Urdu intonation

The current study is an analysis of an Urdu speech corpus using a Tone and Break Indices (ToBI) transcription system to develop a model of Urdu intonation. The analysis indicates that Urdu has three pitch accents (L*, L*+H, H*) and boundary tones associated to two phrase types: accentual phrase (AP) boundaries (Ha, La) and intonational phrase (IP) boundaries (L%, H%, LH%). The AP is a pitch bearing unit on a single word, or more than one word in the context of (a) izāfat, (b) conjunctive vāo, (c) case markers, (d) complex postpositions, and (e) complex verbs. Moreover, this study also investigates the tonal structure of declarative, interrogative (wh-questions, yes/no-questions), and imperative (semi-honorific, polite honorific) sentences in neutral focus context using 50 utterances produced by ten speakers. Results indicate that (i) all declarative sentences consist of a series of APs, represented as (aL) L* (H) Ha, except the sentence final AP, represented as (H*) L%. (ii) wh-questions are different from their corresponding declaratives in terms of pitch range and the final boundary tone; (iii) imperatives are different form their corresponding declaratives in terms of final boundary tone

Prevalence of Dental Caries and its Association with Risk Factors amongst Preschool Children of Bharakahu, Islamabad

Background: It is necessary to understand the prevalence and pattern of distribution of dental caries for better planning and execution of preventive activities in the right dimension. This study provided the base line data about prevalence of dental caries in pre-school children of Bharakahu, Islamabad, and its association with brushing, sugar consumption and previous dental visits. Material and Methods: A total of 384 preschool children aged 3-5-year-old were screened from periurban area of Bharakahu, Islamabad, using type IV screening method. Data about decayed, missing and filled teeth was recorded using decayed-missing-filled teeth (DMFT) index. Socio-demographics, brushing, sugar consumption and previous dental visits were also recorded and analyzed and their association with dental caries was assessed using Chi square and Odds ratio. Results: The overall caries prevalence among the sample was 49%. The mean DMFT score with 1 SD was 2.07±3.215. There was no significant difference in caries prevalence in relation to gender of the children. The most significant association was for brushing and low DMFT. Children who brushed their teeth were 4 times more likely to have a low DMFT score of <1 than those who did not brush at all (P<0.001). Likewise, those who had visited a dentist in the past were twice more likely to have a low DMFT (P=0.003). The association of low sugar consumption and a low DMFT score was statistically insignificant (OR 1.4; P=0.878). Hence, brushing turned out to be the most significant factor in determining the caries experience for a child. Conclusions: This study provided us with the baseline data regarding the prevalence of caries in primary school going children of Bharakahu. The prevalence of unmet dental treatment needs was reflected through a high number of ‘decayed teeth’ as compared to missing and filled ones highlighting the need for restorative care in these children

A framework of network connectivity management in multi-clouds infrastructure

The network function virtualization (NFV) transformation is gaining an incredible momentum from mobile operators as one of the significant solutions to improve the resource allocation and system scalability in fifth-generation (5G) networks. However, the ultra-dense deployments in 5G create high volumes of traffic that pushes the physical and virtual resources of cloud-based networks to edge limits. Consider a distributed cloud, replacing the core network with virtual entities in the form of virtual network functions (VNFs) still requires efficient integration with various underlying hardware technologies. Therefore, orchestrating the distribution of load between cloud geo-datacenters starts by instantiating a virtual and physical network typologies that connect involved front haul with relevant VNFs. In this article, we provide a framework to manage calls within 5G network clusters for efficient utilization of computational resources and also to prevent unnecessary signaling. We also propose a new scheme to instantiate virtual tunnels for call forwarding between network clusters leading to new logic networks that combine geo-datacenters and fronthaul. To facilitate service chaining in cloud, we propose a new enhanced management and orchestration (E-MANO) architecture that brings network traffic policies from the application layer tothe fronthaul for instant monitoring of available resources. We provide analysis and testbed results in support of our proposals. the fronthaul for instant monitoring of available resources. We provide analysis and testbed results in support of our proposals

Characterising the progress in HIV/AIDS research in the Middle East and North Africa.

OBJECTIVES: The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is perceived to have limited HIV data. The objective of this study was to quantitatively characterise the progress in HIV research in this region since the discovery of the epidemic. METHODS: Four indices were defined and implemented to measure the progress of HIV research using the PubMed, Embase, MENA HIV/AIDS Epidemiology Synthesis Project and US Census Bureau HIV/AIDS Surveillance databases. The four indices provide complementary measures to characterise different aspects of the progress of HIV research. RESULTS: A total of 2118, 2352, 683 and 4889 records were identified through the PubMed, the Embase, the Synthesis Project and the HIV Prevalence indices, respectively. The proportion of the total global HIV records that relate to MENA is 1.2%. Overall, the indices show steady progress in the number of new records every year, with an accelerated pace in the last few years. The rate of progress in MENA was also higher than the rate of progress in HIV records globally. There is no evidence so far of stabilisation or a peak in the number of new records year by year. About half of the records were produced after the year 2005. The number of records shows large heterogeneity across countries. CONCLUSIONS: MENA has witnessed a rapid growth in HIV research over the last decade. However, there are still large gaps in HIV scientific evidence in the region, and the progress is far from being uniform across countries. Ongoing and future research needs to be geared towards academic standard and production of scientific publications

Mobile Application Usability Evaluation : A Study Based on Demography

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Machine learning and multi-dimension features based adaptive intrusion detection in ICN

As a new network architecture, Information-Centric Networks (ICN) has great advantages in content distribution and can better meet our needs. But it faced with many threats unavoidably. There are four types of attack in ICN: naming related attacks, routing related attacks, caching related attacks and miscellaneous attacks. These attacks will undermine the availability of ICN, the confidentiality and privacy of data. In addition, routers store a large amount of content for the users' request, and it is necessary to protect these intermediate nodes. Since the styles of content stored in nodes are not the same, using a unified set of intrusion detection rules simply will cause a large number of false positives and false negatives. Therefore, every node should perform intrusion detection according to its own characteristics. In this paper, we propose an intrusion detection mechanism to alert for abnormal packets. We introduce a extensive solution using machine learning for attacks in ICN. Moreover, the nodes in this scheme can adapt to the external environment and intelligently detect packets. Simulation on the machine learning algorithm involved prove that the algorithm is effective and suitable for network packets

Enabling digital grid for industrial revolution: self-healing cyber resilient platform

The key market objectives driving digital grid development are to provide sustainable, reliable and secure network systems that can support variety of applications against any potential cyber attacks. Therefore, there is an urgent demand to accelerate the development of intelligent Software-Defined Networking (SDN) platform that can address the tremendous challenges of data protection for digital resiliency. Modern grid technology tends to adopt distributed SDN controllers for further slicing power grid domain and protect the boundaries of electric data at network edges. To accommodate these issues, this article proposes an intelligent secure SDN controller for supporting digital grid resiliency, considering management coordination capability, to enable self-healing features and recovery of network traffic forwarding during service interruptions. A set of advanced features are employed in grid controllers to configure the network elements in response to possible disasters or link failures. In addition, various SDN topology scenarios are introduced for efficient coordination and configurations of network domains. Finally, to justify the potential advantages of intelligent secure SDN system, a case study is presented to evaluate the requirements of secure digital modern grid networks and pave the path towards the next phase of industry revolution

Optimization of non-orthogonal multiple access based visible light communication systems

In visible light communication (VLC), the data is transmitted by modulating the light emitting diode (LED). The data-rate is throttled by the narrow modulation bandwidth of LEDs, which becomes a barrier for attaining high transmission rates. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a new scheme envisioned to improve the system capacity. In addition to multiple access schemes, optimization techniques are applied to further improve the data rate. In this letter, convex optimization is applied to NOMA-based VLC system for downlink. The proposed optimization system is analyzed in terms of the bit error rate (BER) and the sum-rate