Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Basic auditory processing and sensitivity to prosodic structure in children with specific language impairments: a new look at a perceptual hypothesis

Children with specific language impairments (SLIs) show impaired perception and production of spoken language, and can also present with motor, auditory, and phonological difficulties. Recent auditory studies have shown impaired sensitivity to amplitude rise time (ART) in children with SLIs, along with non-speech rhythmic timing difficulties. Linguistically, these perceptual impairments should affect sensitivity to speech prosody and syllable stress. Here we used two tasks requiring sensitivity to prosodic structure, the DeeDee task and a stress misperception task, to investigate this hypothesis. We also measured auditory processing of ART, rising pitch and sound duration, in both speech (“ba”) and non-speech (tone) stimuli. Participants were 45 children with SLI aged on average 9 years and 50 age-matched controls. We report data for all the SLI children (N = 45, IQ varying), as well as for two independent SLI subgroupings with intact IQ. One subgroup, “Pure SLI,” had intact phonology and reading (N = 16), the other, “SLI PPR” (N = 15), had impaired phonology and reading. Problems with syllable stress and prosodic structure were found for all the group comparisons. Both sub-groups with intact IQ showed reduced sensitivity to ART in speech stimuli, but the PPR subgroup also showed reduced sensitivity to sound duration in speech stimuli. Individual differences in processing syllable stress were associated with auditory processing. These data support a new hypothesis, the “prosodic phrasing” hypothesis, which proposes that grammatical difficulties in SLI may reflect perceptual difficulties with global prosodic structure related to auditory impairments in processing amplitude rise time and duration.
A Combinatorial Approach for Motif Discovery in Unaligned DNA Sequences

Motif (conserved pattern) modelling and finding in unaligned DNA sequences is a fundamental problem in computational biology with important applications in understanding gene regulation. Biological approaches for this problem are tedious and time-consuming. Large amounts of genome sequence data and gene expression micro-array data let us solve this problem computationally. Most computer science problems of this sort are NP -complete. Many heuristic approaches have been developed in the last decade, but the problem is far from being solved. Practical solutions must have good models to describe motifs, a sensitive scoring function to distinguish functional motifs, and a reliable algorithm to recognize these motifs. We discuss these ideas in this thesis and develop a combinatorial approach for profile motif models. Our approach combines greedy signal search and statistical refinement approaches. It tries to catch the motif signal through pairwise signals and to provide the statistical approach with good starting points. Comparative experiments on simulated challenge problems and on real biological samples demonstrate that our approach performs better than other widely used profile motif finding approaches.
Feature Fusion for Registering Wide-baseline Urban Images

This paper proposes a novel automatic image registration method designed for urban scenes containing tall 3D objects under significant viewpoint changes. Our method is based on the fusion of two kinds of features: the interest regions and the edge groups, which we believe are more suitable than conventional local textures for such scenes. Many existing methods face matching difficulty either because of the lack of appropriate textures in urban scenes or due to the difficulty in modeling textures for non-planar objects under complex 3D viewpoint changes, especially for boundary regions. Throughout our registration process, the two “feature tracks” interactively support and constrain each other, producing a large number of initial point-to-point correspondences, which are later refined utilizing global context information. The proposed approach has been tested using urban aerial photos of diverse viewing conditions. Experimental results for challenging inputs have demonstrated its effectiveness.
ON NUMBER FIELDS WITH NONTRIVIAL SUBFIELDS

What is the probability for a number field of composite degree d to have a nontrivial subfield? As the reader might expect the answer heavily depends on the interpretation of probability. We show that if the fields are enumerated by the smallest height of their generators the probability is zero, at least if d > 6. This is in contrast to what one expects when the fields are enumerated by the discriminant. The main result of this paper is an estimate for the number of algebraic numbers of degree d = en and bounded height which generate a field that contains an unspecified subfield of degree e. If n > max{e2 + e, 10}, we get the correct asymptotics as the height tends to infinity.
Adaptive Resource Allocation in Multiuser OFDM Systems Final Report Multidimensional Digital Signal Processing

In a single user communication system, OFDM proves to be a robust technique to mitigate the ISI experienced on frequency selective wideband wireless channels. OFDM is suggested as an approach to be used in multiuser systems, particularly the downlink section of a cellular system. The users of such a system must share resources such as transmit power and subcarriers. In order to increase system performance, it is shown that these resources should be allocated adaptively to users based on their channel information. This report studies two adaptive allocation approaches that maximize system capacity. During the implementation of these approaches, it was found that significant complexity of the algorithms could be reduced by preferring an equal power allocation over the more widely studied water-filling power allocation.
Communications over two-way waveform channels in wireless networks

Two-way channels appear in wireless cellular networks as the duplexing between the base station and the mobile users and in wireless local area networks as the peer-to-peer communications. We examine the two-way channel capacity and find that the capacity of two-way discrete channels and waveform channels without the knowledge of self-interference is the same as that of one-way channels. With the knowledge of self-interference, the capacity of a waveform two-way channel is twice that of a one-way channel.
MHS: a context-enabled regulated framework for pervasive services

Purpose – Pervasive computing environments such as a pervasive campus domain, shopping, etc. will become commonplaces in the near future. The key to enhance these system environments with services relies on the ability to effectively model and represent contextual information, as well as spontaneity in downloading and executing the service interface on a mobile device. The system needs to provide an infrastructure that handles the interaction between a client device that requests a service and a server which responds to the client's request via Web service calls. The system should relieve end‐users from low‐level tasks of matching services with locations or other context information. The mobile users do not need to know or have any knowledge of where the service resides, how to call a service, what the service API detail is and how to execute a service once downloaded. All these low‐level tasks can be handled implicitly by a system. The aim of this paper is to investigate the notion of context‐aware regul.
A Snapshot of CNVs in the Pig Genome

Recent studies of mammalian genomes have uncovered the extent of copy number variation (CNV) that contributes to phenotypic diversity, including health and disease status. Here we report a first account of CNVs in the pig genome covering part of the chromosomes 4, 7, 14, and 17 already sequenced and assembled. A custom tiling oligonucleotide array was used with a median probe spacing of 409 bp for screening 12 unrelated Duroc boars that are founders of a large family material. After a strict CNV calling pipeline, 37 copy number variable regions (CNVRs) across all four chromosomes were identified, with five CNVRs overlapping segmental duplications, three overlapping pig unigenes and one overlapping a RefSeq pig mRNA. This CNV snapshot analysis is the first of its kind in the porcine genome and constitutes the basis for a better understanding of porcine phenotypes and genotypes with the prospect of identifying important economic traits.
An automated system for emulated network experimentation

Emulated networks and systems, where router and server software are run in virtual environments, allow network operators and researchers to perform experiments at large scale more economically than in testbeds. Running real code provides a greater level of realism than simulation. However, large scale comes with a problem: running real software means each test needs at least as much configuration as a real network. To recognise the true value of emulation at scale, we need to reduce the complexity of building, configuring, deploying, and measuring emulated networks. We present a system to facilitate emulation by providing translation from a high-level network design into a concrete set of configurations that are automatically deployed into one of several emulation platforms. Our system can be used to construct multi-domain networks in minutes, and is scalable to networks with over a thousand devices. It is modular, allowing support for different protocols, topology designs, and target platforms: Quagga, JunOS, IOS, etc. Users, from both the research community and industry, have already demonstrated its value in research and education.
Reflective Practice in Healthcare Education: An Umbrella Review

Reflection in healthcare education is an emerging topic with many recently published studies and reviews. This current systematic review of reviews (umbrella review) of this field explores the following aspects: which definitions and models are currently in use; how reflection impacts design, evaluation, and assessment; and what future challenges must be addressed. Nineteen reviews satisfying the inclusion criteria were identified. Emerging themes include the following: reflection is currently regarded as self-reflection and critical reflection, and the epistemology-of-practice notion is less in tandem with the evidence-based medicine paradigm of modern science than expected. Reflective techniques that are recognised in multiple settings (e.g., summative, formative, group vs. individual) have been associated with learning, but assessment as a research topic, is associated with issues of validity, reliability, and reproducibility. Future challenges include the epistemology of reflection in healthcare education and the development of approaches for practising and assessing reflection without loss of theoretical background.
Accounting for Stock-Based Compensation: An Extended Clean Surplus Relation

Residual income valuation is based on the assumption that the clean surplus relation holds. As pointed out by Ohlson (2000), among others, the standard clean surplus relation is frequently violated. Moreover, standard residual income valuation models rest on the implicit assumption that future stated earnings belong to current shareholders only. This is clearly invalid for companies granting employee options. In order to overcome these deficiencies, this paper establishes an extension of the clean surplus relation and derives simple analytical solutions for the value of outstanding stocks in terms of already known accounting information.
A New Experience in Persian Text Clustering using FarsNet Ontology

Clustering through organizing large text corpora has a key role in an easy navigation and browsing of massive amounts of text data and in particular in search engines. The documents comparison using the conventional clustering techniques is based on the surface similarities of words or extracted morphemes. This leads to non-semantic clusters usually. In this paper, Farsi, also known as Persian, has been taken into account with regards to the fact that the amount of electronic Farsi texts are growing rapidly. The documents are enriched by using semantic relationships-synonymy, hypernymy and hyponymy- extracted from FarsNet lexical ontology. A WSD procedure is proposed to decrease uncertainty. After preprocessing routines, three clustering algorithms including Bisecting K-means, LSI and PLSI based clustering is applied on the pre-categorized Persian Hamshahri corpus. Experimental results show the improvement of clustering quality when text data is enriched by the semantic relations especially using PLSI based approach.
Cryptomnesia: Delineating Inadvertent Plagiarism

Cryptomnesia, or inadvertent plagiarism, was experimentally examined in three investigations. Subjects were required to generate category exemplars, alternating with 3 other subjects in Experiments 1 and 2 or with a standardized, written list in Experiment 3. After this generation stage, subjects attempted to recall those items which they had just generated and an equal number of completely new items from each category. Plagiarism of others' generated responses occurred in all three tasks (generation, recall own, and recall new) in each experiment, despite instructions to avoid such intrusions. The amount of plagiarism was greater under more complex generation sequences and for items produced from orthographic relative to semantic categories. The most likely source of plagiarized responses was the person who had responded just before the subject in the generation sequence. Directions for future research are discussed.
Decomposable graphical Gaussian model determination

We propose a methodology for Bayesian model determination in decomposable graphical Gaussian models. To achieve this aim we consider a hyper inverse Wishart prior distribution on the concentration matrix for each given graph. To ensure compatibility across models, such prior distributions are obtained by marginalisation from the prior conditional on the complete graph. We explore alternative structures for the hyperparameters of the latter, and their consequences for the model. Model determination is carried out by implementing a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler. In particular, the dimension-changing move we propose involves adding or dropping an edge from the graph. We characterise the set of moves which preserve the decomposability of the graph, giving a fast algorithm for maintaining the junction tree representation of the graph at each sweep. As state variable, we use the incomplete variance-covariance matrix, containing only the elements for which the corresponding element of the inverse is nonzero. This allows all computations to be performed locally, at the clique level, which is a clear advantage for the analysis of large and complex datasets. Finally, the statistical and computational performance of the procedure is illustrated by mean of both artificial and real datasets.
Bootstrapping structured page segmentation

In this paper, we present an approach to the bootstrap learning of a page segmentation model. The idea evolves from attempts to segment dictionaries that often have a consistent page structure, and is extended to the segmentation of more general structured documents. In cases of highly regular structure, the layout can be learned from examples of only a few pages. The system is first trained using a small number of samples, and a larger test set is processed based on the training result. After making corrections to a selected subset of the test set, these corrected samples are combined with the original training samples to generate bootstrap samples. The newly created samples are used to retrain the system, refine the learned features and resegment the test samples. This procedure is applied iteratively until the learned parameters are stable. Using this approach, we do not need to initially provide a large set of training samples. We have applied this segmentation to many structured documents such as dictionaries, phone books, spoken language transcripts, and obtained satisfying segmentation performance.
How are the career related decisions of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds shaped during their transition towards the end of compulsory schooling

6 Declaration of Original Contribution 7 Copyright Statement 8 Acknowledgements 9 Figures 10 Abbreviations 12 Part 1: Introduction to the Thesis Chapter 1: Introduction 13 1.1: Professional Background and Research Focus 13 1.2: Research Approach 15 1.3: The Location of this Research in the Literature 16 1.4: Structure of Thesis 18 1.5: Chapter Summary 19 Part 2: The Literature Chapter 2: Literature Review 20 2.1: The Train Journey 21 2.2: The Transition Landscape 23 2.3: The Car Journey 25 2.4: The Interpretation 28 2.5: Reflexivity 33 2.6: Chapter Summary 35 Chapter 3: Conceptual Framework 37 3.1: Summary of the Concepts 38 3.2: The Concept of Field 40 3.3: The Concept of Habitus 44 3.4: The Concept of Social Capital 47 3.5: The Concept of Cultural Capital 51 3.6: The Concept of Reflexivity 53
Link Adaptation Mechanism Based on Cross Layer Design for MIMO Systems

In this paper, we present and analyze a novel link layer transmission strategy for wireless networks using multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technology at the physical layer. When the channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitter (CSIT), we present an adaptation algorithm that selects the proper orthogonal sub-channels of the MIMO link to use in order to increase the link layer throughput while maintaining an acceptable frame loss rate. Computer simulations show that the proposed adaptation technique provides a significant performance improvement achieved by designing MIMO-aware link layer algorithms
Web service composition based on bounded model checking

With the acceptance of service-oriented architecture (SOA) in many application domains and rapidly growing number of available services, it is now a challenge to effectively compose services to meet users' needs. In this paper, we present a service composition method based on bounded model checking technique. Specifically, a web service community includes a set of web services whose behavior are specified as labeled transition system and composition requirements are described by linear temporal logic formulas, then bounded model checking tools can be used to automatically synthesize composite services that use only the services in the service community to realize composition requirements. Experiment results show that this method can adapt to large-scale web service composition scenarios.
Design of Robust Control for Pertubed Systems Using QFT

Automatic control systems permeate life in all advanced societies of the day. Developments in ACS has evolved more complex systems. In these complex systems disturbances and noise etc. need to be more effectively addressed. In the present paper such issues are considered in the design process of the controllers. Such systems act as catalysts to promote progress and development in propelling society. In this paper the design of robust control for perturbed systems is presented. The Quantitative Feedback Theory is used for the design of robust control of perturbed system. The foundation of QFT is the fact that feedback is principally needed when the plant is uncertain and / or there are uncertain inputs (disturbances) acting on the plant. The motivation to use QFT in feedback design is to evolve a process in which the designer must trade off between complexity and specifications.
Becoming action-aware through reasoning about logged plan execution traces

Robots that know what they are doing can solve their tasks more reliably, flexibly, and efficiently. They can even explain what they were doing, how and why. In this paper we describe a system that not only is capable of executing flexible and reliable plans on a robotic platform but can also explain control decisions and the reason for specific actions, diagnose the cause of failures and answer queries about the robot's beliefs. For instance, when queried why it opened the cupboard door, the robot might answer that it did so because it believed Michael's cup to be in there. This type of reasoning is not only helpful for debugging but also provides the mechanisms for complex monitoring and failure handling that is not based on local failures and exception handling but on the expressive formulation of error patterns in first order logics. Our system is based on semantic annotations of plans, a fast logging mechanism and the computation of predicates in a first-order representation based on the execution trace.
SAFE: A Statistical Approach to F0 Estimation Under Clean and Noisy Conditions

A novel Statistical Algorithm for F0 Estimation (SAFE) is proposed to improve the accuracy of F0 estimation under both clean and noisy conditions. Prominent signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) peaks in speech spectra constitute a robust information source from which F0 can be inferred. A probabilistic framework is proposed to model the effect of noise on voiced speech spectra. Prominent SNR peaks in the low-frequency band (0 - 1000 Hz) are important to F0 estimation, and prominent SNR peaks in the middle and high-frequency bands (1000-3000 Hz) are also useful supplemental information to F0 estimation under noisy conditions, especially the babble noise condition. Experiments show that the SAFE algorithm has the lowest gross pitch errors (GPEs) compared to prevailing F0 trackers in white and babble noise conditions at low SNRs. Experimental results also show that SAFE is robust in maintaining a low mean and standard deviation of the fine pitch errors (MFPE and SDFPE) in noise. The code of SAFE is available at http://www.ee. ucla.edu/~weichu/safe.
The Improvement of Mothers’ and Children’s Emotional and Behavioral Reactions through the Modification of Attentional Bias in Mothers: A Micro-Trial Study

SYNOPSIS Objective. The aim of this study was to test whether and to what extent inducing attentional bias in mothers toward a child’s positive emotions using a micro-trial method would improve mothers’ emotional and behavioral reactions in parenting-related situations. Effects on children were also assessed. Design. Forty-two mothers of 4- to 5-year-old children participated. Half of the mothers were exposed to an attention bias modification task designed to elicit a transient bias toward positive stimuli. After the manipulation, they were observed during a free-play session and frustration laboratory tasks designed to elicit positive and negative emotions. Results. Mothers exposed to the attention bias modification task displayed more positive emotional and behavioral reactions toward their child during both free-play and frustration tasks. Their children also behaved better, especially during the free-play session. The influence of mothers’ attention allocation on children’s outcomes was mediated by mothers’ behavior. Conclusions. An attention bias modification program is useful in improving interactions between mothers and children.