Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
GMM-UBM for text-dependent speaker recognition

Traditional Text-Dependent Speaker Recognition (TDSR) systems model the user-specific spoken passwords with frame-based features such as mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) and use Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) or hidden Markov Model (HMM) classifiers to handle the variable length of the feature vector sequence. However, DTW can't deal with cross-channel issue while HMM needs more computational complexity and storage space. In this paper, we introduce text-independent framework GMM-UBM into text-dependent field. It not only solves intersession problem but also a compromise between model accuracy and computational cost. Moreover, a more accurate UBM will get lower EER. A new UBM initialization method, LBG-VQ-EM, will be proposed. Experiments shows that it is better than conventional initialization way like K-means. And we also compare the performance of GMM-UBM and DTW, and two stacked methods of training utterances: frame-based and wave-based. The experimental results showed the performance of GMM-UBM exceeded that of DTW, and that of frame-based outperformed that of wave-based.
Real-time autonomous 3D navigation for tracked vehicles in rescue environments

The paper presents a novel framework for 3D autonomous navigation for tracked vehicles. The framework takes care of clustering and segmentation of point clouds, traversability analysis, autonomous 3D path planning, motion planning and flippers control. Results illustrated in an experiment section show that the framework is promising to face harsh terrains. Robot performance is proved in three main experiments taken in a training rescue area, on fire escape stairs and in a non-planar testing environment, built ad-hoc to prove 3D path planning functionalities. Performance tests are also presented.
Syllable-based Thai duration model using multi-level linear regression and syllable accommodation

This paper proposes a syllable-based Thai duration model using multi-level linear regression and syllable accommodation. To build a timing model reflecting control characteristics directly, we introduce two analysis results on hierarchical control characteristics. First analysis result showed that syllable is highly correlated to higher-phone-level timing controls, while, phone differences by themselves do not affect higher control and contribute to local timing control only. Second one on the syllable accommodation showed that phone duration highly depends on local phone factors. These analysis results support a syllable-based hierarchical model proposed in this paper. Duration prediction experiments of 5fold cross validation showed 46.73 and 32.37 ms in RMS error, and, 0.905 and 0.811 in correlation between measured and predicted duration at syllable and phone levels, respectively. The comparison of prediction precision showed that the proposed syllable-based multi-level duration model better performed than a conventional single-level phone duration model.
Occupational safety training and practices in selected vocational training institutions and workplaces in Kampala, Uganda

Several industrial accidents, some of them fatal, have been reported in Uganda. Causes could include training gaps in vocational training institutions (VTIs) and workplaces. This study investigated how occupational safety training in VTIs and workplaces is implemented. The study was carried out in five selected VTIs and workplaces in Kampala. Data were collected from instructors, workshop technicians, students, workshop managers, production supervisors, machine operators and new technicians in the workplaces. A total of 35 respondents participated in the study. The results revealed that all curricula in VTIs include a component of safety but little is practiced in VTI workshops; in workplaces no specific training content was followed and there were no regular consultations between VTIs and industry on safety skills requirements, resulting in a mismatch in safety skills training. The major constraints to safety training include inadequate funds to purchase safety equipment and inadequate literature on safety.
The SH4-Unique-SH3-SH2 domains dictate specificity in signaling that differentiate c-Yes from c-Src

c-Src and c-Yes are highly homologous members of the Src family of non-receptor tyrosine kinases. The overall sequence similarity between c-Src and c-Yes allows them to perform many overlapping functions. However, the phenotypes of the c-src and c-yes knockout mice, and cells derived from them, are quite different, indicating functional specificity between the two proteins. Specifically, c-src-/- cells are deficient in several processes that require dynamic regulation of the actin cytoskeleton. In order to begin to understand why c-Yes is unable to compensate for c-Src signaling, we used a series of Src/Yes chimeras in which the non-catalytic functional domains of Src527F were replaced by those of c-Yes. Using chicken embryo fibroblasts as a model system, our results indicate that the c-Yes N-terminal SH4-Unique domains are sufficient to inhibit the ability of Src527F to alter cell morphology, induce actin filament rearrangements or stimulate motility or invasive potential. The data also indicate that the SH4-Unique-SH3-SH2 domains of c-Yes work cooperatively and prevent activation of signaling proteins associated with Src527F transformation, including activation of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase, phosphorylation of c-Raf and Akt and downregulation of RhoA-GTP. These data indicate that c-Yes may not modulate signals associated with c-Src-induced changes in actin filament integrity and may explain why c-Yes fails to compensate for c-Src signaling in src-/- cells.
Reputation-based self-management of software process artifact quality in consortium research projects

This paper proposes a PhD research that deals with improving internal documentation in software projects. Software developers often do not like to create documentation because it has few value to the individual himself. Yet the purpose of internal documentation is to help others understand the software and the problem it addresses. Documentation increases development speed, reduces software maintenance costs, helps to keep development on track, and mitigates the negative effects of distance in distributed settings. This research aims to increase the individuals' motivation to write documentation by means of reputation. The CollabReview prototype is a web-based reputation system that analyzes artifacts of internal documentation to derive personal reputation scores. Developers making many good contributions will achieve higher reputation scores. These scores can then be employed to softly influence developer behavior, e.g. by incentivizing them to contribute to documentation with social rewards. No strict rule enforcement is necessary.
Clinical impact of enhanced diagnosis of invasive fungal disease in high-risk haematology and stem cell transplant patients

Aims: To investigate the impact of routine use of biomarkers for diagnosing fungal infection within a care pathway on antifungal usage and clinical outcomes. Methods: A cohort of high-risk haematology and stem cell transplant patients was entered into a neutropenic care pathway in which targeted diagnostic testing replaced empiric antifungal treatment. Patients were screened twice a week by PCR and antigen testing during fever or when chronic graft versus host disease was present and were followed-up for a minimum of 1 year. Results: No excess morbidity or mortality was seen in patients in whom empiric antifungal treatment was withheld, and there were substantial savings in antifungal drug expenditure. Conclusions: The introduction of a comprehensive diagnostic surveillance strategy to exclude invasive fungal infection in high-risk patients with haematological malignancy and those undergoing transplantation can result in improvements in clinical management. There are also potential additional benefits of improved patient survival, decreased morbidity and decreased hospital stay.
Connection between Oligomeric State and Gating Characteristics of Mechanosensitive Ion Channels

The mechanosensitive channel of large conductance (MscL) is capable of transducing mechanical stimuli such as membrane tension into an electrochemical response. MscL provides a widely-studied model system for mechanotransduction and, more generally, for how bilayer mechanical properties regulate protein conformational changes. Much effort has been expended on the detailed experimental characterization of the molecular structure and biological function of MscL. However, despite its central significance, even basic issues such as the physiologically relevant oligomeric states and molecular structures of MscL remain a matter of debate. In particular, tetrameric, pentameric, and hexameric oligomeric states of MscL have been proposed, together with a range of detailed molecular structures of MscL in the closed and open channel states. Previous theoretical work has shown that the basic phenomenology of MscL gating can be understood using an elastic model describing the energetic cost of the thickness deformations induced by MscL in the surrounding lipid bilayer. Here, we generalize this elastic model to account for the proposed oligomeric states and hydrophobic shapes of MscL. We find that the oligomeric state and hydrophobic shape of MscL are reflected in the energetic cost of lipid bilayer deformations. We make quantitative predictions pertaining to the gating characteristics associated with various structural models of MscL and, in particular, show that different oligomeric states and hydrophobic shapes of MscL yield distinct membrane contributions to the gating energy and gating tension. Thus, the functional properties of MscL provide a signature of the oligomeric state and hydrophobic shape of MscL. Our results suggest that, in addition to the hydrophobic mismatch between membrane proteins and the surrounding lipid bilayer, the symmetry and shape of the hydrophobic surfaces of membrane proteins play an important role in the regulation of protein function by bilayer membranes.
Cloud Scale Resource Management: Challenges and Techniques

Managing resources at large scale while providing performance isolation and efficient use of underlying hardware is a key challenge for any cloud management software. Most virtual machine (VM) resource management systems like VMware DRS clusters, Microsoft PRO and Eucalyptus, do not currently scale to the number of hosts and VMs supported by cloud service providers. In addition to scale, other challenges include heterogeneity of systems, compatibility constraints between virtual machines and underlying hardware, islands of resources created due to storage and network connectivity and limited scale of storage resources. In this paper, we shed light on some of the key issues in building cloud-scale resource management systems, based on five years of research and shipping cluster resource management products. Furthermore, we discuss various techniques to provide large scale resource management, along with the pros and cons of each technique. We hope to motivate future research in this area to develop practical solutions to these issues.
Modeling and Analysis of Local Comprehensive Minutia Relation for Fingerprint Matching

This paper introduces a robust fingerprint matching scheme based on the comprehensive minutia and the binary relation between minutiae. In the method, a fingerprint is represented as a graph, of which the comprehensive minutiae act as the vertex set and the local binary minutia relations provide the edge set. Then, the transformation-invariant and transformation-variant features are extracted from the binary relation. The transformation-invariant features are suitable to estimate the local matching probability, whereas the transformation-variant features are used to model the fingerprint rotation transformation with the adaptive Parzen window. Finally, the fingerprint matching is conducted with the variable bounded box method and iterative strategy. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme is effective and robust in fingerprint alignment and matching.
A Bayesian Model for Generative Transition-based Dependency Parsing

We propose a simple, scalable, fully generative model for transition-based dependency parsing with high accuracy. The model, parameterized by Hierarchical Pitman-Yor Processes, overcomes the limitations of previous generative models by allowing fast and accurate inference. We propose an efficient decoding algorithm based on particle filtering that can adapt the beam size to the uncertainty in the model while jointly predicting POS tags and parse trees. The UAS of the parser is on par with that of a greedy discriminative baseline. As a language model, it obtains better perplexity than a n-gram model by performing semi-supervised learning over a large unlabelled corpus. We show that the model is able to generate locally and syntactically coherent sentences, opening the door to further applications in language generation.
Two-stage part-based pedestrian detection

This paper introduces a part-based two-stage pedestrian detector. The system finds pedestrian candidates with an AdaBoost cascade on Haar-like features. It then verifies each candidate using a part-based HOG-SVM doing first a regression and then a classification based on the estimated function output from the regression. It uses the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) computed on both the full, upper and lower body of the candidates, and uses these in the final verification. The system has been trained and tested on the INRIA dataset and performs better than similar previous work, which uses full-body verification.
Imaging and strain mapping fibre by fibre in the vicinity of a fatigue crack in a Ti/SiC fibre composite

Abstract High resolution X-ray micro-tomography has been combined with high spatial resolution diffraction measurements to map the relationship between damage and elastic strain in individual fibres in the bulk of a metal matrix composite containing a matrix fatigue crack in 3D for the first time. Approximately three plies bridge the transverse matrix fatigue crack. The interfacial shear stress distributions in individual bridging fibres have been derived from the respective axial fibre strain profiles. For each fibre these profiles indicate a step jump in interfacial shear stress at the boundary between sliding and perfect bonding. This sudden decrease is taken to be the result of a sharp drop in the sliding stress due to fretting fatigue. Furthermore, the sliding stress appears to decrease towards the matrix crack. The extent of fibre sliding makes a 'V' shape in the crack wake, extending around 1·5 mm either side of the crack for ply 1. There is some evidence supporting stick–slip and a lower reverse sliding stress (about 30–50 MPa) than the forward one (about 50–60 MPa).
Definition and acquisition of CM and DM EMI noise for general-purpose adjustable speed motor drives

Separating conducted EMI noise into different modes, common mode (CM) and differential mode (DM), is important to the appropriate application of emission reduction techniques. While the CM/DM separation is well defined and understood for the single-phase or DC system, the same cannot be said for three-phase converter systems, common for general-purpose adjustable speed drives (ASD). Based on the study of CM and DM propagation characteristics of a three-phase diode-front converter, this paper identify different noise modes for different front-diode conducting patterns. The impact on EMI filter components by these noise modes is summarized. Finally, a time-domain based method is proposed to separate and acquire CM and DM noise components for the diode-front three-phase systems. Simulation and experimental verifications are presented.
Cell-based delay locked loop compiler

Digital Delay-Locked Loops (DLLs) have been widely used in today's ICs for all kinds of timing control. Even though a digital DLL circuit is much easier to design than its analog counterparts, our prior experience shows that weeks of efforts, if not months, could still be wasted in order to find a process resilient configuration for a specific DLL requirement. Thus, we propose in this work a cell-based DLL architecture and its compiler. According to a user's demand, our DLL compiler can generate a cell-based DLL circuit in just minutes, it can support easy process migration, and thereby saving a large amount of human efforts spent in tuning DLL designs for different manufacturing processes. Transistor-level simulation has been used to validate its ability in a 0.18 CMOS process and a 90nm CMOS process. It can support input clock frequency up to 1GHz in 0.18 μm, and 1.25GHz in 90nm.
Effect of Concentration on Polyacrylonitrile （PAN） Nanofibers

The study investigates the effect of solution concentration on the morphology of polyacrylonitrile (PAN) nanofibers. PAN electrospun nanofibers are produced from PAN/DMF solutions at six different concentrations (6%-16%). The morphology of the nanofibers is analyzed by scanning electron microscope. The experimental results show that the fiber diameter increases and the bead formation decreases as the concentration increases. On the other hand, the nanofiber diameter becomes finer but less uniform as the concentration decreases.
Data Mining: An Overview from a Database Perspective

Mining information and knowledge from large databases has been recognized by many researchers as a key research topic in database systems and machine learning, and by many industrial companies as an important area with an opportunity of major revenues. Researchers in many different fields have shown great interest in data mining. Several emerging applications in information-providing services, such as data warehousing and online services over the Internet, also call for various data mining techniques to better understand user behavior, to improve the service provided and to increase business opportunities. In response to such a demand, this article provides a survey, from a database researcher's point of view, on the data mining techniques developed recently. A classification of the available data mining techniques is provided and a comparative study of such techniques is presented.
Universal sheet resistance and revised phase diagram of the cuprate high-temperature superconductors

Upon introducing charge carriers into the copper–oxygen sheets of the enigmatic lamellar cuprates, the ground state evolves from an insulator to a superconductor and eventually to a seemingly conventional metal (a Fermi liquid). Much has remained elusive about the nature of this evolution and about the peculiar metallic state at intermediate hole-carrier concentrations (p). The planar resistivity of this unconventional metal exhibits a linear temperature dependence (ρ ∝ T) that is disrupted upon cooling toward the superconducting state by the opening of a partial gap (the pseudogap) on the Fermi surface. Here, we first demonstrate for the quintessential compound HgBa2CuO4+δ a dramatic switch from linear to purely quadratic (Fermi liquid-like, ρ ∝ T2) resistive behavior in the pseudogap regime. Despite the considerable variation in crystal structures and disorder among different compounds, our result together with prior work gives insight into the p-T phase diagram and reveals the fundamental resistance per copper–oxygen sheet in both linear (ρ☐ = A1☐T) and quadratic (ρ☐ = A2☐T2) regimes, with A1☐ ∝ A2☐ ∝ 1/p. Theoretical models can now be benchmarked against this remarkably simple universal behavior. Deviations from this underlying behavior can be expected to lead to new insight into the nonuniversal features exhibited by certain compounds.
The Phosphorylation Status of a Cyclic AMP-Responsive Activator Is Modulated via a Chromatin-Dependent Mechanism

ABSTRACT Cyclic AMP (cAMP) stimulates the expression of numerous genes via the protein kinase A (PKA)-mediated phosphorylation of CREB at Ser133. Ser133 phosphorylation, in turn, promotes recruitment of the coactivator CREB binding protein and its paralog p300, histone acetyltransferases (HATs) that have been proposed to mediate target gene activation, in part, by destabilizing promoter bound nucleosomes and thereby allowing assembly of the transcriptional apparatus. Here we show that although histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors potentiate target gene activation via cAMP, they do not stimulate transcription over the early burst phase, during which CREB phosphorylation and CBP/p300 recruitment are maximal. Rather, HDAC inhibitors augment CREB activity during the late attenuation phase by prolonging CREB phosphorylation on chromosomal but, remarkably, not on extrachromosomal templates. In reconstitution studies, assembly of periodic nucleosomal arrays on a cAMP-responsive promoter template potently inhibited CREB phosphorylation by PKA, and acetylation of these template-bound nucleosomes by p300 partially rescued CREB phosphorylation by PKA. Our results suggest a novel regulatory mechanism by which cellular HATs and HDACs modulate the phosphorylation status of nuclear activators in response to cellular signals.
TeamUFAL: WSD+EL as Document Retrieval

This paper describes our system for SemEval2015 Task 13: Multilingual All-Words Sense Disambiguation and Entity Linking. We have participated with our system in the sub-task which aims at monolingual all-words disambiguation and entity linking. Aside from system description, we pay closer attention to the evaluation of system outputs.
Investment decisions in hospital technology when physicians are devoted workers

This paper analyses the decision to invest in a new technology (as a way to increase quality) by a hospital using a real option framework. The environment is characterised by uncertainty on costs and returns of such investment and by the assumption that physicians are ‘devoted workers’. We model the behaviour of three main actors: an agency purchasing hospital care (purchaser), a hospital (provider) and a representative hospital physician. The purchaser rewards the hospital at a fixed price for each patient treated and sets a quality-contingent long-term contract with the hospital according to a purchasing rule. First, we show that the presence of devoted physicians allows the hospital to reduce its investment while increasing the level of quality of care provided. We then analyse how the purchaser may influence the timing of the hospital's investment and the quality of care through strategic setting of the purchasing rule parameters. In particular, we show that if the purchaser aims at maximising overall quality of hospital care when physicians are devoted workers, it is not optimal to set a purchasing rule that cancels out the value of the option to defer the hospital's investment.