Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The RWTH/UPB system combination for the CHiME 2018 Workshop

This paper describes the systems for the single-array track and the multiple-array track of the 5th CHiME Challenge. The final system is a combination of multiple systems, using Confusion Network Combination (CNC). The different systems presented here are utilizing different front-ends and training sets for a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) Acoustic Model (AM). The front-end was replaced by enhancements provided by Paderborn University [1]. The back-end has been implemented using RASR [2] and RETURNN [3]. Additionally, a system combination including the hypothesis word graphs from the system of the submission [1] has been performed, which results in the final best system.
Networks of Global Interaction

Although the correlation between the Internet and globalisation is well recognised, we know relatively little about the social impact of the networked world order. Based on research on Internet growth in developing countries, this article seeks to identify some of its most salient features and how these influence, and in turn are influenced by, the broader processes of modernisation and globalisation. Through a closer examination of the social and cultural embeddedness of the Internet, the article will discuss how the organisational principle of networks is becoming more prominent in contemporary society, leading to the rise of the networked society. Rather than representing a post-modern social form, the networked society reaffirms some of the most fundamental, and rather contradictory, aspects of modernity, especially the dual processes of globalisation and individualisation. Representing a new medium for communication and interaction, the Internet allows users to establish and maintain social relations on a global scale. Rather than erasing local identities, these 'glocal' interactions have a tendency to enforce a localised sense of belonging. Nonetheless, the boundary-crossing nature of networks also has a tendency to make existing boundaries rather fuzzy and subject to mediated redefinition and re-imagining. This article builds on some of the findings of my recently completed research on the social dynamics of Internet development in developing countries (Uimonen 2000).
Vulnerability of biodiversity hotspots to global change

AimGlobal changes are predicted to have severe consequences for biodiversity; 34 biodiversity hotspots have become international priorities for conservation, with important efforts allocated to their preservation, but the potential effects of global changes on hotspots have so far received relatively little attention. We investigate whether hotspots are quantitatively and qualitatively threatened to the same order of magnitude by the combined effects of global changes. LocationWorldwide, in 34 biodiversity hotspots. MethodsWe quantify (1) the exposure of hotspots to climate change, by estimating the novelty of future climates and the disappearance of extant climates using climate dissimilarity analyses, (2) each hotspot's vulnerability to land modification and degradation by quantifying changes in land-cover variables over the entire habitat, and (3) the future suitability of distribution ranges of 100 of the world's worst invasive alien species', by characterizing the combined effects of climate and land-use changes on the future distribution ranges of these species. ResultsOur findings show that hotspots may experience an average loss of 31% of their area under analogue climate, with some hotspots more affected than others (e.g. Polynesia-Micronesia). The greatest climate change was projected in low-latitude hotspots. The hotspots were on average suitable for 17% of the considered invasive species. Hotspots that are mainly islands or groups of islands were disproportionally suitable for a high number of invasive species both currently and in the future. We also showed that hotspots will increase their area of pasture in the future. Finally, combining the three threats, we identified the Atlantic forest, Cape Floristic Region and Polynesia-Micronesia as particularly vulnerable to global changes. Main conclusionsGiven our estimates of hotspot vulnerability to changes, close monitoring is now required to evaluate the biodiversity responses to future changes and to test our projections against observations.
Advanced approaches of confocal microscopy to study interactions of membrane active peptides with living cells : hemolytic activity of latarcin Ltc 1

Investigations of membrane active peptides can be considerably enhanced using advanced approaches based on the confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM). Studies of the latarcin Ltc1 interactions with erythrocytes exemplify this statement. Conventional and time-lapse CLSM analysis reveals the features of Ltc1 binding to erythrocyte membrane, transformations of erythrocytes on the way from discocytes to ghosts, stages and dynamics of the membrane pore formation as well as the pore size and its dependence on the Ltc1 concentration. The obtained results demonstrate that CLSM is a powerful tool to study functional features of membrane active peptides and clarify mechanisms of peptide-cell interactions.
Viral Suppressors of RNA Silencing in Plants

In eukaryotes, small RNAs play a crucial regulatory role in many processes including development, maintenance of genome stability and antiviral responses. These different but overlapping RNA-guided pathways are collectively termed 'RNA silencing'. In plants, RNA silencing serves as a major line of antiviral defense that is induced by, and targeted against viruses. As a counter-defensive strategy, viruses have evolved to encode suppressor proteins that inhibit various stages of the silencing process. These suppressors are diverse in sequence and structure and appear to be encoded by virtually any type of plant viruses. This review focuses on the novel methods of suppressor screening and revealing the characteristics of RNA silencing suppressors. We have also discussed the mechanism of suppression activity, which principally operate by modifying the accumulation, activity, and/or transmission of siRNAs through either direct interaction with the RNA species or components of the RNA silencing machinery. Finally, the biotechnological applications of silencing suppression have been considered. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Prediction and Uncertainty Quantification of Daily Airport Flight Delays

One in four commercial airline flights is delayed, inconveniencing travelers and causing large financial losses for carriers. The ability to accurately predict delays would make travelers’ lives easier and save airlines money. In this work, we approach the problem of predicting flight delays using a Variational Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model. The model is trained to predict aggregate daily delays for U.S. airports using a combination of continuous and discrete variables, including weather, airport characteristics, and congestion. Monte Carlo Dropout, a Bayesian Deep Learning technique based on variational inference, is incorporated to provide planners with a well-calibrated prediction interval. We show that our Variational LSTM results in an average median absolute error of 5.8 minutes per day across 123 airports in the United States. Moreover, results show that predictive uncertainty is well explained through a calibration analysis.
Outsourcing, Information Leakage and Consulting Firms

This paper offers a general equilibrium model to analyze the problem of investment in R&D of firms that also face the decision between outsourcing and "in-house" production in the presence of R&D information leakage. A contractor hired by a firm learns the firmâ¬"s technology and can diffuse the information to other firms, either by selling it or by â¬Sspillingâ¬? it involuntarily. I find that information leakage concerns have the tendency to concentrate the outsourcing market with respect to a situation in which information leakage is not an issue. In particular, despite the fact that the original outsourcing market is perfectly competitive, I find that when a market for information arises in equilibrium, such a market is always monopolistic. I show that a market for information arises when contractors have a positive but low degree of control on the information they hold. If contractors do not have any control on the information they hold, the market splits into a positive measure of technologically advanced firms that never outsource and a positive measure of low-tech firms that always outsource. If contractors have full information control, all firms invest in technology and outsource, and a market for information never arises. As the contractorsâ¬" degree of control on information increases, the equilibrium technology level decreases and the set of firms that adopt such technology increases. The structure of the equilibria of the model captures several features observable in the management consulting industry.
Iron and zinc effects on silicic acid and nitrate uptake kinetics in three high-nutrient, low-chlorophyll (HNLC) regions

Effects of Fe and Zn availabilities on silicic acid (Si(OH) 4 ) and nitrate (NO 3 -) uptake kinetics in natural phytoplankton assemblages were investigated in 3 high-nutrient, low-chlorophyll (HNLC) regions: off central California, the Southern Ocean and the eastern tropical Pacific. Fe addition significantly increased the maximum potential uptake rate (V max ) of Si(OH) 4 (Si V max ) by 2 to 3 times relative to controls in 8 of 10 experiments. Fe addition significantly increased the maximum potential uptake rate of nitrate (NO 3 - V max ) by 2 to 3 times in all 6 experiments measuring the effect of Fe on NO 3 - V max . Four experiments quantified the effect of Zn addition on Si V max and NO 3 - V max . Zn had a significant effect on Si V max in only 1 experiment, increasing values 2-fold relative to controls. Zn addition had significant effects on NO 3 - V max in 3 experiments, increasing NO 3 - V max almost 2-fold in 1 instance and decreasing NO 3 - V max by 23 to 46 % in 2 instances. Combined Fe and Zn additions had effects on Si and NO 3 - V max that were similar to those of Fe addition alone. In 4 experiments measuring Fe and Zn effects on the half-saturation constant (K s ) for Si(OH) 4 uptake (Si K s ), Fe addition increased Si K s over 3-fold relative to controls in one experiment and Zn addition decreased it by 61 % in another. The effect of Fe and Zn addition on the half-saturation constant for NO 3 - uptake (NO 3 - K s ) could only be measured at 1 location. Here, Fe addition had no effect, and Zn addition alone and in combination with Fe decreased NO 3 - K s by 68 %. Si(OH) 4 :NO 3 - drawdown ratios calculated from changes in nutrient concentrations during the experiments were very similar to Si V max :NO 3 - V max ratios measured at the end of the experiments using tracers, and the effects of Fe and Zn addition on drawdown ratios paralleled the effects of Fe and Zn on V max ratios. In general, changes in Si(OH) 4 :NO 3 - drawdown and V max ratios were driven by changes in NO 3 - drawdown and NO 3 - V max . Our data show that Fe and Zn availabilities have a direct effect on Si(OH) 4 and NO 3 - uptake kinetics in natural phytoplankton assemblages in HNLC regions, and that changes in kinetic parameters may be driving changes in nutrient drawdown ratios, providing further proof that Fe limitation may accelerate the 'silica pump' and lead to seasonal Si(OH) 4 limitation. These results have significant implications for Si and N biogeochemistry and new production in low-Fe regions. Changes in nutrient uptake kinetics can also have important implications for phytoplankton species succession and ecological dynamics.
Award Number: W81XWH-07-1-0297 TITLE: Inhibition of Rac GTPases in the Therapy of Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia

1. Sengupta A, Cancelas JA. Leukemic progenitor retention in the bone marrow niche is impaired in an inducible murine model of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). Submitted to the VI Annual Midwest Blood Club Meeting, Columbus, Ohio, April 3, 2008. 2. Sanchez-Aguilera A, Sengupta A, Williams DA, Cancelas JA. Role of Rac GTPase in p190 BCR-abl-induced B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Submitted to the VI Annual Midwest Blood Club Meeting, Columbus, Ohio, April 3, 2008. 3. Sanchez-Aguilera A, Sengupta A, Williams DA, Cancelas JA. Rac GTPases are activated in p190-BCR-ABL+ acute lymphoblastic leukemia. 10 Annual Ohio Comprehensive Cancer Center Scientific Meeting, Columbus OH, February 22, 2008. 4. Thomas EK, Cancelas JA, Chae H, Cox AD, Keller PJ, Perrotti D, Neviani P, Druker BJ, Zheng Y, Harris CE, Williams DA. Rac GTPases are potential therapeutic targets in p210BCR-ABL-induced myeloproliferative disease (MPD). Oral Session, Amer Soc Hematol Meeting, Atlanta GA, Dec 8-11, 2007. Blood 2007;110(11);143a(465). 5. Sanchez-Aguilera A, Cancelas JA, Williams DA. RhoH-deficient mice show altered B cell populations in vivo. Poster, Amer Soc Hematol Meeting, Atlanta GA, Dec 8-11, 2007. Blood 2007;110(11);683a(2307).
1 Micro Vortex Generators for Boundary Layer Control : Principles and Applications

A review is given to the major developments in the boundary layer control by means of micro vortex generator (MVG). The appearance of MVG dates back to about three decades from the present review and this class of device rapidly spreads as an efficient and robust boundary layer control strategy for flows with separation in particular. Substantial successful applications of MVG have been achieved in subsonic flows and its application into supersonic flow is under progressive development, which requires the current status and capability of MVG to be reviewed. The fundamental aspects of MVG are first summarized, including its working principle and various geometries. Understanding of the fluid mechanics involved in the wake of a MVG device is of uppermost importance: the timeaveraged and instantaneous wakes are discussed respectively. In the former, effects from the MVG geometry parameters are presented; while in the latter, focus is placed on the phenomenon associated with flow instability inside the wake. MVG’s applications in the subsonic regime are discussed, which covers the fundamental flow separation investigations and studies to tackle several practical problems. The ongoing studies in supersonic regime dealing with shock wave boundary layer interaction (SWBLI) induced separation are reviewed later, where the presentation is organized according to different types of SWBLI with emphasis on the interaction region.
Large Scale Studies: Malware Needles in a Haystack

Malware overview reports are valuable information to understand threats behavior and develop proper countermeasures. Currently, most of these studies are focused on either fine-grained, individual sample analysis or coarsegrained landscapes. On the one hand, only the first allows professionals to handle specific security breaches. On the other hand, only the second allows understanding threat scenario as a whole. We claim a complete security treatment is only possible when combining both approaches. Therefore, in this work, we present an analysis of a large malware dataset, showing the distinctions between coarse-grained and fine-grained analysis results. We present both a general threat scenario based on coarse-grained results as well as we detail our fine-grained results to identify particular malicious constructions to antecipate incident response of future threats.
Global Asymptotic Stability for a New Class of Neutral Neural Networks

In the present world, due to the complicated dynamic properties of neural cells, many dynamic neural networks are described by neutral functional differential equations including neutral delay differential equations. These neural networks are called neutral neural networks or neural networks of neural-type. The differential expression not only defines the derivative term of the current state but also explains the derivative term of the past state. In this paper, global asymptotic stability of a neutral-type neural networks, with time-varying delays, are presented and analyzed. The neural network is made up of parts that include: linear, non-linear, non-linear delayed, time delays in time derivative states, as well as a part of activation function with the derivative. Different from prior references, as part of the considered networks, the last part involves an activation function with the derivative rather than multiple delays; that is a new class of neutral neural networks. This paper assumes that the activation functions satisfy the Lipschitz conditions so that the considered system has a unique equilibrium point. By constructing a Lyapunov-Krasovskii-type function and by using a linear matrix inequality analysis technique, a sufficient condition for global asymptotic stability of this neural network has been obtained. Finally, we present a numerical example to show the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach.
On the locus of grammatical context effects on word recognition

While grammatical context effects have been largely documented, their exact nature remains unclear. To determine the locus of these effects, we explored the priming in very strong grammatical contexts, that is, the priming of verbs by immediately preceding French pronominal subjects. In French, the first and second person plural pronouns are always associated with the same verbal inflections, creating very strong grammatical contexts. Participants made lexical decisions on targets (verb vs. pseudoverb) which were presented in three contexts: pronoun-congruent (nous grimpons,we climb), pronoun-incongruent (vous grimpons, you climb) or pseudoword control (zous grimpons, zous climb). Two experiments were conducted: one in the auditory modality and one in the visual modality. Grammatical context effects in the auditory modality did not vary as a function of the ISI, and no grammatical context effect was observed in the visualmodality when the context was presented subliminally. These findings suggest that grammatical context effects operate at a post-lexical locus
Does Distance Matter for Institutional Delivery in Rural India: An Instrumental Variable Approach

Skilled attendance at childbirth is crucial for decreasing maternal and neonatal mortality, yet many women in low- and middle-income countries deliver outside of health facilities, without skilled help. Distance to health facility is considered to be an important non-monetary barrier that impede utilization of health facilities. In this paper, we examine if access to health facilities affects institutional births in a resource-constrained country like India. We use Two-Stage Residual Inclusion (2SRI) and IV-Probit models to account for endogenous placement of health facilities. Our findings indicate that women living closer to health facilities have a higher probability of giving birth in health facility. An increase of one kilometer in the distance to the nearest health facility decreases the probability of institutional delivery by 4.4%. The results from policy simulation suggest that restricting the maximum distance to 5 kilometers would increase institutional delivery by 10%. Overall, our findings show that distance is an important barrier to service utilization and increasing the density of health facilities or improving transport infrastructure may be an important policy tool to improve facility-based delivery in developing countries.
Tomographic reconstruction using incremental and NFFT methods

Projection and backprojection operators are the numerically intensive part of iterative methods in tomographic reconstruction. Some alternatives based on interpolation over a regular grid on the Fourier space or on nonequispaced fast Fourier transforms were developed in order to alleviate the computational cost. Both approaches substantially speed up the computation of the iterations of classical algorithms, but the incremental methods, such as osem, ramla, saem, among others, cannot benefit from these techniques. In this paper, it is presented an efficient approach where the nonequispaced fast Fourier transform (nfft) is used in each sub-iteration of the incremental method “ordered subsets for transmission tomography” (ostr) to perform the most expensive calculations: the projection and backprojection. The proposed method is applied to synchrotron radiation tomography and the results show a good performance.
Procedurally Generating Game Level with Specified Difficulty

With the development of procedural content generation, more and more games use it to generate game contents so that each play can have a different experience. However, the generated game content does not guarantee enough gameplay to keep the player's freshness. In this paper, we generate Pac-Man mazes with specified difficulty with respect to the number of intersections and elements given. In order to verify whether the generated maze can retain the original Pac-Man style or not, we evaluate the appearance of the maze by the esthetic score based on distributions and sizes of various attributes in the generated maze and the original maze. We have divided the generated mazes into nine different difficulty levels, and for each difficulty level, the maze can nearly be generated in 40ms and it is playable! Therefore, our approach is practical and viable for real-time game applications.
Attitude Measurement, Theory, and Prediction

IIHE PAST 50 years have witnessed a general, if sometimes grudging, acceptance of attitude surveys to describe the public's mood and beliefs concerning such disparate matters as political events, consumer products and services, advertising and public information campaigns. So established is this acceptance that, today, budgetary considerations are often the only constraints upon the use of attitude surveys in the development of political and marketing campaigns and, more generally, any communications effort. Nonetheless, this acceptance is certain only at the descriptive level, when all that is needed and wanted is accurate measurement of public beliefs, opinions, feelings, and sentiments. As the focus of interest shifts from the descriptive to the scientific study of human behavior, the status of attitude research becomes more tenuous and ambiguous. There are still many to whom attitudinal data are more interesting than meaningful, to whom such data are inherently "soft" and provide an insufficient base for developing a scientific understanding of how and why we act as we do. Critics of attitude research have always found a receptive audience for their assertions that it is impossible to make reliable predictions of behavior from attitude measurements. The U.S. Department of Commerce went so far as to announce publicly its failure to project reliable estimates of new car purchases from its periodic surveys of consumer buying intentions and abandoned these surveys (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1973)-confounding those who feel that no bureaucrat would ever voluntarily end any program, no matter how futile. One possible response to this criticism that attitudes are poor predictors of behavior is that "understanding," and not prediction, is the appro-