Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Perceived Quality in Game Audio

Perceived quality in game audio is not a question of audio quality alone. As audio is usually only a part in an overall game concept consisting of graphics, physics, artificial intelligence, user input, feedback and so forth, audio has been considered to play a relatively minor role in the overall experience that a game provides. Consequently, a lot of effort has been put into providing near photo-realistic representations of (virtual) game scenarios to the player, but only little into audio. Interestingly, this assessment has had to be revised over the last years. Learning from other artistic fields like cinema, in which storytelling is a central means of providing “user experience”, game developers have come to know that audio can trigger emotions and provide additional information otherwise hard to convey. Today, although budgets are still limited compared to other aspects of game engineering, audio in games is given more attention by the game developers than ever before. But there is more to audio in games than just an emotional support for a story. Most games are user-centered and non-linear, as opposed to the linear story telling of traditional, non-interactive AbstrAct
Will Insta-Business be the Electronic Contemporary Bazaar?: An Exploratory Analysis on Electronic Commerce in Kuwait

Electronic Commerce is shaping many of our daily tasks and, with the introduction to new aspects of social interaction on the net, a new phenomenon is emerging in the arena of e-commerce known as social commerce. Within this new trend in social commerce, Instagram, a simple yet powerful app, is now playing a new role in combining both the advantage of social networks with its design features and capabilities. In this paper we examine how a simple yet powerful picture-based social network app like Instagram is shaping the electronic commerce arena globally, using Kuwait as an example. Instagram has become a major part of most Kuwaiti individual lives, for in Kuwait Instagram is currently an hourly stop instead of a daily one. Instagram transformed from being a voyeuristic tool to becoming a handy shopping outlet. Everything from exotic pets to home car washing and detailing service can be found on Instagram, whose usage in Kuwait is now ubiquitous: from the old widower selling home-cooked traditional dishes to multimillion real estate investment companies. In this paper we explore the factors and barriers that helped Instagram become a social commerce outlet for many users in Kuwait and around the world.
Template-based manipulation in unstructured environments for supervised semi-autonomous humanoid robots

Humanoid robotic manipulation in unstructured environments is a challenging problem. Limited perception, communications and environmental constraints present challenges that prevent fully autonomous or purely teleoperated robots from reliably interacting with their environment. In order to achieve higher reliability in manipulation we present an approach involving remote human supervision. Strengths from both human operator and humanoid robot are leveraged through a user interface that allows the operator to perceive the remote environment through an aggregated worldmodel based on onboard sensing, while the robot can efficiently receive perceptual and semantic information from the operator. A template based manipulation approach has been successfully applied to the Atlas humanoid robot; we show real world footage of the results obtained in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials 2013.
Lexical-semantic system organization in the monolingual and bilingual developing brain

The present doctoral research explored the developing lexical-semantic system in monolingual and bilingual toddlers. The question of how and when word meanings are first related to each other and become integrated into an interconnected semantic system was investigated. Three studies were conducted with monolingual French learning children which aimed at exploring how words are organized, that is, according to taxonomic relationships (e.g., pig - horse) and to semantic similarity distances between words (e.g., cow - sheep versus cow - deer), and whether cognitive mechanisms, such as automatic activation and controlled processes, underlie priming effects. An additional two studies conducted with children learning two languages simultaneously, aimed at determining, first, whether taxonomically related word meanings, in each of the two languages, are processed in a similar manner. The second goal was to explore whether words presented in one language activate words in another language, and vice versa. In an attempt to answer these questions, lexical-semantic processing was explored by two techniques: eye-tracking and event-related potentials (ERPs) techniques. Both techniques provide high temporal resolution measures of word processing but differ in terms of responses. Eye-movement measurements (Study III) reflect looking preferences in response to spoken words and their time-course, whereas ERPs reflect implicit brain responses and their activity patterns (Study I, II, IV, and V). Study I and II revealed that words are taxonomically organized at 18 and 24-month-olds. Both automatic and controlled processes were shown to be involved in word processing during language development (Study II). Study III revealed that at 24-month-olds, categorical and feature overlap between items underpin the developing lexical-semantic system. That is, lexical-items in each semantic category are organized according to graded similarity distances. Productive vocabulary skills influenced word recognition and were related to underlying cognitive mechanisms. Study IV revealed no differences in terms of semantic processing in the bilinguals? two languages, but the ERP distribution across the scalp varied according to the language being processed. Study V showed that words presented in one language activate their semantic representations in the second language and the other way around. The distribution of the ERPs depended, however, on the direction of translation. The results suggest that even early dual language experience yields distinct neural resources underlying lexical-semantic processing in the dominant and non-dominant languages during language acquisition.
Trauma-Focused Treatment in PTSD Patients With Psychosis: Symptom Exacerbation, Adverse Events, and Revictimization

OBJECTIVES: Most clinicians refrain from trauma treatment for patients with psychosis because they fear symptom exacerbation and relapse. This study examined the negative side effects of trauma-focused (TF) treatment in patients with psychosis and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). METHODS: Analyses were conducted on data from a single-blind randomized controlled trial comparing TF treatment (N = 108; 8 sessions prolonged exposure or eye movement desensitization) and waiting list (WL; N = 47) among patients with a lifetime psychotic disorder and current chronic PTSD. Symptom exacerbation, adverse events, and revictimization were assessed posttreatment and at 6-month follow-up. Also investigated were symptom exacerbation after initiation of TF treatment and the relationship between symptom exacerbation and dropout. RESULTS: Any symptom exacerbation (PTSD, paranoia, or depression) tended to occur more frequently in the WL condition. After the first TF treatment session, PTSD symptom exacerbation was uncommon. There was no increase of hallucinations, dissociation, or suicidality during the first 2 sessions. Paranoia decreased significantly during this period. Dropout was not associated with symptom exacerbation. Compared with the WL condition, fewer persons in the TF treatment condition reported an adverse event (OR = 0.48, P =.032). Surprisingly, participants receiving TF treatment were significantly less likely to be revictimized (OR = 0.40, P =.035). CONCLUSIONS: In these participants, TF treatment did not result in symptom exacerbation or adverse events. Moreover, TF treatment was associated with significantly less exacerbation, less adverse events, and reduced revictimization compared with the WL condition. This suggests that conventional TF treatment protocols can be safely used in patients with psychosis without negative side effects. Language: en
Document Representations and Clues to Document Relevance

Research into the role of document representations in the relevance judgment process has focused on the ability of users to predict the relevance of documents based on various document representations. Conclusions have been stated as to the comparative effectiveness of various document representations, but there has been little exploration into why certain document representations seem to enable users to better predict the relevance of documents. This examination is an attempt to identify the extent to which various document representations contain clues that allow users to determine the presence or absence of traits and/or qualities that determine the relevance of the document to the user's situation. Motivated users discussed their reasons for pursuing or not pursuing documents based on information contained within representations of those documents (i.e., titles, abstracts, indexing terms, etc.). The results are presented as the co-occurrence of respondents' mentions of various traits and/or qualities, and the document representations that led to such responses. It is concluded that document representations may differ in their effectiveness as indicators of potential relevance because different types of document representations vary in their ability to present clues for specific traits and/or qualities. Suggestions for further research are provided.
BUPTTeam Participation at TAC 2013 Entity Linking

This paper overviews BUPTTeam’s participation in the Entity Linking task. We tackle the problem of entity disambiguation for large collections of online pages. Specifically, Named Entity Disambiguation is the task to polish the ambiguities of named entities. Several methods have been proposed to solve this problem, but they are largely only focused on one disambiguation mean, Entity Linking or Entity Clustering. In this paper, we propose an original framework to disambiguate the ambiguities of named entities combining Entity Linking and Entity Clustering. The evaluation results show that our method is effective for Entity Linking task.
O C ] 2 3 Ju l 2 00 4 On the Noether Invariance Principle for Constrained Optimal Control Problems

Noether’s invariance principle is one of the most helpful and fundamental results of physics. It describes the universal fact that “invariance with respect to some family of parameter transformations gives rise to the existence of certain conserved quantities. ” Such relation is used to explain everything from the fusion of hydrogen to the motion of planets orbiting the sun [6]. For a modern account of Noether’s invariance principle, in the context of the calculus of variations, we refer the reader to [1, 10]. Extensions for the unconstrained problems of optimal control are available in [8, 9]. Here we generalize the previous results
Predicting protein folding rates from geometric contact and amino acid sequence

Protein folding speeds are known to vary over more than eight orders of magnitude. Plaxco, Simons, and Baker (see References) first showed a correlation of folding speed with the topology of the native protein. That and subsequent studies showed, if the native structure of a protein is known, its folding speed can be predicted reasonably well through a correlation with the “localness” of the contacts in the protein. In the present work, we develop a related measure, the geometric contact number, N α, which is the number of nonlocal contacts that are well‐packed, by a Voronoi criterion. We find, first, that in 80 proteins, the largest such database of proteins yet studied, N α is a consistently excellent predictor of folding speeds of both two‐state fast folders and more complex multistate folders. Second, we show that folding rates can also be predicted from amino acid sequences directly, without the need to know the native topology or other structural properties.
A Selection Criterion for Robust Classifiers : Cancer Prognosis with Microarray Gene Expression

Microarray technology is now enabling us to measure the expression levels of large number of genes simultaneously. In clinical medicine, this technology is going to be applied to predict clinical features, such as malignancy of cancer [2]. For such purposes, we need classifiers which show a high prediction accuracy. However, estimation of the true prediction performance of a classifier is highly variable because of the small size of samples and non-negligible observation noise. Consequently, even when we have a classifier with high expected accuracy, it is not safe if its variance is high. We present here a new method, the Parametric Noise Bootstrap and Percentile (PNBP) method, to estimate the variance by generating artificial datasets which simulate an original dataset with observation noise. The advantages of PNBP are, firstly, we overcome the smallness of sample size to estimate the variance. Secondly, we set a clear criterion to select a robust and reliable classifier which does not depend on only one dataset but considers variance of classifier performance estimation with enough simulated datasets.
Evaluat ing Options in a Context

J o h n F. Hor ty* P h i l o s o p h y D e p a r t m e n t a n d I n s t i t u t e for A d v a n c e d C o m p u t e r S tud ie s U n i v e r s i t y o f M a r y l a n d Col lege P a r k , M D 20742 h o r t y © u m i a c s , umd. edu M a r t h a E. Po l l a c k t D e p a r t m e n t of C o m p u t e r Science a n d In t e l l i gen t S y s t e m s P r o g r a m U n i v e r s i t y of P i t t s b u r g h P i t t s b u r g h , P A 15260 pollack@as, pitt. edu
Trusted Passages : Managing Distributed Trust to Meet the Needs of Emerging Applications

Proposed Work. The inherent complexity of applications, technologies, and platforms in today’s large scale distributed systems makes it extremely challenging for open systems to provide trustworthy services to end-users. In this research project, we propose an approach that integrates modern system virtualization techniques as well as new methods for runtime trust monitoring and assessment. This approach dynamically creates and maintains what we term trusted passages across distributed and potentially untrusted execution platforms. Thus, even with an insecure Internet, our goal is to continually assess the distributed computational platforms being used by applications, and based on that information, provide trusted services to the applications. Our goal is to permit even critical applications to use open systems, enabling them to produce, process, and distribute information in a timely fashion. Applications that can benefit by our work range from remote surveillance, to the operational information systems used in government and commercial settings, to those that run daily e-commerce web services and similar information processing tasks. Attacks on such applications and their infrastructure addressed by our work include compromised systems through rootkits, viruses, or other malicious tampering, and degradation caused by temporary system overloads or failures.
Duty-Cycle-Aware Broadcast in Wireless Sensor Networks

Broadcast is one of the most fundamental services in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It facilitates sensor nodes to propagate messages across the whole network, serving a wide range of higher-level operations and thus being critical to the overall network design. A distinct feature of WSNs is that many nodes alternate between active and dormant states, so as to conserve energy and extend the network lifetime. Unfortunately, the impact of such cycles has been largely ignored in existing broadcast implementations that adopt the common assumption of all nodes being active all over the time. In this paper, we revisit the broadcast problem with active/dormant cycles. We show strong evidence that conventional broadcast approaches will suffer from severe performance degradation, and, under low duty-cycles, they could easily fail to cover the whole network in an acceptable timeframe. To this end, we remodel the broadcast problem in this new context, seeking a balance between efficiency and latency with coverage guarantees. We demonstrate that this problem can be translated into a graph equivalence, and develop a centralized optimal solution. It provides a valuable benchmark for assessing diverse duty-cycle-aware broadcast strategies. We then extend it to an efficient and scalable distributed implementation, which relies on local information and operations only, with built-in loss compensation mechanisms. The performance of our solution is evaluated under diverse network configurations. The results suggest that our distributed solution is close to the lower bounds of both time and forwarding costs, and it well resists to the network size and wireless loss increases. In addition, it enables flexible control toward the quality of broadcast coverage.
Facebook Addiction among College going Students: An Exploratory Study in Patuakhali District of Bangladesh

The Facebook has become an essential part of almost every college going students’ daily life and while a large number of students seem to get advantages from use of the Facebook by exchanging information for educational goals, make friends, and other activities. There is no or little study on identifying factors affecting Facebook addiction at Patuakhali District in Bangladesh. Thus, our objective was to overcome this gap. Using survey, this study adopts a quantitative research method. The survey questionnaires were randomly distributed among 105 respondents from various colleges of Patuakhali area at the class time to collect data. College going students have a great time and fun by using Facebook. However, it is beneficial to social and personal life of users but truly Facebook has some negative effects for its users because of heavy and aimless usages. Definitely, the most important of these problems is Facebook Addiction. This study shows that self-control, parental behavior and academic performance have the significant negative relationship with Facebook addiction. On the other hands, social connection and social isolation have the significant positive relationship with Facebook addiction. It is recommended that college going students should be conscious on any danger that can hamper their valuable career.
Assessment of Hepatitis B Virus and Associated Risk Factors Among Pregnant Women Attending Antenatal Care at Arsi University Asella Referral and Teaching Hospital, Ethiopia

Hepatitis B virus is a public health problem worldwide. Vertical transmission from mother to baby is an important route of transmission for hepatitis B virus infection. Consequently, screening pregnant women and realizing the sero-prevalence of hepatitis B virus during pregnancy is vital to prevent the infection of new born baby from positive mother. The objective of this study was to assess the sero-prevalence of hepatitis B virus among pregnant women and to identify potential risk factors associated with the infection. The study was conducted from January to May, 2016 using data from pregnant women attending the antenatal care unit of Arsi University Asella Referral and Teaching Hospital, Arsi Zone,Oromia Regional State, Ethiopia.Blood samples were collected from 454 pregnant women and tested for hepatitis B surface antigen using rapid strip test which is a qualitative solid phase two site sandwich immunoassay. A pre-structured questionnaire was used to collect sociodemographic data and to find out possible risk factors. The overall study subjects with hepatitis B surface antigen positive were 44(9.7%). Most 301(66.3%) of study participants live in urban and 442(97.4%) were married. The socio-demographic status of the participants shows that high hepatitis B surface antigen positivity was among the urban 29(65.9%) and those who were house wife. All except the gestational age of 3rd trimester (p 0.05). It can be concluded that high prevalence of hepatitis B virus among pregnant women was found in this study as compared to the previous studies in different regions of Ethiopia. This high prevalence indicates the importance of implementing preventive measures including vaccination to women in the child bearing age as they are at increased risk of acquiring HBV compared to the general population.
How manipulating task constraints in small-sided and conditioned games shapes emergence of individual and collective tactical behaviours in football: A systematic review

Background: Small-Sided and Conditioned Games are characterised by modifications of field dimensions, number of players, rules of the game, manipulations used to shape the key task constraints that performers need to satisfy in practice. Evidence has already demonstrated the importance of designing practice to enhance understanding of tactical behaviours in football, but there is a lack of information about how coaches can manipulate task constraints to support tactical learning. Objective: To investigate which task constraints have been most often manipulated in studies of SSCGs; and what impact each manipulation had on emerging tactical behaviours, technical–tactical actions, and positional relationships between players. Methods: PubMed, Web of Science, Scielo, and Academic Google databases were searched for relevant reports without time limits. The criteria adopted for inclusion were: a) studies performed with football players; b) studies that included SSCGs as an evaluation method; c) studies that investigated tactical behaviours in SSCGs; and d), articles in English and Portuguese. Results: The electronic database search included 24 articles in the review. Of these, five manipulated field dimensions, six manipulated number of players involved, five manipulated field dimensions and number of players, five used different scoring targets, two altered the number of players and scoring target, and one manipulated the number of players, field dimension, and scoring target. Conclusion: Among the task constraints analyzed in this systematic review, manipulation of number of players and playing field dimensions concomitantly occurred most frequently.