Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Combining evidences from mel cepstral, cochlear filter cepstral and instantaneous frequency features for detection of natural vs. spoofed speech

Speech synthesis and voice conversion techniques can pose threats to current speaker verification (SV) systems. For this purpose, it is essential to develop front end systems that are able to distinguish human speech vs. spoofed speech (synthesized or voice converted). In this paper, for the ASVspoof 2015 challenge, we propose a detector based on combination of cochlear filter cepstral coefficients (CFCC) and change in instantaneous frequency (IF), (i.e., CFCCIF) to detect natural vs. spoofed speech. The CFCCIF features were extracted at frame-level and Gaussian mixture model (GMM)based classification system was used. On the development set, the proposed features (i.e., CFCCIF) after fusion with Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) features achieved an EER of 1.52 %, which is a significant reduction from MFCC (3.26 %) and CFCCIF (2.29 %) alone using 12-D static features. The EER further decreases to 0.89 % and 0.83 % for delta and delta-delta features, respectively. Experimental results on evaluation set show that fusion of MFCC and CFCCIF works relatively well with an EER of 0.41 % for known attacks and 2.013 % EER for unknown attacks. On an average, fusion of MFCC and CFCCIF features provided relatively best EER of 1.211 % for the challenge.
Virtual machine placement strategy based on discrete firefly algorithm in cloud environments

Because of poor performance of heuristic algorithms on virtual machine placement problem in cloud environments, a multi-objective constraint optimization model of virtual machine placement is presented, which taking energy consumption and resource wastage as the objective. We solve the model based on the proposed discrete firefly algorithm. It takes firefly's location as the placement result, brightness as the objective value. Its movement strategy makes darker fireflies move to brighter fireflies in solution space. The continuous position after movement is discretized by the proposed discrete strategy. In order to speed up the search for solution, the local search mechanism for the optimal solution is introduced. The experimental results in OpenStack cloud platform show that the proposed algorithm makes less energy consumption and resource wastage compared with other algorithms.
Performance of Interconnection Rip-Up and Reroute Strategies

Rip-up and reroute strategies can be applied following use of conventional wiring algorithms to calculate paths for residual connections failed by preceding techniques. The removal of blocking wire to allow new path runs inevitably introduces new (reroute) wiring requirements. In this paper we address the performance implications of various rates of success experienced while attempting reroutes. Using statistical approaches, we develop formulas which allow calculation of expected completion rate and computational effort for several types of rip-up and reroute algorithms. It is found that a basic router having modest completion rate behavior can be used to achieve surprisingly high completion rates, with rip-up strategies.
A research on 3D fusion location algorithm of spatial-time domain based on MUSIC algorithm

In this paper, the new 3D fusion localization algorithm model based on the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm is proposed to integrate space distance positioning with time delay positioning. Space-time cascade approach enhances the receiver to receive signal strength in the range of signal source direction and the multidimensional spectrum peak search only needed in corresponding scope. Space-time fusion approach can match the airspace-domain parameters with time-domain parameters to estimate and handle the estimation problem in which source number is greater than the number of array element. The simulation results show that the accuracy of the signal source is estimated by using the 3D fusion location algorithm model when the pitching angle is less than 70°.
Statistical analysis and improvement of the repeatability and reproducibility of an evaluation method for IMUs on a smartphone

An increasing number of mobile applications, like indoor-navigation or augmented reality, rely on highly accurate inertial sensor systems. However, there exists no standardized test for common inertial sensors, like accelerometers and gyroscopes to assess their accuracy. To easily determine the sensor system quality, a mobile sensor test application for smartphones was published recently. Although this test has several advantages, it lacks reproducibility and repeatability. As a remedy, we designed a special user interface that guides the operator through the test and helps judging the quality of the test conductance. While poorly conducted tests are neglected, only the meaningful ones are evaluated, so that our technology enables a more detailed analysis of the sensor systems. In this paper, we propose a statistical approach capable to distinguish between the four most important systematic errors we observed. Experiments with five state-of-the-art smartphones show that reproducibility and repeatability were significantly improved, enabling a fair comparison of the smartphone sensor systems.
Conservation and enhancement of biological control helps to improve sustainable production of brassica vegetables in China and Australia.

Brassicas comprise a major group of vegetable crops in Zhejiang Province, China and southeast Queensland, Australia. In Zhejiang, heavy reliance on chemical control to manage insect pests in brassica vegetable production has resulted in insecticide resistance, increased costs of pest control and insecticide residues hazardous to human health. In southeast Queensland, reliance on chemical control has also resulted in increased cost of pest control, control failures due to insect resistance and reduced profits. To improve sustainable production of brassica vegetables in the two regions, a group of Chinese and Australian scientists have undertaken a joint project to develop practical integrated pest management (IPM) strategies for these crops. In both regions, major efforts have been made to evaluate the complexes of endemic natural enemies under different pest management practices, and to conserve and enhance these natural enemies as the central elements of effective management programs. In Zhejiang, field trials were conducted across crops, seasons and localities to test and improve an IPM system that emphasized the use of proven action thresholds for different crop growth stages and strategic application of selective insecticides to promote the impact of natural enemies. Compared with conventional methods, IPM practices were associated with substantially higher natural enemy activity, a 20-70% reduction in input of insecticides, and no yield loss. The improved IPM system has been implemented to various degrees in major vegetable production areas in Zhejiang, and has improved the safety and profitability of production. In southeast Queensland, as an important part of the IPM development and implementation effort, a three-year experimental field study was conducted to evaluate the impact of endemic natural enemies on independent farms practicing a range of pest management strategies. Natural enemy impact was greatest on farms adopting IPM and least on farms practicing insecticide intensive conventional pest control strategies. On IPM farms, the contribution of natural enemies to pest mortality permitted the cultivation of marketable crops with no yield loss but with an average of 70% less insecticide inputs compared to conventional farms. _______________________________ Biological Control for Sustainable Production of Brassica Vegetables Second International Symposium on Biological Control of Arthropods 255 The field studies and IPM implementation in China and Australia indicate that naturally occurring biological control can be substantially enhanced to form the central element of effective IPM programs and improve vegetable production. Demonstration of the effectiveness of biological control in the two regions through an international joint effort not only made the evidence more convincing but also promoted the adoption of the improved IPM strategies by farmers.
Enhancing Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks with a Ring Overlay

Wireless mesh network (WMN) has become a popular access network architecture. But because of its multi-hop nature, co-channel interference and contention, the attainable capacity of a wireless node in a WMN is significantly less than the radio capacity. We propose a overlay architecture for a WMN, where a wireless-ring (WRing) is deployed over the regular mesh for carrying wireless mesh traffic only. Our analysis shows that WRing improves the performance of a WMN significantly by reducing the interference and contention.
Comparison of four models to determine surface soil moisture from C‐band radar imagery in a sparsely vegetated semiarid landscape

Four approaches for deriving estimates of near‐surface soil moisture from radar imagery in a semiarid, sparsely vegetated rangeland were evaluated against in situ measurements of soil moisture. The approaches were based on empirical, physical, semiempirical, and image difference techniques. The empirical approach involved simple linear regression of radar backscatter on soil moisture, while the integral equation method (IEM) model was used in both the physical and semiempirical approaches. The image difference or delta index approach is a new technique presented here for the first time. In all cases, spatial averaging to the watershed scale improved agreement with observed soil moisture. In the empirical approach, variation in radar backscatter explained 85% of the variation in observed soil moisture at the watershed scale. For the physical and best semiempirical adjustment to the physical model, the root‐mean‐square errors (RMSE) between modeled and observed soil moisture were 0.13 and 0.04, respectively. Practical limitations to obtaining surface roughness measurements limit IEM utility for large areas. The purely image‐based delta index has significant operational advantage in soil moisture estimates for broad areas. Additionally, satellite observations of backscatter used in the delta index indicated an approximate 1:1 relationship with soil moisture that explained 91% of the variability, with RMSE = 0.03. Results showed that the delta index is scaled to the range in observed soil moisture and may provide a purely image based model. It should be tested in other watersheds to determine if it implicitly accounts for surface roughness, topography, and vegetation. These are parameters that are difficult to measure over large areas, and may influence the delta index.
Using X-machines to model and test discrete event simulation programs

A reactor winding in the form of a high current, multi-turn, multi-layer insulated coil stack embracing an inner member of a magnetizable core assembly of a reactor is resiliently supported by the outer member of the core assembly by inserting a plurality of ripple spring sheets of non-magnetic material between the outer member and selected adjacent surfaces of the outer periphery of the windings. The inner core member is resiliently supported within the coil stack by an additional plurality of ripple spring sheets disposed between adjacent surfaces of the coil stack and inner core member. Ripple spring sheets are also positioned between adjacent surfaces of the inner and outer core members. The ripple spring sheets are preferably disposed between flat side sheets to provide uniform distribution of the spring forces.
Semantic windows mining in sliding window based object detection

This paper studies the problem of end-to-end windows mining directly from detection output. Traditional object detection systems approach this problem in an ad-hoc manner, say, Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS). Beyond NMS, multi-class context modeling has been explored thoroughly recent years. But all these methods put their emphasis on eliminating false positive windows rather than improving recall. To address this problem, we firstly study this problem and propose semantic windows mining. To improve recall, we propose Selective Forward Search (SFS) which keeps most of the semantic windows while substantially reduces the number of false positives. After SFS, to improve precision, we present the end-to-end windows mining by means of similarity refining optimized for mean Average Precision (mAP) and overlap regression. We show a noticeable improvement on the PASCAL VOC datasets in both recall and precision.
Generating Artificial Social Networks with Small World and Scale Free Properties

Recent interest in complex networks has catalyzed the development of numerous models to help artificially generate and understand these networks. Watts and Strogatz presented a model (Watts Strogatz 1998) to explain how the two properties of small world networks, high clustering coefficient and low average path length appear in networks. (Barabasi and Albert 1999) gave a model to explain how networks with power-law degree distribution arise in networks. From these two ground breaking results, many researchers have introduced different models to explain the appearance of networks with small world and scale free properties in the real world. In this paper, we focus on social networks and comparatively study the structure of real world and artificially generated networks. The differences and similarities of different models are highlighted and their shortcomings are identified. Further more, we present a new model which produces networks with both small world and scale free properties which are structurally more similar to real world social networks.
On human-aware task and motion planning abilities for a teammate robot

—Human-robot collaboration requires to equip the robot with explicit reasoning on the human and on its own capabilities to achieve its tasks in a collaborative way with a human partner. This paper presents and discusses three human-aware planners which can provide to a teammate robot the ability to asynthesize pertinent and acceptable behaviour in an industrial context. The illustrative context is inspired by a realistic project to involve collaborative mobile manipulators in the assembly of some components of the Ariane launcher.
Spoken L2 teaching with contrastive visual and auditory feedback

Teaching strategies and positive results from training of both perception and production of spoken Swedish with 13 immigrants are reported. The learners participated in six training sessions lasting thirty minutes, twice a week. The training had a positive effect on the L2-speakers’ perception and production of individual Swedish sounds, stress, intonation and rhythm. The positive results were obtained through auditory and visually contrastive feedback provided through a PC running the IBM SpeechViewer software. Skill building modules together with the Speech Pattering Module “Pitch and Loudness” was used, that displays the speech signal as graphical curves and diagrams. A split screen offered a comparison of the student's production with a correct model by the teacher. Pitch and loudness were displayed either separately or combined.
Fast motion region segmentation based on motion vector field

In this paper, a fast method for extracting motion object regions from moving background is proposed. The proposed approach estimates global motion parameters and implements global motion compensation (GMC) using the motion vector (MV) field. According to the predictive errors of MVs generated by GMC and the movement difference between the background and foreground regions, a dual- threshold mechanism is employed to perform initial region classification. Computing the centroids of the background and foreground set, a recursive cluster procedure is applied to segment the motion object regions. Experimental results show that the proposed method can segment moving regions not only fast but also fairly accurately.
Context-sensitive half-time of fentanyl in dogs

Context-sensitive half-times (CSHTs) of fentanyl in dogs were determined using pharmacokinetic models reported by Murphy et al. and Sano et al., and compared with a human model. The CSHT was defined as the time required for a 50% decrease in drug concentration in the central compartment after the termination of infusion. Although CSHTs increased gradually as the infusion time increased, the CSHTs in dogs were shorter than those in humans. The CSHTs at steady-state were 31.3 and 69.2 min in dogs, and 306.5 min in humans. The CSHTs of fentanyl in dogs are apparently shorter than those in humans; therefore, a continuous infusion of fentanyl may be a rational regimen in dogs, even if duration of infusion is extended.
Benefits and Drawbacks for the Use of ǫ-Dominance in Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization

Using diversity mechanisms in evolutionary algorithms for multi-objective optimization problems is considered as an important issue for the design of successful algorithms. This is in particular the case for problems where the number of non-dominated feasible objective vectors is exponential with respect to the problem size. In this case the goal is to compute a good approximation of the Pareto front. We investigate how this goal can be achieved by using the diversity mechanism of ε-dominance and point out where this concept is provably helpful to obtain a good approximation of an exponentially large Pareto front in expected polynomial time. Afterwards, we consider the drawbacks of this approach and point out situations where the use of ε-dominance slows down the optimization process significantly.
Breaking and Improving Protocol Obfuscation

Different techniques for traffic classification are utilized in various fields of application. In this technical report, we look closer on how statistical analysis can be used to identify network protocols. We show how even obfuscated application layer protocols, such as BitTorrent's MSE protocol and Skype, can be identified by fingerprinting statistically measurable properties of TCP and UDP sessions. We also look closer on the properties our protocol identification algorithm exploits to identify these obfuscated protocols -- protocols that are designed not to be detectable and are thus considered to be very hard to classify. Many of the analyzed protocols are shown to have statistically measurable properties in payload data, flow behavior, or both. Based on this new insight, we propose techniques that can improve future versions of obfuscated protocols, inhibiting identification through this type of statistical analysis. These techniques include better obfuscation of payload data and flow features as well as hiding inside tunnels of well known protocols. This report is intended to provide feedback and suggestions for improvement to creators of obfuscated network protocols, and should thus help to facilitate sustained network neutrality on the Internet.
Asymptotic behavior of the hitting time, overshoot and undershoot for some Lévy processes

Let ( X t , t ≥ 0 ) be a Levy process started at 0 , with Levy measure ν . We consider the first passage time T x of ( X t , t ≥ 0 ) to level x > 0 , and K x := X Tx - x the overshoot and L x := x- X T x - the undershoot. We first prove that the Laplace transform of the random triple ( T x ,K x ,L x ) satisfies some kind of integral equation. Second, assuming that ν admits exponential moments, we show that converges in distribution as x → ∞, where denotes a suitable renormalization of T x .
ANALYZING ABSTRACTION AND APPROXIMATION WITHIN MDP / POMDP ENVIRONMENT

Markov Decision Process (MDP) has been used as a theoretical framework to solve AI problems for many decades. However, thus far most of the results cannot be effectively applied to most real world domains, which have large state spaces, indeterminant (fuzzy) goal states, incorrect guiding functions, and in general are littered with occlusions and inaccuracies. This paper explores abstractions, approximations that occur in most real world domains and their effects on the performance of the agent within such an environment.
A Fragmented China

This paper studies the degree of integration of China’s domestic market and investigates the determinants of inter-provincial trade barriers in light of endogenous trade policy theory. I rely on a new set of provincial trade ows to develop a model which analyzes the magnitude and evolution of Chinese provinces’ engagement in domestic trade by computing all-inclusive indicators of trade barriers. Results underline that not only the Chinese domestic economy is fragmented but also that local protectionism has spread between 1992 and 1997. The investigation of province-level and industry-level trade barriers confirms the relevance of applying the framework of endogenous protection to explain the level of impediments to trade between Chinese provinces. Our findings emphasize that provinces’domestic trade protection pursues a dual objective of socio-economic stability preservation and fiscal revenues maximization.
Transforming At-Risk Students into Powerful Learners.

Rendon, Laura I. Transforming At-Risk Students into Powerful Learners. National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning, and Assessment, University Park, PA. Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED), Washington, DC. 24 Mar 93 R117G10037 23p. ; Paper presented at the National Conference of the American Association for Higher Education (Chicago, IL, March 1994). Reports Research/Technical (143) Speeches/Conference Papers (150)
A Secured Data Transmission using Genetic based Encryption Techniques over Wireless Networks

 Abstract—The speedy development in wireless networks entails the defending data while transmitting in the network. To employ cryptographic algorithm is difficult view in wireless networks. Biometric features such as face, voice, fingerprint, iris, and retina can be possible options to produce a cryptographic key over a predictable cryptography and improve the security. In this paper cryptographic key production using cancelable iris to grant security, authentication code is discussed. This proposed technique has three benefits in excess of previous method. First, authentication code is produced to grant authentication and rectitude. Second, to grant security records is encrypted using two fish encryption key produced from the iris biometric of the receiver. Third, randomization is offers using genetic operator to save from a variety of attacks. The proposed model is examined next to security attributes authentication, confidentiality, integrity. It is establish that it endures against cryptanalytic attack. Analysis taken place by the means of performance and security.
THE ECONOMIC EFFECTS AND BENEFICIARIES OF THE ADMINISTRATION'S PROPOSED HIGHER EDUCATION TAX SUBSIDIES

This paper seeks to frame the debate concerning the proposed Hope Scholarship tax credit and tuition tax deduction. By considering the interaction of the tax subsidy proposals with the Pell Grant program, the paper shows that although many students from lowincome families would not benefit from the nonrefundable tuition credit some would benefit from the deduction and most would be winners under the proposed Pell expansion. Moreover, because the benefits of the credit and deduction are limited with respect to low-income students, fears that they would engender tuition and grade inflation may be overstated. The paper also estimates an expected long-run enrollment response to the proposals of 150,000 to 1.4 million additional students, with the likely response closer to the low end of this range.