Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Wordless Sounds: Robust Speaker Diarization Using Privacy-Preserving Audio Representations

This paper investigates robust privacy-sensitive audio features for speaker diarization in multiparty conversations: i.e., a set of audio features having low linguistic information for speaker diarization in a single and multiple distant microphone scenarios. We systematically investigate Linear Prediction (LP) residual. Issues such as prediction order and choice of representation of LP residual are studied. Additionally, we explore the combination of LP residual with subband information from 2.5 kHz to 3.5 kHz and spectral slope. Next, we propose a supervised framework using deep neural architecture for deriving privacy-sensitive audio features. We benchmark these approaches against the traditional Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) features for speaker diarization in both the microphone scenarios. Experiments on the RT07 evaluation dataset show that the proposed approaches yield diarization performance close to the MFCC features on the single distant microphone dataset. To objectively evaluate the notion of privacy in terms of linguistic information, we perform human and automatic speech recognition tests, showing that the proposed approaches to privacy-sensitive audio features yield much lower recognition accuracies compared to MFCC features.
Draft Genome Sequence of Aeromonas hydrophila Strain BSK-10 (Serotype O97), Isolated from Carassius carassius with Motile Aeromonad Septicemia in China

ABSTRACT We report here a draft genome sequence of Aeromonas hydrophila strain BSK-10, belonging to serotype O97, isolated from crucian carp (Carassius carassius) with motile aeromonad septicemia in Zhejiang, China. The assembly resulted in 34 scaffolds totaling approximately 4.97 Mb, with an average G+C content of 60.97% and 4,594 predicted coding genes.
Identification of genes encoding N‐glycan processing β‐N‐acetylglucosaminidases in Trichoplusia ni and Bombyx mori: Implications for glycoengineering of baculovirus expression systems

Glycoproteins produced by non‐engineered insects or insect cell lines characteristically bear truncated, paucimannose N‐glycans in place of the complex N‐glycans produced by mammalian cells. A key reason for this difference is the presence of a highly specific N‐glycan processing β‐N‐acetylglucosaminidase in insect, but not in mammalian systems. Thus, reducing or abolishing this enzyme could enhance the ability of glycoengineered insects or insect cell lines to produce complex N‐glycans. Of the three insect species routinely used for recombinant glycoprotein production, the processing β‐N‐acetylglucosaminidase gene has been isolated only from Spodoptera frugiperda. Thus, the purpose of this study was to isolate and characterize the genes encoding this important processing enzyme from the other two species, Bombyx mori and Trichoplusia ni. Bioinformatic analyses of putative processing β‐N‐acetylglucosaminidase genes isolated from these two species indicated that each encoded a product that was, indeed, more similar to processing β‐N‐acetylglucosaminidases than degradative or chitinolytic β‐N‐acetylglucosaminidases. In addition, over‐expression of each of these genes induced an enzyme activity with the substrate specificity characteristic of processing, but not degradative or chitinolytic enzymes. Together, these results demonstrated that the processing β‐N‐acetylglucosaminidase genes had been successfully isolated from Trichoplusia ni and Bombyx mori. The identification of these genes has the potential to facilitate further glycoengineering of baculovirus‐insect cell expression systems for the production of glycosylated proteins. © 2009 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Biotechnol. Prog. , 2010
Control of mRNA Export by Adenovirus E 4 orf 6 and E 1 B 55 K Proteins during Productive Infection Requires E 4 orf 6 Ubiquitin Ligase Activity

Control of mRNA Export by Adenovirus E4orf6 and E1B55K Proteins during Productive Infection Requires E4orf6 Ubiquitin Ligase Activity Paola Blanchette, Kathrin Kindsmüller, Peter Groitl, Frédéric Dallaire, Thomas Speiseder, Philip E. Branton, and Thomas Dobner* Departments of Biochemistry and Oncology and the McGill Cancer Centre, McGill University, McIntyre Medical Building, 3655 Promenade Sir William Osler, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G 1Y6, and Heinrich-Pette-Institute for Experimental Virology and Immunology, Martinistr. 52, 20251 Hamburg, Germany
Eye and pointer coordination in search and selection tasks

Selecting a graphical item by pointing with a computer mouse is a ubiquitous task in many graphical user interfaces. Several techniques have been suggested to facilitate this task, for instance, by reducing the required movement distance. Here we measure the natural coordination of eye and mouse pointer control across several search and selection tasks. We find that users automatically minimize the distance to likely targets in an intelligent, task dependent way. When target location is highly predictable, top-down knowledge can enable users to initiate pointer movements prior to target fixation. These findings question the utility of existing assistive pointing techniques and suggest that alternative approaches might be more effective.
An Iterative Link-based Method for Parallel Web Page Mining

Identifying parallel web pages from bilingual web sites is a crucial step of bilingual resource construction for crosslingual information processing. In this paper, we propose a link-based approach to distinguish parallel web pages from bilingual web sites. Compared with the existing methods, which only employ the internal translation similarity (such as content-based similarity and page structural similarity), we hypothesize that the external translation similarity is an effective feature to identify parallel web pages. Within a bilingual web site, web pages are interconnected by hyperlinks. The basic idea of our method is that the translation similarity of two pages can be inferred from their neighbor pages, which can be adopted as an important source of external similarity. Thus, the translation similarity of page pairs will influence each other. An iterative algorithm is developed to estimate the external translation similarity and the final translation similarity. Both internal and external similarity measures are combined in the iterative algorithm. Experiments on six bilingual websites demonstrate that our method is effective and obtains significant improvement (6.2% F-Score) over the baseline which only utilizes internal translation similarity.
An approach for automated video indexing and video search in large lecture video archives

E-Learning is the use of educational technology, communication and information technologies and electronic media in education. E learning contains various types of media including images, video, audio, streaming videos, animation, web based learning, video based learning, audio based learning, E books etc. Distance learning can be done without school or collages, anyone can learn from their home or office. ELearning industry is economically remarkable and it was work out in 2000 to be above 50$ billion corresponding to traditionalist estimates. Lecture Audio, video data on internet is growing rapidly. Hence there is immediate need for method by which we can retrieve audio, videos on internet. In this paper we have presented a technology for video search in lecture video archive. Initially, we can introduce segmentation of videos and key frame detection for offering rules for navigation of video contents. By applying ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) on lecture audio and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on video content we can extract metadata. OCR can be used in Data entry for business document, Automatic Number plate Recognition, Extracting business card information into a contact list and so on. ICR (Intelligent character recognition) focuses on handwritten documents as well as cursive character one at a time usually it involves in Machine Learning. Speech recognition system can classify into continuous or discrete system which can be speaker independent, speaker dependent or adaptive. Discrete system focuses on a separate acoustic model for each single word, sentence, phrase etc. are said to be isolated word speech recognition (ISR). CSR (Continuous Speech Recognition) System focuses on user who speaks sentences continually.
Past, Present, or Future? Managers’ Temporal Orientations and Corporate Climate Action in the Swedish Electricity Sector

Existing research shows that corporate climate actions are the result of public policies and a limited range of other factors that can influence business strategy. Managers are depicted as lacking agency in that they passively adhere to “drivers” of climate actions, with little room for autonomy. This study takes issue with such a view by examining agency vis-à-vis managers’ temporal orientations. In particular, we seek to examine why managers adopt certain temporal orientations and not others in the context of the climate issue and Swedish electricity production. We find that whilst managers are predominantly focused on future policy developments, they also deliberate over, reconstruct, and in some cases actively refute other pressures for climate action that were borne in the past, feature in the present, and which relate to alternative future projections. We further examine reasons for such behaviour.
Lhx6 Regulates the Migration of Cortical Interneurons from the Ventral Telencephalon But Does Not Specify their GABA Phenotype

The LIM homeodomain family of transcription factors is involved in many processes in the developing CNS, ranging from cell fate specification to connectivity. A member of this family of transcription factors, lhx6, is expressed in the medial ganglionic eminence (MGE) of the ventral telencephalon, where the vast majority of cortical interneurons are generated. Its expression in the GABA-containing MGE cells that migrate to the cortex suggests that this gene uniquely or in combination with other transcription factors may play a role in the neurochemical identity and migration of these neurons. We performed loss of function studies for lhx6 in mouse embryonic day 13.5 brain slices and dissociated MGE neuronal cultures using Lhx6-targeted small interfering RNA produced by a U6 promoter-driven vector. We found that silencing lhx6 impeded the tangential migration of interneurons into the cortex, although it did not obstruct their dispersion within the ganglionic eminence. Blocking lhx6 expression in dissociated MGE cultured neurons did not interfere with the production of GABA or its synthesizing enzyme. These results indicate that lhx6, unlike the closely related member lhx7, does not regulate neurotransmitter choice in interneurons but plays an important role in their migration from the ventral telencephalon to the neocortex.
A Relação entre a Atenção Compartilhada e a Teoria da Mente: Um Estudo Longitudinal

We investigated the relationship between infants' ability to coordinate their attention with that of other people and later Theory of Mind skills (i.e., the understanding that people have mental states such as desires, intentions and beliefs) in a sample of 28 children from middle class families in Brazil. Results showed that children's ability to follow the examiner's gaze and pointing gestures at nine months of age significantly predicted their performance on false-belief tasks at the age of four years, independently of variations in their non-verbal intelligence. These findings suggest that, at end of the first year of life, children's joint attention behaviors indicate intentional understanding.
Energy-Based Global Ternary Image for Action Recognition Using Sole Depth Sequences

In order to efficiently recognize actions from depth sequences, we propose a novel feature, called Global Ternary Image (GTI), which implicitly encodes both motion regions and motion directions between consecutive depth frames via recording the changes of depth pixels. In this study, each pixel in GTI indicates one of the three possible states, namely positive, negative and neutral, which represents increased, decreased and same depth values, respectively. Since GTI is sensitive to the subject's speed, we obtain energy-based GTI (E-GTI) by extracting GTI from pairwise depth frames with equal motion energy. To involve temporal information among depth frames, we extract E-GTI using multiple settings of motion energy. Here, the noise can be effectively suppressed by describing E-GTIs using the Radon Transform (RT). The 3D action representation is formed as a result of feeding the hierarchical combination of RTs to the Bag of Visual Words model (BoVW). From the extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, namely MSRAction3D, DHA, MSRGesture3D and SKIG, it is evident that the hierarchical E-GTI outperforms the existing methods in 3D action recognition. We tested our proposed approach on extended MSRAction3D dataset to further investigate and verify its robustness against partial occlusions, noise and speed.
An Efficient Method for Skew Estimation and Compensation in Coherent Receivers

The performance of coherent optical systems can be seriously degraded when in-phase and quadrature (IQ) components experience misalignments crossing certain critical limits. The critical limits of IQ phase, gain, and skew misalignments are lower at higher modulation formats and in narrowband systems. In this letter, frequency-domain skew-estimation algorithm and time-domain skew-compensation technique are proposed. When compared with other published methods, the new architecture improves timing performance and relaxes requirements for a multiple-input multiple-output time-domain equalizer at low implementation price. We discuss IQ imperfections on both transmitter and receiver sides and provide an efficient compensation procedure.
Analysis in Amazon Reviews Using Probabilistic Machine Learning

Users of the online shopping site Amazon are encouraged to post reviews of the products that they purchase. Little attempt is made by Amazon to restrict or limit the content of these reviews. The number of reviews for different products varies, but the reviews provide accessible and plentiful data for relatively easy analysis for a range of applications. This paper seeks to apply and extend the current work in the ﬁeld of natural language processing and sentiment analysis to data retrieved from Amazon. Naive Bayes and decision list classiﬁers are used to tag a given review as positive or negative. The number of stars a user gives a product is used as training data to perform supervised machine learning. A corpus contains 50,000 product review from 15 products serves as the dataset of study. Top selling and reviewed books on the site are the primary focus of the experiments, but useful features of them that aid in accurate classiﬁcation are compared to those most useful in classiﬁ-cation of other media products. The features, such as bag-of-words and bigrams, are compared to one another in their effectiveness in correctly tagging reviews. Errors in classiﬁcation and general difﬁcul-ties regarding the selection of features are analyzed and discussed.
Refugees, trauma and Adversity-Activated Development

The nature of the refugee phenomenon is examined and the position of mental health professionals is located in relation to it. The various uses of the word ‘trauma’ are explored and its application to the refugee context is examined. It is proposed that refugees’ response to adversity is not limited to being traumatized but includes resilience and Adversity-Activated Development (AAD). Particular emphasis is given to the distinction between resilience and AAD. The usefulness of the ‘Trauma Grid’ in the therapeutic process with refugees is also discussed. The Trauma Grid avoids global impressions and enables a more comprehensive and systematic way of identifying the individual refugee's functioning in the context of different levels, i.e. individual, family, community and society/culture. Finally, I discuss implications for therapeutic work with refugees.
Information Diffusion of Topic Propagation in Social Media

Real-world social and/or operational networks consist of agents with associated states, whose connectivity forms complex topologies. This complexity is further compounded by interconnected information layers, consisting, for instance, documents/resources of the agents which mutually share topical similarities. Our goal in this paper is to predict the specific states of the agents, as their observed resources evolve in time and get updated. The information diffusion among the agents and the publications themselves effectively result in a dynamic process which we capture by an interconnected system of networks (i.e., layered). More specifically, we use a notion of a supra-Laplacian matrix to address such a generalized diffusion of an interconnected network starting with the classical “graph Laplacian. ” The auxiliary and external input update is modeled by a multidimensional Brownian process, yielding two contributions to the variations in the states of the agents: one that is due to the intrinsic interactions in the network system, and the other due to the external inputs or innovations. A variation on this theme, a priori knowledge of a fraction of the agents' states is shown to lead to a Kalman predictor problem. This helps us refine the predicted states exploiting the estimation error in the agents' states. Three real-world datasets are used to evaluate and validate the information diffusion process in this novel-layered network approach. Our results demonstrate a lower prediction error when using the interconnected network rather than the single connectivity layer between the agents. The prediction error is further improved by using the estimated diffusion connection and by applying the Kalman approach with partial observations.
Detection of roof load for automotive safety systems

The performance and design of lateral stability systems in cars depend on the ratio between the height of the center of gravity and the wheel base. This ratio is car specific, but a roof load can affect this and decrease the stability margins. We investigate the use of vehicle roll dynamics to detect and estimate changes in the overall sprung mass as well as the load positioned on the roof. It is assumed that the vehicle is equipped with a lateral accelerometer and a roll gyro, and a second order physical model is derived. The parameters in this model are partly unknown, and here estimated with a greybox and an ARMAX approach. The changes in load distribution can be detected and the approach is supported by experimental data in a lab environment.
New techniques for making transport protocols robust to corruption-based loss

Current congestion control algorithms treat packet loss as an indication of network congestion, under the assumption that most losses are caused by router queues overflowing. In response to losses (congestion), a sender reduces its sending rate in an effort to reduce contention for shared network resources. In network paths where a non-negligible portion of loss is caused by packet corruption, performance can suffer due to needless reductions of the sending rate (in response to "perceived congestion" that is not really happening). This paper explores a technique, called Cumulative Explicit Transport Error Notification (CETEN), that uses information provided by the network to bring the transport's long-term average sending rate closer to that dictated by only congestion-based losses. We discuss several ways that information about the cumulative rates of packet loss due to congestion and corruption might be obtained from the network or through fairly generic transport layer instrumentation. We then explore two ways to use this information to develop a more appropriate congestion control response (CETEN). The work in this paper is done in terms of TCP. Since numerous transport protocols use TCP-like congestion control schemes, the CETEN techniques we present are applicable to other transports as well. In this paper, we present early simulation results that show CETEN to be a promising technique. In addition, this paper discusses a number of practical and thorny implementation issues associated with CETEN.
Objective scoring of animal handling and stunning practices at slaughter plants.

OBJECTIVE To develop objective methods for monitoring animal welfare at slaughter plants to ensure compliance with the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. DESIGN Survey of existing procedures. SAMPLE POPULATION 24 federally inspected slaughter plants. PROCEDURE 6 variables evaluated at each plant were stunning efficacy, insensibility of animals hanging on the bleeding rail, vocalization, electric prod use, number of animals slipping, and number of animals falling. RESULTS Of 11 beef plants, only 4 were able to render 95% of cattle insensible with a single shot from a captive-bolt stunner. Personnel at 7 of 11 plants placed the stunning wand correctly on 99% or more of pigs and sheep. At 4 beef plants, percentage of cattle prodded with an electric prod ranged from 5% at a plant at which handlers only prodded cattle that refused to move to 90% at another plant. Use of electric prods at 6 pork plants scored for prod use ranged from 15 to almost 100% of pigs. Percentage of cattle that vocalized during stunning and handling ranged from 1.1% at a plant at which electric prods were only used on cattle that refused to move to 32% at another plant at which electric prods were used on 90% of cattle and a restraint device was inappropriately used to apply excessive pressure. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS To obtain the most accurate assessment of animal welfare at slaughter plants, it is important to score all of the aforementioned variables.
A ballistic bomb calorimeter

The classical methods for determining the calorie value of foodstuffs are both long and tedious, and a number of alternative methods have been suggested for assessing the energy value of foods based on an analysis of the foodstuff and the use of factors with each of the chemical components to give energy content. None of these methods is really satisfactory, and when a high level of accuracy is required direct calorimetry must be used. An improved method which shortens the time taken for a single determination without loss of accuracy would be clearly of great value. The adiabatic method used by Raymond, Canaway & Harris (1957) reduced the time taken for a determination to approximately 30 min, but the equipment is complicated and expensive. A fundamental feature of this and the classical procedure is that the quantity of heat produced is measured by a small rise in temperature of a large mass of material, resulting in long equilibration times and the need for great accuracy of temperature measurement. A simple method proposed by FCry (1912) partly overcomes these disadvantages by making use of a light bomb casing of a standard heat capacity and eliminating the water calorimeter. In this way the equilibration time is reduced to 5 min and the temperature rise is increased to 20-30'. In the method now described no attempt is made to measure the equilibrium temperature of the bomb casing; instead, advantage is taken of the fact that on combustion of a sample most of the heat is transmitted to the upper parts of the bomb casing, which thus rapidly (50 sec) warm up to a high temperature (about 70°) and rapidly cool. We have found that the peak temperature is an accurate measure of the heat released, and we have termed this method of measuring heat quantity 'ballistic ', by analogy with the ballistic method of measuring electrical quantities. In an earlier communication (Fox, Miller & Payne, 1959) a commercially available bomb, modified for this technique by attaching a thermocouple to the lid, was described. Though it was satisfactory in operation, it was thought that some improvement in performance would result from a reduction in thermal capacity of the upper parts of the vessel. Also the conventional lid, with its gas inlet, electrode and thermocouple attachments, was difficult to dry after cooling with tap water between determinations.