Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Time-scaling of speech using independent subspace analysis

We propose a new technique for modifying the time-scale of speech using Independent Subspace Analysis (ISA). To carry out ISA, the single channel mixture signal is converted to a time-frequency representation such as spectrogram. Here, the spectrogram is generated by taking Hartley or Wavelet transform on overlapped frames of speech. We do dimensionality reduction of the autocorrelated original spectrogram using singular value decomposition. Then, we use Independent component analysis to get unmixing matrix using JadeICA algorithm [5]. It is then assumed that the overall spectrogram results from the superposition of a number of unknown statistically independent spectrograms. By using unmixing matrix, independent sources such as temporal amplitude envelopes and frequency weights can be extracted from the spectrogram. Time-scaling of speech is carried out by resampling the independent temporal amplitude envelopes. We then obtain timescaled independent spectrograms after multiplying the independent frequency weights with time-scaled temporal amplitude envelopes. Summing all these independent spectrograms and taking inverse Hartely or wavelet transform of the sum spectrogram to reconstruct and overlap-add the reconstructed time-domain signal to get the time-scaled speech. The quality of the time-scaled speech has been analyzed using Modified Bark Spectral Distortion(MBSD) [6]. From the MBSD score, one can infer that the time-scaled signal is less distorted.
Underground coal mine monitoring with wireless sensor networks

Environment monitoring in coal mines is an important application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that has commercial potential. We discuss the design of a Structure-Aware Self-Adaptive WSN system, SASA. By regulating the mesh sensor network deployment and formulating a collaborative mechanism based on a regular beacon strategy, SASA is able to rapidly detect structure variations caused by underground collapses. We further develop a sound and robust mechanism for efficiently handling queries under instable circumstances. A prototype is deployed with 27 mica2 motes in a real coal mine. We present our implementation experiences as well as the experimental results. To better evaluate the scalability and reliability of SASA, we also conduct a large-scale trace-driven simulation based on real data collected from the experiments.
Cyclosporine A-induced nitration of tyrosine 34 MnSOD in endothelial cells: role of mitochondrial superoxide.

AIMS Cyclosporine A (CsA) has represented a fundamental therapeutic weapon in immunosuppression for the past three decades. However, its clinical use is not devoid of side effects, among which hypertension and vascular injury represent a major drawback. Endothelial cells are able to generate reactive oxygen and nitrogen species upon exposure to CsA, including formation of peroxynitrite. This may result in endothelial cell toxicity and increased tyrosine nitration. We have now studied the subcellular origin of superoxide formation in endothelial cells treated with CsA and the biochemical consequences for the function of mitochondrial enzymes. METHODS AND RESULTS By using electron spin resonance and endothelial cells lacking functional mitochondria, we showed that superoxide anion is generated in mitochondria. This was associated with an effect of CsA on bioenergetic parameters: increased mitochondrial membrane potential and inhibition of cellular respiration. In addition, CsA inhibited the activity of the mitochondrial enzymes aconitase and manganese superoxide dismutase (MnSOD). The use of murine lung endothelial cells deficient in endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) and NOS/peroxynitrite inhibitors allowed us to establish that the presence of eNOS and concomitant NO synthesis and peroxynitrite formation were essential for CsA induced nitration and inhibition of MnSOD activity. As the latter has been shown to become inactivated by nitration, we sought to identify this modification by mass spectrometry analysis. We found that CsA induced specific MnSOD tyrosine 34 nitration both in the recombinant protein and in endothelial cells overexpressing MnSOD. CONCLUSION We propose that CsA induced endothelial damage may be related to increased mitochondrial superoxide formation and subsequent peroxynitrite-dependent nitroxidative damage, specifically targeting MnSOD. The inactivation of this key antioxidant enzyme by tyrosine nitration represents a pathophysiological cellular mechanism contributing to self-perpetuation and amplification of CsA-related vascular toxicity.
Inferring Single Neuron Properties in Conductance Based Balanced Networks

Balanced states in large networks are a usual hypothesis for explaining the variability of neural activity in cortical systems. In this regime the statistics of the inputs is characterized by static and dynamic fluctuations. The dynamic fluctuations have a Gaussian distribution. Such statistics allows to use reverse correlation methods, by recording synaptic inputs and the spike trains of ongoing spontaneous activity without any additional input. By using this method, properties of the single neuron dynamics that are masked by the balanced state can be quantified. To show the feasibility of this approach we apply it to large networks of conductance based neurons. The networks are classified as Type I or Type II according to the bifurcations which neurons of the different populations undergo near the firing onset. We also analyze mixed networks, in which each population has a mixture of different neuronal types. We determine under which conditions the intrinsic noise generated by the network can be used to apply reverse correlation methods. We find that under realistic conditions we can ascertain with low error the types of neurons present in the network. We also find that data from neurons with similar firing rates can be combined to perform covariance analysis. We compare the results of these methods (that do not requite any external input) to the standard procedure (that requires the injection of Gaussian noise into a single neuron). We find a good agreement between the two procedures.
Considerations About Psychological Development of Children With ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder)

Piaget’s theory of psychological development can contribute to a better understanding of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). The assumption is that children with ADHD present deficits in the development of the construction of operational notions, such as space-time conceptions and causality. Sixty-nine children (aged 6 to 12) were divided into two groups: children with ADHD and children without diagnosis. According to Piaget’s clinical interview, Piagetian tasks were applied. The clinical sample was sub-divided into children who used methylphenidate and non-medicated children. ADHD children showed a tendency to response and reasoning considered most common at developmental levels inferior to the comparison group. Regarding the use of methylphenidate, there was no significant difference of performance between the subgroups. Results may be indicative that the deficits relate mainly to structuring aspects of thinking, and not to performance. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed.
Vision loss in older adults : nursing assessment and care management

Contributors Preface Acknowledgments * Vision Problems in the Older Adult: An Introduction, Susan Crocker Houde * Age-Related Macular Degeneration, Ruth Remington * Cataracts, Pat Gillett, Kate Goldblum, and Joyce Powers * Glaucoma, Arlene McGrory * Retinopathies, Judy Pentedemos * Prevention of Age-related Vision Loss, Susan Crocker Houde * Psychological and Social Impact of Age-related Vision Loss, Karen Devereaus Melillo * Nursing Care of Older Adults with Age-related Vision Loss, Pamela Z. Cacchione * Supporting Families of Older Adults with Age-related Vision Loss, Catherine Sackett and Betsy Campochiaro * Assistive Devices and Resources for Older Adults with Age-related Vision Loss, Betsy Campochiaro and Catherine Sackett * Future Directions in the Care of Older Adults with Age-related Vision Loss, Kate Goldblum, Pat Gillett, and Joyce Powers.
How Software Designers Interact with Sketches at the Whiteboard

Whiteboard sketches play a crucial role in software development, helping to support groups of designers in reasoning about a software design problem at hand. However, little is known about these sketches and how they support design `in the moment', particularly in terms of the relationships among sketches, visual syntactic elements within sketches, and reasoning activities. To address this gap, we analyzed 14 hours of design activity by eight pairs of professional software designers, manually coding over 4000 events capturing the introduction of visual syntactic elements into sketches, focus transitions between sketches, and reasoning activities. Our findings indicate that sketches serve as a rich medium for supporting design conversations. Designers often use general-purpose notations. Designers introduce new syntactic elements to record aspects of the design, or re-purpose sketches as the design develops. Designers constantly shift focus between sketches, using groups of sketches together that contain complementary information. Finally, sketches play an important role in supporting several types of reasoning activities (mental simulation, review of progress, consideration of alternatives). But these activities often leave no trace and rarely lead to sketch creation. We discuss the implications of these and other findings for the practice of software design at the whiteboard and for the creation of new electronic software design sketching tools.
The Impact of Perioperative Complications on Clinical Outcome in Adult Deformity Surgery

Study Design. Retrospective case-control series. Objective. The purpose of this study is to determine whether perioperative complications alter subsequent clinical outcome measures in adult spinal deformity surgery. Summary of Background Data. Increasingly, the benefit of surgical intervention is being evaluated based on patient reported outcomes and standardized health related quality of life (HRQOL) measures. As improvement or deterioration in HRQOL scores becomes a standard for clinical evaluation in adult spinal deformity, the correlation between HRQOL outcome scores and historic benchmarks, such as curve correction, sagittal balance, fusion healing, or the occurrence of a complication, must be clarified. Methods. This study analyzes a prospective multicenter data base for adult spinal deformity. Patients with major, minor, and no complications were matched using a logistic regression technique producing 46 patients in each group. Standardized outcome measures at baseline and at 1 year postop were compared. Results. Forty-seven major complications were reported in 46 patients. Sixty-two minor complications were noted in 46 patients. Comparison between the 3 complication groups revealed that 1-year postoperative outcome measures were not statistically different for the Scoliosis Research Society Outcomes Instrument, Medical Outcomes Short Form-36 (SF-12), Oswestry Disability Index, or Numerical Pain Scales. The only significant interaction was in the rate of change from preop to 1-year postop for the SF-12 general health subscale. For the group with major complications, SF-12 general health deteriorated by 2.1 points from preop to 1-year postop. During the same period, the group with minor complications experienced an improvement of 4.2 points and the group with no complications experienced an improvement of 1.5 points. Conclusion. This study suggests that risk for minor complications may be a less substantial obstacle than previously assumed for surgical treatment in adult spinal deformity. In contrast, major complications were reported in approximately 10% of cases and adversely affected outcome as evidenced by the deterioration in SF-12 general health scores at 1 year after surgery.
OPTIMAL FEATURE DESIGN FOR VISION-GUIDED MANIPULATION

Optimal Feature Design for Vision-Guided Manipulation Azad Shademan, Master of Applied Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Ryerson U niversity, 2005 Numerous industrial applications use vision-guided manip ulation, where cameras are used to generate the feedback control signal. Current vision algor ithms select a set of image features to estimate pose in real-time. Object design has received litt le a ention in this context; more importantly, improper designs could lead to task failure. The foc us of this thesis is on optimal industrial design of features. The goal is to construct the theory of opt imal design for vision-guided manipulation. The problem is posed as a multi-objective optimizat ion problem within an axiomatic-design theoretic framework. The visual and directional motion res olvability objectives are specified for a given 6-dimensional camera trajectory. Simulation result s verify that the redesigned object satisfies the objectives. The practical implementation is attempted by camera calibration, pose estimation, and experiments on a real industrial object under a known cam er trajectory.
Review Paper on Prevention of Direct and Indirect Discrimination

Data mining is very important technology for extracting useful knowledge from large data. The discrimination is nothing but the unfair treatment given to an individual or group according to particular characteristics. For data mining classification rules are performing very important role but discrimination comes into picture because of biased classification rules. The training data sets are biased so we need to firstly discover discrimination and then need to prevent that discrimination to make it discrimination free. Discrimination can be of two types, direct and indirect. When decisions are made based on sensitive attributes, Direct Discrimination occurs. While decisions based on nonsensitive attributes, Indirect Discrimination occurs. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed techniques are effective at removing direct and/or indirect discrimination in the original data set while preserving data quality.
Maternal Immune Activation Alters Fetal Brain Development through Interleukin-6

Schizophrenia and autism are thought to result from the interaction between a susceptibility genotype and environmental risk factors. The offspring of women who experience infection while pregnant have an increased risk for these disorders. Maternal immune activation (MIA) in pregnant rodents produces offspring with abnormalities in behavior, histology, and gene expression that are reminiscent of schizophrenia and autism, making MIA a useful model of the disorders. However, the mechanism by which MIA causes long-term behavioral deficits in the offspring is unknown. Here we show that the cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6) is critical for mediating the behavioral and transcriptional changes in the offspring. A single maternal injection of IL-6 on day 12.5 of mouse pregnancy causes prepulse inhibition (PPI) and latent inhibition (LI) deficits in the adult offspring. Moreover, coadministration of an anti-IL-6 antibody in the poly(I:C) model of MIA prevents the PPI, LI, and exploratory and social deficits caused by poly(I:C) and normalizes the associated changes in gene expression in the brains of adult offspring. Finally, MIA in IL-6 knock-out mice does not result in several of the behavioral changes seen in the offspring of wild-type mice after MIA. The identification of IL-6 as a key intermediary should aid in the molecular dissection of the pathways whereby MIA alters fetal brain development, which can shed new light on the pathophysiological mechanisms that predispose to schizophrenia and autism.
Motion sensing for robot hands using MIDS

A novel computer input system-the Micro Input Devices System (MIDS)-is under development by merging MEMS sensors and existing wireless technologies. This system could potentially replace the functions of the mouse, pen, and keyboard as input devices to the computer. The system could also be used as a general wireless 3D motion sensing device. In this paper, we will present our work on using MIDS for motion sensing application of robot hands. MIDS is used to evaluate the performance of PD adaptive control and Impedance control schemes in manipulating a five-fingered robot hand and in manipulating this hand to grasp a ball. Experimental results indicate that MIDS is capable of obtaining real-time 3D acceleration/vibration data wirelessly for the robotic hand, hence eliminating the need to perform the time-consuming integration of the position sensor data to obtain acceleration. Moreover, our initial results also indicate that further exploration of this technology could eventually produce a new control-input device for robotic grasping manipulators. These results are presented in this paper.
Determining Writing Genre: Towards a Rubric-based Approach to Automated Essay Grading

A writing genre can be thought of as the style in which the writer chooses to present textual content to the reader. We distinguish four main types of essay genres namely Narrative, Persuasive, Descriptive and Expository. An essay's writing genre can be identified by searching for salient features present within those genres using various Natural Language Processing tools such as Named Entity Recognition, Part of Speech tagging and Sentence Parsing. This paper explains the more common writing genres in student essays and describes the method in which essays in the narrative genre are identified.
Creating Strong Principals.

A rmed with compelling new evidence about how principals can enhance teaching and learning, many large school districts are focusing on bolstering school leadership. This stepped-up attention to school leadership stems from two realizations. First, the quality of school principals can make a real difference in classrooms. In fact, research has established that leadership is second only to teaching among school-related factors as an influence on learning (Louis, Leithwood, Wahlstrom, & Anderson, 2010). Second, the job of the principal entails much more than administration or enforcing discipline. Principals today must be instructional leaders, hearkening back to public education’s early days when heads of schools were called “principal teachers. ” Instructional leadership requires principals to be consummate team builders who can shape a vision of success for all students, cultivate leadership in others, help teachers upgrade their skills, and use data to foster school improvement (Portin, 2009). As Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, noted,
Thermomigration Versus Electromigration in Microelectronics Solder Joints

Competing mechanisms of electromigration and thermomigration in flip chip SnAgCu (SAC) solder joints were studied experimentally. A daisy chain of solder joints were stressed at 2.0 times 104 Amps/cm2, 2.4 times 104 Amps/cm2, and 2.8 times 104 Amps/cm2 current density levels at room temperature. In the test vehicle, some solder joints were exposed to a combination of electromigration and thermomigration, while some others were exposed to thermomigration alone. The changes in the intermetallic compound (IMC) microstructure were observed with scanning electron microscope (SEM) under thermomigration alone and when both migration processes are present. In all cases, Cu6Sn5 IMC at the hot side disintegrated while at the cold side thickened. The dissolution of the IMC at the hot side and the thickening at the cold side is a result of temperature and diffusion driving forces. It is observed that thermomigration driving force, when present, is much larger than electromigration.
Accelerating parameter estimation for multivariate self-exciting point processes

Self-exciting point processes are stochastic processes capturing occurrence patterns of random events. They offer powerful tools to describe and predict temporal distributions of random events like stock trading and neurone spiking. A critical calculation in self-exciting point process models is parameter estimation, which fits a model to a data set. This calculation is computationally demanding when the number of data points is large and when the data dimension is high. This paper proposes the first reconfigurable computing solution to accelerate this calculation. We derive an acceleration strategy in a mathematical specification by eliminating complex data dependency, by cutting hardware resource requirement, and by parallelising arithmetic operations. In our experimental evaluation, an FPGA-based implementation of the proposed solution is up to 79 times faster than one CPU core, and 13 times faster than the same CPU with eight cores.
Changes in bile acids, FGF-19 and sterol absorption in response to bile salt hydrolase active L. reuteri NCIMB 30242

The size and composition of the circulating bile acid (BA) pool are important factors in regulating the human gut microbiota. Disrupted regulation of BA metabolism is implicated in several chronic diseases. Bile salt hydrolase (BSH)-active Lactobacillus reuteri NCIMB 30242, previously shown to decrease LDL-cholesterol and increase circulating BA, was investigated for its dose response effect on BA profile in a pilot clinical study. Ten otherwise healthy hypercholesterolemic adults, recruited from a clinical trial site in London, ON, were randomized to consume delayed release or standard release capsules containing L. reuteri NCIMB 30242 in escalating dose over 4 weeks. In another aspect, 4 healthy normocholesterolemic subjects with LDL-C below 3.4 mmol/l received delayed release L. reuteri NCIMB 30242 at a constant dose over 4 weeks. The primary outcome measure was the change in plasma BA profile over the intervention period. Additional outcomes included circulating fibroblast growth factor (FGF)-19, plant sterols and LDL-cholesterol as well as fecal microbiota and bsh gene presence. After one week of intervention subjects receiving delayed release L. reuteri NCIMB 30242 increased total BA by 1.13 ± 0.67 μmol/l (P = 0.02), conjugated BA by 0.67 ± 0.39 μmol/l (P = 0.02) and unconjugated BA by 0.46 ± 0.43 μmol/l (P = 0.07), which represented a greater than 2-fold change relative to baseline. Increases in BA were largely maintained post-week 1 and were generally correlated with FGF-19 and inversely correlated with plant sterols. This is the first clinical support showing that a BSH-active probiotic can significantly and rapidly influence BA metabolism and may prove useful in chronic diseases beyond hypercholesterolemia.
Recursive bipartitioning of signal flow graphs for programmable video signal processors

We consider the problem of partitioning video algorithms over an arbitrary network of high-performance video signal processors. The partitioning problem under consideration is very hard due to the many constraints that need to be satisfied. We present a solution strategy based on a recursive bipartitioning approach, which effectively handles the routing of the data flows through the network under time and resource constraints. The bipartitions are generated using a variable-depth search algorithm. We present results for industrially relevant video algorithms.