The SPIRIT collection: an overview of a large web collection

A large scale collection of web pages has been essential for research in information retrieval and related areas. This paper provides an overview of a large web collection used in the SPIRIT project for the design and testing of spatially-aware retrieval systems. Several statistics are derived and presented to show the characteristics of the collection

Beam Dynamics in High Intensity Cyclotrons Including Neighboring Bunch Effects: Model, Implementation and Application

Space charge effects, being one of the most significant collective effects, play an important role in high intensity cyclotrons. However, for cyclotrons with small turn separation, other existing effects are of equal importance. Interactions of radially neighboring bunches are also present, but their combined effects has not yet been investigated in any great detail. In this paper, a new particle in cell based self-consistent numerical simulation model is presented for the first time. The model covers neighboring bunch effects and is implemented in the three-dimensional object-oriented parallel code OPAL-cycl, a flavor of the OPAL framework. We discuss this model together with its implementation and validation. Simulation results are presented from the PSI 590 MeV Ring Cyclotron in the context of the ongoing high intensity upgrade program, which aims to provide a beam power of 1.8 MW (CW) at the target destination

Overview of the NTCIR-14 Lifelog-3 task

Lifelog-3 was the third instance of the lifelog task at NTCIR. At NTCIR-14, the Lifelog-3 task explored three different lifelog data access related challenges, the search challenge, the annotation challenge and the insights challenge. In this paper we review the activities of participating teams who took part in the challenges and we suggest next steps for the community

Overview of NTCIR-15 MART

MART (Micro-activity Retrieval Task) was a NTCIR-15 collaborative benchmarking pilot task. The NTCIR-15 MART pilot aimed to motivate the development of irst generation techniques for high-precision micro-activity detection and retrieval, to support the identiication and retrieval of activities that occur over short time-scales such as minutes, rather than the long-duration event segmentation tasks of the past work. Participating researchers developed and benchmarked approaches to retrieve micro-activities from rich time-aligned multi-modal sensor data. Groups were ranked in decreasing order of micro-activity retrieval accuracy using mAP (mean Average Precision). The dataset used for the task consisted of a detailed lifelog of activities gathered using a controlled protocol of real-world activities (e.g. using a computer, eating, daydreaming, etc). The data included a lifelog camera data stream, biosignal activity (EOG, HR), and computer interactions (mouse movements, screenshots, etc). This task presented a novel set of challenging micro-activity based topics

Spoken term detection ALBAYZIN 2014 evaluation: overview, systems, results, and discussion

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13636-015-0063-8Spoken term detection (STD) aims at retrieving data from a speech repository given a textual representation of the search term. Nowadays, it is receiving much interest due to the large volume of multimedia information. STD differs from automatic speech recognition (ASR) in that ASR is interested in all the terms/words that appear in the speech data, whereas STD focuses on a selected list of search terms that must be detected within the speech data. This paper presents the systems submitted to the STD ALBAYZIN 2014 evaluation, held as a part of the ALBAYZIN 2014 evaluation campaign within the context of the IberSPEECH 2014 conference. This is the first STD evaluation that deals with Spanish language. The evaluation consists of retrieving the speech files that contain the search terms, indicating their start and end times within the appropriate speech file, along with a score value that reflects the confidence given to the detection of the search term. The evaluation is conducted on a Spanish spontaneous speech database, which comprises a set of talks from workshops and amounts to about 7 h of speech. We present the database, the evaluation metrics, the systems submitted to the evaluation, the results, and a detailed discussion. Four different research groups took part in the evaluation. Evaluation results show reasonable performance for moderate out-of-vocabulary term rate. This paper compares the systems submitted to the evaluation and makes a deep analysis based on some search term properties (term length, in-vocabulary/out-of-vocabulary terms, single-word/multi-word terms, and in-language/foreign terms).This work has been partly supported by project CMC-V2 (TEC2012-37585-C02-01) from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. This research was also funded by the European Regional Development Fund, the Galician Regional Government (GRC2014/024, “Consolidation of Research Units: AtlantTIC Project” CN2012/160)

Obstructive Sleep Apnea Alters Sleep Stage Transition Dynamics

Enhanced characterization of sleep architecture, compared with routine polysomnographic metrics such as stage percentages and sleep efficiency, may improve the predictive phenotyping of fragmented sleep. One approach involves using stage transition analysis to characterize sleep continuity.We analyzed hypnograms from Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS) participants using the following stage designations: wake after sleep onset (WASO), non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, and REM sleep. We show that individual patient hypnograms contain insufficient number of bouts to adequately describe the transition kinetics, necessitating pooling of data. We compared a control group of individuals free of medications, obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), medical co-morbidities, or sleepiness (n = 374) with mild (n = 496) or severe OSA (n = 338). WASO, REM sleep, and NREM sleep bout durations exhibited multi-exponential temporal dynamics. The presence of OSA accelerated the "decay" rate of NREM and REM sleep bouts, resulting in instability manifesting as shorter bouts and increased number of stage transitions. For WASO bouts, previously attributed to a power law process, a multi-exponential decay described the data well. Simulations demonstrated that a multi-exponential process can mimic a power law distribution.OSA alters sleep architecture dynamics by decreasing the temporal stability of NREM and REM sleep bouts. Multi-exponential fitting is superior to routine mono-exponential fitting, and may thus provide improved predictive metrics of sleep continuity. However, because a single night of sleep contains insufficient transitions to characterize these dynamics, extended monitoring of sleep, probably at home, would be necessary for individualized clinical application

Cholinergic Modulation of Narcoleptic Attacks in Double Orexin Receptor Knockout Mice

To investigate how cholinergic systems regulate aspects of the sleep disorder narcolepsy, we video-monitored mice lacking both orexin (hypocretin) receptors (double knockout; DKO mice) while pharmacologically altering cholinergic transmission. Spontaneous behavioral arrests in DKO mice were highly similar to those reported in orexin-deficient mice and were never observed in wild-type (WT) mice. A survival analysis revealed that arrest lifetimes were exponentially distributed indicating that random, Markovian processes determine arrest lifetime. Low doses (0.01, 0.03 mg/kg, IP), but not a high dose (0.08 mg/kg, IP) of the cholinesterase inhibitor physostigmine increased the number of arrests but did not alter arrest lifetimes. The muscarinic antagonist atropine (0.5 mg/kg, IP) decreased the number of arrests, also without altering arrest lifetimes. To determine if muscarinic transmission in pontine areas linked to REM sleep control also influences behavioral arrests, we microinjected neostigmine (50 nl, 62.5 µM) or neostigmine + atropine (62.5 µM and 111 µM respectively) into the nucleus pontis oralis and caudalis. Neostigmine increased the number of arrests in DKO mice without altering arrest lifetimes but did not provoke arrests in WT mice. Co-injection of atropine abolished this effect. Collectively, our findings establish that behavioral arrests in DKO mice are similar to those in orexin deficient mice and that arrests have exponentially distributed lifetimes. We also show, for the first time in a rodent narcolepsy model, that cholinergic systems can regulate arrest dynamics. Since perturbations of muscarinic transmission altered arrest frequency but not lifetime, our findings suggest cholinergic systems influence arrest initiation without influencing circuits that determine arrest duration