Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Noise spectrum estimation using Gaussian mixture model-based speech presence probability for robust speech recognition

This work presents a noise spectrum estimator based on the Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based speech presence probability (SPP) for robust speech recognition. Estimated noise spectrum is then used to compute a subband a posteriori signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). A sigmoid shape weighting rule is formed based on this subband a posteriori SNR to enhance the speech spectrum in the auditory domain, which is used in the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) framework for robust feature, denoted here as Robust MFCC (RMFCC) extraction. The performance of the GMM-SPP noise spectrum estimator-based RMFCC feature extractor is evaluated in the context of speech recognition on the AURORA-4 continuous speech recognition task. For comparison we incorporate six existing noise estimation methods into this auditory domain spectrum enhancement framework. The ETSI advanced frontend (ETSI-AFE), power normalized cepstral coefficients (PNCC), and robust compressive gammachirp cepstral coefficients (RCGCC) are also considered for comparison purposes. Experimental speech recognition results show that, in terms of word accuracy, RMFCC provides an average relative improvements of 8.1%, 6.9% and 6.6% over RCGCC, ETSI-AFE, and PNCC, respectively. With GMM-SPP -based noise estimation method an average relative improvement of 3.6% is obtained over other six noise estimation methods in terms of word recognition accuracy.
Cysteine-String Protein Increases the Calcium Sensitivity of Neurotransmitter Exocytosis in Drosophila

Previous studies suggest that the vesicular cysteine-string protein (CSP) may modulate presynaptic Ca2+ channel activity in fast neurotransmitter release. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed the dynamics of presynaptic Ca2+ ion influx with the Ca2+ indicator fluo-4 AM at csp mutant neuromuscular junctions of Drosophila. From 24 to 30°C, stimulus-evoked, relative presynaptic Ca2+ signals were increasingly larger in csp mutant boutons than in controls. Above 30°C, Ca2+ signals declined and were similar to controls at 34°C. A prolonged decay of Ca2+ signals in mutant boutons at high temperatures indicated abnormally slow Ca2+ clearance. Cytosolic Ca2+ at rest was determined with the ratiometric Ca2+ indicator fura-2 AM and was similar in mutant and control boutons at 24°C but higher in mutant boutons at 34°C. Despite larger Ca2+ signals in mutant boutons, evoked neurotransmitter release was always reduced in cspmutants and exhibited pronounced facilitation. Thus, a lack of Ca2+ entry cannot explain the reduction of neurotransmitter release in csp mutants. At all temperatures tested, raising extracellular Ca2+ increased transmitter release elicited by single stimuli in cspmutants. Collectively, these data suggest multiple functions for CSP at synaptic terminals. Increased Ca2+ signals coupled with reduced release suggest a direct function of CSP in exocytosis downstream from Ca2+ entry. Because the reduction of evoked release in csp mutants is counteracted by increased Ca2+ levels, we suggest that CSP primarily increases the Ca2+ sensitivity of the exocytotic machinery.
Intentions to quit work among care staff working in the aged care sector.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY The aged care industry experiences high rates of staff turnover. Staff turnover has significant implications for the quality of care provided to care recipients and the financial costs to care agencies. In this study, we applied a model of intention to quit to identify the contextual and personal factors that shape aged care staff's intention to quit. DESIGN AND METHODS A sample of 208 aged care staff, including nurses, personal care assistants, allied health professionals, and managers completed a self-report questionnaire. The questionnaire assessed intention to quit, organizational commitment, job satisfaction, self-esteem, stressors, stress, and supervisor support. RESULTS The findings largely supported the model. Specifically, job commitment, job satisfaction, and work stressors directly influenced intentions to quit, although work stressors and supervisor support demonstrated numerous indirect associations on quitting intentions. IMPLICATIONS The findings suggest that aged care service providers can modify aged care workers' intentions to quit by reducing job stressors and increasing supervisor support.
A LOW POWER MULTIPLIER USING ENCODING AND BYPASSING TECHNIQUE

In this paper, a low power Encoding and Bypassing t echnique based shift-add multiplier is presented. T he proposed architecture is derived from simple way to reduce power consumption and area of the multiplie r in VLSI design architecture level model. The propos ed architecture maximum reduces the power consumption and area compared to the other conventional multiplier. The modification to the multiplier includes proposed Encoder design for Modified Radix-4 recording rules, removal of zero partial product s using bypassing technique (decoder). A decoder inst ead of bypass and feeder register is utilized for t he removal of zeros (bypassing) and selecting the curr ent partial product value to be stored in register. In this paper, encoder and decoder selector circuit has bee n used in the proposed model work. Low power consumption and low area occupied multiplier archit ecture model is proposed. The simulation result for the encoding process and bypassing technique using decoder generated using Xpower analyzer in Xilinx 10.1 ISE (integrated software environment) represents th e dynamic power consumption is reduced to almost 50%. When the power consumed by the proposed multiplier using Spartan-2 is 6.28mW, the Virtex-4 device is 6.89mW. The proposed multiplier is mainly applicable for designing low power VLSI circuits a nd high speed switching techniques.
Rapid previewing via volume-based solid modeling

Quick previewing of 3D models is necessary for efficient product design and rapid prototyping. An inherent weakness of most solid modeling systems is that as model complexity increases, quick 3D viewing suffers, especially on low cost workstations. We explore an alternative approach to surface representation in which object space, called volume, is subdivided into a 3D grid of cubic cells, each containing information on the object(s) which occupy it. A data structure is introduced that consists of a 2D amay of pointers each holding a linked list of adjacent non empty cells. To benefit from data coherency along one dimension, we have developed new modeling and rendering algorithms that are beam-oriented, incremental, and integer-based. To illustrate the usefulness of our approach, we use it in Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) modeling. We describe our prototype system and show, by comparing it to existing systems, that our data structure and its associated algorithms, while being of finite resolution, provide for suitable and more efficient model visualization.
2 Are You Social? The Ontological and Developmental Emergence of the Person

In what way does human sociality differ from that of ants or bees? The sociality of social insects is an emergent at the level of the nest or hive, an emergent of the organization of interactions among the biological organisms: Each individual insect remains as a biological being no matter how complex the social organization. There is a sense in which that is the case for humans, but human sociality also involves an additional social ontological emergence for each individual. This is the developmental emergence of the social person. Modeling how this occurs, and accounting for how it could possibly occur, will be the foci of this chapter.
Minding metaphors : Rethinking the ecology of written language

: The field of reading and literacy studies has undergone large changes in the past three decades. A branch referred to as New Literacy Studies has established itself alongside the traditional school of psychological reading research, and in general there has been a continuous effort to bring together individual and social aspects of literacy. The approach of the present article is rooted in the rhetoric of science and explores metaphorical barriers to cross-disciplinary understanding. More specifically, it revisits David Barton’s metaphorical understanding of literacy as an ecology of written language, originally intended to draw the social and the psychological together. The article discusses the marginalisation of the individual in Social Turn theories in general and in the ecology framework in particular. An understanding of involvement and eventness is suggested that makes room for the individual and thus also improves the precision of the framework. Rethinking ecology along this line of thought might enrich the ecology metaphor in the study of reading and literacy in a way that makes it meaningful from a psychological perspective.
International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems Interactive Industrial Robot Programming for the Ceramic Industry Regular Paper

This paper presents an interactive programming method for programming industrial robots in ceramic applications. The main purpose was to develop a simple but flexible programming system that empowers the user with product driven programming without compromising flexibility. To achieve this flexibility, a two step hybrid programming model was designed: first the user sketches the desired trajectory in a spatial augmented reality programming table using the final product and then relies on an advanced 3D graphical system to tune the robot trajectory in the final workcell. The results measured by the end-user feedback show that a new level of flexibility was reached for this type of application.
ROFF: RObust and Fast Forwarding in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Many safety applications rely on multi-hop broadcasting to disseminate safety messages. In most existing multi-hop broadcasting protocols, one next forwarder is selected through contention among forwarder candidates based on their different waiting times. In this paper, we first analyze the latency and collision of the existing protocols, and point out two problems: 1) unnecessary delay occurs in the contention process due to the lack of considering the distribution of vehicles and 2) the short difference between waiting times of forwarder candidates may allow redundant broadcasts to collide with each other. Secondly, we propose a new multi-hop broadcast protocol called RObust and Fast Forwarding (ROFF) to mitigate both problems. ROFF solves the first problem of unnecessary delay by allowing a forwarder candidate to use the waiting time which is inversely proportional to its forwarding priority. A forwarder candidate acquires its forwarding priority using the novel concept of ESD bitmap, which describes the distribution of empty spaces between vehicles. In addition, ROFF prevents the waiting time difference from being shorter than the predefined lower bound in order to avoid collisions, thus solving the second problem. Our extensive simulations reveal that ROFF achieves faster and more reliable broadcasting as compared to the other protocols.
Asserting Real-Time Emotions through Cued-Recall: Is it Valid?

Asserting emotions through free-recall is commonly used to evaluate user experience (UX) of interactive systems. From psychology we know that free-recall of emotions leads to a significant memory bias where participants rely on a few of the most intense episodes when asserting an overall experience. It is argued that cued-recall can reduce the memory bias in UX evaluations. Yet, this has not been studied empirically. We present a systematic empirical study based on 38 participants. We measured emotions in terms of objective galvanic skin responses (GSR) and subjective Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) ratings. We found significant correlations between emotions experienced in real-time and those experienced during cued-recall. This validates the use of cued-recall for UX evaluations. An implication is that HCI researchers and practitioners now have cued-recall as an alternative that significantly reduces the memory bias and enables highly detailed measurements of emotions while not disturbing participants during system interaction.
Global ocean wind power sensitivity to surface layer stability

Global ocean wind power has recently been assessed (W. T. Liu et al., 2008) using scatterometry‐based 10 m winds. We characterize, for the first time, wind power at 80 m (typical wind turbine hub height) above the global ocean surface, and account for the effects of surface layer stability. Accounting for realistic turbine height and atmospheric stability increases mean global ocean wind power by +58% and −4%, respectively. Our best estimate of mean global ocean wind power is 731 W m−2, about 50% greater than the 487 W m−2 based on previous methods. 80 m wind power is 1.2–1.5 times 10 m power equatorward of 30° latitude, between 1.4 and 1.7 times 10 m power in wintertime storm track regions and >6 times 10 m power in stable regimes east of continents. These results are relatively insensitive to methodology as wind power calculated using a fitted Weibull probability density function is within 10% of power calculated from discrete wind speed measurements over most of the global oceans.
Contour based smoke detection in video using wavelets

This paper proposes a novel method to detect smoke in video. It is assumed the camera monitoring the scene is stationary. The smoke is semi-transparent at the early stages of a fire. Therefore edges present in image frames start loosing their sharpness and this leads to a decrease in the high frequency content of the image. The background of the scene is estimated and decrease of high frequency energy of the scene is monitored using the spatial wavelet transforms of the current and the background images. Edges of the scene produce local extrema in the wavelet domain and a decrease in the energy content of these edges is an important indicator of smoke in the viewing range of the camera. Moreover, scene becomes grayish when there is smoke and this leads to a decrease in chrominance values of pixels. Periodic behavior in smoke boundaries is also analyzed using a Hidden Markov model (HMM) mimicking the temporal behavior of the smoke. In addition, boundary of smoke regions are represented in wavelet domain and high frequency nature of the boundaries of smoke regions is also used as a clue to model the smoke flicker. All these clues are combined to reach a final decision.
Hierarchical Bayesian Language Modelling for the Linguistically Informed

In this work I address the challenge of augmenting n-gram language models according to prior linguistic intuitions. I argue that the family of hierarchical Pitman-Yor language models is an attractive vehicle through which to address the problem, and demonstrate the approach by proposing a model for German compounds. In an empirical evaluation, the model outperforms the Kneser-Ney model in terms of perplexity, and achieves preliminary improvements in English-German translation.
Dimensional Analysis of a Crime Scene from a Single Image

Dimensional analysis from a single image is an interesting topic of investigation in the research community, even though range sensors are becoming a common alternative for the generation of metric information in real-time. The interest in obtaining metric measurements from a single image is motivated by a wide spectrum of applications such as cultural heritage, civil engineering, urban planning, and even criminology. This paper describes the research conducted in collaboration with the Scientific Madrid Police (Spain), to evaluate the utility of a single image approach for scene of crime dimensional analysis.
High Coverage Search in Multi-Tree Based P2P Overlay Network

The blind flooding algorithm under a time-to-live (TTL) constraint used in unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, such as Gnutella, may cause a large amount of network traffic. The algorithm cannot guarantee for acquiring the required data objects, especially for rare ones. To mitigate these problems, this paper proposes PercolationNET, a multi-tree sub-overlay, which is built on top of an existing P2P overlay (named original overlay). PercolationNET organizes peers in a tree-based structure which facilitates reliable and efficient message dissemination for search. The search process is divided into two stages. A query message is first propagated on the original overlay, and then broadcast along the sub-overlay PercolationNET. PercolationNET combines the advantages of fast coverage speed in flooding-based scheme and low traffic cost in tree-based scheme. The experimental results of PercolationNET compared with FloodNet confirm the superiority of PercolationNET in achieving faster coverage speed and lower message cost.
Lattice thermal conductivity of nanoporous Si : Molecular dynamics study

Lattice thermal conductivity κl of Si with nanometer-sized pores along the [001] direction is calculated as a function of pore diameter (dp) and pore spacing (ds) by employing a molecular dynamics approach. Our results show that κl across pores is smaller than the bulk value by over two orders of magnitude at room temperature, and that it decreases (increases) as a function of dp (ds) for fixed ds (dp). This behavior is shown to originate from the reduction in the channels for phonon transport and the increased phonon scattering at the pore surfaces.
Rate-distortion models for entropy constrained lattice quantization

In this paper we present new models for rate-distortion curves for entropy coded lattice codevectors. Exact models for both the rate and the distortion are proposed for the lattice Zn for generalized Gaussian sources. The resulting precision with respect to experimental values is improved by 50% over previously proposed models. In addition an approximate model for general lattices is proposed for Gaussian sources, its precision being verified against experimental values and shown to improve the estimation precision from 10% to 4%.
Research on Land Use/Cover Classification Based on RS and GIS

The investigation of the state of land-use/land- cover (LULC) is very important for daily cadastre supervisory work and it is an important foundation link of land management. It is also an important base of the research of land-use/land-cover change (LUCC), as well as pre-processing of monitoring of forest health and simulation of dynamic evolution of natural vegetation landscape. A land classification system is established in view of the research region and the interrelated LULC standards in this paper, then the edit layers of SPOT 5 HRS images with 3 wave bands are fused using software eCognition 4.0. And then applying the eCognition object-oriented classification method, the precise classification chart of the LULC is obtained through interactive experiments on eCognition 4.0. Thus the LULC map is presented. The map includes six classifications of cultivation, grassland, woodland, aquatic area, construction land, and unused land. So this work has certain significance to the research and development ofRS and GIS further integration.
A review of modulation techniques for hybrid multilevel inverter

This paper presents the overview of modulation methods for hybrid multilevel inverters. Modulation techniques consider modulation index with respect to amplitude and frequency which are to be defined. These modulation techniques can be applied to various multilevel inverters. Some techniques can be applied directly to multilevel inverters while some modifications are required in some techniques for various multilevel inverters. Therefore, a given modulation technique can synthesize several multilevel configurations, significantly increasing flexibility and decreasing total harmonic distortion (THD). The purpose of the modulation techniques presented here is to observe effect of different techniques on different multilevel inverter topology. This paper presents a survey of different modulation techniques for different multilevel inverter for different level output.
Optimal Bilingual Data for French-English PB-SMT

We investigate the impact of the original source language (SL) on French‐English PB-SMT. We train four configurations of a state-of-the-art PB-SMT system based on French‐English parallel corpora which differ in terms of the original SL, and conduct experiments in both translation directions. We see that data containing original French and English translated from French is optimal when building a system translating from French into English. Conversely, using data comprising exclusively French and English translated from several other languages is suboptimal regardless of the translation direction. Accordingly, the clamour for more data needs to be tempered somewhat; unless the quality of such data is controlled, more training data can cause translation performance to decrease drastically, by up to 38% relative B LEU in our experiments.
Communication in Multilateral Bargaining

One of the most robust phenomena in the experimental literature on multilateral bargaining is the failure of proposers to extract equilibrium rents. However, all previous experiments have overlooked the fact that outside the lab committee members are allowed to – and do – engage in sometimes intense communication processes prior to voting on a proposal. We conduct an experimental test of the Baron–Ferejohn model in which we allow committee members to engage in unrestricted cheap-talk communication before a proposal is submitted. We find that proposers extract a significantly higher share of resources when communication is allowed. Communication increases proposer power through two channels. First, it mitigates the uncertainty surrounding the amount a coalition member is willing to accept. Second, it allows potential coalition members to compete for a place in the coalition by lowering this stated price.
Protostellar Holes: Spitzer Space Telescope Observations of the Protostellar Binary IRAS 16293–2422

Mid-infrared (23-35 μm) emission from the deeply embedded Class 0 protostar IRAS 16293-2422 is detected with the Spitzer Space Telescope infrared spectrograph. A detailed radiative transfer model reproducing the full spectral energy distribution (SED) from 23 μm to 1.3 mm requires a large inner cavity of radius 600 AU in the envelope to avoid quenching the emission from the central sources. This is consistent with a previous suggestion based on high angular resolution millimeter interferometric data. An alternative interpretation using a two-dimensional model of the envelope with an outflow cavity can reproduce the SED but not the interferometer visibilities. The cavity size is comparable to the centrifugal radius of the envelope and therefore appears to be a natural consequence of the rotation of the protostellar core, which has also caused the fragmentation leading to the central protostellar binary. With a large cavity such as required by the data, the average temperature at a given radius does not increase above 60-80 K, and although hot spots with higher temperatures may be present close to each protostar, these constitute a small fraction of the material in the inner envelope. The proposed cavity will also have consequences for the interpretation of molecular line data, especially of complex species probing high temperatures in the inner regions of the envelope.
On heavy-quark free energies, entropies, Polyakov loop, and AdS/QCD

In this paper we explore some of the features of a heavy quark-antiquark pair at finite temperature using a five-dimensional framework nowadays known as AdS/QCD. We shall show that the resulting behavior is consistent with our qualitative expectations of thermal gauge theory. Some of the results are in good agreement with the lattice data that provides additional evidence for the validity of the proposed model.