Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The importance of being placefriends: discovering location-focused online communities

Discovering groups of online friends who go to the same physical places has numerous potential applications including privacy management, friend recommendation, and contact grouping as in Google+ circles. Until recently, little information was available about places visited by users of online social networking services, so community detection on the social graph could not take this into account. With the rise of services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places, where users check in to named venues and share their location with their friends, we now have the right data to make this possible. In this work, we propose a way to extract place-focused communities from the social graph by annotating its edges with check-in information. Using traces from two online social networks with location sharing, we show that we can extract groups of friends who meet face-to-face, with many possible benefits for online social services.
The problem is my partner: Treating couples when one partner wants the other to change

Partners commonly present to couple therapy expecting that the relationship will only improve if their partner changes. In other words, the partner is the problem. In this article, the authors review research on people’s capacity for change, the process of behavior change, and personality change, especially the role of attachment theory. They then review techniques for working with couples based on empirically validated approaches to couple therapy and general change principles in therapy. Finally, the authors present a case study and recommendations for working with change-demanding couples, emphasizing the importance of focusing on emotional acceptance.
Why pay if it ’ s free ? Streaming , downloading , and digital music consumption in the “ iTunes era ”

This research study is an investigation into the consumption of digital music. Rapid growth in the market for digital music has been led by the rise in popularity of online download stores such as iTunes and streaming services. Consumers now have the option to acquire songs from a variety of paid and non-paid legitimate sources, as well as through unlawful channels. At the same time, rights holders have attempted to re-commodify a product that has been decommodified through copyright infringement. Drawing from the theory of planned behavior, this study places emphasis on the role of norms and attitudes in the formation of intentions to either purchase music or download it for free. It will be shown that these preferences affect the treatment of digital music as a cultural object. A political economy framework is used to understand negative attitudes towards attempts to control digital music distribution. An online questionnaire was designed and completed by a total of (n = 162) consumers. The data was analyzed using a mixed-method approach in order to triangulate quantitative results. The results indicate that a large portion of consumers are willing to pay for digital music. However, they are not encouraged by the threat of legal repercussions. Despite being satisfied with the streaming service, users are not willing to subscribe. The youngest consumers hold favorable attitudes towards illegal downloading which is grounded in a norm of copyright infringement and belief in the Internet as free. Finally, it was found that affinity for the recording artist serves to moderate intentions to download illegally. Overall, the results have implications for measures to counter digital piracy and to encourage willingness to pay. Furthermore, they question the long-term viability of the subscription-revenue streaming business model. MSc Dissertation Theodore Giletti
Descriptive Set-theoretic Dichotomy Theorems and Limits Superior

Suppose that X is a Hausdorff space, I is an ideal on X, and (A i) i∈ω is a sequence of analytic subsets of X. We investigate the circumstances under which there exists I ∈ [ω] ω with i∈I A i / ∈ I. We focus on Laczkovich-style characterizations and ideals associated with descriptive set-theoretic dichotomies. Warning. This is a preliminary draft of our paper. Several arguments still need to be written out, there are no doubt many typos remaining, and our terminology is less than perfect. Please email corrections and suggestions to glimmeffros@gmail.com.
Online Scheduling of Parallel Jobs with Bounded Processing times on Two Machines

We study the problem of online scheduling parallel jobs with bounded processing times on 2 machines, and the objective is to minimize makespan. A parallel job requires simultaneous processing on a pre-specified, job-dependent number of machines. The problem is online in the sense that jobs are presented one by one. Once a job is presented, we must irrevocably assign it to some time slot before the next one shows up. We investigate the case where the processing times of jobs are bounded within interval [a, αa] where a > 0 and α > 1. We first prove a lower bound of competitive ratios for online algorithms equal $\min\left\{1+\frac{1}{\alpha}, \frac{2+3\alpha}{2(1+\alpha)}\right\}$ when α ≥ 2 and $\min\left\{\frac{1+\alpha}{2}, \frac{2+\alpha}{1+\alpha}\right\}$ when 1 < α < 2, respectively. We further prove that the Greedy algorithm proposed in Chan et al. (2008) is $\left(1+\frac{\alpha}{2}\right)$-competitive in the case but it cannot be better than $\left(1+\frac{1+\alpha}{5+\alpha}\right)$-competitive.
BMP15 and GDF9 Gene Mutations in Premature Ovarian Failure

Background: Premature ovarian failure (POF) is an ovarian defect characterized by the premature depletion of ovarian follicles before the age of 40, representing one major cause of female infertility. Mutations in bone morphogenetic protein 15 (BMP15) and growth differentiation factor 9 (GDF9) have been shown to be associated with POF. Methods: Genomic DNA was isolated from 52 idiopathic premature ovarian failure patients and 100 normal control individuals. Exons of BMP15 and GDF9 gene were amplified using PCR method and subjected to directed sequencing. Variants were identified by comparing the sequences obtained with normal sequences from NCBI database. Results: Four BMP15 gene variants were identified in 6 patients in heterozygous condition. Out of these 4 variants, 3 variants namely, c.165A>T (p.Glu55Asp), c.538 G>T (p.Aln180 Ser) and c. 510_512 delT were novel variants. In silico analysis using SIFT, Provean and Polyphen 2 score predicted the non-deleterious effect of c.165A>T and c.538 G>T variant. 788insTCT variant was identified in 3 patients. No variant was identified in GDF9 gene in any patients and controls. Conclusion: Although the variant has been identified in BMP15 gene but it may not be associated with the premature ovarian failure.
A case study on occupational stressors and effective stress management interventions from a call center perspective

This case study explores the realities of work stress in the Nigerian call center context and employees’ views on how effective stress management practices can improve workplace well-being. A total of 30 participants (20 call center agents and 10 team managers) employed in two different call centers took part in the study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted about the impact of call center working conditions on employee well-being while thematic content analysis was used to analyze the data. The findings unveiled various interpretations of how participants perceived call center stressors and the various coping strategies used in managing job stress. Furthermore, recommendations were made for call center organizations within this context to implement organizational-levelled stress management practices rather making employees indulge in individual coping abilities. Thus, the implication of study is to create a scholarly awareness on how occupational stress is perceived and interventions conceptualized in service jobs within a non-Western context where literature is rare.
Reducing Power Consumption at the Control Path of High Performance Microprocessors

Low power embedded processors become more important for portable applications. For CMOS circuits, power is consumed during the charging and discharging of the capacitances. Reducing switching activities would significantly reduce power consumption of an embedded processor. In this paper, we address the problem of how to reduce switching activities at the control path of an embedded processor. We study the effects of using Gray code as the addressing scheme to reduce the switching activities. Gray codes have an advantage over the conventional binary code in that consecutive memory addresses have only one-bit different. Due to locality of program execution, Gray code addressing can significantly reduce the amount of switching on the instruction address bits. Also an instruction scheduling technique called cold scheduling, is developed to reorder the instruction sequence to reduce the switching activities. Reducing Power Consumption at the Control Path of High Performance Microprocessors Ching-Long Su, Chi-Ying Tsui, and Alvin M. Despain University of Southern California December, 1994 IEEE Design & Test of Computers, December, 1994
Albumin infusion improves renal blood flow autoregulation in patients with acute decompensation of cirrhosis and acute kidney injury

In cirrhotic patients with renal failure, renal blood flow autoregulation curve is shifted to the right, which is consequent upon sympathetic nervous system activation and endothelial dysfunction. Albumin infusion improves renal function in cirrhosis by mechanisms that are incompletely understood. We aimed to determine the effect of albumin infusion on systemic haemodynamics, renal blood flow, renal function and endothelial function in patients with acute decompensation of cirrhosis and acute kidney injury.
Body Composition is Strongly Associated With Cardiorespiratory Fitness in a Large Brazilian Military Firefighter Cohort: The Brazilian Firefighters Study

Abstract Nogueira, EC, Porto, LGG, Nogueira, RM, Martins, WR, Fonseca, RMC, Lunardi, CC, and de Oliveira, RJ. Body composition is strongly associated with cardiorespiratory fitness in a large Brazilian military firefighter cohort: The Brazilian Firefighters Study. J Strength Cond Res 30(1): 33–38, 2016—Firefighting is associated with high-level physical demands and requires appropriate physical fitness. Considering that obesity has been correlated with decreased cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) and that the prevalence of obesity may also be elevated within firefighters (FF), we analyzed the association between CRF and body composition (BC) in Brazilian military FF. We assessed 4,237 male FF (18–49 years) who performed a physical fitness test that included BC and CRF. Body composition was assessed by body mass index (BMI), body adiposity index (BAI), body fat percentage (BF%), and waist circumference (WC). CRF was assessed by the 12-minute Cooper test. Comparisons of V[Combining Dot Above]O2max between the BC categories were analyzed using the Mann-Whitney test, and the analysis was adjusted for age using the General Linear Model. The Spearman test was used for correlation analysis and the odds ratio (OR) was calculated to assess the odds of the unfit group (⩽12 metabolic equivalents [METs]) for poor BC. Statistically significant differences were considered when p ⩽ 0.05. Considering the BMI categories, 8 volunteers (0.2%) were underweight, 1,306 (30.8%) were normal weight, 2,301 (54.3%) were overweight, and 622 (14.7%) were obese. The V[Combining Dot Above]O2max was negatively correlated with age (r s = −0.21), BMI (r s = −0.45), WC (r s = −0.50), and BAI (r s = −0.35) (p < 0.001). Cardiorespiratory fitness was lower in the obese compared with the nonobese for all age categories (−3.8 ml·kg−1·min−1; p < 0.001) and for all BC indices (−4.5 ml·kg−1·min−1; p < 0.001). The OR of the unfit group having poor BC in all indices varied from 2.9 to 8.1 (p < 0.001). Despite the metabolically healthy obesity phenomenon, we found a strong association between CRF and BC irrespective of age and the BC method (BMI, BAI, WC, or BF%). These findings may aid in improving FF training programs with a focus on health and performance.
Investigation of deep neural networks for robust recognition of nonlinearly distorted speech

This paper studies the use of hybrid context-dependent Deep Neural Network Hidden Markov Model (DNN-HMM) architecture for robust recognition of speech affected by real-world nonlinear distortions. We consider two types of distortions; a) signals distorted through overgained microphone preampliﬁer in the analog domain and b) recordings exhibiting unnatural spectral sparseness, caused by excessive denoising or low-bit-rate compression. We compare the performance of DNN-HMM architecture with that of the conventional system, based on context-dependent Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)- HMMs, which applies channel/speaker adaptation and/or feature compensation in the front-end via Histogram Equalization (HEQ). We show that DNN-HMM architecture achieves a sig-niﬁcantly lower Word Error Rate (WER) on the considered distorted datasets and that the obtained relative WER reduction is higher than 60%. We also investigate the usefulness of the feature compensation via HEQ for a DNN-HMM system and show that it can be helpful in the case of shallower networks.
Towards Gestural Sonic Affordances

We present a study that explores the affordance evoked by sound andsound-gesture mappings. In order to do this, we make use of a sensor systemwith minimal form factor in a user study that minimizes cultural associationThe present study focuses on understanding how participants describe sounds andgestures produced while playing designed sonic interaction mappings. This approach seeks to move from object-centric affordance towards investigatingembodied gestural sonic affordances.
Smart farming using IOT

Even today, different developing countries are also using traditional methods and backward techniques in agriculture sector. Little or very less technological advancement is found here that has increased the production efficiency significantly. To increase the productivity, a novel design approach is presented in this paper. Smart farming with the help of Internet of Things (IOT) has been designed. A remote controlled vehicle operates on both automatic and manual modes, for various agriculture operations like spraying, cutting, weeding etc. The controller keeps monitoring the temperature, humidity, soil condition and accordingly supplies water to the field.
Real-time Road Traffic Information Detection Through Social Media

In current study, a mechanism to extract traffic related information such as congestion and incidents from textual data from the internet is proposed. The current source of data is Twitter. As the data being considered is extremely large in size automated models are developed to stream, download, and mine the data in real-time. Furthermore, if any tweet has traffic related information then the models should be able to infer and extract this data. Currently, the data is collected only for United States and a total of 120,000 geo-tagged traffic related tweets are extracted, while six million geo-tagged non-traffic related tweets are retrieved and classification models are trained. Furthermore, this data is used for various kinds of spatial and temporal analysis. A mechanism to calculate level of traffic congestion, safety, and traffic perception for cities in U.S. is proposed. Traffic congestion and safety rankings for the various urban areas are obtained and then they are statistically validated with existing widely adopted rankings. Traffic perception depicts the attitude and perception of people towards the traffic. It is also seen that traffic related data when visualized spatially and temporally provides the same pattern as the actual traffic flows for various urban areas. When visualized at the city level, it is clearly visible that the flow of tweets is similar to flow of vehicles and that the traffic related tweets are representative of traffic within the cities. With all the findings in current study, it is shown that significant amount of traffic related information can be extracted from Twitter and other sources on internet. Furthermore, Twitter and these data sources are freely available and are not bound by spatial and temporal limitations. That is, wherever there is a user there is a potential for data.
Specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes are involved in in vivo clearance of infectious bronchitis virus

Cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL) responses to infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) were determined at regular intervals between 3 and 30 days postinfection (p.i.). The maximum response with 82% lysis of labeled target cells was detected at 10 days p.i. The specific CTL response did not begin to decline until the amount of virus, which peaked at day 8 p.i. in both the kidneys and lungs, started to decrease. Clinical respiratory signs of illness also correlated with amount of virus. CTL activity was shown to be major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class restricted because the lysis of MHC-mismatched targets was negligible, and lysis was mediated by CD8+ CD4- T cells, as the CTL response could be abolished with removal of CD8+ CD4- but not CD4+ CD8- lymphocytes. In contrast, immunoglobulin M (IgM) antibody was not detected until day 10 p.i. , and levels peaked at day 12 p.i. ; IgG antibody levels were minimal until day 15 p.i. but continued to increase exponentially until day 30 p.i. , the last day examined. In summary, CTL responses correlated with initial decreases in infection and illness.
The Melting of Aqueous Foams

Diffusing-wave spectroscopy measurements show that ordinarily solid aqueous foams flow by a series of stick-slip avalanche-like rearrangements of neighboring bubbles from one tight packing configuration to another. Contrary to a recent prediction, the distribution of avalanche sizes do not obey a power-law distribution characteristic of self-organized criticality. This can be understood from a simple model of foam mechanics based on bubble-bubble interactions.
Postfilters to Modify the Modulation Spectrum for Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis

This paper presents novel approaches based on modulation spectrum (MS) for high-quality statistical parametric speech synthesis, including text-to-speech (TTS) and voice conversion (VC). Although statistical parametric speech synthesis offers various advantages over concatenative speech synthesis, the synthetic speech quality is still not as good as that of concatenative speech synthesis or the quality of natural speech. One of the biggest issues causing the quality degradation is the over-smoothing effect often observed in the generated speech parameter trajectories. Global variance (GV) is known as a feature well correlated with the over-smoothing effect, and the effectiveness of keeping the GV of the generated speech parameter trajectories similar to those of natural speech has been confirmed. However, the quality gap between natural speech and synthetic speech is still large. In this paper, we propose using the MS of the generated speech parameter trajectories as a new feature to effectively quantify the over-smoothing effect. Moreover, we propose postfilters to modify the MS utterance by utterance or segment by segment to make the MS of synthetic speech close to that of natural speech. The proposed postfilters are applicable to various synthesizers based on statistical parametric speech synthesis. We first perform an evaluation of the proposed method in the framework of hidden Markov model (HMM)-based TTS, examining its properties from different perspectives. Furthermore, effectiveness of the proposed postfilters are also evaluated in Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based VC and classification and regression trees (CART)-based TTS (a.k.a., CLUSTERGEN). The experimental results demonstrate that 1) the proposed utterance-level postfilter achieves quality comparable to the conventional generation algorithm considering the GV, and yields significant improvements by applying to the GV-based generation algorithm in HMM-based TTS, 2) the proposed segment-level postfilter capable of achieving low-delay synthesis also yields significant improvements in synthetic speech quality, and 3) the proposed postfilters are also effective in not only HMM-based TTS but also GMM-based VC and CLUSTERGEN.
A Study of Close Eigenvalues and Communication Performance in Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Eigenbeam Space-Division Multiplexing

In multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) eigenbeam space-division multiplexing (E-SDM), increased phase angle variation velocities have been reported because the transmission and reception weights become increasingly sensitive to smaller gaps between eigenvalues. In this paper, the effects of close eigenvalues were evaluated based on the number of antenna elements and spatial correlations. The evaluation is executed using the ITU-R M.2135-1 time variant channel model. As a result, it is clarified that there is a good possibility of improved communication performance in MIMO E-SDM based on adaptive control of the channel estimation time period using the eigenvalue gap as an input parameter.
A Preliminary Study to Reduce the Missing Wedge Effect by Using a Noise Robust Mojette Reconstruction

Apart from the usual methods based on the Radon theorem, the Mojette transform proposes a specific algorithm called Corner Based Inversion (CBI) to reconstruct an image from its projections. Contrary to other transforms, it offers two interesting properties. First, the acquisition follows discrete image geometry and resolves the well-known irregular sampling problem. Second, it updates projection values during the reconstruction such that the sinogram contains only data for not yet reconstructed pixels. These properties could be a solution to reduce the missing wedge effect in tomography. Unfortunately, the CBI algorithm is noise sensitive and reconstruction from corrupted data fails. In this paper, we first develop and optimize a noise-robust CBI algorithm based on data redundancy and noise modelling in the projections. Afterwards, this algorithm is applied in discrete tomography from a specific Radon acquisition. Reconstructed image results are discussed and applications and perspectives to reduce the missing wedge effect are also developed.