Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estimating phrase curves in the general superpositional intonation model

Superpositional intonation models posit that the pitch contour, , can be quasi-additively decomposed into component curves such as phrase curves, accent curves, and segmental perturbation curves. Currently, these component curves can only be estimated if one assumes a specific superpositional model, such as the Fujisaki model. A method is proposed for estimating phrase curves that is model-independent, and thus can be used to explore the validity of the general concept of superposition, which component curves are needed, and what the properties are of these curves. Results are presented that show that accurate estimates of phase curves can be obtained for pitch curves generated by the Fujisaki model and by a variant of the Bell Labs’ Linear Alignment model, using the same method and parameter settings.
COSMOLOGICAL FINAL FOCUS SYSTEMS

We develop the many striking parallels between the dynamics of light streams from distant galaxies and particle beams in accelerator final focus systems. Notably the deflections of light by mass clumps are identical to the kicks arising from the long-range beam-beam interactions of two counter-rotating particle beams (known as parasitic crossings). These deflections have sextupolar as well as quadrupolar components. We estimate the strength of such distortions for a variety of circumstances and argue that the sextupolar distortions from clumping within clusters may be observable. This possibility is enhanced by the facts that (1) the sextupolar distortions of background galaxies is a factor of 5 smaller than the quadrupolar distortion, (2) the angular orientation of the sextupolar and quadrupolar distortions from a mass distribution would be correlated, appearing as a slightly curved image, (3) these effects should be spatially clumped on the sky.
On Predicting and Exploiting HotSpots in Click-Based Graphical Passwords

We provide an in-depth study of the security of click-based graphical password schemes like PassPoints (Weidenbeck et al., 2005), by exploring popular points (hot-spots), and examining strategies to predict and exploit them in guessing attacks. We report on both shortand long-term user studies: one labcontrolled, involving 43 users and 17 diverse images, the other a field test of 223 user accounts. We provide empirical evidence that hot-spots do exist for many images, some more so than others. We explore the use of “human-computation” (in this context, harvesting click-points from a small set of users) to predict these hot-spots. We generate two “human-seeded” attacks based on this method: one based on a first-order Markov model, another based on an independent probability model. Within 100 guesses, our first-order Markov model-based attack guesses 4% of passwords in one instance, and 10% of passwords in a second instance. Our independent model-based attack guesses 20% within 2 guesses in one instance and 36% within 2 guesses in a second instance. These are all for a system whose full password space has cardinality 2. We also evaluate our first-order Markov model-based attack with cross-validation of the field study data, finding that it guesses an average of 7-10% of user passwords within 3 guesses. Our results suggest that these graphical password schemes (as originally proposed) are vulnerable to offline and online attacks, even on systems that implement conservative lock-out policies.
Heterogeneity of the unemployment insurance system : lazyness or simply income effects ?

It has been recently aknowledged that the impact of the unemployment insurance system can be very heterogeneous. We present evidence of this heterogenity for two important labor market outcomes related: unemployment duration and reemployment wages. We exploit a quasi-experimental setting and show that longer spells of unemployment, arise particularly in younger cohorts, if given additional entitlement periods. In terms of reemployment wages, the estimates suggest a negative impact on young individuals’ wages, noticeable only at quartiles above the median of the previous income. The effect of added subsidized search time for older individuals is slightly positive and clearly driven by those in the fourth quartile of the previous income distribution. This means that reforms of the system should target these age groups in differentiated ways.
Effects of Hd2 in the presence of the photoperiod-insensitive functional allele of Hd1 in rice

ABSTRACT The role of photoperiod sensitivity (PS) of flowering genes have become well recognized in rice, whereas little attention has been drawn to the non-PS component of these genes, especially to their influence on gene-by-gene interactions. Rice populations in which the photoperiod-sensitive allele at Hd1 has become insensitive to photoperiod but continued to affect heading date (HD) were used in this study to fine-map a quantitative trait locus (QTL) for HD and analyze its genetic relationship to Hd1. The QTL was delimitated to a 96.3-kb region on the distal end of the long arm of chromosome 7. Sequence comparison revealed that this QTL is identical to Hd2. In the near-isogenic line (NIL) populations analyzed, Hd1 and Hd2 were shown to be photoperiod insensitive and have pleiotropic effects for HD, plant height and yield traits. The two genes were found to largely act additively in regulating HD and yield traits. The results indicate that non-PS components of flowering genes involved in photoperiod response play an important role in controlling flowering time and grain yield in rice, which should allow breeders to better manipulate pleiotropic genes for balancing adaptability and high-yielding accumulation. Summary: We show that photoperiod-insensitive components of alleles of Hd1 and Hd2 play an important role in balancing ecological adaptability and high-yield accumulation in rice.
Optimal rate-distortion based unequal error protection in the transmission electrocardiograph signal

In this paper, we are using rate-distortion optimized embedded (RED) technology to extract relatively more important and less important bits of different electrocardiograph (ECG) signals, which are protected by different rates of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes to realize unequal error protected (UEP) performance. The UEP performance will be reflected by comparing experiment results that under different AWGN channel, then observing the distortion of reconstruction signal.
ICT for Human Development in South Pacific

The author worked past year as Professor & Head of School of Computing, Information and Mathematical Sciences and Director of Japan Pacific ICT Centre at the University of South Pacific. The South Pacific Region has many problems related to environmental and economic issues. The University of the South Pacific (USP) is an ideal platform for provision of development of Human Resources and enhancement of Human Security in the Pacific. Current dynamic Internet developments and continuous demand for the ubiquitous connectivity combined with the next generation of networks contributes towards creation the future cyberspace infrastructures worldwide. Implementation of the cyberspace in the government and corporate infrastructures, contributes towards creation of new paradigm in the decision making processes. Decisions that are currently governed by the human intelligence knowledge and intuition may be influenced by the cyber-data and processes. Future cyberspace will ultimately impact the decision making processes by government, corporate, industrial and academic institutions worldwide. Main objective of ICT Development is to build human-resource for ICT capacity development all across developing countries in the south pacific while “bridging the digital divide”. Main Goal was to provide the south pacific region with appropriate resources to take the lead role in driving the Pacific through Human Resource Development Programs. Specific Goal is to focus on developing and strengthening ICT skills applicable at the e-services level. The author discusses the development of new Japan Pacific Information Communications Technologies (ICT) Centre at the University of the South Pacific and ICT for Human Development and Security in the South Pacific Region. The main objective is to accommodate increasing demand for ICT-related education and training in the region and to accelerate research and development activities in the Pacific. The ICT Centre will play a facilitator role for ICT related education, Training; and Research and Development for the Pacific. In conclusion the author promotes discussion on the role of the role of the ICT in the South Pacific Region. The author opens discussion on ICT's social and ethical impact in the south pacific region in the context of governance vs. privacy.
Global event influence model: integrating crowd motion and social psychology for global anomaly detection in dense crowds

Abstract. Crowd motions usually play a basic role of analyzing and understanding abnormal events. However, only using these visible features cannot fully describe the scenarios because the influence caused by an abnormal event is not considered from the social psychological point of view. Although the invisible influences cannot be directly observed through the video, they objectively exist and have precise definitions and specific analytical methods in sociology and psychology. Therefore, a mid-level representation named global event influence (GEI) for global anomaly detection in dense crowds is introduced. The proposed GEI integrates the crowd motions and social psychology attributes to improve the description of crowds. For this, low-level motion features are abstracted as crowd attributes of scale, velocity, and disorder. Then, the detailed definitions and mathematical expressions of GEI are presented through calculating the convolution of rise factor and decay factor. Based on GEI, a model for global anomaly detection is proposed. Compared with most previous methods, our proposed model is robust to detect not only the occurrence of anomalous events but also elimination time of the event influence. Accordingly, strategies for event occurrence detection and influence elimination detection are proposed, respectively. In addition, a dataset of dense crowds is introduced and used for evaluation. The experimental comparison on benchmark datasets shows that the performance of our GEI model has not only the competitive accuracy of event occurrence detection but also the claimed effectiveness of influence elimination, which is more advanced than others.
Hybrid ARQ Based on Rateless Coding for Wireless Mesh Networks

—This paper shows an incremental redundancy hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) scheme, based on rateless coding, for possible application to a distributed wireless network. The proposed approach is demonstrated to be effective under energy consumption and rate constraints. This objective is pursued by increasing the average throughput, limiting the length of re-transmitted packets thanks to rateless coding. Performance are evaluated in terms of average energy consumption, comparing the presented solution with a HARQ based on traditional coding techniques. Simulation results are obtained using a network simulation model for rateless code transmissions applied to mesh systems.
Data Soni(cid:12)cation: Do You See What I Hear?

Using sound to complement graphics and to present data is becoming increasingly popular. Sound can potentially reveal patterns and anomalies in data that are di(cid:14)cult to perceive visually. Moreover, psychological studies show that some types of data are more quickly assimilated when presented with sound; an audio alarm is the classic example. Unfortunately, the lack of standards governing the software interface to sound hardware, as well as the diversity of sound hardware, make it di(cid:14)cult to portably integrate mappings of data to sound (soni(cid:12)cations) with existing data visualization tools. This paper describes the design of a soni(cid:12)cation toolkit, Porsonify, created to simplify this task.
Pick Your Layers Wisely - A Quality Assessment of H.264 Scalable Video Coding for Mobile Devices

Multi-dimensional video scalability as defined in H.264/SVC is a promising concept to efficiently adapt encoded streams to individual device capabilities and network conditions. However, we still lack a thorough understanding of how to automate scaling procedure in order to achieve an optimal quality of experience (QoE) for end uses. In this paper we present and discuss the results of a subjective quality assessment we performed on mobile devices to investigate the effects of multi-dimensional scalability on human quality perception. Our study reveals that QoE degrades nonmonotonically with bitrate and that scaling order preferences are content-dependent. We confirm previous studies which found common objective metrics to fail for scalable content, but we also show that even scalability-aware models perform poor. Our results are supposed to help improving the design of quality metrics and adaptive network services for scalable streaming applications.
Abdominal Radical Trachelectomy

Objective Abdominal radical trachelectomy (ART) is one of the fertility-sparing procedures in women with early-stage cervical cancer. The published results of ART, in comparison with vaginal radical trachelectomy, so far are limited. Materials and Methods This retrospective study comprises all cases of female patients referred to ART with early-stage cervical cancer from 2 gynecologic oncology centers in Romania. Results A total of 29 women were referred for ART, but subsequently, fertility could not be preserved in 3 of them. Eleven women had stage IA2 disease (42.3%), 14 (53.8%) women had stage IB1 disease, and 1 (3.8%) woman had stage IB2 disease. Histologic subtypes were 15 (57.6%) squamous, 8 (30.7%) adenocarcinoma, and 3 (11.5%) adenosquamous. There were no major intraoperative complications in both hospitals. Early postoperative complications were mainly related to the type C parametrectomy—bladder dysfunction for more than 7 days (8 [30.7%] women) and prolonged constipation (6 [23.0%] women). Other complications consisted in symptomatic lymphocele in 2 (7.6%) patients, which were drained. Median follow-up time was 20 months (range, 4–43 months). Up to the present time, there has been 1 (3.8%) recurrence in our series. Most patients did not experience late postoperative complications. Three (11.5%) women are amenorrheic, and 1 (3.8%) woman developed a cervical stenosis. Of the 23 women who have normal menstruation and maintained their fertility, a total of 7 (30.4%) women have attempted pregnancy, and 3 (42.8%) of them achieved pregnancy spontaneously. These pregnancies ended in 2 first trimester miscarriages and 1 live birth at term by cesarean delivery. Conclusions Our results demonstrate that ART preserves fertility and maintains excellent oncological outcomes with low complication rates.
SeMiTri: a framework for semantic annotation of heterogeneous trajectories

GPS devices allow recording the movement track of the moving object they are attached to. This data typically consists of a stream of spatio-temporal (x,y,t) points. For application purposes the stream is transformed into finite subsequences called trajectories. Existing knowledge extraction algorithms defined for trajectories mainly assume a specific context (e.g. vehicle movements) or analyze specific parts of a trajectory (e.g. stops), in association with data from chosen geographic sources (e.g. points-of-interest, road networks). We investigate a more comprehensive semantic annotation framework that allows enriching trajectories with any kind of semantic data provided by multiple 3rd party sources. This paper presents SeMiTri - the framework that enables annotating trajectories for any kind of moving objects. Doing so, the application can benefit from a "semantic trajectory" representation of the physical movement. The framework and its algorithms have been designed to work on trajectories with varying data quality and different structures, with the objective of covering abstraction requirements of a wide range of applications. Performance of SeMiTri has been evaluated using many GPS datasets from multiple sources -- including both fast moving objects (e.g. cars, trucks) and people's trajectories (e.g. with smartphones). These two kinds of experiments are reported in this paper.
No Longer in a Dry Spell: The Developing Understanding of How Sex Influences Romantic Relationships

Sex is a defining feature of romantic relationships, yet only recently has research into the implications of sexual processes for such relationships proliferated. We review this work to illustrate how considering the way in which sexual processes influence relationships can help bridge theoretical and empirical work outside and within relationship science. We begin by providing a novel organizational framework for considering how sexual processes influence relationships, illustrating how they can be (a) a direct predictor of relationship outcomes, (b) a mechanism that explains important associations, and (c) a moderator that alters relationship dynamics. We then situate these findings within a dual-process framework for understanding how sex influences relationships and conclude by highlighting several open questions and methodological challenges that remain for future research. Our goal is to demonstrate how considering sexual functioning in light of a variety of theoretical perspectives adds to, and sometimes alters, what we know about relationship dynamics.
Individual Identification Based on Code-Modulated Visual-Evoked Potentials

The electroencephalography (EEG) method has recently attracted increasing attention in the study of brain activity-based biometric systems because of its simplicity, portability, noninvasiveness, and relatively low cost. However, due to the low signal-to-noise ratio of EEG, most of the existing EEG-based biometric systems require a long duration of signals to achieve high accuracy in individual identification. Besides, the feasibility and stability of these systems have not yet been conclusively reported, since most studies did not perform longitudinal evaluation. In this paper, we proposed a novel EEG-based individual identification method using code-modulated visual-evoked potentials (c-VEPs). Specifically, this paper quantitatively compared eight code-modulated stimulation patterns, including six 63-bit (1.05 s at 60-Hz refresh rate) m-sequences (M1–M6) and two spatially combined sequence groups ( $\text{M}\times \text{4}$ : M1–M4 and $\text{M}\times \text{6}$ : M1–M6) in recording the c-VEPs from a group of 25 subjects for individual identification. To further evaluate the influence of inter-session variability, we recorded two data sessions for each individual on different days to measure intra-session and cross-session identification performance. State-of-the-art VEP detection algorithms in brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) were employed to construct a template-matching-based identification framework. For intra-session identification, we achieved a 100% correct recognition rate (CRR) using 5.25-s EEG data (average of five trials for M5). For cross-session identification, 99.43% CRR was attained using 10.5-s EEG signals (average of ten trials for M5). These results suggest that the proposed c-VEP-based individual identification method is promising for real-world applications.
Dichromatic level-lines

Unlike edges, level lines are closed and less sensitive to external parameters. They provide a compact geometrical representation of images and they are, to some extent, robust to contrast changes. This paper proposes a novel and vectorial representation of color lines which does not require any color conversion. The topographic map is defined along each dominant color vector, from the body reflection, instead of the sole luminance direction in the RGB space. Experimental results show that this approach provides a better trade-off between compactness and quality. In addition, the lines extracted are quasi-invariant to illuminant changes.
Secure lossy source-channel wiretapping with side information at the receiving terminals

The problem of secure lossy source-channel wiretapping with arbitrarily correlated side informations at both receivers is investigated. This scenario consists of an encoder (referred to as Alice) that wishes to compress a source and send it through a noisy channel to a legitimate receiver (referred to as Bob). In this context, Alice must simultaneously satisfy the desired requirements on the distortion level at Bob, and the equivocation rate at the eavesdropper (referred to as Eve). This setting can be seen as a generalization of the conventional problems of secure source coding with side information at the decoders, and the wiretap channel. Inner and outer bounds on the rate-distortion-equivocation region for the case of arbitrary channels and side informations are derived. In some special cases of interest, it is shown that separation holds. By means of an appropriate coding, the presence of any statistical difference among the side informations, the channel noises, and the distortion at Bob can be fully exploited in terms of secrecy.
A learning-oriented knowledge representation for teaching interfaces

This paper presents a formalism for representing knowledge, intended for use in teaching interfaces. The driving concern in developing the formalism was to get an explicit method for sequencing the presentation of materials to be learned. The first criterion for doing the sequencing is that it satisfies a relation of constructability or learning support among the materials. If the relation is restricted to be a function then it is possible to represent it by a directed acyclic graph, as it happens in other constructive processes. The directed acyclic graph representation enables automatic generation of presentation sequences satisfying the learning support relation. It turns out that the formalism suggests other criteria in a natural way. These criteria may be added in a variety of ways to refine the presentation and enhance the responsiveness of the interface to learner needs
Experimental results on the support of TCP over 802.11b: an insight into fairness issues

Great attention has been dedicated, in the recent years, to the WLAN standards that are opening the market to the short range and high data rate wireless services in the local and hot spot areas. Technically speaking, the main strength of the most quoted standard, the IEEE 802.11, is the fully distributed nature of the access scheme, that provides cheap and easy-to-install components, able to operate in the unlicensed spectrum, still guaranteeing broadband capabilities. The aim of this paper is to deeply investigate traffic issues in 802.11b networks by emphasizing the interaction between WLAN link layer parameters or Access Point buffer provisioning with uplink/downlink TCP fairness. The novel aspect is that this investigation is fully made in an experimental environment. A great portion of flows that are exchanged in a WLAN are TCP-based (e.g. FTP flows). We prove, with real experiments, that TCP suffers of some inequalities that derive to unfair bandwidth sharing between uplink and downlink. Our extensive experimental analysis shows the main effects of these inequalities on the TCP behavior and highlights some performance anomalies that are difficult to be measured via simulations.