Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A New Acoustic-Based Pronunciation Distance Measure

We present an acoustic distance measure for comparing pronunciations, and apply the measure to assess foreign accent strength in American-English by comparing speech of non-native American-English speakers to a collection of native American-English speakers. An acoustic-only measure is valuable as it does not require the time-consuming and error-prone process of phonetically transcribing speech samples which is necessary for current edit distance-based approaches. We minimize speaker variability in the data set by employing speaker-based cepstral mean and variance normalization, and compute word-based acoustic distances using the dynamic time warping algorithm. Our results indicate a strong correlation of r = −0.71 (p < 0.0001) between the acoustic distances and human judgments of native-likeness provided by more than 1,100 native American-English raters. Therefore, the convenient acoustic measure performs only slightly lower than the state-of-the-art transcription-based performance of r = −0.77. We also report the results of several small experiments which show that the acoustic measure is not only sensitive to segmental differences, but also to intonational differences and durational differences. However, it is not immune to unwanted differences caused by using a different recording device.
Determining Sources of Uncertainty, Performance, and Strategy in Biodiesel Supply Chain

Recently, biodiesel as a biofuel has a significant role in replacing fossil fuels because of its benefits, including energy security, reducing environmental impacts (e.g., global warming and GHG emissions), and improving the economy in the rural area. However, the utilization of large-scale biodiesel industry faces many challenges, mainly uncertainties that inherent within decision making in the biodiesel supply chain. Therefore, this paper contributes by identifying several sources of uncertainty in upstream, midstream, and downstream along the biodiesel supply chain. The sources of uncertainty were investigated by using a fishbone diagram as the tool to identify the root causes in which its elements derived from the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model. SCOR model provides several basic supply chain processes, i.e., plan, source, make, and deliver. Due to these uncertainty issues related to the biodiesel supply chain, it highlights the need to set performance measures to be achieved through the alignment of supply chain strategies. In the Indonesian context, critical uncertainty sources in the biodiesel supply chain are oil palm supply, oil palm price, land farming, CPO price, CPO supply, production, and operation, technology, policy and regulation, transportation and logistics, biodiesel price, and biodiesel demand. Key performance measures for each source of uncertainty are also determined, such as oil palm yields and oil palm quality for biomass supply uncertainty. The uncertainty management strategies discussed refer to lean strategies, but agile or hybrid strategies are also considered. Future research directions are also presented in this paper.
Mitochondrial Function in Enamel Development

Enamel is the most calcified tissue in vertebrates. Enamel formation and mineralization is a two-step process that is mediated by ameloblast cells during their secretory and maturation stages. In these two stages, ameloblasts are characterized by different morphology and function, which is fundamental for proper mineral growth in the extracellular space. Ultrastructural studies have shown that the mitochondria in these cells localize to different subcellular regions in both stages. However, limited knowledge is available on the role/s of mitochondria in enamel formation. To address this issue, we analyzed mitochondrial biogenesis and respiration, as well as the redox status of rat primary enamel cells isolated from the secretory and maturation stages. We show that maturation stage cells have an increased expression of PGC1α, a marker of mitochondrial biogenesis, and of components of the electron transport chain. Oxygen consumption rate (OCR), a proxy for mitochondrial function, showed a significant increase in oxidative phosphorylation during the maturation stage, promoting ATP production. The GSH/GSSG ratio was lower in the maturation stage, indicative of increased oxidation. Because higher oxidative phosphorylation can lead to higher ROS production, we tested if ROS affected the expression of AmelX and Enam genes that are essential for enamel formation. The ameloblast cell line LS8 treated with H2O2 to promote ROS elicited significant expression changes in AmelX and Enam. Our data highlight important metabolic and physiological differences across the two enamel stages, with higher ATP levels in the maturation stage indicative of a higher energy demand. Besides these metabolic shifts, it is likely that the enhanced ETC function results in ROS-mediated transcriptional changes.
A population genomic unveiling of a new cryptic mosquito taxon within the malaria-transmitting Anopheles gambiae complex

The Anopheles gambiae complex consists of multiple morphologically indistinguishable mosquito species including the most important vectors of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum in sub-Saharan Africa. Several lineages have only recently been described as distinct, including the cryptic taxon GOUNDRY in central Burkina Faso. The ecological, immunological, and reproductive differences among these taxa will critically impact population responses to disease control strategies and environmental changes. Here we examine whole-genome sequencing data from a longitudinal study of putative A. coluzzii in western Burkina Faso. Surprisingly, many samples are genetically divergent from A. coluzzii and all other Anopheles species and represent a new taxon, here designated Anopheles TENGRELA (AT). Population genetic analysis suggests that GOUNDRY sensu stricto represents an admixed population descended from both A. coluzzii and AT. AT harbors low nucleotide diversity except for the 2La inversion polymorphism which is maintained by overdominance. It shows numerous fixed differences with A. coluzzii concentrated in several regions reflecting selective sweeps, but the two taxa are identical at standard diagnostic loci used for taxon identification and thus AT may often go unnoticed. We present an amplicon-based genotyping assay for identifying AT which could be usefully applied to numerous existing samples. Misidentified cryptic taxa could seriously confound ongoing studies of Anopheles ecology and evolution in western Africa, including phenotypic and genotypic surveys of insecticide resistance. Reproductive barriers between cryptic species may also complicate novel vector control efforts, for example gene drives, and hinder predictions about evolutionary dynamics of Anopheles and Plasmodium.
Mathematical Modeling and Analysis of Factors Affecting Medical Errors in Emergency Department of Government Hospitals in Province X

JCI established a standard for common medical errors in hospitals known as IPSG. This study focused on the emergency departments of government hospitals A to C and a private hospital D. The objective for this study is to know and determine which among the factors must be considered in constructing an emergency department (ED), which lessens medical errors, and to be able to create a mathematical model among the factors. This research used a combination of quantitative correlational research and quasi-experimental research. The data were tested for reliability using the Attribute Agreement Analysis (3A) method in MINITAB v.17 then it proceeded to factor analysis using SPSS, which yields the result of interdependence of the factors to each presence. SEM can be performed to see the partial correlation and multi collinearity of the variables. All of the measurements used were incorporated to create a mathematical model, which aims to analyze the factors. Among the three major factors that were cited, environmental-related (ER) factors ranked the highest correlativity to medical errors or International Patient Safety Goals (IPSGs) with a value of 0.82 versus the other factors of 0.59 and 0.68. Noise and illumination were the two highest contributors of medical errors from ER factors with a value of 0.93 and 0.82, respectively.
The persistence of Nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae fuels airway inflammation

Nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi) is commonly isolated from airway of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients. However, to what extent NTHi persistence contributes to the lung inflammatory burden during CF chronic airway disease is controversial. Here, we aimed at determining the pathological role of NTHi persistence in a cohort of CF patients and in a newly generated mouse model of NTHi persistence. In our study cohort, we found that CF patients chronically colonized by NTHi had significantly higher levels of IL-8 and CXCL1 than those who were not colonized. To better define the impact of NTHi persistence in fuelling inflammatory response, we developed a new mouse model using both laboratory and CF clinical strains. NTHi persistence was associated with chronic inflammation of the lung, characterized by recruitment of neutrophils and cytokine release (KC, G-CFS, IL-6 and IL-17A) at 2 and 14 days postinfection. An increased burden of T cell mediated response (CD4+ and γδ cells) and higher levels of matrix metalloproteinase 9, known to be associated with tissue remodelling, were observed at 14 days post-infection. Of note we found that both CD4+IL-17+ cells and levels of IL-17 cytokine were enriched in mice at advanced stage of NTHi chronic infection. Moreover, by immunohistochemistry we found CD3+, B220+ and CXCL-13+ cells localized in bronchus-associated lymphoid tissue-like structures at day 14. Our results demonstrate that NTHi persistence exerts a pro-inflammatory activity in the human and murine lung, and could therefore contribute to the exaggerated burden of lung inflammation in CF patients.
Crowdsourcing Practice for Efficient Data Labeling: Aggregation, Incremental Relabeling, and Pricing

In this tutorial, we present a portion of unique industry experience in efficient data labeling via crowdsourcing shared by both leading researchers and engineers from Yandex. We will make an introduction to data labeling via public crowdsourcing marketplaces and will present the key components of efficient label collection. This will be followed by a practice session, where participants will choose one of the real label collection tasks, experiment with selecting settings for the labeling process, and launch their label collection project on one of the largest crowdsourcing marketplaces. The projects will be run on real crowds within the tutorial session. While the crowd performers are annotating the project set up by the attendees, we will present the major theoretical results in efficient aggregation, incremental relabeling, and dynamic pricing. We will also discuss their strengths and weaknesses as well as applicability to real-world tasks, summarizing our five year-long research and industrial expertise in crowdsourcing. Finally, participants will receive a feedback about their projects and practical advice on how to make them more efficient. We invite beginners, advanced specialists, and researchers to learn how to collect high quality labeled data and do it efficiently.
"Learning for the Rise of China": Exploring Uses and Gratifications of State-Owned Online Platform

In January 2019, the Chinese Communist Party launched the online platform XueXi QiangGuo, which translates into "Learning for the Rise of China. " Within two months, XueXi became the top-downloaded item of the month on Apple's App Store in China. In response, we conducted an interview study with 28 active XueXi users to investigate their uses and gratifications of this state-owned online platform. Our results reveal seven key motivations: compliance, self-status seeking, general information seeking, job support, entertainment, patriotism, and learning. This state-owned platform introduced a new model for official information dissemination and political communication through direct surveillance and monitoring, leveraging and fostering emotional attachment, and offering heterogeneous apolitical content. We discuss the intended and unintended ramifications of these components, highlighting the importance of future CSCW research to critically engage with pluralist political narratives situated in varied societies, especially non-Western democracies.
LiveClip: towards intelligent mobile short-form video streaming with deep reinforcement learning

Recent years have witnessed great success of mobile short-form video apps. However, most current video streaming strategies are designed for long-form videos, which cannot be directly applied to short-form videos. Especially, short-form videos differ in many aspects, such as shorter video length, mobile friendliness, sharp popularity dynamics, and so on. Facing these challenges, in this paper, we perform an in-depth measurement study on Douyin, one of the most popular mobile short-form video platforms in China. The measurement study reveals that Douyin adopts a rather simple strategy (called Next-One strategy) based on HTTP progressive download, which uses a sliding window with stop-and-wait protocol. Such a strategy performs poorly when network connection is slow and user scrolling is fast. The results motivate us to design an intelligent adaptive streaming scheme for mobile short-form videos. We formulate the short-form video streaming problem and propose an adaptive short-form video streaming strategy called LiveClip using a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach. Trace-driven experimental results prove that LiveClip outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches by around 10%-40% under various scenarios.
A Random Access Protocol Based on Idle Pilot Reallocation for Crowded Massive MIMO Systems

As the occurrence of massive machine type communication (mMTC), the requirements for the performance of random access in crowded massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are increasing. To improve the access performance, a novel random access protocol called strongest-user collision resolution combined idle pilot reallocation (SUCR-IPRA) scheme is proposed. Through the idle pilot reallocation strategy, the utilization of idle pilots can be significantly improved, and its expression is derived in this letter. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme observably outperform the existing strongest-user collision resolution (SUCRe) and SUCR combined idle pilot access (SUCR-IPA) schemes in terms of increasing the efficiency and success rate during the random access process.
Taurus Database: How to be Fast, Available, and Frugal in the Cloud

Using cloud Database as a Service (DBaaS) offerings instead of on-premise deployments is increasingly common. Key advantages include improved availability and scalability at a lower cost than on-premise alternatives. In this paper, we describe the design of Taurus, a new multi-tenant cloud database system. Taurus separates the compute and storage layers in a similar manner to Amazon Aurora and Microsoft Socrates and provides similar benefits, such as read replica support, low network utilization, hardware sharing and scalability. However, the Taurus architecture has several unique advantages. Taurus offers novel replication and recovery algorithms providing better availability than existing approaches using the same or fewer replicas. Also, Taurus is highly optimized for performance, using no more than one network hop on critical paths and exclusively using append-only storage, delivering faster writes, reduced device wear, and constant-time snapshots. This paper describes Taurus and provides a detailed description and analysis of the storage node architecture, which has not been previously available from the published literature.
Seed dispersal, seedling establishment and gap partitioning among tropical pioneer trees

1 We examined the abundance and distribution patterns of pioneer seeds in the soil seed bank, and of pioneer seedlings in 53 recently formed gaps, in a 50‐ha forest dynamics plot on Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama. The aim was to assess the importance of dispersal limitation (failure of seeds to arrive at all sites suitable for their germination) and establishment limitation (failure of seeds having reached a site to germinate successfully and establish as seedlings) in determining patterns of gap occupancy.
Process of Building of the Pivot Meta-model

Within a competitive environment marked by strong technological evolution, organizations have to be compliant at the same time with several repositories, norms or standards relating to quality of their processes continuous improvement. Diversity of standards can lead to different issues such as heterogeneity, redundancy and also increasing costs for their implementation in terms of time, resource mobilization and budget. To solve these problems, the idea is to establish an alignment approach that guarantees the high level of quality wished by using several standards simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a Model Driven Engineering approach of building a common meta-model of quality standards.
Hepatotoxicidade associada à microcistina

Urban and industrial discharges, intense agricultural exploitation and fisheries have been causing the eutrophication in both drinking and recreational waters. A frequent consequence of eutrophication in waters is the massive development of cyanobacteria. The occurrence of these blooms induces a severe problem, as Microcystis aeruginosa, the most widespread distributed cyanobacteria, can produce microcystins (MC). Toxic effects of MC have been described in liver, lungs, stomach, and intestine. Deaths in wildlife, livestock and human beings were also associated with MC exposition. MC exposition can occurs directly by ingestion, inhalation, contact, intravenous inoculation of contaminated water (hemodialysis) or indirectly, by the consumption of animals, as fish and mollusks, the majors ingestors of cyanobacteria and its toxins. The most
Improvements in task performance after practice are associated with scale-free dynamics of brain activity

Although practicing a task generally benefits later performance on that same task, there are individual differences in practice effects. One avenue to model such differences comes from research showing that brain networks extract functional advantages from operating in the vicinity of criticality, a state in which brain network activity is more scale-free. We hypothesized that higher scale-free signal from fMRI data, measured with the Hurst exponent (H), indicates closer proximity to critical states. We tested whether individuals with higher H during repeated task performance would show greater practice effects. In Study 1, participants performed a dual-n-back task (DNB) twice during MRI (n = 56). In Study 2, we used two runs of n-back task (NBK) data from the Human Connectome Project sample (n = 599). In Study 3, participants performed a word completion task (CAST) across 6 runs (n = 44). In all three studies, multivariate analysis was used to test whether higher H was related to greater practice-related performance improvement. Supporting our hypothesis, we found patterns of higher H that reliably correlated with greater performance improvement across participants in all three studies. However, the predictive brain regions were distinct, suggesting that the specific spatial H↑ patterns are not task-general.
Digitization of Electrocardiogram Using Bilateral Filtering

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most basic tools available for the detection of cardiovascular disease (CVD) which has evolved as one of the major causes of death in recent times, spanning countries. Conventionally, ECGs are printed on graph sheets which keep fading away with time. Hence, the preservation of ECG graph sheets is difficult. Digitization of printed ECG graph sheets is a solution to this problem. Digitization also helps in faster analysis and interpretation of ECG signals. Although the previous works have succeeded in smoothing ECG after extracting the signal from graph sheet, the cost amounts to loss of peak amplitude characteristics leading to wrong diagnosis. In this work, we propose a digitization technique to extract ECG signals from graph sheets. The proposed bilateral filter based method achieves a high degree of smoothness with all the peak characteristics intact when compared to other implementations using Butterworth filters. With this technique, it is now possible to create extensive databases similar to MIT–BIH from printed ECG graph sheets. A high level of automation is achieved, and results verified with over 60 ECGs and compared.
FPGA-based Near Data Processing Platform Selection Using Fast Performance Modeling (WiP Paper)

With the trend of adopting FPGAs in data centers, various FPGA acceleration platforms have been developed in recent years. Each server could incorporate one or many of these FPGAs at different compute hierarchy levels to match its workload intensity. FPGAs could either be used as IO-attached accelerators or be closely integrated with CPU as on-chip co-processors. For a more data-centric approach, an FPGA could be moved closer to the data medium (RAM or disk) and serve as a near-memory or near-storage accelerator. In this work, we present a quantitative model and in-depth analysis of application characteristics to determine when an application is more suitable for each acceleration hierarchy. We analyze 18 benchmarks from six domains and create a preliminary guideline for both application and hardware developers.
Contrasting stripes are a widespread feature of group living in birds, mammals and fishes

Grouping is a widespread form of predator defense, with individuals in groups often performing evasive collective movements in response to predators’ attacks. Individuals in these groups use behavioral rules to coordinate their movements, with visual cues about neighbors’ positions and orientations informing movement decisions. Although the exact visual cues individuals use to coordinate their movements with neighbors have not yet been decoded, some studies have suggested that stripes, lines or other body patterns may act as conspicuous conveyors of movement information that could promote coordinated group movement, or promote dazzle camouflage, thereby confusing predators. We used phylogenetic logistic regressions to test whether the contrasting achromatic stripes present in four different taxa vulnerable to predation, including species within two orders of birds (Anseriformes and Charadriiformes), a suborder of Artiodactyla (the ruminants) and several orders of marine fish (predominantly Perciformes) were associated with group living. Contrasting patterns were significantly more prevalent in social species, and tended to be absent in solitary species or species less vulnerable to predation. We suggest that stripes taking the form of light-colored lines on dark backgrounds, or vice versa, provide a widespread mechanism across taxa that serves either to inform conspecifics of neighbors’ directional movement, or to confuse predators, when moving in groups. Detection and processing of patterns and of motion in the visual channel is essentially colourblind. That diverse animal taxa with widely different vision systems (including di-, tri- and tetrachromats) appear to have converged on a similar use of achromatic patterns is therefore expected given signal-detection theory. This hypothesis would explain the convergent evolution of conspicuous achromatic patterns as an antipredator mechanism in numerous vertebrate species.