Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Detecting fetal heart sounds by means of Fractal Dimension analysis in the Wavelet domain

Phonocardiography is a low-cost technique for the detection of fetal heart sounds (FHS) that can extend clinical auscultation in mobile and home care setups. The work presented here examines the transferability of a Wavelet Transform (WT)-based method that combines also Fractal Dimension (FD) analysis, previously proposed as WT-FD for the cases of lung and bowel sound analysis [4], to the extraction of FHSs. The WT-FD method has been evaluated with 12 simulated FHS signals and has shown promising results in terms of accuracy and performance (89%) in identifying the location of heartbeat, even in cases of signals with additive noise up to (6dB). This robustness paves the way for WT-FD testing in real FHSs, recorded under clinical setting, clearly contributing to better evaluation of the fetal heart functionality.
Determining the Relative Benefits of Pairing Virtual Reality Displays with Applications

Over the last century, virtual reality (VR) technologies (stereoscopic displays in particular) have repeatedly been advertised as the future of movies, television, and more recently, gaming and general HCI. However after each wave of commercial VR products, consumer interest in them has slowly faded away as the novelty of the experience wore off and its benefits were no longer perceived as enough to outweigh the cost and limitations. Academic research has shown that the amount of benefit a VR technology provides depends in the application it is used for and that, contrary to how these technologies are often marketed, there is currently no one-size-fits-all 3D technology. In this paper we present an evaluation framework designed to determine the quality of depth cues produced when using a 3D display technology with a specific application. We also present the results of using this framework to evaluate some common consumer VR technologies. Our framework works by evaluating the technical properties of both the display and application against a set of quality metrics. This framework can help identify the 3D display technology which provides the largest benefit for a desired application.
Bending invariant representations for surfaces

Isometric surfaces share the same geometric structure also known as the first fundamental form. For example, bending of a given surface, that includes length preserving deformations without tearing or stretching the surface, are considered to be isometric. We present a method to construct a bending invariant canonical form for such surfaces. This invariant representation is an embedding of the intrinsic geodesic structure of the surface in a finite dimensional Euclidean space, in which geodesic distances are approximated by Euclidean ones. The canonical representation is constructed by first measuring the intergeodesic distances between points on the surfaces. Next, multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) techniques are applied to extract a finite dimensional flat space in which geodesic distances are represented as Euclidean ones. The geodesic distances are measured by the efficient fast marching on triangulated domains numerical algorithm. Applying this transform to various objects with similar geodesic structures (similar first fundamental form) maps isometric objects into similar canonical forms. We show a simple surface classification method based on the bending invariant canonical form.
Comparison study of neural network and deep neural network on repricing GAP prediction in Indonesian conventional public bank

The economic condition of a country is determined by the bank condition of that country it self, so that's why the whole world keep looking for the most effective and efficient method in conducting the assessment of the bank performance condition. Risk rate is commonly used to perform an analysis of the health condition of the bank, mainly using repricing gap. This research is propose deep neural network (DNN) which is one of deep learning algorithm as a method to predict the value of the repricing gap of the bank. The experiments is do a performance comparison of two methods that are neural network — standard backpropagation (SB) and DNN, by using 10 years historical data of monthly report. In DNN is using autoencoder which is an unsupervised algorithm as initiator value gradient on the formation of the network. The experimental results of both methods is the performance of DNN is better than SB. Using 30700 iteration, obtained the MSE value for DNN is more lower than SB. At high iteration amount, DNN still consistent to press the MSE value, and it's different with SB that start slowing down at the earliest iteration point, about 5700 iteration. DNN network topology that used in the experiments is the topology that can produce a model that have the most minimum MSE value, and that is equal network topology. (Every hidden layer neuron has the same number of units).
Multi-task recurrent model for true multilingual speech recognition

Research on multilingual speech recognition remains attractive yet challenging. Recent studies focus on learning shared structures under the multi-task paradigm, in particular a feature sharing structure. This approach has been found effective to improve performance on each individual language. However, this approach is only useful when the deployed system supports just one language. In a true multilingual scenario where multiple languages are allowed, performance will be significantly reduced due to the competition among languages in the decoding space. This paper presents a multi-task recurrent model that involves a multilingual speech recognition (ASR) component and a language recognition (LR) component, and the ASR component is informed of the language information by the LR component, leading to a language-aware recognition. We tested the approach on an English-Chinese bilingual recognition task. The results show that the proposed multi-task recurrent model can improve performance of multilingual recognition systems.
ffice-based dynamic imaging of vocal cords in awake atients with swept-source optical coherence omography

hongping Chen niversity of California, Irvine epartment of Biomedical Engineering rvine, California 92697 and niversity of California, Irvine eckman Laser Institute rvine, California 92617 Abstract. Optical coherence tomography OCT is an evolving noninvasive imaging modality that has been used to image the human larynx during surgical endoscopy. The design of a long gradient index GRIN lens–based probe capable of capturing images of the human larynx by use of swept-source OCT during a typical office-based laryngoscopy examination is presented. In vivo OCT imaging of the human larynx is demonstrated with a rate of 40 frames per second. Dynamic vibration of the vocal folds is recorded to provide not only high-resolution cross-sectional tissue structures but also vibration parameters, such as the vibration frequency and magnitude of the vocal cords, which provides important information for clinical diagnosis and treatment, as well as fundamental research of the voice itself. Office-based OCT is a promising imaging modality to study the larynx for physicians in otolaryngology. © 2009 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. DOI: 10.1117/1.3268442
Data condensation in large databases by incremental learning with support vector machines

An algorithm for data condensation using support vector machines (SVM) is presented. The algorithm extracts data points lying close to the class boundaries, which form a much reduced but critical set for classification. The problem of large memory requirements for training SVM in batch mode is circumvented by adopting an active incremental learning algorithm. The learning strategy is motivated from the condensed nearest neighbor classification technique. Experimental results presented show that such active incremental learning enjoy superiority in terms of computation time and condensation ratio, over related methods.
The limits of Earth orbital calculations for geological time-scale use

The orbital motion of the planets in the Solar System is chaotic. As a result, initially close orbits diverge exponentially with a characteristic Lyapunov time of 5 Ma. This sensitivity to initial conditions will limit the possibility to obtain an accurate solution for the orbital and precessional motion of the Earth over more than 35 to 50 Ma. The principal sources of uncertainty in the model are review here. It appears that at present the largest source of error could reside in the lack of knowledge of the value of the precession due to the oblateness (J2) of the Sun. Nevertheless, for the calibration of geological time-scale, this limitation can be overcome to some extent if one considers in the geological data the signature of the outer planets secular orbital motion which is predictable on a much longer time-scale. Moreover, it should be possible to observe in the geological records the trace of transition from the (s4 −s3)−2(g4− g3) secular resonance to the (s4− s3)− (g4− g3) resonance. The detection and dating of these passages should induce extremely high constraints on the dynamical models for the orbital evolution of the Solar System.
Investigating effect of rich syntactic features on Mandarin prosodic phrase boundaries prediction

Previous researches indicated that the performance of automatic prosodic boundaries prediction benefited from syntactic information for Mandarin. However, few researches focused on the usefulness of various syntactic features on different phrase boundaries prediction detailly, especially on large-scale corpus. This paper investigates the effect of different syntactic features combinations for prosodic phrase boundaries prediction based on a large-scale Mandarin corpus. The experimental results shows that prediction models of prosodic word and prosodic phrase achieve best performance with syntactic phrase and dependency features. Different from other two types of boundaries, the models with dependency features outperform than models with other features when prediction object is intonational phrase.
Making a Difference in Educational Quality Through Teacher Education

Is teacher education beneficial and worthwhile? What standards are being established for admitting students to teacher education programs? What is the relationship of these standards to teacher effectiveness? These questions and others implicit in the debate regard ing the efficacy of teacher preparation programs are discussed by Evertson, Hawley and Zlotnik. The authors review the extensive body of research surround ing preparation programs, make propo sals for strengthening teacher prepara tion, and offer words of caution to those endorsing many of the popular proposals for teacher education reform, including advocates of alternative credentialing.
On the Practical (In-)Security of 64-bit Block Ciphers: Collision Attacks on HTTP over TLS and OpenVPN

While modern block ciphers, such as AES, have a block size of at least 128 bits, there are many 64-bit block ciphers, such as 3DES and Blowfish, that are still widely supported in Internet security protocols such as TLS, SSH, and IPsec. When used in CBC mode, these ciphers are known to be susceptible to collision attacks when they are used to encrypt around 232 blocks of data (the so-called birthday bound). This threat has traditionally been dismissed as impractical since it requires some prior knowledge of the plaintext and even then, it only leaks a few secret bits per gigabyte. Indeed, practical collision attacks have never been demonstrated against any mainstream security protocol, leading to the continued use of 64-bit ciphers on the Internet. In this work, we demonstrate two concrete attacks that exploit collisions on short block ciphers. First, we present an attack on the use of 3DES in HTTPS that can be used to recover a secret session cookie. Second, we show how a similar attack on Blowfish can be used to recover HTTP BasicAuth credentials sent over OpenVPN connections. In our proof-of-concept demos, the attacker needs to capture about 785GB of data, which takes between 19-38 hours in our setting. This complexity is comparable to the recent RC4 attacks on TLS: the only fully implemented attack takes 75 hours. We evaluate the impact of our attacks by measuring the use of 64-bit block ciphers in real-world protocols. We discuss mitigations, such as disabling all 64-bit block ciphers, and report on the response of various software vendors to our responsible disclosure of these attacks.
The Use of Tobacco and Cannabis at an International Music Festival

Background: Music festivals are known to attract a high proportion of drug users. Methods: Using a survey of 1,772 visitors at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, we assessed substance use at the festival, the incidence of use of substances among never-users and the incidence of use among lifetime users who had not used a substance in the past 12 months. Results: New onset of tobacco use was reported by 9.2% of never-smokers, and new onset of cannabis use was reported by 9.3% of never-smokers of cannabis. Resumption of tobacco use was reported by 24% of past year abstainers, and resumption of cannabis use was reported by 30% of past year abstainers. New onset of other types of substances was reported by less than 0.5% of subjects, but among past year abstainers, 5–10% reported resumption of amphetamine, ketamine, MDMA and cocaine use. New onset smokers of cannabis were significantly younger than never-smokers. Conclusion: Music festivals such as the Roskilde Festival may be important arenas for the prevention of onset of tobacco and cannabis use and for a return to substance use.
Cognitive function in idiopathic generalized epilepsy of childhood

This study evaluated the cognitive profiles of children with idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE), uniformly treated with valproic acid with well‐controlled seizures. Twenty‐four were neuropsychologically evaluated. They comprised: 14 females, 10 males: 12 with generalized tonic‐clonic seizures (GTCS), mean age 14y 4mo, SD 1y 7mo, range 12y to 16y 4 mo; 12 with absence seizures (AS) mean age 14y 5mo, SD 1y 10mo, range 11y to 16y 4mo, with intellectual abilities within the normal range and age‐appropriate scholastic skills, and 20 healthy controls (12 females, 8 males; mean age 14y 5mo, SD 1y 10mo, range 10y 7mo to 16y 7mo). As a group, children with IGE performed significantly poorer in all tests (non‐verbal and verbal attention, verbal learning and memory, word fluency, and controlled sequential fine motor responses) excluding nonverbal memory. Analysis according to type of seizure revealed that both patient groups (AS and GTCS) had an attention deficit, whereas only children with AS showed deficits in verbal learning and memory, word fluency, and controlled fine motor responses. These results suggest a long‐term risk of learning impairment for children with IGE, even if they have normal intelligence and their seizures are well controlled.
On ISI-free Modulations for Diffusion based Molecular Communication

A diffusion molecular channel is a channel with memory, as molecules released into the medium hit the receptors after a random delay. Coding over the diffusion channel is performed by choosing the type, intensity, or the released time of molecules diffused in the environment over time. To avoid intersymbol interference (ISI), molecules of the same type should be released at time instances that are sufficiently far apart. This ensures that molecules of a previous transmission are faded in the environment, before molecules of the same type are reused for signaling. In this paper, we consider ISI-free time-slotted modulation schemes. The maximum reliable transmission rate for these modulations is given by the constrained coding capacity of the graph that represents the permissible transmission sequences. However, achieving the constrained coding capacity requires long blocklengths and delays at the decoder, making it impractical for simple nanomachines. The main contribution of this paper is to consider modulations with small delay (short blocklength) and show that they get very close to constrained coding capacity.
Environmental Adaptation by Persons in their Later Life

In an attempt to delay institutionalization among elders while supporting their widespread desire for privacy and independence in living style, it has been deemed necessary to adapt the physical and social milieu to fit declining competence. The theoretical rationale underlying current housing policy can be identified in person-environment theories of aging. The aims of this article are to (1) assess critically and expand Lawton's ecological model of aging as it pertains to environmental decisions among the elderly, and (2) test a series of hypotheses derived from the theoretical discussion using a 1987 study of environmental adaptation among 280 elderly, 74 years of age and over, living in the community. The most striking finding is the tendency for older elderly to engage in psychological processes of adaptation to a greater extent than altering the physical or social characteristics of the home environment. The findings suggest extending the Lawton model to include a wider range of subjective attributes of the individual.
Using echo state networks for robot navigation behavior acquisition

Robot behavior learning by demonstration deals with the ability for a robot to learn a behavior from one or several demonstrations provided by a human teacher, possibly through tele-operation or imitation. This implies controllers that can address both (1) the feature selection problem related to a great amount of mostly irrelevant sensory data and (2) dealing with temporal sequences of demonstrations. Echo state networks (H. Jaeger, 2001) have been proposed recently for time series prediction and have been shown to perform remarkably well on this kind of data. In this paper, we introduce ESN to robot behavior acquisition in the scope of a mobile robot performing navigation tasks. ESN actually show comparable and even better performance with that of other algorithms from the literature in similar experimental conditions. Moreover, some properties regarding dynamics of ESN in the context of learning by demonstration are investigated.
Finding connected components in O(log n loglog n) time on the EREW PRAM

In this paper, a parallel algorithm for finding the connected components of an undirected graph is presented. On a graph with n vertices and m edges, the algorithm runs in O(log n log log n) time using n + m processors on an EREW (exclusive-read and exclusive-write) PRAM. Prior to our work, the best exclusive-write algorithm known for this problem required O(log1.5n) time using n + m processors (D. B. Johnson and P. Metaxas, in "Proceedings 32nd Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, 1991, pp. 688-697; D. R. Karger, N. Nisan, and M. Parnas, in "Proceedings 4th Annual ACM Symposium on Parallel Architectures and Algorithms, 1992," pp. 373-381; N. Nisan, S. Szemerdi, and A. Wigderson, in "Proceedings 33rd Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, 1992," pp. 24-29).
Unit commitment considering demand response behavior based on utility maximization

The active participation of demand side resources in power grid operation not only benefits the individual participant but also benefits the whole system. The optimal goal can promote by excavating the active behaviors of demand side. The welfare maximization of market participant is the driving force of such active behaviors. Considering the independence of each user's behavior, the consumer's utility function is selected to depict consumer's preference and demand response behavior. In order to coordinate the consumers' maximum welfare with social welfare maximization, consumers' utility function and units' operation cost are integrated into Unit Commitment (UC) model. The objective function is to maximize social welfare, by subtracting units' operation cost from consumers' total utility, and this objective can be acquired. Considering the proposed model should be solved in a distributed manner, the idea of the centralized coordination and the decentralized decision-making is proposed. Based on the Lagrangian relaxation (LR) principle and distributed real-time pricing scheme, a closed-loop feedback mechanism is constructed to reflect the relationship among generator output, price level, and load demand. The ten generating units example can illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Customised and Noncustomised Birth Weight Centiles and Prediction of Stillbirth and Infant Mortality and Morbidity: A Cohort Study of 979,912 Term Singleton Pregnancies in Scotland

Background There is limited evidence to support the use of customised centile charts to identify those at risk of stillbirth and infant death at term. We sought to determine birth weight thresholds at which mortality and morbidity increased and the predictive ability of noncustomised (accounting for gestational age and sex) and partially customised centiles (additionally accounting for maternal height and parity) to identify fetuses at risk. Methods This is a population-based linkage study of 979,912 term singleton pregnancies in Scotland, United Kingdom, between 1992 and 2010. The main exposures were noncustomised and partially customised birth weight centiles. The primary outcomes were infant death, stillbirth, overall mortality (infant and stillbirth), Apgar score <7 at 5 min, and admission to the neonatal unit. Optimal thresholds that predicted outcomes for both non- and partially customised birth weight centiles were calculated. Prediction of mortality between non- and partially customised birth weight centiles was compared using area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (AUROC) and net reclassification index (NRI). Findings Birth weight ≤25th centile was associated with higher risk for all mortality and morbidity outcomes. For stillbirth, low Apgar score, and neonatal unit admission, risk also increased from the 85th centile. Similar patterns and magnitude of associations were observed for both non- and partially customised birth weight centiles. Partially customised birth weight centiles did not improve the discrimination of mortality (AUROC 0.61 [95%CI 0.60, 0.62]) compared with noncustomised birth weight centiles (AUROC 0.62 [95%CI 0.60, 0.63]) and slightly underperformed in reclassifying pregnancies to different risk categories for both fatal and non-fatal adverse outcomes (NRI -0.027 [95% CI -0.039, -0.016], p < 0.001). We were unable to fully customise centile charts because we lacked data on maternal weight and ethnicity. Additional analyses in an independent UK cohort (n = 10,515) suggested that lack of data on ethnicity in this population (in which national statistics show 98% are white British) and maternal weight would have misclassified ~15% of the large-for-gestation fetuses. Conclusions At term, birth weight remains strongly associated with the risk of stillbirth and infant death and neonatal morbidity. Partial customisation does not improve prediction performance. Consideration of early term delivery or closer surveillance for those with a predicted birth weight ≤25th or ≥85th centile may reduce adverse outcomes. Replication of the analysis with fully customised centiles accounting for ethnicity is warranted.