Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Why standard brain-computer interface (BCI) training protocols should be changed: an experimental study

Objective. While promising, electroencephaloraphy based brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) are barely used due to their lack of reliability: 15% to 30% of users are unable to control a BCI. Standard training protocols may be partly responsible as they do not satisfy recommendations from psychology. Our main objective was to determine in practice to what extent standard training protocols impact users’ motor imagery based BCI (MI-BCI) control performance. Approach. We performed two experiments. The first consisted in evaluating the efficiency of a standard BCI training protocol for the acquisition of non-BCI related skills in a BCI-free context, which enabled us to rule out the possible impact of BCIs on the training outcome. Thus, participants (N = 54) were asked to perform simple motor tasks. The second experiment was aimed at measuring the correlations between motor tasks and MI-BCI performance. The ten best and ten worst performers of the first study were recruited for an MI-BCI experiment during which they had to learn to perform two MI tasks. We also assessed users’ spatial ability and pre-training μ rhythm amplitude, as both have been related to MI-BCI performance in the literature. Main results. Around 17% of the participants were unable to learn to perform the motor tasks, which is close to the BCI illiteracy rate. This suggests that standard training protocols are suboptimal for skill teaching. No correlation was found between motor tasks and MI-BCI performance. However, spatial ability played an important role in MI-BCI performance. In addition, once the spatial ability covariable had been controlled for, using an ANCOVA, it appeared that participants who faced difficulty during the first experiment improved during the second while the others did not. Significance. These studies suggest that (1) standard MI-BCI training protocols are suboptimal for skill teaching, (2) spatial ability is confirmed as impacting on MI-BCI performance, and (3) when faced with difficult pre-training, subjects seemed to explore more strategies and therefore learn better.
Deep countercurrent beneath the Kuroshio in the Okinawa Trough

[1] The Okinawa Trough is geographically separated into the northern and southern parts by the Kerama Gap, and the northern part is composed of the northern, central and southern subbasins formed by bights of the continental slope. Previous observations have indicated that a deep countercurrent is present beneath the Kuroshio on the continental slope in the northern Okinawa Trough. However, its persistence over time and its spatial structure over the entire basin have not been clarified to date. The present study examines moored current meter data on the continental slope in the southern and central subbasins of the northern Okinawa Trough for November 2004 to November 2006. Deep flows on the continental slope have a clear seasonality in the southern subbasin; eddy motions due to Kuroshio meanders are organized into a persistent countercurrent below the Kuroshio in the winter-spring period. During this time, high-frequency Kuroshio meanders with periods near 10 d are likely to diminish in the southern subbasin while low-frequency Kuroshio meanders with periods of 1–3 months tend to dominate in the northern subbasin. In addition, a high-resolution ocean general circulation model is used to explore the deep flow field over the entire Okinawa Trough. The model indicates that the deep flow field is stable in the southern Okinawa Trough over the year, whereas it is unstable in the northern Okinawa Trough particularly in the winter-spring period. This results in a persistent countercurrent driven by cyclonic eddies on the continental slope in the northern Okinawa Trough.
Currency Internationalisation: Lessons from the Global Financial Crisis and Prospects for the Future in Asia and the Pacific (Full Publication)

Since its launch in September 2006, the Asian Research Programme has focused on policy-oriented studies for central banks and supervisory authorities in the Asia-Pacific region. Under the programme, the BIS Representative Office for Asia and the Pacific has co-organised a series of conferences, seminars and workshops with central banks and supervisory authorities in Asia and the Pacific. The subjects of interest have included improving monetary policy and operations, developing financial markets, maintaining financial stability and strengthening prudential policy. On 19-20 March 2009, the BIS Asian Office and the Bank of Korea co-hosted a high-level seminar on currency internationalisation in Seoul. Participants from 12 central banks as well as academic scholars and BIS economists attended the seminar. The purpose of the seminar was to review experiences of economies in the Asia-Pacific region with currency internationalisation and to assess the prospects for further internationalisation, emphasising the policy implications facing central banks if current trends continue. Lessons learned about currency internationalisation since the intensification of the strains in global markets in mid-2007 were also discussed. This volume is a collection of the speeches, presentations and papers from the seminar.
Using Causality to Diagnose Configuration Bugs

We present a novel method for diagnosing configuration management errors. Our proposed approach deduces the state of a buggy computer by running predicates that test system correctness and comparing the resulting execution to that generated by running the same predicates on a reference computer. Our approach generates signatures that represent the execution path of a predicate by recording the causal dependencies of its execution. Our results show that comparisons based on dependency sets significantly outperform comparisons based on predicate success or failure, uniquely identifying the correct bug 86-100% of the time. In the remaining cases, the dependency set method identifies the correct bug as one of two equally likely bugs.
Social Networks-based Adaptive Pairing Strategy for Cooperative Learning

In this paper, we propose a grouping strategy to enhance the learning and testing results of students, called Pairing Strategy (PS). The proposed method stems from the need of interactivity and the desire of cooperation in cooperative learning. Based on the social networks of students, PS provides members of the groups to learn from or mimic learners who have good relationships with them. As such, the learning achievement can be raised. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can provide a better learning result, especially when compared to grouping at random, because it enables low achievers to find more appropriate collaborators. More precisely, the experimental results show that the learning achievement of approximately 17.64% of the students is increased. The average score is increased from 79 to 91.9 while the standard deviation is decreased from 16.9 to 13.6.
Diagnostic yield of chromosome analysis in patients with developmental delay or mental retardation who are otherwise nondysmorphic

There is a standard recommendation that chromosomes be obtained in any patient who presents with developmental delay (DD) or mental retardation (MR) regardless of whether or not they have dysmorphic features. Increasingly, if patients are physically well‐formed, the option to perform a karyotype is questioned because of the presumed low yield of a chromosomal abnormality. We hypothesize that patients with DD/MR who are non‐dysmorphic do not have abnormal chromosomes at a rate high enough to warrant obtaining a karyotype on all patients in this population. A retrospective analysis of patients with DD/MR who were non‐dysmorphic was performed. The total number of subjects was 134. Of these, 120 patients were recommended to have high‐resolution chromosomes performed, among whom seven were lost to follow‐up. In the remaining 113 patients, all had normal karyotypes. Three subjects were found to have fragile X syndrome, accounting for 3% of the males. One subject had a pathological mutation in MECP2. Our yield of chromosome analysis in non‐dysmorphic patients with DD/MR is less than that previously described. The role of array‐comparative genomic hybridization (array‐CGH) as an auxiliary or alternative procedure in this patient population will be discussed. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The Effect of Bottom Friction on Low-Frequency Coastal Trapped Waves

Abstract An approximate technique is presented for including the effect of turbulent bottom friction in the forced first-order wave equation governing long generalized coastal trapped waves. The resulting governing equations include both damping and a cross-shelf and vertical phase shift. A set of examples shows that damping of free waves decreases as the static stability increases, consistent with the inhibition of vertical motions by stratification.
Fertility and family surveys in countries of the ECE region : standard country report : Slovenia

Partnership and reproductive behaviour patterns have undergone major shifts over much of Europe and North America during the past three decades, leading to the coexistence of a variety of family forms. This country report sheds some light on the development in fertility and partnership formation and it provides a deeper understanding of the subject by measuring possible explanatory factors.
Non-conscious routes to building culture: Nonverbal components of socialization

Gesture and elaborate forms of nonverbal behaviour have been posited as necessary antecedents to language and shared conceptual understanding. Here we argue that subtle and largely unintentional nonverbal behaviours play a key role in building consensual beliefs within culture. We propose a model that focuses on the subtle and automatic nonverbal transmission of attitudes, beliefs and cultural ideals. Specifically, people extract attitudes and beliefs from nonverbal behaviour — such extraction is both ubiquitous and efficient. The extracted attitudes and beliefs become individual beliefs if encountered frequently enough. Consequently, people may come to adopt the same attitudes, beliefs and behaviours in the absence of verbal communication. Finally, one’s own nonverbal behaviour reflects the extracted attitudes, beliefs and ideals of those of one’s group, serving as a means for transmitting culture. The implication is that subtle nonverbal behaviour is important for the creation and maintenance of
Surveying in Ceylon during the nineteenth century

Le Service topographique du Ceylan (Ceylon Survey Department) a ete cree en 1800 et il etait a la fin du siecle l'un des plus importants des colonies britanniques. il ne mena cependant aucune triangulation generale de l'ile et jusqu'aux annees 1870 aucun leve topographique regulier. Seule une carte importante de Ceylan resultant de leves modernes fut publiee avant la fin du XIXe siecle. Nous nous demanderons pourquoi si peu de leves topographiques ou trigonometriques furent realises. Nos conclusions sont les suivantes: ce service topographique etait mediocrement organise et les topographes etaient absorbes par la construction de routes et par la cartographie des territoires de la Couronne destines a la vente comme plantations de cafe.
Visualizing Vortices in Simulated Air Flow around Bat Wings during Flight

We present a case study of our efforts towards building a set of data visualization tools to aid the understanding of airflow structures involved in the flight of bats. We use two visualization schemes that involve off-line computation of “interesting” pathlines and streamlines respectively, and an immersive virtual reality facility, CAVE, for their visualization. Hussain’s et at vortex region detection technique, λ2 [1] is employed in our line sampling methods to emphasize vortices in the flow. Interactive control over emphasis parameters allows users to explore a continuum between localized and contextual representations of vortices. Our results, composed by two visualizations applied to a common dataset, lead to a subjective comparison between the effectiveness of pathlines and streamlines in the representation of vortices.
A Fuzzy-Logic Based Bidding Strategy for Autonomous Agents in Continuous Double Auctions

Increasingly, many systems are being conceptualized, designed, and implemented as marketplaces in which autonomous software entities (agents) trade services. These services can be commodities in e-commerce applications or data and knowledge services in information economies. In many of these cases, there are both multiple agents that are looking to procure services and multiple agents that are looking to sell services at any one time. Such marketplaces are termed continuous double auctions (CDAs). Against this background, this paper develops new algorithms that buyer and seller agents can use to participate in CDAs. These algorithms employ heuristic fuzzy rules and fuzzy reasoning mechanisms in order to determine the best bid to make given the state of the marketplace. Moreover, we show how an agent can dynamically adjust its bidding behavior to respond effectively to changes in the supply and demand in the marketplace. We then show, by empirical evaluations, how our agents outperform four of the most prominent algorithms previously developed for CDAs (several of which have been shown to outperform human bidders in experimental studies).
Temporal selective dereverberation of noisy speech using one microphone

Reverberant speech can be described as sounding distant with noticeable coloration and echo. These detrimental perceptual effects are caused by early and late reflections, respectively, and reduces the fidelity and intelligibility of speech. It is well-known that the echo density of the reflections increases with time. Therefore, the temporal structure of early and late reflections differs. In this paper, we combine two different dereverberation techniques that were recently developed to suppress early and late reverberation separately. First, late reverberation is suppressed using a spectral processing technique that is based on a statistical reverberation model. Secondly, early reverberation and residual late reverberation are suppressed using a linear prediction (LP) residual processing technique. In addition, an objective measure based on the kurtosis of the LP residual is proposed to measure the coloration caused by early reflections. Experimental results demonstrate the beneficial use of the new single microphone system that reduces echo and coloration with little speech distortion.
Auror: defending against poisoning attacks in collaborative deep learning systems

Deep learning in a collaborative setting is emerging as a corner-stone of many upcoming applications, wherein untrusted users collaborate to generate more accurate models. From the security perspective, this opens collaborative deep learning to poisoning attacks, wherein adversarial users deliberately alter their inputs to mis-train the model. These attacks are known for machine learning systems in general, but their impact on new deep learning systems is not well-established. We investigate the setting of indirect collaborative deep learning --- a form of practical deep learning wherein users submit masked features rather than direct data. Indirect collaborative deep learning is preferred over direct, because it distributes the cost of computation and can be made privacy-preserving. In this paper, we study the susceptibility of collaborative deep learning systems to adversarial poisoning attacks. Specifically, we obtain the following empirical results on 2 popular datasets for handwritten images (MNIST) and traffic signs (GTSRB) used in auto-driving cars. For collaborative deep learning systems, we demonstrate that the attacks have 99% success rate for misclassifying specific target data while poisoning only 10% of the entire training dataset. As a defense, we propose Auror, a system that detects malicious users and generates an accurate model. The accuracy under the deployed defense on practical datasets is nearly unchanged when operating in the absence of attacks. The accuracy of a model trained using Auror drops by only 3% even when 30% of all the users are adversarial. Auror provides a strong guarantee against evasion; if the attacker tries to evade, its attack effectiveness is bounded.
Distributed Multiscale Data Analysis and Processing for Sensor Networks

Abstract : While multiresolution data analysis, processing, and compression hold considerable promise for sensor network applications, progress has been confounded by two factors. First, typical sensor data are irregularly spaced, which is incompatible with standard wavelet techniques. Second, the communication overhead of multiscale algorithms can become prohibitive. In this paper, we take a first step in addressing both shortcomings by introducing two new distributed multiresolution transforms. Our irregularly sampled Haar wavelet pyramid and telescoping Haar orthonormal wavelet basis provide efficient piecewise-constant approximations of sensor data. We illustrate with examples from distributed data compression and in-network wavelet de-noising.
Treatment Adherence Among Low-Income, African American Children with Persistent Asthma

Objective. The study aims to assess medication adherence and asthma management behaviors and their modifiable predictors in low-income children with persistent asthma. Methods. The authors conducted a cohort study of 143 children ages 6 to 11 prescribed a daily inhaled controller medicine that could be electronically monitored. Children were recruited from clinics or the emergency department of an urban children's hospital. Data were collected at baseline (T1) and 1 year later (T2). Outcome measures were adherence to controller medications as measured by electronic monitoring devices, observed metered-dose inhaler and spacer technique, exposure to environmental tobacco smoke, and attendance at appointments with primary health care provider. Results. Medication adherence rates varied across medications, with higher rates for montelukast than for fluticasone. Eleven percent to 15% of children demonstrated metered dose inhaler and spacer technique suggesting no drug delivery, and few (5% to 6%) evidenced significant exposure to environmental tobacco smoke. Less than half of recommended health care visits were attended over the study interval. Few psychosocial variables were associated with adherence at T1 or in the longitudinal analyses. Fluticasone adherence at T2 was predicted by caregiver asthma knowledge. Conclusions. A substantial number of low-income children with persistent asthma receive less than half of their prescribed inhaled controller agent. Patients without Medicaid, with low levels of caregiver asthma knowledge, or with caregivers who began childrearing at a young age may be at highest risk for poor medication adherence.
Failure to Detect the Novel Retrovirus XMRV in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Background In October 2009 it was reported that 68 of 101 patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) in the US were infected with a novel gamma retrovirus, xenotropic murine leukaemia virus-related virus (XMRV), a virus previously linked to prostate cancer. This finding, if confirmed, would have a profound effect on the understanding and treatment of an incapacitating disease affecting millions worldwide. We have investigated CFS sufferers in the UK to determine if they are carriers of XMRV. Methodology Patients in our CFS cohort had undergone medical screening to exclude detectable organic illness and met the CDC criteria for CFS. DNA extracted from blood samples of 186 CFS patients were screened for XMRV provirus and for the closely related murine leukaemia virus by nested PCR using specific oligonucleotide primers. To control for the integrity of the DNA, the cellular beta-globin gene was amplified. Negative controls (water) and a positive control (XMRV infectious molecular clone DNA) were included. While the beta-globin gene was amplified in all 186 samples, neither XMRV nor MLV sequences were detected. Conclusion XMRV or MLV sequences were not amplified from DNA originating from CFS patients in the UK. Although we found no evidence that XMRV is associated with CFS in the UK, this may be a result of population differences between North America and Europe regarding the general prevalence of XMRV infection, and might also explain the fact that two US groups found XMRV in prostate cancer tissue, while two European studies did not.
Automated Signal Processing Applied to Volatile-Based Inspection of Greenhouse Crops

Gas chromatograph–mass spectrometers (GC-MS) have been used and shown utility for volatile-based inspection of greenhouse crops. However, a widely recognized difficulty associated with GC-MS application is the large and complex data generated by this instrument. As a consequence, experienced analysts are often required to process this data in order to determine the concentrations of the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) of interest. Manual processing is time-consuming, labour intensive and may be subject to errors due to fatigue. The objective of this study was to assess whether or not GC-MS data can also be automatically processed in order to determine the concentrations of crop health associated VOCs in a greenhouse. An experimental dataset that consisted of twelve data files was processed both manually and automatically to address this question. Manual processing was based on simple peak integration while the automatic processing relied on the algorithms implemented in the MetAlign™ software package. The results of automatic processing of the experimental dataset resulted in concentrations similar to that after manual processing. These results demonstrate that GC-MS data can be automatically processed in order to accurately determine the concentrations of crop health associated VOCs in a greenhouse. When processing GC-MS data automatically, noise reduction, alignment, baseline correction and normalisation are required.
Support for multitasking and background awareness using interactive peripheral displays

In this paper, we describe Kimura, an augmented office environment to support common multitasking practices. Previous systems, such as Rooms, limit users by constraining the interaction to the desktop monitor. In Kimura, we leverage interactive projected peripheral displays to support the perusal, manipulation and awareness of background activities. Furthermore, each activity is represented by a montage comprised of images from current and past interaction on the desktop. These montages help remind the user of past actions, and serve as a springboard for ambient context-aware reminders and notifications.
Generalized Magnetic Frequency Conversion for Thin-Film Laminate Magnetoelectric Sensors

Magnetic frequency conversion is a promising technique to enhance the limit of detection of magnetoelectric sensors detecting low-frequency magnetic signals. In comparison with the direct detection in the mechanical resonance of the sensor, this method shows a limit of detection increased, i.e., worsened, by approximately 2.5 decades. For the detection of bio-magnetic signal, frequencies ranging from 0.1 Hz up to approximately 100 Hz though the method yield a better limit of detection than direct detection. Still, it is worse than theoretically expected. The cause of the deterioration of the signal-to-noise ratio during magnetic frequency conversion is investigated. Besides the conversion loss, it is due to the arising magnetic noise during excitation of a magnetostrictive material with a pumping signal, which is also in the order of approximately 2.5 decades. The noise can be reduced by applying an additional dc-bias field, which simultaneously results in less output signal. Measurements are confirmed by a numerical model. An existing equivalent noise model for magnetoelectric sensors is extended accordingly.