Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Influence of acoustic low-level descriptors in the detection of clinical depression in adolescents

In this paper, we report the influence that classification accuracies have in speech analysis from a clinical dataset by adding acoustic low-level descriptors (LLD) belonging to prosodic (i.e. pitch, formants, energy, jitter, shimmer) and spectral features (i.e. spectral flux, centroid, entropy and roll-off) along with their delta (Δ) and delta-delta (Δ-Δ) coefficients to two baseline features of Mel frequency cepstral coefficients and Teager energy critical-band based autocorrelation envelope. Extracted acoustic low-level descriptors (LLD) that display an increase in accuracy after being added to these baseline features were finally modeled together using Gaussian mixture models and tested. A clinical data set of speech from 139 adolescents, including 68 (49 girls and 19 boys) diagnosed as clinically depressed, was used in the classification experiments. For male subjects, the combination of (TEO-CB-Auto-Env + Δ + Δ-Δ) + F0 + (LogE + Δ + Δ-Δ) + (Shimmer + Δ) + Spectral Flux + Spectral Roll-off gave the highest classification rate of 77.82% while for the female subjects, using TEO-CB-Auto-Env gave an accuracy of 74.74%.
Requirements prioritization techniques and different aspects for prioritization a systematic literature review protocol

Requirements prioritization (RP) is considered as an important part of software requirements engineering in which requirements are ranked to develop high-quality software. Success of quality software depends on the selection of well-prioritized requirements. Different techniques are proposed and used to prioritize the software requirements. Requirements are assigned weights or ranked according to their importance and are placed in a priority list for implementation in successive releases. These techniques depend on many aspects that need to be addressed while prioritizing requirements. Requirements prioritization aspects are categorized into three major groups' technical aspects, business aspects and client aspects. Most of the existing techniques are unable to support these aspects, and it affects the quality of decision-making in the requirements prioritization process. Hence, there is a need to explore the different techniques and their support for different aspects. A comparison of the existing techniques is performed. The requirements prioritization aspects are selected to determine the current trends in the software requirements prioritization process. The issue of scalability and the business/client related aspects are the key focal points of this research paper. This paper describes the review protocol, as per guidelines of the Barbara Kitchenham, in order to conduct a systematic literature review.
The community dynamics of epiphytic midge larvae across the pelagic-littoral interface : do animals respond to changes in the abiotic environment ?

In some littoral systems, abiotic heterogeneity results from the edge of vegetation towards the shore as macrophytes gradually impede mixing between pelagic and littoral water. During the summer of 1994, we investigated whether such abiotic heterogeneity influenced epiphytic midge larvae (Diptera:Chironomidae) inhabiting a stand of Scirpus americanus in Saginaw Bay, Lake Huron. After macrophytes became well established, gradients in six parameters of water quality (turbidity, alkalinity, pH, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, and chloride) formed horizontally from the macrophyte edge towards the shore. In outer portions of the stand where physico-chemical properties were influenced by the influx of pelagic surface waves, chironomid abundance increased to 1076 larvae · stem-1. Diversity (H prime ) in these areas remained constant over the summer with grazing and filter-feeding taxa equally represented. Further into the macrophyte bed where water quality indicated highly reduced mixing, midge abundance never e.
The impact of struggling students' self-efficacy, agency and horizons for action on their learning in a flipped environment

Flipped instruction is a form of blended learning that moves significant instruction and preparation outside the classroom to facilitate ‘in class’ time to be used for more participative learning activities. These activities should provide opportunities for students to interact and collaborate to improve their learning, their learning experience and ideally their capacity to learn. These in-class blended learning activities provide opportunities for instructors to provide more dynamic and specific feedback to students and to receive feedback from students about how they learn, the effectiveness of the activity and what they do and don’t yet understand.
THE EDGE OF THE MILKY WAY STELLAR DISK REVEALED USING CLUMP GIANT STARS AS DISTANCE INDICATORS

We use the clump giants of the disk as standard candles calibrated from Hipparcos parallaxes in order to map their distribution with two new near-infrared surveys of the Galactic plane: UKIDSS-GPS and VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV). We explore different selection cuts of clump giants. We conclude that there is an edge of the stellar disk of the Milky Way at R = 13.9 ± 0.5 kpc along various lines of sight across the Galaxy. The effect of the warp is considered, taking fields at different longitudes and above and below the plane. We demonstrate that the edge of the stellar disk of the Milky Way can now be mapped in the near-infrared in order to test different models, and to establish our own place within the Galaxy.
Using the active appearance algorithm for face and facial feature tracking

This paper describes a system for tracking a face and its facial features in an input video sequence using the active appearance algorithm. The algorithm adapts a wireframe model to the face in each frame, and the adaptation parameters are converted to MPEG-4 facial animation parameters. The results are promising, and it is our conclusion that we should continue on this track in our task to create a real-time model-based coder.
Sec16 influences transitional ER sites by regulating rather than organizing COPII

It has been proposed that during the budding of COPII vesicles from transitional ER (tER) sites, Sec16 plays two distinct roles: negatively regulating COPII turnover and organizing COPII assembly. New data suggest that Sec16 does not in fact organize COPII and that regulation of COPII turnover can explain the influence of Sec16 on tER sites.
Contrasting Networks for Recognition Memory and Recency Memory Revealed by Immediate-Early Gene Imaging in the Rat

The expression of the immediate-early gene c-fos was used to compare networks of activity associated with recency memory (temporal order memory) and recognition memory. In Experiment 1, rats were first familiarized with sets of objects and then given pairs of different, familiar objects to explore. For the recency test group, each object in a pair was separated by 110 min in the time between their previous presentations. For the recency control test, each object in a pair was separated by less than a 1 min between their prior presentations. Temporal discrimination of the objects correlated with c-fos activity in the recency test group in several sites, including area Te2, the perirhinal cortex, lateral entorhinal cortex, as well as the dentate gyrus, hippocampal fields CA3 and CA1. For both the test and control conditions, network models were derived using structural equation modeling. The recency test model emphasized serial connections from the perirhinal cortex to lateral entorhinal cortex and then to the CA1 subfield. The recency control condition involved more parallel pathways, but again highlighted CA1 within the hippocampus. Both models contrasted with those derived from tests of object recognition (Experiment 2), because stimulus novelty was associated with pathways from the perirhinal cortex to lateral entorhinal cortex that then involved both the dentate gyrus (and CA3) and CA1 in parallel. The present findings implicate CA1 for the processing of familiar stimuli, including recency discriminations, while the dentate gyrus and CA3 pathways are recruited when the perirhinal cortex signals novel stimuli.
Ozone and Ozonated Oils in Skin Diseases: A Review

Although orthodox medicine has provided a variety of topical anti-infective agents, some of them have become scarcely effective owing to antibiotic- and chemotherapeutic-resistant pathogens. For more than a century, ozone has been known to be an excellent disinfectant that nevertheless had to be used with caution for its oxidizing properties. Only during the last decade it has been learned how to tame its great reactivity by precisely dosing its concentration and permanently incorporating the gas into triglycerides where gaseous ozone chemically reacts with unsaturated substrates leading to therapeutically active ozonated derivatives. Today the stability and efficacy of the ozonated oils have been already demonstrated, but owing to a plethora of commercial products, the present paper aims to analyze these derivatives suggesting the strategy to obtain products with the best characteristics.
Automatic extraction of POIs in smart cities: Big data processing in ParticipAct

Recent advances in sensor-equipped smartphones are opening brand new opportunities, such as automatically extracting Points Of Interest (POIs) and mobility habits of citizens in Smart Cities from the large amount of harvested data hotspots. At the same time, the high dynamicity and unpredictability of Smart Cities crowds, opportunistically collaborating toward these common crowdsensing tasks, introduces challenging issues due to the need for fast and continuous processing of these Big Data Streams in the backend of next generation crowdsensing platforms. This paper presents our practical experiences and lessons learnt in deploying the ParticipAct platform and living lab, an ongoing experiment at University of Bologna that involves 300 students for one year. Among all management issues addressed in ParticipAct, this article shows the integration of MongoDB in the ParticipAct backend, as a powerful NoSQL storage and processing engine to fasten the identification of POIs; the reported performance results confirm the feasibility of the approach by quantifying its advantages for city managers.
Fuzzy Conceptual Information Modeling in UML Data Model

Conceptual data models, being the tool of design databases, have been proposed. Information in real world application is often vague or ambiguous. Currently, less research has been done in modeling imprecision and uncertainty in conceptual data model. The UML (Unified Modeling Language), being a set of OO modeling notations and a standard of the Object Management Group (OMG), can be applied for many areas of software engineering, knowledge engineering, and data modeling. In this paper, different levels of fuzziness are introduced into the class of the UML.
Evaluation of data mining techniques for suspicious network activity classification using honeypots data

As the amount and types of remote network services increase, the analysis of their logs has become a very difficult and time consuming task. There are several ways to filter relevant information and provide a reduced log set for analysis, such as whitelisting and intrusion detection tools, but all of them require too much fine- tuning work and human expertise. Nowadays, researchers are evaluating data mining approaches for intrusion detection in network logs, using techniques such as genetic algorithms, neural networks, clustering algorithms, etc. Some of those techniques yield good results, yet requiring a very large number of attributes gathered by network traffic to detect useful information. In this work we apply and evaluate some data mining techniques (K-Nearest Neighbors, Artificial Neural Networks and Decision Trees) in a reduced number of attributes on some log data sets acquired from a real network and a honeypot, in order to classify traffic logs as normal or suspicious. The results obtained allow us to identify unlabeled logs and to describe which attributes were used for the decision. This approach provides a very reduced amount of logs to the network administrator, improving the analysis task and aiding in discovering new kinds of attacks against their networks.
Mining relation between the blogger and query in blog retrieval system

Blog is one of the important components in Web 2.0. Many blog retrieval systems still use the classical retrieval method in Web page retrieval. In this paper, we present a new retrieval approach which is based on the relation between the blogger and query. The advantage of this approach is collecting the semantic information which we called blogger role in retrieval model. The experiments show that this approach achieves a better performance than the classical retrieval model in blog retrieval.
The Statistical Properties of Hedge Fund Index Returns and Their Implications for Investors

The monthly return distributions of many hedge fund indices exhibit highly unusual skewness and kurtosis properties as well as first-order serial correlation. This has important consequences for investors. Although many hedge fund indices are highly attractive in mean-variance terms, this is much less the case when skewness, kurtosis and autocorrelation are taken into account. Sharpe ratios will substantially overestimate the true risk/return performance of (portfolios containing) hedge funds. Similarly, mean-variance portfolio analysis will overestimate the benefits of including hedge funds in an investment portfolio and therefore overallocate to hedge funds. We also find substantial differences between indices that aim to cover the same type of strategy. Investors' perceptions of hedge fund performance and value added will therefore strongly depend on the indices used.
The experiences of young Karen people living in Melbourne

This qualitative study focuses on the experiences of young Karen people living in Melbourne. It examines the experiences of the young Karen living in their homeland Burma and their experiences resettling in Australia. Five Karen bom young people aged from 18 to 26 years old participated in this research. They have been living in Melbourne for 1 '72 to 13 years and left Burma through the Thai-Burma border. Three of them lived in the Karen State of Burma, while the others moved from inside Karen State of Burma into refugee camps where they lived for 12 to 14 years. The purpose of this study is to document the experiences of young Karen people living in Melbourne; what has their experience been like in their homeland, and what have their experiences been like resettling into a new country from their own perspective.
Fast Recovery Power Epitaxial Diode

Several diode designs to satisfy specific needs of quick response and power, this paper examines the arguments of a design that is economical in terms of manufacturing process but to improve the requirements of the few devices on the market with these characteristics (reverse breakdown voltage of 600V and reverse recovery time of 35ns). The design is tested using finite elements-through simulation and compared the results with commercial diodes by similar characteristics. The designed structure was p + nn +, with an epitaxial layer 50 mm thick and doped structure 2 × 1014 cm-3, which are obtained breakdown voltages of more than 600V and fast reverse recovery of less than 35 ns. A breakdown voltage of more than 600 V and reverse recovery times less than 35 ns were obtained for a p + nn + structure, with an epilayer of 50 μm thickness and doping of 2 to 3 × 1014 cm-3.
Dynamically Evolving

A dynamic geometric data stream consists of a sequence of m insert/delete operations of points from the discrete space { 1, . , ∆ } d [26]. We develop streaming ( 1 + (cid:15) ) -approximation algorithms for k -median, k -means, MaxCut, maximum weighted matching (MaxWM), maximum travelling salesperson (MaxTSP), maximum spanning tree (MaxST), and average distance over dynamic geometric data streams. Our algorithms maintain a small weighted set of points (a coreset) that approximates with probability 2/3 the current point set with respect to the considered problem during the m insert/delete operations of the data stream. They use poly ( (cid:15) − 1 , log m, log ∆ ) space and update time per insert/delete operation for constant k and dimension d . Having a coreset one only needs a fast approximation algorithm for the weighted problem to compute a solution quickly. In fact, even an exponential algorithm is sometimes feasible as its running time may still be polynomial in n . For example one can compute in poly ( log n, exp ( O (( 1 + log ( 1/(cid:15) ) /(cid:15) ) d − 1 ))) time a solution to k -median and k -means [21] where n is the size of the current point set and k and d are constants. Finding an implicit solution to MaxCut can be done in poly ( log n, exp (( 1/(cid:15) ) O ( 1 ) )) time. For MaxST and average distance we require poly ( log n, (cid:15) − 1 ) time and for MaxWM we require O ( n 3 ) time to do this.
Optimal Policy in Discrete Pursuit-Evasion Games

In a discrete Pursuit-Evasion game, we describe an algorithm to calculate the optimal policy that pursuers should use in order to capture evaders with the minimum number of steps. We assume that all players have full knowledge and that evaders also play an optimal strategy. We illustrate how convergence time varies by topology. We have implemented this algorithm, and present results on a physical multi-robot testbed.
Displacement Mapped Billboard Clouds

This paper introducesdisplacement mapped billboard clouds (DMBBC), a new image-based rendering primitive for the fast display of geometrically complex objects at medium to far distances. The representation is based on the well-known billboard cloud (BBC) technique, which represents an object as several textured rectangles in order to dramatically reduce its geometric complexity. Our new method uses boxes instead of rectangles, each box representing a volumetric part of the model. Rendering the contents of a box is done entirely on the GPU using ray casting. DMBBCs will often obviate the need to switch to full geometry for closer distances, which is especially helpful for scenes that are densely populated with complex objects, e.g. for vegetation scenes. We show several ways to store the volumetric information, with different tradeoffs between memory requirements and image quality. In addition we discuss techniques to accelerate the ray casting algorithm, and a way for smoothly switching between DMBBCs for medium distances and BBCs for far distances.
The Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention: secondary prevention for youth at risk of developing PTSD.

OBJECTIVE This pilot study evaluated the effectiveness of a four-session, caregiver-child Intervention, the Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention (CFTSI), to prevent the development of chronic posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) provided within 30 days of exposure to a potentially traumatic event (PTE). METHOD One-hundred seventy-six 7 to 17-year-old youth were recruited through telephone screening based on report of one new distressing posttraumatic stress symptom after a PTE. Of those, 106 youth were randomly assigned to the Intervention (n = 53) or a four-session supportive Comparison condition (N = 53). Group differences in symptom severity were assessed using repeated measures with mixed effects models of intervention group, time, and the interaction of intervention and time. Logistic regression analyses were performed to assess treatment condition and any subsequent traumas experienced as predictors for full and partial PTSD diagnosis at 3-month follow-up. An exploratory chi-square analysis was performed to examine the differences in PTSD symptom criteria B, C, and D at follow-up. RESULTS At baseline, youth in both groups had similar demographics, past trauma exposures and symptom severity. At follow-up, the Intervention group demonstrated significantly fewer full and partial PTSD diagnoses than the Comparison group on a standardized diagnostic measure of PTSD. Also, there was a significant group by time interaction for Trauma Symptom Checklist for Children's Posttraumatic Stress and Anxiety Indices as the CFTSI group had significantly lower posttraumatic and anxiety scores than the Comparison group. CONCLUSIONS The results suggest that a caregiver-youth, brief preventative early intervention for youth exposed to a PTE is a promising approach to preventing chronic PTSD.
Plug-in Hybrid Vehicles and the Vermont Grid : a Scoping Analysis

This research report specifically examines the CO2 and NOx emissions of switching a significant number of Vermont vehicles from gasoline to electricity. In addition to the environmental and social impacts, the reliance on petroleum to fuel Vermont vehicles impacts the state’s economy and the pocket-books of consumers. Drivers in Vermont spent more than $1.1 billion to fuel vehicles in 2007, an increase of about $500 million dollars from 2002. Changing the fuel in Vermont vehicles can address both emissions and economic issues. Advances in electric drive systems and energy storage devices have made plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) a reality. Building on the success of hybrid electric vehicles, PHEVs allow the consumer to charge the vehicle’s battery pack directly from the electric grid rather than from the vehicle’s gas engine. This research report looks at the ability of the Vermont electric grid to handle large numbers of PHEVs, and at the emissions impact and end-user economic costs.
Design of a multicast router for network-on-chip architectures with irregular topologies

As chip complexity keeps increasing in system-on-chip (SoC), the on-chip interconnect has become a critical issue for large-scale chip design.It has been proposed that the packet-switched network exchanging messages between intellectual property (IP) cores is a viable solution for the SoC interconnect problem.The design of the router in such network-on-chip (NoC) architectures is the key to high-performance communication for the IP cores in SoC. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a multicast router for NoC with irregular topologies.The router employs our previously proposed tree-based routing algorithm for irregular networks.Our experiment results show that the multicast router has a slightly lower clock rate and moderately larger chip area than the unicast router in NoC.Since multicasting is a technique providing superior network performance, especially for large networks, such multicast router design is an effective routing solution for large-scale network-on-chip architectures.
How did we built our hyperbolic mirror omni- directional camera - practical issues and basic geometry

Like a lot of other researchers in the field of mobile robotics we decided to build an omnidirectional vision system by placing a hyperbolic mirror in front of a regular perspective camera. In this paper we give an account of the practical issues we encountered when assembling and calibrating our omnidirectional camera system. Hopefully our experiences can help others that want to build their own system.
An authentication scheme for three-party mobile Conditional Access system(CAS)

In this paper, we redefine the roles in Mobile-TV systems from two parties(service provider and user) to three par-ties(network operator, content provider and user). Afterwards, we concentrate our discussion on service authentication problem in three-party model. Our proposed scheme is based on Identity Based Encryption(IBE) scheme, give a novel way to solve the mutual authentication and batch authentication problems. Our scheme inherits the advantages of IBE scheme which the public keys don't need to be certificated, the certification Authority mechanism will not be needed and the key exchange overhead can be reduced. Our scheme achieves better performance in storage, communication and computation comparing to traditional authentication schemes.