Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Speaker Recognition Using Real vs Synthetic Parallel Data for DNN Channel Compensation

Abstract : The effective use of synthetic multi-channel data for training denoising DNNs has been demonstrated for several speech technologies such as ASR and speaker recognition. This paper compares the use of real and synthetic data for training denoising DNNs for multi-microphone speaker recognition. Large reductions in error rates (37% and 50% for the AVG and POOL EERs and 20% and 30% for the AVG and POOL min DCFs) are attained on Mixer 6 microphone data using Mixer 1 and 2 multi-microphone data to train a denoising DNN. Nearly the same reduction in error rate is realized using room impulse response and noise estimates (RIRs) derived from the Mixer 1and 2 data and applied to just the telephone channel. Applying RIRs from three publicly available databases used in the Kaldi Aspire evaluation system yields lower but significant reductions in error rate (16% and 34% relative improvement in AVG and POOL EER and 13% and 25% relative improvement in AVG and POOL min DCFs). In all cases, the telephone channel performance on SRE10 is improved by the denoising DNNs with the real Mixer 1 and 2 trained DNN reducing EER by 12% and min DCF by 8.9%.
The experimental teaching reform in biochemistry and molecular biology for undergraduate students in Peking University Health Science Center

Since 2010, second‐year undergraduate students of an eight‐year training program leading to a Doctor of Medicine degree or Doctor of Philosophy degree in Peking University Health Science Center (PKUHSC) have been required to enter the “Innovative talent training project. ” During that time, the students joined a research lab and participated in some original research work. There is a critical educational need to prepare these students for the increasing accessibility of research experience. The redesigned experimental curriculum of biochemistry and molecular biology was developed to fulfill such a requirement, which keeps two original biochemistry experiments (Gel filtration and Enzyme kinetics) and adds a new two‐experiment component called “Analysis of anti‐tumor drug induced apoptosis. ” The additional component, also known as the “project‐oriented experiment” or the “comprehensive experiment,” consists of Western blotting and a DNA laddering assay to assess the effects of etoposide (VP16) on the apoptosis signaling pathways. This reformed laboratory teaching system aims to enhance the participating students overall understanding of important biological research techniques and the instrumentation involved, and to foster a better understanding of the research process all within a classroom setting. Student feedback indicated that the updated curriculum helped them improve their operational and self‐learning capability, and helped to increase their understanding of theoretical knowledge and actual research processes, which laid the groundwork for their future research work. © 2015 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 43:428–433, 2015.
X-RAY SUB-MICRON TOMOGRAPHY AS A TOOL FOR THE STUDY OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL WOOD PRESERVED THROUGH THE CORROSION OF METAL OBJECTS

Wood preserved in the corrosion layer of two early medieval iron objects was examined using X-ray tomography. A state-of-the art multi-resolution X-ray tomography set-up (http://www.ugct.ugent.be) provided virtual cross-sections of the archaeological wood samples at sub-micron resolution. These were compared with scans of samples of similar modern wood. These scans demonstrate the power of sub-micron X-ray tomography for wood identification, although the process of mineralization pushes this technique to its limits. Furthermore, this technique facilitated appraisal of the mineral content of the archaeological wood, which is useful in selecting the most appropriate strategy for the (preventative) conservation of the archaeological object.
Using multiple recognition hypotheses to improve speech translation

This paper describes our recent work on integrating speech recognition and machine translation for improving speech translation performance. Two approaches are applied and their performance are evaluated in the workshop of IWSLT 2005. The first is direct N-best hypothesis translation, and the second, a pseudo-lattice decoding algorithm for translating word lattice, can dramatically reduce computation cost incurred by the first approach. We found in the experiments that both of these approaches could improve speech translation significantly.
Rening Translation Grammars through Paraphrase Clustering Msc Thesis (afstudeerscriptie) Written By

Finding the right model for the structure of translation equivalence between languages is one of the major challenges and lines of research in statistical machine translation. In this thesis we consider a formalization of translation equivalence as synchronous grammars and explore a particular way of modifying a translation grammar by labeling its nonterminal symbols. The labeling we develop is based on the general notion of semantic equivalence: since it is not know a priori what kind of semantic distinctions are relevant to translation equivalence, we de ne an unsupervised procedure to learn a label set by clustering close paraphrases that somehow characterize strings generated from a given nonterminal symbol. We implement the de ned procedure and test a current baseline grammar (Hiero system [Chiang07]) labeled with a generated label set. By trying out a number of labeling algorithms and introducing additional modi cations to the grammar, as well as making other changes to the standard translation pipeline, we nd that the performance of the labeled grammar is worse than the one of the unlabeled. We discuss possible reasons for that and propose a number of modi cations to the labeling procedure we de ned and implemented here that could improve the performance.
Stress induced magnetic field abnormality

Residual stresses in ferromagnetic material affect the direction and structure of domains and generatemagnetic field abnormality on the surface. In the formation of stress induced magnetic field, the influence of geo-magnetic field is unclear. Residual stress specimen was produced by tight matching of a round ring and a peg. Themagnetic fields of contrast specimens, which were produced in geomagnetic field or in shielding geomagnetic field, were in-spected with 8 mm lift-off. The results show that mean amplitude of magnetic field of the specimen produced in geomagneticfield is 0. 85 % larger than that of specimen produced in shielding geomagnetic field. So the formation of stress induced mag-netic field abnormality above the surface of inspected ferromagnetic material geomagnetic field gives little contribution.
Genomic patterns associated with hypoplastic compared to hyperplastic myelodysplastic syndromes

While the bone marrow in most patients with myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) has normal or increased cellularity (hyper-MDS), approximately 10%–15% of MDS patients will present with a hypocellular bone marrow (hypo-MDS). [1][1] Since the diagnosis of MDS relies mainly on the presence of dyplastic
A Simple ICI Suppression Method Utilizing Cyclic Prefix for OFDM Systems in the Presence of Phase Noise

An extremely low-complexity inter-carrier interference (ICI) suppression method for OFDM systems in the presence of phase noise is proposed in this paper. The core idea is to utilize the ISI-free part of cyclic prefix (CP), which is simply ignored in traditional methods. We linearly combine the ISI-free samples in CP with the corresponding samples in the OFDM symbol to suppress ICI, and this scheme is called `CP combining' throughout this paper. In addition, the optimum combining coefficients, in the sense of ICI power minimization, are derived, and a set of near-optimum coefficients are proposed to reduce the complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed CP combining method improves the system performance by 0.5-1.5dB. Furthermore, the proposed method can be incorporated with other phase noise mitigation methods to further improve the system performance.
Atomic Landau-Zener tunneling and Wannier-Stark ladders in optical potentials.

Ly2m. In the moving frame of the potential, the atoms feel a constant inertial force, simulating the electric force in the usual electronic experiment. Bloch bands and rates of LZ tunneling. —The eigenenergy equation for the above potential (1) with a › 0 can be solved in terms of the Mathieu functions. We show the energy bands in Fig. 1 for the case of V0 › 0.4. There is one band deep below the potential barriers, which may be regarded as the ground state levels of the potential wells broadened into a band due to tunneling through the barriers. The second band lies about the barrier tops and has a substantial width. The gap above this band is located about the energy E › 0.5, corresponding to second order Bragg scattering. The third band has an even wider width, with a tiny gap at E › 1.125 corresponding to third order Bragg scattering. We study how the atoms are trapped in the first and second bands and how they are dragged when the potential accelerates.
Web page organization and visualization using generative topographic mapping: A pilot study

Automatic Web page organization and visualization is an effective way for foraging information in a Web structure. Web pages contain both text (content) and links (structure), implying that content and structure analysis techniques should be adopted and properly integrated. In this paper, we take the probabilistic model-based approach and extend a topographypreserving model known as Generative Topography Map (GTM). The extended GTM provides a principled way to integrate Web pages and hyperlinks and project them into a low-dimension latent space (2D in our case) for visualization. The proposed extension has been applied to an artificially created dataset and also the WebKB dataset for performance evaluation. Based on the preliminary results obtained, we propose several directions for future research.
A prospective study of downhill mountain biking injuries

Background Downhill mountain biking (DMB) has become an increasingly popular extreme sport in the last few years with high velocities and bold manoeuvres. The goal of this study was to provide information on the pattern and causes of injuries in order to provide starting points for injury prevention measures. Methods We performed a monthly e-mail-based prospective survey of 249 riders over one summer season ranging from April until September 2011. Results A total of 494 injuries occurred during the 29 401 h of downhill exposure recorded, of these 65% were mild, 22% moderate and 13% severe, of which 41% led to a total restriction greater than 28 days. The calculated overall injury rate was 16.8 injuries per 1000 h of exposure. For experts it was 17.9 injuries per 1000 h of exposure, which is significantly higher than the 13.4 for professional riders (OR 1.34; 95% CI, 1.02 to 1.75; p=0.03). A significantly higher rate of injury was reported during competition (20 per 1000 h) than during practice (13 per 1000 h) (OR 1.53; 95% CI, 1.16 to 2.01; p=0.0022). The most commonly injured body site was the lower leg (27%) followed by the forearm (25%). Most frequent injury types were abrasions (64%) and contusions (56%). Main causes of injury reported by the riders were riding errors (72%) and bad trail conditions (31%). Conclusions According to our data DMB can be considered an extreme sport conveying a high risk of serious injury. Strategies of injury prevention should focus on improvements in riders’ technique, checking of local trail conditions and protective equipment design.
Dependable Demand Response Management in the Smart Grid: A Stackelberg Game Approach

Demand Response Management (DRM) is a key component in the smart grid to effectively reduce power generation costs and user bills. However, it has been an open issue to address the DRM problem in a network of multiple utility companies and consumers where every entity is concerned about maximizing its own benefit. In this paper, we propose a Stackelberg game between utility companies and end-users to maximize the revenue of each utility company and the payoff of each user. We derive analytical results for the Stackelberg equilibrium of the game and prove that a unique solution exists. We develop a distributed algorithm which converges to the equilibrium with only local information available for both utility companies and end-users. Though DRM helps to facilitate the reliability of power supply, the smart grid can be succeptible to privacy and security issues because of communication links between the utility companies and the consumers. We study the impact of an attacker who can manipulate the price information from the utility companies. We also propose a scheme based on the concept of shared reserve power to improve the grid reliability and ensure its dependability.
Prepotential, Mirror Map and F-Theory on K3

We compute certain one-loop corrections to F^4 couplings of the heterotic string compactified on T^2, and show that they can be characterized by holomorphic prepotentials. We then discuss how some of these couplings can be obtained in F-theory, or more precisely from 7-brane geometry in type IIB language. We in particular study theories with E_8 x E_8 and SO(8)^4 gauge symmetry, on certain one-dimensional sub-spaces of the moduli space that correspond to constant IIB coupling. For these theories, the relevant geometry can be mapped to Riemann surfaces. Physically, the computations amount to non-trivial tests of the basic F-theory -- heterotic duality in eight dimensions. Mathematically, they mean to associate holomorphic 5-point couplings of the form (del_t)^5 G = sum[ g_l l^5 q^l/(1-q^l) ] to K3 surfaces. This can be seen as a novel manifestation of the mirror map, acting here between open and closed string sectors.
A performance and cost evaluation of combining OPC-UA and Microsoft Azure IoT Hub into an industrial Internet-of-Things system

The expected monetary costs and response time performance is important information to know before deploying an industrial Internet-of-Things system. The system investigated in this paper is built up by combining the Open Plant Communication Universal Architecture and the Microsoft Azure Internet-of-Things Hub. We consider a real life industrial scenario that remotely monitors a piece of industrial equipment consisting of 1500 sensors, of which 600 update their values every second. The measured results show that the response times for a fiber based Internet connection was on average 770 ms with a standard deviation of 330 ms and the same measurements on a mobile internet connection was on average 1150 ms with a standard deviation of 340 ms. Cost wise, the investigated scenario fits within the most expensive price plan for the IoT hub and ends in a total of just over $5000 per month for the whole cloud service.
Numerical simulation of vacuum prebreakdown phenomena in a cathode microprotrusion at subnanosecond pulse durations

A two-dimensional, two-temperature model has been developed to describe the prebreakdown phenomena in a cathode microprotrusion at nanosecond durations of the applied voltage pulse. The simulation procedure includes a particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation to calculate the self-consistent electric field at the cathode and the field-emission characteristics of the cathode. A numerical simulation performed for a copper cathode for voltage pulses with ~1015 V/s rise rates has demonstrated that (i) the screening of the external field by the space charge of emitted electrons has the result that the electric field strength levels off approaching to that at the microprotrusion tip, and this gives rise to a region inside the microprotrusion where the current density is about twice the maximum field emission current density at the tip; (ii) the electron temperature can be greater than the lattice temperature by 0.5-1 eV at the onset of the explosive metal-plasma phase transition; (iii) with a 5-mum characteristic height of microprotrusions on a point cathode whose radius of curvature is 50 mum the field emission-to-explosive emission transition can occur within (1.2)ldr10-10 s only for microprotrusions with a tip radius no more than 0.1 mum.
Measurement of the effect of monovalent cations on RNA hairpin stability.

Using optical tweezers, we have measured the effect of monovalent cation concentration and species on the folding free energy of five large (49-124 nt) RNA hairpins, including HIV-1 TAR and molecules approximating A.U and G.C homopolymers. RNA secondary structure thermodynamics are accurately described by a model consisting of nearest-neighbor interactions and additive loop and bulge terms. Melting of small (<15 bp) duplexes and hairpins in 1 M NaCl has been used to determine the parameters of this model, which is now used extensively to predict structure and folding dynamics. Few systematic measurements have been made in other ionic conditions or for larger structures. By applying mechanical force, we measured the work required to fold and unfold single hairpins at room temperature over a range of cation concentrations from 50 to 1000 mM. Free energies were then determined using the Crooks fluctuation theorem. We observed the following: (1) In most cases, the nearest-neighbor model accurately predicted the free energy of folding at 1 M NaCl. (2) Free energy was proportional to the logarithm of salt concentration. (3) Substituting potassium ions for sodium slightly decreased hairpin stability. The TAR hairpin also misfolded nearly twice as often in KCl, indicating a differential kinetic response. (4) Monovalent cation concentration affects RNA stability in a sequence-dependent manner. G.C helices were unaffected by changing salt concentration, A.U helices were modestly affected, and the hairpin loop was very sensitive. Surprisingly, the U.C. U bulge of TAR was found to be equally stable in all conditions tested. We also report a new estimate for the elastic parameters of single-stranded RNA.
Quasilinear elliptic systems in divergence form with weak monotonicity and nonlinear physical data

We study the quasilinear elliptic system div (x,u,Du) = v(x) + f(x,u) + divg(x,u) on a bounded domain of R n with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. This system corresponds to a diusion problem with a source v in a moving and dissolving substance, where the motion is described by g and the dissolution by f. We prove existence of a weak solution of this system under classical regularity, growth, and coercivity conditions for , but with only very mild monotonicity assumptions.
(2Z,3Z)-Quinoxaline-2,3(1H,4H)-dione dioxime

The asymmetric unit of the title compound, C8H8N4O2, contains one half-molecule; a twofold rotation axis bisects the molecule. An intramolecular N—H⋯O hydrogen bond results in the formation of a five-membered ring, which displays an envelope conformation. In the crystal structure, intermolecular O—H⋯N hydrogen bonds link the molecules.
Regular and Chaotic Dynamics of the Lorenz-Stenflo System

We analytically investigate the dynamics of the generalized Lorenz equations obtained by Stenflo for acoustic gravity waves. By using Descartes' Rule of Signs and Routh–Hurwitz Test, we decide on the stability of the fixed points of the Lorenz–Stenflo system, although without explicit solution of the eigenvalue equation. We determine the precise location where pitchfork and Hopf bifurcation of fixed points occur, as a function of the parameters of the system. Parameter-space plots, Lyapunov exponents, and bifurcation diagrams are used to numerically characterize periodic and chaotic attractors.
Automated Patch-Clamp Technique: Increased Throughput in Functional Characterization and in Pharmacological Screening of Small-Conductance Ca2+ Release-Activated Ca2+ Channels

The suitability of an automated patch clamp for the characterization and pharmacological screening of calcium release—activated calcium (CRAC) channels endogenously expressed in RBL-2H3 cells was explored with the QPatch system. CRAC currents (I CRAC) are small, and thus precise recordings require high signal-to-noise ratios obtained by high seal resistances. Automated whole-cell establishment resulted in membrane resistances of 1728 ± 226 MΩ (n = 44). CRAC channels were activated by a number of methods that raise intracellular calcium concentration, including EGTA, ionomycin, Ins(1,4,5)P3, and thapsigargin. ICRAC whole-cell currents ranged from 30 to 120 pA with rise times of 40 to 150 s. An initial delay in current activation was observed in particular when ICRAC was activated by passive store depletion using EGTA. Apparent rundown of ICRAC was commonly observed, and the current could be reactivated by subsequent addition of thapsigargin. ICRAC was blocked by SKF-96365 and 2-APB with IC50 values of 4.7 ± 1.1 µM (n = 9) and 7.5 ± 0.7 (n = 9) µM, respectively. The potencies of these blockers were similar to values reported for ICRAC in similar conventional patch-clamp experiments. The study demonstrates that CRAC channels can be rapidly and efficiently targeted with automated patch-clamp techniques for characterization of physiological and pharmacological properties. (Journal of Biomolecular Screening 2008:638-647)
The proposed model for security in the cloud, controlled by the end user

Cloud environment offers a great possibility in computing, it is immensely helpful to all parties, enables quick access to data and space usage is based on the needs. In this context public data is exposed to other parties for different purposes but private data must be protected when used in different operations in order to have a secure environment. The aim of this work is to provide a logical view for a proposed model in cloud, where the main role in selecting the level of security falls to the end user. In the proposed model by end user we refer to IT administrator of a particular organization which is informed about all statistics our model offer. Therefore the end user is aware of the main parameters which are related to the cloud security. After selecting the level of security the entire communication continues on the same level, for each member of that organization.
Training a Sentence-Level Machine Translation Confidence Measure

We present a supervised method for training a sentence level confidence measure on translation output using a human-annotated corpus. We evaluate a variety of machine learning methods. The resultant measure, while trained on a very small dataset, correlates well with human judgments, and proves to be effective on one task based evaluation. Although the experiments have only been run on one MT system, we believe the nature of the features gathered are general enough that the approach will also work well on other systems.
Transcriptional repression of hypoxia-inducible factor-1 (HIF-1) by the protein arginine methyltransferase PRMT1

Hypoxia-inducible factors (HIF) are essential for the adaptive response of cells to low-oxygen conditions. Transcription of HIF-α subunits and HIF activity are repressed by the arginine methyltransferase PRMT1. Therefore PRMT1 is a novel regulator of hypoxic cell responses.
GENDER DIFFERENCES IN PSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS: EFFECTS ON LABOR MARKET OUTCOMES

A combined skin lotion dispenser and applicator is disclosed herein having an elongated tube containing a quantity of lotion which is of thin walled construction so as to be manually squeezed to forceably urge the lotion through a one-way closure valve into a rigid applicator member of a paddle type. The member includes a row of openings of different diameters arranged in fixed apart spaced relationship on a convex arcuate section. The member is covered with a removable mitt or fabric bag intended to be saturated with the dispensed lotion. A detachable base is provided for supporting the applicator on a surface and a tote or carrying bag is employed for storing the applicator during transport.