Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Probabilistic Kernels for Improved Text-to-Speech Alignment in Long Audio Tracks

The synchronization of text transcripts with audio tracks is typically solved by forced alignment at the phonetic level. However, when dealing with either very long audio tracks or acoustically inaccurate text transcripts, more complex methods are needed, usually based on heavy and costly ASR systems. In a previous work, we showed that a simple and lightweight method could be effectively applied, based on a free phonetic decoding of the speech signal and the alignment of the free and reference phonetic sequences, allowing the transfer of timestamps from the former to the latter. This method has yielded competitive results on the Hub4-97 dataset and is currently applied to synchronize the videos and minutes of the Basque Parliament plenary sessions. In this paper, probabilistic kernels (similarity functions) are applied, based on the hypothesis that a confusion matrix computed from a large corpus of speech conveys key information about the behavior of the phonetic decoder, and that the probabilistic interpretation of this information may help design informative kernels leading to improved alignments. The probabilistic kernels proposed in this work outperform our baseline kernels and other alternatives, including a reference ASR-based approach and a knowledge-based kernel, in experiments on the Hub4-97 dataset.
Protocol Re-synthesis Based on Extended Petri Nets

Protocol synthesis is used to derive a speci cation of a distributed system from the speci cation of the services to be provided by the system to its users. Maintaining such a system involves applying frequent minor modi cations to the service speci cation due to changes in the user requirements. In order to reduce the maintenance costs of such a system, we present an original method that consists of a set of rules that avoid complete protocol synthesis after these modi cations. These rules are given for a system modeled as an extended Petri net. An application example is given along with some experimental results.
An automatic and accurate camera calibration using translational planar object

Many 3D reconstruction tasks need implicit camera parameters with high accuracy. To this aim, we propose a novel calibration method using a translational planar object, which is cheaper and flexible. The calibration instruments are installed to collect both the calibration image and the correction image. The world coordinates of control points are assigned by its’ spatial distribution in the designated world coordinate. We detect control points in the calibration image and then the initial camera parameters are calculated. According to the reprojection errors obtained by the last camera parameters, the location of control points are adjusted and refined until convergence. The skew bias, which caused by the finite precision of assembly of the planar object, are estimated with the information of the correction image. Then the world coordinates of control points are corrected with the skew factors and utilized to optimize the final camera parameters. Many experiments based on real images denote that the proposed method is more accurate than Heikkila’s or Zhang’s method. The camera parameters obtained by our method can be applied to 3D reconstruction directly and effectively.
Effect of Treatment on Nutrient Availability January 2007

The USEPA is revising the Total Coliform Rule (TCR) and is considering new possible distribution system requirements as part of these revisions. As part of this process, the USEPA is publishing a series of issue papers to present available information on topics relevant to possible TCR revisions. This paper was developed as part of that effort. The objectives of the issue papers are to review the available data, information and research regarding the potential public health risks associated with the distribution system issues, and where relevant identify areas in which additional research may be warranted. The issue papers will serve as background material for EPA, expert and stakeholder discussions. The papers only present available information and do not represent Agency policy. Some of the papers were prepared by parties outside of EPA; EPA does not endorse those papers, but is providing them for information and review.
Wireless Interconnects Enabled On-chip Multicast Communication

The ability of multicasting is necessary and useful for Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs) to benefit and implement cache coherence protocols, parallel algorithms, etc. Whereas the design and implementation of high-efficient multicasting in traditional wired Network-on-Chip (NoC) is an arduous task. With the aid of wireless interconnects, not only the bandwidth and latency of NoC can be improved dramatically, but also the inherent broadcast properties of wireless signals can be adopted for multicasting. In this paper, we propose a mesh-like multicast enhancing mechanism based on wireless interconnects. Equipped with 9 wireless transceivers in a traditional 9x9 mesh NoC, this approach realizes a high efficiency, low latency group interconnection. Simulation results show the promising performance boosting of the wireless interconnection.
Leakage Resilient IBE and IPE schemes ?

We construct identity-based encryption (IBE) and inner product encryption (IPE) schemes under the decision linear (DLIN) or symmetric external Diffie-Hellman (SXDH) assumptions. Their private user keys are leakage-resilient in several scenarios. In particular, • In the bounded memory leakage model (Akavia et al., TCC ’09), our basic schemes reach the maximum-possible leakage rate 1− o(1). • In the continual memory leakage model (Brakerski et al., Dodis et al., FOCS ’10), variants of the above schemes enjoy leakage rate at least 1 2 − o(1). Among the results, we improve upon the work of Brakerski et al. by presenting adaptively secure IBE schemes.
Does Adoption of Management Standards Deliver Efficiency Gain in Firms’ Pursuit of Sustainability Performance? An Empirical Investigation of Chinese Manufacturing Firms

Building on longitudinal data from 73 Chinese manufacturing firms during 2009–2012, we assess whether and how firms gain higher efficiency in achieving their sustainability goals by adopting management practice standards (ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and/or OHSAS 18001). We propose four pathways for firms to gain sustainability efficiency in their certification journey: participation, qualitative integration, quantitative expansion, and temporal accumulation. Our results confirm that firms certifying management standards gain higher efficiency in pursuing their sustainability goals than firms without these standards. We also find some support for increased efficiency effect in firms with diverse management systems over firms with only a single certificate in 2011. Finally, our results highlight the experiential and temporal accumulation effect of such efficiency gains, that is, firms with prior certification experience or having a longer certification history demonstrate higher efficiency gains in pursuing their sustainability goals.
Policy Systems: The Integration of Information Technology into Policy Analysis, Planning, and Program

We define a policy system to be a collection of hardware, software, communication technologies, persons, procedures, protocols, and standards driven by and for the purpose of advancing a public organization’s mission in regard to policy analysis, planning, and program evaluation decisions. While policy systems already exist in practice, we believe that they have not been identified and studied as a separate, distinguishable area of information systems. They have components and patterns of use that could benefit governments of all levels in carrying out policy making. We propose principles for building policy systems, identify their components, discuss how they address the complexities of policy making, illustrate them with several examples including our own policy system built for a local government agency, and distinguish them from related systems such as management information systems, decision support systems, and collaboratories.
The orphan G protein-coupled receptor, Gpr161, encodes the vacuolated lens locus and controls neurulation and lens development

The vacuolated lens (vl) mouse mutant causes congenital cataracts and neural tube defects (NTDs), with the NTDs being caused by abnormal neural fold apposition and fusion. Our positional cloning of vl indicates these phenotypes result from a deletion mutation in an uncharacterized orphan G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR), Gpr161. Gpr161 displays restricted expression to the lateral neural folds, developing lens, retina, limb, and CNS. Characterization of the vl mutation indicates that C-terminal tail of Gpr161 is truncated, leading to multiple effects on the protein, including reduced receptor-mediated endocytosis. We have also mapped three modifier quantitative trait loci (QTL) that affect the incidence of either the vl cataract or NTD phenotypes. Bioinformatic, sequence, genetic, and functional data have determined that Foxe3, a key regulator of lens development, is a gene responsible for the vl cataract-modifying phenotype. These studies have extended our understanding of the vl locus in three significant ways. One, the cloning of the vl locus has identified a previously uncharacterized GPCR-ligand pathway necessary for neural fold fusion and lens development, providing insight into the molecular regulation of these developmental processes. Two, our QTL analysis has established vl as a mouse model for studying the multigenic basis of NTDs and cataracts. Three, we have identified Foxe3 as a genetic modifier that interacts with Gpr161 to regulate lens development.
Mobile Programming with Ambients

Mobility is an important paradigm for modern distributed applications, where mobile code is supplied on demand and mobile components interact freely within a given network. However, mobile applications are difficult to develop: not only do they involve complex parallel interactions between multiple components, but they must also satisfy strict security requirements. One could argue that the development of such applications would benefit from a programming language based on a formal model. Foundational research has shown that Ambient calculi are a promising approach to modelling mobile computation. More recently, Boxed Ambient calculi have been designed to be at a level of abstraction suitable for an application programmer. This paper presents a programming language based on a variant of Boxed Ambients with channels. The paper shows how the language can be used to program a non-trivial mobile application for tracking the location of migrating agents, starting from a formal calculus specification of the application. The paper also describes how a distributed runtime for the language can be implemented in OCaml, based on a formal specification of the runtime that was proved sound and complete with respect to the calculus in [21]. The use of a functional language allows for an almost direct mapping from runtime specification to functional code, giving greater confidence in the runtime implementation. The correctness of the runtime ensures that the work done in specifying and analysing mobile applications is not lost during their execution.
Climate Change Mitigation and Internationalization: The Competitiveness of Multinational Corporations

In recent years, the debate about climate change and the competitiveness of multinational corporations (MNCs) has increased. Decision-makers in MNCs often face ambiguities on how their business competitiveness could be impacted by their actions to mitigate climate change. By combining knowledge from the field of climatology with the management literature, this study suggests that climate change mitigation can enhance an MNC's competitiveness. We test the hypotheses using longitudinal panel data on US MNCs from 2001 to 2009. We find that MNCs that implement climate change mitigation are likely to see significant increase in sales effectiveness and product leadership, but no significant increase in return on equity. Further, the positive influence of mitigation on sales effectiveness and product leadership is found to be more strongly positive when the MNC's internationalization is high. Hence, mitigation efforts positively impact at least two dimensions of competitiveness — sales effectiveness and product leadership, particularly when internationalization is high.
First in, First out? The Effects of Network Externalities on Pioneer Survival

Network externalities are playing an increasingly important role in the economy, and they have significant implications for firms’ marketing strategies. The authors study the effects of network externalities in conjunction with other product and firm characteristics on the survival of pioneers. They apply an accelerated failure time model to data on 45 office products and consumer durables. The authors find evidence that network externalities have a negative main effect on the survival duration of pioneers. However, for more radical products and for technologically intense products, increases in network externalities are associated with increased survival duration. The larger the pioneer, the more network externalities increase its survival duration, whereas incumbent pioneers experience a decrease in survival duration compared with nonincumbents. The findings of this article contribute to theory in marketing strategy and have important implications for firms that are developing market entry strategies for products with network externalities.
The effect of multiplayer dynamic difficulty adjustment on the player experience of video games

Multiplayer Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (mDDA) is a method of reducing the difference in player performance and subsequent challenge in competitive multiplayer video games. As a balance of between player skill and challenge experienced is necessary for optimal player experience, this experimental study investigates the effects of mDDA and awareness of its presence on player performance and experience using subjective and biometric measures. Early analysis indicates that mDDA normalizes performance and challenge as expected, but awareness of its presence can reduce its effectiveness.
Automatic Fight Detection in Surveillance Videos

Affective computing is an up-surging research area relying on multimodal multimedia information processing techniques to study human interaction. Social signal processing under affective computing aims at recognizing and extracting useful human social interaction patterns. Fight is a common social interaction in real life. A fight detection system finds wide applications, such as in a prison, a bar and so on. Research works on fight detection are often based on visual features and demand substantive computation and good video quality. In this paper, we propose an approach to detect fights in a natural and low cost manner through motion analysis. Most existing works evaluated their algorithms on public datasets manifesting simulated fights, where the fight events are acted by actors. To evaluate on real fight scenarios, we collect fight videos from YouTube to form our own dataset. Based on the two types of datasets, we process the motion information to achieve fight detection. Experimental results indicate that our approach accurately detect fights in real scenarios. More importantly, we uncover some fundamental differences between real and simulated fights and could discriminate them well.
Autonomous agent-based inspection for inter-VM traffic in a Cloud environment

Cloud Computing (CC) has generated interest from both industry and academia over these years. As an extension of Grid Computing and Distributed Computing, CC aims to provide users with flexible services in a transparent manner. The distributed implementation of CC creates a suitable environment for easy targets, vulnerable and prone to sophisticated attacks. Commonly virtualization is the most utilized technology to implement a Cloud environment with a massive multi-tenancy usage, opening a door to a whole other level of security issues. This creates new targets for intrusion due to the complexity of access and difficulty in monitoring all interconnection points between systems, applications, and data sets. This raises many questions about the appropriate infrastructure, processes, and strategy for enacting detection and response to intrusion in a Cloud environment. This article discusses the security and the visibility issues of inter-VM traffic and solutions for it within a Cloud environment context, by proposing an approach relying on distributed intrusion detection technique and packet inspection.
Fast self-organizing of n-dimensional topology maps

The self-organizing algorithm, proposed in this contribution, is more efficient than the original one, because it starts at a coarse lattice and refines the lattice of the map using spline interpolation at well determined learning steps until a quantization criteria is reached. Therefore the feature map becomes self-growing. The proposed algorithm also includes a hierarchical search for the nearest neighbour. All these enhancements lead to a time complexity of order O(logN) of the self-organizing algorithm for a nA-dimensional map with N neurons in each dimension.
Disulfide crosslinks to probe the structure and flexibility of a designed four‐helix bundle protein

The introduction of disulfide crosslinks is a generally useful method by which to identify regions of a protein that are close together in space. Here we describe the use of disulfide crosslinks to investigate the structure and flexibility of a family of designed 4‐helix bundle proteins. The results of these analyses lend support to our working model of the proteins' structure and suggest that the proteins have limited main‐chain flexibility.
Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology Using Roles of Variables to Enhance Novice's Debugging Work

Debugging skill is an essential part of the programming skills. It is also highly related with program comprehension skills. In this paper we present a novel tool, called ViLLE, which supports learning debugging by promoting students' understanding of target program. ViLLE combines visual debugging features with the support for roles of variables. These roles promote activating schemas of variable use in programs. In addition, ViLLE supports automatic presentation of the target program in different programming languages, even in pseudo code or with tex-tual explanations. T his, in turn, helps in building more general and abstract understanding of program structures and their relation to problem domain concepts. The key features of the tool are presented, followed by a discussion of how the tool should be used in programming education.
Performance of PVM with the MOSIX preemptive process migration scheme

With the increased interest in workstation networks for parallel and high performance computing it is necessary to reexamine the use of process migration algorithms, to improve the overall utilization of the system, to achieve high performance and to allow flexible use of idle workstations. Currently, almost all programming environments for parallel systems do not use process migration for task assignments. Instead, a static process assignment is used, with sub-optimal performance, especially when several users execute multiple processes simultaneously. The paper highlights the advantages of a process migration scheme for better utilization of the computing resources as well as to gain substantial speedups in the execution of parallel and multi-tasking applications. The authors executed several CPU and communication bound benchmarks under PVM, a popular programming environment for parallel computing that uses static process assignment. These benchmarks were executed under the MOSIX multicomputer operating system, with and without its preemptive process migration scheme. The results of these benchmarks prove the advantages of using preemptive process migrations. The paper begins with an overview of MOSIX, a multicomputer enhancement of UNIX that supports transparent process migration for load-balancing, and PVM. They then present the performance of the executions of the benchmarks. Their results show that in some cases the improvements in the performance of PVM with the MOSIX process migration can reach tens or even hundreds of percents.
Performance analysis of impulse noise removal using cloud algorithm

In this paper, a novel switching mean filter using cloud algorithm method is proposed, which is a powerful impulse noise removal method. We employ an efficient impulse noise detector to detect the noisy pixels and proposed cloud impulse noise removal algorithm to reconstruct the intensity value of noise pixels. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method can obtain better performances in terms of both subjective and objective evaluations than those state-of-the-art impulse denoising techniques. Especially, the proposed method can preserve edges very well while removing impulse noise. Since our algorithm is simple, it is very suitable to be applied to real-time applications.
SLAM with Panoramic Vision

This article presents an approach to SLAM that takes advantage of panoramic images. Landmarks are interest points detected and matched in the images and mapped according to a bearings‐only SLAM approach. As they are acquired and processed, the panoramic images are also indexed and stored into a database. A database query procedure, independent of the robot and landmark position estimates, is able to detect loop closures by retrieving memorized images that are close to the current robot position. The bearings‐only estimation process is described, and results over a trajectory of a few hundreds of meters are presented and discussed. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Source location based on direction of arrival estimation and regional contraction

A new method is proposed for the source location with distributed sensor array. Firstly, the direction of arrival (DOA) of each subarray is estimated by the Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) group delay function. Secondly, the initial rectangular region is established from the DOA estimation. Finally, the regional contraction is performed based on the larger steered response power. The centroid of the final region is the source location. The group delay from the phase information of MUSIC spectrum can enhance the resolution of the DOA estimation. The region reduction is iteratively completed and substantially shrunk based on the virtual points' larger steered response power. The simulation results show that the proposed method provides a more accurate source location with a stronger noise robustness than the traditional triangulation location method.