Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
LBNL-59173 Topology Changing Transitions in Bubbling Geometries

Topological transitions in bubbling half-BPS Type IIB geometries with SO(4) × SO(4) symmetry can be decomposed into a sequence of n elementary transitions. The half-BPS solution that describes the elementary transition is seeded by a phase space distribution of fermions filling two diagonal quadrants. We study the geometry of this solution in some detail. We show that this solution can be interpreted as a time dependent geometry, interpolating between two asymptotic pp-waves in the far past and the far future. The singular solution at the transition can be resolved in two different ways, related by the particle-hole duality in the effective fermion description. Some universal features of the topology change are governed by two-dimensional Type 0B string theory, whose double scaling limit corresponds to the Penrose limit of AdS5 × S at topological transition. In addition, we present the full class of geometries describing the vicinity of the most general localized classical singularity that can occur in this class of half-BPS bubbling geometries.
Final Year Project Intelligent Photo Gallery Final Report

People nowadays take a lot of photos and are in need of a tool for organizing their own collection of photos. Existing photo gallery application such as Google Photos uses face recognition and cloud storage to improve the photo management experience. However using cloud storage in raises privacy concerns and performing face recognition on the local machine can be slow. This project aims to build a photo gallery application to provide an alternative to the existing solutions and allow users to manage the photos conveniently. Since face recognition is a popular feature amongst modern gallery applications, we also performed different experiments on different approaches on the face recognition algorithms to find the most suitable face recognition solution to be implemented. This paper discusses the experiment results and the implementation of the facial recognition function along with the implementation of other photo management features. Moreover, this paper also mentioned the constraints faced in the development stages and ends with the future development of the project.
Reconstruction of Patch Face Reducing Malicious Attack in Secure Computation

Secure Computation of Face Identification (SCiFI) is a recently developed system which combines security with face recognition system and that ensures the list of faces it can identify remains private. A detailed study that shows the outcome of distorted input attacks on the system—from both a security and computer vision standpoint is given. In particular, the following is proposed, 1) a cryptographic attack that allows a fraudulent user to unnoticeably obtain a coded representation of faces on the list, and 2) a visualization approach that turns the lossy recovered codes into human-identifiable face sketches exploiting the breach.
On the CO Near-IR Band and the Line Splitting Phenomenon in the Yellow Hypergiant ρ Cassiopeiae

Editorial Dear Colleagues, It is our pleasure to present the 111 issue of the AGB Newsletter. Many contributions continue to discuss the properties of Planetary Nebulae (not only in the recent PN symposium proceedings). Don’t miss the paper by Ludmila Kondratyeva presenting temporal changes in the spectra of PNe — real-time evolution? There is also increasing interest in the interaction between AGB stars and PNe with the ISM — see for instance the two contributions about the bowshock of RHya and the PhD thesis of Chris Wareing in this issue of the Newsletter. Let’s hope that the ”Why Galaxies Care About AGB Stars” conference in Vienna next week will help us to better understand the PN-progenitors, as well as the impact that AGB stars have on the galaxies which they inhabit. The next issue will be distributed on the 1 of September; the deadline for contributions is the 31 of August.
A High Performance Online Uninterruptible Power Supply UPS System Based on Multitask Decomposition

High quality online uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) are widely used in applications e.g. precision medical equipment with critical loads. This paper proposes a low-cost and high performance online UPS system. Firstly, the performance improvement of a bidirectional switch based bridgeless power factor (PFC) converter, which is regulated by a hybrid control strategy with load current feedforward is studied. Secondly, the proposed closed-loop controller integrates improved predictive current control with predictive voltage control and applies to the second-stage neutral-point-clamped (NPC) three-level inverter for low output voltage harmonics. Moreover, a push-pull dc-dc converter interfaces and boosts voltage of a 24V battery bank as the backup energy source. Considering complexity of the UPS system as well as cost reduction, we implement a multi-task decomposition method for control on a monolithic low-cost digital signal processor (DSP) embedded with Control Law Accelerator (CLA). Finally, the experimental results from a 1kVA a prototype can effectively verify validly of the theoretical analysis and design.
The biomedical properties of a chitosan-based periodontal basic fibroblast growth factor delivery system

The aim of this study was to evaluate a CS-HTCC/GP-bFGF thermosensitive hydrogel synthesized using chitosan (CS), quaternized CS (HTCC) and α, β-glycerophosphate (α, β-GP) loaded with basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) for possible periodontal tissue engineering applications. The thermosensitive characteristics, substructure, bFGF-release profile, cytocompatibility and alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity of human periodontal ligament cells (HPDLCs) were determined. An aqueous solution of CS–HTCC/GP–bFGF transformed into a hydrogel within 8–10 min when the temperature increased to 37°C. Scanning electron microscopy showed the substructure to be a three-dimensional, porous structure with interconnected pores. In vitro, bFGF was released over 48h in an artificial saliva buffer with a pH of 6.8, potentially improving the proliferation and ALP activity of HPDLCs. The data demonstrate that the CS-HTCC/GP-bFGF thermosensitive hydrogel was a strong candidate as a local protein delivery system for periodontal tissue regeneration.
pl STATE OF GLOBAL FISHERIES – MANAGEMENT POLICIES

Global fisheries landings have stagnated and are associated with many negative environmental impacts, affecting the economy and food security in many countries around the world. Although many different management policies trying to incorporate a more sustainable and resilient scope have been developed over the years to improve this current fisheries crisis, we are still in the early stages of adopting more adaptive and corrective fisheries management globally, as well as enforcing it, due to the inherent difficulties of managing uncertain natural resources Upon analysis of different management strategies, using Peru and the European Union as case studies, three major recommendations were made for developing more sustainable and resilient management policies: decentralisation of the management system, ecosystem-based fisheries management and reallocation of subsidies. Finally, possible management strategies for different scenarios predicting the future of fisheries were described. In the current fisheries crisis situation, developing and implementing sustainable and resilient fisheries management strategies should be seen as a long-term investment in the profitability of the industry, as well as an opportunity to decrease social tensions and improve food security.
Prevalence and risk factors of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in residents from the Dongguan Shilong region of China

Objective: The aim of the current study was to investigate prevalence rates and risk factors of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in residents from the Dongguan Shilong region of Guangdong Province, China. Methods: A random sampling of patients aged > 40 years with high-risk COPD from Dongguan Shilong was collected. They underwent pulmonary function testing and completed questionnaire surveys. Prevalence rates of COPD were calculated. Univariate and multivariate factor logistic analyses were carried out, aiming to identify potential risk factors of COPD. Results: The overall prevalence of COPD in Dongguan Shilong was 9.05%. Prevalence rates of the male population were higher than those of the female population. Prevalence of COPD was significantly increased with aging (P<0.05). The severity of COPD was evaluated as grade I-II. Gender, age, education levels, body mass index (BMI), family history of respiratory disease, and smoking indexes (SI) significantly differed between COPD and non-COPD individuals (all P<0.05). Multivariate logistic regression analysis demonstrated BMI, age, gender, and SI to be risk factors for prevalence of COPD (all P<0.05). Conclusion: Prevalence of COPD in Dongguan Shilong is relatively high. High BMI (higher), old age, male gender, and higher SIs are risk factors of incidence of COPD. Therefore, active interventions should be delivered, targeting these risk factors and aiming to reduce prevalence rates of COPD in China.
Acoustic Model Ensembling Using Effective Data Augmentation for CHiME-5 Challenge

CHiME-5 is a research community challenge targeting the problem of far-field and multi-talker conversational speech recognition in dinner party scenarios involving background noises, reverberations and overlapping speech. In this study, we present five different kinds of robust acoustic models which take advantages from both effective data augmentation and ensemble methods to improve the recognition performance for the CHiME-5 challenge. First, we detail the effective data augmentation for far-field scenarios, especially the farfield data simulation. Different from the conventional data simulation methods, we use a signal processing method originally developed for channel identification to estimate the room impulse responses and then simulate the far-field data. Second, we introduce the five different kinds of robust acoustic models. Finally, the effectiveness of our acoustic model ensembling strategies at the lattice level and the state posterior level are evaluated and demonstrated. Our system achieves the best performance of all four tasks among submitted systems in the CHiME-5 challenge.
Dissection of genetic variability for traits related to mechanical harvesting and yield components in chickpea ( Cicer arietinum L . )

In the present scenario, mechanization of farm operations for improving efficiency and reducing the cost of cultivation is being widely adopted in India. Due to non availability of cultivars suitable for mechanical harvesting in chickpea it is mainly harvested by hand and due to increasing labour cost, the manual harvesting is becoming expensive. Hence, present investigation was carried out to understand the components of genetic variance for the traits related to mechanical harvesting and yield components. Therefore, 58 diverse lines were evaluated in RBD with two replications for tallness as well as traits suitable for mechanical harvesting. All the traits under study showed a wide range of variation. High heritability coupled with high genetic advance as a percent over mean was shown by many characters except days to maturity, number of internodes per plant and stem bio-density. Thus the selection based on key traits like stem thickness, plant height, internodal length on main stem, seeds per plant, yield per plant, biomass per plant, stem bio-density and hundred seed weight would be useful in the chickpea improvement and pyramiding of traits needed for machanical harvesting and high yield.
Menstrual migraine: the role of oestrogen.

Research into the association between migraine and menstruation has been hampered by lack of an agreed definition for 'menstrual' migraine. This thesis presents evidence for increased risk of migraine without aura on or between the two days before menstruation and the first three days of bleeding. Within individual women menstrual attacks differ from attacks at other times of the cycle, being longer and more severe. These findings led to the development of definitions for 'pure menstrual migraine' and 'menstrually-related migraine', which have subsequently been adopted by the International Headache Society. Further research identified an inverse relationship between oestrogen and migraine incidence. The follicular phase oestrogen rise was associated with reduced risk of migraine late luteal oestrogen 'withdrawal' at menstruation was associated with increased risk of migraine. In order to counteract the luteal phase oestrogen drop and prevent menstrual attacks, oestrogen supplements were used from the luteal phase oestrogen peak (day-6) through to the early follicular rise of endogenous oestrogen (day +2). Identification of ovulation using a fertility monitor enabled prediction of menstruation and accurate timing of oestrogen supplements, despite a wide inter- and intra-individual range in cycle length. The results showed that use of oestrogen supplements was associated with a significant reduction in migraine days compared to placebo. However, the benefits were offset by delayed oestrogen 'withdrawal' migraine. In women with migraine in the pill-free interval of combined hormonal contraceptives, there was a trend for oestrogen supplements to prevent 'menstrual' attacks, although the dose used was suboptimal. These findings support the hypotheses that menstrual migraine is a discrete clinical entity and is associated with oestrogen 'withdrawal'. Further, oestrogen 'withdrawal' migraine can be independent of menstruation and independent of ovulation. Oestrogen 'withdrawal' migraine can be prevented with oestrogen supplements, although the optimal regime has yet to be established.
Towards understanding members’ participation behaviour in Business to Business (B2B) Virtual Communities: A socio-technical approach

The importance of virtual communities for businesses has been well documented in the literature. Particularly, information and knowledge exchange has been identified as one of the main reasons for businesses to participate in virtual communities. The success of a virtual community depends on its members’ active contribution to the community. A considerable amount of literature has been published on factors affecting members’ participation behaviour in various community types. Limited research has focused on B2B virtual communities. Subsequently, there is limited understanding of what motivates businesses to actively participate in their virtual communities. Hence, the primary goal of this paper is to provide some understanding of the crucial factors that determine businesses’ participation behaviours in virtual community environments. Towards achieving this aim, underpinned by two well-known theories: Social Exchange Theory and Information System Success Model, this study proposes an integrated theoretical framework. The application of the framework has yet to be tested with a particular B2B virtual community.
Live Migration Overhead-Aware Dynamic VM Consolidation Algorithm in Cloud Computing

Energy Efficiency has become a crucial concern in modern data centers. Dynamic VM consolidation is one of the effective approaches endorsed to achieve energy efficiency in cloud data centers hosting thousands of servers. Live migration is a core feature enabling VM consolidation. However, live migration is a costly operation imposing energy and performance overhead. An efficient dynamic virtual machine consolidate should consider the cost due to live migration. In this paper, we design and implement a dynamic VM consolidation algorithm based on simulated annealing that accounts for the migration cost imposed by a consolidation plan. We conduct simulation-based experiments on CloudSim using real cloud workload traces from PlanetLab to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Results show that the using the proposed algorithm, the simulated data center consumes almost the same amount of energy of that using a FF based consolidation. However, the proposed algorithm accounts for the cost due to live migration and hence, reducing SLA violations and performance degradations.
Magnetite-Accelerated Corrosion of SA 508 Tubesheet Material and Its E ff ect on Steam Generator Tube

The objective of this work is to investigate the magnetite-accelerated corrosion phenomenon of SA508 used as tubesheet material in simulated secondary side environments of pressurized water reactors through immersion and electrochemical tests. The presence of sulfate ions induced the fast growth of a corrosion product layer on SA508, and this phenomenon was accelerated when the SA508 was coupled to magnetite. From the perspective of electrochemical behavior, it was found that SA508 behaves as an anodic member in the coupling system with magnetite, resulting in an increased corrosion rate.
Where Does the Additional Utility of an Improvement to the Transport System Occur ?

This paper shows with a agent-based simulation that models with more decision dimensions produce different equilibria in terms of network loads and resulting utilities. In case of infrastructural measures additional decision dimensions provide the model with more flexibility to adjust to the new situation. Therefore we note higher predicted utility gains with additional decision dimensions. The errors made by disregarding relevant decision dimensions might influence the decision on whether to build a infrastructural measures or not. The simulation experiments also indicate that travel time savings do not capture utility gains appropriately, because additional decision dimensions allow for trade-off's between utility components.
Prevalencia y factores de riesgo del trastorno de la memoria asociado a la edad en un área de salud

Introduccion. El envejecimiento normal se caracteriza por la alteracion de las funciones cognitivas. En 1958 Kral define el ? olvido benigno de la senescencia? para designar un trastorno mnesico diferente del envejecimiento normal. En 1986 un grupo de investigadores del National Institute of Mental Health y otros centros propone una nueva entidad neuropsicologica denominada trastorno de la memoria asociado a la edad. Actualmente constituye un reto para la comunidad cientifica establecer la prevalencia, la evolucion y los factores de riesgo de esta entidad. Objetivos. Establecer la prevalencia y precisar algunos factores de riesgo en el trastorno de la memoria asociado a la edad. Sujetos y metodos. El universo estuvo constituido por todos los pacientes mayores de 50 anos de edad de un area de salud (234 individuos), a los que se les aplicaron los criterios diagnosticos. Ademas de a los pacientes, se selecciono un grupo control para establecer correlacion con factores de riesgo seleccionados. Resultados y conclusiones. La prevalencia obtenida fue del 39,7%; de ellos, el 38,7% correspondia al sexo masculino y el 40,4% al femenino. Tambien se observo que a mayor edad del paciente y anos de evolucion, hay mayor deterioro de la memoria. Con relacion a los factores de riesgo, se comprobo que el habito de fumar y las caracteristicas psicosociales constituyeron factores predisponentes, no asi la hipertension arterial, el antecedente de demencia y la satisfaccion de las necesidades basicas.
The LeVoice Far-Field Speech Recognition System for VOiCES from a Distance Challenge 2019

This paper describes our submission to the “VOiCES from a Distance Challenge 2019”, which is designed to foster research in the area of speaker recognition and automatic speech recognition (ASR) with a special focus on single channel distant/far-field audio under noisy conditions. We focused on the ASR task under a fixed condition in which the training data was clean and small, but the development data and test data were noisy and unmatched. Thus we developed the following major technical points for our system, which included data augmentation, weighted-prediction-error based speech enhancement, acoustic models based on different networks, TDNN or LSTM based language model rescore, and ROVER. Experiments on the development set and the evaluation set showed that the front-end processing, data augmentation and system fusion made the main contributions for the performance increasing, and the final word error rate results based on our system scored 15.91% and 19.6% respectively.
Robust Joint Image Reconstruction from Color and Monochrome Cameras

Recent years have seen an explosion of the number of camera modules integratedinto individual consumer mobile devices, including configurations that contain multi-ple different types of image sensors. One popular configuration is to combine an RGBcamera for color imaging with a monochrome camera that has improved performancein low-light settings, as well as some sensitivity in the infrared. In this work we in-troduce a method to combine simultaneously captured images from such a two-camerastereo system to generate a high-quality, noise reduced color image. To do so, pixel-to-pixel alignment has to be constructed between the two captured monochrome and colorimages, which however, is prone to artifacts due to parallax. The joint image recon-struction is made robust by introducing a novel artifact-robust optimization formulation.We provide extensive experimental results based on the two-camera configuration of a commercially available cell phone.
Automatic Compression of Subtitles with Neural Networks and its Effect on User Experience

Understanding spoken language can be impeded through factors like noisy environments, hearing impairments or lack of proﬁciency. Subtitles can help in those cases. However, for fast speech or limited screen size, it might be advantageous to compress the subtitles to their most relevant content. Therefore, we address automatic sentence compression in this paper. We propose a neural network model based on an encoder-decoder approach with the possibility of integrating the desired compression ratio. Using this model, we conduct a user study to investigate the effects of compressed subtitles on user experience. Our results show that compressed subtitles can sufﬁce for comprehension but may pose additional cognitive load.
Multi-Microphone Adaptive Noise Cancellation for Robust Hotword Detection

Recently we proposed a dual-microphone adaptive noise cancellation (ANC) algorithm with deferred ﬁlter coefﬁcients for robust hotword detection in [1]. It exploits two unique hotword-related features: hotwords are the leading phrase of valid voice queries and they are short. These features allow us not to compute a speech-noise mask that is a common prerequisite for many multichannel speech enhancement approaches. This novel idea was found effective against strong and ambiguous speech-like TV noise. In this paper, we show that it can be generalized to support more than two microphones. The development is validated using re-recorded data with background TV noise from a 3-mic array. By adding one more microphone, the false reject (FR) rate can be further reduced relatively by 33.5%.