87 research outputs found
Motivational and Situational Aspects of Active and Passive Social Media Breaks May Explain the Difference Between Recovery and Procrastination
Students frequently multitask with social media (SM) during self-study. Such social media multitasking (SMM) has the potential either to support wellbeing by acting as a recovery activity or subvert it by acting as a procrastination activity. It is currently unclear which specific SM behaviours and related factors push SMM towards recovery or procrastination. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 undergraduates to explore which SMM behaviours and factors led to recovery or procrastination. We found that both active and passive SM breaks have the potential to be recovery or procrastination activities. Whether a SM break becomes a recovery or procrastination activity partly depends on its automaticity and situational SM factors. This paper contributes empirical evidence that supports emerging criticism of an existing simplistic understanding of the relationship between active/passive SM use and wellbeing, and demonstrates how a richer model can inform the design of technologies that support better SM breaks
COLT: Cyclic Overlapping Lottery Tickets for Faster Pruning of Convolutional Neural Networks
Pruning refers to the elimination of trivial weights from neural networks.
The sub-networks within an overparameterized model produced after pruning are
often called Lottery tickets. This research aims to generate winning lottery
tickets from a set of lottery tickets that can achieve similar accuracy to the
original unpruned network. We introduce a novel winning ticket called Cyclic
Overlapping Lottery Ticket (COLT) by data splitting and cyclic retraining of
the pruned network from scratch. We apply a cyclic pruning algorithm that keeps
only the overlapping weights of different pruned models trained on different
data segments. Our results demonstrate that COLT can achieve similar accuracies
(obtained by the unpruned model) while maintaining high sparsities. We show
that the accuracy of COLT is on par with the winning tickets of Lottery Ticket
Hypothesis (LTH) and, at times, is better. Moreover, COLTs can be generated
using fewer iterations than tickets generated by the popular Iterative
Magnitude Pruning (IMP) method. In addition, we also notice COLTs generated on
large datasets can be transferred to small ones without compromising
performance, demonstrating its generalizing capability. We conduct all our
experiments on Cifar-10, Cifar-100 & TinyImageNet datasets and report superior
performance than the state-of-the-art methods
LumiNet: The Bright Side of Perceptual Knowledge Distillation
In knowledge distillation literature, feature-based methods have dominated
due to their ability to effectively tap into extensive teacher models. In
contrast, logit-based approaches, which aim to distill `dark knowledge' from
teachers, typically exhibit inferior performance compared to feature-based
methods. To bridge this gap, we present LumiNet, a novel knowledge distillation
algorithm designed to enhance logit-based distillation. We introduce the
concept of 'perception', aiming to calibrate logits based on the model's
representation capability. This concept addresses overconfidence issues in
logit-based distillation method while also introducing a novel method to
distill knowledge from the teacher. It reconstructs the logits of a
sample/instances by considering relationships with other samples in the batch.
LumiNet excels on benchmarks like CIFAR-100, ImageNet, and MSCOCO,
outperforming leading feature-based methods, e.g., compared to KD with ResNet18
and MobileNetV2 on ImageNet, it shows improvements of 1.5% and 2.05%,
respectively
Hematology and serum chemistry reference values of stray dogs in Bangladesh
Hematology and serum chemistry values were obtained from 28 male and 22 female stray dogs in Chittagong Metropolitan area, Bangladesh. The goal of the study was to establish reference value for hematology and serum chemistry for these semi wild animals in relation to age, sex, reproductive stage and body condition. No significant differences were found for mean values of hemoglobin, packed cell volume, mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration, white blood cell, differential leukocyte count, total protein, albumin, glucose, cholesterol, phosphorus and potassium among or between sexes, ages, reproductive states or body conditions. Significant differences were noted for erythrocyte sedimentation rate (p<0.02) between sexes. Among different age groups significant differences were found for total red blood cell count (p<0.001). Different body conditions have significant differences in red blood cell count, mean corpuscular volume and mean corpuscular hemoglobin (p<0.001). Pregnant and non-pregnant females differed significantly in their red blood cell count, mean corpuscular volume and mean corpuscular hemoglobin (p<0.001)
Oral Health Behavior and Dental Caries status: A comparative study between rural and urban school-going children in Dhaka Division
Introduction: The importance of oral health in children is paramount. Proper techniques of brushing and the influence of fermentable carbohydrates in dental caries should be taught at the early childhood stage.
Objective: To estimate the mean deft, DMFT, Oral health-related behavior, and practice among the selected rural and urban school-going children in Bangladesh.
Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional study carried out among 593 (152 rural and 441 urban children) school children using the purposive sampling technique. Data were collected from 3 urban schools and 1 rural school, using an interview-based structured questionnaire and oral examination. Consent was taken both from the college authority and participants before data collection. Descriptive analysis was performed. Results and Discussion: The study was carried out among 593 school children with an age range between below 5 years to above 15 years old. The majority of the students at urban schools brush their teeth twice daily while most rural school children brush their teeth once daily. Most of the students use toothbrushes and toothpaste as cleaning aids, however, the majority of them usually brush before meals. In addition, the majority of the students at rural and urban schools do not brush their teeth after taking sweet foods. Mean deft in deciduous teeth is high among rural school children (2.07) while mean DMFT in permanent teeth is high among urban schools.
Conclusion: Organized and systemic community oral health promotion should be strengthened and a prevention-oriented oral health system is needed for promoting future oral self-care practices among school children
Performance of a hermetic device and neem (Azadirachta indica) in storing wheat seed: Evidence from participatory household trials in central Bangladesh
Smallholder farmers in Bangladesh often use low-density polyethylene (LDPE) bags contained within woven polypropylene bags to store wheat seed during the summer monsoon that precedes winter season planting. High humidity and temperature during this period can encourage increased seed moisture and pests, thereby lowering seed quality. Following a farm household survey conducted to inform trial design, eighty farmers were engaged in an action research process in which they participated in designing and conducting trials comparing traditional and alternative seed storage methods over 30 weeks. Factorial treatments included comparison of hermetic SuperGrainbags® (Premium RZ) against LDPE bags, both with and without the addition of dried neem tree leaves (Azadirachta indica). SuperGrainbags® were more effective in maintaining seed moisture at acceptable levels close to pre-storage conditions than LDPE bags. Both seed germination and seedling coleoptile length were significantly greater in hermetic than LDPE bags. Neem had no effect on seed moisture, germination, or coleoptile length. SuperGrainbags® were also more effective in abating seed damage during storage, although inclusion of neem within LDPE bags also had significant damage. Quantification of seed predating insects and diseases suggested that SuperGrainbags® also suppressed Coleopteran pests and blackspot, the latter indicative of Fusarium graminearum. Conversely, where farmers used LDPE bags, neem also had an additional though limited pest suppressive effect. Post-storage treatment scoring by farmers revealed a strong preference for SuperGrainbags® and no preference differences for or against neem. This study demonstrates a process by which farmers can be involved in the participatory co-design and testing of alternative wheat storage options, and stresses the need to develop SuperGrainbag® supply chains so hermetic storage can be made widely available
Prevalence and Diversity of Avian Haematozoan Parasites in Wetlands of Bangladesh
The parasites of genera Haemoproteus, Plasmodium, and Leucocytozoon are well-known avian haematozoa and can cause declined productivity and high mortality in wild birds. The objective of the study was to record the prevalence of haematozoan parasites in a wide range of wetland birds in Bangladesh. Six species of Haemoproteus, seven species of Plasmodium, one unidentified species of Leucocytozoon, and one unidentified microfilaria of the genus Paronchocerca were found. Data on the morphology, size, hosts, prevalence, and infection intensity of the parasites are provided. The overall prevalence among the birds was 29.5% (95 out of 322 birds). Of those, 13.2% (42 of 319) of birds were infected with Haemoproteus spp., 15.1% with Plasmodium spp. (48 of 319) and 0.6% with Leucocytozoon spp. (2 of 319). Two birds were positive for both Haemoproteus sp. and Plasmodium sp. A single resident bird, Ardeola grayii, was found positive for an unidentified microfilaria. Prevalence of infection varied significantly among different bird families. Wild birds of Bangladesh carry several types of haematozoan parasites. Further investigation with a larger sample size is necessary to estimate more accurately the prevalence of haematozoan parasites among wild birds as well as domestic ducks for better understanding of the disease ecology
BaDLAD: A Large Multi-Domain Bengali Document Layout Analysis Dataset
While strides have been made in deep learning based Bengali Optical Character
Recognition (OCR) in the past decade, the absence of large Document Layout
Analysis (DLA) datasets has hindered the application of OCR in document
transcription, e.g., transcribing historical documents and newspapers.
Moreover, rule-based DLA systems that are currently being employed in practice
are not robust to domain variations and out-of-distribution layouts. To this
end, we present the first multidomain large Bengali Document Layout Analysis
Dataset: BaDLAD. This dataset contains 33,695 human annotated document samples
from six domains - i) books and magazines, ii) public domain govt. documents,
iii) liberation war documents, iv) newspapers, v) historical newspapers, and
vi) property deeds, with 710K polygon annotations for four unit types:
text-box, paragraph, image, and table. Through preliminary experiments
benchmarking the performance of existing state-of-the-art deep learning
architectures for English DLA, we demonstrate the efficacy of our dataset in
training deep learning based Bengali document digitization models
Temporal flowability evolution of slag-based self-compacting concrete with recycled concrete aggregate
The addition of by-products, such as recycled concrete aggregate and ground granulated blast furnace slag, modify the in-fresh flowability of ordinary self-compacting concrete both initially and over time. A detailed study is presented in this paper of 18 mixtures (SF3 slump-flow class) containing 100% coarse recycled concrete aggregate, two types of cement (CEM I or CEM III/A, the latter with 45% ground granulated blast furnace slag), different contents of fine recycled concrete aggregate (0, 50, or 100%), and three different aggregate powders (ultra-fine limestone powder <0.063 mm, limestone fines 0/0.5 mm, and recycled concrete aggregate 0/0.5 mm). The temporal evolution of slump flow, viscosity, and passing ability, and the values of segregation resistance, air content, fresh and hardened density, and compressive strength were evaluated in all the mixtures. The addition of fine recycled concrete aggregate and CEM III/A improved initial slump flow and passing ability by 6%, due to their higher proportion of fines. Nevertheless, the temporal loss of flowability within 60 min was 5.8% lower when adding natural aggregate and CEM I. Viscosity and air content increased 26% on average following additions of fine recycled concrete aggregate, unlike with additions of ground granulated blast furnace slag. Flowability and strength increased with the addition of limestone fines 0/0.5 mm. According to multi-criteria analyses, the mixtures with CEM III/A, 50% fine recycled concrete aggregate, and limestone fines 0/0.5 mm showed an optimal balance between their flowability (SF2 slump-flow class 60 min after the mixing process), compressive strengths (around 60 MPa), and carbon footprints.Spanish Ministry MCIU, AEI and ERDF [grant numbers FPU17/03374 and RTI 2018-097079-B-C31]; the Junta de Castilla y LeĂłn (Regional Government) and ERDF [grant number UIC-231, BU119P17]; the Youth Employment Initiative (JCyL) and ESF [grant number UBU05B_1274]; the University of Burgos [grant number SUCONS, Y135. GI], UPV/EHU (PPGA20/26) and, finally, our thanks also to the Basque Government research group IT1314-19
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