Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Are we ready to transfer optical light to gamma-rays?

Scattering relativistic electrons with optical lasers can result in a significant frequency upshift for the photons, potentially producing $\gamma$-rays. This is what linear Compton scattering taught us. Ultra-intense lasers offer nowadays a new paradigm where multi-photon absorption effects come into play. These effects can result in higher harmonics, higher yields and also electron-positron pairs. This article intends to discriminate the different laser scenarios that have been proposed over the past years as well as to give scaling laws for future experiments. The energy conversion from laser or particles to high-frequency photons is addressed for both the well-known counter propagating electron beam-laser interaction and for Quantum-electrodynamics cascades triggered by various lasers. Constructing bright and energetic gamma-ray sources in controlled conditions is within an ace of seeing the light of day.
A High-Recall Self-Improving Web Crawler That Finds Images Using Captions

Finding multimedia objects to meet some need is considerably harder on the World Wide Web than finding text because content-based retrieval of multimedia is much harder than text retrieval and caption text is inconsistently placed. We describe a Web "crawler" and caption filter MARIE-4 we have developed that searches the Web to find text likely to be image captions and its associated image objects. Rather than examining a few features like existing systems, it uses broad set of criteria including some novel ones to yield higher recall than competing systems, which generally focus on high precision. We tested these criteria in careful experiments that extracted 8140 caption candidates for 4585 representative images, and quantified for the first time the relative value of several kinds of clues for captions. The crawler is self-improving in that it obtains from experience further statistics as positive and negative clues. We index the results found by the crawler and provide a user interface. We have done a demonstration implementation of a Web search engine for all 667,573 publicly-accessible U.S. Navy Web images.
Greenland equilibrium line from ERS-1/2 scatterometers and surface mass balance model data

Long-term changes in the surface mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet are thought to respond directly to climate changes. Studies have shown increased thinning mainly along the southwest and northern margins, but thickening has been observed in the higher elevation accumulation regions. Knowledge of whether the overall change is positive or negative remains unclear. Therefore, this study compares data from the first and second Earth Remote Sensing (ERS-1/2) satellites and surface mass balance model data for the years 1992 to 1999. From ERS-1/2 data, the snow/ice zones are delineated and compared with accumulation, runoff, and surface mass balance estimates ascertained for this period. Results show substantial interannual variability between the data sets mainly along the periphery of the ice sheet in the southwest and northern margins. Surface mass balance estimates agreed within higher elevations, but disagreed in lower elevations of the ice sheet. INDEX WORDS: Greenland ice sheet, Earth Remote Sensing Satellite, Equilibrium line, Surface mass balance GREENLAND EQUILIBRIUM LINE FROM ERS-1/2 SCATTEROMETERS AND SURFACE MASS BALANCE MODEL DATA
An efficient multigrid method for graph Laplacian systems

We consider linear systems whose matrices are Laplacians of undirected graphs. We present a new aggregation-based algebraic multigrid method designed to achieve robustness for this class of problems, despite the diversity of connectivity patterns encountered in practical applications. These indeed range from regular mesh graphs to scale-free type of graphs associated with social networks. The method is based on the recursive static elimination of the vertices of degree 1 combined with a new Degree-aware Rooted Aggregation (DRA) algorithm. This algorithm always produces aggregates big enough so that the cost per iteration is low, whereas reasonable convergence is observed when the approach is combined with the K-cycle. The robustness of the resulting method is illustrated on a large collection of test problems, and its effectiveness is assessed via the comparison with a state-of-the-art reference method.
Overview of NIT HMM-based speech synthesis system for Blizzard Challenge 2012

This paper describes a hidden Markov model (HMM) based speech synthesis system developed for the Blizzard Challenge 2012. In the Blizzard Challenge 2012, we focused on a design of contexts for using audio books as training data and duration modeling of silence between sentences for synthesizing paragraphs. It is well known that contextual factors affect speech. We use extended contexts for using audio books to construct appropriate model parameter tying structures. In addition, duration models of silence between sentences are created to synthesize more natural speech because connections between sentences are important for synthesizing paragraphs. Subjective evaluation results show that the system synthesized the high intelligible speech. Index Terms: speech synthesis, hidden Markov model, context clustering
Overview of NIT HMM-based speech synthesis system for Blizzard Challenge 2011

This paper describes a hidden Markov model (HMM) based speech synthesis system developed for the Blizzard Challenge 2011. In the Blizzard Challenge 2011, we focused on the training algorithm for HMM-based speech synthesis systems. To alleviate the local maxima problems in the maximum likelihood estimation, we apply the deterministic annealing expectation maximization (DAEM) algorithm for training HMMs. By using the DAEM algorithm, the reliable acoustic model parameters can be estimated. In addition, we apply stepwise model selection to the model training. The decision tree based context clustering is used as model selection in HMM-based speech synthesis. By using the stepwise model selection method, decision trees are gradually changed from small trees into large trees for estimating reliable acoustic models. Subjective evaluation results show that the system synthesized the high intelligible speech. Index Terms: speech synthesis, hidden Markov model, deterministic annealing, model structure
AIS Electronic Library (AISeL) A Temporal Frequent Itemset-Based Clustering Approach For Discovering Event Episodes From News Sequence

When performing environmental scanning, organizations typically deal with a numerous of events and topics about their core business, relevant technique standards, competitors, and market, where each event or topic to monitor or track generally is associated with many news documents. To reduce information overload and information fatigues when monitoring or tracking such events, it is essential to develop an effective event episode discovery mechanism for organizing all news documents pertaining to an event of interest. In this study, we propose the time-adjoining frequent itemset-based event-episode discovery (TAFIED) technique. Based on the frequent itemset-based hierarchical clustering (FIHC) approach, our proposed TAFIED further considers the temporal characteristic of news articles, including the burst, novelty, and temporal proximity of features in an event episode, when discovering event episodes from the sequence of news articles pertaining to a specific event. Using the traditional feature-based HAC, HAC with a time-decaying function (HAC+TD), and FIHC techniques as performance benchmarks, our empirical evaluation results suggest that the proposed TAFIED technique outperforms all evaluation benchmarks in cluster recall and cluster precision.
Charge-Sensitive TCP and Rate Control in theInternetRichard

In a communication network a good rate allocation algorithm should reeect the utilities of the users while being fair. We investigate this fundamental problem of achieving the system optimal rates in the sense of maximizing aggregate utility, in a distributed manner, using only the information available at the end hosts of the network. This is done by decomposing the overall system problem into subproblems for the network and for the individual users, by introducing a pricing scheme. The users are to solve the problem of maximizing individual net utility, which is the utility less the amount they pay. We provide algorithms for the network to adjust its prices and the users to adjust their window sizes such that at an equilibrium the system optimum is achieved. Further, the equilibrium prices are such that the system optimum achieves weighted proportional fairness. It is notable that the update algorithms of the users do not require any explicit feedback from the network, rendering them easily deployable over the Internet. Our scheme is incentive compatible in that there is no beneet to the users to lie about their utilities.
Maternal and Perinatal Outcomes in Childbirths with Meconium Stained Amniotic Fluid in a Low-resource Setting: A Prospective Cohort Study

Meconium stained amniotic fluid (MSAF) can be associated with a high maternal and perinatal mortality. There is paucity of data on maternal and fetal outcomes of MSAF in Cameroon. Aim: The study was to determine the maternal and perinatal outcomes in patients with MSAF. Study Design: Prospective cohort study. Place and Duration of Study: The study carried out in the Limbe Regional Hospital maternity, Cameroon from 10th January 2017 to 20th April 2017. Methodology: Fifty- two mothers who had MSAF and their neonates, were matched with controls (without MSAF) in a 1:1 ratio after matching for: age, gestational age, parity and body mass index. Risk ratio (RR) of MSAF on the various perinatal outcomes were calculated by multivariate logistic regression with MSAF (-) being the reference. Data was analyzed with Epi Info 7. Results: Two hundred and three deliveries were conducted during the study period with fifty-two with MSAF enrolled in the study. The proportion of participants with MSAF was 19.1%. Parturients who had thick MSAF were 3 times more likely to have caesarean sections (RR: 3.2, 95% CI= 1.1 - 10.2, p = 0.04). Two (3.9%) parturients with chorioamnionitis had MSAF. The neonatal complications were: non- reassuring fetal heart rate (RR=4.4, 95%CI: 1.1-16.8, p=0.02), neonatal sepsis (RR=3.7, 95%CI: 1.4-9.8, p=0.01) and neonatal intensive care unit admissions (RR=2.9, 95%CI: 1.2-6.9, p=0.02), were associated with MSAF. Two (3.9%) had meconium aspiration syndrome on clinical examination. No maternal death was recorded. However, a perinatal death occurred in a parturient with MSAF. Conclusion: The proportion of parturients with MSAF was high. MSAF was associated with increased maternal and neonatal morbidity. We recommend larger and robust cohort studies to further refine our findings.
A Simple Framework for Text-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Training. AdamW [10] optimizer is used for training, and the weight decay is 0.2. The learning rate is initialized to 3e-4. The learning rate schedule is cosine decay, with a minimum learning rate at 3e-5 (i.e., minimum scale of 0.1). The model is trained for 20 epochs, where warmup epochs account for 2.5% of the entire training procedure. The temperature of contrastive loss is learnable and initialized to 0.07. The batch size is 4096.
DANGERS OF DATA-DRIVEN INFERENCE: THE CASE OF CALENDAR EFFECTS IN STOCK RETURNS BY RYAN SULLIVAN

Economics is primarily a non-experimental science. Typically, we cannot generate new data sets on which to test hypotheses independently of the data that may have led to a particular theory. The common practice of using the same data set to formulate and test hypotheses introduces data-snooping biases that, if not accounted for, invalidate the assumptions underlying classical statistical inference. A striking example of a datadriven discovery is the presence of calendar effects in stock returns. There appears to be very substantial evidence of systematic abnormal stock returns related to the day of the week, the week of the month, the month of the year, the turn of the month, holidays, and so forth. However, this evidence has largely been considered without accounting for the intensive search preceding it. In this paper we use 100 years of daily data and a new bootstrap procedure that allows us to explicitly measure the distortions in statistical inference induced by data-snooping. We find that although nominal P-values of individual calendar rules are extremely significant, once evaluated in the context of the full universe from which such rules were drawn, calendar effects no longer remain significant. Dangers of Data-Driven Inference 2 “October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February. ” Mark Twain (1894)
An uncertainty-focused approach to modeling the atmospheric chemistry of persistent organic pollutants

In this thesis, I study polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and perfluorocarboxylic acids (PFCAs). PAHs are by-products of burning and therefore have important anthropogenic sources in the combustion of fuels, biomass, etc. PFCAs and their atmospheric precursors are used in making firefighting foams, non-stick coatings, and other surfactant applications. I quantitatively examine the relative importance of uncertainty in emissions and physicochemical properties (including reaction rate constants) to Northern Hemisphere (NH) and Arctic PAH concentrations. NH average concentrations are more sensitive to uncertainty in the atmospheric lifetime than to emissions rate. The largest uncertainty reductions would come from precise experimental determination of PHE, PYR and BaP rate constants for the reaction with OH. I calculate long-chain PFCA formation theoretical maximum yields for the degradation of precursor species at a representative sample of atmospheric conditions from a three dimensional chemical transport model, finding that atmospheric conditions farther from pollution sources have both higher capacities to form long chain PFCAs and higher uncertainties in those capacities. I present results from newly developed simulations of atmospheric PFCA formation and fate using the chemical transport model GEOS-Chem, simulating the degradation of fluorotelomer precursors, as well as deposition and transport of the precursors, intermediates and end-products of the PFCA formation chemistry. I compare the model results to remote deposition measurements and find that it reproduces Arctic deposition of PFOA effectively. Given the most recent precursor emission inventory, the atmospheric indirect source of PFOA and PFNA is 10-45 t/yr globally and 0.2-0.7 t/yr to the Arctic. Thesis Supervisor: Noelle Eckley Selin Title: Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Associate Professor
Sparse Discriminant Analysis Line Clemmensen

Classi cation in high-dimensional feature spaces where interpretation and dimension reduction are of great importance is common in biological and medical applications. For these applications standard methods as microarrays, 1D NMR, and spectroscopy have become everyday tools for measuring thousands of features in samples of interest. Furthermore, the samples are often costly and therefore many such problems have few observations in relation to the number of features. Traditionally such data are analyzed by rst performing a feature selection before classi cation. We propose a method which performs linear discriminant analysis with a sparseness criterion imposed such that the classi cation, feature selection and dimension reduction is merged into one analysis. The sparse discriminant analysis is faster than traditional feature selection methods based on computationally heavy criteria such as Wilk's lambda, and the results are better with regards to classi cation rates and sparseness. The method is extended to mixtures of Gaussians which is useful when e.g. biological clusters are present within each class. Finally, the methods proposed provide low-dimensional views of the discriminative directions.
The CASIA phrase-based machine translation system

In this paper we propose a phrase-based translation system. In the system, we use phrase translation model instead of word-based model. An improved method to compute phrase translation probability is studied. A phrase-based decoder we developed employs a beam search algorithm, in which some target language words that have both high frequency of appearance and also fertility zero are introduced to make the result more reasonable. We improve the previously proposed tracing back algorithm to get the best path. Some experiments concerned are presented.
The Experimental Study on FGD-Gypsum Improving Coastal Saline-Soil

Two kinds of flue gas desulfurization gypsum (FGDgypsum) A# and B# were chosen to improve coastal saline-soil at the different ratios of quality (0%, 0.5%, 1%, 2.5%, 5%) respectively in soil column leaching experiment. A came from a steelworks whose technology was wet gas gush churn tower sintering flue gas desulfurization and B came from a coal-fired power plant whose technology was conventional spray wet limestone-gypsum flue gas desulfurization, A gypsum contained more impurities than B. The results showed that, compared with the control, applying A could increase soil saturated hydraulic conductivity and leaching sodium quality by 5~6 times, 11.0%~22.2%, and decrease soil pH, exchangeable sodium percentage (ESP) by 0.41~0.11, 25.1%~76.7%, respectively. The improvement effect of B was superior than that of A due to higher Ca dissolution efficiency and lower chloride ion content of B. Compared with A, B could increase soil saturated hydraulic conductivity and leaching sodium quality by 57.5%~89.1%, 51.3%~74.0%, and decrease soil pH, ESP by 0.10~0.36, 66.7%~83.6%, respectively. When two kinds of FGD-gypsum improving coastal saline-soil, the change rules of soil's physical and chemical properties were that, with increasing ratios of FGD-gypsum, soil saturated hydraulic conductivity increased before leveling off, leaching sodium quality gradually increased, soil pH declined before leveling off, ESP gradually reduced. And soil leaching sodium quality had relationship with the improvement of soil hydraulic conductivity and the substitution reaction of sodium and calcium. The application of FGD-gypsum to improve saline-soil, this kind of FGD-gypsum which has low chloride ion content, high calcium ion dissolution efficiency is
Vertical Mental Timeline Is Not Influenced by VisuoSpatial Processing

The results examining the direction (bottom-to-top vs. top-to-bottom) of the mental vertical timeline are not conclusive. The visuospatial processing of temporal stimuli along vertical space could influence this time representation. This study aimed to investigate whether and how the visuospatial processing stage modulated the vertical timeline in an online temporal categorization task. In three studies, Italian university students (N = 150) responded more quickly to words expressing the past with a down arrow key, and more quickly to words expressing the future with an up arrow key, irrespective of whether the words were located in the top, middle, or bottom space (Experiment 1), or were presented downward (from top to bottom; Experiment 2A) or upward (from bottom to top Experiment 2B). These results suggest that the representation of time was not influenced by the visuospatial processing. The daily experience with verticality (e.g., to reach the attic, the lift goes up) could explain the bottom-to-top direction of the mental timeline.
Where do the antibiotic resistance genes come from? A modulated analysis of sources and loads of resistances in Lake Maggiore

Abstract Antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) are abundant in aquatic ecosystems affected by human activities. Understanding the fate of ARGs across different ecosystems is essential because of the significant role aquatic environments play in the cycle of antibiotic resistance. We quantified selected ARGs in Lake Maggiore, its main tributaries, and the effluent of the main wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) discharging directly into the lake. We linked their dynamics to the different anthropogenic impacts in each tributary's watershed. The dynamics of tetA in the lake were influenced by those of the rivers and the WWTP effluent, and by the concentration of N-NH4, related to anthropogenic pollution, while sul2 abundance in the lake was not influenced by any water inflow. The dynamics of the different ARGs varied across the different rivers. Rivers with watersheds characterized by high population density, touristic activities, and secondary industries released more ARGs, while ermB correlated with higher numbers of primary industries. This study suggests a limited contribution of treated wastewater in the spread of ARGs, indicating as prevalent origin other sources of pollution, calling for a reconsideration on what are considered the major sources of ARGs into the environment.
Analyse multi-satellite et multi-échelle de la turbulence dans le vent solaire

La turbulence dans le vent solaire a suscite beaucoup d'interet depuis les premieres mesures in-situ dans l'heliosphere. Mais de nombreuses questions sont encore sans reponse. En particulier, le role de la turbulence dans le chauffage du vent solaire ainsi que la nature de la turbulence autour des echelles ioniques, la ou les fluctuations turbulentes sont supposees etre dissipees. A travers une etude multi-satellite incluant les sondes Helios 2, Stereo et Ulysses, nous avons montre qu'a grande echelle, dans le domaine inertiel, il existe une forte correlation entre la pression thermique des ions et l'amplitude des fluctuations magnetiques. Cette correlation est observee de 0,3 a 5,4 unites astronomiques. Elle pourrait s'expliquer soit par la presence d'une correlation fossile deja presente dans la photosphere ou la couronne solaire ; soit par le fait que le vent solaire est chauffe par la turbulence. Par la suite, nous nous sommes concentres sur les echelles ioniques, ou le spectre turbulent forme un coude. Grâce a la transformee en ondelettes, nous avons mis en evidence la presence d'ondes d'Alfven de faibles amplitudes, ainsi que celle de couches de courant et vortex d'Alfven de fortes amplitudes. Nous avons aussi mis en place un nouveau formalisme base sur une fonction de quatre parametres permettant de decrire la statistique des fluctuations magnetiques dans le vent solaire. Cette description s'applique des echelles MHD aux echelles electroniques. En utilisant deux approches differentes, l'analyse locale et l'analyse statistique des fluctuations, nous avons etabli un lien entre l'evolution de l'intermittence et celle du spectre turbulent aux echelles ioniques.