Processing of Threat-related Information Outside the Focus of Visual Attention

En el presente estudio se investiga si las palabras relativas a peligros se perciben fuera del campo de atención visual. En una tarea de decisión léxica se presentaron como estímulos de prueba palabras representativas de peligro, otras de contenido emocional positivo, y otras neutras. La palabra de prueba iba precedida por 2 palabras-contexto simultáneas (1 en posición foveal, en el centro del campo visual; 1 parafoveal, desplazada 2.2 grados a izquierda o derecha) durante 150 ms. Una de las palabras-contexto era idéntica a la de prueba o bien no estaba relacionada ésta. Los resultados mostraron facilitación en la tarea de decisión léxica para las palabras de peligro cuando estaban precedidas por una palabra idéntica en el campo parafoveal derecho. Se concluye que las palabras de peligro tienen un acceso privilegiado (en comparación con las neutras y con las positivas) para ser analizadas fuera del foco de atención. Esto revela un sesgo cognitivo en el procesamiento preferente y en paralelo de la información con importancia adaptativa.This study investigates whether threat-related words are especially likely to be perceived in unattended locations of the visual field. Threat-related, positive, and neutral words were presented at fixation as probes in a lexical decision task. The probe word was preceded by 2 simultaneous prime words (1 foveal, i.e., at fixation; 1 parafoveal, i.e., 2.2 deg. of visual angle from fixation), which were presented for 150 ms, one of which was either identical or unrelated to the probe. Results showed significant facilitation in lexical response times only for the probe threat words when primed parafoveally by an identical word presented in the right visual field. We conclude that threat-related words have privileged access to processing outside the focus of attention. This reveals a cognitive bias in the preferential, parallel processing of information that is important for adaptation

A Train-on-Target Strategy for Multilingual Spoken Language Understanding

[EN] There are two main strategies to adapt a Spoken Language Understanding system to deal with languages different from the original (source) language: test-on-source and train-on-target. In the train-ontarget approach, a new understanding model is trained in the target language, which is the language in which the test utterances are pronounced. To do this, a segmented and semantically labeled training set for each new language is needed. In this work, we use several general-purpose translators to obtain the translation of the training set and we apply an alignment process to automatically segment the training sentences. We have applied this train-on-target approach to estimate the understanding module of a Spoken Dialog System for the DIHANA task, which consists of an information system about train timetables and fares in Spanish. We present an evaluation of our train-on-target multilingual approach for two target languages, French and EnglishThis work has been partially funded by the project ASLP-MULAN: Audio, Speech and Language Processing for Multimedia Analytics (MEC TIN2014-54288-C4-3-R).García-Granada, F.; Segarra Soriano, E.; Millán, C.; Sanchís Arnal, E.; Hurtado Oliver, LF. (2016). A Train-on-Target Strategy for Multilingual Spoken Language Understanding. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 10077:224-233. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49169-1_22S22423310077Benedí, J.M., Lleida, E., Varona, A., Castro, M.J., Galiano, I., Justo, R., López de Letona, I., Miguel, A.: Design and acquisition of a telephone spontaneous speech dialogue corpus in Spanish: DIHANA. In: LREC 2006, pp. 1636–1639 (2006)Calvo, M., Hurtado, L.-F., García, F., Sanchís, E.: A Multilingual SLU system based on semantic decoding of graphs of words. In: Torre Toledano, D., Ortega Giménez, A., Teixeira, A., González Rodríguez, J., Hernández Gómez, L., San Segundo Hernández, R., Ramos Castro, D. (eds.) IberSPEECH 2012. CCIS, vol. 328, pp. 158–167. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-35292-8_17Calvo, M., Hurtado, L.F., Garca, F., Sanchis, E., Segarra, E.: Multilingual spoken language understanding using graphs and multiple translations. Comput. Speech Lang. 38, 86–103 (2016)Dinarelli, M., Moschitti, A., Riccardi, G.: Concept segmentation and labeling for conversational speech. In: Interspeech, Brighton, UK (2009)Esteve, Y., Raymond, C., Bechet, F., Mori, R.D.: Conceptual decoding for spoken dialog systems. In: Proceedings of EuroSpeech 2003, pp. 617–620 (2003)García, F., Hurtado, L., Segarra, E., Sanchis, E., Riccardi, G.: Combining multiple translation systems for spoken language understanding portability. In: Proceedings of IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT), pp. 282–289 (2012)Hahn, S., Dinarelli, M., Raymond, C., Lefèvre, F., Lehnen, P., De Mori, R., Moschitti, A., Ney, H., Riccardi, G.: Comparing stochastic approaches to spoken language understanding in multiple languages. IEEE Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process. 6(99), 1569–1583 (2010)He, Y., Young, S.: A data-driven spoken language understanding system. In: Proceedings of ASRU 2003, pp. 583–588 (2003)Hurtado, L., Segarra, E., García, F., Sanchis, E.: Language understanding using n-multigram models. In: Vicedo, J.L., Martínez-Barco, P., Muńoz, R., Saiz Noeda, M. (eds.) EsTAL 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3230, pp. 207–219. Springer, Heidelberg (2004). doi: 10.1007/978-3-540-30228-5_19Jabaian, B., Besacier, L., Lefèvre, F.: Comparison and combination of lightly supervised approaches for language portability of a spoken language understanding system. IEEE Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process. 21(3), 636–648 (2013)Koehn, P., et al.: Moses: open source toolkit for statistical machine translation. In: Proceedings of ACL Demonstration Session, pp. 177–180 (2007)Lafferty, J., McCallum, A., Pereira, F.: Conditional random fields: probabilistic models for segmenting and labeling sequence data. In: International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 282–289. Citeseer (2001)Lefèvre, F.: Dynamic Bayesian networks and discriminative classifiers for multi-stage semantic interpretation. In: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2007, vol. 4, pp. 13–16. IEEE (2007)Ortega, L., Galiano, I., Hurtado, L.F., Sanchis, E., Segarra, E.: A statistical segment-based approach for spoken language understanding. In: Proceedings of InterSpeech 2010, Makuhari, Chiba, Japan, pp. 1836–1839 (2010)Segarra, E., Sanchis, E., Galiano, M., García, F., Hurtado, L.: Extracting semantic information through automatic learning techniques. IJPRAI 16(3), 301–307 (2002)Servan, C., Camelin, N., Raymond, C., Bchet, F., Mori, R.D.: On the use of machine translation for spoken language understanding portability. In: Proceedings of ICASSP 2010, pp. 5330–5333 (2010)Tür, G., Mori, R.D.: Spoken Language Understanding: Systems for Extracting Semantic Information from Speech, 1st edn. Wiley, Hoboken (2011

Formation of bubbles and droplets in microfluidic systems

This mini-review reports the recent advances in the hydrodynamic techniques for formation of bubbles of gas in liquid in microfluidic systems. Systems comprising ducts that have widths of the order of 100 micrometers produce suspensions of bubbles with narrow size distributions. Certain of these systems have the ability to tune the volume fraction of the gaseous phase – over the whole range from zero to one. The rate of flow of the liquids through the devices determines the mechanism of formation of the bubbles – from break-up controlled by the rate of flow of the liquid (at low capillary numbers, and in the presence of strong confinement by the walls of the microchannels), to dynamics dominated by inertial effects (at high Weber numbers). The region of transition between these two regimes exhibits nonlinear behaviours, with period doubling cascades and irregular bubbling as prominent examples. Microfluidic systems provide new and uniquely controlled methods for generation of bubbles, and offer potential applications in micro-flow chemical processing, synthesis of materials, and fluidic optics.The U.S. Department of Energy DE-FG02- 00ER45852Foundation for Polish ScienceMinisterio de Educación y Ciencia de España DPI2002-04305-C02-02

Uniform non-stoichiometric titanium nitride thin films for improved kinetic inductance detector array

We describe the fabrication of homogeneous sub-stoichiometric titanium nitride films for microwave kinetic inductance detector (mKID) arrays. Using a 6 inch sputtering target and a homogeneous nitrogen inlet, the variation of the critical temperature over a 2 inch wafer was reduced to <25 %. Measurements of a 132-pixel mKID array from these films reveal a sensitivity of 16 kHz/pW in the 100 GHz band, comparable to the best aluminium mKIDs. We measured a noise equivalent power of NEP = 3.6e-15 W/Hz^(1/2). Finally, we describe possible routes to further improve the performance of these TiN mKID arrays.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Journal of low temperature physics, Proceedings of LTD-1

Can Europe recover without credit?

Data from 135 countries covering five decades suggests that creditless recoveries, in which the stock of real credit does not return to the pre-crisis level for three years after the GDP trough, are not rare and are characterised by remarkable real GDP growth rates: 4.7 percent per year in middle-income countries and 3.2 percent per year in high-income countries. However, the implications of these historical episodes for the current European situation are limited, for two main reasons. First, creditless recoveries are much less common in highincome countries, than in low-income countries which are financially undeveloped. European economies heavily depend on bank loans and research suggests that loan supply played a major role in the recent weak credit performance of Europe. There are reasons to believe that, despite various efforts, normal lending has not yet been restored. Limited loan supply could be disruptive for the European economic recovery and there has been only a minor substitution of bank loans with debt securities. Second, creditless recoveries were associated with significant real exchange rate depreciation, which has hardly occurred so far in most of Europe. This stylised fact suggests that it might be difficult to re-establish economic growth in the absence of sizeable real exchange rate depreciation, if credit growth does not return

Solar oxygen abundance using SST/CRISP center-to-limb observations of the O I 7772 \r{A} line

Solar oxygen abundance measurements based on the O I near-infrared triplet have been a much-debated subject for several decades since non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (NLTE) calculations with 3D radiation-hydrodynamics model atmospheres introduced a large change to the 1D LTE modelling. In this work, we aim to test solar line formation across the solar disk using new observations obtained with the SST/CRISP instrument. The observed dataset is based on a spectroscopic mosaic stretching from disk center to the solar limb. By comparing the state-of-the-art 3D NLTE models with the data, we find that the 3D NLTE models provide an excellent description of line formation across the disk. We obtain an abundance value of $A(\mathrm{O}) = (8.73 \pm 0.03)$ dex, with a very small angular dispersion across the disk. We conclude that spectroscopic mosaics are excellent probes for geometric and physical properties of hydrodynamics models and non-LTE line formation.Comment: Accepted in A&

Spin injection in Silicon at zero magnetic field

In this letter, we show efficient electrical spin injection into a SiGe based \textit{p-i-n} light emitting diode from the remanent state of a perpendicularly magnetized ferromagnetic contact. Electron spin injection is carried out through an alumina tunnel barrier from a Co/Pt thin film exhibiting a strong out-of-plane anisotropy. The electrons spin polarization is then analysed through the circular polarization of emitted light. All the light polarization measurements are performed without an external applied magnetic field \textit{i.e.} in remanent magnetic states. The light polarization as a function of the magnetic field closely traces the out-of-plane magnetization of the Co/Pt injector. We could achieve a circular polarization degree of the emitted light of 3 % at 5 K. Moreover this light polarization remains almost constant at least up to 200 K.Comment: accepted in AP

Lumped element kinetic inductance detectors maturity for space-borne instruments in the range between 80 and 180 GHz

This work intends to give the state-of-the-art of our knowledge of the performance of LEKIDs at millimetre wavelengths (from 80 to 180~GHz). We evaluate their optical sensitivity under typical background conditions and their interaction with ionising particles. Two LEKID arrays, originally designed for ground-based applications and composed of a few hundred pixels each, operate at a central frequency of 100, and 150~GHz ($\Delta \nu / \nu$ about 0.3). Their sensitivities have been characterised in the laboratory using a dedicated closed-circle 100~mK dilution cryostat and a sky simulator, allowing for the reproduction of realistic, space-like observation conditions. The impact of cosmic rays has been evaluated by exposing the LEKID arrays to alpha particles ($^{241}$Am) and X sources ($^{109}$Cd) with a readout sampling frequency similar to the ones used for Planck HFI (about 200~Hz), and also with a high resolution sampling level (up to 2~MHz) in order to better characterise and interpret the observed glitches. In parallel, we have developed an analytical model to rescale the results to what would be observed by such a LEKID array at the second Lagrangian point.Comment: 7 pages, 2 tables, 13 figure

Preassociative aggregation functions

The classical property of associativity is very often considered in aggregation function theory and fuzzy logic. In this paper we provide axiomatizations of various classes of preassociative functions, where preassociativity is a generalization of associativity recently introduced by the authors. These axiomatizations are based on existing characterizations of some noteworthy classes of associative operations, such as the class of Acz\'elian semigroups and the class of t-norms.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1309.730