Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DeepSleep: A Ballistocardiographic-based Deep Learning Approach for Classifying Sleep Stages

Purpose: According to a 2009 study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention [4] in the USA, 35.3% of 74,751 people reported having less than 7 hours of sleep, 48% reported having snoring-related issues, 37.9% reported unintentionally falling asleep during the day and 4.7% reported nodding off while driving. Sleep-related disorders such as sleep deprivation [3] and sleep apnea [8] can be studied and diagnosed at sleep clinics. Sleep clinics typically use Polysomnography (PSG), a test conducted to study sleep and to diagnose different forms of sleep disorders [1]. To date, PSG is considered as the most accurate method for diagnosing sleep-related problems and considered the gold standard in clinical sleep medicine. However, it suffers from the fact that it is expensive, complex, time-consuming, and uncomfortable for the users [2]. In this early work, we aim to model a sleep classification system using an unobtrusive Ballistocardiographic (BCG)-based heart sensor signal collected from Dozee1, a commercially available non-contact, unobtrusive pressure-sensitive sensor sheet. Here, we ask: How can a sleep classification system bemodelled using BCG sensor data, in order to achieve a performance comparable with PSG? Methods: In this work, we aim to classify four sleep stages [10]: (1) Wake state (2) Rapid Eye Movement (REM) (3) Light sleep, and (4) Deep sleep. This study is based on four datasets: Dozee’s BCG dataset2, Dozee’s ECG data, the MIT-BIH Polysomnographic dataset [5, 6] and the PPG-based Fitbit data [9] provided by Fitabase3. In this work, the model is trained using the Dozee’s BCG dataset while the Dozee ECG, MIT-BIH PSG data and the Fitbit’s PPG data are used for transfer learning. To study the effect of sleep on our cardiac rhythm, a specific set of features called the Heart-rate Variability (HRV) features need to be extracted [10]. Our approach is to extract such features automatically using deep neural network architectures. Here, we present DeepSleep, a hybrid deep neural network model that can automatically extract heart-related features and learn the time-dependent nature of the sleep patterns for classification. We show how pre-training and subsequently fine-tuning the model can 1https://www.dozee. io 2Dozee: https://www.dozee. io 3Fitabase: https://www.fitabase. com/research-library/ Authors’ addresses: Shashank Rao, Multimedia Computing, TU Delft, Mekelweg 4, 2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands, s.p.rao@student.tudelft. nl; Abdallah El Ali, Distributed & Interactive Systems, CentrumWiskunde & Informatica, Science Park 123, 1098 XG, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, abdallah.el. ali@cwi.nl; Pablo Cesar, Distributed & Interactive Systems, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Science Park 123, 1098 XG, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, p.s. cesar@cwi.nl.
Automatic Analysis of Emotional Prosody in Mandarin Chinese: Applying the Momel Algorithm

Based on the Momel algorithm, a set of acoustic parameters was analyzed automatically on Chinese emotional speech. Global prosodic features were calculated on the sentence level, which showed a concordance with the usual pattern reported in the literature. Local constraints were also considered on the syllable layer. An ANOVA showed that there were interactive effects among emotions, syllable positions and syllable tones on certain parameters. Further more, by examining the pitch movements, no significant difference was found between neutral speech and active emotional speech, which was different from the performance in non-tonal languages. However when reducing the tonal influence by using utterances composed of only tone 1 syllables, this inverse effect disappeared. Hence we posited an interpretation that due to the existence of lexical tone in Mandarin Chinese, the paralinguistic use of pitch movements has been reduced.
Integrity Assurance of OTA Software Update in Smart Vehicles

Abstract Smart vehicles tend to choose an over-the-air (OTA) software (SW) update service. In an environment with smart vehicles, software malfunctions may have serious consequences such as accidents involving human lives and property loss. Therefore, we must ensure that the software updates in smart vehicles are completed correctly. In this study, we focused on the assurance of both data integrity and service integrity in smart vehicles to improve the OTA SW update service security. To this end, the security features of integrity in smart vehicles were identified and discussed with an emphasis on its potential impact on future vehicular applications.
How Intimate are You with Your Preferred Brand?-A Study on Brand Personality Congruence

Brand personality congruence is a concept not widely studied. The present study corrects this lack of knowledge of brand personality congruence by studying it via a service brand like KFC in the Quick Service Restaurant industry. Data were collected in two phases, first for a pilot study from a student sample with exploratory factor analysis applied to the data. Subsequently, data were collected from 473 KFC customers in the city of Bhubaneswar, India and tests like the confirmatory factor analysis and Structural Equation Modelling were applied to validate the conceptual model and estimate the path in the structural model. The findings of the study have practical implications for different service brands in the Quick Service Restaurant industry such as to design their products and services to match the personality of different target groups.
Does the size distribution of mineral dust aerosols depend on the wind speed at emission?

The size distribution of mineral dust aerosols partially determines their interactions with clouds, radiation, ecosystems, and other components of the Earth system. Several theoretical models predict that the dust size distribution depends on the wind speed at emission, with larger wind speeds predicted to produce smaller aerosols. The present study investigates this prediction using a compilation of published measurements of the size-resolved vertical dust flux emitted by eroding soils. Surprisingly, these measurements indicate that the size distribution of naturally emitted dust aerosols is independent of the wind speed. The recently formulated brittle fragmentation theory of dust emission is consistent with this finding, whereas other theoretical models are not. The independence of the emitted dust size distribution with wind speed simplifies both the interpretation of geological records of dust deposition and the parameterization of dust emission in atmospheric circulation models.
The Effect of Optimism Bias and Perceived Risk on the Continuance Usage Intention of E-Government Service

Many previous studies have found a significant negative relationship between perceived risk and continuance usage behaviour of technology. Perceived risk is defined as the potential loss in the pursuit of the desired outcome of using an e-service or more accurately as the fear of losing information or being monitored on the internet. Consumers would always want to avoid mistakes in any risky decision making rather than maximizing utility, thus perceived risk can be considered as a powerful tool in explaining consumer's behaviour. In Malaysia's context, the E-Filing system which was introduced in 2006 serves as a major advantage over the traditional manual procedure. The adoption of the e-filing system in Malaysia has shown a tremendous increase since its introduction, particularly for individual taxpayers. Although many previous local studies have found a significant negative relationship between perceived risk and usage of e-filing system but the adoption of this system is increasing year by year. It explains that citizens acknowledge the risk of using the e-filing system but they are still willing to use the system. Indeed optimism bias may explain this phenomenon. As such the purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of optimism bias and perceived risk on the continuance usage intention of e-filing system in Malaysia. The sample size comprises 731 taxpayers' from the urban states of Peninsular Malaysia were collected using selfadministered questionnaires to the individual salaried taxpayers and analyzed using Partial Least Squared (PLS). Based on the findings, the theoretical and practical implication of the study was also provided.
Reflection of Sport Awareness On Body Composition in Students at the School of Physical Education and Sports

Objectives: We examined the reflection of sport awareness on body composition in the students at the School of Physical Education and Sports by determining the changes in body fat ratios over a period of four years. Study Design: A total of 42 students (20 boys and 22 girls) from the School of Physical Education and Sports (aged between 17 to 21 years) were compared in terms of the body fat ratios using three different anthropometry-based equations. The study groups of both sexes consisted of students who exercised regularly in any type of sport at least two hours per day and three days a week within the last year. Tukey-Kramer multiple comparison test was used to compare the groups. Results: The body fat ratios increased in all groups contrary to the expected reduction. Although there was a reduction in year 2006 values, they were still higher than year 2003 values. Conclusion: While the educational system should be reconsidered to give a shape to enhance sport and physical education awareness and willpower in the students, they should be able to force their willpowers to act as guided by their awareness as well. Turkish Baslik: Beden Egitimi ve Spor Yuksekokulu Ogrencilerinde Spor Bilincinin Vucut Kompozisyonuna Yansimasi Anahtar Kelime: Spor bilinci; vucut yagi; beden egitimi; deri kivrim kalinligi Amac: Dort yillik bir periyotta vucut yag oranlarindaki degisimlere bakarak Beden Egitimi ve Spor Yuksekokulu ogrencilerinde spor bilincinin vucut kompozisyonuna yansima derecesi incelendi. Calisma Plani: Yaslari 17-21 arasindaki 20 erkek ve 22 kizdan olusan toplam 42 Beden Egitimi ve Spor Yuksekokulu ogrencisi, uc farkli antropometri formulu ile hesaplanan vucut yag oranlari acisindan karsilastirildi. Her iki cinste calisma gruplari, herhangi bir sporu, son bir yildir en az haftada uc gun ve gunde iki saat olacak sekilde duzenli olarak yapan ogrencilerden olusturuldu. Gruplarin karsilastirmalari Tukey-Kramer coklu karsilastirma testi ile yapildi. Bulgular: Vucut yag oranlari tum gruplarda beklenenin aksine artti. 2006 degerlerinde bir azalma gerceklesmis olmasina ragmen bunlar yine de 2003 degerlerinden yuksekti. Sonuc: Egitim sisteminin ogrencilerde spor bilinci ve iradeleri yukseltecek sekilde yeniden gozden gecirilmesi gerekirken, ogrencilerin de spor bilincinin gerektirdigi yonde iradelerini zorlayabilmeleri gerekmektedir.
Gawehn, Vanessa Banks and Corporate Income Taxation: A Review Banks and Corporate Income Taxation: A Review

In this paper, I review the empirical literature in the intersection of banks and corporate income taxation that emerged over the last two decades. To structure the included studies, I use a stakeholder approach and outline how corporate income taxation plays into the relation of banks and their four main stakeholders: bank regulators, customers, investors and tax authorities. My contribution to the literature is threefold: First, I contribute by providing, to the best of my knowledge, a first comprehensive review on this topic. Second, I point to areas for future research. Third, I deduce policy implications from the studies under review. In sum, the studies show that taxes distort banks’ pricing decisions, the relative attractiveness of debt and equity financing, the decision to report on or off the balance sheet and banks’ investment allocations. Empirical insights on how tax rules affect banks’ decision-making are helpful for policymakers to tailor suitable and sustainable tax legislation directed at banks. JEL CLASSIFICATION G21, H22, H25, M41
Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) has drawn significant research attention recently due to the popularity and capability of portable devices. This paper presents an MCC offloading system based on internet offloading choices. This system guarantees the conservation of battery life and reduced execution time. The proposed effective context sensitive offloading approach using support value-based classification is processed in different steps. Initially, the context data of the input tasks is extracted through the energy consumption model, cost model, execution model, communication model and stored. Then, the support valuebased classification approach classifies the tasks based on the context information. This classification creates the information about the tasks and finally, a decision is made at the right time to achieve better offloading. The result indicates the presented offloading framework can choose reasonable cloud assets depending on various contexts of the mobile devices and achieve significant performance enhancement.
Anisotropic thermal conductivity in 2D tellurium

Two-dimensional tellurium (2D-Te) has been recently synthesized and shown potential in electronics, optoelectronics, and thermoelectric applications, with the merits of high mobility, environmental stability, high thermoelectric power-factor, and simplicity of mass production. These 2D-Te films have unique atomic structures: the Te atoms form trigonal helical chains and are then stacked into hexagonal lattice by van der Waals force, which brings up distinctive transport behaviors. Here we report anisotropic thermal conductivity of suspended 2D-Te films measured by micro-Raman thermometry and the time-domain thermal reflectance (TDTR) method. The in-plane along-chain and cross-chain thermal conductivities are found to be around 2.5 and 1.7 W m−1 K−1, respectively, for thicker films (>100 nm), and reduced to 1.6 and 0.64 W m−1 K−1 for the thinner films (<20 nm). The measured anisotropy is >1.3 for all the films studied. The cross-plane (also across-chain) thermal conductivity is found to be around 0.8 to 1.2 W m−1 K−1 for thicker films, slightly lower than that along the in-plane across-chain direction due to the stronger suppression by the thin film boundary. Theoretical modeling reveals that the anisotropy mainly originates from anisotropic phonon dispersion. The long mean-free-path phonons in Te are also shown to be strongly suppressed by boundary scattering. The large reduction of anisotropic thermal conductivity from the bulk makes it the best single-element thermoelectric material and enables potential thermoelectric generation or cooling devices at room temperature. Our results also provide critical information for thermal management of 2D-Te electronic devices.
What Production of Presence and Mimesis have in Common

The aim of this paper is to open up the discussion on presence to questions about the influence of the presumed ontic status of the perceived on presence experience. In order to develop an approach considering this item, experiences of tele-presence have to be distinguished from those of ‘pure’ presence on the one hand and ‘fictional’ presence on the other: Fictional presence depends on an ‘as-if’ experience that is due to a communication act, whereas ‘pure’ presence is due to the belief in an un-biased perception that allows also non-communicative items to occur. Tele-presence is a grounds for intersection between these two issues that allows an experience of two realities to ‘take place’ in the same time and place. The relations between these three concepts among each other and regarding virtual presence (as a broader concept) are discussed and a definition for hyper-presence is introduced. a presence to be felt and known. (Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais)
A proposed sustainable BNR plant with the emphasis on recovery of COD and phosphate

Water problems have to be solved in an integrated way, and sustainability has become a major issue. For this reason, developing more sustainable wastewater treatment processes is needed. New discoveries and good understanding on microbial conversions of nitrogen and phosphorus make more sustainable processes possible. New options for decentralized sustainable sanitation are generally compared to conventional sewage systems, we think that for a proper comparison also innovative centralized treatment schemes should be evaluated. In this article, a more sustainable WWTP is proposed for municipal wastewater treatment, mainly based on the principles of denitrifying dephosphatation and anaerobic ammonium oxidation (ANAMMOX). The proposed system consists of a first stage of the A/B process in which maximal sludge production is achieved. In this way, COD is regained as sludge for methanation. The following BCFS® and CANON processes can remove N and P with minimal or no COD need. As a potential fertiliser, struvite can easily be removed from the sludge water by adding magnesium compounds. A case study is done on the basis of the mass balance over the proposed plant. The effluent from the system has a good quality to be recycled. This could also make a contribution to meeting the world’s water needs and lessening the impact on the world’s water environment. Since all the separate units are already applied or tested on pilot-scale, no problems for technical implementation are foreseen.
Distractor rejection in parallel search tasks takes time but does not benefit from context repetition*

ABSTRACT When the spatial configuration of a search display is presented repeatedly, response times to finding the target within that configuration are shorter compared to completely novel configurations, even though observers do not have explicit recognition of the repetition. This phenomenon is known as Contextual Cueing and selective attention is thought to be necessary for the effect. Previous research has suggested that repetition of the context of unattended items does not appear to improve performance; only repetition of attended items does. It has been proposed that this occurs because unattended items are pre-attentively filtered and thus do not contribute to performance. Here we demonstrate that so-called “unattended” items do contribute to performance, just not to contextual cueing. We approach this question from the perspective of the parallel processing of the scene that unfolds at the start of each item and that has been recently modelled by the Target Contrast Signal Theory. We show that the processing time per item during parallel evaluation of the scene is not affected by context repetition, suggesting that the locations of the items rejected in this stage are not integrated into the memory representation underlying contextual cueing. Other alternatives are also discussed.
sP2D2: Software Productivity and Popularity of Open Source Projects based on Defect Technical Debt

The goal of this research is to help software product owners and decision makers predict early in the software project when or if the project is at risk of failure. If the decision makers can get an early notification of the outcome, they can make better choices on what they need to do to make the project successful. Particularly, open source projects present a different kind of problem because they are continuously being changed and do not necessarily have an end to the project. In addition, their determination of success and failure are different than traditional software projects with predefined success criteria. In this paper, we explore creating a likelihood of success factor for open source projects to use for determining the success of their projects. We propose use of number of bugs as technical debt (TD), the productivity element, and the GitHub StarGazer (SG) metrics as the popularity element. We use publicly available TD and SG data to calculate the likelihood of success rate of open source projects using our novel algorithm called Software Productivity and Popularity of Open Source Projects based on Defect Technical Debt (sP2D2). This paper presents an implementation of the sP2D2 method and results of analysis of several open source GitHub projects. Keywords—Agile Software Development, Project Management, Project Outcome Prediction, Technical Debt, Open Source, Productivity, Popularity
Processing Prosodic Boundaries in Natural and Filtered Speech

The prosody of an utterance can carry information that is critically important to understand the meaning of a sentence. Previous studies have shown that listeners are able to detect major prosodic boundaries in their native language in stimuli whose segmental information has been removed, such as low-pass filtered [1][2] and hummed speech [2][3][4][5]. The present boundary strength rating study is conducted on native and non-native speakers to Swedish, in an attempt to observe non-native speakers’ accuracy in judging the upcoming boundary size in natural and filtered speech. 18 Taiwanese and 18 American English speakers were recruited for the rating task whose stimuli consisted of Swedish utterances from three prosodic boundary types (word boundary, phrase/tone sandhi group boundary, and Intonation Phrase boundary). In Experiment 1, participants rated the upcoming boundary strength on a slider for natural speech stimuli. In Experiment 2, they rated the boundary strength for filtered speech stimuli. The results show that both native and non-native speakers could accurately predict the upcoming prosodic boundary type in both natural and filtered speech. The acoustic analyses of duration, f0 range, f0 median, spectral tile, and harmonics-to-noise ratio reveal that both native and non-native speakers use these prosodic cues to make their judgment; however, they put different emphasis on different cues when they were presented with stimuli of different qualities (natural vs. filtered) and lengths. The results reveal the significant correlations between the acoustic measures from the last of the filtered utterances and the logarithmic boundary strength. It seems that English listeners rely on more voice quality cues for both lengths whereas Taiwanese listeners, who had better boundary strength when presented with 2-second fragments, tended to make use of more cues, including durational measures, to predict the upcoming boundaries. In addition, tone language speakers, such as Taiwanese, also used f0 range as a reliable cue when they were asked to predict upcoming boundary in a non-native language. Pitch is not only for lexical use for Taiwanese listeners.
Transforming Dementia Care in an Acute Teaching Hospital to a Dementia Aware Hospital: The 3 Tier Model of Dementia Care

The elderly patients occupy most of the beds in an acute hospital and will likely increase in the years to come. Providing dignified care to the vulnerable elderly patients living with dementia is challenging for most healthcare professionals due to constraints in resources and a lack of training. This paper discusses processes involved in ensuring that any elderly patients with cognitive issues are cared for with compassion and dignity anywhere in the hospital, regardless of their medical/ surgical problems and the teams which they are admitted under.