Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DEVELOPING KEYWORD SEARCH UNDER THE IARPA BABEL PROGRAM

Spoken content in languages of emerging importance needs to be searchable to provide access to the underlying information. Keyword search (KWS), also known as spoken term detection (STD), is a speech processing task in which the goal is to find all the occurrences of a textual “keyword”, a sequence of one or more words, in a large corpus of speech data. In 2006, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) created the STD evaluation initiative to facilitate research and development of technology for retrieving information from archives of speech data. The STD 2006 evaluation revealed a close relationship between the performance of KWS technology and the state of the art for automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology on a given combination of language and genre. Reducing the performance gap between high-resource, well studied languages and low-resource, lightly studied languages is one of the primary aims of the IARPA Babel program: “the goal of the Babel Program is to be able to rapidly develop speech recognition capability for keyword search in a previously unstudied language, working with speech recorded in a variety of conditions with limited amounts of transcription. ” [1]. To achieve this goal, in each period of Babel, program performers work with a diverse set of development languages to gain experience with KWS. In the first period, the development languages are Cantonese, Tagalog, Pashto and Turkish. At the end of each period, there are evaluations of KWS performance on the development languages, and on a surprise language, Vietnamese, where performers have a limited period of time for system development. In this paper, we present our system for KWS on noisy speech for low-resource languages developed in the framework of the IARPA Babel program. Our approach achieves good performance by combining postings lists produced by diverse speech recognition systems from three different research groups. We apply these methods tolanguages that present some new issues in terms of reduced resources and query lengths. This approach is used for the NIST Open Keyword Search 2013 (OpenKWS13) Evaluation [2], as part of the Babel base period evaluation. Experiments and analysis are provided on the evaluation data. First, we show score normalization methodology that improves in average by 26% keyword search performance. Second, we show that properly combining the outputs of diverse ASR systems performs in average 21% better than the best normalized ASR system.
Obstacle-Aware Longest-Path Routing with Parallel MILP Solvers

Longest-path routing problems, which can arise in the design of high-performance printed circuit boards (PCBs), have been proven to be NP-hard. In this article, we propose a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation to gridded longest-path routing problems; each of which may contain obstacles. After a longest-path routing problem has been transformed into an MILP problem, parallel MILP solvers can be used to find optimal solutions. In addition, suboptimal solutions can be generated in exchange for reduced execution time. The proposed formulation method can also be used to solve shortest-path routing problems. Experimental results show that more than 3,700X speed-up can be achieved by using 16 threads in solving formulated longest-path routing problems. The execution time can be further reduced if more processer cores are available.
CMOS Camera With In-Pixel Temporal Change Detection and ADC

An array of 90times90 active pixel sensors (APS) with pixel-level embedded differencing and comparison is presented. The nMOS-only 6T 2C 25 mum times 25 mum pixel provides both analog readout of pixel intensity and a digital flag indicating temporal change at variable thresholds. Computation is performed through a pixel-level capacitively coupled comparator which also functions as analog-to-digital converter. The chip, fabricated in a 0.5 mum 3M2P CMOS, process consumes 4.2 mW of power while operating at 30 fps. Change sensitivity is 2.1% at an illumination of 1.7 W/cm2. Gating of raster-scanned pixel output by change detection typically produces a 20-fold compression in the data stream, depending on image conditions and reconstruction quality set by the change detection threshold.
Finite Element Analysis of Soft-lined Mandibular Complete Denture and its Supporting Structures

Background and aims There are many edentulous people with severely resorbed residual ridges and non-resilient lin-ing mucosa that are unable to tolerate occlusal forces during functional and parafunctional movements. Lining the tissue surface of dentures with a flexible material can theoretically distribute and absorb forces with cushioning effect. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of a soft liner on stress levels in mandibular complete denture and its supporting struc-tures by finite element analysis. Materials and methods A simplified 3-dimensional finite element model of relatively resorbed mandible, mucosa, denture and a soft liner was prepared. Then the model, with and without soft liner, underwent normal vertical and lateral occlusal forces. The stresses were analyzed using the ANSYS 12 software. Results Using the soft liner increased stress levels up to 18.5% and 30% in the cortical bone and mucosa, respectively, after vertical load was applied in the incisor region. Application of bilateral vertical load on the molar area increased stress in cortical bone u to 44% and in the mucosa up to 29%. Unilateral loading in the canine area increased stress level in the mucosa up to 63.5%. The highest stress was seen at denture base followed by the cortical bone. Conclusion Use of soft liners increased stress in denture supporting structures. Higher level of stress concentration was observed primarily in the denture base followed by the cortical bone.
Deformation of the early glaucomatous monkey optic nerve head connective tissue after acute IOP elevation in 3-D histomorphometric reconstructions.

PURPOSE To retest the hypothesis that monkey ONH connective tissues become hypercompliant in early experimental glaucoma (EEG), by using 3-D histomorphometric reconstructions, and to expand the characterization of EEG connective tissue deformation to nine EEG eyes. METHODS Trephinated ONH and peripapillary sclera from both eyes of nine monkeys that were perfusion fixed, with one normal eye at IOP 10 mm Hg and the other EEG eye at 10 (n=3), 30 (n=3), or 45 (n=3) mm Hg were serial sectioned, 3-D reconstructed, 3-D delineated, and quantified with 3-D reconstruction techniques developed in prior studies by the authors. Overall, and for each monkey, intereye differences (EEG eye minus normal eye) for each parameter were calculated and compared by ANOVA. Hypercompliance in the EEG 30 and 45 eyes was assessed by ANOVA, and deformations in all nine EEG eyes were separately compared by region without regard for fixation IOP. RESULTS Hypercompliant deformation was not significant in the overall ANOVA, but was suggested in a subset of EEG 30/45 eyes. EEG eye deformations included posterior laminar deformation, neural canal expansion, lamina cribrosa thickening, and posterior (outward) bowing of the peripapillary sclera. Maximum posterior laminar deformation and scleral canal expansion co-localized to either the inferior nasal or superior temporal quadrants in the eyes with the least deformation and involved both quadrants in the eyes achieving the greatest deformation. CONCLUSIONS The data suggest that, in monkey EEG, ONH connective tissue hypercompliance may occur only in a subset of eyes and that early ONH connective tissue deformation is maximized in the superior temporal and/or inferior nasal quadrants.
INFRASOUND FROM WIND TURBINES - FACT, FICTION OR DECEPTION

Infrasound is discussed in terms of what it actually is, how the media has dealt with it and what those with limited knowledge say about it. The perception of infrasound occcurs at levels higher than the levels produced by wind turbines and there is now agreement amongst acousticians that infrasound from wind turbines is not a problem. Statements on infrasound from objectors are considered and it is shown how these may have caused avoidable distress to residents near wind turbines and also diverted attention from the main noise source, which is the repeating sound of the blades interacting with the tower. This is the noise which requires attention, both to reduce it and to develop optimum assessment methods
3D Markerless Human Limb Localization through Robust Energy Minimization

Markerless human tracking addresses the problem of esti- mating human body motion in non-cooperative environments. Computer Vision techniques combined with Pattern Recognition theory serve the purpose of extracting information on human body postures from video- sequences, without the need of wearable markers. Multi-camera systems further enhance this kind of application providing frames from multiple viewpoints. This work tackles the application of multi-camera posture estimation through the use of a multi-camera environment, also known as "smart space". A 3D skeleton structure and geometrical descriptors of human muscles are fltted to the volumetric data to directly recover 3D information. 3D skeleton deformations and bio-mechanical constraints on joint models are used to provide posture information at each frame. The proposed system does not require any pre-initialization phase and automatically adapt the skeleton and the volumetric occupation of each limb to the actor physiognomy independently from the pose. Exhaustive tests were performed to validate our approach. Gesture tracking and posture estimation require the localization of the hu- man body in the scene and the estimation of each limb position during motion. This process can be considered as a combination of two major components, namely, Model Deflnition and Pose Estimation. Model deflnition aims at the moulding of the human body model that best flts to the speciflc shape and size of the tracked human subject, whereas pose estimation is devoted to the proper model adaptation to the postures and the body joint conflgurations during the motion evolution (1). Only a few human motion tracking approaches use im- ages from multiple cameras in order to obtain cues on 3D information. On the other hand, a broad range of applications is based on a single monocular ac- quisition device,e.g.(2). Motion tracking solutions can be parsed into three main classes: marker-based, model-based and model-free. Our aim is the realization of a markerless system able to estimate the human posture evolution exploiting visual features such as colors, edges, silhouettes and textures. The output of such a system is a set of angles relating each limb to each other, submitted to appro- priate constraints for each joint (articulations difier in possible rotation angles and angular extensions). Various approaches that explicitly model the human body as an assembly of rigid parts can be found in the literature(3). Most of them adopt a two-stage strategy: a bottom-up detector is flrst applied on the image in order to extract the candidate parts, then, a top-down procedure is used to
Reorganization of actin in depolarized synaptosomes

Depolarization of whole brain synaptosomes, which stimulates transmitter release, also affects regulation of the assembly of actin microfilaments. Lysates of depolarized synaptosomes contain 20% less cytoskeletal actin than lysates of unstimulated synaptosomes. Parameters affecting the assembly of actin are modified before lysis, but release of actin from the Triton-insoluble cytoskeleton does not occur until after lysis. Actin released from the cytoskeleton is not precipitated with myosin, indicating that it consists of monomers and/or short oligomers. Synaptosomes were incubated for 12 sec in one of three solutions of identical ionic strength but of different salt mixtures: 75 mM KCl-2 mM CaCl2, 5 mM KCl-2mM CaCl2, or 75 mM KCl-0.1 mM EGTA. Synaptosomes were then lysed in an F-actin stabilizing buffer containing 1% Triton X-100. Control synaptosomes (no incubation) were lysed directly into the same lysis buffer containing one of the three different salt mixtures. The cytoskeletal and noncytoskeletal actin pools were separated 25 sec after lysis by centrifugation at 10(4) X g for 1 min, and the actin in each pool was quantitated by the DNase I inhibition assay. The drop in cytoskeletal actin induced by depolarization is maximized by including Ca2+ in the depolarizing buffer, and it is blocked completely by adding a neutral thiol protease inhibitor, leupeptin, to either the pre- or post-lysis buffer. The drop is also completely reversed by repolarizing the synaptosomes.
Use Cases and Traceability : a Marriage for Improved Software Quality

This paper asserts the close relationship between Use Cases and functional requirements traceability throughout the software development process. Use-case driven application development can provide a natural vehicle that assures the traceability of functional requirements. When functional requirements are both traceable and visible throughout essential development activities to all stakeholders, the likelihood that required functionality will be accommodated in the delivered system is improved. This paper uses the template of the Use Case to introduce a mechanism called traceability identifiers (scenario identifiers) that are used to actually name and track these scenarios through analysis, design, construction, and ultimately to validation. Identifiers are used in a traceability matrix that provides a visible trace of functionality to various stakeholders. Using this matrix requires only a slightly modified development process. This paper asserts that these suggested mechanisms will boost the potential for improved requirements traceability as found in use cases into a set of real development activities undertaken to improve the quality of the delivered system. 1. THE USE CASE / TRACEABILITY LANDSCAPE Perhaps one of the most serious problems in software development nowadays is the disconnect between analysis and design. While the discipline of computer science considers analysis and design two domains of knowledge, software engineers find it difficult to separate these two activities, as good design often requires additional analysis, while some additional analysis may be required to improve the design. All too often, development teams struggle to achieve a good model of the prospective system (sometimes the current system as well, although fewer and fewer efforts are spending time in this area). In-house conferences, high intensity Joint Resource Planning (JRP) sessions, and other techniques that incorporate significant user involvement are employed to establish a comprehensive, reliable set of requirements that can underpin successful development. The requirements model, after tremendous effort and buyoff, is then sometimes mysteriously ‘shelved’ and often does not provide the essential, constant driving force guiding design and implementation. It may be that analysis and design activities are carried out by different people with different mindsets, or a host of other speculative reasons. But nevertheless, most development professionals will subscribe to this disconnect theory. It is a serious problem in ensuring the delivered products do meet stakeholder expectations. Use Cases and Traceability: a Marriage for Improved Software Quality
Combined Genome Scans for Body Stature in 6,602 European Twins: Evidence for Common Caucasian Loci

Twin cohorts provide a unique advantage for investigations of the role of genetics and environment in the etiology of variation in common complex traits by reducing the variance due to environment, age, and cohort differences. The GenomEUtwin (http://www.genomeutwin.org) consortium consists of eight twin cohorts (Australian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, and United Kingdom) with the total resource of hundreds of thousands of twin pairs. We performed quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis of one of the most heritable human complex traits, adult stature (body height) using genome-wide scans performed for 3,817 families (8,450 individuals) derived from twin cohorts from Australia, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden, and United Kingdom with an approximate ten-centimorgan microsatellite marker map. The marker maps for different studies differed and they were combined and related to the sequence positions using software developed by us, which is publicly available (https://apps.bioinfo.helsinki.fi/software/cartographer.aspx). Variance component linkage analysis was performed with age, sex, and country of origin as covariates. The covariate adjusted heritability was 81% for stature in the pooled dataset. We found evidence for a major QTL for human stature on 8q21.3 (multipoint logarithm of the odds 3.28), and suggestive evidence for loci on Chromosomes X, 7, and 20. Some evidence of sex heterogeneity was found, however, no obvious female-specific QTLs emerged. Several cohorts contributed to the identified loci, suggesting an evolutionarily old genetic variant having effects on stature in European-based populations. To facilitate the genetic studies of stature we have also set up a website that lists all stature genome scans published and their most significant loci (http://www.genomeutwin.org/stature_gene_map.htm).
Predicting Coronary Artery Disease from Heart Rate Variability Using Classification and Statistical Analysis

HRV (heart rate variability) is one of the most promising quantitative indications of autonomic activity. In present study, our aim is to develop the multi-pararmetric feature including linear and nonlinear features of HRV. We also propose a suitable prediction model to enhance the reliability of medical examination for cardiovascular disease. This study analyzes the HRV for three recumbent positions. Interaction effect between recumbent positions and groups (Normal, Patient) was observed based on the HRV indices. We have carried out various experiments on linear and nonlinear features of HRV to evaluate classifiers. In our experiments, SVM and Bayesian classifiers outperformed the other classifiers.
Tag Normalization and Prediction for Effective Social Media Retrieval

In this paper, we propose a tag normalization algorithm to unify the userspsila annotations. Meanwhile, we explore some general phenomena in a social annotation system and propose a supervised tag prediction model to predict the stabilized tag set of a resource, with feedback of a small amount of user annotation records. The experiments show that a large potion of the stabilized tag set is predicted, and it is feasible to reduce the requirement of sufficient user annotations in the applications of social annotations.
Harmonic control in package of power GaN transistors for high efficiency and wideband performances in S-band

This paper presents a method for synthesizing the package of power GaN transistors in order to achieve wideband matching at harmonics. The proposed method is applied to optimize the package of a 15W power GaN HEMT for high efficiency performance over 39% bandwidth (S-band). It is demonstrated that the internal pre-matching of package ensures that the impedance seen by the GaN die at the second-harmonic frequency remains confined inside a high-efficiency region over a wide bandwidth whatever loads presented to the output of the package. In fact, when the 2nd-harmonic frequency termination of the package is varied all over the entire Smith Chart, the packaged transistor demonstrates a limited variation of PAE (70±3)% at 3.2GHz. Thereby, this method allows the designer to synthesize the external output matching of the packaged transistor only at the fundamental frequencies without imposing constraints on the 2nd harmonic loads.
Gender Differences in Presenting and Prodromal Stroke Symptoms

Background and Purpose— Prompt recognition of stroke symptoms is critical to timely treatment and women have increased delay to treatment. Women may be more likely to present with atypical symptoms, but this hypothesis has not been extensively evaluated. Methods— We examined gender differences in the prevalence of presenting and prodromal stroke symptoms among 1107 consecutive patients hospitalized with neurologist-confirmed acute ischemic stroke. Patient demographics, clinical variables, and stroke symptoms were abstracted from medical records by trained abstractors using standardized forms. Estimates were age-standardized to the age distribution of men and women combined. Presenting symptoms occurred within 24 hours of incident stroke admission; prodromal symptoms occurred ≥24 hours of admission. Results— Women were significantly older (P<0.001), more likely to have cardioembolic stroke (P<0.01), and less likely to receive aspirin (P=0.014) or statins (P<0.001). Thirty-five percent of the sample (n=389) reported prodromal symptoms. Women were more likely to have ≥1 somatic prodromal and presenting symptoms (P=0.03; P=0.008), but did not differ from men on specific somatic symptoms. Women did not differ from men in classic presenting stroke symptoms (P=0.89). Conclusion— Women did not differ significantly in the prevalence of traditional stroke symptoms but were more likely to have somatic presenting and prodromal symptoms. We found no differences in specific prodromal symptoms, making it difficult to craft a public health message about gender differences in early warning signs of stroke. These results suggest that the focus of stroke prevention education for women should continue to emphasize traditional stroke risk factors.
On the early detection of threats in the real world based on open-source information on the internet

Many threats in the real world can be related to activities of persons on the internet. Internet surveillance aims to detect threats in an early stage and to assist in finding suspects based on information from the web. However, the amount of data on the internet rapidly increases and it is time consuming to monitor many open sources. In this paper, we present a method to find abnormal behavior on the internet and give an early warning for threats. The system was tested on Twitter data. The results show that it can successfully analyze the content of messages and recognize abnormal changes in sentiment and threatening content.
Association between delayed graft function and allograft and patient survival: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND Delayed graft function (DGF) is a common complication of renal transplantation. The short-term consequences of DGF are well known, but the long-term relationship between DGF and patient and graft survival is controversial in the published literature. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to precisely estimate these relationships. METHODS We performed a literature search for original studies published through March 2007 pertaining to long-term (>6 months) outcomes of DGF. The primary outcome was graft survival. Secondary outcomes were patient survival, acute rejection and kidney function. RESULTS When compared to patients without DGF, patients with DGF had a 41% increased risk of graft loss (RR 1.41, 95% CI 1.27-1.56) at 3.2 years of follow-up. There was no significant relationship between DGF and patient survival at 5 years (RR 1.14, 95% CI 0.94-1.39). The mean creatinine in the non-DGF group was 1.6 mg/dl. Patients with DGF had a higher mean serum creatinine (0.66 mg/dl, 95% CI 0.57-0.74) compared to patients without DGF at 3.5 years of follow-up. DGF was associated with a 38% relative increase in the risk of acute rejection (RR 1.38, 95% CI 1.29-1.47). CONCLUSION The results of this meta-analysis emphasize and quantify the long-term detrimental association between DGF and important graft outcomes like graft survival, acute rejection and renal function. Efforts to prevent and treat DGF should be aggressively investigated in order to improve graft survival given the deficit in the number of kidney donors.