Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Between-speaker rhythmic variability is not dependent on language rhythm, as evidence from Persian reveals

Acoustic measures of speech rhythm based on the durational characteristics of consonantal and vocalic intervals (henceforth C- or V-intervals) as well as syllabic intensity reveal between-speaker variability. The evidence obtained so far is based on speakers of stressed-timed languages, which are assumed to have complex consonant clusters and a higher degree of vowel reduction. Speakers of stressed-timed languages might operate their articulatory organs in different ways due to the syllable complexity and vowel reduction. Complex consonant clusters are released differently, and vowel reduction tends to be produced more or less strongly depending on speakers. When a language lacks such features, it is possible that rhythmic variation between its speakers decreases. In the present study, we aimed at exploring between- and within-speaker rhythmic variability in Persian, an Indo-European language categorised as syllable-timed. Acoustic correlates of speech rhythm (%V, ΔV[ln], ΔC[ln], n-PVI-V) and articulation rate were obtained from two Persian corpora with different sources of within-speaker variability. In the first corpus, the source of within-speaker variability mainly comes from non-contemporaneous recording sessions, and in the second corpus, from different speech rates. Results revealed that there were significant differences between speakers in all investigated speech rhythm measures in Persian and %V best discriminated between speakers. This reveals that the lack of typical stress-time features does not affect between-speaker variability in speech rhythm.
Programming Techniques and Data Structures Chain Multiplication of Matrices of Approximately or Exactly the Same Size

We present a different approach to finding an optimal computation order; it exploits both the difference between the size of the matrices and the difference between the number of nonzero elements in the matrices. Therefore, this technique can be usefully applied where the matrices are almost or exactly the same size. We show that using the proposed technique, an optimal computation order can be determined in time O(n) if the matrices have the same size, and in time O(n 3) otherwise.
Testosterone differentially regulates the regenerative properties of injured hamster facial motoneurons

We have previously demonstrated that systemic administration of testosterone accelerates functional recovery, as measured behaviorally, from facial paralysis induced by facial nerve crush axotomy in gonadectomized adult male hamsters. In this investigation, the hypothesis that testosterone enhances return of motor function by increasing the rate of axonal regeneration following injury was tested using fast axonal transport of radioactively labeled proteins to assess facial nerve regeneration. Adult castrated and intact males, and intact females, were subjected to right facial nerve crush axotomy at the stylomastoid foramen. One-half of the axotomized animals in each group received subcutaneous implants of testosterone, with the remainder of the animals sham implanted. Systemic administration of testosterone resulted in a 26-30% increase in the rate of regeneration of the fastest growing population of axons in the male experimental groups, regardless of whether the animal was castrated or not. This rate increase is similar to that observed in the conditioning lesion paradigm utilized by others. In the females, testosterone had a significant, but less pronounced, effect on the rate of axonal regeneration, which may be due in part to inherent gender-related differences in regenerative properties of facial motoneurons. A surprising finding of this study was that no shortening of the delay of sprout formation by testosterone was observed across the various experimental groups. These data suggest that the mechanism by which gonadal steroids act in the injured nervous system is partly through the differential regulation of the regenerative properties of the injured cell, presumably via hormone receptor-mediated action at the level of the neuronal genome.
Minimum Variance Distortionless Response Beamformer with Enhanced Nulling Level Control via Dynamic Mutated Artificial Immune System

In smart antenna applications, the adaptive beamforming technique is used to cancel interfering signals (placing nulls) and produce or steer a strong beam toward the target signal according to the calculated weight vectors. Minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamforming is capable of determining the weight vectors for beam steering; however, its nulling level on the interference sources remains unsatisfactory. Beamforming can be considered as an optimization problem, such that optimal weight vector should be obtained through computation. Hence, in this paper, a new dynamic mutated artificial immune system (DM-AIS) is proposed to enhance MVDR beamforming for controlling the null steering of interference and increase the signal to interference noise ratio (SINR) for wanted signals.
RoboCode & problem-based learning: a non-prescriptive approach to teaching programming

The fundamental principle behind Problem-based Learning (PBL) is that the problem is the driving force that initiates the learning. In order to function effectively in a PBL environment a good set of problems is required. Solving problems is a vital element within Computer Science and yet the discipline has been slow to embrace PBL as an approach to learning. The net result means that there are few good PBL problems available to assist new practitioners with implementation. PBL emphasizes a real-world approach to learning, and we present a RoboCode Competition as a candidate for a good, realistic PBL problem within the computer science discipline. We list and identify the criteria that categorise a PBL problem as good and validate the RoboCode domain against these criteria. We argue that the concept of freedom --- in different guises --- plays a key role in making PBL a good mechanism for teaching programming, and for making RoboCode a good domain for PBL.
Text and Content-based Approaches to Image Modality Classification and Retrieval for the ImageCLEF 2011 Medical Retrieval Track

This article describes the participation of the Communications Engineering Branch (CEB), a division of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, in the ImageCLEF 2011 medical retrieval track. Our methods encompass a variety of techniques relating to text-and content-based image retrieval. Our textual approaches primarily utilize the Uniﬁed Medical Language System (UMLS) synonymy to identify concepts in topic descriptions and image-related text, and our visual approaches utilize similarity metrics based on computed “visual concepts” and low-level image features. We also explore mixed approaches that utilize a combination of textual and visual features. In this article we present an overview of the application of our methods to the modality classiﬁcation, ad-hoc image retrieval, and case-based image retrieval tasks, and we describe our submitted runs and results.
Leveraging Social Networking Sites to Acquire Rich Task Structure

Task management is a core part of knowledge work. However, intelligent assistance for task management is hampered be the lack of large amounts of structured knowledge about user tasks. In this paper, we present a novel approach, Social Task Networks, for obtaining rich user contributed task information by integrating task management with social networking sites.
On opportunistic codes and broadcast codes with degraded message sets

Diversity embedded codes are opportunistic codes which take advantage of good channel realizations while ensuring at least part of the information is received reliably for bad channels. We establish a connection between these codes and degraded message set broadcast codes. We characterize the achievable rate region for the parallel Gaussian degraded message set broadcast problem, when only the strongest user needs the private information. Using this, we partially characterize the set of achievable rate-diversity tuples for the diversity embedded problem for parallel fading channels.
Using InfiniBand Hardware Gather-Scatter Capabilities to Optimize MPI All-to-All

The MPI all-to-all algorithm is a data intensive, high-cost collective algorithm used by many scientific High Performance Computing applications. Optimizations for small data exchange use aggregation techniques, such as the Bruck algorithm, to minimize the number of messages sent, and minimize overall operation latency. This paper presents three variants of the Bruck algorithm, which differ in the way data is laid out in memory at intermediate steps of the algorithm. Mellanox's InfiniBand support for Host Channel Adapter (HCA) hardware scatter/gather is used selectively to replace CPU-based buffer packing and unpacking. Using this offload capability reduces the eight and sixteen byte all-to-all latency on 1024 MPI Processes by 9.7% and 9.1%, respectively. The optimization accounts for a decrease in the total memory handling time of 40.6% and 57.9%, respectively.
Promoting Instructional Discourse for Secondary Teachers of Newcomer Students: The Practice of Integrated Language and Content Instruction

Author(s): Caindec, Dennis De Guzman | Advisor(s): Mintrop, Heinrich | Abstract: Instructional time for newcomer English learners necessitates a balanced integration of language and content within the curriculum (Batt, 2008) and that the development of the academic uses of language for newcomer students becomes the obligation of every secondary content discipline teacher to engage these students in meaningful language use for content specific purposes (Heritage et al., 2015). Now more than ever, secondary content area teachers are critical actors in ensuring that the necessary language skills through their content instruction are taught and supported for newcomer students in their classes. Thus, this design development research employs a robust intervention that promotes a systematic approach for an interdisciplinary team of secondary content area teachers to have productive conversations around instruction in order to better understand and implement an integrated language and content instruction for newcomer students.Set in a small high school located at a predominantly immigrant neighborhood in a large urban community in Northern California, this study focused on three teachers as a teacher team who serve newcomer students. I found that participants in this study struggled to develop a common understanding and enacting effective language and content integration in classroom practice. However, findings suggested promising efficacy of this design study, particularly around improving participants’ instructional mindset along the dimensions of language and content integration understanding and language and content integration in practice. I present the utility of the Teacher Team Cycle of Inquiry as a systematic, structured sequence of activities that reframes the responsibility of teaching language development for newcomer students as one of a teacher team’s collective and shared responsibility. This teacher team structure, along with the set of learning activities, can serve as a catalyst for capacity building for teachers to improve their practice and understanding of integrating language and content.
Integration of phonetic and prosodic information for robust utterance verification

Mandarin speech is known for its tonal characteristic, and prosodic information plays an important role in Mandarin speech recognition. Driven by this property, phonetic and prosodic information are integrated and used for Mandarin telephone speech keyword spotting. A two-stage strategy, with recognition followed by verification, is adopted. For keyword recognition, 132 subsyllable models, two general acoustic filler models and one background/silence model are separately trained and used as the basic recognition units. For utterance verification, 12 anti-subsyllable models, 175 context-dependent prosodic models and five anti-prosodic models are constructed. A keyword verification function combining phonetic-phase and prosodic-phase verification is investigated. Using a test set of 3088 conversational speech utterances from 33 speakers (20 males and 13 females) and a vocabulary of 2583 faculty names, at 8.5% false rejection, the proposed verification method results in an 18.3% false alarm rate. Furthermore, this method is able correctly to reject 90.9% of non-keywords. Comparison with a baseline system without prosodic-phase verification shows that prosodic information can benefit the verification performance.
New Approach to Quantification of Privacy on Social Network Sites

Users may unintentionally reveal private information to the world on their blogs on social network sites (SNSs). Information hunters can exploit such disclosed sensitive information for the purpose of advertising, marketing, spamming, etc. We present a new metric to quantify privacy, based on probability and entropy theory. Simply by relying on the total leaked privacy value calculated with our metric, users can adjust the amount of information they reveal on SNSs. Previous studies focused on quantifying privacy for purposes of data mining and location finding. The privacy metric in this paper deals with unintentional leaks of information from SNSs. Our metric helps users of SNSs find how much privacy can be preserved after they have published sentences on their SNSs. It is simple, yet precise, which is proved through an experimental evaluation.
Neuronal activities in brain-stem cholinergic nuclei related to tonic activation processes in thalamocortical systems

This study was performed to examine the hypothesis that thalamic- projecting neurons of mesopontine cholinergic nuclei display activity patterns that are compatible with their role in inducing and maintaining activation processes in thalamocortical systems during the states of waking (W) and rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep associated with desynchronization of the electroencephalogram (EEG). A sample of 780 neurons located in the peribrachial (PB) area of the pedunculopontine tegmental nucleus and in the laterodorsal tegmental (LDT) nucleus were recorded extracellularly in unanesthetized, chronically implanted cats. Of those neurons, 82 were antidromically invaded from medial, intralaminar, and lateral thalamic nuclei: 570 were orthodromically driven at short latencies from various thalamic sites: and 45 of the latter elements are also part of the 82 cell group, as they were activated both antidromically and synaptically from the thalamus. There were no statistically significant differences between firing rates in the PB and LDT neuronal samples. Rate analyses in 2 distinct groups of PB/LDT neurons, with fast (greater than 10 Hz) and slow (less than 2 Hz) discharge rates in W, indicated that (1) the fast-discharging cell group had higher firing rates in W and REM sleep compared to EEG- synchronized sleep (S), the differences between all states being significant (p less than 0.0005); (2) the slow-discharging cell group increased firing rates from W to S and further to REM sleep, with significant difference between W and S (p less than 0.01), as well as between W or S and REM sleep (p less than 0.0005). Interspike interval histograms of PB and LDT neurons showed that 75% of them have tonic firing patterns, with virtually no high-frequency spike bursts in any state of the wake-sleep cycle. We found 22 PB cells that discharged rhythmic spike trains with recurring periods of 0.8–1 sec. Autocorrelograms revealed that this oscillatory behavior disappeared when their firing rate increased during REM sleep. Dynamic analyses of sequential firing rates throughout the waking-sleep cycle showed that none of the full-blown states of vigilance is associated with a uniform level of spontaneous firing rate. Signs of decreased discharge frequencies of mesopontine neurons appeared toward the end of quiet W, preceding by about 10–20 sec the most precocious signs of EEG synchronization heralding the sleep onset. During transition from S to W, rates of spontaneous discharges increased 20 sec before the onset of EEG desynchronization. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Improved Geometric Conditions for Non-Blowup of the 3D Incompressible Euler Equation

This is a follow-up of our recent article Deng et al. (2004). In Deng et al. (2004), we derive some local geometric conditions on vortex filaments which can prevent finite time blowup of the 3D incompressible Euler equation. In this article, we derive improved geometric conditions which can be applied to the scenario when velocity blows up at the same time as vorticity and the rate of blowup of velocity is proportional to the square root of vorticity. This scenario is in some sense the worst possible blow-up scenario for velocity field due to Kelvin's circulation theorem. The improved conditions can be checked by numerical computations. This provides a sharper local geometric constraint on the finite time blowup of the 3D incompressible Euler equation.
Mir-34a Mimics Are Potential Therapeutic Agents for p53-Mutated and Chemo-Resistant Brain Tumour Cells

Chemotherapeutic drug resistance and relapse remains a major challenge for paediatric (medulloblastoma) and adult (glioblastoma) brain tumour treatment. Medulloblastoma tumours and cell lines with mutations in the p53 signalling pathway have been shown to be specifically insensitive to DNA damaging agents. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential of triggering cell death in p53 mutated medulloblastoma cells by a direct activation of pro-death signalling downstream of p53 activation. Since non-coding microRNAs (miRNAs) have the ability to fine tune the expression of a variety of target genes, orchestrating multiple downstream effects, we hypothesised that triggering the expression of a p53 target miRNA could induce cell death in chemo-resistant cells. Treatment with etoposide, increased miR-34a levels in a p53-dependent fashion and the level of miR-34a transcription was correlated with the cell sensitivity to etoposide. miR-34a activity was validated by measuring the expression levels of one of its well described target: the NADH dependent sirtuin1 (SIRT1). Whilst drugs directly targeting SIRT1, were potent to trigger cell death at high concentrations only, introduction of synthetic miR-34a mimics was able to induce cell death in p53 mutated medulloblastoma and glioblastoma cell lines. Our results show that the need of a functional p53 signaling pathway can be bypassed by direct activation of miR-34a in brain tumour cells.
Predicting and measuring premises-level harm in the night-time economy.

AIMS To assess associations between measures of premises-level alcohol-related harm and risk factors for harm. METHODS Thirty-two licensed premises with a history of on-premises violent assault were recruited. An environmental survey of the drinking context of each premises was undertaken. Levels of patron intoxication were assessed using a breathalyser and a visual assessment of customers at each premises. Premise-level violence was identified via routine police and hospital emergency department data. Analyses examined associations between hospital and police data, surveyor and objective ratings of intoxication and the relationship between intoxication, drinking context and violence at the premises level. RESULTS Hospital and police data were associated. Aggregate levels of surveyor-rated intoxication were associated with aggregate alcometer breath alcohol levels. Analyses further suggest that premises with the highest levels of violence also had customers whose entry-exit change in intoxication was greatest, were open for longer hours, had alcohol promotions and had visible security staff present. CONCLUSIONS Police and hospital data can be used to identify violent premises and to assess outcomes from premises-level interventions to reduce violence. Relatively low-cost observational survey methods can be used to identify high-risk premises, and can be used as outcomes for premises-level interventions. Features of premises that promote intoxication are associated with violence, suggesting that targeting resources at risky premises will likely address two public health concerns: excessive intoxication and assault-related injury.
An Ant Colony based algorithm for optimal selection of Materialized view

The problem of Materialized view selection is one key issue in improving response time of complex queries in data warehouse. In this paper we proposed an Ant Colony based algorithm which is efficient compared with Genetic Algorithm (GA), a popular algorithm for materialized view selection. Given space limitation, our algorithm could minimize total query cost as much as possible. Based on evaporation mechanism and positive feedback of Ant Colony Algorithm, our approach could achieve sub-optimal selection in global search area. Experimental results show that our algorithm is much more efficient than GA algorithm with varying space limitations.
Bioelectric Signaling Regulates Size in Zebrafish Fins

The scaling relationship between the size of an appendage or organ and that of the body as a whole is tightly regulated during animal development. If a structure grows at a different rate than the rest of the body, this process is termed allometric growth. The zebrafish another longfin (alf) mutant shows allometric growth resulting in proportionally enlarged fins and barbels. We took advantage of this mutant to study the regulation of size in vertebrates. Here, we show that alf mutants carry gain-of-function mutations in kcnk5b, a gene encoding a two-pore domain potassium (K+) channel. Electrophysiological analysis in Xenopus oocytes reveals that these mutations cause an increase in K+ conductance of the channel and lead to hyperpolarization of the cell. Further, somatic transgenesis experiments indicate that kcnk5b acts locally within the mesenchyme of fins and barbels to specify appendage size. Finally, we show that the channel requires the ability to conduct K+ ions to increase the size of these structures. Our results provide evidence for a role of bioelectric signaling through K+ channels in the regulation of allometric scaling and coordination of growth in the zebrafish.
On improving the Performance of Multimodal biometric authentication through Ant colony optimization

Multimodal biometric authentication systems are now widely used for providing the utmost security owing to its better recognition performance compared to unimodal systems. Multimodal biometric systems are developed by combining the information of individual biometrics. In this paper, a multimodal biometric system is proposed by combining the scores of iris and palm print traits of a person. This information fusion takes place at the matching score level, due to the ease in accessing and combining the scores generated by the two different matchers. Since the matching scores output by the two modalities are heterogeneous, score normalization is needed to transform these scores into a common domain, prior to combining them. The normalized values are then applied to various score fusion methods. The resulting scores are compared to a threshold value for taking a decision of accepting or rejecting the person. The recognition accuracy of fusion methods strongly depend upon the correctness of this threshold value. Hence we propose Ant colony optimization (ACO) technique for selecting the optimal threshold value for each of the fusion method employed. This approach further enhances the accuracy of the system compared to the fusion methods with no optimal threshold. The experimental results obtained using CASIA iris and palm print databases show that the application of ACO results in higher recognition rates and lower error rates. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work that applies ACO to enhance the accuracy of biometric authentication process. Key-Words: ACO, Biometrics, Multimodal, Normalization, Product, Score fusion, Sum