Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Detection, diagnosis and management of the early carious lesion

The current evidenced-based caries understanding, based on biological concepts, involves new approaches in caries detection, assessment, and management that should include non-cavitated lesions.The purpose of the studies presented in this thesis was to investigate the current available evidence on methods to detect non-cavitated lesions (NCCls), the current evidence related to the efficacy of non-surgical caries preventive methods to arrest or reverse the progression of NCCls, the current evidence for the prediction of caries using four caries risk assessment systems/guidelines and a review of the literature related to alternative caries clinical trial methods for oral care products. The purpose of the in vitro studies was to study the performance of different caries detection methods (ICDAS, ICDAS photographs, FOTI, QLF, OCT, Soprolife) in detecting early caries lesions and in particular and to assess the QLF ability to detect changes after remineralisation/demineralisation cycles. The last study was a cross-sectional study aiming to investigate the caries management decisions for early caries lesions among dentists. The results of the systematic reviews (Paper I-IV) suggest a large variation of Sensitivity, Specificity and lack of consistence on the definition of disease among the detection methods assessed. The evidence on Caries Risk Assessment Systems is limited and the current systems seem not to predict future disease. In terms of Caries Management, according to the evidence fluorides continue to be the most effectiveness anti-caries agent. The evidence on abbreviated clinical trials showed excellent discrimination between anti-caries products in short clinical trials with fewer subjects using more sensitive caries detection methods. Paper V, showed that all the caries detection methods assessed in this study, except for OCT (0.65), were strongly correlated with Histology. In papers VI and VII, QLF showed the ability to detect differences between two NaF toothpastes (550 ppm F, 1100 ppm F) and a fluoride placebo treatment in two pH cycling models. Finally, the results of the questionnaire on Caries Related Treatment Decisions (Paper VIII) revealed that 60% of the dentists are practising prevention in occlusal early lesions. However, a large number of dentists are still oriented towards a restorative approach and do not base their treatment decisions on individual caries risk. The main conclusions from this thesis are that: 1) A comprehensive management system should include initial caries lesions; 2) Visual examinations is still the standard method of detection, other methods may be included for monitoring purposes; 3) QLF was able to detect remineralisation of artificial carious lesions and inhibition of demineralisation in sound enamel after two remineralisation/demineralisation pH cycling models; 4) The results of the cross-over study indicate that Colombian dentists have not yet fully adopted conservative treatment for early caries lesions.
Games, Design and Play: A detailed approach to iterative game design

The play-focused, step-by-step guide to creating great game designs This book offers a play-focused, process-oriented approach for designing games people will love to play. Drawing on a combined 35 years of design and teaching experience, Colleen Macklin and John Sharp link the concepts and elements of play to the practical tasks of game design. Using full-color examples, they reveal how real game designers think and work, and illuminate the amazing expressive potential of great game design. Focusing on practical details, this book guides you from idea to prototype to playtest and fully realized design. Youll walk through conceiving and creating a games inner workings, including its core actions, themes, and especially its play experience. Step by step, youll assemble every component of your videogame, creatingpractically every kind of play: from cooperative to competitive, from chance-based to role-playing, and everything in between. Macklin and Sharp believe that games are for everyone, and game design is an exciting art form with a nearly unlimited array of styles, forms, and messages. Cutting across traditional platform and genre boundaries, they help you find inspiration wherever it exists. Games, Design and Play is for all game design students, and for beginning-to-intermediate-level game professionals, especially independent game designers. Bridging the gaps between imagination and production, it will help you craftoutstanding designs for incredible play experiences! Coverage includes: Understanding core elements of play design: actions, goals, rules, objects, playspace, and players Mastering tools such as constraint, interaction, goals, challenges, strategy, chance, decision, storytelling, and context Comparing types of play and playerexperiences Considering the demands videogamesmake on players Establishing a games design values Creating design documents, schematics, and tracking spreadsheets Collaborating in teams on a shared design vision Brainstorming and conceptualizing designs Using prototypes to realize and playtest designs Improving designs by making the most of playtesting feedback Knowing when a design is ready for production Learning the rules so you can break them!
Anti-Spoofing Speaker Verification System with Multi-Feature Integration and Multi-Task Learning

Speaker anti-spoofing is crucial to prevent security breaches when the speaker verification systems encounter the spoofed attacks from the advanced speech synthesis algorithms and high fidelity replay devices. In this paper, we propose a framework based on multiple features integration and multi-task learning (MFMT) for improving anti-spoofing performance. It is important to integrate the complementary information of multiple spectral features within the network, such as MFCC, CQCC, Fbank, etc., as often a single kind of feature is not enough to grasp the global spoofing cues and it generalizes poorly. Furthermore, we propose a helpful butterfly unit (BU) for multi-task learning to propagate the shared representations between the binary decision task and the other auxiliary task. The BU can obtain task representations of other branch during forward propagation and prevent the gradient from assimilating the branch during back propagation. Our proposed system yielded an EER of 9.01% on ASVspoof 2017, while the best single system and the average scores fusion obtained the evaluation EER of 2.39% and 0.96% on ASVspoof 2019 PA, respectively.
Bootstrapping a Text Normalization System for an Inflected Language. Numbers as a Test Case

Text normalization is an important part of many natural language applications, in particular for text-to-speech systems. Text normalization poses special challenges for highly inﬂected languages since the correct morphological form for the normalization is not evident from the non-standard word, e.g. a digit. In this paper we report on ongoing work on a text normalization system for Icelandic, a highly inﬂected North Germanic language. We describe experiments on the normalization of numbers and address the problem of choosing the correct morphological form of number names. We use language models trained on texts containing number names and inspect effects of different LMs on domain speciﬁc texts with a high ratio of digits. A partially class based LM, replacing number names with their part-of-speech tags, shows the best results in all domains. We further show that testing normalization on texts where number names have been converted to digits does not show representative results for texts originally containing digits: while a test set similar to the language model training data shows an error rate of 10.1% on inﬂected cardinals from 1-99, test sets originally containing digits show 45.3% and 55% error rates.
The Changes in Interest and Attitudes of Nursing Students toward the Disabled before and after the Disability Experience Program

Introduction: The purpose of this study was to investigate the changes in the concern and attitudes of Nursing students toward the disabled before and after the disability experience program. Method: 151 Nursing students with clinical practice in National rehabilitation hospital were conveniently selected as the subject. All subjects had experience the disability program, and their attitudes toward the disabled were measured before and after the 3hours' program. Collected data were analyzed by SPSS 11.0 with paired t-test. Results: 1. The concern toward the disabled after their disability experience program was more positive than before(t=-4.930, p=.000). 2. The attitudes toward the disabled after their disability experience program was more positive than before(t=5.892, p=.000). 3. The appreciation of daily life after their disability experience program was higher than before(t=-8.563, p= .000). Conclusion: In summary, the disability experience program should be effective in order to promote the positive attitude toward the disabled. Therefore expansion of this program is of profound significant.
Design and Simulation of Two bit Multiplier Circuit using MGDI Technique

- Multiplier in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) are crucial. Thus modern DSP and ECC systems require to develop low power multiplier circuits to reduce the power dissipation and at the same time to increase the speed. One of the efficient ways to reduce power dissipation is by the use of Modified Gate Diffusion Input (MGDI) which at the same time reduces the circuit parameters like transistor count, implementation cost, space required and propagation delay. This paper proposes a new design technique for two-bit binary multiplier and hence multi-bit binary multiplier using the proposed two-bit multiplier circuit. This paper also implements the proposed two-bit multiplier using DSCH 3.5. The proposed technique claims lower power consumption, lower cost, lower space required and also lesser number of transistor than other conventional techniques like CMOS, PTL, CPL etc. A comparative study of the proposed technique has been dealt here clearly which shows the novelty of the proposed technique.
Prosody Usage Optimization for Children Speech Recognition with Zero Resource Children Speech

Children’s speech recognition remains a big challenge for automatic speech recognition. Due to the more difﬁcult process and higher cost on data collection, most current ASR systems are optimized only using lots of adult speech with limited or even none children’s speech. Accordingly, the acoustic mismatch be-tween children’s and adult speech is the primary reason for the ASR performance degradation when facing children’s speech. To overcome this problem, we proposed several approaches to improve children’s speech recognition without using any children’s speech data. A better utilization strategy on prosody-based features is developed. First, pitch and prosody mod-iﬁcation is explored in both training and testing respectively, which can signiﬁcantly reduce the mismatch between two types of speech. Furthermore, joint-decoding with both the prosody modiﬁed speech and the original speech is designed to get a more robust performance on both children’s and adult speech. Experiments are evaluated on a Mandarin speech recognition task, with only 400-hour adult speech in the training. The re-sults show that our proposed method can obtain a large gain on children’s speech, with relative ∼ 20% WER reduction compared to the baseline, and also no obvious degradation is observed on the adult speech for the proposed system.
Brownfield, greenfield, and renewable energy consumption: Moderating role of effective governance

This study investigates the influence of greenfield investment and brownfield investment on renewable energy consumption along with the moderating effect of government effectiveness in 68 countries over the period 2013 to 2014. In order to evaluate more holistic view of the empirical model, we further divide our data into two sub-panels based on country risk. By applying the system-GMM technique to mitigate statistical biases including endogeneity, the empirical results show that brownfield and greenfield investment positively influences renewable energy consumption in global and low-risk panel. However, there is no statistically significant effect of brownfield investment and adverse effect of greenfield investment on renewable energy consumption in low-risk countries. Results also show that effective governments promote the use of renewable energy but it does not moderate the relationship between brownfield investment and renewable energy consumption. On the other hand, government effectiveness strengthens the positive association between greenfield investment and renewable energy consumption in global and low-risk panel, while weakens the negative link between these variables in high-risk countries. Policy implications of our results are also discussed.
Plum and Posner’s diagnosis of stupor and coma

Edited by JeromeB Posner, CliffordB Saper, NicholasD Schiff. Published by Oxford University Press, New York, 2007, pp 380. hardcover. ISBN 9700195321319 Twenty-seven years have passed since the last edition of this well known and widely respected book was published. In the intervening years, advances in structural and functional imaging have transformed the investigation of disorders of consciousness, and the “science of consciousness” has become a popular—even fashionable—pursuit. The new edition preserves the character and structure of its predecessors, but its creators, Jerome Posner and Fred Plum, have responded to the rapid advances in the subject in two …
Computation Offloading in a Mobile Edge Communication Network: A Joint Transmission Delay and Energy Consumption Dynamic Awareness Mechanism

Various problems arise in the maintenance of communication networks. For example, on-site maintenance personnel have insufficient work experience. Devices used for maintenance work have limited computing resources and battery life. Moreover, most maintenance systems still use the centralized single processing mode of traditional cloud computing, which increases the data center computing pressure and slows the data flow. To overcome these problems, we propose a communication network edge maintenance system based on smart wearable technology and introduce computation offloading technology for mobile edge computing (MEC). Before offloading, we propose a multimerged computing sorting segmentation (MCSS) algorithm to divide a part of the task to offload. When making an offloading decision, we access a suitable MEC service node for each user with the lowest transmission cost and establish a related model. We use an improved Kuhn–Munkras (KM) algorithm that considers fairness among users to solve this model. After that, we propose a dynamic energy-efficiency awareness strategy. When tasks are processed locally, we optimize the CPU clock frequency. When tasks are offloaded, we adaptively allocate the transmission power. Finally, we conduct a simulation experiment. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can reduce the transmission cost and improve the performance, thereby increasing the level of on-site maintenance work.
Doing Q Methodological Research: Theory, Method & Interpretation

This book introduces the theory and practice of Q methodology, and takes the reader on a journey from understanding the early history of the method to being in a position where the reader will be able to do Q methodology for themselves. Watts and Stenner cogently and clearly set out the origins of Q methodology in factor analysis and the R methodological procedures, and go on to explain the theory behind Q as set out by the method's early pioneers. They also look at how Q deals with issues such as subjectivity, abduction and constructivism. The main purpose of this book is to enable the reader to set up, run and analyse and effective study using Q methodology. The book is illustrated with examples and case studies throughout, and offers advice on highly practical issues such as the conduct of fieldwork, working with participants, good data management. The bulk of the book looks at process of analysis itself in Q methodology and examines and explains analysis through the use of a dataset and practical examples and exercises.
Vitamin B12 And Folate Deficiency In a Hospital Population

This is a study of B12 and folate deficiency in a hospital population. We studied the incidence of their deficiency by evaluating blood levels in every tenth hospital admission. Among the 450 patients chosen, 417 had normal levels of both, 2 had deficiency of folate alone (folate 95) was seen in 69% of those with both B12 and folate deficiency, 43.4% with B12 deficiency and 61.15 with folate deficiency. Hypersegmented polymorphs were seen in 21.7% with B12 deficiency, 27.5% with folate both B12 and folate deficiency had either megaloblastosis or dimorphic picture. It is to be noted that B12 and folate deficiency in this population was more frequent than we previously considered and reliance on haematologic parameters will miss half to one third of all cases. As expected B12 deficiency is more frequent in vegetarians than non-vegetarians.
Remarks on an arbitrage-free condition for XVA

After the ﬁnancial crisis, it has been widely recognized that counterparty default risks have serious consequences and that there are remarkably large diﬀerences in various interest rates. As a result, the methodology for pricing derivative securities has been modiﬁed: Currently, the price of a derivative security is expressed as the so-called XVA, which is the risk-neutral price plus total valuation adjustment. In this paper, we aim to provide a theoretical interpretation of XVA: Some valuation adjustments are interpreted as the “0th-order” approximation of XVA. Further, we describe a suﬃcient condition to ensure the arbitrage-free property of the 0th-order price approximation.
The Prediction and Assessment of the Impacts of Soil Sealing on Agricultural Land in the North Nile Delta (Egypt) Using Satellite Data and GIS Modeling

Soil sealing is currently one of the most critical barriers to sustainable development, particularly in developing countries such as Egypt. Agriculture is a major component of the Egyptian economy and the country’s main source of food security. Urbanization is devouring vast areas of agricultural land, and therefore, in the present study, urbanization was used to determine the degree of soil sealing in a region of Kafr El Sheikh Governorate, Egypt. In this work, remote sensing data were used to monitor changes in land use and land cover (LULC) between 1984 and 2016. A field survey and population data were also used in the analysis. Support vector machine (SVM) classification was used to produce LULC maps of the study area. An accuracy assessment was performed by calculating overall accuracy and individual kappa coefficients. Additionally, soil sealing was assessed using data from 1984 to 2016, and the potential expansion of soil sealing until 2048 was simulated using the cellular automata (CA)–Markov model. Our analysis showed that in the study area (i) about 90% of the soils had soil capability degrees between class II and class III; (ii) soil sealing was not uniformly distributed in the study area; (iii) between 1984 and 2016, the area of soil sealing in fertile soils due to urbanization increased by 19,500 hectares; and (iv) between 1984 and 2000, the urban area increased by around 29%, whereas between 2000 and 2010 it increased by around 43.6%. The results suggest that the magnitude of soil sealing is a good indicator of the soil loss rate and the potential for agricultural development in the Nile Delta. The model predicted that by 2048 an area of 32,290 hectares of agricultural soil will be lost to urbanization. This study indicates that the change of LULC has a negative impact on soil sealing. Between 2000 and 2010, the area of agricultural land decreased by 4%, despite an increase in land reclamation in the north of the study area. The amount of soil sealing was found to increase towards the southeast and northeast of the study area, except for the northern parts, where the amount of soil sealing increased towards the east. Our analyses and forecasts are useful for decision-makers responsible for soil-sealing mitigation strategies and soil-sealing protection plans in the Kafr El Sheikh Governorate, Egypt.
Modelling of Audio Effects for Vocal and Music Synthesis in Real Time

Sound effects play an important role in today’s music industry. The various effects, modulations to the voice is done. here we present a musical sound effects processing system based on virtual analog modelling and Digital Signal Processing techniques. The modelling is using in matlab and the order of effects are sequenced depending on the musicians choice. The various techniques of Digital signal processing are used . The comparison of results obtained are done with the available system.
Simulations on Lévy subordinators and Lévy driven contagion models

Levy subordinators have become a fundamental component to be used to construct many useful stochastic processes, which have numerous applications in finance, insurance and many other fields. However, as many applications of Levy based stochastic models use fairly complicated analytical and probabilistic tools, it has been challenging to implement in practice. Hence, simulation-based study becomes more desirable. In this thesis, we deal with exact simulation on Levy subordinators and Levy driven stochastic models. In the first part, we focus on developing more efficient exact simulation schemes for Levy subordinators with existing simulation algorithms in the literature. Besides, we also introduce a new type of Levy subordinators, i.e. truncated Levy subordinators. We study the path properties, develop exact simulation algorithms based on marked renewal representations, and provide relevant applications in finance and insurance. The associated results in this part are later used in the sequel. The second part of this thesis proposes a new type of point processes by generalising the classical self-exciting Hawkes processes and doubly stochastic Poisson processes with Levy driven Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type intensities. These resulting models are analytically tractable, and intrinsically inherit the great flexibility as well as desirable features from the two original processes, including skewness, leptokurtosis, mean-reverting dynamics, and more importantly, the contagion or feedback effects. These newly constructed processes would then substantially enrich continuous-time models tailored for quantifying the contagion of event arrivals in finance, economics, insurance, queueing and many other fields. In turn, we characterise the distributional properties of this new class of point processes and design an exact simulation algorithm to generate sample paths. This is done by applying the exact distributional decomposition technique. We carry out extensive numerical implementations and tests to demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of our scheme and give examples of some financial applications to credit portfolio risk to show the applicability and flexibility of our new model.
Collecting, Analyzing and Predicting Socially-Driven Image Interestingness

Interestingness has recently become an emerging concept for visual content assessment. However, understanding and predicting image interestingness remains challenging as its judgment is highly subjective and usually context-dependent. In addition, existing datasets are quite small for in-depth analysis. To push forward research in this topic, a large-scale interestingness dataset (images and their associated metadata) is described in this paper and released for public use. We then propose computational models based on deep learning to predict image interestingness. We show that exploiting relevant contextual information derived from social metadata could greatly improve the prediction results. Finally we discuss some key findings and potential research directions for this emerging topic.