination questions posed to students in secondary schools were examined. In this research, document analysis method within the framework of the qualitative research approach was used. The data obtained from the documents consisting of written examination papers were analyzed with content analysis method. In this study, it is intended to determine whether the written examination questions asked and to measure the students’ acquisition about the verbal skills in accordance with the purpose or not; whether the distribution of the written examination questions on the Barrett's taxonomy domain sublevels is balanced or not; and whether the examination questions meet the acquisitions determined in the program or not. Document review within the framework of a qualitative research method was used in this study. The study has been conducted in 43 primary schools selected from different socio-cultural districts in Kayseri province. A total of 49 written examination papers have been determined with random method among papers. During the analysis, the taxonomic scale were used, given extensive information and added to the end of research. According to the results obtained, a written exam questions used to determine students' reading comprehension skills are concentrated stage of simple understanding in the Barrett's Taxonomy, the steps of meeting the reorganizing and the satisfaction was not enough. The distribution of the written examination questions in according to Barrett's Taxonomy sublevels is not balanced.
The Construction and Evaluation of Instructional Package on Vector Quantity

In this study, an instructional package to enhance teaching and learning on Vector Quantity was constructed. It consisted of three types of media; teaching documents, a PowerPoint presentation and an experimental set for measurement of vector components. The validity and reliability of this package was assessed prior to utilization in the evaluation of impact on students’ learning achievement. The sample consisted of 60 Bachelor of Science students. They were selected by multi-stage sampling and divided into an experimental group and a control group. The instructional package was utilized in teaching the experimental group while the control group was taught conventionally. The results of this study revealed that: 1) the magnitude of vector components measured by using the experimental set was equal to that determined by conventional calculation, significantly at the . 05 level, 2) the quality of the instructional package was rated as excellent, and 3) the learning achievement of the experimental group was higher than the control group with statistical significance level of 0.05. Thus, the instructional package could encourage students’ motivation and promote successful learning.
First-order probabilistic inference

There have been many proposals for first-order belief networks (i.e., where we quantify over individuals) but these typically only let us reason about the individuals that we know about. There are many instances where we have to quantify over all of the individuals in a population. When we do this the population size often matters and we need to reason about all of the members of the population (but not necessarily individually). This paper presents an algorithm to reason about multiple individuals, where we may know particular facts about some of them, but want to treat the others as a group. Combining unification with variable elimination lets us reason about classes of individuals without needing to ground out the theory.
In medias res: reframing design for learning

Our goal in this article is to set out some important elements of a useful theory of design for learning . We aim to help understand what it means to design something, or some assemblage of things, to help other people learn. In offering what we believe to be a useful framework for thinking about design for learning, we address a number of key issues, including: how it is that something designed by one person can help other people learn; what kinds of things can be designed; how these things might also need to support the work of people (like teachers) whose job it is to support other peoples’ learning; how learning usually has multiple layers and multiple goals – each of which may place different requirements on design – and how people who are learning can also be expected to modify that which has been designed. Keywords: design for learning; indirection; sustainable design (Published: 16 September 2013) Citation: Research in Learning Technology Supplement 2013, 21 : 19909 - http://dx.doi. org/10.3402/rlt.v21i0. 19909
The current state of face tracking for video surveillance

A fundamental task in video surveillance is that of visual tracking, specifically in environments where surveillance is a priority, such as airports. Many approaches to tracking have been proposed, with different drawbacks and advantages that affect their suitability for face and human tracking for surveillance. In this report, we present the most relevant and recent methods for tracking and evaluate their suitability for the aforementioned task.
Array failure correction with a genetic algorithm

A flexible approach using the genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed for array failure correction in digital beamforming of arbitrary arrays. In this approach, beamforming weights of an array are represented directly by a vector of complex numbers. The decimal linear crossover is employed so that no binary coding and decoding is necessary. Three mating schemes, adjacent-fitness-paring (AFP), best-mate-worst (BMW), and emperor-selective (EMS), are proposed and their performances are studied. Near-solutions from other analytic or heuristic techniques may be injected into the initial population to speed up convergence. Numerical examples of single- and multiple-element failure correction are presented to show the effectiveness of the approach.
Version 1.1

This document provides a list of terms and abbreviations in the context of orchestration, automation and virtualisation. Definitions were provided based on standardisation documents whenever possible, some also extended to reflect the understanding of the terms as used by a large number of NRENs in the GÉANT community. As of version 1.1, the document has also been adopted by the GNA-G Network Automation working group as their reference terminology.
Recursive Loops of Game-Based Learning: a Conceptual model.

This paper addresses the issues surrounding knowledge and skill acquisition from Game-Based Learning. Using both the learning models of Garris, Ahlers, and Driskell (2002) and Klob (1984), an enhanced conceptual model of how and where game-based learning fosters learning outcomes has been presented. The new model contains a time dimension and shows the scaffolding of player abilities. The motivation behind this paper is to promote an understanding of the pedagogy delivered by computer games, both educational and recreational, to assist educators utilize these tools when including game-based learning into the teaching curriculum.
Simulation of manufacturing systems

Introduction to Simulation Types of Simulation and the Flow of Time Stochastic Simulation Discrete Simulation A Job Shop Model with Material Handling Simulation Software - An Overview Flexible Manufacturing Systems Building FMS Models - 1: Load-Unload Operations, Pallets, Machines Building FMS Models - 2: Machine Buffers and Central Pallet Storage Building FMS Models 3 - Operation Sequences, Fixtures and Tools Building Simulation Models 4 - Vehicles and Movement Durations Building Simulation Models 5 - Robots, Conveyors and AS/RS Systems On Simulation Projects Some Developments in Simulation.
An Evaluation of Parallel Synchronous and Conservative Asynchronous Logic-Level Simulations

A recent paper by Bailey [1] contains a theorem stating that the idealized execution times of unit-delay, synchronous and conservative asynchronous simulations are equal under the conditions that unlimited number of processors are available and the evaluation time of each logic element is equal. Further it is shown that the above conditions result in a lower bound on the execution times of both synchronous and conservative asynchronous simulations. Bailey's above important conclusions are derived under a strict assumption that the inputs to a circuit remain fixed during the entire simulation. We remove this limitation and, by extending the analyses to multi-input, multi-output circuits with an arbitrary number of input events, show that the conservative asynchronous simulation extracts more parallelism and executes faster than synchronous simulation in general. Our conclusions are supported by a comparison of the idealized execution times of synchronous and conservative asynchronous algorithms on ISCAS combinational and sequential benchmark circuits.
Flipping the classroom in an academic writing course

This article describes a series of video lessons the authors prepared using the iPad application Educreations to teach elements of the academic essay in an English-medium university in the United Arab Emirates. The authors give a brief introduction to the topic, a rationale for flipping the classroom, and provide a step-by-step account of how the academic writing course progressed.
Measurement and simulation of radio wave propagation in hospitals

This paper investigates radio wave propagation in hospitals. In contrast to other buildings, hospitals are partly constructed of walls that contain metallic layers in their structure. The type of wall depends on the functionality of the room. Measurements were performed at eight discrete frequencies in the range from 42.6 MHz up to 5.2 GHz in all relevant types of rooms such as operating rooms, X-ray, MRT (magnet resonance tomograph) and others. Due to the large frequency range and in order to investigate extensively the wave propagation properties, various antennas and measurement systems were used. The results show a different behavior of the wave propagation in different rooms of the hospital. Furthermore the results reveal that it is important to consider the room as a whole when determining the attenuation between adjacent rooms. For EM-wave propagation in rooms with metallic layers, slots and openings in the walls are crucial. The measurement data is further used to find a suitable modeling of the walls for simulations with ray-optical methods. The walls are homogeneously modeled with multiple layers of different material parameters. This makes it possible to model walls in hospitals with embedded metallic shieldings. The results of the simulations agree well with the measurements.
Extensions of semiparametric expectile regression

Expectile regression can be seen as an extension of available (mean) regression models as it describes more general properties of the response distribution. This thesis introduces to expectile regression and presents new extensions of existing semiparametric regression models. The dissertation consists of four central parts. First, the one-to-one-connection between expectiles, the cumulative distribution function (cdf) and quantiles is used to calculate the cdf and quantiles from a fine grid of expectiles. Quantiles-from-expectiles-estimates are introduced and compared with direct quantile estimates regarding e�ciency. Second, a method to estimate non-crossing expectile curves based on splines is developed. Also, the case of clustered or longitudinal observations is handled by introducing random individual components which leads to an extension of mixed models to mixed expectile models. Third, quantiles-from-expectiles-estimates in the framework of unequal probability sampling are proposed. All methods are implemented and available within the package expectreg via the open source software R. As fourth part, a description of the package expectreg is given at the end of this thesis.
Performance Evaluation of Frequent Subgraph Discovery Techniques

Due to rapid development of the Internet technology and new scientific advances, the number of applications that model the data as graphs increases, because graphs have highly expressive power to model a complicated structure. Graph mining is a well-explored area of research which is gaining popularity in the data mining community. A graph is a general model to represent data and has been used in many domains such as cheminformatics, web information management system, computer network, and bioinformatics, to name a few. In graph mining the frequent subgraph discovery is a challenging task. Frequent subgraph mining is concerned with discovery of those subgraphs from graph dataset which have frequent or multiple instances within the given graph dataset. In the literature a large number of frequent subgraph mining algorithms have been proposed; these included FSG, AGM, gSpan, CloseGraph, SPIN, Gaston, and Mofa. The objective of this research work is to perform quantitative comparison of the above listed techniques. The performances of these techniques have been evaluated through a number of experiments based on three different state-of-the-art graph datasets. This novel work will provide base for anyone who is working to design a new frequent subgraph discovery technique.
Preparing the Future Professoriate in Second Language Acquisition

This paper is a response to the call for a more complete graduate education to include both teaching and research preparation. Given the importance of discipline-specific training of graduate students, it is surprising that very little has been written about the role of training graduate students to teach content courses in second language acquisition (SLA). Rather, in the general area of applied linguistics, the focus has been on the training of language teachers, as evidenced by volumes such as Mentoring Foreign Language Teaching Assistants, Lecturers, and Adjunct Faculty (Rifkin, 2000). To address this issue, a team-teaching project was implemented using the mentor/TA construct described in Nyquist and Wulff (1996). This paper reports the results of that project and, additionally, includes a discussion of the challenges and benefits encountered as this teaching design was implemented. To prepare for the implementation of this team-teaching project, two questions were posed: 1) What are the existing practices of SLA teacher preparation? and 2) To what extent do junior faculty members perceive their preparedness for their current teaching assignment as adequate? The results of two surveys are presented, one dealing with current practices of second language acquisition (SLA) programs in preparing graduate students to teach SLA courses as part of their future professorial responsibilities, and the other aimed at determining feelings of preparedness for such teaching by junior faculty members. Finally, the results of the team teaching project are presented, followed by a discussion of the implications for the field of SLA.
Improving GPU Performance: Reducing Memory Conflicts and Latency

Improving GPU Performance Reducing Memory Conflicts and Latency Over the last decade Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have evolved from fixed function computer graphics processors to energy efficient and programmable general purpose compute accelerators. During this period the number of cores in a GPU increased from 128 to 3072, an increase of 24×. However, the peak compute performance only increased by 12×, and memory bandwidth by a mere 3.9×. Algorithms with an abundance of parallelism, such as matrix multiplication, can be implemented relatively easily on these GPUs and scale well with an increase in core count. Other, irregular algorithms are much harder to implement efficiently and benefit less of the increased number of cores. In this work a class of irregular algorithms, the so called ‘voting algorithms’ such as histogram and Hough transform, are analyzed, implemented and optimized on GPUs. Histograms are not only used in statistics or for displaying the distribution of colors in an image, but also for contrast adjustments in images, image segmentation and feature detection, such as in the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HoG). The Hough transform can be used to detect the lines on a road, or the circles of a traffic sign, but also to track particles, e.g. in the Large Hadron Collider. In voting algorithms a set of input values is mapped to a, usually much smaller, set of output bins. The main challenge in mapping voting algorithms to GPUs is to efficiently update the output bins in a parallel manner. The first contribution of this work is a set of software techniques to improve the parallel updating of the output bins in the voting algorithms. Voting algorithms use atomic operations to update the bins. By duplicating all the bins a significant performance improvement can be achieved. Multi-core CPU implementations are made which utilize the SSE and AVX vector extensions of the processor. These optimizations improve the performance of the histogram application on a CPU by 10× over a single thread CPU implementation. The baseline GPU implementation
To simulate or not? Comment on steingroever, Wetzels, and Wagenmakers (2014)

© 2014 American Psychological Association. Steingroever, Wetzels, and Wagenmakers (2014) conducted a detailed investigation of 3 popular reinforcement-learning models for the Iowa gambling task using 2 model comparison techniques: a post hoc fit criterion and a simulation method. However, these 2 methods yield inconsistent results regarding which model should be preferred as a description of underlying psychological processes. Here, we describe the benefits of each method in an attempt to develop a more balanced view of how to utilize these model comparison techniques, and we outline the risks of focusing on a single method to make inferences about the overall utility of a model. Also, we make several suggestions about how applied research should evaluate candidate cognitive models, and we offer guidelines for future research aimed at identifying "good" models for decomposing and explaining participants' performance.
Indoor geolocation science and technology

This article presents an overview of the technical aspects of the existing technologies for wireless indoor location systems. The two major challenges for accurate location finding in indoor areas are the complexity of radio propagation and the ad hoc nature of the deployed infrastructure in these areas. Because of these difficulties a variety of signaling techniques, overall system architectures, and location finding algorithms are emerging for this application. This article provides a fundamental understanding of the issues related to indoor geolocation science that are needed for design and performance evaluation of emerging indoor geolocation systems.
Examining Weibo posting anxiety among well-educated youth in China

This study extends the application of Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) to investigate the nature of Weibo posting anxiety and its determinants (i.e., micro-blogging self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and prior experience) among well-educated youth in China. Analyzing semi-structured interviews with Chinese Weibo users, this study identified four dimensions of microblogging posting anxiety, including social-, writing-, technology-, and safety-related anxiety. Fear of receiving negative evaluation from offline friends and leaking personal information to unknown/dangerous readers were the main reasons for their Weibo posting anxiety. Prior experiences of obtaining undesirable comments and disappointing feedback were found to create negative outcome expectations of Weibo usage (e.g., deteriorating self-presentation and causing misunderstanding), which may indirectly induce Weibo posting anxiety. However, self-efficacy did not play a significant role in generating anxious reactions towards Weibo posting. Theoretically, this study uses an SCT analytical lens to enhance the understanding of Weibo posting anxiety among Chinese users. Practically, the findings provide insights to services operators and system designers about users’ anxiety in using social media like Weibo so as to improve the service and boost the usage. Note: An oral presentation of this article was made at the 2014 annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), Montreal, Canada.
A statistical wideband mobile radio channel model including the directions-of-arrival

A statistical wideband mobile radio channel model including the directions-of-arrival is presented. This model is derived by extending conventional statistical tap-delay-line models of the mobile radio channel to take into account the directions-of-arrival. It is shown how the parameters of this model can be adapted to measurement results obtained in outdoor macrocellular environments. Statistical wideband mobile radio channel models including the directions-of-arrival are essential for assessing, developing, evaluating and optimizing adaptive directional antenna concepts for future mobile radio systems.