Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using segment probabilities for speech recognition tasks

Our experience with an automatic dialog system providing train timetable information shows that speakers tend to use very long spontaneous utterances, specially in the first turn. The utterances might be composed of three or more sentences, reaching a duration of about 30 seconds or even more. This could lead to very low or even null acoustic probabilities when recognizing the whole utterance. To overcome this problem two different strategies might be considered. First, the acoustic probability computation could be re-initialized by identifying the points where each component sentence finish, thus recognizing individual sentences inside each turn. This could be achieved by incorporating specific "sentence end" probabilities to the language model. On the other hand, the acoustic probability computation procedure itself could be modified, in two possible ways: a) by normalizing the acoustic probabilities at each frame, or b) by restricting the computation to a short segment, instead of the whole signal from the beginning. In this paper we explore the effect of applying this latter approach. The recognizing procedure was slightly modified by adding an auxiliary sequence of probabilities at each trellis node. Both memory requirements and time complexity were incremented, because each sequence entry had to be updated at each frame. Preliminary acoustic-phonetic decoding experiments were carried out, using the same acoustic models (multiple codebook discrete HMMs) and different segment lengths to compute the acoustic probabilities. A phonetically balanced spanish database containing read speech sampled at 16 kHz was used, with 1529 sentences for training and 493 independent sentences for testing purposes. The same database was filtered and resampled at 8 kHz, to simulate the conditions on which our spontaneous speech database was acquired, so that the same experiments were reproduced at 8 kHz. Results show that beyond a certain segment length (around 20 frames)
On the security of some multimedia encryption schemes

The security of multimedia data becomes more and more important due to the rapid development of the modern computer, networking and information technologies. Notably, the traditional text encryption schemes fail to protect the multimedia data efficiently because of the special properties of multimedia data. To overcome this difficulty, researchers tried to develop special encryption schemes for multimedia data adopting some related nonlinear theories. However, some new schemes have been found to be insecure from the viewpoint of cryptography, and some general recommendations have been drawn to facilitate the design of more secure multimedia encryption schemes. This thesis is concerned with the security analysis of some multimedia encryption schemes. The security of the schemes against some common attack methods, such as bruteforce attack, known/chosen-plaintext attack and differential attack, is investigated in detail with theoretical analyses and experimental verifications. In addition, some special design defects of the schemes are revealed and discussed. The main contributions of the thesis are summarized as follows: 1. The security problems of a symmetric key block cipher using multiple one-dimensional chaotic maps are cryptanalyzed in detail. Some new findings are: 1) a number of weak keys exists; 2) some important intermediate data of the cipher are not sufficiently random; 3) the whole secret key can be broken by a known-plaintext attack with only 120 consecutive known plain-bytes in one known plaintext; 4) an improved version of the chaotic cipher still suffers from all the same security defects. 2. Recently two encryption schemes were proposed by combining circular bit shift and XOR operations, under the control of a pseudorandom bit sequence (PRBS) generated from a chaotic system. These two schemes are cryptanalyzed together, leading to the following findings: 1) there exist some security defects in both schemes; 2) the underlying chaotic PRBS can be reconstructed as an equivalent key by using only two chosen plaintexts; 3) most elements in the underlying chaotic PRBS can be obtained by a differential known-plaintext attack using only two known plaintexts.
HST-COS OBSERVATIONS OF AGNs. II. EXTENDED SURVEY OF ULTRAVIOLET COMPOSITE SPECTRA FROM 159 ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI

The ionizing fluxes from quasars and other active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are critical for interpreting their emission-line spectra and for photoionizing and heating the intergalactic medium. Using far-ultraviolet (FUV) spectra from the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), we directly measure the rest-frame ionizing continua and emission lines for 159 AGNs at redshifts 0.001 < zAGN < 1.476 and construct a composite spectrum from 475 to 1875 Å. We identify the underlying AGN continuum and strong extreme ultraviolet (EUV) emission lines from ions of oxygen, neon, and nitrogen after masking out absorption lines from the H i Lyα forest, 7 Lyman-limit systems ( cm−2) and 214 partial Lyman-limit systems (). The 159 AGNs exhibit a wide range of FUV/EUV spectral shapes, , typically with −2 ⩽ αν ⩽ 0 and no discernible continuum edges at 912 Å (H i) or 504 Å (He i). The composite rest-frame continuum shows a gradual break at λbr ≈ 1000 Å, with mean spectral index αν = −0.83 ± 0.09 in the FUV (1200–2000 Å) steepening to αν = −1.41 ± 0.15 in the EUV (500–1000 Å). We discuss the implications of the UV flux turnovers and lack of continuum edges for the structure of accretion disks, AGN mass inflow rates, and luminosities relative to Eddington values.
THE BILINGUAL CHILD: EARLY DEVELOPMENT AND LANGUAGE CONTACT . Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. vii + 295.

Yip and Matthews’ latest book makes a welcome new contribution to an expanding body of literature on first language acquisition in bilingual contexts. Their starting point is the now well-established view that the bilingual child’s languages constitute separate systems. The past decade has witnessed an intense debate over whether the two linguistic systems, although separate in principle, may nevertheless interact. Yip and Matthews provide substantial empirical evidence in favour of this view, arguing that bilingual children develop differently from monolinguals. Moreover, they show that many developmental phenomena in bilingual data are paralleled by similar features in contact varieties, such as Singapore Colloquial English (SCE), and they argue that bilingual acquisition can have the effect of establishing substrate influence in a contact language. In particular, mutual influence occurring in bilingual development – so is the hypothesis – provides one mechanism by which two languages in contact can converge. Chapter 1 introduces some fundamental questions, specifically: (1) How does bilingual development differ from acquisition of the same two languages by monolingual children? (2) Do the two languages develop independently or is there evidence for transfer or cross-linguistic influence and in the latter case, what factors determine its direction? (3) What do the linguistic features of bilingual children’s two developing lan guages reveal about the processes of language contact and language acquisition? Chapter 2 provides the theoretical framework, introducing different forms of bilingualism and discussing the relationship between bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA) and early second language acquisition. Correctly, the authors bring the logical problem of language acquisition to bear on BFLA research, claiming that success in attaining bilingual competence strengthens the poverty-of-stimulus argument, ‘since the deficiency of input is more acute and the success all the more remarkable [compared to monolingual acquisition]’. The chapter provides a sum mary of major findings in BFLA research over the past few decades and introduces key BOOK REVIEW
Paradoxes of the Inka Utopianism of José Carlos Mariátegui's Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality

The historical presence of the ‘Inka Empire’ (spelled with ‘k’ and not ‘c’) goes back to the year 1200 AD in the area known as the Cuzco Valley, and over the next 300 years it became one of the greatest native kingdoms in South America, controlling a region that comprised much of what today is Perú, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, and portions of Argentina and Colombia. In his Comentarios Reales de los Incas, 1609 (Royal Commentaries of the Incas), Peruvian writer Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca, defined the empire, ‘THE INCA KINGS divided their empire into four parts, which they called Tahuantinsuyo, meaning “the four quarters of the world,” corresponding to the four cardinal points of heaven: east, west, north and south’ (Garcilaso de la Vega 1994: 93). The Inca Empire and its enduring cultural legacy have fired the social, political and artistic imagination of these countries for centuries. In Peru, in particular, indigenismo or ‘Indianism,’ a Latin American political, literary, artistic and social movement in favor of the South American Indians, gave new life to different symbols and cultural elements of the Inca culture, and became especially visible during the first half of the twentieth century. New indigenista groups and associations were created by urban intellectuals who criticized indigenous exploitation, while at the same time rebellions of the aboriginal population challenged the power of large land-owners in rural areas. In the Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (Lima 1927) (Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality) Peruvian Marxist thinker José Carlos Mariátegui reinterpreted the indigenismo movement and transformed it into a revolutionary praxis that would lead to socialism. Mariátegui’s socialist utopia was founded on the existence of a rural communal Inca tradition that survives into the present, justifying the participation of indigenous populations in social revolution, and providing a historical foundation for the imagining of a new Peruvian nation. In a critical effort to avoid European imitation, Mariátegui’s Peruvian socialist utopia attempts to integrate ancient Inca tradition and modern revolution, myth and Western history, and more specifically, European Marxism and indigenismo into a single national revolutionary project: the creation of what he calls ‘Indo-American socialism. ’ However, I argue that Mariátegui’s imagining of revolutionary utopia is ambiguously trapped in an idealized view of indigenous people, with racist prejudices against populations not descended from the Inca, and an abstract and exclusionary concept of agrarian community, among other problems. Despite Mariátegui’s rejection of nineteenth-century racial thought, which
Environmental Bacteria Involved in Manganese(II) Oxidation and Removal From Groundwater

The presence of iron (Fe) and manganese (Mn) in groundwater is an important concern in populations that use it as source of drinking water. The ingestion of high concentrations of these metals may affect human health. In addition, these metals cause aesthetic and organoleptic problems that affect water quality and also induce corrosion in distribution networks, generating operational and system maintenance problems. Biological sand filter systems are widely used to remove Fe and Mn from groundwater since they are a cost-effective technology and minimize the use of chemical oxidants. In this work, the bacterial communities of two biological water treatment plants from Argentina, exposed to long term presence of Mn(II) and with a high Mn(II) removal efficiency, were characterized using 16S rRNA gene Illumina sequencing. Several selective media were used to culture Mn-oxidizing bacteria (MOB) and a large number of known MOB and several isolates that have never been reported before as MOB were cultivated. These bacteria were characterized to select those with the highest Mn(II) oxidation and biofilm formation capacities and also those that can oxidize Mn(II) at different environmental growth conditions. In addition, studies were performed to determine if the selected MOB were able to oxidize Mn(II) present in groundwater while immobilized on sand. This work allowed the isolation of several bacterial strains adequate to develop an inoculum applicable to improve Mn(II) removal efficiency of sand filter water treatment plants.
Covariance and Correlation Kernels on a Graph in the Generalized Bag-of-Paths Formalism

This work derives closed-form expressions computing the expectation of co-presences and of number of co-occurences of nodes on paths sampled from a network according to general path weights (a bag of paths). The underlying idea is that two nodes are considered as similar when they appear together on (preferably short) paths of the network. The results are obtained for both regular and hitting paths and serve as a basis for computing new covariance and correlation measures between nodes. Experiments on semi-supervised classification show that the introduced similarity measures provide competitive performances compared to other state-of-the-art distances and similarities.
Fully Convolutional Neural Network for Semantic Segmentation of Anatomical Structure and Pathologies in Colour Fundus Images Associated with Diabetic Retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the most common form of diabetic eye disease. Retinopathy can affect all diabetic patients and becomes particularly dangerous, increasing the risk of blindness, if it is left untreated. The success rate of its curability solemnly depends on diagnosis at an early stage. The development of automated computer aided disease diagnosis tools could help in faster detection of symptoms with a wider reach and reasonable cost. This paper proposes a method for the automated segmentation of retinal lesions and optic disk in fundus images using a deep fully convolutional neural network for semantic segmentation. This trainable segmentation pipeline consists of an encoder network, a corresponding decoder network followed by pixel-wise classification to segment microaneurysms, hemorrhages, hard exudates, soft exudates, optic disk from background. The network was trained using Binary cross entropy criterion with Sigmoid as the last layer, while during an additional SoftMax layer was used for boosting response of single class. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using sensitivity, positive prediction value (PPV) and accuracy as the metrices. Further, the position of the Optic disk is localised using the segmented output map.
Expressive mechanisms for equitable rent division on a budget

We study the incentive properties of envy-free mechanisms for the allocation of rooms and payments of rent among financially constrained roommates. Each agent reports her values for rooms, her housing earmark (soft budget), and an index that reflects the difficulty the agent experiences from having to pay over this amount. Then an envy-free allocation for these reports is recommended. The complete information non-cooperative outcomes of each of these mechanisms are exactly the envy-free allocations with respect to true preferences if and only if the admissible budget violation indices have a bound.
Fourier Neural Networks: A Comparative Study

We review neural network architectures which were motivated by Fourier series and integrals and which are referred to as Fourier neural networks. These networks are empirically evaluated in synthetic and real-world tasks. Neither of them outperforms the standard neural network with sigmoid activation function in the real-world tasks. All neural networks, both Fourier and the standard one, empirically demonstrate lower approximation error than the truncated Fourier series when it comes to approximation of a known function of multiple variables.
Hierarchical Critic Assignment for Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we investigate the use of global information to speed up the learning process and increase the cumulative rewards of multi-agent re-inforcement learning (MARL) tasks. Within the actor-critic MARL, we introduce multiple cooperative critics from two levels of the hierarchy and pro-pose a hierarchical critic-based MARL algorithm. In our approach, the agent is allowed to receive information from local and global critics in a competition task. The agent not only receives low-level details but also considers coordination from high levels to obtain global information for increasing operational performance. Here, we deﬁne multiple cooperative critics in a top-down hierarchy, called the Hierarchical Critic Assignment (HCA) framework. Our experiment, a two-player tennis competition task performed in the Unity environment, tested the HCA multi-agent framework based on the Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algo-rithm. The results showed that the HCA framework outperforms the non-hierarchical critic base-line method on MARL tasks.
Iris Image Processing in Compressive Sensing Scenario

This paper observes the application of the Compressive Sensing in reconstruction of the under-sampled iris images. Iris recognition represents form of biometric identification whose usage in real applications is growing. Compressive Sensing represents a novel form of sparse signal acquisition and recovering when small amount of data is a available. Different sparsity domains are considered and compared using various number of available image pixels. The theory is verified on iris images.
Optimization of Lead Placement in the Right Ventricle During Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy. A Simulation Study

Patients suffering from heart failure and left bundle branch block show electrical ventricular dyssynchrony causing an abnormal blood pumping. Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) is recommended for these patients. Patients with positive therapy response normally present QRS shortening and an increased left ventricle (LV) ejection fraction. However, around one third do not respond favorably. Therefore, optimal location of pacing leads, timing delays between leads and/or choosing related biomarkers is crucial to achieve the best possible degree of ventricular synchrony during CRT application. In this study, computational modeling is used to predict the optimal location and delay of pacing leads to improve CRT response. We use a 3D electrophysiological computational model of the heart and torso to get insight into the changes in the activation patterns obtained when the heart is paced from different regions and for different atrioventricular and interventricular delays. The model represents a heart with left bundle branch block and heart failure, and allows a detailed and accurate analysis of the electrical changes observed simultaneously in the myocardium and in the QRS complex computed in the precordial leads. Computational simulations were performed using a modified version of the O'Hara et al. action potential model, the most recent mathematical model developed for human ventricular electrophysiology. The optimal location for the pacing leads was determined by QRS maximal reduction. Additionally, the influence of Purkinje system on CRT response was assessed and correlation analysis between several parameters of the QRS was made. Simulation results showed that the right ventricle (RV) upper septum near the outflow tract is an alternative location to the RV apical lead. Furthermore, LV endocardial pacing provided better results as compared to epicardial stimulation. Finally, the time to reach the 90% of the QRS area was a good predictor of the instant at which 90% of the ventricular tissue was activated. Thus, the time to reach the 90% of the QRS area is suggested as an additional index to assess CRT effectiveness to improve biventricular synchrony.
Detecting mixed-unitary quantum channels is NP-hard

A quantum channel is said to be amixed-unitarychannel if it can be expressed as a convex combination of unitary channels. We prove that, given the Choi representation of a quantum channelΦ, it is NP-hard with respect to polynomial-time Turing reductions to determine whether or notΦis a mixed-unitary channel. This hardness result holds even under the assumption thatΦis not within an inverse-polynomial distance (in the dimension of the space upon whichΦacts) of the boundary of the mixed-unitary channels.
Synergistic Effects in Networked Epidemic Spreading Dynamics

In this brief, we study epidemic spreading dynamics taking place in complex networks. We specifically investigate the effect of synergy, where multiple interactions between nodes result in a combined effect larger than the simple sum of their separate effects. Although synergistic effects play key roles in various biological and social phenomena, their analyses have been often performed by means of approximation techniques and for limited types of networks. In order to address this limitation, this brief proposes a rigorous approach to quantitatively understand the effect of synergy in the susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model taking place in an arbitrary complex network. We derive an upper bound on the growth rate of the synergistic SIS model in terms of the eigenvalues of a matrix whose size grows quadratically with the number of the nodes in the network. We confirm the effectiveness of our result by numerical simulations on empirically observed human and animal social networks.
Oral Contraceptives Impair Complex Emotion Recognition in Healthy Women

Despite the widespread use of oral contraceptives (OCs), remarkably little is known about the effects of OCs on emotion, cognition, and behavior. However, coincidental findings suggest that OCs impair the ability to recognize others’ emotional expressions, which may have serious consequences in interpersonal contexts. To further investigate the effects of OCs on emotion recognition, we tested whether women who were using OCs (n = 42) would be less accurate in the recognition of complex emotional expressions than women who were not using OCs (n = 53). In addition, we explored whether these differences in emotion recognition would depend on women’s menstrual cycle phase. We found that women with OC use were indeed less accurate in the recognition of complex expressions than women without OC use, in particular during the processing of expressions that were difficult to recognize. These differences in emotion recognition did not depend on women’s menstrual cycle phase. Our findings, thus, suggest that OCs impair women’s emotion recognition, which should be taken into account when informing women about the side-effects of OC use.