Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards context-aware face anonymisation

Today's high-end mobile phones commonly include one or two digital cameras. These devices, also known as cameraphones, allow their owners to take photographs anywhere, at any time with practically no cost. As a result, many urban dwellers are photographed everyday without even being aware of it. Although in many countries, legislation recognises the right of people to veto the dissemination of their image, snapshots including recognisable passers-by often end up on photo-sharing websites. In this paper, we present a cooperative system for cameraphones which automatically anonymises faces of people photographed involuntarily. Our system, called BlurMe, uses Bluetooth awareness to inform a photographer's cameraphone when people around this photographer do not wish for their picture being taken. It then identifies subjects on the photograph and anonymises other people's faces. BlurMe was tested on 876 face regions detected on 150 real-life photographs collected from a photo-sharing website and manually labelled for subject faces. The system achieved very promising results on photographs with up to three subjects.
A coalescent framework for comparing alternative models of population structure with genetic data: evolution of Celebes toads

Isolation of populations eventually leads to divergence by genetic drift, but if connectivity varies over time, its impact on diversification may be difficult to discern. Even when the habitat patches of multiple species overlap, differences in their demographic parameters, molecular evolution and stochastic events contribute to differences in the magnitude and distribution of their genetic variation. The Indonesian island of Sulawesi, for example, harbours a suite of endemic species whose intraspecific differentiation or interspecific divergence may have been catalysed by habitat fragmentation. To further test this hypothesis, we have performed phylogenetic and coalescent-based analyses on molecular variation in mitochondrial and nuclear DNA of the Celebes toad (Bufo celebensis). Results support a role for habitat fragmentation that led to a population structure in these toads that closely matches distributions of Sulawesi macaque monkeys. Habitat fragmentation, therefore, may also have affected other groups on this island.
Accent Sandhi Estimation of Tokyo Dialect of Japanese Using Conditional Random Fields

When synthesizing speech from Japanese text, correct assignment of accent nuclei for input text with arbitrary contents is indispensable in obtaining naturally-sounding synthetic speech. A phenomenon called accent sandhi occurs in utterances of Japanese; when a word is uttered in a sentence, its accent nucleus may change depending on the contexts of preceding/succeeding words. This paper describes a statistical method for automatically predicting the accent nucleus changes due to accent sandhi. First, as the basis of the research, a database of Japanese text was constructed with labels of accent phrase boundaries and accent nucleus positions when uttered in sentences. A single native speaker of Tokyo dialect Japanese annotated all the labels for 6,344 Japanese sentences. Then, using this database, a conditional-random-field-based method was developed using this database to predict accent phrase boundaries and accent nuclei. The proposed method predicted accent nucleus positions for accent phrases with 94.66% accuracy, clearly surpassing the 87.48% accuracy obtained using our rule-based method. A listening experiment was also conducted on synthetic speech obtained using the proposed method and that obtained using the rule-based method. The results show that our method significantly improved the naturalness of synthetic speech. key words: Japanese text-to-speech, accent sandhi, accent phrase boundary estimation, accent type estimation, conditional random field
Developmental correlates of emotional intelligence: Temperament, family environment and childhood trauma

Abstract This study examined temperament, environmental factors (family environment and childhood trauma), and the interaction between them as developmental correlates of ability and trait emotional intelligence (EI). Using 97 university students, correlational analyses revealed that temperament characteristics were related to trait but not ability EI. Components of family environment and childhood trauma were not significantly related to ability or trait EI. Multiple regression analyses confirmed the importance of temperament in predicting trait EI, but provided little support for the role of environmental factors or their interactions with temperament in predicting either type of EI.
Sexually dimorphic immunoreactivity of galanin and colocalization with arginine vasotocin in the chicken brain (Gallus gallus domesticus)

The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis medialis (BSTM) of adult chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) was previously shown to synthesize arginine vasotocin (AVT) in males only and coincides spatially and temporally with steroid activity regulating male reproductive behavior. Galanin has been shown to be a potent modulator of the behavioral and neuroendocrine responses in the mammalian BSTM and in other sexually dimorphic brain regions. In the present study of adult chickens the morphological relationship of AVT and galanin was examined by immunohistochemical analysis of two limbic structures, the BSTM and the lateral septum (SL). The analysis also included the hypothalamic nuclei supraopticus (SON) and paraventricularis (PVN). In males galanin and AVT were both synthesized in the BSTM, while in females neither galanin nor AVT was present. Furthermore, in the males galanin and AVT were colocalized in the majority of neurons within BSTM and in fibers of the SL. In both sexes galanin neurons in the PVN were scattered between the distinct clusters of AVT neurons and there was no colocalization of galanin and AVT in single PVN neurons. Furthermore, AVT immunoreactivity was significantly higher in the SON than in the PVN in both sexes. In the SON, galanin was colocalized with AVT in significantly more neurons in hens than in males (P ≤ 0.05%). These results demonstrate that the distributions of galanin and AVT are sexually dimorphic not only in the limbic BSTM but also in the hypothalamic SON. It is tempting to speculate that galanin in the SON is involved in regulation of oviposition as an AVT‐dependent female‐specific function. J. Comp. Neurol. 499:828–839, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The development of self-assembled liquid crystal display alignment layers

From simple pocket calculators to mobile telephones and liquid crystal display (LCD)-TV, over the past few decades, devices based on LCD technology have proliferated and can now be found in all conceivable aspects of everyday life. Although used in cutting-edge technology, it is surprising that a vital part in the construction of such displays, namely the alignment layer, relies essentially on a mechanical rubbing process, invented almost 100 years ago. In this paper efforts to develop alignment layers (also called command layers) by processes other than rubbing, namely self-assembly of molecular and macromolecular components will be discussed. Two topics will be presented: (i) tuneable command layers formed by stepwise assembling of siloxane oligomers and phthalocyanine dyes on indium tin oxide surfaces and (ii) command layers formed by self-assembly of porphyrin trimers. The potential use of these layers in sensor devices will also be mentioned.
Modeling of Process Parameters for Enhanced Production of Coenzyme Q10 From Rhodotorula glutinis

Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) plays an indispensable role in ATP generation through oxidative phosphorylation and helps in scavenging superoxides generated during electron transfer reactions. It finds extensive applications specifically related to oxidative damage and metabolic dysfunctions. This article reports the use of a statistical approach to optimize the concentration of key variables for the enhanced production of CoQ10 by Rhodotorula glutinis in a lab-scale fermenter. The culture conditions that promote optimum growth and CoQ10 production were optimized and the interaction of significant variables para-hydroxybenzoic acid (PHB, 819.34 mg/L) and soybean oil (7.78% [v/v]) was studied using response surface methodology (RSM). CoQ10 production increased considerably from 10 mg/L (in control) to 39.2 mg/L in batch mode with RSM-optimized precursor concentration. In the fed-batch mode, PHB and soybean oil feeding strategy enhanced CoQ10 production to 78.2 mg/L.
Image Classification via Object-Aware Holistic Superpixel Selection

In this paper, we propose an object-aware holistic superpixel selection (HPS) method to automatically select the discriminative superpixels of an image for image classification purpose. Through only considering the selected superpixels, the interference of cluttered background on the object can be alleviated effectively and thus the classification performance is significantly enhanced. In particular, for an image, HPS first selects the discriminative superpixels for the characteristics of certain class, which can together match the object template of this class well. In addition, these superpixels compose a class-specific matching region. Through performing such superpixel selection for several most probable classes, respectively, HPS generates multiple class-specific matching regions for a single image. Then, HPS merges these matching regions into an integral object region through exploiting their pixel-level intersection information. Finally, such object region instead of the original image is used for image classification. An appealing advantage of HPS is the ability to alleviate the interference of cluttered background yet not require the object to be segmented out accurately. We evaluate the proposed HPS on four challenging image classification benchmark datasets: Oxford-IIIT PET 37, Caltech-UCSD Birds 200, Caltech 101, and PASCAL VOC 2011. The experimental results consistently show that the proposed HPS can remarkably improve the classification performance.
Extensible Architecture for High-Performance, Scalable, Reliable Publish-Subscribe Eventing and Notification

Existing Web service notification and eventing standards are useful in many applications, but they have serious limitations that make them ill-suited for large-scale deployments, or as a middleware or a component- integration technology in todayâ€™s data centers. For example, it is not possible to use IP multicast, or for recipients to forward messages to others, scalable notification trees must be setup manually, and no end-to-end security, reliability, or QoS guarantees can be provided. We propose an architecture that is free of such limitations and that may serve as a basis for extending or complementing the existing standards. The approach emerges from our work on QuickSilver, a new, extremely modular and extensible platform for high-performance, scalable, reliable eventing.
Domain adaptation via within-class covariance correction in I-vector based speaker recognition systems

In this paper we propose a technique of Within-Class Covariance Correction (WCC) for Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) in Speaker Recognition to perform an unsupervised adaptation of LDA to an unseen data domain, and/or to compensate for speaker population difference among different portions of LDA training dataset. The paper follows on the study of source-normalization and inter-database variability compensation techniques which deal with multimodal distribution of i-vectors. On the DARPA RATS (Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech) task, we show that, with two hours of unsupervised data, we improve the Equal-Error Rate (EER) by 17.5%, and 36% relative on the unmatched and semi-matched conditions, respectively. On the Domain Adaptation Challenge we show up to 70% relative EER reduction and we propose a data clustering procedure to identify the directions of the domain-based variability in the adaptation data.
Galanin modulates oxytocin release from rat hypothalamo-neurohypophysial explant in vitro - the role of acute or prolonged osmotic stimulus.

INTRODUCTION Galanin (Gal) may be involved as the neuromodulator of different processes in the central nervous system in the regulation of neurohypophysial function. The aim of the present study was to examine the influence of Gal on oxytocin (OT) release in vitro: an acute or prolonged osmotic stimulus was used as the stimulatory agent. MATERIAL AND METHODS Experiments were carried out on three-month old male rats which acted as donors of isolated rat hypothalamus (Hth), neurohypophysis (NH) or hypothalamo-neurohypophysial explants (Hth-NH). The effect of Gal on OT secretion was studied under conditions of non-osmotic (i.e. K(+)-evoked) (series 1), direct osmotic (i.e. Na(+)-evoked) (series 2) or indirect osmotic stimulation (series 3; neural tissues were obtained from animals drinking 2% NaCl). OT content was determined by radioimmunoassay. RESULTS Galanin added into incubative media caused the inhibition of basal OT release from NH and Hth-NH explants prepared from euhydrated rats but stimulated basal and K(+)-stimulated OT release from the Hth tissue. Gal did not exert any influence on Na(+)-evoked OT secretion. We observed increased basal OT secretion from NH and K(+)-evoked respective OT release from Hth and Hth-NH explants taken from osmotically challenged rats under the influence of Gal. CONCLUSIONS Present experiments in vitro show that: 1. Galanin plays the role of an inhibitory neuromodulator of OT release from the neurohypophysis; its effect is opposite at the hypothalamic level. 2. Galanin acts as the stimulatory neuromodulator of OT release in response to prolonged osmotic stimulus; an acute osmotic stimulus blocks OT-ergic neurons susceptible to Gal.
Towards the Spatial Analysis of Vague and Imaginary Places : Evolving the Spatial Humanities through Medieval Romance

The establishment of the field of Spatial Humanities testifies to the success in the use of technologies such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for the analysis of texts in Humanities. Although the increasing volume of projects can be regarded as a sign of advance, an important challenge has remained unsolved in this field and it has been barely addressed. The majority of research dealing with spatial narratives in historical and literary corpora, focus on the investigation of what can be called ‘real’ geographies. This is to say, places that can be located and analysed through coordinates in software such as GIS. The challenge, however, is that a large number of narratives deal with places that are geographically vague and/or imaginary. We presented this challenge at the Digital Humanities Conference during the summer of 2016 as part of the workshop ‘A Place for Places’ from which this volume emerges. On it, we posed the question: How can we, through computational methods, move into the analysis of spatial narratives incorporating real, vague, and imaginary space and place? Looking to address this key question and using the iconic French medieval romances of Chretién de Troyes as example, this article presents a preliminary analysis that implements a tailored methodology combining a spatial and linguistic approach for the
Efficient fuzzy-connectedness segmentation using symmetric convolution and adaptive thresholding

Fuzzy Connectedness segmentation emerged in recent years as an alternative to traditional "hard" image-segmentation approaches. It employs scale-based affinity, which incorporates both fuzziness and degree of hanging-togetherness of a region, to extract regions of interest from, especially, medical images. Computation complexity has been, however, one of its arguable issues that needs further theoretical investigation and improvement. Furthermore, the homogeneity parameter needs to be specified on per image fashion. In this paper we propose an improved fuzzy connectedness segmentation method by utilizing a sequential grow-and-merge scheme that we called symmetric convolution and an adaptive thresholding technique that incorporates an entropy-guided process to determine the homogeneity parameter. The proposed approach with symmetric convolution is proven valid and efficient. We employ a simulated on-line Brain database-BrainWeb to generate the testbed to evaluate the accuracy and robustness of the proposed algorithm.
A Graph-Based Vehicle Proposal Location and Detection Algorithm

The majority of the existing appearance-based vehicle-detection systems make use of a sliding-window paradigm for vehicle-candidate regions location. In order to locate all vehicle regions with various sizes and shapes, a large number of search windows are generated by a sliding-window paradigm in most vehicle-detection systems. It is desirable to obtain fewer and more precisely located vehicle candidate regions for further detection. For this purpose, a novel graph-based algorithm is proposed to locate the vehicle proposal regions, which estimates the possibility of a vehicle contained in a bounding box. Experimental results on the public traffic analysis data set (KITTI) and PASCAL VOC 2007 show that the proposed region proposal approach leads to better performances compared with popular bottom-up region proposal methods. Moreover, the proposed vehicle-detection system is evaluated on the KITTI data set, which are determined to be satisfactory, even for the images containing vehicles that have undergone scale variations and camera viewpoint changes, as well as for images that were photographed with complex backgrounds.
Simple , Correct Parallelization for Blocked Gibbs Sampling Graham Neubig November

We present a method for distributing collapsed Gibbs sampling over multiple processors that is simple, statistically correct, and memory efficient. The method uses blocked sampling, dividing the training data into relatively large sized blocks, and distributing the sampling of each block over multiple processors. At the end of each parallel run, MetropolisHastings rejection sampling is performed to ensure that samples are being drawn from the correct distribution. Empirical results on part-of-speech tagging and word segmentation tasks show that the proposed blocked sampling method can sample from the true distribution while achieving convergence speed comparable with previous parallel sampling methods.
HF radar for port management: Case study in the port of rotterdam

The phased array HF ocean radar installed at the Port of Rotterdam gives good quality near real-time information on surface currents for port management. This paper examines the potential to infer current profiles from HF radar and wind station data using prior knowledge of the site. It is shown that tidal currents follow a logarithmic boundary layer profile, and the wind-driven currents have an approximately exponential profile. These two models are combined to estimate the current profiles.
The use of particle swarm optimisation for the tracking of Induction motor faulty lines

This paper focuses on particles swarm optimization as a resource related to the tracking of faulty current lines of induction motor operating under fault. This can approach should be an opportunity to rise up the principal lines dealing with a rotor broken bar even if the motor operates at variable frequency. The approach considered in this paper a linear time varying inertia weight. We will show the ability of this approach to estimate the line frequency and the fault line frequencies. The induction motor operates under one full broken bar. Experiments prove that particle swarm optimization method is an efficient method to solve the optimization problem as to extract information quickly from a spectrum.
A bio-inspired quadruped robot with a global compliant spine

A compliant spine of one-piece elastic material is designed to replace the rigid trunk of a quadruped robot to improve motion coordination among the four legs and postural stability of the trunk. Based on deformation mechanism of elastic material and discretized pseudo rigid body, the shape and dimensions of the compliant spine are designed, and the stress-strain distributions of three different spines are analyzed comparatively. The biologically-inspired central pattern generator is modeled to produce position trajectories for the active joints of the quadruped robot. The effects of the compliant spine on walking of the quadruped robot are evaluated via dynamic simulations. The results show the compliant spine can improve the coordination and postural stability positively. The physical robot is built and can walk compliantly and perform multiple movements.
Bypassing Races in Live Applications with Execution Filters

Deployed multithreaded applications contain many races because these applications are difficult to write, test, and debug. Worse, the number of races in deployed applications may drastically increase due to the rise of multicore hardware and the immaturity of current race detectors. LOOM is a "live-workaround" system designed to quickly and safely bypass application races at runtime. LOOM provides a flexible and safe language for developers to write execution filters that explicitly synchronize code. It then uses an evacuation algorithm to safely install the filters to live applications to avoid races. It reduces its performance overhead using hybrid instrumentation that combines static and dynamic instrumentation. We evaluated LOOM on nine real races from a diverse set of six applications, including MySQL and Apache. Our results show that (1) LOOM can safely fix all evaluated races in a timely manner, thereby increasing application availability; (2) LOOM incurs little performance overhead; (3) LOOM scales well with the number of application threads; and (4) LOOM is easy to use.
Quantification of Fungal DNA by Using Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer and the Light Cycler System

ABSTRACT The Light Cycler technique combines rapid in vitro amplification of DNA in glass capillaries with real-time species determination and quantification of DNA load. We have established a quantitative PCR protocol for two clinically important pathogens, Candida albicans and Aspergillus fumigatus. The sensitivity of the assay was comparable to those of previously described PCR protocols (5 CFU/ml). Specific detection of C. albicans andA. fumigatus could be achieved. The assay showed a high reproducibility of 96 to 99%. The assay was linear in a range between 101 and 104Aspergillus conidia. As capillaries do not have to be reopened for post-PCR analysis, the risk of carryover contaminations could be minimized. The Light Cycler allowed quantification of the fungal loads in a limited number of clinical specimens from patients with hematological malignancies and histologically proven invasive fungal infections. Five of nine positive samples had fungal loads between 5 and 10 CFU/ml of blood, two of nine positive samples had fungal loads between 10 and 100 CFU/ml of blood, and two of nine samples had fungal loads of more than 100 CFU/ml of blood. All samples were also found to be PCR positive by PCR–enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay analysis.