Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Study on Text Classification Methods and Text Features

When it comes to the task of classification the data used for training is the most crucial part. It follows that how this data is processed and presented for the classifier plays an equally important role. This thesis attempts to investigate the performance of multiple classifiers depending on the features that are used, the type of classes to classify and the optimization of said classifiers. The classifiers of interest are support–vector machines (SMO) and multilayer perceptron (MLP), the features tested are word vector spaces and text complexity measures, along with principal component analysis on the complexity measures. The features are created based on the Stockholm–Umeå-Corpus (SUC) and DigInclude, a dataset containing standard and easy–to–read sentences. For the SUC dataset the classifiers attempted to classify texts into nine different text categories, while for the DigInclude dataset the sentences were classified into either standard or simplified classes. The classification tasks on the DigInclude dataset showed poor performance in all trials. The SUC dataset showed best performance when using SMO in combination with word vector spaces. Comparing the SMO classifier on the text complexity measures when using or not using PCA showed that the performance was largely unchanged between the two, although not using PCA had slightly better performance.
EVALUATION OF THE INFLUENCE OF BROILER BREEDER EGG WEIGHTS ON HATCHING AND POST-HATCH PERFORMANCES IN MARSHAL BREED

This study was designed to evaluate the effects of different Marshal breed broiler on hatching egg weights on hatching characteristics and post-hatch performances; and also to compare the cost of production of hatchlings to table size. A total of 900 hatching eggs (HE) from 40 weeks old parent stock were sorted, graded and purposively grouped on weight basis into small (<50g), medium (50-65g) and large (>65g) sizes (3 groups). Each group was allotted 300 eggs and replicated thrice, with each replicate having 100 eggs in a complete randomised design before incubation for 21 days. Candling of incubated eggs was done on day 18 on group basis and numbers of fertile eggs noted. The chicks were individually weighed and counted to determine hatchability, hatchling weight and cost of production. Thereafter, hatched chicks were allotted into the respective groups and replicated to determine the post-hatch performance. Each replicate has 45 chicks, intensively raised and were fed ad libitum with broiler starter mash for the first 4 weeks of life and broiler finisher mash from 4-8 weeks. Data generated include feed intake, final weight, mortality; weight gain, feed conversion ratio and unit cost of production of chicken were calculated. The data were analyzed by GLM of SAS and Duncan’s multiple-range test was used to separate significance of differences among treatment means at 5% significance level. The medium HE had the best fertility (93.00%), hatchability (95.67%) and cost of producing a chick (N 90.07) when compared with the small and large HEs. The large HE has the best results in terms of, final weight and weight gain, while medium HE has the best FCR, lowest mortality and least cost of production, which are significant at p< 0.05. It is therefore recommended poultry breeders and hatchery operators should consider the use of medium weight (50-65g) HEs in their operations, so as to cut down the production cost.
Optimised piezoelectric energy scavengers for elder care

Low power wireless electronics requires portable and autonomous power sources. This motivates the interest in energy harvesting. Among the proposed solutions, vibration-based piezoelectric bimorphs are characterised by marked advantages. This work investigates the possibility to increase the specific power generation of piezoelectric scavengers by structurally optimising their shape. Analytical and FE simulations are performed allowing the proposed layouts to be compared. The advantages of optimised layouts are proven and discussed.
Towards Robust Speech Emotion Recognition Using Deep Residual Networks for Speech Enhancement

The use of deep learning (DL) architectures for speech enhancement has recently improved the robustness of voice applications under diverse noise conditions. These improvements are usually evaluated based on the perceptual quality of the enhanced audio or on the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. We are interested instead in the usefulness of these algorithms in the ﬁeld of speech emotion recognition (SER), and speciﬁcally in whether an enhancement architecture can effectively remove noise while preserving enough information for an SER algorithm to accurately identify emotion in speech. We ﬁrst show how a scalable DL architecture can be trained to enhance audio signals in a large number of unseen environments, and go on to show how that can beneﬁt common SER pipelines in terms of noise robustness. Our results show that incorporating a speech enhancement architecture is beneﬁcial, especially for low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions.
Mobile Payment Services Adoption: An Empirical Investigation of the Effects of Customer Perceived Value and Customer Satisfaction on Adoption Intention

________________________ Abstract Considering the way for enhancing intention to adopt new products and services in the highly competitive market, customer perceived value and customer satisfaction are two imperative factors in the marketing context. This paper therefore aims primarily at investigating the relationships among customer perceived value, customer satisfaction and behavioral intention in adopting mobile payment service in new developing country, particularly in China. Questionnaire survey method was employed and distributed to respondents who have had experience using mobile payment service such Questionnaire Star, QQ, Alipay and Wechat payment websites. 376 valid questionnaires from mobile users in China were collected from Shanghai, Hangzhou and Guangzhou. Descriptive analysis and Structure Equation Model (SEM) were adopted to investigate the relationships of all variables in the research conceptual model. The results indicate that customer perceived value has a direct effect towards customer satisfaction, and indirect effect on intention through customer satisfaction in the mobile payment services of China.
Comparative study of coarticulation in a multilingual speaker: Preliminary results from MRI data

This study explores the relative coarticulatory resistance of consonants across languages using static mid-sagittal MRI of one trilingual speaker sustaining consonants in symmetrical vowel contexts for Australian English (AuE), French (FR), and Croatian (CR). Semi-supervised segmentation provided articulators’ contours that can be superposed and compared. A set of 7 vowels analogous for the 3 languages was determined and used to compute mean consonant contours and dispersion related to vowels. A focussed observation of /s/ and /ʃ/ showed that the tongue in CR /s/ is more resistant to coarticulation than in AuE or FR, whereas for /ʃ/ it is more resistant in FR than in AuE or CR. It was also found that, the stop and the fricative parts of the CR affricates /ʦ/ and /ʧ/ are more resistant than the single consonants /t/, /s/ and /ʃ/. This study will be extended to other consonants, and make use of articulatory modelling.
Acute effects of exercise on appetite, food intake and circulating concentrations of gastrointestinal hormones

Recent years have witnessed significant research into the acute effects of exercise on appetite, energy intake and gut hormone responses. The experiments in this thesis have further investigated this topic by examining the appetite, acylated ghrelin, peptide YY and energy intake responses to energy deficits induced via different exercise protocols and food restriction. To achieve this, 48 young healthy males (mean (SD): age 23 (3) years, body mass index 23.7 (2.7) kg.m-2, maximum oxygen uptake 52.9 (9.8) mL.kg 1.min-1) were recruited into four studies. In study one, 60 min of treadmill running at 70% of VO2 max did not stimulate any increases in appetite or daily energy intake regardless of whether the exercise was performed after breakfast or in the fasted state. In study two, six 30 s Wingate tests stimulated increases in appetite during the subsequent hours compared with 60 min of cycling at 68% of VO2 max. Differences in appetite appeared to be unrelated to changes in plasma acylated ghrelin concentrations and did not influence ad libitum energy intake. Subsequently, endurance exercise resulted in a significantly greater negative daily energy balance than sprint exercise due to a larger exercise energy expenditure. Study three revealed that appetite and energy intake did not differ from a resting control trial after either ten, 4 min cycling bouts at 85 90% of VO2 max separated by 2 min of rest or 60 min of constant cycling at 60% of VO2 max. This occurred despite elevated PYY3-36 concentrations during the hours after exercise. Finally, study four showed that an energy deficit of ~1475 kJ stimulated increases in appetite when induced via food restriction but not when achieved by an acute bout of exercise. This was associated with differences in plasma PYY3-36 concentrations but did not appear to be related to changes in circulating levels of acylated ghrelin and did not influence energy intake. This thesis has shown that appetite perceptions do not differ from a resting control trial during the hours after continuous endurance exercise. Alternatively, supramaximal cycling exercise and subtle reductions in food intake stimulated increases in appetite during the subsequent hours. Such increases in appetite do not appear to be related to changes in acylated ghrelin but may be influenced by plasma PYY3-36 concentrations. Despite differences in appetite, daily energy intake was unaffected by all interventions.
IDENTIFYING FACTORS OF INFLUENCE ON FAMILY PLANNING PRACTICES AMONG RURAL HAITIAN WOMEN

Haiti, a country located in the Caribbean, is considered to be the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. With a population of more than eight million, Haiti is amongst the poorest of the poor with majority of the population living in abject poverty. In Haiti, a large majority of women have unmet needs for family planning or child-spacing which inevitably leads to high maternal mortality. In Haiti, most births occur at home without trained health care personnel, and the country has the highest prevalence of HIV/AIDs in the region. Increasing access to reproductive health services, including family planning, to women who want them is of critical public health concern. The purpose of this thesis is to examine factors that may affect rural Haitian women's choice in utilizing family planning services by using the Social Ecological Framework as a guide. A comprehensive literature search was conducted through multiple search engines and two themes were identified as factors of influence including contraceptive use and desired family size. Increasing the availability of family planning services to women who want them would increase the likelihood of saving lives and improving the overall health of women in rural Haiti by increasing socio-economic status, empowerment, education, and reproductive health.
2 Improved Local Search for Geometric Hitting Set

Over the past several decades there has been steady progress towards the goal of polynomial-time approximation schemes (PTAS) for fundamental geometric combinatorial optimization problems. A foremost example is the geometric hitting set problem: given a set P of points and a set D of geometric objects, compute the minimum-sized subset of P that hits all objects in D. For the case where D is a set of disks in the plane, the 30-year quest for a PTAS, starting from the seminal work of Hochbaum [19], was finally achieved in 2010. Surprisingly, the algorithm to achieve the PTAS is simple: local-search. Since then, local-search has turned out to be a powerful algorithmic approach towards achieving good approximation ratios for geometric problems (for geometric independent-set problem, for dominating sets, for the terrain guarding problem and several others). Unfortunately all these algorithms have the same limitation: local search is able to give a PTAS, but with hopeless running times; e.g., a 3-approximation for the geometric hitting takes more than n66 time [15] for the geometric hitting set problem for disks in the plane! That leaves open the question of whether a better understanding – both combinatorial and algorithmic – of local search and the problem can give a better approximation ratio in a more reasonable time. In this paper, we investigate this question for one of the fundamental problems, hitting sets for disks in the plane. We present tight approximation bounds for (3, 2)-local search1 and give an (8 + )-approximation algorithm with running time O(n2.34); the previous-best result achieving a similar approximation ratio gave a 10-approximation in time O(n15) – that too just for unit disks. The techniques and ideas generalize to (4, 3) local search. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, local-search has been used for several other geometric optimization problems; for all these problems our results show that (3, 2) local search gives an 8-approximation and no better 2. Similarly (4, 3)-local search gives a 5-approximation for all these problems.
Chapter 9 Visual Attributes for Fashion Analytics

In this chapter, we describe methods that leverage clothing and facial attributes as mid-level features for fashion recommendation and retrieval. We introduce a system called Magic Closet for recommending clothing for different occasions, and a system called Beauty E-Expert for hairstyle and facial makeup recommendation. For fashion retrieval, we describe a cross-domain clothing retrieval system, which receives as input a user photo of a particular clothing item taken in unconstrained conditions, and retrieves the exact same or similar item from online shopping catalogs. In each of these systems, we show the value of attribute-guided learning and describe approaches to transfer semantic concepts from large-scale uncluttered annotated data to challenging real-world imagery. S. Liu (B) State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China e-mail: liusi@iie.ac. cn L.M. Brown IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, New York, England e-mail: lisabr@us.ibm. com Q. Chen · J. Huang · L. Liu · S. Yan Qihoo 360 Artificial Intelligence Institute, Beijing, China e-mail: chenqiang-iri@360.cn J. Huang e-mail: huangjunshi@360.cn L. Liu e-mail: llq667@gmail.com S. Yan e-mail: yanshuicheng@360.cn © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 R.S. Feris et al. (eds.), Visual Attributes, Advances in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-50077-5_9 215
TONGUE AND LIP MOTION PATTERNS IN VOICED, WHISPERED, AND SILENT VOWEL PRODUCTION

The speech production process during vocalized speech involves the integration of auditory and vocal motor sensory feedback. The aim of this study was to evaluate articulatory behaviour in different modes of speech during the production of eight English vowels to improve our understanding of the connection between tongue motion patterns in normal (vocalized), whispered and silent (mouthed) speech. EMA was used to record movements of sensors attached to the tongue and lips. Experimental results suggest that articulatory trajectories are longer in duration and slower in speed in silent speech compared to normal and whispered speech. A machine learning algorithm (support vector machine) showed higher accuracy in vowel classification for voiced speech than in the whispered and silent conditions. In addition, articulatory distinctiveness vowel spaces showed a smaller area in silent speech than in normal and whispered speech. The results may suggest less distinct tongue movement patterns in silent speech.
Effects of a Postural Restoration Focused Intervention on Muscle Activation During Deadlifts

EFFECTS OF A POSTURAL RESTORATION FOCUSED INTERVENTION ON MUSCLE ACTIVATION DURING DEADLIFTS Caleb West Richardson Old Dominion University, 2019 Director: Dr. Hunter J. Bennett The purpose of this study was to determine the efficacy of implementing two Postural Restoration exercises and relating principles on deadlifts using a hexagonal barbell. Specifically, we aimed to examine the effects of the intervention on muscle activation and the location of the ground reaction force (GRF) center of pressure. Sixteen subjects (age 18-35 yrs.; male (n=14); female (n=2)), with at least 1 year of deadlifting experience, were randomly assigned into a control and intervention group (both n=8). Both groups performed two sets of three repetitions of deadlifts at 50% and at 80% of their estimated one repetition maximum (1-RM). The intervention group received a Postural Restoration inspired breathing exercise routine after three sets, while the control group rested. The deadlift tests were then repeated. We found no significant muscle activation differences for the intervention group for the back extensors, gluteus, hamstrings (biceps femoris long head and semitendinosus), or oblique activation during the hexagonal bar deadlift (p>0.05). The anteroposterior center of pressure waveforms demonstrated a more posterior force for the right foot post intervention with a 50% 1-rep max load, occurring during the first 25% of the concentric phase (p<0.05). Based on our lack of significant findings, short-term non-manual PRI interventions and coaching does not appear to positively affect deadlift mechanics.
Uncoupled impedance matching for coupled multi-antenna systems

Optimal impedance matching to a coupled antenna array requires implementation of a coupled load or matching network, leading to high complexity and in many cases narrow bandwidth. Research has therefore focused on the development of uncoupled matching networks with good performance, although such solutions have received little rigorous attention in the context of multiple-input multiple-output communication. This paper explores uncoupled impedance matching to the array active and passive impedances for multi-antenna communications and extends matching to the array active impedance to the case where the propagating field is specified stochastically. Simulations demonstrate the relative performance of the different matching techniques.
ERIA-DP-2018-14 1 ERIA Discussion Paper Series Export Dynamics and the Invoicing Currency

In this paper, using finely disaggregated firm-level export data for Thailand, we examine how firms’ export experience is related to the dynamic choice of the invoicing currency. We present evidence that the majority of exporters seldom change the invoicing currency for the same product/destination during the sample period. This evidence implies that changing the invoicing currency is costly for exporters. We also find that even after controlling for export size, the probability of choosing the export country’s currency, or the producers’ currency (PC) for the first export is significantly higher than for the export of the second and subsequent products/destinations. Assuming importers are risk averse, this finding implies that the accumulation of firm export experience provides better know-how for exchange rate risk management and enhances the use of currencies other than the PC in order to gain better profit. We also propose a theoretical model that provides the rationale for these empirical findings.
ACOUSTIC PROPERTIES OF PARA-PHONEMIC SOUNDS: CLICKS IN AMERICAN ENGLISH

Clicks in English are known to occur in transitional periods of talk, during word searches and as indicators of speaker affect. Less well established are the phonetic properties of these clicks, phonetic variation with respect to the click’s discourse role, and phonetic variation between speakers. This study contributes to understandings of click acoustics by examining clicks used within the Buckeye Corpus of American English [9]. Percussive clicks varied significantly in intensity from those with a discourse role such as conveying affect or turn-management. Speakers also varied in the extent to which clicks of all discourse types were employed: male speakers clicked percussively at a significantly higher rate than female speakers, whereas female speakers were more likely to use turn-management and affect-conveying clicks. This research helps illuminate an understudied aspect of sound systems, and gives insight into the extent of intraand interspeaker variation in para-phonemic sounds.
A pr 2 01 9 Pulse strategy for suppressing spreading on networks

In networked spreading models, each node can infect its neighbors and cure spontaneously. The curing is assumed to occur uniformly over time. A pulse immunization/curing strategy is more efficient and broadly applied to suppressing spreading processes. We model the epidemic process by the basic Susceptible-Infected (SI) process with a pulse curing and incorporate the underlying contact network. The mean-field epidemic threshold of the pulse SI model is shown to be 1 λ1 ln 1 1−p , where λ1 and p are the largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix and the fraction of nodes covered by each curing, respectively. Compared to the extensively studied uniform curing process, we show that the pulse curing strategy saves about 36.8%, i.e. p ≈ 0.632, of the number of curing operations invariant to the network structure. Our results may help related policy makers to estimate the cost of controlling spreading processes.
Nonlinear Optimal Control of Continuously Variable Transmission

Optimization of gear ratio with the objectives of fuel consumption reduction and vehicle longitudinal performance improvement has been the subject of many studies for years. Finding a strategy for changing gears with specific control objectives, especially in the design of vehicles equipped with Continuously Variable Transition system (CVT), which has advantage of arbitrary selection of gear ratio, has been the aim of some recent researches. Optimal control theory has rarely been used in the previous control approaches applied to such systems due to the limitations in the use of fast computational systems. The aim of this study is to design the aforementioned gear ratio change strategy and related control rules on the basis of optimal control. A driver model is also designed for the simulation of driving cycle using MATLAB Simulink Toolbar. Results of implementing optimal control rules in vehicle longitudinal movement simulation with the aim of fuel consumption reduction are finally represented. The presented method has the remarkable advantage of considerable fuel consumption reduction in comparison to other proposed approaches for gear ratio change strategies.
Draft – September 11 , 2019 Finding and Recognizing Popular Coalition Structures

An important aspect of multi-agent systems concerns the formation of coalitions that are stable or optimal in some welldefined way. The notion of popularity has recently received a lot of attention in this context. A partition is popular if there is no other partition in which more agents are better off than worse off. In 2019, a long-standing open problem concerning popularity was solved by proving that computing popular partitions in roommate games is NP-hard, even when preferences are strict. We show that this result breaks down when allowing for randomization: mixed popular partitions can be found efficiently via linear programming and a separation oracle. Mixed popular partitions are particularly attractive because they are guaranteed to exist in any coalition formation game. Our result implies that one can efficiently verify whether a given partition in a roommate game is popular and that strongly popular partitions can be found in polynomial time (resolving an open problem). By contrast, we prove that both problems become computationally intractable when moving from coalitions of size 2 to coalitions of size 3. Moreover, we give elaborate proofs showing that finding popular partitions in additively separable hedonic games and fractional hedonic games is NP-hard.