SAMO: Speaker Attractor Multi-Center One-Class Learning for Voice Anti-Spoofing

Voice anti-spoofing systems are crucial auxiliaries for automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems. A major challenge is caused by unseen attacks empowered by advanced speech synthesis technologies. Our previous research on one-class learning has improved the generalization ability to unseen attacks by compacting the bona fide speech in the embedding space. However, such compactness lacks consideration of the diversity of speakers. In this work, we propose speaker attractor multi-center one-class learning (SAMO), which clusters bona fide speech around a number of speaker attractors and pushes away spoofing attacks from all the attractors in a high-dimensional embedding space. For training, we propose an algorithm for the co-optimization of bona fide speech clustering and bona fide/spoof classification. For inference, we propose strategies to enable anti-spoofing for speakers without enrollment. Our proposed system outperforms existing state-of-the-art single systems with a relative improvement of 38% on equal error rate (EER) on the ASVspoof2019 LA evaluation set

Investigation on thermal barrier coating and thermal behaviour at high temperature

The oxidation behaviour of diffusion and overlay coating, manufactured by pack cementation and high velocity oxygen fuel (HVOF) techniques, was studied under isothermal condition at a temperature of 1100 °C for up to 500 hours. Detailed analysis on oxide thickness coupled with cross section microstructure observation was carried out. The results shown sub-parabolic oxide growth for all samples. To simulate a real operating condition for the thermal barrier coating (TBC) system, high temperature oxy-acetylene flame based burner rig was designed, manufactured and calibrated. A maximum surface temperature of 1400 °C detected by a single wavelength pyrometer with a 700 °C through sample thickness thermal gradient was achieved. A TBC system in which the ceramic top layer deposited by air plasma spray (APS) technique was tested under such condition. Several damage/failure types were identified in comparison with samples tested under isothermal loading. A novel physical based mathematical moving boundary problem model utilizing asymptotic analysis that predicts the growth of the oxide layer on a binary bond coat system was proposed. The governing equations were discretized and solved numerically using finite difference and Newton’s iteration method respectively. Numerical results obtained from this model had shown a good qualitative agreement from comparison with the experimental studies

PDF-VQA: A New Dataset for Real-World VQA on PDF Documents

Document-based Visual Question Answering examines the document understanding of document images in conditions of natural language questions. We proposed a new document-based VQA dataset, PDF-VQA, to comprehensively examine the document understanding from various aspects, including document element recognition, document layout structural understanding as well as contextual understanding and key information extraction. Our PDF-VQA dataset extends the current scale of document understanding that limits on the single document page to the new scale that asks questions over the full document of multiple pages. We also propose a new graph-based VQA model that explicitly integrates the spatial and hierarchically structural relationships between different document elements to boost the document structural understanding. The performances are compared with several baselines over different question types and tasks\footnote{The full dataset will be released after paper acceptance

Research on the Post Occupancy Evaluation of Green Public Building Environmental Performance Combined with Carbon Emissions Accounting

AbstractThe development of green building in China has reached a new stage, needs to turn to the total energy consumption control from the technology control[1]. We should avoid packing technologies in green building projects and regard achieving good environmental performance as the fundamental goal. In this paper, we use the method of post-occupancy evaluation and regard the building environmental performance as the core of the evaluation system, in order to reduce the influence on the accuracy of results from the measures evaluation. We establish the evaluation index system of green public building environmental performance in severe cold and cold regions, including the index of building life-cycle carbon emissions accounting. And we set up the application plan of index and the scoring method, then we put forward a kind of evaluation grade based on environmental performance level, finally proposed the POE System of Green Public Building Environmental Performance in Severe Cold and Cold Regions (POE-GPBEPC)

Doc-GCN: Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Networks for Document Layout Analysis

Recognizing the layout of unstructured digital documents is crucial when parsing the documents into the structured, machine-readable format for downstream applications. Recent studies in Document Layout Analysis usually rely on computer vision models to understand documents while ignoring other information, such as context information or relation of document components, which are vital to capture. Our Doc-GCN presents an effective way to harmonize and integrate heterogeneous aspects for Document Layout Analysis. We first construct graphs to explicitly describe four main aspects, including syntactic, semantic, density, and appearance/visual information. Then, we apply graph convolutional networks for representing each aspect of information and use pooling to integrate them. Finally, we aggregate each aspect and feed them into 2-layer MLPs for document layout component classification. Our Doc-GCN achieves new state-of-the-art results in three widely used DLA datasets.Comment: Accepted by COLING 202

ゲンダイ ノ フェティシズム ゲンショウ ト ジコ モノガタリ モエ ヨウソ ノ ジュヨウ ト ショウヒ ヲ レイ ニ

弗朗索瓦·利奥塔在《后现代状况》一书中提到，在后现代社会中，原本具有普遍适用性的宏大叙事失去效用，与此相对的有限的、个性化的微观叙事将会繁荣。在此基础上，日本的批评家大塚英志提出了“物语消费论”，即御宅族等群体通过对于商品中物语的碎片的消费，获得重组、再造物语的暂时性体验，以此来弥补宏大叙事缺失带来的“饥饿感”。但在此之后，同样作为批评家的东浩纪在《动物化的后现代》一书中对于大塚英志的“物语消费论”进行了反驳，认为御宅族的消费与传统的商品拜物教不同，现在的御宅族已经放弃了对于作品中物语的消费，而已经转向对于其中的符号、数据进行动物性的消费。对于大塚英志与东浩纪之间的分歧，笔者认为，“物语消费论”并非已经消失，而是跟随时代背景的发展“物语消费论”的形态与构造发生了较大变化。据此，本论文从自我叙事的角度出发，以萌元素为例，讨论关于萌元素的先行研究的不足，并论证御宅族的对于萌元素的消费同样是一种拜物教行为这一论点。在此基础上，讨论以对于萌元素的消费为代表的，以“物语”为消费对象的新型现代消费的形态。本论文的第一章首先论述了论文的问题意识与研究目的。第二章中，本论文以宗教学、马克思主义经济学、精神分析三个领域中的拜物教行为的研究成果为主要参考，并参照了田中雅一等现代日本学者的拜物教研究的著作，最终以“以某一现实世界中的具象的物来作为替代品，用来否认所追求之物的不在场”的“双重否认”特质是拜物教行为的共有特征这一结论。第三章中，以御宅族对于萌元素的消费行为及萌元素的形成过程作为例证，以三浦展的“永久志向”作为理论参考，提出了在宏大叙事已经解体的今天，御宅族希望通过将自己抽象的自我叙事与具象化、商品化的萌元素结合起来，来提升自我叙事的承认度和存在的合理性，并以此萌元素为中心来创建共有相同叙事的亚文化群体这一观点。第四章中，笔者通过比较第三章中论述的御宅族对于萌元素的消费与大塚英志提出的“物语消费论”，突出了在物语消费研究中大塚英志所欠缺的拜物教理论与自我叙事视角的重要地位，并将第三章的论述一般化，概括性论述了当今社会物语消费的样态与轮廓。第六章中，对于本论文的研究内容进行了总结，并对于这一课题今后的研究方向进行了展望

A Maternity Hospital in Shenyang Indoor Environment Performance Influence Factor Analysis

AbstractIn recent years, the city air pollution level of PM2.5, ozone, nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxides in our country occupies first place. Indoor environmental problems caused by outdoor air pollution are increasingly significant. Indoor environment of hospital which is a special public building has special requirement. The feature of maternity hospital is crowded, heavy energy consumption, weakness of maternal and neonate, generate the sick and the patients need the better indoor environment quality. Therefore, this paper takes hospital building as research object by using questionnaire method, which analyzes the indoor comprehensive environmental performance of hospital, such as the air quality, the thermal environment, the light environment, and the acoustic environment. Results show that most of the patients is satisfied with the indoor comprehensive environmental performance of hospital, and only a small part is dissatisfied with the sound environment and the outdoor vision. This paper provides a research base for establishing a complete evaluation system and method of comprehensive indoor environmental performance of maternity hospital, which will help in building environmental monitoring systems and improving the level of public participation in the construction of hospital management

Laryngeal Reinnervation Using Ansa Cervicalis for Thyroid Surgery-Related Unilateral Vocal Fold Paralysis: A Long-Term Outcome Analysis of 237 Cases

To evaluate the long-term efficacy of delayed laryngeal reinnervation using the main branch of the ansa cervicalis in treatment of unilateral vocal fold paralysis (UVFP) caused by thyroid surgery.UVFP remains a serious complication of thyroid surgery. Up to now, a completely satisfactory surgical treatment of UVFP has been elusive.From Jan. 1996 to Jan. 2008, a total of 237 UVFP patients who underwent ansa cervicalis main branch-to-recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) anastomosis were enrolled as UVFP group; another 237 age- and gender-matched normal subjects served as control group. Videostroboscopy, vocal function assessment (acoustic analysis, perceptual evaluation and maximum phonation time), and electromyography were performed preoperatively and postoperatively. The mean follow-up period was 5.2±2.7 years, ranging from 2 to 12 years.>0.05, respectively). Postoperative laryngeal electromyography confirmed successful reinnervation of laryngeal muscle.Delayed laryngeal reinnervation with the main branch of ansa cervicalis is a feasible and effective approach for treatment of thyroid surgery-related UVFP; it can restore the physiological laryngeal phonatory function to the normal or a nearly normal voice quality

Discovery of Potential piRNAs from Next Generation Sequences of the Sexually Mature Porcine Testes

Piwi- interacting RNAs (piRNAs), a new class of small RNAs discovered from mammalian testes, are involved in transcriptional silencing of retrotransposons and other genetic elements in germ line cells. In order to identify a full transcriptome set of piRNAs expressed in the sexually mature porcine testes, small RNA fractions were extracted and were subjected to a Solexa deep sequencing. We cloned 6,913,561 clean reads of Sus Scrofa small RNAs (18–30 nt) and performed functional characterization. Sus Scrofa small RNAs showed a bimodal length distribution with two peaks at 21 nt and 29 nt. Then from 938,328 deep-sequenced small RNAs (26–30 nt), 375,195 piRNAs were identified by a k-mer scheme and 326 piRNAs were identified by homology searches. All piRNAs predicted by the k-mer scheme were then mapped to swine genome by Short Oligonucleotide Analysis Package (SOAP), and 81.61% of all uniquely mapping piRNAs (197,673) were located to 1124 defined genomic regions (5.85 Mb). Within these regions, 536 and 501 piRNA clusters generally distributed across only minus or plus genomic strand, 48 piRNA clusters distributed on two strands but in a divergent manner, and 39 piRNA clusters distributed on two strands in an overlapping manner. Furthermore, expression pattern of 7 piRNAs identified by homology searches showed 5 piRNAs displayed a ubiquitous expression pattern, although 2 piRNAs were specifically expressed in the testes. Overall, our results provide new information of porcine piRNAs and their specific expression pattern in porcine testes suggests that piRNAs have a role in regulating spermatogenesis

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival