Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficient and Robust Multimodal Biometric System for Feature Level Fusion (Speech and Signature)

Pattern can be characterized by more or less rich & varied pieces of information of different features. The fusion of these different sources of information can provide an opportunity to develop more efficient biometric system which is known as Multimodal biometric System. Multimodal biometrics is the combination of two or more modalities such as signature and speech modalities. In this work an offline signature verification system and speech verification system are combined as these modalities are widely accepted and natural to produce. This combination of multimodal enhances security and accuracy. In this work, database can be gathered from 14 users. Each user contributes 4 samples of signature & speech also. Forgeries are also added to test system. 14 forgeries are used for testing purpose. SIFT features are extracted for offline signature which results as a feature vector of 128 numbers & MFCC features are extracted for speech which results as a feature vector of 195 numbers. Fusion at feature extraction level is used in this work by using a new technique named msum which can be proposed by combining sum method & mean method. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed multimodal biometric system achieves a recognition accuracy of 98.2% and with false rejection rate (FRR) of = 0.9% & false acceptance rate (FAR) of = 0.9%.
Automated Cell Characterization Platform: Application to Yeast Protoplast Study by Electrorotation

This paper is about the development of a new automated platform dedicated to cell manipulation and characterization by dielectrophoretic methods. We illustrate its possibilities by studying yeast protoplasts and yeast cells electrorotation spectra, obtained using polynomial microelectrode structures powered by computer-controlled generators. Measurements were made over the frequency range 100 kHz to 80MHz, mostly in a suspending medium of conductivity 50 mS/m inside the rotation chamber. The rotation rate of yeast protoplasts was inferior to that of whole yeast cells. To understand such behavioral differences, yeast protoplasts were modelled as single-shell spheres in a first approach.
Kognitive Veränderungen bei spontan auftretendem Morbus Parkinson

Zusammenfassung Der dem Morbus Parkinson unterliegende pathologische Prozess entwickelt sich über viele Jahre. Erste Veränderungen entstehen noch vor dem Erscheinen klinischer Symptome. Der Prozess befällt in vorbestimmter Weise übergeordnete Zentren des olfaktorischen, limbischen, viszeromotorischen und somatomotorischen Systems. Die zeitlich gestaffelte und räumlich geordnete Ausbreitung der Veränderungen über das zentrale Nervensystem ermöglicht eine Zuordnung individueller Autopsiefälle zu sechs neuropathologischen Stadien. Kognitive Beeinträchtigungen variablen Schweregrades ergänzen die klassische Symptomentrias des Morbus Parkinson. Diese Beeinträchtigungen kognitiver Fähigkeiten, ermittelt mit Hilfe des MMSE-Testes, korrelieren mit den Stadien der neurodegenerativen Veränderungen. Der Abbau kognitiver Fähigkeiten gehört zu den Kernsymptomen der Parkinsonschen Krankheit wie Bradykinesie, Rigor und Tremor und kann gelegentlich das klinische Bild beherrschen. Das pathomorphologische Korrelat der dementiven Veränderungen wird diskutiert.
Navigation, Interaction and Bridge Team Work

During the course of this paper we explore the interaction of seafarers engaged in navigation on the bridge of a merchant ship. More specifically we examine how ‘bridge teams' utilise a range of practical conversational methods and devices in carrying out the days work within a context where temporal and spatial considerations are paramount. Utilising the principles of ethnomethodologically informed conversation analysis we analyse transcribed materials gathered from a working bridge. The business of bridge team-work is the generation of a mutual frame of navigational perspective and decision making. A central aspect of this interactional accomplishment is a confirmatory form of talk that is utilised in order to avoid confusion and maritime disaster. The paper also explores empirical examples of interaction and identifies the way in which bridge team-work is accomplished, organised and sustained. The paper suggests how consideration of these features may inform further enquiry and modify training practice.
Coresets for Nonparametric Estimation - the Case of DP-Means

Scalable training of Bayesian nonparametric models is a notoriously difficult challenge. We explore the use of coresets - a data summarization technique originating from computational geometry - for this task. Coresets are weighted subsets of the data such that models trained on these coresets are provably competitive with models trained on the full dataset. Coresets sublinear in the dataset size allow for fast approximate inference with provable guarantees. Existing constructions, however, are limited to parametric problems. Using novel techniques in coreset construction we show the existence of coresets for DP-Means - a prototypical nonparametric clustering problem - and provide a practical construction algorithm. We empirically demonstrate that our algorithm allows us to efficiently trade off computation time and approximation error and thus scale DP-Means to large datasets. For instance, with coresets we can obtain a computational speedup of 45x at an approximation error of only 2.4% compared to solving on the full data set. In contrast, for the same subsample size, the "naive" approach of uniformly subsampling the data incurs an approximation error of 22.5%.
Boosting Open Information Extraction with Noun-Based Relations

Open Information Extraction (Open IE) is a strategy for learning relations from texts, regardless the domain and without predefining these relations. Work in this area has focused mainly on verbal relations. In order to extend Open IE to extract relationships that are not expressed by verbs, we present a novel Open IE approach that extracts relations expressed in noun compounds (NCs), such as (oil, extracted from, olive) from olive oil, or in adjective-noun pairs (ANs), such as (moon, that is, gorgeous) from gorgeous moon. The approach consists of three steps: detection of NCs and ANs, interpretation of these compounds in view of corpus enrichment and extraction of relations from the enriched corpus. To confirm the feasibility of this method we created a prototype and evaluated the impact of the application of our proposal in two state-of-the-art Open IE extractors. Based on these tests we conclude that the proposed approach is an important step to fulfil the gap concerning the extraction of relations within the noun compounds and adjective-noun pairs in Open IE.
Bullying among Prison inmates in Pakistan: An Exploration of the Problem

The study attempted at redefining bullying, its nature, scope, and dimensions in cultural perspective of Pakistan. Direct and Indirect Prisoners Checklist (DIPC modified) © Ireland 1999 and Rehabilitation in Correctional Settings Attitude Scale (RICS) © Rice, 1970 were used in the study. Randomly selected (400) male and female prison inmates from all four Provinces’ major prisons of Pakistan participated in the study. Study was conducted in the cultural context of a collectivist society, like Pakistan (developing country), while the previous studies were carried out in individualistic societies, i.e., in the UK, USA, or Canada (developed countries). Reliability values for the DIPC and RICS subscales were calculated and found to be in acceptable range, except for the Proactive /Positive Behaviors. Thus, all sub scales except for "Proactive/Positive Behaviors towards Other” were included in the main analyses. The results suggested that victims experienced physical, psychological, theft-related, and indirect bullying to similar degrees. However, psychological bullying was the most prevalent, while physical bullying the least. Both male and female prisoners reported that they were victimized by bullying more than they perpetrated bullying, with gender having no difference. Demographic variables and prisoner's self-reported
Enhancing neurocognitive assessment using immersive virtual reality

Immersive virtual reality has significant potential as a tool for enhancing the reliability and specificity of neurocognitive assessment by supporting the ability to carry out carefully controlled, replicable, highly detailed and ecologically valid testing of peoples' ability to perform complex executive functions such as planning and organizing, problem-solving and multitasking, and selective attention and inhibitory control, which are difficult to evaluate using standard paper-and-pencil measures of basic cognitive abilities such as memory, learning, or reasoning. We begin this short paper with an overview of current diagnostic needs in the field of neuropsychology, and a vision of the advantages that immersive virtual reality has the potential to offer as a diagnostic platform. We then briefly summarize our preliminary efforts to develop a robust virtual reality platform for neuropsychological assessment that incorporates a variety of physiological metrics as well as detailed measures of multiple attributes of task performance in a Virtual Environments Grocery Store (VEGS).
Effect of Drinking on Adiponectin in Healthy Men and Women

OBJECTIVE Moderate alcohol consumption is associated with reduced incidence of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular mortality and increases adiponectin concentrations, but effects might differ according to sex and beverage consumed. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS A total of 72 healthy individuals (22–56 years) were enrolled in this randomized controlled crossover trial. After washout, two interventions for 3 weeks followed: ethanol (concentration 12.5%), beer (5.6%), or red wine (12.5%) equivalent to 30 g ethanol/day for men and 20 g/day for women or the same de-alcoholized beverages or water. Adiponectin was measured by sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. RESULTS Among women, adiponectin significantly increased after consuming red wine (29.8%, P < 0.05) and increased among men after ethanol solution (17.4%, P < 0.05) and consuming beer (16.1%, P < 0.05). De-alcoholized beverages had no substantial effect on adiponectin concentrations. CONCLUSIONS Moderate amounts of ethanol-containing beverages increased adiponectin concentrations, but sex-specific effects might depend on type of beverage consumed.
Gang scheduling and adaptive resource allocation to mitigate advance reservation impact

Simultaneous parallel computational grid jobs require reservation by the local job schedulers to ensure allocation of matching time slots at the different sites involved. However, reservations create road blocks in the local schedule, leading to only a small percentage of reservations being tolerable. A large number of reservations typically has adverse effects on local response times and machine utilization. We have extended our SCOJO scheduler to enable advance reservations. SCOJO can perform space sharing or gang scheduling and can run as either adaptive or traditional non-adaptive variant. We show that gang scheduling is more flexible than space sharing in regards to tolerating reservations. We also show that, for space sharing and a low multiprogramming level, the adaptive variants can tolerate reservations better than the non-adaptive variants.
Chloride‐ion concentration dependence of molecular dimension in the acid‐denatured state of equine β‐lactoglobulin

The chloride-ion concentration dependence of the molecular dimension in the acid-denatured state of equine β-lactoglobulin (ELG) was investigated by small-angle X-ray scattering. In the presence of chloride ion, ELG has a globular and compact conformation (the A state). The molecular dimension of ELG increases little with decreasing chloride-ion concentration. A remarkable dependence was observed for a mutant protein in which both Cys66 and Cys160 were replaced with Ala (C66A/C160A). In the presence of chloride ion, C66A/C160A has a globular and compact conformation, like the wild type. In the absence of chloride ion, however, the molecular dimension and shape was close to that in the urea-unfolded state. Previously, we have shown that the helix content in the acid-denatured state increases with decreasing chloride-ion concentration [Yamada et al. (2006). Proteins Struct. Funct. Bioinf. 63, 595–602]. These results suggest that the secondary structure in the A state is mainly determined by non-local interactions. When they are absent in an expanded conformation, the local interactions become predominant and the amount of non-native α-helix increases.
Health status and quality of life among older adults in rural Tanzania

Background : Increasingly, human populations throughout the world are living longer and this trend is developing in sub-Saharan Africa. In developing African countries such as Tanzania, this demographic phenomenon is taking place against a background of poverty and poor health conditions. There has been limited research on how this process of ageing impacts upon the health of older people within such low-income settings. Objective : The objective of this study is to describe the impacts of ageing on the health status, quality of life and well-being of older people in a rural population of Tanzania. Design : A short version of the WHO Survey on Adult Health and Global Ageing questionnaire was used to collect information on the health status, quality of life and well-being of older adults living in Ifakara Health and Demographic Surveillance System, Tanzania, during early 2007. Questionnaires were administered through this framework to 8,206 people aged 50 and over. Results : Among people aged 50 and over, having good quality of life and health status was significantly associated with being male, married and not being among the oldest old. Functional ability assessment was associated with age, with people reporting more difficulty in performing routine activities as age increased, particularly among women. Reports of good quality of life and well-being decreased with increasing age. Women were significantly more likely to report poor quality of life (odds ratio 1.31; p<0.001, 95% CI 1.15–1.50). Conclusions : Older people within this rural Tanzanian setting reported that the ageing process had significant impacts on their health status, quality of life and physical ability. Poor quality of life and well-being, and poor health status in older people were significantly associated with marital status, sex, age and level of education. The process of ageing in this setting is challenging and raises public health concerns. Access the supplementary material to this article: INDEPTH WHO-SAGE questionnaire (including variants of vignettes), a data dictionary and a password-protected dataset (see Supplementary files under Reading Tools online). To obtain a password for the dataset, please send a request with ‘SAGE data’ as its subject, detailing how you propose to use the data, to global.health@epiph.umu. se
Evaluation of the immunofluorescence procedure for detection of Giardia cysts and Cryptosporidium oocysts in water

The accurate determination of the presence of Giardia cysts and Cryptosporidium oocysts in surface waters requires a reliable method for the detection and enumeration of these pathogenic organisms. Published methods have usually reported recovery efficiencies of less than 50% for both cysts and oocysts. Typically, the losses are greater for Cryptosporidium oocysts than they are for Giardia cysts. The purpose of this study was to examine procedures used for sample collection, elution, concentration, and clarification to determine when losses of cysts and oocysts occurred during processing. The results showed that major losses of cysts and oocysts occurred during centrifugation and clarification. Depending on the centrifugation force, oocyst losses of as high as 30% occurred for each centrifugation step. A 1.15-specific-gravity Percoll-sucrose gradient was needed to optimize recovery of oocysts from natural water samples. Minor improvements in the procedure could be accomplished by selecting a filter other than the recommended 1-micron-pore-size (nominal-porosity) polypropylene filter.
An Indexed, Mapped Mutant Library Enables Reverse Genetics Studies of Biological Processes in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii[OPEN]

A collection of green algal mutants with known insertion sites is presented and used to identify a Chlamydomonas gene important in green algal triacylglycerol biosynthesis. The green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is a leading unicellular model for dissecting biological processes in photosynthetic eukaryotes. However, its usefulness has been limited by difficulties in obtaining mutants in specific genes of interest. To allow generation of large numbers of mapped mutants, we developed high-throughput methods that (1) enable easy maintenance of tens of thousands of Chlamydomonas strains by propagation on agar media and by cryogenic storage, (2) identify mutagenic insertion sites and physical coordinates in these collections, and (3) validate the insertion sites in pools of mutants by obtaining >500 bp of flanking genomic sequences. We used these approaches to construct a stably maintained library of 1935 mapped mutants, representing disruptions in 1562 genes. We further characterized randomly selected mutants and found that 33 out of 44 insertion sites (75%) could be confirmed by PCR, and 17 out of 23 mutants (74%) contained a single insertion. To demonstrate the power of this library for elucidating biological processes, we analyzed the lipid content of mutants disrupted in genes encoding proteins of the algal lipid droplet proteome. This study revealed a central role of the long-chain acyl-CoA synthetase LCS2 in the production of triacylglycerol from de novo-synthesized fatty acids.
Change detection on light field for active video surveillance

Existing background model based change detection methods have difficulty in distinguishing between foreground and background changes when both changes are caused by the same factors. We explore the possibility of using a light field camera to resolve the problem of existing single-view camera-based approaches. We present a new change detection strategy that processes light rays captured by the light field camera. The light rays are used for three purposes: 1) generating an active surveillance field (ASF) to determine in-focus and out-focus areas, 2) evaluating focusness to determine whether the light rays come from the ASF, and 3) creating and updating light-ray background models to capture temporal changes in light rays. To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we evaluated several video sequences captured by a light field camera. Experimental results show that our change detection scheme can robustly handle challenging situations that cannot be resolved by existing single-view approaches.
Reactive probabilistic belief modeling for mobile robots

Despite the dramatic advancements in the field of robotics, robots still tend to exhibit erratic behavior when facing unexpected situations, causing them, for example, to run into walls. This is mainly the result of the robot’s internal world model no longer being an accurate description of the environment and the robot’s localization within the environment. The key challenge explored in this dissertation is the creation of an internal world model for mobile robots that is more robust and accurate in situations where existing approaches exhibit a tendency to fail. First, means to avoid a major source of localization error – collisions – are investigated. Efficient collision avoidance is achieved by creating a two-layered model of free space in the direct vicinity of the robot. The model is based on camera images and serves as a short term memory, enabling the robot to avoid obstacles that are out of sight. It allows the robot to efficiently circumnavigate obstacles. Furthermore, the model provides information about visual occlusions in the camera image and is thus an important building block of negative information (see below). The motion model of the robot is enhanced by integrating proprioceptive information. Since the robot lacks sensors dedicated to proprioception, information about the current state and configuration of the robot’s body is generated by comparing control commands and actual motion of individual joints. This enables the robot to detect collisions with other robots or obstacles and is used as additional information for modeling locomotion. It allows the robot to reliably move about based solely on dead reckoning as long as it does not detect collisions. If a collision occurs, the belief quickly changes to reflect the uncertainty introduced by this disturbance. In the context of sensing, the notion of negative information is introduced. Negative information marks the ascertained absence of an expected observation in featurebased localization. This information is not used in previous work on localization because of the several reasons for a sensor to miss a feature, even if the object lies within its sensing range: occlusion of the feature by other objects in the environment, sensor imperfections, erroneous image processing, etc. This information can, however, be put to good use by carefully modeling the sensor. Integrating negative information allows the robot to localize in situations where it cannot do so based on landmark observation alone.
Genetic-Based Multiresolution Noisy Color Image Segmentation

Segmentation of a color image composed of different kinds of regions can be a hard problem, namely to compute for an exact texture fields and make a decision of the optimum number of segmentation areas in an image when it contains similar and/or unstationary texture fields. A local novel neighborhood-based segmentation approach is proposed. Genetic algorithm is used in the proposed limited segment-pass optimization process. In this pass, an energy function, which is defined based on Markov Random Fields, is minimized. The proposed system uses an adaptive threshold estimation method for image thresholding in the wavelet domain based on the Generalized Gaussian Distribution (GGD) modeling of sub band coefficients. This method called Normal Shrink is computationally more efficient and adaptive because the parameters required for estimating the threshold depend on sub band data energy that used in the pre-stage of segmentation. A quadtree is utilized to implement the fast clustering segments for multiresolution framework analysis, which enables the use of different strategies at different resolution levels, and hence, the computation can be accelerated. The experimental results of the proposed segmentation approach are very encouraging.
Hierarchical model for real time simulation of virtual human crowds

This paper describes a model for simulating crowds of humans in real time. We deal with a hierarchy composed of virtual crowds, groups and individuals. The groups are the most complex structure that can be controlled in different degrees of autonomy. This autonomy refers to the extent to which the virtual agents are independent of the user intervention and also the amount of information needed to simulate crowds. Thus, depending on the complexity of the simulation, simple behaviors can be sufficient to simulate crowds. Otherwise, more complicated behavioral rules can be necessary, and in this case, it can be included in the simulation data in order to improve the realism of the animation. We present three different ways for controlling crowd behaviors: i) by using innate and scripted behaviors; ii) by defining behavioral rules, using events and reactions, and, iii) by providing an external control to guide crowd behaviors in real time. The two main contributions of our approach are: the possibility of increasing the complexity of group/agent behaviors according to the problem to be simulated, and the hierarchical structure based on groups to compose a crowd.