Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Audio-Based Event Detection in Videos - a Comprehensive Survey

Applications such as video classification, video summarization, video retrieval, highlight extraction, and so forth. , need discriminating activities occurring in the video. Such activity or event detection in videos has significant consequences in security, surveillance, entertainment and personal archiving. Typical systems focus on the usage of visual cues. Audio cues, however, contains rich information that might be effectively used for event detection and Multimedia Event Detection (MED) could benefit from the attention of researchers in audio analysis. Many audio-based event detection methods have been proposed for specific applications, while others are generic. This survey presents an exhaustive review of efforts in the past years to address the issues of using audio-based cues in video event detection. Existing methods that are based on audio features and modeling techniques that have been used are summarized in this survey. We hope to provide a good understanding of different directions in this field of research. KeywordsEvent detection, Highlight Extraction, Gaussian Mixture Model, Support Vector Machine
PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIODEMOGRAPHIC CORRELATES OF THE IRRITABLE BOWEL SYNDROME

SUMMARY Thirty patients with the Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) were evaluated for personality profiles and psychiatric morbidity. In comparison with normal controls, these patients were more neurotic, showed more anxiety and had a higher incidence of neurotic depression, anxiety neurosis and alcoholism. IBS was found to be more common in young, urban males and sedentary workers.
Renal transplantation in Iran.

Iran—formerly called Persia—is located in the Middle East between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. It covers 1 648 000 km and has 60 million inhabitants. The prevalence of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients in Iran is about 15 000 and the annual incidence of new ESRD patients is 3175 or 53 patients per million populations per year. Iran has the most successful renal transplant programme in the region. The renal transplant activity of the country has reached 24 renal transplants per million per year. There are two periods in the evolution of the renal transplantation programme in Iran. During the first period (1967–1988) all transplants were from living related donors (LRD) and the number of renal transplants performed was much lower than the national demand. In the beginning of the second period (1988–2000) by careful attention to the country’s cultural, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds a controlled living unrelated donor (LURD) renal transplant programme was adopted. As a result, in the last 12 years more than 10 000 renal transplants were performed and the renal transplant waiting list was eliminated by the end of 1999. In this article, I will first review the history of renal transplantation in Iran from 1967 to 2000 and describe the practice of renal transplantation emphasizing the characteristics of our LURD renal transplantation programme. Then I will report the results of 1420 consecutive renal transplants from LRD and LURD that have been carried out in our centre. Finally, I will discuss the necessity for and the ethical issues involved with our LURD renal transplantation programme. History of renal transplantation in Iran (1967–2000)
Jamming emitter localization with multiple UAVs equipped with smart antennas

This paper presents a wideband jamming emitter localization method based on the fusion of multiple direction-of-arrivals (DOAs) and time-difference-of-arrival(s) (TDOA(s)) obtained from multiple unmanned-aerial-vehicles (UAVs). In this technique, we assume that multiple trajectory controllable UAVs are available and they are equipped with smart antennas to estimate the emitter's angle (DOA) with respect to themselves. In addition, UAVs communicate with each other to support the estimation of TDOA between pair(s) of UAVs and the emitter. The obtained DOA and TDOA information is fused at one UAV using an extended Kalman filter (EKF) to localize and track the mobile/static jamming emitter. In this method, we use DOA fusion to provide a good initialization of the emitter position to guarantee the EKF's convergence speed. The emitter localization accuracy is provided by the fusion of TDOAs if three or more UAVs are available. The simulation results show that the localizing-tracking error is less than 15% of the range difference estimation error standard deviation with three UAVs that is accurate enough for jamming emitter destruction.
An Analysis of Post Contributions in the Hacker Community

We are interested in how the posters in the hacker community contribute and exchange information. Text-mining techniques have been used to learn about the quality nature of the posts. We found that the knowledge exchanges in the hacker community are both interesting and complex. We uncover some interesting knowledge exchange behavioral patterns between initial post contributor and post repliers (initiators vs. followers). Namely, popular threads, i.e., threads with more replies, actually generate lower quality discussions in replies. On the other hand, we observe a higher percentage of quality replies with less popular threads. The results show that thread popularity does not immediately imply valuable discussions. In fact, threads with lower initial post quality are often associated with higher quality yet less popularity discussions
Alteration of Ca2+ Dependence of Neurotransmitter Release by Disruption of Ca2+ Channel/Syntaxin Interaction

Presynaptic N-type calcium channels interact with syntaxin and synaptosome-associated protein of 25 kDa (SNAP-25) through a binding site in the intracellular loop connecting domains II and III of the α1 subunit. This binding region was loaded into embryonic spinal neurons of Xenopus by early blastomere injection. After culturing, synaptic transmission of peptide-loaded and control cells was compared by measuring postsynaptic responses under different external Ca2+ concentrations. The relative transmitter release of injected neurons was reduced by ∼25% at physiological Ca2+ concentration, whereas injection of the corresponding region of the L-type Ca2+channel had virtually no effect. When applied to a theoretical model, these results imply that 70% of the formerly linked vesicles have been uncoupled after action of the peptide. Our data suggest that severing the physical interaction between presynaptic calcium channels and synaptic proteins will not prevent synaptic transmission at this synapse but will make it less efficient by shifting its Ca2+ dependence to higher values.
Noise Power Spectral Density Estimation based on Maximum a Posteriori and Generalized Gamma Distribution

Noise power spectral density (PSD) estimation is a crucial part of speech enhancement system due to its contributory effect on the quality of the noise reduced speech. A novel estimation method for color noise PSD on the basis of an assumption of generalized Gamma distribution and maximum a posteriori (MAP) criterion is proposed. In the experiment, generalized Gamma PDF which is a natural extension of the Gaussian modeling of a non-white components distribution is found best fitting in four types of color noises compared with Laplace, Rayleigh distributions. After that MAP noise estimators based on the reported generalized Gamma PDF models are competed with Minimum Statistics (MS), minimum mean square error (MMSE) based PSD estimation and Maximum Likelihood estimation (MLE) noise tracking methods in evaluations. The performance of the proposed noise estimations are good as demonstrated by log error, segmental SNR and PESQ measures when they are integrated with the speech enhancement technique.
Human detection and tracking in an assistive living service robot through multimodal data fusion

A new method is proposed for using a combination of measurements from a laser range finder and a depth camera in a data fusion process that benefits from each modality's strong side. The combination leads to a significantly improved performance of the human detection and tracking in comparison with what is achievable from the singular modalities. The useful information from both laser and depth camera is automatically extracted and combined in a Bayesian formulation that is estimated using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling framework. The experiments show that this algorithm can track robustly multiple people in real world assistive robotics applications.
Hierarchical Back-off Modeling of Hiero Grammar based on Non-parametric Bayesian Model

In hierarchical phrase-based machine translation, a rule table is automatically learned by heuristically extracting synchronous rules from a parallel corpus. As a result, spuriously many rules are extracted which may be composed of various incorrect rules. The larger rule table incurs more run time for decoding and may result in lower translation quality. To resolve the problems, we propose a hierarchical back-off model for Hiero grammar, an instance of a synchronous context free grammar (SCFG), on the basis of the hierarchical Pitman-Yor process. The model can extract a compact rule and phrase table without resorting to any heuristics by hierarchically backing off to smaller phrases under SCFG. Inference is efficiently carried out using two-step synchronous parsing of Xiao et al., (2012) combined with slice sampling. In our experiments, the proposed model achieved higher or at least comparable translation quality against a previous Bayesian model on various language pairs; German/French/Spanish/JapaneseEnglish. When compared against heuristic models, our model achieved comparable translation quality on a full size GermanEnglish language pair in Europarl v7 corpus with significantly smaller grammar size; less than 10% of that for heuristic model.
Scientific Software Installation Testing Using a Plan-Do-Check-Act Methodology: A Case Study

The scientific software installation testing has a main goal: Evaluate if the software meets its requirements and specifications. In this paper, the scientific software installation in six machines is evaluated. The software installation was tested using a PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) approach in 3 machines and were compared with other 3 machines which were installed exclusively based in the installer experience. The software installed on the machines using a PDCA approach for testing, lead to the expected results. Scientific software installation should be tested during the installation and not as a final test. A methodology based on PDCA is recommended for testing scientific software.
Management of Gliomas: Overview of the Latest Technological Advancements and Related Behavioral Drawbacks

The advancements in basic sciences and the availability of sophisticated technological aids to surgical removal of gliomas have led over the last few years to the rise of innovative surgical strategies, the identification of better prognostic/predictive biomolecular factors, and the development of novel drugs and all are meant to profoundly impact the outcome of patients diagnosed with these aggressive tumours. Unfortunately, the treatment protocols available nowadays still confer only a small survival advantage at a potentially high cost in terms of overall well-being. In this review we identified the potential and limits of the most promising research trends in the management of glioma patients, also highlighting the related externalities. Finally, we focused our attention on the imbalance between the technical and behavioral aspects pertinent to this research area, which ultimately represent the two sides of the same coin.
Robust video watermarking for MPEG compression and DA-AD conversion

In this paper, we proposed a robust video watermarking system. Using DCT domain spread-spectrum watermarking, our system achieved robustness to various non-hostile video processings such as MPEG compression, and DA-AD conversion. Our proposed system guarantees that 16-bit data can be extracted in any 15 second interval, even in a long video, by using adaptive frame selection. To verify the performance of the proposed system, various experiments were carried out under a DA-AD conversion environment. Experimental results show that the proposed method is not only robust to non-hostile video processings but also achieves invisibility.
Virtual Machine Replay Update: Improved Implementation for Modern Hardware Architecture

This paper describes a successive and updated work of Revirt project which presents a virtual machine replay framework on Xen hyper visor. As both the commodity hardware and Xen hyper visor have been changed significantly since the first publication of Revirt, the initial implementation does not meet the needs of modern architecture any more. This paper presents an improved implementation of virtual machine execution replay system called CAS Motion. CAS Motion has three contributions. First, CAS Motion uses the performance monitor of Intel Core2 processor to construct time point of recorded events, which makes the event record more complete and precise. Second, CAS Motion can fully support multi-core hardware platform which is prevalent today. Third, CAS Motion is developed with more general architecture design, which makes it deployable on upstream Xen hyper visor and Dom0. Our experiments under a varity of workloads shows CAS Motion has low performance impact on monitored DomU. The growth of record log is also in acceptable range.
Gamma-Ray Bursts from Neutron Star Kicks

The idea that gamma-ray bursts might be a phenomenon associated with neutron star kicks was first proposed by Dar & Plaga. Here we study this mechanism in more detail and point out that the neutron star should be a high-speed one (with proper motion larger than ~1000 km s-1). It is shown that the model agrees well with observations in many aspects, such as the energetics, the event rate, the collimation, the bimodal distribution of durations, the narrowly clustered intrinsic energy, and the association of gamma-ray bursts with supernovae and star-forming regions. We also discuss the implications of this model on the neutron star kick mechanism and suggest that the high kick speed was probably acquired as the result of the electromagnetic rocket effect of a millisecond magnetar with an off-centered magnetic dipole.
Extending gerontological research through linking investigators' studies to public-use datasets.

PURPOSE Public-use datasets can extend data collected by individual investigators in various ways: making external comparisons, providing additional data on individual respondents, and creating internal comparison groups. The authors describe the advantages and limitations of these methods and practical and conceptual issues in combining investigator-initiated and public-use datasets. DESIGN AND METHODS These issues are illustrated with a study of functional decline among 674 patients following hospitalization for hip fracture that was augmented with data from a public-use dataset, the Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly (EPESE). RESULTS By creating an internal comparison group of EPESE respondents, frequency matched to hip fracture patients on age, sex, and baseline functional limitations, the authors formed a single dataset and performed multivariable analyses of factors associated with functional decline. IMPLICATIONS Gerontological research may benefit by applying these methods to program evaluations and longitudinal analyses of health outcomes with numerous public-use datasets.
Pattern extraction methods for ear biometrics - A survey

The Human Ear is a new class of relatively stable Biometrics that has drawn researcher's attention recently. Human ear is a perfect data for passive person identification, which can be applied to provide security in the public places. In this article, we overview the proposed Pattern extraction algorithms from 2D and 3D Ear images.
Joint crisis plans for people with borderline personality disorder: feasibility and outcomes in a randomised controlled trial

Background People with borderline personality disorder frequently experience crises. To date, no randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of crisis interventions for this population have been published. Aims To examine the feasibility of recruiting and retaining adults with borderline personality disorder to a pilot RCT investigating the potential efficacy and cost-effectiveness of using a joint crisis plan. Method An RCT of joint crisis plans for community-dwelling adults with borderline personality disorder (trial registration: ISRCTN12440268). The primary outcome measure was the occurrence of self-harming behaviour over the 6-month period following randomisation. Secondary outcomes included depression, anxiety, engagement and satisfaction with services, quality of life, well-being and cost-effectiveness. Results In total, 88 adults out of the 133 referred were eligible and were randomised to receive a joint crisis plan in addition to treatment as usual (TAU; n=46) or TAU alone (n=42). This represented approximately 75% of our target sample size and follow-up data were collected on 73 (83.0%) participants. Intention-to-treat analysis revealed no significant differences in the proportion of participants who reported self-harming (odds ratio (OR) =1.9, 95% CI 0.53-6.5,P = 0.33) or the frequency of self-harming behaviour (rate ratio (RR)=0.74, 95% CI 0.34-1.63, P=0.46) between the two groups at follow-up. No significant differences were observed between the two groups on any of the secondary outcome measures or costs. Conclusions It is feasible to recruit and retain people with borderline personality disorder to a trial of joint crisis plans and the intervention appears to have high face validity with this population. However, we found no evidence of clinical efficacy in this feasibility study.
Proline Biosynthesis Is Required for Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress Tolerance in Saccharomyces cerevisiae*

Background: Proline is an important amino acid for stress resistance in different organisms. Results: Depletion of proline biosynthesis disrupts redox homeostasis and increases sensitivity to endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress in yeast. Conclusion: Proline biosynthesis is critical for maintaining the intracellular redox environment and the UPR during ER stress. Significance: Proline metabolism is shown to have an important role in ER stress tolerance that was previously unknown. The amino acid proline is uniquely involved in cellular processes that underlie stress response in a variety of organisms. Proline is known to minimize protein aggregation, but a detailed study of how proline impacts cell survival during accumulation of misfolded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) has not been performed. To address this we examined in Saccharomyces cerevisiae the effect of knocking out the PRO1, PRO2, and PRO3 genes responsible for proline biosynthesis. The null mutants pro1, pro2, and pro3 were shown to have increased sensitivity to ER stress relative to wild-type cells, which could be restored by proline or the corresponding genetic complementation. Of these mutants, pro3 was the most sensitive to tunicamycin and was rescued by anaerobic growth conditions or reduced thiol reagents. The pro3 mutant cells have higher intracellular reactive oxygen species, total glutathione, and a NADP+/NADPH ratio than wild-type cells under limiting proline conditions. Depletion of proline biosynthesis also inhibits the unfolded protein response (UPR) indicating proline protection involves the UPR. To more broadly test the role of proline in ER stress, increased proline biosynthesis was shown to partially rescue the ER stress sensitivity of a hog1 null mutant in which the high osmolality pathway is disrupted.
Marionette: Using Rpc for Interactive Development, Debugging, Macroprogramming, and Unit Testing of Wireless Embedded Networks an Analysis of the Comcast Bittorrent Throttling Controversy and Unit Testing of Wireless Embedded Networks 2. an Analysis of the Comcast Bittorrent Throttling Controversy 3

Executive Summary Technical Report Wireless sensor networks, which are becoming increasingly more commonly used, had been difficult to write programs for due to the inability to effectively perform many different tasks that were common on other development platforms, such as debugging and unit testing. In order to solve this problem, Kamin Whitehouse and his co-authors developed Marionette, a development framework which uses remote procedure calls (RPCs) simplifies wireless sensor network development in many ways. Marionette allows a programmer to call functions and manipulate variables on nodes from a PC. I became involved in the project when I approached Professor Whitehouse and asked if I could perform research under him. He suggested that I work on improving Marionette; a conference paper had already been published on it, but much time had passed and the framework had not been updated. In addition, we were interested in undertaking enough new research to warrant publishing a journal article through expansion of the original conference paper. I first updated Marionette to function with the new version of TinyOS, the operating system running on the sensor nodes that Marionette is targeting. This work greatly increased the number of applications that could utilize Marionette by making it much more viable. After that, I concentrated on adding new functionality as well as evaluating the different applications Marionette could be utilized for. I expanded the scope of Marionette by developing a system by which it could be used from a remote system in almost any programming language. I also began development on a feature which offers streamlined unit testing capabilities. For more details on this and my current and future work on Marionette, see the preface to the technical document. I would like to thank Kamin Whitehouse for giving me the chance to work on Marionette and for continuing to provide me with a gracious amount of guidance and support. In May of 2007, Comcast Inc. was discovered to be interfering with BitTorrent traffic intended for their customers' computers. This incident became a large public controversy, considering it was the first actual significant case of network neutrality being violated. Comcast came to an agreement with BitTorrent Inc. in April, 2008 and ceased specifically interfering with BitTorrent traffic. I decided to examine this incident and the merits of each side's argument as I have long had an interest in network neutrality and electronic privacy rights. I analyzed the case from …
Robust alignment of wide baseline terrestrial laser scans via 3D viewpoint normalization

The complexity of natural scenes and the amount of information acquired by terrestrial laser scanners turn the registration among scans into a complex problem. This problem becomes even more challenging when two individual scans captured at significantly changed viewpoints (wide baseline). Since laser-scanning instruments nowadays are often equipped with an additional image sensor, it stands to reason making use of the image content to improve the registration process of 3D scanning data. In this paper, we present a novel improvement to the existing feature techniques to enable automatic alignment between two widely separated 3D scans. The key idea consists of extracting dominant planar structures from 3D point clouds and then utilizing the recovered 3D geometry to improve the performance of 2D image feature extraction and matching. The resulting features are very discriminative and robust to perspective distortions and viewpoint changes due to exploiting the underlying 3D structure. Using this novel viewpoint invariant feature, the corresponding 3D points are automatically linked in terms of wide baseline image matching. Initial experiments with real data demonstrate the potential of the proposed method for the challenging wide baseline 3D scanning data alignment tasks.