Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploring the potential of virtual reality technology to investigate the health and well being benefits of group singing

ABSTRACT There is a growing body of academic research aiming to quantify and understand the associated health and well being benefits of group singing. The social interaction is known to strongly contribute to perceived improvements to mental and physical health but there are also indications that singing together elicits better well being outcomes than other community activities. This paper introduces the Vocal Interaction in an Immersive Virtual Acoustic (VIIVA) system, which allows the user to take part in a group singing activity in 360 degree virtual reality, hearing themselves in the recorded venue alongside the other singers. The VIIVA is intended to make group singing accessible to those unable to attend real community choirs but also as a tool for experimental research into the health and well being benefits of group singing. This paper describes the VIIVA system and presents a number of methodologies and applications which are discussed in relation to three ongoing research projects. Preliminary work indicates that the VIIVA system provides a promising tool with which to study the health and well being benefits of group singing, and in particular to control for the social interactions inherent in real group singing activities.
Using Biofilms for the Detection and Bioremediation of Arsenic

1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . 2 INTRODUCTION . 4 Arsenic in Drinking Water . 4 Arsenic Remediation . 5 Biofilms . 6 Using Synthetic Biology to Enhance Bioremediation . 7 Engineering Biofilm Biosensors . 7 Project Goal . 8 METHODS . 9 Crystal Violet Biofilm Assay. 9 Growing S. epidermidis Biofilms on Nylon Mesh Discs . 10 Cloning the Arsenic Biosensor Construct . 11 Cloning the Synthetic Chelator Construct . 12 Testing the Natural Chelating Abilities of S. epidermidis and A. baylyi . 13 Measuring Arsenic Chelation by E. coli Expressing the Synthetic Chelator . 13 RESULTS . 15 Crystal Violet Biofilm Assay. 15 S. epidermidis Growth on Nylon Mesh Discs . 16 Arsenic Biosensor Cloning . 17 Synthetic Chelator Cloning . 18 Natural Arsenic Chelation by S. epidermidis and A. baylyi . 19 Arsenic Chelation by E. coli Expressing the Synthetic Chelator . 20 DISCUSSION . 21 REFERENCES . 24 APPENDICES . 26
Down-regulation and individual blade control as lifetime extension enablers

As more and more wind turbines are coming close to the end of their design lifetime, evaluation of end of life strategies is becoming highly relevant. Moreover, as turbine technology matures and wind farms grow larger, lifetime extension becomes a financially attractive option compared to re-powering and decommissioning. Present work suggests control strategies, namely down-regulation and individual blade control, as lifetime extension enablers. The concept of using them as retrofit control implementations is explained. Their individual and combined potential in fatigue load reduction is evaluated, along with their effect on other performance and pitch system metrics. Finally, the possible period of extension, beyond the nominal 20 years, is evaluated in an example case where the retrofit control strategy is applied after 15 years of baseline operation. The aeroelastic simulations are performed with a 10 MW reference wind turbine, according to load certification standards. Results show that the two methods complement each other in load alleviation. The pitch actuator demands are also significantly decreased when the two methods are combined.
Reusable Conformable Workholding

Often times milled parts are designed around their ability to be fixtured within a machine tool. This paper looks at the plausibility of developing work holding methods for parts with abnormal geometry. A process was developed for three parts of increasing complexity with each part representing a grade of part that one might encounter. A 3D printed negative mold of the part with vacuum ports was developed and examined for feasibility in workholding. The process includes coatings to better seal the fixture and adapt an additively manufactured part for the purpose of workholding. The process was tested and conclusions were drawn based upon the quality of the finished part, the ease of the process, and visual keys during machining.
The Effects of Perspective Taking and Victim Impact Statements on Courtroom Decisions

This research utilizes two studies to examine the influence of perspective taking with a defendant and emotionality of victim impact statements on courtroom decisions. We hypothesize that perspective taking with the defendant will limit the effects of emotionality within victim impact statements. In Study 1 the defense attorney’s statement prompted participants to perspective take with a defendant in a murder trial. Participants also viewed either flat or high emotionality victim impact statements. Study 2 replicated study one, but instead primed participants to perspective take with the defendant using a sentence unscrambling task. The results of Study 1 were inconclusive. Study 2 found that perspective taking with the defendant diminished the influence of the emotionality of the victim impact statements on sentencing as well as empathy felt towards the victim and victim’s significant others. We compare our results to past research regarding perspective taking and victim impact statements in the courtroom.
Elastic instability of black rings at large D

Using the inverse dimensional expansion method we study the elastic instability of black rings found recently in numerical analysis of fully nonlinear dynamical evolutions. In our analysis we should perform 1/D^1/2 expansions, not usual 1/D expansions, of the Einstein equations to capture this elastic instability of D dimensional black rings. By solving the Einstein equations at large D we obtain the effective equations for black rings, and the perturbation analysis of the large D effective equations with 1/D^1/2 expansions yields the formula for quasinormal mode frequencies. From this formula, we find that black rings actually suffer from both elastic and Gregory-Laflamme like instabilities. These instabilities are coupled and appear at the same time as observed in numerical analysis. The elastic instability does disappear at the infinite limit of a ring radius, which implies that the (boosted) black string is stable to elastic perturbations. Furthermore we observe that the Gregory-Laflamme like instability becomes more efficient than the elastic instability even for certain thin black rings in enough higher dimensions.
NEW LEARNING ALGORITHM BASED HIDDEN MARKOV MODEL ( HMM ) AS STOCHASTIC MODELLING FOR PATTERN CLASSIFICATION MALARVILI

This study investigates the use discriminative training methods of minimum classification error (MCE) to estimate the parameter of hidden Markov model (HMM). The conventional training of HMM is based on the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) which aims to model the true probabilistic distribution of the data in term of maximizing the likelihood. This requires sufficient training data and correct choice of probabilistic models, which in reality hardly achievable. The insufficient training data and incorrect modeling assumption of HMM often yield an incorrect and unreliable model. Instead of learning the true distribution, the MCE based training targeted to minimizing the probability of error is used to obtain optimal Bayes classification. The central idea of MCE based training is to define a continuous, differentiable loss function to approximate the actual performance error rate. Gradient based optimization methods can be used to minimize this loss. In this study the first order online generalized probabilistic descent is used as optimization methods. The continuous density HMM is used as the classifier structure in the MCE framework. The MCE based training is evaluated on speaker-independent Malay isolated digit recognition. The MCE training achieves the classification accuracy of 96.4% compared to 96.1% of using MLE with small improvement rate of 0.31%. The small vocabulary is unable to reflect the performance comparison of the two methods, the MLE training given sufficient training data is sufficient to provide optimal classification accuracy. Future work will extend the evaluation on difficult classification task such as phoneme classification, to better access the discriminative ability of the both methods.
Supplementary Material for Occupancy Networks : Learning 3 D Reconstruction in Function Space

In this supplementary document, we first give a detailed overview of our architectures and training procedure in Section 1. We then discuss our implementation of the baselines in Section 2 and compare them to the implementation in the original publications. Finally, we provide additional experimental results, both qualitatively and quantitatively in Section 3. The supplementary video shows 3D animations of the output of our method for the conditional tasks as well as latent space interpolations for our generative model. 1. Implementation Details In this section, we first give a detailed description of our architectures. We then describe all our data preprocessing steps and provide details on the metrics we use both for training and testing. Finally, we give details on our training protocol and inference procedure.
The Utility of Personalities in Front-End Innovation

This report embarks to explore a new way to organise front-end innovation. Enhancing the models of current research that conclude to beneficial social network structures or heterogeneity ratios, this study aim to find ideal personality constellations within project teams to make them powerful and useful. There is limited research given to how an individual’s personality traits in the context of a team impacts the potential of that team to innovate, yet it is vital to match up the right individuals in order to create desirable outcomes. Initial exploration provided insights to the key dimensions that makes an idea valuable; customer orientation, feasibility, market opportunity and strategic fit. The theoretical framework suggests that each of four personality archetypes (rationals, guardians, idealist and artisans) is naturally prone to produce ideas within one or more of those specific dimensions. Knowing the predominant type of ideas, which teams produce will allow for a better organisational structure to improve the flow of ideas. A meticulous methodology was designed to supply the quantitative and qualitative data needed for such conclusions. A personality test with 96 participants, followed by an ideation session granted for a sample of 179 ideas to be produced. Collaborations with external industry professionals facilitated for the categorisation of ideas according to the four idea utility dimensions. The empirical data was analysed within correlations and regressions to show that personalities have, in fact, a predictive impact that can be exploited. The archetype of rationals, on the one hand, was prone to produce feasible and customer orientated ideas. Alternatively, the idealist and artisan archetypes portrayed to opposite as their ideas were less feasible but rich in market opportunities. A firm can therefore vertically translate a short-term, low risk innovation strategy into tasking rationals appropriately. Likewise, idealists and artisans come into play to suit a long-term and future oriented innovation strategy.
Reproductive biology SIRT 1 signalling protects mouse oocytes against oxidative stress and is deregulated during aging

Giovanna Di Emidio1, Stefano Falone1, Maurizio Vitti1, Anna Maria D’Alessandro1, Marilena Vento2, Cinzia Di Pietro3, Fernanda Amicarelli1, and Carla Tatone1,4,* Department of Life, Health and Environmental Sciences, University of L’Aquila, Via Vetoio, 67100 L’Aquila, Italy Servizio di PMA, Azienda Ospedaliera Cannizzaro, Catania, Italy Dipartimento Gian Filippo Ingrassia, Sezione di Biologia, Genetica, Genomica Cellulare e Molecolare Giovanni Sichel, Università degli Studi di Catania, Catania, Italy Infertility Service, San Salvatore Hospital, Via Vetoio, 67100 L’Aquila, Italy
Validation of air-displacement plethysmography to measure body fat

that of our study, but the prevalence of symptomatic HIV infection or AIDS in these cohorts varied greatly. We recently published findings from our study cohort examining the association of HIV infection and adverse pregnancy outcomes (5). This analysis was limited to women who were randomly assigned to receive no multivitamins because of the significant effect of multivitamin supplements on the risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes previously reported in this cohort (2). We concurrently enrolled and followed 502 HIV-uninfected pregnant women in addition to our trial cohort of 1078 HIV-infected women, and we found no significant differences between these 2 groups in poor pregnancy outcomes, including the risk of fetal loss, LBW, and preterm delivery (5). However, we found significantly higher relative risks (RRs) of LBW (RR: 2.29; 95% CI: 1.34, 3.92) and preterm delivery (RR: 1.93; 95% CI: 1.35, 2.77) among symptomatic HIV-infected women than among HIV-uninfected women (5). The rates of LBW were 14.7%, 13.0%, and 26.4% in HIV-uninfected, asymptomatic HIVinfected, and symptomatic HIV-infected women, respectively. Symptomatic HIV-infected women (World Health Organization stage II or higher) made up 16.6% of this cohort. Braddick et al (3) reported a 17% LBW rate among women in Kenya with HIV-related diseases compared with a 6% LBW rate among women who were asymptomatic or had generalized lymphadenopathy alone (odds ratio: 3.4; P = 0.08). LBW was rare (3%) among uninfected women in the study. Ryder et al (6) reported LBW rates of 9.8%, 16.9%, and 32.9% among Rwandan women who were HIV uninfected, HIV infected without AIDS, and HIV infected with AIDS, respectively. In the Brocklehurst and French (7) meta-analysis of HIV infection and perinatal outcomes, a modest relation was observed between HIV infection and LBW, but there was considerable heterogeneity among study results. The reported association was stronger in studies from developing countries than in those from developed countries. Compared with HIV-infected women in developed countries, infected women in developing countries are more likely to be at advanced clinical and immunologic stages of HIV-related disease, possibly because of the high prevalence of undernutrition, opportunistic infections, and poor access to treatment. These conditions increase the risk of poor pregnancy outcomes regardless of HIV status, and they may be important contributors to the high rates observed among HIV-infected women, particularly those with symptoms of HIV-related disease. Our findings support those of the metaanalysis and suggest that the increased risk of LBW and preterm delivery associated with HIV infection may be due in large part to the more advanced disease in some HIV-infected women.
MARAN : normalizing microarray data

Summary: MARAN is a web-based application for normalizing microarray data. MARAN comprises a generic ANOVA model, an option for Loess fitting prior to ANOVA analysis, and a module for selecting genes with significantly changing expression. Availability: http://www.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/maran/ Contact: kristof.engelen@esat.kuleuven.ac.be
AcMC 2 : Accelerated Markov Chain Monte Carlo for Probabilistic Models

Probabilistic models (PMs) are ubiquitously used across a variety of machine learning applications. They have been shown to successfully integrate structural prior information about data and effectively quantify uncertainty to enable the development of more powerful, interpretable, and efficient learning algorithms. This paper presents AcMC2, a compiler that transforms PMs into optimized hardware accelerators (for use in FPGAs or ASICs) that utilize Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to infer and query a distribution of posterior samples from the model. The compiler analyzes statistical dependencies in the PM to drive several optimizations to maximally exploit the parallelism and data locality available in the problem. We demonstrate the use of AcMC2 to implement several learning and inference tasks on a Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA. AcMC2-generated accelerators provide a 47 − 100× improvement in runtime performance over a 6-core IBM Power8 CPU and a 8 − 18× improvement over an NVIDIA K80 GPU. This corresponds to a 753 − 1600× improvement over the CPU and 248 − 463× over the GPU in performance-per-watt terms. CCS Concepts • Computer systems organization → Parallel architectures; • Hardware → Hardware accelerators; • Software and its engineering → Compilers; Domain specific languages.
An Emotion Awareness Tool for the Sharing of Emotions: What Impact on Computer-Supported Collaborative Processes?

There is a large consensus on a significant role of emotions in individual and collaborative settings. In this context, emotion awareness tools (EAT) have been developed to promote the sharing of emotions during computer-mediated collaboration. In this study, we explore whether and how an EAT impacts collaborative processes, and whether there is a gender effect. Results showed that the EAT was beneficial to mutual modeling processes but we found also that men exchanged more verbal acts aiming at improving the relational climate but expressed less divergent opinions with the EAT, which is not the case in women.
Language Ecology in Cyprus, Sweden and Estonia: Bilingual Russian-Speaking Families in Multicultural Settings

We investigated language transmission in Russian-speaking families in multilingual settings in Cyprus, Estonia and Sweden. What they have in common is their Russian-language background and the minority status of their native language. In Cyprus and Sweden, participants mainly come from immigrant and mixed-marriage communities, while in Estonia they live in a bilingual society, where Estonian is a prestigious language and Russian has low status. To investigate the complex contexts of the informants’ language choices, the language ecology theory was chosen as a theoretical framework. Particular attention was paid to similarities and differences in the three country groups under investigation. Written questionnaires and oral sociolinguistic interviews were used for data collection among Russian-speaking informants in the three countries. We asked whether Russian as the first language was transmitted to the second generation and why. The attitudes towards bilingualism and Russian language transmission (including the change of these attitudes over time) – depending on the parents’ success in bringing up children bilingually – seemed to matter. Parental language choice is one of the main factors contributing to successful transmission. A lot depends on whether there was a desire for integration with the dominant language community, for staying isolated and only preserving the home language, or for having a balanced bilingual/multilingual approach and positive attitude towards both majority and minority languages. The socio-economic status, level of education and mother’s employment status played crucial roles in language transmission and attitudes. The linguistic repertoire of the father (minority, majority, or mixed) also had an effect.
Understanding Social Psychology Across Cultures: Engaging with Others in a Changing World

Part One: Establishing the Framework 1. Why Does Social Psychology Need a Cross-Cultural Perspective? 2. Clarifying the Way Forward with Culture: Theories and Frameworks 3. The Origins and Dynamics of Culture 4. How to do Cross-Cultural Psychology Part Two: Core Aspects of Social Psychology in Cross-Cultural Perspective 5. Personality and Social Context 6. Cognition, Motivation and Emotion 7. Self and Identity Processes 8. Cultural Norms and Socialisation Processes 9. Interpersonal Behaviour 10. Group Processes Part Three: The World in Flux 11. Intercultural Contact 12. Intergroup Relations 13. Acculturation 14. Globalisation and Cultural Change 15. The Unfinished Agenda
Within-session e ff ect of repeated stress exposure on extinction circuitry function in social anxiety disorder

Anxiety reduction following repeated exposure to stressful experiences is generally held to depend on neural processes involved in extinction of conditioned fear. We predicted that repeated exposure to stressful experiences would change activity throughout the circuitry serving extinction, including ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), the hippocampus and the amygdala. To test this prediction, 36 participants diagnosed with SAD performed two successive speeches in front of an observing audience while regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) was recorded using positron emission tomography. To control for non-anxiolytic effects of repeated exposure, rCBF was also measured during repeated presentations of neutral and angry facial expressions. Results showed that anxiety ratings and heart rate decreased from the first to the second speech, indicating an anxiolytic effect of repeated exposure. Exposure attenuated rCBF in the amygdala whereas no change in rCBF was observed in the vmPFC or hippocampus. The rCBF-reductions in the amygdala were greater following repetition of the speech task than repetition of face exposure indicating that they were specific to anxiety attenuation and not due to a reduced novelty. Our findings suggest that amygdala-related attenuation processes are key to understanding the working mechanisms of exposure therapy.