Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Harmonicity based dereverberation with maximum a posteriori estimation

A harmonicity based dereverberation (HERB) scheme has recently been proposed for single channel speech dereverberation. HERB was shown to work effectively for modest reverberation times of up to 1.0 sec when a sufficiently large amount of observed signals are available. The conventional formulation of HERB makes intuitive use of the stronger components of the speech signal, namely the pitch harmonics, when obtaining the dereverberation filter; however, it does not provide an analytical framework within which the dereverberation performance can be optimized. In this paper, we reformulate HERB as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation problem, in which the dereverberation filter is determined as one that maximizes the a posteriori probability given the observed signals. We derive a closed form solution to this problem by assuming that the a posteriori probability is given by means of a Gaussian probability distribution function (PDF) under a harmonicity constraint. A preliminary experiment shows that we can further improve the performance of HERB by carefully choosing the PDF when the amount of observed signals is small.
A new approach for modeling OOV words

This paper addressed the problem of Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) utterance detection in small vocabulary telephone keyword spotting system. We propose a new approach for modeling OOV words in the scenario of a small vocabulary of telephone keyword spotting system. The paper adopt the semi-continuous Hidden Markov Model with multiple codebooks to modeling the keywords. We propose a two pass procedure to spot the real keyword occurrence. In the first pass, the normal viterbi search procedure is applied, with the appropriate defined and trained garbage models and silence models. The output of this stage produces the N-best word hypothesis The second pass, which can be seen as a verification procedure, take the first pass output as focuses. This approach is mainly constructing a “dynamic anti-model” based on the detected hypothesis keyword model and the current input acoustic information.
Pathways to the Paralympic Games: Exploring the Sporting Journeys of High Performance Para Athletes with a Limb Deficiency

i List of Figures . iv List of Tables . iv List of Appendices.iv Notes on Terminology . v Attestation of Authorship . xi Acknowledgements . xii Ethical Approval . xiv Acknowledgement of Funding . xv Chapter
“The Pill Line Is Longer Than the Chow Line”: The Impact of Incarceration on Prisoners and Their Families

Incarceration removes individuals from their families and their communities, increasing the potential for disrupted relationships, community fragmentation, and burden on service systems. Based on focus groups with 38 male and 39 female inmates and interviews with 21 family members, this study identifies specific impacts of incarceration on prisoners and their families. Findings include prisoners’ and families’ perceptions of incarceration’s impact on their communication, health, mental health, finances, and involvement with community supports such as friends, church groups, and human services. Implications for research, practice, and policy are discussed.
Source Monitoring: ERP Evidence for Greater Reactivity to Nontarget Information in Older Adults

Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) were collected concurrently with stimulus presentation during a source monitoring task. Younger adults were less likely than older adults to make source monitoring errors and their ERP records showed far greater discrimination between target stimuli and familiar but nontarget foils. Older adults not only made more source errors but produced high amplitude late positivities to the nontarget foils even when these foils were correctly rejected. Under divided attention conditions, younger adults performance was similar to that of the older adults both behaviorally and electrophysiologically. These data illustrate the role that attentional resources play in the ability to inhibit response tendencies and suggest that age differences in source monitoring may be more related to attentional control than inefficiencies in the encoding of contextual information. As well, they suggest that the ERP late positivity may represent a more general response to item salience rather than serve as an index of recollection as is the current view.
Maternal prenatal depressive symptoms predict infant NR3C1 1F and BDNF IV DNA methylation

Prenatal maternal psychological distress increases risk for adverse infant outcomes. However, the biological mechanisms underlying this association remain unclear. Prenatal stress can impact fetal epigenetic regulation that could underlie changes in infant stress responses. It has been suggested that maternal glucocorticoids may mediate this epigenetic effect. We examined this hypothesis by determining the impact of maternal cortisol and depressive symptoms during pregnancy on infant NR3C1 and BDNF DNA methylation. Fifty-seven pregnant women were recruited during the second or third trimester. Participants self-reported depressive symptoms and salivary cortisol samples were collected diurnally and in response to a stressor. Buccal swabs for DNA extraction and DNA methylation analysis were collected from each infant at 2 months of age, and mothers were assessed for postnatal depressive symptoms. Prenatal depressive symptoms significantly predicted increased NR3C1 1F DNA methylation in male infants (β = 2.147, P = 0.044). Prenatal depressive symptoms also significantly predicted decreased BDNF IV DNA methylation in both male and female infants (β = −3.244, P = 0.013). No measure of maternal cortisol during pregnancy predicted infant NR3C1 1F or BDNF promoter IV DNA methylation. Our findings highlight the susceptibility of males to changes in NR3C1 DNA methylation and present novel evidence for altered BDNF IV DNA methylation in response to maternal depression during pregnancy. The lack of association between maternal cortisol and infant DNA methylation suggests that effects of maternal depression may not be mediated directly by glucocorticoids. Future studies should consider other potential mediating mechanisms in the link between maternal mood and infant outcomes.
A mixed integer linear formulation for microgrid economic scheduling

Microgrids are subsystems of the distribution grid which comprises small generation capacities, storage devices and controllable loads, which can operate either connected or isolated from the utility grid. This paper studies the microgrid economic scheduling, i.e. the problem of optimize microgrid operations to fulfil a time-varying energy demand and operational constraints while minimizing the costs of internal production and imported energy from the utility grid. The problem is posed as a mixed-integer linear programming model. The key difference in the proposed modeling approach is that no complex heuristics or decompositions are used; the full model is formulated and solved in an efficient way by using commercial solvers. This leads to significant improvements in schedule quality and in computational burden. A case study of a typical microgrid is investigated: simulation results show the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Relational Aggression, Social Aggression, and Antisocial Personality Features: An Investigation of Bullying Behavior in a Sample of Juvenile Offenders

iv List of Tables.ix Chapter 1: Introduction.1 Problem Statement.5 Research Questions and Hypotheses.5 Summary.5 Chapter 2: Literature Review.7 Bullying and Indirect Forms of Aggression.7 Background and Characteristics of Bullying.7 Prevalence.8 Psychological Impact.9 Definition and Characteristics.10 Indirect Forms of Aggression. 12 . Importance of Indirect Forms of Aggression.17 Summary. 21 Psychopathy and Callous-Unemotional Traits. 21 Development and Definition. 22 Extending Psychopathy to Youth: Issues and Evidence.30 Callous-Unemotional Traits as Distinguishing Criteria.34 Summary.38 Psychopathy and Narcissism.38 Definition and Presentation.40
Dynamic applications from the ground up

Some Lisp programs such as Emacs, but also the Linux kernel (when fully modularised) are mostly dynamic; i.e., apart from a small static core, the significant functionality is dynamically loaded. In this paper, we explore fully dynamic applications in Haskell where the static core is minimal and code is hot swappable. We demonstrate the feasibility of this architecture by two applications: Yi, an extensible editor, and Lambdabot, a plugin-based IRC robot. Benefits of the approach include hot swappable code and sophisticated application configuration and extension via embedded DSLs. We illustrate both benefits in detail at the example of a novel embedded DSL for editor interfaces.
Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Due to Military Sexual Trauma: A Case Report

Although published treatment guidelines recommend cognitive and/or behavioral therapies as the first-line treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), recent research has shown that interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) represents a promising treatment option for PTSD. We report a case study describing the use of IPT to treat symptoms of PTSD due to military sexual trauma in a female veteran. Following a brief course of IPT, the veteran reported significant improvement in symptoms of PTSD and depression and positive changes in her relationships with important others in her life. While case studies are by nature limited, the treatment course described here offers initial support for IPT as an alternative treatment approach for military sexual trauma–related symptoms of PTSD, particularly in cases in which depression is a co-occurring treatment consideration. Psicoterapia interpersonal para el trastorno de estrés postraumático por trauma sexual militar: informe de un caso Aunque las guías de tratamiento publicadas recomiendan terapias cognitivas y / o conductuales como el tratamiento de primera línea para el trastorno de estrés postraumático (TEPT), investigaciones recientes han demostrado que la psicoterapia interpersonal (IPT) representa una opción de tratamiento prometedora para el TEPT. Presentamos un estudio de caso que describe el uso de IPT para tratar los síntomas de PTSD causados por trauma sexual militar en una mujer veterana. Después de un breve curso de IPT, la veterana informó una mejoría significativa en los síntomas de TEPT y depresión y cambios positivos en sus relaciones con otras personas importantes en su vida. Mientras que los estudios de casos son limitados por naturaleza, el curso de tratamiento descrito aquí ofrece apoyo inicial para IPT como un enfoque de tratamiento alternativo para los síntomas del TEPT relacionados con el trauma sexual militar, particularmente en casos en que la depresión es una consideración de tratamiento concurrente.
Placement of relay nodes in wireless sensor networks

The placement of relay nodes is one of the critical need of wireless sensor networks when connectivity, lifetime, fault tolerance like factors are desired in the network. In this study, we review the node placement techniques based on two broad categories, i.e. algorithm based and approximation based solutions and provide an overall view of this study by summarizing previous achievements. A taxonomy is presented to enlist the present techniques. The paper also emphasizes on the research challenges and gives an idea of potential future scope in this research domain.
Large-scale electromagnetic field analyses of coils wound with coated conductors using a current-vector-potential formulation with a thin-strip approximation

We developed a novel software for large-scale electromagnetic field analyses of coils wound with coated conductors based on current-vector-potential formulation with thin-strip approximation. Although this formulation was effective for obtaining the precise solutions of the electromagnetic field, the strong nonlinear property of superconducting materials frequently led to highly ill-conditioned linear systems of equations, which were difficult to solve efficiently. Moreover, the memory consumption and computation time required for the analyses rapidly increased with the size of the analysis due to dense matrix operations. In our software, the first difficulty was addressed by a novel preconditioning technique based on the algebraic multigrid method. Algebraic multigrid preconditioning enabled us to efficiently and stably solve the ill-conditioned linear systems of equations encountered in our analyses. It also improved the robustness of the analyses containing multifilament-coated conductors. As regards the second difficulty, the hierarchical matrices representation drastically reduced the memory consumption related to the dense matrices, as well as computation time. Meanwhile, our implementation of the hierarchical matrices representation was quite compatible with parallel computations on distributed memory computers. Finally, we presented some practical examples of large-scale analyses, which became possible by using the new software. For instance, the analysis of a cosine-theta dipole magnet whose number of degrees of freedom was more than 1.5 million was successfully completed in 78 h by 56 parallel processes and with a total memory consumption of 177 GB.
Development and first validation of the COPD Assessment Test

There is need for a validated short, simple instrument to quantify chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) impact in routine practice to aid health status assessment and communication between patient and physician. Current health-related quality of life questionnaires provide valid assessment of COPD, but are complex, which limits routine use. The aim of the present study was to develop a short validated patient-completed questionnaire, the COPD Assessment Test (CAT), assessing the impact of COPD on health status. 21 candidate items identified through qualitative research with COPD patients were used in three prospective international studies (Europe and the USA, n = 1,503). Psychometric and Rasch analyses identified eight items fitting a unidimensional model to form the CAT. Items were tested for differential functioning between countries. Internal consistency was excellent: Cronbach's α = 0.88. Test re-test in stable patients (n = 53) was very good (intra-class correlation coefficient 0.8). In the sample from the USA, the correlation with the COPD-specific version of the St George’s Respiratory Questionnaire was r = 0.80. The difference between stable (n = 229) and exacerbation patients (n = 67) was five units of the 40-point scale (12%; p<0.0001). The CAT is a short, simple questionnaire for assessing and monitoring COPD. It has good measurement properties, is sensitive to differences in state and should provide a valid, reliable and standardised measure of COPD health status with worldwide relevance.
Interactions in the air: adding further depth to interactive tabletops

Although interactive surfaces have many unique and compelling qualities, the interactions they support are by their very nature bound to the display surface. In this paper we present a technique for users to seamlessly switch between interacting on the tabletop surface to above it. Our aim is to leverage the space above the surface in combination with the regular tabletop display to allow more intuitive manipulation of digital content in three-dimensions. Our goal is to design a technique that closely resembles the ways we manipulate physical objects in the real-world; conceptually, allowing virtual objects to be 'picked up' off the tabletop surface in order to manipulate their three dimensional position or orientation. We chart the evolution of this technique, implemented on two rear projection-vision tabletops. Both use special projection screen materials to allow sensing at significant depths beyond the display. Existing and new computer vision techniques are used to sense hand gestures and postures above the tabletop, which can be used alongside more familiar multi-touch interactions. Interacting above the surface in this way opens up many interesting challenges. In particular it breaks the direct interaction metaphor that most tabletops afford. We present a novel shadow-based technique to help alleviate this issue. We discuss the strengths and limitations of our technique based on our own observations and initial user feedback, and provide various insights from comparing, and contrasting, our tabletop implementations
Interdisciplinarity in Closed-Loop Supply Chain Management Research

Closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) management has evolved to be a mature area of supply chain management in its own right. Guide and Van Wassenhove (2009) describe how this research began with focusing on tactical and operational issues such as the disassembly of products or shop-floor control and coordination, and later started addressing issues pertaining to the entire reverse supply chain such as product acquisition, supply-chain contracting and incentives. Recently, the literature has begun studying issues at the intersection of other disciplines, drawing on concepts from industrial ecology, studying marketing issues such as the pricing and positioning of new and remanufactured products, etc. It is clear that the research in closed-loop supply chains is moving in an interdisciplinary direction. This is of great value, as the " messier " problems in industry tend to require an interdisciplinary approach. At a recent workshop 1 , invited industry participants 2 shared the issues that they face in closing the loop in their business context. These questions were then grouped primarily along the areas of Industrial Ecology, New Product Development, Marketing, and Economic Development, and discussed by small groups of workshop participants. This chapter builds on these discussions to present some existing research that is relevant to the questions posed, and is therefore necessarily interdisciplinary. A number of open research directions are also presented. We hope that describing industry problems and the current state of the art will prompt researchers to close existing gaps in the literature and increase the practical impact of closed-loop supply chain management research. Table 1 provides a list of teaching material that has significant closed-loop supply chain content and that is at the interface of the above-mentioned areas, to aid in broadening instruction related to CLSC management. This chapter is organized as follows: In §2, we provide short case studies based on each industry participant to provide an account of their closed-loop supply chain activities and the problems they currently face in managing these operations. In §3, we identify the common threads running through the issues raised by these discussions and provide insights from the 2 existing literature. We conclude in §4. is the world's largest provider of commercial carpet tile. It is well recognized for its attempts to be an environmentally sustainable enterprise with the ambitious goal of zero environmental impact by 2020 (Toktay et al. 2006). This is a particularly challenging goal, as the inputs into carpet …
WHY DO PEOPLE DIFFER IN THEIR ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION? A NUCLEAR TWIN FAMILY STUDY

Although many previous studies have emphasized the role of environmental factors, such as parental home and school environment, on achievement motivation, classical twin studies suggest that both additive genetic influences and non-shared environmental influences explain interindividual differences in achievement motivation. By applying a Nuclear Twin Family Design on the data of the German nationally representative of TwinLife study, we analyzed genetic and environmental influences on achievement motivation in adolescents and young adults. As expected, the results provided evidence for the impact of additive genetic variation, non-additive genetic influences, as well as twin specific shared environmental influences. The largest amount of variance was attributed to non-shared environmental influences, showing the importance of individual experiences in forming differences in achievement motivation. Overall, we suggest a revision of models and theories that explain variation in achievement motivation by differences in familial socialization only.
Visualization of shoulder range of motion for clinical diagnostics and device development

Rotations of the humerus in the human shoulder girdle are usually described using five classical medical definitions: flexion/extension, abduction/adduction, internal/external rotation, horizontal abduction/adduction, and horizontal flexion/extension. The latter two are needed to overcome the inability of the first three to define the full range of motion. The International Society for Biomechanics recommendations reduce these to three sequential rotations around perpendicular axes: rotation of the plane of elevation (horizontal rotation), elevation, and axial rotation. We expand on this work by providing a new and intuitive visualization method to display these rotations that superimposes the axial rotation on the map projection of the reachable workspace of the elbow. We provide methods to interpret and create the visualization using direct observations, but also the equations and Matlab scripts needed to use the method. The visualization allows the immediate observation of the full rotational range of motion of the humerus and the interaction effects between these physiologically coupled rotations. Furthermore, it allows visualization of the effects of kinematic limitations of external devices such as endpoint manipulators or exoskeletons. Therefore, the new visualization method is useful for both clinical diagnostics and device development.
Full wave analysis of EM wave propagation over terrain using the Improved Tabulated Interaction Method

This paper proposes extending the forward-scattering based Tabulated Interaction Method (TIM) [1] for computing electromagnetic wave propagation over terrain profiles to one incorporating back-scattering. The proposed method uses a common set of basis functions in conjunction with a “matching technique” to compress the original linear system to a reduced system containing much fewer unknowns and therefore provides a very efficient and accurate method. The original TIM [1] is shown to be a special case of the proposed method whereby the lower triangular portion of the reduced system is retained and solved. The proposed method is compared with the recently proposed Characteristic Basis Function Method (CBFM) [2], [3] with which it shares several features. The complexity and numerical analysis demonstrates that the proposed method has an extremely low computational complexity and storage.
Graph cut-based multiple active contours without initial contours and seed points

This paper presents a new graph cut-based multiple active contour algorithm to detect optimal boundaries and regions in images without initial contours. The task of multiple active contours is framed as a partitioning problem by assuming that image data are generated from a finite mixture model with unknown number of components. Then, the partitioning problem is solved within a divisive graph cut framework where multi-way minimum cuts for multiple contours are efficiently computed in a top-down way through a swap move of binary labels. A split move is integrated into that framework to estimate the model parameters associated with regions without the use of initial contours and seed points. The number of regions is also estimated as a part of the algorithm. Experimental results of boundary and region detection of natural images are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.