Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Unsupervised Adaptation with Adversarial Dropout Regularization for Robust Speech Recognition

Recent adversarial methods proposed for unsupervised domain adaptation of acoustic models try to fool a specific domain discriminator and learn both senone-discriminative and domaininvariant hidden feature representations. However, a drawback of these approaches is that the feature generator simply aligns different features into the same distribution without considering the class boundaries of the target domain data. Thus, ambiguous target domain features can be generated near the decision boundaries, decreasing speech recognition performance. In this study, we propose to use Adversarial Dropout Regularization (ADR) in acoustic modeling to overcome the foregoing issue. Specifically, we optimize the senone classifier to make its decision boundaries lie in the class boundaries of unlabeled target data. Then, the feature generator learns to create features far away from the decision boundaries, which are more discriminative. We apply the ADR approach on the CHiME-3 corpus and the proposed method yields up to 12.9% relative WER reductions compared with the baseline trained on source domain data only and further improvement over the widely used gradient reversal layer method.
Value-Adaptive Instruction for Promoting More Productive Civil Discourse

Civil discourse is our most basic form of civic engagement. In a democracy, it is our best tool for collectively answering a society's most fundamental question: "What shall we do? " While most us have no doubt participated in political discussions, engaging in civil discourse that is productive (i.e., dialogue that fosters democratic goals) can be substantially more difficult. For example, when both sides of an argument view their beliefs as part of their identity, debating the merits of those beliefs without calling into question the merits of the individuals who hold them can be challenging. Ideally, a careful discussant might find common ground, previously obscured by the trappings of tribalism, or, at the very least, foster a mutual understanding of and respect for the values that inform beliefs they do not share. On the other hand, an unskilled discussant, perhaps one only interested in personal attacks or "winning arguments," will likely only further entrench each party in the views of their political tribe.
Probability-Based Damage Assessment on a Composite Door Surrounding Structure

A Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) system based on Acousto Ultrasonics (AU) is installed and used to inspect a full scale Door Surround Structure (DSS). A generic DSS is manufactured with an integrated SHM Network conformed of 584 piezoelectric. Afterwards, the DSS undergoes an impact campaign with a total of 112 impacts, inducing skin delaminations and debondings of various structural features. The purpose of the impact campaign is the development and validation of the SHM system applied to the DSS. A probability-based damage identification algorithm is developed within the project and its performance detecting the damages of the DSS is evaluated. Traditional non -destructive inspection (NDI) serves as a reference for the evaluation of the damage assessment. The results show a good correlation between SHM and NDI in identification as well as location of damages. The SHM system is sensitive to all damage types occurred in the DSS.
Family Influence and Community Influence on Self-Management and Prosocial Relationship Skills: A Path Model

The path model by Morrissey and Werner-Wilson (2005) was tested. Morrisey and Werner-Wilson argued that Family and Community Influence directly affects participation in organized groups and the consequent developmental outcomes. Furthermore, participation mediates the influence of Family and Community. A survey was conducted and yielded 322 respondents (94 males and 228 females) who were exclusively involved in school clubs (72.4%), sports clubs (14.2%) and involved in both school and sports clubs (13.4%). Results show that active membership (as measured by the Hours Spent per Week) in any organized youth groups in school leads to enhanced Self-Management and Prosocial Relationship skills. Also, both Family Influence and Community Influence predict developmental outcomes. But only Community Influence had a significant effect on both SelfManagement and Prosocial Relationship. Finally, only Community Influence is mediated by Hours Spent per Week as it affects Self-Management and Prosocial Relationship. Findings have an impact on a deeper understanding of youth development in organized groups and agents that provides support to the youth.
Reverse tenancy and distress contracting among rural farming households in Malawi

This study analyzes factors associated with reverse tenancy and distress contracting in the land rental market for rural households in Malawi. Land rental markets transfer land from the land rich but resource poor to the land poor but wealthy households. It is also a remedy to the problem of land scarcity due to the soaring population growth and the resultant high pressure on farm land. We employed the binary probit model for participation, and the censored (Tobit) model for the degree of participation for both tenants and landlords to pin down socio-economic factors affecting reverse tenancy and distress contracting in the land rental market using 450 randomly sampled households across six districts. The study revealed that fixed rental contracts dominated while sharecropping was rare. Reverse tenancy contracts where tenants are richer than landlords in non-land assets were common. Own land and non-land resources (family labor, assets, tropical livestock units and others), and household poor health condition were found to be significantly associated with land market participation and the degree of participation.
Use of night lights data as proxy for economic growth : A multi-year Light based growth indicator ( LBGI ) for China , India and the U .

In this paper we explore how satellite images of global night lights from the years 2001 to 2007 can be used to estimate economic activity at the sub-regional level in the U.S., India and China. The night lights based estimates of economic activity are then spatially analyzed and compared with sub-regional economic indicators where available for selected years. We also briefly discuss two theoretical models that shed light on the geospatial patterns reflected by the night light data. The results are presented with a series of maps, charts and tables.
Pn TOMOGRAPHY AND LOCATION IN EURASIA

We are exploring the use of Pn tomography for improving seismic event location in Eurasia. Toward this end, we have developed a new approach based on travel-time differences for two stations recording the same event. The premise of the station-differencing method is that by using travel-time differences among station pairs, the effect on the inversion of location errors inherent in the bulk of seismic bulletin origins can be significantly reduced. This permits the use of events previously discarded due to large location uncertainty, providing additional needed travel-time constraints in areas with sparse data coverage. The ability to include these lower-quality events in the inversion significantly expands our available constraints and enhances the quality of the tomographic results. We have applied our method to the preliminary Annual Bulletin of Chinese Earthquakes (ABCE), yielding a map of Pn velocity perturbations and station delay terms. This map is similar in character to earlier, single-ray tomography results, although the perturbations from our differential method tend to be more smoothly varying within tectonic provinces. Preliminary location tests using the tomographic Pn results show improvement over IASPEI91-based locations on the order of 30%. We intend to compare travel times from our study to those of previous research efforts to assess relative strengths of different approaches. We also plan to extend our study by applying our new method to the Michigan State University (MSU) eastern Russia database. Station differencing can also be used to perform quality control on seismic catalogs themselves, helping to identify bad phase arrival picks, stations with intermittent timing errors, and other sources of erroneous travel-time information. Results from an inversion for timing errors reveal questionable performance for some ABCE stations, as well as 10, 20, and 60 s timing residuals that may arise from typographical errors. 471 27th Seismic Research Review: Ground-Based Nuclear Explosion Monitoring Technologies
Attitudes of Ghanaians toward environmental sanitation : Evidence from residents of Asamankese in the Lower West Akim Municipality of Ghana

This study, conducted at Amanfrom in Asamankese in the Eastern Region of Ghana, examined attitude of residents towards environmenta l sanitation. The study adopted the mixed-methods sequential explanatory designby c ombining interviews, questionnaires and field observation in the data co lle tion processes. The researcher sampled 140 study participants, comprisi ng 11 officials from the Sanitation and Health Inspectorate Unit of the Lowe r West Akim Municipal Assembly (LWAMA)and Zoom Lion Company Ghana Limited . Again, 129 residents from 129 households in Amanfrom were sampled for th e s udy. Systematic sampling was used for sampling the households. Purposive sam pling was used to select the 11 officials for interview, while convenience and simp le random sampling through the lottery method was employed to select the 129 resid ents for the study. The findings showed that most residents of Amanfrom have a poor attitude to sanitation because they have a negative culture of creating refuse dum ps at any available space due to inadequate waste containers, incinerators, and publ ic toilet facilities. This study recommended that the Health Inspectorate Unit of Lo wer West Akim Municipal Assembly in liaison with Zoom Lion Company Ghana Li mited should provide enough waste containers as well as other forms of r efuse receptacles, permanent land space and public toilet facilities for waste d isposal. They should also organize periodic clean-up exercise, regular waste collectio n, and environmental education as preventative measures of addressing the poor env i onmental sanitation attitude among residents in Amanfrom.
Simulation of Single Stage LNA Based on Ladder Matching Networks for WiMAX Application

This paper presents a simulation of single stage LNA based on ladder matching networks for WiMAX application. Wireless communication is a type of telecommunication that available for transmitting the large amounts of data, voice and video over long distance using a different frequency. Low Noise Amplifier is located at the first block of receiver system, which makes it one of the important parts to amplified the signal. This project is to design a Low Noise Amplifier for wireless Application that will work at 5.8 GHz using high-performance low noise superHEMT transistor FHX76LP manufactured by Eudyna Technologies. From the simulaton result the low noise amplifier produced gain (S21) of 17.2 dB and return loss (S12) of -19.9. The input reflection (S11) and output return loss (S22) are -19.9 dB and -19.6 dB respectively. While, the noise figure is 0.914 dB.
Context-Aware Voice-Based Interaction in Smart Home - VocADom@A4H Corpus Collection and Empirical Assessment of Its Usefulness

Smart homes aim at enhancing the quality of life of people at home by the use of home automation systems and Ambient Intelligence. Most of these smart homes provide enhanced interaction by relying on context-aware systems learned on data. Whereas voice-based interaction is the current emerging trend, most available corpora are either concerned only with home automation sensors or only with audio technology, which limits the development of context-aware voice-based systems. This paper presents the VocADom@A4H corpus, which is a dataset composed of users' interactions recorded in a fully equipped Smart Home. About 12 hours of multichannel distant speech signal synchronized with logs of an openHAB home automation system were collected from 11 participants who performed activities of daily living with the presence of real-life noises, such as other persons speaking, use of vacuum cleaner, TV, etc. This corpus can serve as a valuable material for studies in pervasive intelligence, such as human tracking, human activity recognition, context aware interaction, and robust distant speech processing in the home. Experiments performed on multichannel speech and home automation sensors data for robust voice activity detection and multiresident localization show the potential of the corpus to support the development of context-aware smart home systems.
Enhancing Adoption of Agroforestry in the Eastern Agro-Ecological Zone of Uganda

Widespread deforestation and increasingly intensive use of land to sustain a growing population has increased soil erosion, lowered soil fertility and reduced agricultural productivity in Uganda. This has raised concern over sustainability of farming systems in the Eastern Agro-ecological zone of Uganda. There is growing evidence that agroforestry can be a potential solution to these problems. However, enhancement of adoption of agroforestry as a viable alternative for farmers in diverse ecological and socio-economic conditions has remained low. The objective of this study was to identify the factors influencing the enhancement of adoption of agroforestry by smallholder farmers. Primary data on household, farm and technology characteristics was collected from 153 farming households. Results show that boundary planting, scattered tree planting, row planting and homestead gardening were the most commonly adopted agroforestry technologies in the study area. The Tobit model showed that sex, age, household size, education level, group membership, access to credit and extension visits had significantly positive effects on enhancing adoption of agroforestry. Mobilizing farmers to join groups, improving the quality and coverage of extension services, consideration of gender issues and intensifying agroforestry training among farmers with low levels of education were suggested as avenues to further enhance adoption of agroforestry in the Eastern agro-ecological zone of Uganda.
A Lexical and Syntactic Analysis System for Chinese Electronic Medical Record

Lexical and syntactic analysis, including word segmentation, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, shallow parsing and full parsing, are essential for medical language processing (MLP). However, research on full parsing, even shallow parsing and POS tagging for Chinese electronic medical record (CEMR), has not been carried out because of the lack of annotated corpus on CEMR. In this paper, we built a corpus of 5,024 sentences from CEMR with word segmentation, POS tags and phrase tags, of them, 2,553 are annotated as full parsing trees. Inter-annotator agreement results: Chinese word segmentation (97.56%), POS tagging (93.34%), shallow parsing (96.5%), full parsing (91.22%). A lexical and syntactic analysis system for CEMR is developed and evaluated based on above corpus. Of its components, we proposed a joint model for word segmentation and POS tagging with the transformation-based error-driven model as correction postprocessing to alleviate the problem of error accumulation, the F1-score of word segmentation and POS tagging were 94.39% and 93.2%, respectively. A shallow parsing model under the framework of group learning we proposed was developed, which enriched word features by word embedding from large unlabeled CEMRs and achieved the F1-score of 96.3%. At last, we presented a state-of-art full parser combining the Berkeley parser and the Stanford parser to outperform the best single parser by 3.68%. The evaluation results show a substantial benefit to statistical machine learning models from the annotated CEMR. These works are the foundation for natural language processing (NLP) technologies applied to CEMR.
Facing the Truth: Benchmarking the Techniques for the Evolution of Variant-Rich Systems

The evolution of variant-rich systems is a challenging task. To support developers, the research community has proposed a range of different techniques over the last decades. However, many techniques have not been adopted in practice so far. To advance such techniques and to support their adoption, it is crucial to evaluate them against realistic baselines, ideally in the form of generally accessible benchmarks. To this end, we need to improve our empirical understanding of typical evolution scenarios for variant-rich systems and their relevance for benchmarking. In this paper, we establish eleven evolution scenarios in which benchmarks would be beneficial. Our scenarios cover typical lifecycles of variant-rich system, ranging from clone & own to adopting and evolving a configurable product-line platform. For each scenario, we formulate benchmarking requirements and assess its clarity and relevance via a survey with experts in variant-rich systems and software evolution. We also surveyed the existing benchmarking landscape, identifying synergies and gaps. We observed that most scenarios, despite being perceived as important by experts, are only partially or not at all supported by existing benchmarks-a call to arms for building community benchmarks upon our requirements. We hope that our work raises awareness for benchmarking as a means to advance techniques for evolving variant-rich systems, and that it will lead to a benchmarking initiative in our community.
Automatic Recognition and Classification on Chinese Discourse Connective

Based on the annotation of discourse connective in Chinese Discourse Treebank, especially the annotation of the connective and its relation classification. The authors extract syntax, lexical and position features of automatic syntax tree and standard syntax tree, and use supervised method to recognize and classify connective. Experimental results show that connective recognition F1-measure is 69.2%, and connective classification accuracy is 89.1%.
Comparison of outcomes after open total and laparoscopy-assisted radical resection for early rectal cancer

Background: The study was aimed to compare the outcomes of open total and laparoscopy-assisted radical resection for early rectal cancer. Methods: Patients with rectal cancer who underwent total radical resection in Xinan hospitals between August 2007 and November 2014 were analyzed in this retrospective and propensity score-matched cohort study. The association between methods of operation and survival was evaluated by cox proportional hazards regression models. Results: Only 783 patients were included finally in this cohort study. There was no significant difference found between the group of open total and laparoscopy-assisted radical resection. The comparative items include overall survival (open total versus laparoscopy-assisted radical resection: hazard ratio (HR) for 0.97, 95% c.i. 0.67 to 1.75), recurrence-free survival (HR 3.20, 0.41 to 8.52), postoperative death (2.6%/1.3%; P=0.045) and the severity of complications (following the Clavien-Dindo classification). However, we found the pattern of complication was different between two groups. Anastomosis-related complication is more common in laparoscopy-assisted group (8.0%/4.2%; P=0.015) and wound-related complication is more common in the group of open total radical resection (1.6%/5.6%; P=0.003). Conclusion: In terms of the long term outcomes (survival and recurrence), laparoscopy-assisted total radical resection for early rectal cancer is more feasible than open total radical resection. However, an increased risk of anastomotic leakage and a higher postoperative mortality rate is found significantly after laparoscopic-assisted total radical resection, which suggests an urgent need of anastomotic innovation for the total laparoscopy-assisted radical resection of rectal cancer in the future.
FRACTIONAL DYNAMICS IN MECHANICAL MANIPULATION ( DETC 2007-35418 )

021204 Fractional Optimal Control of a Distributed System Using Eigenfunctions Om P.Agrawal 021205 Dynamics of a Duffing Oscillator With Two Time Delays in Feedback Control Under Narrow-Band Random Excitation Yanfei Jin and Haiyan Hu 021206 Nonlinear Analysis of Road Traffic Flows in Discrete Dynamical System Meng Xu and Ziyou Gao 021207 Identifying a Transfer Function From a Frequency Response Duarte Valério, Manuel Duarte Ortigueira, and José Sã da Costa
Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis of laboratory test simulations using an elastoplastic model

: The focus of the present paper is on Monte Carlo approaches to uncertainty and sensitivity analysis of laboratory test simulations. The soil behaviour is simulated using an elastoplastic multi-mechanism model. The Fourier amplitude sensitivity test (FAST) method is performed in order to assess the inﬂuence of input parameters on the response of the model following several loading paths. According to the sensitivity indices derived by FAST method, each parameter has an important role following both the loading path and the strain range.
N O T I C E THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRODUCED FROM MICROFICHE. ALTHOUGH IT IS RECOGNIZED THAT CERTAIN PORTIONS ARE ILLEGIBLE, IT IS BEING RELEASED IN THE INTEREST OF MAKING AVAILABLE AS MUCH INFORMATION AS POSSIBLE

A kinetic model for a solar simulator pumped iodine laser system is being developed and compared to an experiment in which the solar simulator output is dispersed over a large active volume (150 cm3) with low simulator light intensity (= 200 solar constants). A trace foreign gas which quenches the upper level is introduced into the model. Furthermore, a ·constant representing optical absorption of the simulator emission is introduced, in addition to a constant representing the scattering at each of the mirrors, via the optical cavity time constant. The non-uniform heating of the gas is treated as well as the pressure change as a function of time within the cavity. With these new phenomena introduced into the kinetic model, a best I~asonable fit to the experimental data is found by adjusting the reaction rate coefficients within the range of known uncertainity by numerical methods. The experimental parameters modeled are the lasing time, laser pulse energy, and the laser threshold. i r:. __ ::~: _::_ . :_::_:_:= __ :. __ --_-~-_'~_"'-,. _"'-==::::. =. :::::::_. _ ~. J._-_ ,~=_ ,. ,_. 11 -
CFD analysis of the combustion, gas flow, and heat exchange processes in a boiler of a thermal power p lant

The strategic role of energy and the current co cerning with greenhouse effects enhance the import ance of the studies of complex physical and chemical processes occurring inside boilers of thermal power plants. Combustion comprises phenomena such as turbulence, radiative and convective heat transfer, particle tr ansport and chemical reactions. The study of these coupled henomena is a challenging issue. The state of the art in computational fluid dynamics and the availability o f commercial codes encourage numeric studies of the combustion processes. In the present work a commerc ial software, CFXAnsys Europe Ltd., has been used to study the coal combustion process in a 160 MW comme rcially operated thermal power plant, with the obje ctive of simulate the operation conditions and identify i nefficiency factors. Coal reserves in Brazil, which are used mainly for electricity production, are enough to meet the next 200 years demand. Nonetheless, in order to face the com petition from renewable, natural gas and nuclear en ergy sources, some main problems must be solved, as to r educe CO2 emissions through increasing efficiency[1]. Also NOx and SOx emissions should be reduced to environmentally acc eptable levels. At this way, an efficient operation of combustion chambers of these plants de pends on the proper knowledge of the oxidation reac tions and heat transfer from the combustion products to t he chamber walls and heat exchangers, which require s a detailed analysis of the governing mechanisms.