Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using Implicit Measures to Assess User Experience in Children: A Case Study on the Application of the Implicit Association Test (IAT)

The number of multimodal agents aimed at children with or without neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) has increased tremendously during the last decade. As this expands, so does research into methods, tools, and metrics that can reliably assess their impact. Traditionally, the majority of UX Research tools have been produced for an adult audience, with fewer tools developed for a younger population. Furthermore, most of these tools use a "direct" method, in which detailed questions are asked directly to the individuals. However, when assessing youngsters, and mainly when direct inquiries are posed, the literature identifies several challenges and pitfalls not usually faced when testing adults. If overlooked, they might lead to biased judgments. This paper proposes a novel approach to UX Evaluation using implicit metrics, which offers the obvious advantage of avoiding direct questions. We investigated the application of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) - one of the most acknowledged tests in psychology to reveal unconscious attitudes, automatic preferences, and hidden biases - to determine whether 60 school-aged children enjoyed a multimodal interface dedicated to language assessment. The results, although preliminary, disclose discrepancies between what children state directly and what the test detects. With our work, we want to offer two contributions. The first, technical, describes both the logic as well as the tool we used to develop the IAT. The second, methodological, offers preliminary but exciting evidence to support the usefulness of implicit measures, and the IAT, in this field.
Modeling air quality in a changing climate

Pollution levels in urban areas and their surrounding rural regions differ due to different sources and density of emissions, different composition of pollutants as well as specific meteorological effects. These concentration differences for PM10 are investigated and compared in this study for three different north-west European urban agglomerations: The German Ruhr area, the Dutch Randstad and the German city of Berlin. Measurement data for PM10 for the years 2003-2008 at urban and rural background stations are selected from the AirBase database to specify the PM10 concentration difference between these urban areas and their surrounding rural regions, here defined as the urban increment. The measured urban increment averaged over 2003-2008 is found to be 7. 4μg/m for the Ruhr area, 3. 1μg/m 3 for the Randstad and 8. 5μg/m 3 for Berlin. To analyze whether the regional chemistry transport model LOTOS-EUROS is able to reproduce the measured urban increment simulation runs were performed for 2003-2008 on a 0.5°x0.25° lon-lat grid covering Europe and for the year 2008 on a finer grid of 0.125°x0.0625° covering the Netherlands and Germany, both with ECMWF meteorology as input. Although the model underestimates the absolute PM10 urban increment for the three areas, the relative concentration difference between urban and rural region for the Ruhr area and the Randstad is in general agreement with the measurements. The tested increase of the horizontal resolution gives no systematic improvement of the simulated urban increment. However, an even higher resolution than used here seems to be more appropriate to capture the urban increment (especially for Berlin). Nevertheless, model results could be used to interpret the observed increments. The variability of the PM10 urban increment with weather is tested by means of the extreme summer 2003, such a synoptic situation is expected to occur more often in future. Measured and simulated PM10 concentrations in summer 2003 were compared to the summer average of 2003-2008. The response of the urban increment was found to depend on the urban area. In general the model reproduces the main features for the Randstad and Berlin.
SMYLE: A new multimodal resource of talk-in-interaction including neuro-physiological signal

This article presents the SMYLE corpus, the first multimodal corpus in French (16h) including neuro-physiological data from 60 participants engaged in face-to-face storytelling (8.2h) and free conversation tasks (7.8h). The originality of this corpus lies first in the fact that it bears all modalities, precisely synchronized and second in the addition for the first time at this scale of neuro-physiological modalities. It constitutes the first corpus of this size offering the opportunity to investigate cognitive characteristics of spontaneous conversation including at the brain level. The storytelling task comprises two conditions: a storyteller talking with a “normal” or a “distracted” listener. Contrasting normal and disrupted conversations allows to study at a behavioral, linguistic and cognitive levels the complex characteristics and organization of conversations. In this article, we present first the methodology developed to acquire and synchronize the different sources and types of signal. In a second part, we detail the large set of automatic, semi-automatic and manual annotations of the complete dataset. In a last section, we illustrate one application of the corpus by providing preliminary analyses of the annotated data, that reveal the impact of distracted listener’s on his/her feedbacks and the quality of the narration.
Creep on the San Andreas fault

ABSTRACT Progressive destruction of buildings and other works of man at the W. A. Taylor Winery near Hollister, California, indicates that one side of a segment of the San Andreas fault is creeping relative to the other. Three different types of measurements all yield an annual rate of creep of approximately one-half inch per year. Steinbrugge and Zacher: Measurements of the separations of pairs of reference marks adjacent to the line of creep have been repeated periodically since 1956, and damage to structures provides a good measure of the total creep since 1948. Reports of damage to older buildings on the same site suggest that the creep may have been going on at about the present rate for fifty or more years. Tocher: Creep recorders designed to measure continuously the differential lateral movement of adjacent sections of the concrete floor have been installed in the main winery building. The creep rate so determined has been about one-half inch per year (with right-lateral sense) for the past two years. Creep accumulates largely in spasms of rather short duration (on the order of a week) separated by intervals of weeks or months during which little or no creep takes place. Ninety-two per cent of the movement in a recent 371-day period accumulated in four spasms of total duration 34 days. Three of these spasms began at times when no local earthquakes were recorded on near-by seismographs; the fourth began with a sudden right-lateral fault movement of 3 mm. at the time of a sharp local earthquake (Richter magnitude 5.0) on January 20, 1960 (GCT). Whitten and Claire: Resurveys over monumented points established near the winery also yield a rate of slippage or creep along the fault line of one-half inch per year. A new method for analyzing the data obtained by retriangulating over monumented points at wide intervals (10 to 20 years) is presented and applied to two triangulation networks which cross the San Andreas fault in central California. Results from a net near Hollister show an average creep rate of about one-half inch per year; results from a net near Cholame (about 75 miles southeast of Hollister) show an average creep rate of about one-tenth inch per year. The results also give an angular value which represents the deformation in the crust adjacent to the fault line.
Exploring Unimodal Notification Interaction and Display Methods in Augmented Reality

As we develop computing platforms for augmented reality (AR) head-mounted display (HMDs) technologies for social or workplace environments, understanding how users interact with notifications in immersive environments has become crucial. We researched effectiveness and user preferences of different interaction modalities for notifications, along with two types of notification display methods. In our study, participants were immersed in a simulated cooking environment using an AR-HMD, where they had to fulfill customer orders. During the cooking process, participants received notifications related to customer orders and ingredient updates. They were given three interaction modes for those notifications: voice commands, eye gaze and dwell, and hand gestures. To manage multiple notifications at once, we also researched two different notification list displays, one attached to the user’s hand and one in the world. Results indicate that participants preferred using their hands to interact with notifications and having the list of notifications attached to their hands. Voice and gaze interaction was perceived as having lower usability than touch.
The Proof of Gold is Fire: Measuring Stress to Show Impact of Gender Based Initiatives in Computing Education

Many initiatives across the world try to address the issue of gender imbalance in computing education. Evaluation of the impact of these initiatives is not always straightforward. Some interventions are able to demonstrate impact based on recruitment and retention numbers of underrepresented gender groups, in particular, women, often requiring a longer-term study to see impact. Others, especially shorter term interventions and those taking place during the teaching and learning process, frequently use feedback and other instruments as a measure of impact. This work reviews existing evaluation methods from the literature, categorises them as using statistical data, feedback or instruments, grouping different approaches into sub categories. It then looks at how the different types of initiatives map to the categories of evaluation practices, discusses trends, and makes a recommendation suitable for measuring the impact on shorter term than obtaining recruitment or retention statistics. The Perceived Stress Scale is proposed as a lightweight and time saving approach to evaluate some of the retention based gender initiatives.
ASAR Dataset and Computational Model for Affective State Recognition During ARAT Assessment for Upper Extremity Stroke Survivors

Stroke is one of the leading global causes of disability and many stroke survivors must deal with challenging movement impairment daily. Stroke rehabilitation therapy is expensive, physically, and emotionally challenging, can be difficult to access, and is time-consuming for patients and clinicians alike. As a result, there is an opportunity to develop automated or semi-automated systems to assist clinicians in efficient and accurate stroke patient movement assessment. In this work, we present the ASAR (Affective State for ARAT Rehab) dataset where we use custom label classes (neutral, engagement, and pain) to annotate video data of stroke survivors performing the standardized Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) for upper extremity assessment. 106 patients participated in this study and each patient performed, or attempted to perform, each of the 19 ARAT assessment tasks. In our preliminary analysis, we annotated the frames of 126 videos for 10 patients. Using a multimodal model, we achieved an accuracy of 0.77 ± 0.06 in per-frame state recognition on the ASAR dataset. This affective information will potentially increase the interpretability of clinician’s scores of the stroke survivor’s ARAT performance and thus could assist in the design and implementation of semi-automated systems for stroke assessment and rehabilitation.
Drought-Associated Tree Mortality: Global Patterns and Insights from Tree Ring Studies in the Southwestern U.S.A.

9 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION . 12 Statement of problem . 12 Background . 21 Regional context . 21 The role of dendrochronology in studies of tree mortality . 23 Explanation of the research approach . 26 CHAPTER 2: PRESENT STUDY . 29 A global synthesis of drought and heat-associated tree mortality . 30 Tree-ring growth records in piñon pine and predisposition to mortality during severe droughts . 31 Pre-formed tree defenses and the risk of mortality during drought . 35 Climatic sensitivity of vertical resin duct formation in piñon pine . 37 REFERENCES . 40 APPENDIX A: A GLOBAL OVERVIEW OF DROUGHT AND HEATINDUCED TREE MORTALITY REVEALS EMERGING CLIMATE CHANGE RISKS FOR FORESTS . 55 Abstract . 56 Introduction . 57 Methods. 57 Results . 58 Discussion . 64 Conclusions . 67 Acknowledgements . 67 Appendix A . 67 References . 75 APPENDIX B: GROWTH-MORTALITY RELATIONSHIPS IN PIÑON PINE (PINUS EDULIS) DURING SEVERE DROUGHTS OF THE PAST CENTURY: SHIFTING PROCESSES IN SPACE AND TIME . 81 Abstract . 82 Introduction . 82 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS continued Materials and Methods . 83 Results . 86 Discussion . 93 Conclusions . 94 Supporting Information Descriptions . 95 Acknowledgements . 96 Author Contributions . 96 References . 96 Supporting Information . 99 APPENDIX C: MORTALITY RISK OF AN ARIDLANDS CONIFER DURING SEVERE DROUGHT DEPENDS ON RADIAL GROWTH AND INVESTMENT INTO DEFENSE . 113 Abstract . 113 Introduction . 114 Methods. 119 Study Sites . 119 Sampling of live-dead tree pairs . 120 Dendroecological methods . 121 Statistical analyses of growth and duct variables . 122 Models of mortality risk . 123 Results . 126 Resin duct and growth characteristics across space and time . 126 Relationships between growt and duct attributes . 127 Models of mortality risk . 129 Discussion . 130 Defense anatomy is strongly associated with drought-mortality risk in P. edulis . 130 Spatial and temporal variability in the importance of growth and resin duct attributes . 131 The importance of resin duct size for mortality risk . 133 Relationships between growth, defense and mortality are tradeoffs evident? 134 Conclusion and Implications . 137 Acknowledgements . 139 References . 139 Tables . 148 Figure Legends . 151 Figures. 153 Supplementary Materials . 158 7
The Racial Contract of White Masochism

ABSTRACT In this article I critique Gilles Deleuze’s “Coldness and Cruelty” (1967), his introduction of Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870). Having rightly emphasized the contract as the most important political aspect of masochism, and precisely the feature that psychoanalysis, as a theory of sexuality, could not account for, I argue that Deleuze nonetheless fails to confront the racial contract that renders this masochism white. By failing to confront the racial contract that informs not only the social contract but also the sociality implicit in the masochistic contract, Deleuze idealizes masochism. Drawing from queer of color critique, and especially from the work of Amber Jamilla Musser, I show the ways in which anti-Blackness supplements the masochistic contract in the effort of the sexual parties to reach for that modality of desire that approximates death. Notwithstanding Deleuze’s powerful critique of the complementariness that psychoanalysis wrongly establishes between sadism and masochism, I conclude this article by showing how the racial contract makes it possible for sado-masochism to become complementary in this case.
Wrinkle ridges, stress domains, and kinematics of Venusian plains

Wrinkle ridges are nearly ubiquitous landforms on the plains of Venus. By analogy with similar structures on other planets, venusian wrinkle ridges are inferred to trend normal to the direction of maximum principal compression in the crust, an inference that is verified by geometrical relationships with positive and negative relief features on Venus. Because plains are the dominant terrain on Venus, wrinkle ridges provide an excellent opportunity to determine the orientations of shallow crustal principal stress trajectories over most of the planet. In most places there are two or more sets of wrinkle ridges, and commonly one of these persists over a very large area, defining a regional stress domain. Intersection relationships indicate that these domains differ in age.
Operator-N Layer Construction for Optimizing Capsule Network Methods in Image Classification Problems

Capsule Network (CapsNet) is an image classification method that has successfully demonstrated excellent performance in Deep Learning. The main concept of CapsNet is to change image features into capsules and create entities that better represent information from these features. However, capsule formation causes an increase in the number of training parameters and makes the computation time longer. Moreover, the CapsNet method is less effective in processing images with complex backgrounds because it has limitations in feature extraction. We propose a mathematical approach by introducing an operator-N layer to improve CapsNet performance. The operator-N is an operator constructed using Euclidean norms, which functions to shrink dimensions and speed up the process of translation equivariance from a capsule. According to experimental results on MNIST, Fashion MNIST, and Kuzushiji MNIST datasets, the proposed operator-N layer significantly improves accuracy up to 1.72% with 2.91 times faster computation time than the original CapsNet. Furthermore, the total parameters used during the training process have been reduced to 15.7%. Our research provides valuable insights for overcoming the challenges posed by feature extraction limitations and paves the way for more efficient image classification methods in the future.
An Educational Data Mining System for Predicting Students' Programming Performance

Educational Data Mining (EDM) plays a vital role in discovering meaningful relationships from educational data. In recent years, the application of EDM has become an active research ﬁeld for predicting the performance of students. In this paper, we propose an EDM paradigm for classifying the students’ performance in programming more precisely over real collected data. In the proposed EDM system, we investigate an eﬀective feature engineering process and an ensemble machine learning classiﬁer to boost the prediction performance. The classiﬁcation process identiﬁes the current programming status of students into four groups: excellent, good, average, and weak. In particular, we analyze Random Forest (RF) classiﬁer and measure the performance using accuracy, precision, recall, f1-score, RMSE, kappa-score, and ROC. We train the RF model over 1700 data samples and the experimental results show that the predicting accuracy is 94%.
Photoreceptor calyceal processes accompany the developing outer segment, adopting a stable length despite a dynamic core

Vertebrate photoreceptors detect light through a large cilium-based outer segment, which is filled with photopigment-laden membranous discs. Surrounding the base of the outer segment are microvilli-like calyceal processes (CPs). While CP disruption has been associated with altered outer segment morphology and photoreceptor degeneration, the role of the processes remains elusive. Here, we used zebrafish as a model to characterize CPs. We quantified CP parameters and report a strong disparity in outer segment coverage between photoreceptor subtypes. CP length is stable across light and dark conditions, while heat shock inducible expression of tagged actin revealed rapid turnover of the CP actin core. Detailed imaging of the embryonic retina uncovered substantial remodeling of the developing photoreceptor apical surface, including a transition from dynamic tangential processes to vertically-oriented CPs immediately prior to outer segment formation. Remarkably, we also found a direct connection between apical extensions of the Müller glia and retinal pigment epithelium, arranged as bundles around the ultraviolet sensitive cones. In summary, our data characterize the structure, development, and surrounding environment of photoreceptor microvilli in the zebrafish retina.
Diverse prey capture strategies in teleost larvae

Animal behavior is adapted to the sensory environment in which it evolved, while also being constrained by physical limits, evolutionary history, and developmental trajectories. The hunting behavior of larval zebrafish (Danio rerio), a cyprinid native to streams in Eastern India, has been well characterized. However, it is unknown if the complement and sequence of movements employed during prey capture by zebrafish is universal across freshwater teleosts. Here, we explore the syntax of prey capture behavior in larval fish belonging to the clade Percomorpha, whose last common ancestor with cyprinids lived ∼240 million years ago. We compared the behavior of four cichlid species from Lake Tanganyika endemic to deep benthic parts of the lake (Lepidiolamprologus attenuatus, Lamprologus ocellatus, and Neolamprologus multifasciatus) or inhabiting rivers (Astatotilapia burtoni) with that of medaka (Oryzias latipes), a fish found in rice paddies in East Asia. Using high speed videography and artificial neural networks, we tracked eye movements and extracted swim kinematics during hunting from these five species. Notably, we found that the repertoire of hunting movements of cichlids is broader than that of zebrafish, but shares basic features, such as eye convergence, positioning of prey centrally in the binocular visual field, and discrete prey capture bouts, including two kinds of capture strikes. In contrast, medaka swim continuously, track the prey monocularly without eye convergence, and position prey laterally before capturing them with a side swing. This configuration of kinematic motifs suggests that medaka may judge distance to prey by motion parallax, while cichlids and zebrafish may use binocular visual cues. Together, our study documents the diversification of locomotor and oculomotor adaptations among hunting teleost larvae.
Specificity and promiscuity of JAK recruitment regulates pleiotropy of cytokine-receptor signaling

Promiscuous binding of different Janus kinases (JAKs) to class I/II cytokine receptors has been reported, yet its role in signaling is unclear. To systematically explore JAK pairing in type I interferon (IFN-I) signaling, we generated an artificial IFN-I receptor (AIR) by replacing the extracellular domains of IFNAR1 and IFNAR2 with anti mEGFP and mCherry nanobodies. The heterodimeric AIR restored near-native IFN-I activity, while the homomeric variant of IFNAR2 (AIR-dR2) initiated much weaker signaling despite harboring docking sites for signal transducer and activator of transcription (STAT) proteins. AIR-dR1 was signaling inactive, yet, pulldown uncovered its ICD to bind both TYK2 and JAK1. To further investigate the roles of JAKs on the receptors, knockout (KO) JAK1, JAK2, TYK2, and JAK2/TYK2 were generated. JAK1 KO led to complete loss of IFN-I signaling, which was partially restored by TYK2 overexpression. TYK2 KO cells retained partial activity, which was elevated by JAK1 overexpression, suggesting both JAKs to partially substitute each other. Conversely, JAK2 KO only moderately impacted the biological activity of IFN-Is, even in JAK2/TYK2 KO cells. Live cell micropatterning confirmed promiscuous binding of JAK1, JAK2 and TYK2 to IFNAR1 and IFNAR2, in line with an AlphaFold model that shows JAKs interchangeability on IFNAR ICDs. Similar promiscuity of JAK binding was observed for TPOR and GHR but not EPOR, accompanied by different downstream signaling activity. The competitive binding of JAKs to cytokine receptors together with the highly diverse absolute and relative JAK expression levels can account for cell type-dependent signaling pleiotropy observed for cytokine receptors. One Sentence Summary Promiscuous and interchangeable binding of JAKs to cytokine receptors enables cell type-specific pleiotropic signaling.