Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Influence of the Labeller's Regional Background on Phonetic Transcriptions: Implications for the Evaluation of Spoken Language Resources

Phonetic transcriptions of spoken language corpora are not an exact written reproduction of the speech signal. They are influenced by a variety of factors such as the transcriber s native categorical perception. What remains unexplored is to what extent variation of perception within the same language exerts any influence on phonetic transcriptions. We report a case study of the labelling of vowel quality performed by native speakers of Dutch from either The Netherlands or Belgium. An analysis of the distribution of vowel quality labels reveals that labellers from The Netherlands have an other preference for certain vowel quality labels than labellers from Belgium. The inter-labeller agreement between is higher between labellers from the same region than between labellers from different regions. From these results, the conclusion can be drawn that labellers from The Netherlands and Belgium have a different perception of vowel quality in Standard Dutch. Thus, the factor regional background of transcribers should be taken into account when evaluating phonetic transcriptions of spoken language resources.
Auditory activation of cortical visual areas in cats after early visual deprivation

Auditory activation of the primary visual cortex (area 17) and two extrastriate visual cortical areas – the anterolateral lateral suprasylvian area (ALLS) and anteromedial lateral suprasylvian area (AMLS), was investigated in visually impaired cats. Impairment was accomplished shortly after birth by bilateral eyelid suturing (binocularly deprived cats, BD) or bilateral enucleation (binocularly enucleated cats, BE). In BE cats, the optic nerve and chiasm were entirely degenerated. No cortical atrophy or cytoarchitectural malformation was noticed in either BD or BE cats. In both normal and impaired cats we found auditory‐responsive cells in the ALLS and AMLS, areas that are considered strictly visual. The most remarkable finding was an increase in the relative number of these auditory cells in the BD and BE cats, which was more prominent in the latter. Some auditory‐responsive cells were also found in area 17 of BE cats. On the basis of formal calculation, it is tempting to suggest that the increase in relative number of auditory cells in these areas reflects the transformation of all the visual cells in the ALLS of BD and BE cats into auditory cells. In BE cats, all bimodal cells and an appreciable percentage of non‐responsive cells also had transformed to auditory cells. In the AMLS of BD cats, it is primarily the bimodal cells that become auditory cells, whereas in BE cats all the visual and bimodal cells as well as non‐responsive cells undergo this transformation. This assumption, however, is one possible interpretation of our results but not the only one. Other modes of neuronal plasticity that might yield similar results in the visually deprived cats can not be ruled out.
Real-time Implementation of Multi-rate Sampling Systems in RT-Linux environment

For real-time implementation of multi-rate sampling system, the position control of servo unit with real-time PID control algorithm-using RT-Linux thread program is considered. In the RT-Linux environment, effect of varying time-delays on performance and stability in the single-channel multi-rate hybrid system consisting of a continuous-time plant and a discrete-time controller is presented in this paper. The best sampling rate is chosen for the sampled-data system, which is the slowest rate meets all performance requirements. The multi-rate controller is composed by a slow sampler (operating at a low frequency) and a fast hold (operating at a high frequency). Each of the slow samples is converted into a group of N fast samples (Hold) and thus only one of each group of N samples can be used as information feedback to the controller since sensor operates at low frequency. The main result of our experiment shows that the multi-rate control technique in RT-Linux can solve the stability problems caused by the random access delays and asynchronization with required performance.
Search Aid System Based on Machine Vision and Its Visual Attention Model for Rescue Target Detection

The prompt search and rescue of lifesaving target is very important in the case that a marine casualty occurs. To detect the small target in the wide views over the sea, we have proposed a machine vision system to aid search and rescue on the sea, which combines remote sensing, radar, infrared with visual light technology. One of the detection methods in this system, which is based on visual attention mechanism, is proposed in this paper to find rescue target from visual light image. The color information, image intensity and other image properties are used to generate the feature maps that form the saliency map subsequently with the weighted integrating strategy. The experimental results show that the proposed method is efficient to detect the small target in cluttered ocean scene.
Performance evaluation of GA and RL based PSS of a multi-machine system

One of the main problems that lead to instability in a power system is the low frequency oscillation caused by swinging generator rotor. These oscillations will lead to loss of synchronism, limit the power transfer capability and also lead to the islanding of inter connected power system. So it is very important to damp out these oscillations, power system stabilizer (PSS) is a device which is commonly used for damp out these oscillations. A power system stabilizer uses angular speed as the input and produce stabilizing signal to damp out these oscillations. The most commonly used power system stabilizer is the conventional power system stabilizer, which is designed by using the theory of phase compensation in the frequency domain and it uses a lead-lag network in its design. This paper focus on the design of PSS for a Single machine connected to infinite bus system (SMIB) and Multi-machine power system having 3 generator and 9 bus system. For optimizing the gain of PSS, Genetic algorithm and Reinforcement learning techniques are used. The simulations are carried out using state space modelling technique.
A Hybrid Technique for English-Chinese Cross Language Information Retrieval

In this article we describe a hybrid technique for dictionary-based query translation suitable for English-Chinese cross language information retrieval. This technique marries a graph-based model for the resolution of candidate term ambiguity with a pattern-based method for the translation of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) terms. We evaluate the performance of this hybrid technique in an experiment using several NTCIR test collections. Experimental results indicate a substantial increase in retrieval effectiveness over various baseline systems incorporating machine- and dictionary-based translation.
Reliable Computation Using Unreliable Network Tools

In network tools, reliability is usually approached by attempting to make the network tool reliable. These efforts deliver transparent, fault tolerant network computation engines which internally require a lot of state and global system knowledge in order to ensure the successful progress of computation tasks throughout the system [1]. Here we propose a framework for the design of distributed/parallel systems that are not dependent on reliable networks or global network status information. There is a class of stochastic algorithms that are amenable to decomposition into independent components that have their own (independent) chance of failure. The system, as a whole, can be designed to not manage failures inside of the system. Instead these failures can be more successfully managed in the context of algorithm design. By dividing the algorithm along lines of problem definition versus atomic calculations to be completed, failure of individual calculations become irrelevant to the convergence of the solution as a whole. Many algorithms can be constructed along these lines. The family of algorithms on which we concentrate are those which use a significant stochastic component in their computation. The randomness within the stochastic component will be used to hide the failure from the network tool in a way which is nondestructive to the solution generation progress. We use a Genetic Algorithm as an example; the approach can be as easily applied to any Monte-Carlo technique, and to many techniques within Grid Computing. In fact, this design philosophy can be seen as a way to evolve Grid Computing to use the existing Internet without the use of a set of global standards that imply a significant use of bandwidth just for organizational structures.
A speech signal based gender identification system using four classifiers

This paper presents a study of four different classifiers in the task of automatic speech based gender identification. Gender identification could have several applications in automatic speech and speaker recognition systems and in content -based multimedia indexing. Gaussian mixture model (GMM), multilayer perceptrons (MLP), vector quantization (VQ) and learning vector quantization (LVQ) are the classifiers used in this work along with mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC). The performance attained by our best system is 96.4% identification accuracy using only 1s of speech per speaker using the IViE corpus.
Principal component analysis of synthetic galaxy spectra

We analyse synthetic galaxy spectra from the evolutionary models of Bruzual & Charlot and Fioc & Rocca-Volmerange using the method of principal component analysis (PCA). We explore synthetic spectra with different ages, star formation histories and metallicities, and identify the principal components (PCs) of variance in the spectra resulting from these different model parameters. The PCA provides a more objective and informative alternative to diagnostics by individual spectral lines. We discuss how the PCs can be used to estimate the input model parameters, and explore the impact of dust and noise in this inverse problem. We also discuss how changing the sampling of the ages and other model parameters affects the resulting PCs. Our first two synthetic PCs agree with a similar analysis on observed spectra obtained by Kennicutt and the 2dF redshift survey. We conclude that with a good enough signal-to-noise ratio (S/N>> 10) it is possible to derive age, star formation history and metallicity from observed galaxy spectra using PCA.
Traditional or non-traditional students?: incorporating UK students’ living arrangements into decisions about going to university

Abstract Since the introduction of the post-1992 university, various, and ongoing, higher education (HE) policy reforms have fuelled academic, political, media and anecdotal discussions of the trajectories of UK university students. An outcome of this has been the dualistic classification of students as being from either ‘traditional’ or ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds. An extensive corpus of literature has sought to critically discuss how students experience their transition into university, questioning specifically the notion that all students follow a linear transition through university. Moreover, there is far more complexity involved in the student experience than can be derived from just employing these monolithic terms. This research proposes incorporating students’ residential circumstances into these debates to encourage more critical discussions of this complex demographic. Drawing upon the experiences of a sample of students from a UK ‘post-1992’ university this research will develop a profile for each accommodation type to highlight the key characteristics of the ‘type’ of student most likely to belong to each group. In doing so this establishes a more detailed understanding of how a ‘student’ habitus might affect the mechanisms which are put in place to assist students in their transitions into and through university.
Formation Compound Control for Nonholonomic Mobile Robots under Motion Constraints

A YIQ computer graphics system includes a data processing system having a data tablet for receiving inputs from an artist and a video processing system connected to the data processing system. The video processing system includes a two component expandable frame store with the first component storing video intensity information for each pixel of a visual image and with the second component storing two video color components each for one-half of the visual image. The video processing system further includes a memory controller coupled to receive pixel address information identifying pixel locations within a row and column matrix of pixel locations containing the visual image and addressing specific locations within the frame store in response thereto, an interface circuit coupled to transfer video data between the frame store and the data processing system at pixel locations within a matrix of locations defined by the data processing system, and a video output processor coupled to provide matrix address locations to the frame store and receive in return video data from the frame store to generate a color video output signal in raster scan order. The video processing system may also include an input scanner coupled to write into the frame store video information on a continuous frame-by-frame basis to permit the video output processor to output a video signal which indicates a continuously changing video image on a frame-by-frame real time basis.
Usage and Consequences of Privacy Settings in Microblogs

Twitter facilitates borderless communication, informing us about real-life events and news. To address privacy needs, Twitter provides various security settings. However, users with protected profiles are limited to their friendship circles and thus might have less visibility from outside of their networks. Previous research on privacy reveals information leakage and security threats in social networks despite of privacy protection enabled. In this context, could protecting microblogging content be counterproductive for individual users? Would microbloggers use Twitter more effectively when opening their content for everyone rather than protecting their profiles? Are user profile protection features necessary? We wanted to address this controversy by studying how microbloggers exploit privacy and geo-location setting controls. We followed a set of user profiles during half of year and compared their usage of Twitter features including status updates, favorites, being listed, adding friends and follower contacts. Our findings revealed that protecting user accounts is not always detrimental to exploiting the main microblogging features. Additionally, we found that users across geographic regions have different privacy preferences. Our results enable us to get insights into privacy issues in microblogs, underlining the need of respecting user privacy in microblogs. We suggest to further research user privacy controls usage in order to understand user goals and motivations for sharing and disclosing their microblogging data online with the focus on user cultural origins.
Lane-level map-matching based on optimization

We propose a method for ego-lane estimation that can robustly determine the currently used lane as required by future lane-precise navigation systems. It employs a lane-level map-matching on a digital road map through least-squares optimization and only requires sensors available in current production vehicles, such as GPS, odometry, visual lane-marking detection and radars. Radar data is used in a RANSAC-based filtering step for lane hypotheses and, together with camera data, in the determination of the reliability of each lane hypothesis. Detailed evaluation in actual traffic in urban scenarios shows very low error rates below 0.2%.
Network capabilities of cloud services for a real time scientific application

Dedicating high-end servers for executing scientific applications that run intermittently, such as severe weather detection or generalized weather forecasting, wastes resources. While the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model used by today's cloud platforms is well-suited for the bursty computational demands of these applications, it is unclear if the network capabilities of today's cloud platforms are sufficient. In this paper, we analyze the networking capabilities of multiple commercial (Amazon's EC2 and Rackspace) and research (GENICloud and ExoGENI cloud) platforms in the context of a Nowcasting application, a forecasting algorithm for highly accurate, near-term, e.g., 5-20 minutes, weather predictions. The application has both computational and network requirements. While it executes rarely, whenever severe weather approaches, it benefits from an IaaS model; However, since its results are time-critical, enough bandwidth must be available to transmit radar data to cloud platforms before it becomes stale. We conduct network capacity measurements between radar sites and cloud platforms throughout the country. Our results indicate that ExoGENI cloud performs the best for both serial and parallel data transfer with an average throughput of 110.22 Mbps and 17.2 Mbps, respectively. We also found that the cloud services perform better in the distributed data transfer case, where a subset of nodes transmit data in parallel to a cloud instance. Ultimately, we conclude that commercial and research clouds are capable of providing sufficient bandwidth for our real-time Nowcasting application.
The art of transparency

Artists throughout the ages have discovered a number of techniques to depict transparency. With only a few exceptions, these techniques follow closely the properties of physical transparency. The two best known properties are X-junctions and the luminance relations described by Metelli. X-junctions are seen where the contours of a transparent material cross contours of the surface behind; Metelli's constraints on the luminance relations between the direct and filtered portions of the surface specify a range of luminance values that are consistent with transparency. These principles have been used by artists since the time of ancient Egypt. However, artists also discovered that stimuli can be seen as transparent even when these physical constraints are not met. Ancient Greek artists, for example, were able to depict transparent materials in simple black-and-white line drawings. Artists also learned how to represent transparency in cases where neither X-junctions nor Metelli's constraints could apply: for example, where no portions of the objects behind the transparent material extend beyond it. Many painters convincingly portrayed transparency in these cases by depicting the effects the transparent medium would have on material or object properties. Here, we show how artists employed these and other techniques revealing their anticipation of current formalizations of perceived transparency, and we suggest new, as-yet-untested principles.
Learning Manipulated Pragmatic Frames in Triadic Interactions

✴ We would like to thank the participating children and their families. ✴ Many thanks to Angela Grimminger who acted as second experimenter. ✴ Juana Salas Poblete gratefu l ly acknowledges the financial support from Honda Research Institute Europe. When children learn new words they need to make use of the pragmatic frames in which the words are presented to acquire not only the object-label-match but knowledge about the embedding social context [1],[2],[3]. So far, frames have mainly been stipulated for situations, in which the child is directly addressed. Nevertheless, it is now widely acknowledged that children learn language not only in dyadic but also in triadic and multi-party contexts [4],[5].
Newman ’ s Proof of Newman ’ s Lemma

Textbooks on rewriting all give one or more (short 1) proofs of Newman's Lemma [2, Theorem 2], but none of them gives an account of Newman's original proof. It might be worthwhile to do so. Lemma. If → is terminating and has the weak Church–Rosser property, then it has the Church– Rosser property. Proof. It suffices to prove that → is confluent. This we prove by showing that any peak π 1 : b և a ։ c can be stepwise transformed into a valley b ։ · և c. A transformation step consists in replacing an occurrence of a local peak b ′ ← a ′ → c ′ in a path π i between b and c, by a valley b ′ ։ · և c ′ using the assumption that → has the weak Church–Rosser property, yielding another such path π i+1. Local peaks are selected during the transformation process in breadth-first fashion as illustrated in Figure 1, where the numbers indicate the successive selections, and a c π9 b 2 1 6 4 7 5 3 8 d Figure 1: Attempt to transform a peak stepwise into valley the red conversion is the path π 9 reached at stage 9 of the process. Intuitively, if the process terminates the final path must be a valley since it does not contain peaks, and moreover the process must terminate since peaks are being pushed further and further down. To formalise the intuition that peaks are being pushed ever further down, define the depth at stage i of an object occurring in π i to be the maximal length of a reduction from a to that object only through steps up to that stage, i.e. in the subsystem → ↾i = j≤i π j. For instance, the object d in the figure has depth 8 (at stage 14). The notion of depth is well-defined, since each stage contains only finitely many objects all reachable from a, and because reduction cycles are impossible by the assumption that → is terminating. Depths increase along a breadth-first transformation, formalised by always selecting a peak having a source of minimal depth at that stage. For instance, the source of the peaks selected at stages 6, 7 and 8 all have depth 3, and applying transformation steps in breadth-first fashion, consecutively replaces each by a valley, yielding the conversion π 9 only having peaks …
Temporal Feature Selection on Networked Time Series

This paper formulates the problem of learning discriminative features (\textit{i.e.,} segments) from networked time series data considering the linked information among time series. For example, social network users are considered to be social sensors that continuously generate social signals (tweets) represented as a time series. The discriminative segments are often referred to as \emph{shapelets} in a time series. Extracting shapelets for time series classification has been widely studied. However, existing works on shapelet selection assume that the time series are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.). This assumption restricts their applications to social networked time series analysis, since a user's actions can be correlated to his/her social affiliations. In this paper we propose a new Network Regularized Least Squares (NetRLS) feature selection model that combines typical time series data and user network data for analysis. Experiments on real-world networked time series Twitter and DBLP data demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. NetRLS performs better than LTS, the state-of-the-art time series feature selection approach, on real-world data.