Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Direct-to-reverberant Energy Ratio Estimation Based on Interaural Coherence and a Joint ITD/ILD Model

This paper proposes a novel algorithm to estimate the direct-to-reverberant energy ratio (DRR) using hearing aid microphones. The algorithm is based on the interaural magnitude-squared coherence of signals and is able to take both phase and level differences of microphones signals in the binaural configuration into account. We employ a spherical head model to approximate binaural cues. The proposed algorithm uses the common assumption of an ideally diffuse reverberation sound field. We test our approach on signals based on simulated and on measured binaural room impulse responses. Results show improved performance of the proposed algorithm as compared to other coherence-based DRR estimation methods.
Development of an electromagnetic repulsion mechanism for a 40.5kV fast vacuum circuit breaker

Researches on electromagnetic repulsion mechanisms are drawing more and more attention globally. The objective of this paper is to develop an electromagnetic repulsion mechanism for a 40.5 kV vacuum circuit breaker and then to make an optimization. Design of experiments (DOE) method are used to screen the prominent factors. Result shows that three impact factors are the prominent factors, which include the number of coil turns (N), the capacitance of energy-storage capacitor(C), and the charging voltage (U). The other impact factors include: the height of the coil (H), the inner radius (r) and the outer radius (R) of the coil, the thickness (T) and the diameter (D) of the metal plate, and the initial air gap (δ) between the coil and the metal plate. The effect of these nine investigated factors on the performance of the electromagnetic repulsion mechanism is ranked as: C > N > U > H > D > δ > T > R > r. Considering the requirements of dynamic characteristics and cost, an optimum objective is achieved by minimizing the energy stored in capacitor. The optimized parameters of the electromagnetic repulsion mechanism are with the charging voltage of 650 V, the capacitance of energy-storage capacitor of 15 mF and coil turns of 15. The optimized electromagnetic repulsion mechanism is demonstrated for a prototype of 40.5 kV vacuum circuit breaker.
Constructing Strategies for Programming

Learning to program is difficult. To support learning programming, many intelligent tutoring systems for learning programming have been developed. Research has shown that such tutors have positive effects on learning. However, intelligent tutors for learning programming are not widely used. Building an intelligent tutor for a programming language is a substantial amount of work, and utilising it in a course is often hard for a teacher. In this paper we illustrate how to construct strategies for solving programming exercises and how these strategies can be used to automatically support students using an intelligent programming tutor to incrementally develop a program. Using strategies for programming, specifying an exercise becomes relatively easy, and more flexible.
An overview of MIMO communications - a key to gigabit wireless

High data rate wireless communications, nearing 1 Gb/s transmission rates, is of interest in emerging wireless local area networks and home audio/visual networks. Designing very high speed wireless links that offer good quality-of-service and range capability in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environments constitutes a significant research and engineering challenge. Ignoring fading in NLOS environments, we can, in principle, meet the 1 Gb/s data rate requirement with a single-transmit single-receive antenna wireless system if the product of bandwidth (measured in hertz) and spectral efficiency (measured in bits per second per hertz) is equal to 10/sup 9/. A variety of cost, technology and regulatory constraints make such a brute force solution unattractive, if not impossible. The use of multiple antennas at transmitter and receiver, popularly known as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless, is an emerging cost-effective technology that offers substantial leverages in making 1 Gb/s wireless links a reality. The paper provides an overview of MIMO wireless technology covering channel models, performance limits, coding, and transceiver design.
Mortality Associated with Night and Weekend Admissions to ICU with On-Site Intensivist Coverage: Results of a Nine-Year Cohort Study (2006-2014)

Background The association between mortality and time of admission to ICU has been extensively studied but remains controversial. We revaluate the impact of time of admission on ICU mortality by retrospectively investigating a recent (2006–2014) and large ICU cohort with on-site intensivist coverage. Patients and Methods All adults (≥ 18 years) admitted to a tertiary care medical ICU were included in the study. Patients' characteristics, medical management, and mortality were prospectively collected. Patients were classified according to their admission time: week working days on- and off-hours, and weekends. ICU mortality was the primary outcome and adjusted Hazard-ratios (HR) of death were analysed by multivariate Cox model. Results 2,428 patients were included: age 62±18 years; male: 1,515 (62%); and median SAPSII score: 38 (27–52). Overall ICU mortality rate was 13.7%. Admissions to ICU occurred during open-hours in 680 cases (28%), during night-time working days in 1,099 cases (45%) and during weekends in 649 cases (27%). Baseline characteristics of patients were similar between groups except that patients admitted during the second part of night (00:00 to 07:59) have a significantly higher SAPS II score than others. ICU mortality was comparable between patients admitted during different time periods but was significantly higher for those admitted during the second part of the night. Multivariate analysis showed however that admission during weeknights and weekends was not associated with an increased ICU mortality as compared with open-hours admissions. Conclusion Time of admission, especially weeknight and weekend (off-hour admissions), did not influence the prognosis of ICU patients. The higher illness severity of patients admitted during the second part of the night (00:00–07:59) may explain the observed increased mortality.
On the relationship between fundamental measurements in TCP flows

This paper considers fundamental measurements which drive TCP flows: throughput, RTT and loss. It is clear that throughput is, in some sense, a function of both RTT and loss. In their seminal paper Padyhe et al [1] begin with a mathematical model of the TCP sliding window evolution process and come up with an equation showing that TCP throughput is (roughly) proportional to 1/RTT√p where p is the probability of packet loss. Their equation is shown to be consistent with data gathered on several links. This paper takes the opposite approach and analyses a large number of packet traces from well-known sources in order to create a data-driven estimate of the functions which relate TCP, loss and RTT. Regression analysis is used to fit models to connect the quantities. The fitted models show different behaviour from that expected in [1].
Time-frequency-masking-based Determined BSS with Application to Sparse IVA

Most of the determined blind source separation (BSS) algorithms related to the independent component analysis (ICA) were derived from mathematical models of source signals. However, such derivation restricts the application of algorithms to explicitly definable source models, i.e., an implicit model associated with some signal-processing procedure cannot be utilized within such framework. In this paper, we propose an extension of the existing algorithm so that any time-frequency masking method (e.g., those developed in speech enhancement literature) can be incorporated into the determined BSS algorithm. As an application of the proposed algorithm, a sparse extension of the well-known independent vector analysis (IVA) is also proposed for illustrating the potentiality of the masking-based implicit source model.
Development of motion model and position correction method using terrain information for tracked vehicles with sub-tracks

Gyro-based odometry is an easy-to-use localization method for tracked vehicles because it uses only internal sensors. However, on account of track-terrain slippage and transformation caused by changes in sub-track angles, gyro-based odometry for tracked vehicles with sub-tracks experiences difficulties in estimating the exact location of the vehicles. In order to solve this problem, we propose an estimation method with 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) for determining the position and pose of the tracked vehicles using terrain information. (In this study, position refers to the robot's position and pose.) In the proposed method, position are estimated using a particle filter. The subsequent position of each particle are predicted using a motion model that separately considers each contact point of the vehicle with the ground. In addition, each particle is analyzed using terrain and gravity information. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this method.
Assessment of mOMV adjuvant efficacy in the pathogenic H1N1 influenza virus vaccine

Purpose Since the pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus has been a seasonal flu which still poses great human health concerns worldwide, vaccination would be considered as the most effective strategy to control the influenza virus spreading. Here, we assessed adjuvant efficacy of modified outer membrane vesicle (mOMV) towards the pandemic H1N1 split antigen. Materials and Methods For this study, mice were vaccinated twice with various amount of antigen (0.05, 0.1, and 0.5 µg/dose hemagglutinin [HA]) that were mixed with mOMV, aluminum hydroxide (alum), and MF59, as well as the combined adjuvant comprising the mOMV plus alum. Results We found that all the adjuvanted vaccines of A/California/04/09 (CA04, H1N1) containing HA antigen more than 0.1 µg/dose protected effectively from lethal challenge (maCA04, H1N1) virus, compared to the antigen only group. Furthermore, vaccinated mice received as low as 0.05 µg/dose of the split vaccine containing the combined adjuvant (10 µg of mOMV plus alum) showed a full protection against lethal challenge with H1N1 virus. Taken together, these results suggest that mOMV can exert not only the self-adjuvanticity but also a synergy effect for the vaccine efficacy when combined with alum. Conclusion Our results indicate that mOMV could be a promising vaccine adjuvant by itself and it could be used as a vaccine platform for development of various vaccine formulations to prepare future influenza pandemic.
The antimicrobial activity of heterotrophic bacteria isolated from the marine sponge Erylus deficiens (Astrophorida, Geodiidae)

Interest in the study of marine sponges and their associated microbiome has increased both for ecological reasons and for their great biotechnological potential. In this work, heterotrophic bacteria associated with three specimens of the marine sponge Erylus deficiens, were isolated in pure culture, phylogenetically identified and screened for antimicrobial activity. The isolation of bacteria after an enrichment treatment in heterotrophic medium revealed diversity in bacterial composition with only Pseudoalteromonas being shared by two specimens. Of the 83 selected isolates, 58% belong to Proteobacteria, 23% to Actinobacteria and 19% to Firmicutes. Diffusion agar assays for bioactivity screening against four bacterial strains and one yeast, revealed that a high number of the isolated bacteria (68.7%) were active, particularly against Candida albicans and Vibrio anguillarum. Pseudoalteromonas, Microbacterium, and Proteus were the most bioactive genera. After this preliminary screening, the bioactive strains were further evaluated in liquid assays against C. albicans, Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli. Filtered culture medium and acetone extracts from three and 5 days-old cultures were assayed. High antifungal activity against C. albicans in both aqueous and acetone extracts as well as absence of activity against B. subtilis were confirmed. Higher levels of activity were obtained with the aqueous extracts when compared to the acetone extracts and differences were also observed between the 3 and 5 day-old extracts. Furthermore, a low number of active strains was observed against E. coli. Potential presence of type-I polyketide synthases (PKS-I) and non-ribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs) genes were detected in 17 and 30 isolates, respectively. The high levels of bioactivity and the likely presence of associated genes suggest that Erylus deficiens bacteria are potential sources of novel marine bioactive compounds.
Cross-Lingual SRL Based upon Universal Dependencies

In this paper, we introduce a cross-lingual Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) system with language independent features based upon Universal Dependencies. We propose two methods to convert SRL annotations from monolingual dependency trees into universal dependency trees. Our SRL system is based upon cross-lingual features derived from universal dependency trees and a supervised learning that utilizes a maximum entropy classifier. We design experiments to verify whether the Universal Dependencies are suitable for the cross-lingual SRL. The results are very promising and they open new interesting research paths for the future.
Profil Keterampilan Metakognitif Dan Sikap Ilmiah Mahasiswa Jurusan Biologi FMIPA UNM

Abstract: One of the skills needs in the 21st century is thinking skills including metacognitive skills. In addition, it students who have a good scientific attitude. This research was Ex Post Facto with survey method. This study aims to describe the profile of students metacognitive skills and scientific attitude at Department of Biology Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences Universitas Negeri Makassar. The sample of this research was the students of biology class academic year 2016/2017 as many as 115 people, distributed in 4 classes. The metacognitive skills of students was measured by essays, and scientific attitudes was measured using scientific attitude observation sheets. The research instruments were validated before use. Research data was analyzed descriptively qualitative. The results showed that students metacognitive skills was still very risky category with the average score of 10.67. While the students scientific attitude was in the low category with the average score of 3.0. So that required a learning strategy that can empower students' metacognitive skills as well as trained a scientific attitude. Keywords: Metacognitive skills, scientific attitude, learning strategy.
Allpass modeling of LP residual for speaker recognition

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of phase derived from the linear prediction (LP) residual for speaker recognition. Though the sequence of samples in the LP residual are uncorrelated, they are not independent. Since the magnitude spectrum of the LP residual is almost flat, the dependencies among the samples in LP residual are reflected mainly in its phase spectrum. The information in the phase spectrum of the LP residual is captured by modeling LP residual as the output of an allpass filter excited by independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) nongaussian input. The coefficients of the allpass filter are estimated iteratively using higher order cumulants of the input. The estimated coefficients are used as features to build a speaker recognition system using Gaussian mixture models. The speaker recognition system built from the proposed features resulted in an equal error rate of 6% on a population of 50 speakers.
A Divide-and-Conquer Strategy for Shallow Parsing of German Free Texts

We present a divide-and-conquer strategy based on finite state technology for shallow parsing of real-world German texts. In a first phase only the topological structure of a sentence (i.e., verb groups, subclauses) are determined. In a second phase the phrasal grammars are applied to the contents of the different fields of the main and sub-clauses. Shallow parsing is supported by suitably configured preprocessing, including: morphological and on-line compound analysis, efficient POS-filtering, and named entity recognition. The whole approach proved to be very useful for processing of free word order languages like German. Especially for the divide-and-conquer parsing strategy we obtained an f-measure of 87.14% on unseen data.
On the connectedness of peer-to-peer overlay networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications typically use overlay networks to forward the content queries. However, due to the distributed fashion of the overlay establishment, the overlay networks in P2P applications are not guaranteed to be connected. In this paper, we introduce a new concept called 'buddy-assignment graph' for the P2P overlay networks and prove a theorem that the connectedness of a P2P overlay network, being irrelevant to the kind of its overlay graph, is equivalent to the connectedness of its buddy-assignment graph. Then, with the aid of this theorem, we show that (1) when all hosts are active in the P2P overlay networks, two random buddies for each host suffice to make the connectedness probability close to 1 as well as approximating to 1 with the increase of the overlay scale and (2) when hosts are only active in certain probability, though the connectedness probability decreases with the increase of the overlay scale, the connectedness probability can still be very quickly raised to almost 1 by increasing the number of buddies for each host.
A demographic and sentiment analysis of e-cigarette messages on Twitter

Social media provide a potentially useful new data source to understand emerging public health behaviors. In this paper, we study messages about e-cigarettes posted to Twitter.com. We apply methods to classify messages by sentiment and to estimate the gender and age of users. We apply our approach to nearly one million messages about e-cigarettes posted from October 2012 to September 2013. We find that overall volume of e-cigarette tweets increased five-fold (from 30K per month to 150K per month); and that males and younger users were more likely to post positive messages about e-cigarettes. A qualitative analysis also reveals several trends, such as negative sentiment toward people who smoke in class; females giving e-cigarettes to relatives to help them quit smoking; and spikes in people using e-cigarettes to quit smoking in January.
Antioxidant activity evaluation of rosemary ethanol extract and their cellular antioxidant activity toward HeLa cells.

Rosemary ethanol extract (REE) from Rosmarinus officinalis was identified by LC-ESI-MS/MS and 12 compounds were found. Among them, rosmarinic acid (389.78 μg/mg in REE), luteolin-3'-O-glucuronide (325.58 μg/mg), luteolin-5-O-glucuronide (120.92 μg/mg), and geniposide (120.83 μg/mg) are the major components. The antioxidant activity evaluation of REE by off-line HPLC methods indicated that among the 12 compounds, rosmarinic acid had the strongest scavenging activities in both DPPH· and ·OH. The cytotoxicity experiment showed that REE with the concentration ranges from 1 to 100 µg/ml did not significantly affect the cell viability of HeLa, while inhibitory rate reduced to 62.3% when the concentration was increased to 1,000 µg/ml. The results of intracellular antioxidation assay showed that the ability of REE in reducing the reactive oxygen species (ROS) in HeLa cells was higher than rosmanol, and lower than rosmarinic acid without cell toxicity. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS: Plant polyphenols are essential components of functional foods, due to their antioxidant and enzyme inhibition activities. This paper is the first study about the quantification of antioxidant compounds, antioxidant activity evaluation, and their cellular antioxidant activity of polyphenols extract from R. officinalis toward HeLa cells. We aimed to elucidate the chemical composition and recognition of antioxidant components with DPPH and OH free radicals scavenging activity. In addition, the polyphenols dose-response correlations with cellular antioxidant activity were also determined. These results indicated that off-line HPLC method with DPPH and OH free radicals as markers is available for screening antioxidant activity of polyphenols from the mixture.
Extracellular vesicles and viruses: Are they close relatives?

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) released by various cells are small phospholipid membrane-enclosed entities that can carry miRNA. They are now central to research in many fields of biology because they seem to constitute a new system of cell–cell communication. Physical and chemical characteristics of many EVs, as well as their biogenesis pathways, resemble those of retroviruses. Moreover, EVs generated by virus-infected cells can incorporate viral proteins and fragments of viral RNA, being thus indistinguishable from defective (noninfectious) retroviruses. EVs, depending on the proteins and genetic material incorporated in them, play a significant role in viral infection, both facilitating and suppressing it. Deciphering the mechanisms of EV-cell interactions may facilitate the design of EVs that inhibit viral infection and can be used as vehicles for targeted drug delivery.
Activin A Maintains Self‐Renewal and Regulates Fibroblast Growth Factor, Wnt, and Bone Morphogenic Protein Pathways in Human Embryonic Stem Cells

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) self‐renew indefinitely while maintaining pluripotency. The molecular mechanism underlying hESCs self‐renewal and pluripotency is poorly understood. To identify the signaling pathway molecules that maintain the proliferation of hESCs, we performed a microarray analysis comparing an aneuploid H1 hESC line (named H1T) versus euploid H1 hESC line because the H1T hESC line demonstrates a self‐renewal advantage while maintaining pluripotency. We find differential gene expression for the Nodal/Activin, fibroblast growth factor (FGF), Wnt, and Hedgehog (Hh) signaling pathways in the H1T line, which implicates each of these molecules in maintaining the undifferentiated state, whereas the bone morphogenic protein (BMP) and Notch pathways could promote hESCs differentiation. Experimentally, we find that Activin A is necessary and sufficient for the maintenance of self‐renewal and pluripotency of hESCs and supports long‐term feeder and serum‐free growth of hESCs. We show that Activin A induces the expression of Oct4, Nanog, Nodal, Wnt3, basic FGF, and FGF8 and suppresses the BMP signal. Our data indicates Activin A as a key regulator in maintenance of the stemness in hESCs. This finding will help elucidate the complex signaling network that maintains the hESC phenotype and function.
Optimizing challenge in an educational game using large-scale design experiments

Online games can serve as research instruments to explore the effects of game design elements on motivation and learning. In our research, we manipulated the design of an online math game to investigate the effect of challenge on player motivation and learning. To test the \'1cInverted-U Hypothesis\'1d, which predicts that maximum game engagement will occur with moderate challenge, we produced two large-scale (10K and 70K subjects), multi-factor (2x3 and 2x9x8x4x25) online experiments. We found that, in almost all cases, subjects were more engaged and played longer when the game was easier, which seems to contradict the generality of the Inverted-U Hypothesis. Troublingly, we also found that the most engaging design conditions produced the slowest rates of learning. Based on our findings, we describe several design implications that may increase challenge-seeking in games, such as providing feedforward about the anticipated degree of challenge.