Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Continuous speech recognition by connectionist statistical methods

Over the period of 1987-1991, a series of theoretical and experimental results have suggested that multilayer perceptrons (MLP) are an effective family of algorithms for the smooth estimation of high-dimension probability density functions that are useful in continuous speech recognition. The early form of this work has focused on hidden Markov models (HMM) that are independent of phonetic context. More recently, the theory has been extended to context-dependent models. The authors review the basic principles of their hybrid HMM/MLP approach and describe a series of improvements that are analogous to the system modifications instituted for the leading conventional HMM systems over the last few years. Some of these methods directly trade off computational complexity for reduced requirements of memory and memory bandwidth. Results are presented on the widely used Resource Management speech database that has been distributed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Topic Models with Sparse and Group-Sparsity Inducing Priors

The quality of topic models highly depends on quality of used documents. Insufficient information may result in topics that are difficult to interpret or evaluate. Including external data to can help to increase the quality of topic models. We propose sparsity and grouped sparsity inducing priors on the meta parameters of word topic probabilities in fully Bayesian Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). This enables controlled integration of information about words.
Processing of Aesthetic Information

In a preference choice task subjects were tachistoscopically presented with aesthetic stimuli of equivalent meaning (i.e., semantics) which were modified in three different ways: (H) harmony, symmetry, (R) redundance, decoration, and (D) distant, original piece of art. In this research, a standard procedure used in experimental cognitive psychology was applied, i.e., variation of exposure duration which provided variation of depth of processing. At the shortest exposure duration subjects preferred the (H) type of stimuli. Increase of exposure duration to 500 ms shifted preference to (R) type of stimuli, while a further increase of an additional 500 ms favoured (D) type of stimuli. A model of aesthetic decision making including three consecutive stages with different operative characteristics is proposed.
Contamination and screening level toxicity of sediments from remediated and unremediated wetlands near Sydney, Australia

The present study assessed contamination and toxicity of sediments from seven remediated and remnant wetland sites within Sydney Olympic Park, Australia, and four unremediated sites adjacent to its boundary using chemical analysis and a luminescent bacterial biosensor assay (Escherichia coli). Concentrations of metals (Pb, Cr, Cu, Ni, Zn, Cd, and As) and persistent organic chemicals (DDT and its metabolites, dichlorodiphenyldichloroethane and dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene; polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons; polychlorinated biphenyls; and polychlorinated dibenzo‐p‐dioxins and dibenzofurans) in sediments and their pore‐water samples were determined. Zinc concentrations were the highest of the metals in the sediments (84–618 mg/kg), and at eight sites, metal concentrations in sediments exceeded the Australian ecological trigger values for Pb, Zn, and Ni. Concentrations of organic contaminants in the sediments exceeded the trigger values at all 11 sites for DDTs, at 6 sites for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and 5 sites for polychlorinated biphenyls. Sediment samples from the four unremediated sites outside the Sydney Olympic Park had dioxin concentrations greater than 200 pg (toxic equivalency per gram). The same four sites were identified as contaminated in pore‐water toxicity tests with the luminescent biosensor, generally consistent with the bioavailable fractions of the contaminants (pore‐water and Tenax® extraction data), as well as dioxin levels, in the sediments. Preliminary toxicity identification and evaluation tests of the pore water from the four sites outside the park demonstrated that organic contaminants were the main cause of toxicity to E. coli, with no evidence that metals contributed to the toxicity of the pore water.
PREDATION ON HARDEST MOLLUSCAN EGGS BY CONFAMILIAL SNAILS (NERITIDAE) AND ITS POTENTIAL SIGNIFICANCE IN EGG-LAYING SITE SELECTION

Neritid snails (Gastropoda: Neritimorpha) protect their eggs in a hard capsule, of tough conchiolin, reinforced by mineral particles derived from the faeces and stored in a special sac near the anus and oviduct opening. Predation on this arguably hardest of molluscan egg capsule is described and illustrated here; neritids of the freshwater to brackish-water genera Clithon and Vittina, generally classified as herbivores, feed facultatively on the eggs of various confamilial species after breaking the reinforced capsule lid by means of prolonged radular rasping. Intensive predation pressure by these common inhabitants in Indo-West Pacific coastal streams may have given rise to the remarkable egg-laying behaviour of Neritina on the shells of other living snails. Our laboratory examination showed that Neritina species deposited clusters of egg capsules more frequently on the living shell than on other substrates, and that the predation rate was significantly lower on this moving ‘nursery’. Predation rate was even lower on the small egg capsules of Clithon and Vittina themselves, which were deposited one by one in the depressions on the rough surfaces of stones.
Catch a Star Book! Responses of Fifth-Grade Students to Celebrity-Authored Children's Literature

Reader response theory and research on book interest underpinned a study of the appeal of celebrity-authored children's storybooks to elementary school students. We engaged fifth-grade students in selecting and reading from a set of 41 celebrity-authored books and completing reader response forms. Utilizing the survey research design and a combination of quantitative and qualitative procedures, we analyzed the students' responses. The data revealed that the students focused on how and the extent to which the contents of the books “spoke” to them rather than on the celebrity status of the authors. Implications are drawn for book selection criteria not only for children's reading but also for the literature that might be promoted in children's literature courses and reading courses in university settings.
A tool environment for quality assurance of delta-oriented model-based SPLs

With the advent of model-driven engineering, software product line (SPL) technologies must be able to generate models as instances of a model-based SPL (MBSPL). Delta modeling is a variability mechanism which can be easily adopted for MBSPLs. The idea is to generate products by applying one or several deltas onto a core model. Hence, the main task during SPL implementation is to develop a set of deltas and to maintain several kinds of interrelations, e.g. dependencies and conflicts, in order to be able to generate all products of a MBSPL upon request. The resulting network of deltas is often complex and hard to maintain without appropriate tool support. This paper presents a tool environment for quality assurance in delta-oriented MBSPLs supporting the identification and elimination of design flaws in a network of deltas based on the principles of quality metrics and refactoring. We build upon previous work on the integration of model versioning tools with delta-oriented development of MBSPLs. Our solution is agnostic of the modeling language and may be easily extended by additional quality metrics and refactorings. We illustrate our approach using a delta-oriented MBSPL from the automation domain.
Metagenome Sequencing Reveals Rhodococcus Dominance in Farpuk Cave, Mizoram, India, an Eastern Himalayan Biodiversity Hot Spot Region

ABSTRACT The present study employed 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing to survey the prokaryotic microbiota on Farpuk Cave, revealing a diverse bacterial community with 4,021 operational taxonomical units (OTUs), mainly dominated by the genus Rhodococcus. Moreover, 18.17% of the OTUs were unclassified at the phylum level, suggesting the existence of novel bacterial species.
Practising Gender When Networking: The Case of University–Industry Innovation Projects

This paper gains insight into the role of gender in interpersonal networks, which is largely neglected in research on networking. We do so by exploring the concept of ‘practising gender’, the spatial-temporal accomplishment of gender practices, when people build, maintain and exit social networks. The paper is based on a study of male-dominated technological collaboration projects between universities and industry. Our analysis of observations of project meetings and interviews with project participants demonstrates how people in real time and space draw from culturally available gender practices in their networking with each other. This practising of gender was found to be done largely unreflexively, sometimes through humour, within allegedly trivial activities such as pouring coffee and socializing as well as in critical activities such as composing the network. The exploration of the practising of gender in relation to culturally available gender practices enabled us to examine how those gender practices are reproduced, stretched or challenged when people network. We show how focussing on the dynamic side of gender allows us to get better insight into how gender inequalities in networks are reproduced or countered on the micro-interactional level.
Weighted voting for replicated data

In a new algorithm for maintaining replicated data, every copy of a replicated file is assigned some number of votes. Every transaction collects a read quorum of rvotes to read a file, and a write quorum of wvotes to write a file, such that r+w is greater than the total number of votes assigned to the file. This ensures that there is a non-null intersection between every read quorum and every write quorum. Version numbers make it possible to determine which copies are current. The reliability and performance characteristics of a replicated file can be controlled by appropriately choosing r, w, and the file's voting configuration. The algorithm guarantees serial consistency, admits temporary copies in a natural way by the introduction of copies with no votes, and has been implemented in the context of an application system called Violet.
Developing a Wireless Implantable Body Sensor Network in MICS Band

Through an integration of wireless communication and sensing technologies, the concept of a body sensor network (BSN) was initially proposed in the early decade with the aim to provide an essential technology for wearable, ambulatory, and pervasive health monitoring for elderly people and chronic patients. It has become a hot research area due to big opportunities as well as great challenges it presents. Though the idea of an implantable BSN was proposed in parallel with the on-body sensor network, the development in this area is relatively slow due to the complexity of human body, safety concerns, and some technological bottlenecks such as the design of ultralow-power implantable RF transceiver. This paper describes a new wireless implantable BSN that operates in medical implant communication service (MICS) frequency band. This system innovatively incorporates both sensing and actuation nodes to form a closed-control loop for physiological monitoring and drug delivery for critically ill patients. The sensing node, which is designed using system-on-chip technologies, takes advantage of the newly available ultralow-power Zarlink MICS transceiver for wireless data transmission. Finally, the specific absorption rate distribution of the proposed system was simulated to determine the in vivo electromagnetic field absorption and the power safety limits.
Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Passengers’ Interests at London Tube Stations

With as many as 3.5 million passengers using the London underground system every day, it is desirable to examine and understand their interests and opinions, and to harness this information to improve the services of Transport for London (TfL). This research aims to achieve a better understanding of passengers’ interests by harvesting text from geo-tagged Tweets sourced over a four week period in 2014 from the vicinity of the stations. An unsupervised topic modelling method Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is used to generate topics, and k-means is used to cluster stations in order to understand the overall patterns of topics.
Augustine or Philistine? College Students' Sanctification of Learning and Its Implications

Sanctification is a psychological process in which aspects of life are associated with God (theistic sanctification) or sacred qualities (nontheistic sanctification). Sanctification accounts for outcomes in diverse areas, such as family, the environment, and work. One area yet to be examined is the sanctification of learning, which was addressed in the present study in a sample of 349 college students in the United States. Sanctification of education was related to better educational outcomes (i.e., positive emotions toward education, higher grade point averages, and psychological growth), partially through the mediator of good study strategies (critical thinking and self-regulation), as indicated by structural equation modeling. Hierarchical regressions revealed that sanctification of learning predicted higher levels of investment in learning, advanced study strategies, and better educational outcomes, over and above demographic and general religious variables. The present study demonstrates the beneficial implications of sanctifying learning while contributing to the growing body of literature that demonstrates the importance of the sanctification construct.
The ASCA Catalog of Potential X-Ray Counterparts of GeV Sources

We present a catalog of 2-10 keV ASCA Gas Imaging Spectrometer images of fields containing bright sources of GeV emission. The images cover ∼85% of the 95% confidence position contour for 28 of the 30 sources with >1 GeV fluxes above 4 × 10-8 ph cm-2 s-1. We find an excess of hard X-ray sources with F2-10keV ≳ 10-12 ergs cm-2 s-1 positionally coincident with unidentified sources of GeV emission. We comment on radio-loud and radio-quiet pulsar candidates, as well as several SNRs and massive binaries as possible sources of the GeV emission. We also find evidence for a class of variable γ-ray sources associated with extended regions of hard X-ray emission, and propose that for these sources, a significant percentage of the γ-ray emission is generated in synchrotron nebulae surrounding fast, young pulsars.
Antimicrobial Activity of Diterpenes from Viguiera arenaria against Endodontic Bacteria

Six pimarane-type diterpenes isolated from Viguiera arenaria Baker and two semi-synthetic derivatives were evaluated in vitro against a panel of representative microorganisms responsible for dental root canal infections. The microdilution method was used for the determination of the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC) against Porphyromonas gingivalis, Prevotella nigrescens, Prevotella intermedia, Prevotella buccae, Fusobacterium nucleatum, Bacteroides fragilis, Actinomyces naeslundii, Actinomyces viscosus, Peptostreptococcus micros, Enterococcus faecalis and Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans. The compounds ent-pimara-8(14),15-dien-19-oic acid, its sodium salt and ent-8(14),15-pimaradien-3β-ol were the most active, displaying MIC values ranging from 1 to 10 μg mL-1. The results also allow us to conclude that minor structural differences among these diterpenes significantly influence their antimicrobial activity, bringing new perspectives to the discovery of new chemicals for use as a complement to instrumental endodontic procedures.
Parent–child relationship and adoptees’ psychological well-being in adolescence and emerging adulthood: Disentangling maternal and paternal contribution

This study focused on the parent–child relationship and children’s psychological well-being in families with internationally adopted adolescents and emerging adults. The study’s goal was twofold: (1) to analyze parent–child conflict, communicative openness in regard to adoption, and promotion of children’s volitional functioning as key aspects of parent–child relationship; and (2) to measure the relative importance of each of the above-mentioned parent–child relationship aspects in predicting adoptees’ psychological well-being. In the analyses, parent and child genders and child developmental stage (adolescence vs. emerging adulthood) were taken into account. Participants were 160 Italian international adoptees, aged between 15 and 24 years, who were asked to complete a self-report questionnaire. Results showed significant differences in the level of the quality of parent–child relationship according to parents’ gender, child’s gender and developmental stage. Additionally, mother–child relationship and father–child relationship predicted adopted children’s well-being differently, also according to child’s gender and developmental stage.
Common Dorsal Stream Substrates for the Mapping of Surface Texture to Object Parts and Visual Spatial Processing

Abstract Everyday objects are often composed of multiple parts, each with a unique surface texture. The neural substrates mediating the integration of surface features on different object parts are not fully understood, and potential contributions by both the ventral and dorsal visual pathways are possible. To explore these substrates, we collected fMRI data while human participants performed a difference detection task on two objects with textured parts. The objects could either differ in the assignment of the same texture to different object parts (“texture-location”) or the types of texture (“texture-type”). In the ventral stream, comparable BOLD activation levels were observed in response to texture-location and texture-type differences. In contrast, in a priori localized spatial processing regions of the dorsal stream, activation was greater for texture-location than texture-type differences, and the magnitude of the activation correlated with behavioral performance. We confirmed the reliance of surface texture to object part mapping on spatial processing mechanisms in subsequent psychophysical experiments, in which participants detected a difference in the spatial distance of an object relative to a reference line. In this task, distracter objects occasionally appeared, which differed in either texture-location or texture-type. Distracter texture-location differences slowed detection of spatial distance differences, but texture-type differences did not. More importantly, the distracter effects were only observed when texture-location differences were presented within whole shapes and not between separated shape parts at distinct spatial locations. We conclude that both the mapping of texture features to object parts and the representation of object spatial position are mediated by common neural substrates within the dorsal visual pathway.
The metaphorical species: Evolution, adaptation and speciation of metaphors

Studying cartoons about the economic crisis and focusing on a pair of scissors as a symbol, I prove how they first turn into unambiguous metaphor for the economic crisis and then experience an evolution in order to adapt to new communication contexts. Along these processes, they undergo more complex changes such as coadaptation and speciation. This has allowed for the scissors meme as a symbol of economic cutbacks to permeate society, and for its metaphorical use to occupy many disparate communication scenarios, unlike other symbolic elements that were also used, but turned out to be less cognitively efficient and therefore offered fewer evolutionary possibilities.
Calculation of dissipation resistances in a single-element transducer

In this paper, a new formulation of the electrical input impedance of a single element transducer is presented. The resistive part of the electrical impedance that takes into account acoustic radiation in the front medium and losses in the transducer is split into a radiation resistance on one hand and into dissipation resistances related to each transducer component on the other hand. To confirm these theoretical results, characterization methods based on temperature measurements and pulse-echo response are presented. Measurements have been conducted on 1 MHz transducers, which consist of a piezoelectric ceramic glued on a backing. The results show a good agreement between experience and theory for dissipation resistance and radiation resistance values, which confirms the theoretical approach.
A Novel Key Generating Architecture for Wireless Low-Resource Devices

Secret key establishment based on parameters of the communication channel is a highly attractive option for many applications that operate in a dynamic mobile environment with peer-to-peer association. On the other hand, high usability and dynamic key management are still very difficult to achieve for wireless devices which have to operate under strict resource constraints. In fact, most previously reported key generation methods cannot operate in such environment.In this work, we present a new system architecture which is suitable also for resource-constrained platforms. Our design strongly focuses on security, rather than a robust key generation rate, as well as on low complexity and efficiency. Our approach has the potential to dramatically reduce the cost of securing small embedded devices for the Internet of Things, and hence make mass production and deployment viable.
’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Engineering adaptive user interfaces for enterprise applications Conference Item

The user interface (UI) layer is considered an important component in software applications since it links the users to the software’s functionality. Enterprise applications such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems have very complex UIs that are used by users with diverse needs in terms of the required features and layout preferences. The inability to cater for the variety of user needs diminishes the usability of these applications. One way to cater for those needs is through adaptive UIs. Some enterprise software providers offer mechanisms for tailoring UIs based on the variable user needs, yet those are not generic enough to be used with other applications and require maintaining multiple UI copies manually. A generic platform based on a model-driven approach could be more reusable since operating on the model level makes it technology independent. The main objective of this research is devising a generic, scalable, and extensible platform for building adaptive enterprise application UIs based on a runtime model-driven approach. This platform primarily targets UI simplification, which we defined as a mechanism for increasing usability through adaptive behavior by providing users with a minimal feature-set and an optimal layout based on the context-of-use. This paper provides an overview of the research questions and methodology, the results that were achieved so far, and the remaining work.
A Firm-Level Analysis of Employee Attrition

Using a sample (n = 297) of private sector firms, this article considers the role that firm characteristics, work force characteristics, location, and employee benefits practices have in explaining employee attrition. Hierarchical regression analyses suggest that benefit practices are associated with turnover, even when controlling for firm characteristics, firm setting, and work force characteristics. Specifically, firms where benefits were a higher percentage of total labor costs and firms whose benefits packages were described to be of higher quality experienced less attrition. Implications of the findings for human resource management are discussed.