Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Single-Ended Quality Measurement of Noise Suppressed Speech Based on Kullback-Leibler Distances

In this paper, a single-ended quality measurement algorithm for noise suppressed speech is described.The proposed algorithm computes fast approximations of Kullback-Leibler distances between Gaussian mixture (GM) reference models of clean, noise corrupted, and noise suppressed speech and a GM model trained online on the test speech signal. The distances, together with a spectral flatness measure, are mapped to an estimated quality score via a support vector regressor. Experimental results show that substantial improvement in performance and complexity can be attained, relative to the current state-of-art single-ended ITU-T P.563 algorithm. Due to its modular architecture, the proposed algorithm can be easily configured to also perform signal distortion and background intrusiveness measurement, a functionality not available with current standard algorithms.
Safe and flexible human-robot cooperation in industrial applications

The increasing need of a closer cooperation between human and robots in industrial environments requires the appropriate treatment of risky situations that may arise in the shared working space. This paper deals with technological approaches about the prediction of such situations and the avoidance of the hazards, by using a flexible monitoring system that involves the fusion of information and data from various sources: a set of stereo cameras is used to build a 3D representation of the scene, which builds the basis for the danger estimation. Representative features of the elements of the scene, such as the position of the robots and humans, their trajectories and relative velocities are used to predict future hazardous situations, which are resolved by an appropriate reaction on the behavior pattern of the robots. Additionally, the authors present a visualization tool that enables the pre-selection of the most suitable configuration of the system according to the needs and characteristics of particular use cases, as well as the definition of the danger situations and the corresponding reactions.
Collection Tree Extension of LOADng Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks

—The Lightweight On-demand Ad hoc Distance- vector Routing Protocol - Next Generation (LOADng) is a reactive distance-vector protocol which is intended for use in Mobile Ad hoc Networks and Low-power and Lossy Networks to build paths between source–destination pairs. In 2013, ITU-T has ratiﬁed the recommendation G.9903 Amendment 1, which includes LOADng in a speciﬁc normative annex for routing protocol in smart grids. This paper proposes an extension to the LOADng, for efﬁcient construction of a collection tree for data acquisition in sensor networks. The extension uses the mechanisms from LOADng, imposes minimal overhead and complexity, and enables a deployment to efﬁciently support “sensor-to-root” trafﬁc, avoiding complications of uni-directional links in the collection tree. The protocol complexity, security and interoperability are examined in detail. The simulation results show that the extension can effectively improve the efﬁciency of data acquisition in the network.
Molecular Ordering in HIV-induced Apoptosis

Dysregulated apoptosis may underlie the etiology of T cell depletion by human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1). We show that HIV-induced apoptosis is preceded by an exponential increase in reactive oxygen intermediates (ROIs) produced in mitochondria. This leads to caspase-3 activation, phosphatidylserine (PS) externalization, and GSH depletion. Since mitochondrial ROI levels are regulated by the supply of NADPH from the pentose phosphate pathway (PPP), the effect of transaldolase (TAL), a key enzyme of PPP, was investigated. Jurkat and H9 human CD4+ T cells were transfected with TAL expression vectors oriented in the sense or antisense direction. TAL overexpression down-regulated glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase activities and GSH levels. Alternatively, decreased TAL expression up-regulated glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase activities and GSH levels. HIV-induced 1) mitochondrial ROI production, 2) caspase-3 activation, 3) proteolysis of poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase, and 4) PS externalization were accelerated in cells overexpressing TAL. In contrast, suppression of TAL abrogated these four activities. Thus, susceptibility to HIV-induced apoptosis can be regulated by TAL through controlling the balance between mitochondrial ROI production and the metabolic supply of reducing equivalents by the PPP. The dominant effect of TAL expression on oxidative stress, caspase activation, PS externalization, and cell death suggests that this balance plays a pivotal role in HIV-induced apoptosis.
Towards assessing depth of argumentation

For analyzing argumentative text, we propose to study the ‘depth’ of argumentation as one important component, which we distinguish from argument quality. In a pilot study with German newspaper commentary texts, we asked students to rate the degree of argumentativeness, and then looked for correlations with features of the annotated argumentation structure and the rhetorical structure (in terms of RST). The results indicate that the human judgements correlate with our operationalization of depth and with certain structural features of RST trees.
Finding a Maximum Clique using Ant Colony Optimization and Particle Swarm Optimization in Social Networks

Interaction between users in online social networks plays a key role in social network analysis. One on important types of social group is full connected relation between some users, which known as clique structure. Therefore finding a maximum clique is essential for some analysis. In this paper, we proposed a new method using ant colony optimization algorithm and particle swarm optimization algorithm. In the proposed method, in order to attain better results, it is improved process of pheromone update by particle swarm optimization. Simulation results on popular standard social network benchmarks in comparison standard ant colony optimization algorithm are shown a relative enhancement of proposed algorithm.
Exiting the Design Studio: Leveraging Online Participants for Early-Stage Design Feedback

Online collaboration tools enable developers of interactive systems to quickly reach potential users for usability testing. Can these technologies serve designers who seek feedback on user needs during the earliest stages of design? Online needfinding may help designers create products and services that can target a more diverse user population. To explore this, we conducted a feasibility study to compare face-to-face methods with online needfinding sessions. We found that video can sufficiently capture nuanced reactions to preliminary concept storyboards, but that feedback providers need guidance and structure. We then introduce a tool for collecting early-stage design feedback from online participants and conduct a case study with a professional design team. The team conducted needfinding activities with local participants, as well as a cost-equivalent number of online participants The case study demonstrates that combining online crowdsourcing with a video survey tool provides a simple and cost-efficient way to collect early-stage feedback.
Realtime style transfer for unlabeled heterogeneous human motion

This paper presents a novel solution for realtime generation of stylistic human motion that automatically transforms unlabeled, heterogeneous motion data into new styles. The key idea of our approach is an online learning algorithm that automatically constructs a series of local mixtures of autoregressive models (MAR) to capture the complex relationships between styles of motion. We construct local MAR models on the fly by searching for the closest examples of each input pose in the database. Once the model parameters are estimated from the training data, the model adapts the current pose with simple linear transformations. In addition, we introduce an efficient local regression model to predict the timings of synthesized poses in the output style. We demonstrate the power of our approach by transferring stylistic human motion for a wide variety of actions, including walking, running, punching, kicking, jumping and transitions between those behaviors. Our method achieves superior performance in a comparison against alternative methods. We have also performed experiments to evaluate the generalization ability of our data-driven model as well as the key components of our system.
BCR/ABL Directly Inhibits Expression of SHIP, an SH2-Containing Polyinositol-5-Phosphatase Involved in the Regulation of Hematopoiesis

ABSTRACT The BCR/ABL oncogene causes chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), a myeloproliferative disorder characterized by clonal expansion of hematopoietic progenitor cells and granulocyte lineage cells. The SH2-containing inositol-5-phosphatase SHIP is a 145-kDa protein which has been shown to regulate hematopoiesis in mice. Targeted disruption of the murine SHIP gene results in a myeloproliferative syndrome characterized by a dramatic increase in numbers of granulocyte-macrophage progenitor cells in the marrow and spleen. Also, hematopoietic progenitor cells from SHIP−/−mice are hyperresponsive to certain hematopoietic growth factors, a phenotype very similar to the effects of BCR/ABL in murine cells. In a series of BCR/ABL-transformed hematopoietic cell lines, Philadelphia chromosome (Ph)-positive cell lines, and primary cells from patients with CML, the expression of SHIP was found to be absent or substantially reduced compared to untransformed cell lines or leukemia cells lacking BCR/ABL. Ba/F3 cells in which expression of BCR/ABL was under the control of a tetracycline-inducible promoter showed rapid loss of p145 SHIP, coincident with induction of BCR/ABL expression. Also, an ABL-specific tyrosine kinase inhibitor, CGP57148B (STI571), rapidly caused reexpression of SHIP, indicating that BCR/ABL directly, but reversibly, regulates the expression of SHIP protein. The estimated half-life of SHIP protein was reduced from 18 h to less than 3 h. However, SHIP mRNA also decreased in response to BCR/ABL, suggesting that SHIP protein levels could be affected by more than one mechanism. Reexpression of SHIP in BCR/ABL-transformed Ba/F3 cells altered the biological behavior of cells in culture. The reduction of SHIP due to BCR/ABL is likely to directly contribute to the pathogenesis of CML.
Articulatory Phonetic Features for Robust Speech Recognition

The report summarizes the author’s research on automatic speech recognition during his pursue of a Ph.D. degree from the school of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in Nanyang Technological University from August 2008 to the present. The author applies speech production knowledge in the form of articulatory phonetic features to improve the robustness of speech recognition in practical situations. The main concept is that English speech has three attributes in the human speech processing system, i.e., the motor activation, the articulatory trajectory, and the auditory perception. Consequently, the research work reported here consists of three components. First, it describes an adaptive neural control model, which reproduces the articulatory trajectories and retrieves the motor activation patterns in a bio-mechanical speech synthesizer. Next, by manipulating the elastic vocal tract walls, the synthesizer produces the overall articulatoryto-acoustic trajectory map for the English pronunciation models. Finally, the articulatory phonetic features are extracted by neural networks for the speech recognition experiments in cross-speaker and noisy conditions, the performance of which is compared with the traditional hidden Markov baseline system.
Similarity Search for Numerous Patterns in Multiple High-Speed Time-Series Streams

Similarity search for patterns over streaming time series is a big challenge in data mining at present. In the paper, we introduce an efficient method, which performs similarity search for numerous patterns in multiple time-series streams at high-speed rates under the Euclidean distance. The search method matches approximately new-coming time-series sub sequences of time-series streams with given patterns using an overlapped segmentation of time-series data. Moreover, this method is designed for range search not only with the same search radius for all time-series patterns but also the own search radius for each time-series pattern. The experimental results reveal that the search method has the same accuracy as similarity search in static time series, and low wall-clock times.
The Difference a Global Educator Can Make.

Not surprisingly, these decisions become more important when a community, state, or country is feeling the effects of global economic, sociocultural, environmental, political, or technological change. The arrival of a Honda assembly plant, the resettlement of 17,000 Somali refugees, or the exodus of U.S. manufacturing plants to other countries can influence community thinking and teachers' instructional decisions. National and regional events—such as the Gulf War, protests at World Trade Organization meetings, or the attacks of September 11, 2001—also have considerable effects on teachers' instruction (Merryfield, 1993).
Hybrid Information Flow Analysis for Programs with Arrays

Information flow analysis checks whether certain pieces of (confidential) data may affect the results of computations in unwanted ways and thus leak information. Dynamic information flow analysis adds instrumentation code to the target software to track flows at run time and raise alarms if a flow policy is violated; hybrid analyses combine this with preliminary static analysis. Using a subset of C as the target language, we extend previous work on hybrid information flow analysis that handled pointers to scalars. Our extended formulation handles arrays, pointers to array elements, and pointer arithmetic. Information flow through arrays of pointers is tracked precisely while arrays of non-pointer types are summarized efficiently. A prototype of our approach is implemented using the Frama-C program analysis and transformation framework. Work on a full machine-checked proof of the correctness of our approach using Isabelle/HOL is well underway; we present the existing parts and sketch the rest of the correctness argument.
Statistical process adjustment of multivariate processes with minimum control efforts

In controlling a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) process, usually all control variables have to be adjusted at each step, which may incur high adjustment cost. This paper proposes a Lasso adjustment algorithm, which minimizes the number of variables to be adjusted at each step. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can maintain acceptable output deviations while reduce the number of variables need to be adjusted significant.
Network-Based Organizing for Product Innovation: How Power Imbalances Matter

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Stasis: flexible transactional storage

An increasing range of applications requires robust support for atomic, durable and concurrent transactions. Databases provide the default solution, but force applications to interact via SQL and to forfeit control over data layout and access mechanisms. We argue there is a gap between DBMSs and file systems that limits designers of data-oriented applications. Stasis is a storage framework that incorporates ideas from traditional write-ahead logging algorithms and file systems. It provides applications with flexible control over data structures, data layout, robustness, and performance. Stasis enables the development of unforeseen variants on transactional storage by generalizing write-ahead logging algorithms. Our partial implementation of these ideas already provides specialized (and cleaner) semantics to applications. We evaluate the performance of a traditional transactional storage system based on Stasis, and show that it performs favorably relative to existing systems. We present examples that make use of custom access methods, modified buffer manager semantics, direct log file manipulation, and LSN-free pages. These examples facilitate sophisticated performance optimizations such as zero-copy I/O. These extensions are composable, easy to implement and significantly improve performance.
Analyzing egress accuracy through the study of virtual and real crowds

A variety of scientific models and computational tools have been developed to improve human safety and comfort in built environments. In this work we discuss the use of crowd simulation to reproduce and to evaluate egress performance in specific scenarios. We present CrowdSim, a crowd simulation tool designed to automatically reproduce crowd behaviors during building egress. Associated with this kind of software, that aims to be used in real life events, are critical validation questions. Here we present quantitative and qualitative methods to evaluate our CrowdSim software, but that can be extended to any crowd simulator. To ground these methods a case study in a real night club evacuation was performed and results are discussed in the paper.
Genome Sequence of Yersinia pestis KIM

ABSTRACT We present the complete genome sequence of Yersinia pestis KIM, the etiologic agent of bubonic and pneumonic plague. The strain KIM, biovar Mediaevalis, is associated with the second pandemic, including the Black Death. The 4.6-Mb genome encodes 4,198 open reading frames (ORFs). The origin, terminus, and most genes encoding DNA replication proteins are similar to those of Escherichia coli K-12. The KIM genome sequence was compared with that of Y. pestis CO92, biovar Orientalis, revealing homologous sequences but a remarkable amount of genome rearrangement for strains so closely related. The differences appear to result from multiple inversions of genome segments at insertion sequences, in a manner consistent with present knowledge of replication and recombination. There are few differences attributable to horizontal transfer. The KIM and E. coli K-12 genome proteins were also compared, exposing surprising amounts of locally colinear “backbone,” or synteny, that is not discernible at the nucleotide level. Nearly 54% of KIM ORFs are significantly similar to K-12 proteins, with conserved housekeeping functions. However, a number of E. coli pathways and transport systems and at least one global regulator were not found, reflecting differences in lifestyle between them. In KIM-specific islands, new genes encode candidate pathogenicity proteins, including iron transport systems, putative adhesins, toxins, and fimbriae.
Crowd-sourcing Web knowledge for metadata extraction

We explore a new metadata extraction framework without human annotators with the ground truth harvested from Web. A new training sample is selected based on not only the uncertainty and representativeness in the unlabeled pool, but also on its availability and credibility in Web knowledge bases. We construct a dataset of 4329 books with valid metadata and evaluate our approach using 5 Web book databases as oracles. Empirical results demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency.
A Model of Behaviour Change in Housework for Women with Upper Limb Repetitive Strain Injury

Upper limb repetitive strain injury (RSI) is a costly disease. Evidence indicates biomechanical risk in housework that contributes to this cluster of conditions among women. Although there is consistent evidence indicating the importance of conducting ergonomic education to monitor the mechanical exposures for better musculoskeletal health, there is limited research on understanding behaviour change in housework for women with upper limb RSI. Occupational therapy has an important role in facilitating behaviour change in housework for women with upper limb RSI, to minimise their exposure to biomechanical risk in housework through ergonomic education. In a hand therapy outpatient clinic in an acute hospital in Singapore, such education is usually conducted by therapists for women with upper limb RSI on a one-to-one basis; planning is based on the clinical experience of individual therapists rather than on a specific theory. The purpose of this thesis is to construct a model of behaviour change in housework for women with upper limb RSI, to guide the planning of such education within a hand therapy outpatient clinic in Singapore acute care hospital. Framed by a client-centred approach, a central philosophy of occupational therapy, which indicates the importance of ‘listening and communicating’ with clients at all stages of intervention and considering the importance of making therapists’ tacit knowledge explicit while planning an intervention, two grounded theory studies (Study I and Study II) adopting the constructivist approach outlined by Charmaz (2009a) were conducted to construct
Nandrolone decanoate inhibits gluconeogenesis and decreases fasting glucose in Wistar male rats.

The use of anabolic-androgenic steroids to improve physical performance or appearance has increased notably. The doses used are 10- to 100- fold higher than the therapeutic dose (TD), and this abuse can cause several side effects. Glucose metabolism is significantly affected by anabolic-androgenic steroid abuse, but studies about glycemic regulation during fasting are scarce. There are some evidences showing that testosterone can antagonize glucocorticoids action, which are crucial to glucose production during fasting. Thus, the aim of this study was to determine the impact of supraphysiological doses (SDs) of nandrolone decanoate (DECA) on rat glucose metabolism during fasting. Male Wistar rats were treated with i.m. injections of vehicle, a low TD (0.016 mg/100 g b.w.-TD group) or a high SD (1 mg/100 g b.w.-SD group) of DECA, once a week for 8 weeks. After 12 h fasting, we evaluated glucose and pyruvate tolerance tests, liver glycogen content, serum levels of gluconeogenic substrates, insulin and corticosterone, glucose uptake and hexokinase (HK) activity in skeletal muscle, and the adrenal catecholamine content. SD group had increased serum insulin levels and a blunted response to insulin regarding glucose uptake in skeletal muscle. Fasting serum glucose decreased significantly in SD group, as well as the pyruvate tolerance test and liver glycogen content. Moreover, serum levels of glycerol were increased in SD group. Our data indicate that SDs of DECA exert effects on different regulatory points of glucose metabolism, resulting in defective gluconeogenesis and decreased skeletal muscle glucose uptake in response to insulin.
Identifying the Ingroup: A Closer Look at the Influence of Demographic Dissimilarity on Employee Social Identity

Relational demography researchers have constructed models based on social identity theory and self-categorization theory, without fully incorporating their theoretical and empirical richness. We rectify this omission by constructing a model that includes key concepts from these theories and that predicts whether employees will identify with a particular demographic category or with their workgroup, or both. Propositions derived examine whether demographic dissimilarity will positively or negatively influence employee social identity.