Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Studying Eye Gaze of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders in Interaction with a Social Robot

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) experience deficits in verbal and nonverbal communication skills including motor control, emotional facial expressions, and eye gaze attention. In this thesis, we focus on studying the feasibility and effectiveness of using a social robot, called NAO, at modeling and improving the social responses and behaviors of children with autism. In our investigation, we designed and developed two protocols to fulfill this mission. Since eye contact and gaze responses are important nonverbal cues in human’s social communication and as the majority of individuals with ASD have difficulties regulating their gaze responses, in this thesis we have mostly focused on this area. In Protocol 1 (eye gaze duration and shifting frequency are analyzed in this protocol), we designed two social games (i.e. NAO Spy and Find the Suspect) and recruited 21 subjects (i.e. 14 ASD and seven Typically Developing (TD) children) ages between 717 years old to interact with NAO. All sessions were recorded using cameras and the videos were used for analysis. In particular, we manually annotated the eye gaze direction of children (i.e. gaze averted ‘0’ or gaze at robot ‘1’) in every frame of the videos within two
Domain Specific Iterative Word Sense Disambiguation in a Multilingual Setting

We report here our work on Domain Specific Iterative Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) for nouns, adjectives and adverbs in the trilingual setting of English, Hindi 1 and Marathi 2 . The methodology proposed relies on dominant senses of words in specified domains. Starting from monosemous words we iteratively disambiguate bi, tri and polysemous words. We combine corpus biases for senses along with information in wordnet graph structure to arrive at the sense decisions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at a large scale multilingual WSD involving Indian languages and English. The accuracy values of approximately 65% (F1-score) for 1 Hindi is the official national language of India. The language and its close cousin Urdu are spoken by approximately 500 million people in the world. 2 Marathi is the official language of Maharashtra, a state in Western India. The language has close to 20 million speakers in the world. all the three languages compares well with the state of the art.
How a Multidimensional View of Perceived Organizational Support Impacts Self-Efficacy and Task Understanding during Training for Boundary Spanning Tasks

Abstract : Perceived organizational support (POS), defined as how much employees feel the organization they work for cares for them and assists them in their needs, has been traditionally characterized in a single dimension. This study examines the implications of a multidimensional view of POS. POS was separated into three different dimensions based on the organizational level from which support can be viewed to originate: corporate headquarters, the home office, or the training environment. These dimensions of POS were tested to discover their effect on the self-efficacy and task understanding of individuals training for boundary-spanning tasks. These tasks are those that place the employee in an environment, culture, and/or duties outside of their organization. For this study, the perceptions of United States Air Force Airmen deploying overseas to perform Army duties were researched. Results of the study showed that home office POS had a direct positive effect on both the self-efficacy and task understanding of these boundary-spanning individuals.
Simultaneous hardware and time redundancy with online task scheduling for low energy highly reliable standby-sparing system

Standby-sparing is one of the common techniques in order to design fault-tolerant safety-critical systems where the high level of reliability is needed. Recently, the minimization of energy consumption in embedded systems has attracted a lot of concerns. Simultaneous considering of high reliability and low energy consumption by DVS is a challenging problem in designing such a system, since using DVS has been shown to reduce the reliability profoundly. In this article, we have studied different schemes of standby-sparing systems from the energy consumption and reliability point of view. Moreover, we propose a new standby-sparing scheme which addresses both reliability and energy consumption jointly together. This scheme uses a simple energy management coupled with an online task scheduler which tries to dispatch those ready tasks which are expected to lead to high reliability and low energy consumption in the system. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme has been shown on TGFF under stochastic workloads. The results show 52% improvement on energy saving compared to the conventional hot standby-sparing system. Moreover, two orders of magnitude higher reliability is obtained on average, while preserving the same level of energy saving as compared to the state-of-the-art low-energy standby-sparing system (LESS).
Religious Fundamentalism and Intercultural Communication: The Relationships Among Ethnocentrism, Intercultural Communication Apprehension, Religious Fundamentalism, Homonegativity, and Tolerance for Religious Disagreements

The purpose of the current study was to examine the relationships among ethnocentrism, intercultural communication apprehension, religious fundamentalism, homonegativity, and tolerance for religious disagreements. This study found a positive relationship between religious fundamentalism with ethnocentrism and homonegativity. The study further found a negative relationship between tolerance for religious disagreement with ethnocentrism and religious fundamentalism. Lastly, homonegativity, ethnocentrism, and tolerance for religious disagreement were shown to account for approximately 17.5% of the variance in an individual's intercultural communication apprehension. However, religious fundamentalism was not shown to be related to intercultural communication apprehension.
An Ecosystemic Environment for Knowledge and Services Sharing on Creative Enterprises

The users' need to quickly assemble information, online services and applications is stimulating the development of paradigms that are able to integrate data, functionality and user interfaces from the Web. In this context, data, services, applications, and knowledge can be viewed as entities of a Digital Ecosystem, defined as a virtual environment that supports the mash-up, knowledge sharing and management among the multiple and independent entities, which are part of this environment. This is particularly important with respect to the creativeness and innovation at social and economic level. This paper provides SHAPES web platform, that combines, in an ecosystemic approach, online social media and services for the creation and management of distributed knowledge, and the creation of intelligent services for communities of creative enterprises. The main features of the SHAPES on-line platform are described. The description underlines how the platform allows connecting the actors involved in the ecosystem with relevant services provided by means of the framework components, and the role of the ecosystemic environment in offering significant opportunities in terms of services and knowledge sharing, integration and collaboration.
Speech recognition as a function of high-pass filter cutoff frequency for people with and without low-frequency cochlear dead regions.

Regions in the cochlea with no (or very few) functioning inner hair cells and/or neurons are called "dead regions" (DRs). The recognition of high-pass filtered nonsense syllables was measured as a function of filter cutoff frequency for hearing-impaired people with and without low-frequency (apical) cochlear DRs. The diagnosis of any DR was made using the TEN(HL) test, and psychophysical tuning curves were used to define the edge frequency (f(e)) more precisely. Stimuli were amplified differently for each ear, using the "Cambridge formula. " For subjects with low-frequency hearing loss but without DRs, scores were high (about 78%) for low cutoff frequencies, remained approximately constant for cutoff frequencies up to 862 Hz, and then worsened with increasing cutoff frequency. For subjects with low-frequency DRs, performance was typically poor for the lowest cutoff frequency (100 Hz), improved as the cutoff frequency was increased to about 0.57f(e), and worsened with further increases. These results indicate that people with low-frequency DRs are able to make effective use of frequency components that fall in the range 0.57f(e) to f(e), but that frequency components below 0.57f(e) have deleterious effects. The results have implications for the fitting of hearing aids to people with low-frequency DRs.
Effect of food form on postprandial plasma amino acid concentrations in older adults

To assess the effect of food form (FF) on postprandial (PP) plasma amino acid (AA) concentrations, ten older adults (five men and five women, age 72 (sem 2) years, BMI 26·0 (sem 0·9) kg/m2) consumed, on separate days, energy and macronutrient-matched test meal replacement products (MRP) (approximately 25 % of the subject's daily energy need; approximately 54 % carbohydrate, 21 % protein, 25 % fat) in beverage and solid form. Blood samples were taken during fasting and throughout the 4 h PP period; plasma AA concentrations were assessed using HPLC. Consumption of each MRP led to an increase in total AA, branched-chain AA (BCAA), essential AA (EAA), non-essential AA (NEAA) and leucine concentrations (4 h area under the curve, AUC) (time effect; P < 0·05). The beverage MRP resulted in a greater initial (i.e. 30 min) and sustained (4 h AUC) increase in total AA, BCAA, EAA, NEAA and leucine concentrations compared with the solid MRP (each effect of FF; P < 0·05). Although there was no effect of FF on PP insulin response, glucose concentration was greater 1 and 2 h after the solid MRP was consumed (FF × time interaction; P < 0·05). For all PP time points combined, total AA concentration was positively associated with plasma insulin (r 0·25) and glucose (r 0·24) concentrations for the solid MRP but not for the beverage MRP. In conclusion, older adults can achieve higher plasma AA concentrations when a protein-containing MRP is ingested in beverage form. The implications of the higher AA availability on anabolic processes warrant investigation.
Simulation of Gate Circuits with Feedback in Multi-Valued Algebras

Simulation of gate circuits is an efficient method of detecting hazards and oscillations that may occur because of delays. Ternary simulation consists of two algorithms, A and B, and is well understood. It has been generalized to an infinite algebraC and finite algebrasCk, k ≥ 2, whereC2 is ternary algebra. Simulation inC has been studied extensively for feedback-free circuits, for which Algorithm A al ways terminates and Algorithm B is unnecessary. We study the simulation of gate circuits with feedback in finite algebrasCk. The gate functions are restricted to a set that includes all the 1and 2-variable functions and multi-input AND , OR, NAND , NOR, XOR andXNOR functions. We prove that Algorithm B in AlgebraCk, for k > 2, provides no more information than in ternary algebra. Thus, for any gate in any circuit, the final result of Algorithm B is always one of the binary values, 0 or 1, or the “uncertain” value; the remaining values of Ck never appear. This permits us to replace Algorithm B inCk by the same algorithm in ternary algebra, and to reduce the simulation time.
Hand gesture recognition based on free-form contours and probabilistic inference

Hand gesture recognition based on free-form contours and probabilistic inference A computer vision system is described that captures color image sequences, detects and recognizes static hand poses (i.e., "letters") and interprets pose sequences in terms of gestures (i.e., "words"). The hand object is detected with a double-active contour-based method. A tracking of the hand pose in a short sequence allows detecting "modified poses", like diacritic letters in national alphabets. The static hand pose set corresponds to hand signs of a thumb alphabet. Finally, by tracking hand poses in a longer image sequence, the pose sequence is interpreted in terms of gestures. Dynamic Bayesian models and their inference methods (particle filter and Viterbi search) are applied at this stage, allowing a bi-driven control of the entire system.
Sparse recovery on sphere via probabilistic compressed sensing

It is difficult to determine whether or not the restricted isometry property (RIP) holds when measurements are taken on a given order. Hence, a probabilistic and RIPless compressed sensing that requires weaker and simpler conditions was recently developed. However, in unbounded orthonormal systems such as spherical harmonics, this theory on its own does not yield an optimum bound on the minimum number of required measurements. This is primarily due to the coherence of spherical harmonics growing with the band-limit and varying with the position of sample points. In this paper, we incorporate a preconditioning technique into the probabilistic approach to derive a slightly improved bound on the order of measurements for accurate recovery of spherical harmonic expansions.
Brighter than Gold: Figurative Language in User Generated Comparisons

Comparisons are common linguistic devices used to indicate the likeness of two things. Often, this likeness is not meant in the literal sense—for example, “I slept like a log” does not imply that logs actually sleep. In this paper we propose a computational study of figurative comparisons, or similes. Our starting point is a new large dataset of comparisons extracted from product reviews and annotated for figurativeness. We use this dataset to characterize figurative language in naturally occurring comparisons and reveal linguistic patterns indicative of this phenomenon. We operationalize these insights and apply them to a new task with high relevance to text understanding: distinguishing between figurative and literal comparisons. Finally, we apply this framework to explore the social context in which figurative language is produced, showing that similes are more likely to accompany opinions showing extreme sentiment, and that they are uncommon in reviews deemed helpful.
Applied Theories in Occupational Therapy: A Practical Approach

"Applied Theories in Occupational Therapy: A Practical Approach" provides a comprehensive overview of theories and frames of reference in occupational therapy. Unlike other texts, there are no distinctions between specialty areas as current and developing theories are applied to a continuum of health and wellness for all age groups. Practical guidelines are included to assist with evaluation and treatment planning. The focus of this text is wellness rather than illness. Applications and learning activities use occupational theories for personal growth and self-improvement. These activities provide the reader with a guide through the reasoning process, enabling them to select and apply frames of reference in a logical manner. Learning theory and its application to occupational therapy intervention will become a rewarding experience for both student and practicing therapist. The origins of each frame will be included as well as their objectives, function-dysfunction continuum, and views of change and motivation. Practical applications of each frame along with case studies demonstrate a new and reasonable methodology to organize theory for occupational therapy intervention. With all of the changes occurring within this field, "Applied Theories in Occupational Therapy" provides readers with the necessary guidelines to succeed professionally.
Establishing a roadmap and metrics for conscious machines development

From the point of view of Cognitive Informatics, consciousness can be considered as a grand integration of a number of cognitive processes. Intuitive definitions of consciousness generally involve perception, emotions, attention, self-recognition, theory of mind, volition, etc. Due to this compositional definition of the term consciousness it is usually difficult to define both what is exactly a conscious being and how consciousness could be implemented in artificial machines. When we look into the most evolved biological examples of conscious beings, like great apes or humans, the vast complexity of observed cognitive interactions in conjunction with the lack of comprehensive understanding of low level neural mechanisms makes the reverse engineering task virtually unreachable. With the aim to effectively address the problem of modeling consciousness at a cognitive level, in this work we propose a concrete developmental path in which key stages in the progressive process of building conscious machines are identified and characterized. Furthermore, a method for calculating a quantitative measure of artificial consciousness is presented. The application of the proposed framework is illustrated with the comparative study of different software agents designed to compete in a first-person shooter video game.
How Text Segmentation Algorithms Gain from Topic Models

This paper introduces a general method to incorporate the LDA Topic Model into text segmentation algorithms. We show that semantic information added by Topic Models significantly improves the performance of two word-based algorithms, namely TextTiling and C99. Additionally, we introduce the new TopicTiling algorithm that is designed to take better advantage of topic information. We show consistent improvements over word-based methods and achieve state-of-the art performance on a standard dataset.
Robust speech recognition with speaker localization by a microphone array

This paper proposes robust speech recognition with speaker localization by an arrayed microphone (SLAM) to realize a hands-free speech interface in noisy environments. In order to localize a speaker direction accurately in low SNR conditions, a speaker localization algorithm based on extracting pitch harmonics is introduced. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, speech recognition experiments are carried out both in computer simulation and real environments. These results show that the proposed system attains much higher speech recognition performance than that of a single microphone not only in computer simulation but also in real environments.
Abused Women Who Kill: Juror Perspectives on Self-Defense Theories

In self-defense cases of battered women who kill their abusive husbands, defendants have used Battered Woman Syndrome (BWS) expert testimony to help justify their acts of self-defense. However, past research demonstrates that BWS is ineffective in persuading jurors because it pathologizes the defendant rather than rationalizing her behavior. Additionally, BWS highlights passive (i.e., stereotypical) features of a battered woman, and such testimony may not apply to a defendant with active (i.e., atypical) features of a battered women. The current study hypothesized that another type of expert testimony, Social-Agency Framework (SAF), will persuade jurors to render more lenient verdicts, and that the defendant’s passive or active response history will affect verdict decisions. Additionally, a meditational model predicted that the effect of mock jurors’ gender on verdict decisions will be mediated by their attitudes toward battered women. In a 3(expert testimony: BWS vs. SAF vs. control) x 2(response history: passive vs. active) x 2(gender: male vs. female) model, jury-eligible participants (expected N = 510) recruited from the website mTurk answered a survey measuring their attitudes toward battered women, read a mock trial transcript, and rendered a verdict. The results indicated nonsignificant findings for the effects of expert testimony and response history on verdict outcomes. A full mediation was found, indicating that gender acted as a proxy for jurors’ attitudes, influencing their verdict decisions. This study has strong legal implications that highlight the prevailing effect of attitudes and how those attitudes may override the effects of expert testimony and defendant response history. Running head: ABUSED WOMEN WHO KILL 2 Abused Women who Kill: Juror Perspectives on Self-Defense Theories Domestic violence pervades the lives many woman, far greater than those of men. Of the total homicides that occurred in the United States between the years of 1976 and 2005, 35% of the victims were killed by an intimate partner. Of that 35%, 30% of the victims were women. Between 1993 and 2007, intimate partner homicides amounted to 14% of all recorded homicides with 70% of the victims being female. Considering the gender disparity in domestic homicide victims, the law needs to specifically address whether to penalize women who defend themselves against domestic violence (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2009). Should the law view a woman who kills her abusive spouse in self-defense in the same manner as it does a woman who kills a stranger in self-defense?
Chemerin is associated with inflammatory markers and metabolic syndrome phenotypes in hypertension patients

Abstract Background: Chemerin is a new adipokine elevated in states of obesity and metabolic syndrome. In order to identify the role of chemerin in hypertension, we conducted a case--control study to evaluate the role of chemerin in hypertension. Methods: Two hundred and thirty-seven new-diagnosed essential hypertensive (EH) patients and one hundred and ten normotensive healthy subjects (NT) were enrolled. After an overnight fasting, participants underwent an oral glucose-tolerance test (OGTT). Anthropometric measurements and serum analyses were checked, including body mass index (BMI), waist circumference, insulin, triglycerides, total cholesterol, HDL-cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol, glucose, chemerin, hs-CRP, TNF-α and IL-6. Results: Compared with healthy controls, subjects with hypertension had significantly higher chemerin serum levels (p < 0.001). In hypertensive patients, chemerin level was significantly associated with metabolic characteristics including BMI, systolic blood pressure, fasting glucose and insulin, OGTT 2-hour glucose, plasma triglycerides, plasma total cholesterol, HOMA-IR and markers of inflammation including hs-CRP, TNF-α and IL-6, independent of age and gender. Only gender, HOMA-IR, TNF-α and TG were independently related factors to plasma chemerin level after multiple regression analysis. In logistic regression analysis, high chemerin level was an independent predictor of the presence of hypertension (OR: 1.045, p < 0.001) when metabolic variables were adjusted for. However, the association was lost when further adjustment for inflammatory markers including hs-CRP, TNF-α and IL-6 (OR: 1.022, p = 0.289). Conclusions: Chemerin is strongly associated with markers of inflammation and components of the metabolic syndrome in hypertensive subjects and was independently associated with hypertension after adjustment for age, gender and metabolic risk factors.