Data Reduction in the String Space for Efficient kNN Classification through Space Partitioning

Within the Pattern Recognition field, two representations are generally considered for encoding the data: statistical codifications, which describe elements as feature vectors, and structural representations, which encode elements as high-level symbolic data structures such as strings, trees or graphs. While the vast majority of classifiers are capable of addressing statistical spaces, only some particular methods are suitable for structural representations. The kNN classifier constitutes one of the scarce examples of algorithms capable of tackling both statistical and structural spaces. This method is based on the computation of the dissimilarity between all the samples of the set, which is the main reason for its high versatility, but in turn, for its low efficiency as well. Prototype Generation is one of the possibilities for palliating this issue. These mechanisms generate a reduced version of the initial dataset by performing data transformation and aggregation processes on the initial collection. Nevertheless, these generation processes are quite dependent on the data representation considered, being not generally well defined for structural data. In this work we present the adaptation of the generation-based reduction algorithm Reduction through Homogeneous Clusters to the case of string data. This algorithm performs the reduction by partitioning the space into class-homogeneous clusters for then generating a representative prototype as the median value of each group. Thus, the main issue to tackle is the retrieval of the median element of a set of strings. Our comprehensive experimentation comparatively assesses the performance of this algorithm in both the statistical and the string-based spaces. Results prove the relevance of our approach by showing a competitive compromise between classification rate and data reduction.This research work was partially funded by “Programa I+D+i de la Generalitat Valenciana” through grant ACIF/2019/ 042 and the Spanish Ministry through HISPAMUS project TIN2017-86576-R, partially funded by the EU

Omaisten saama tuki ja selviytymiskeinot läheisen kuoltua

Krueger, Merja. Omaisten saama tuki ja selviytymiskeinot läheisen kuoltua. Diak Länsi, Pori, kevät 2012, 41 s., 2 liitettä. Daikonia-ammattikorkeakoulu, sosiaalialan koulutusohjelma, Diakonisen sosiaalityön suuntautumisvaihtoehto, sosionomi (AMK)+ diakonian virkakelpoisuus. Opinnäytetyö pohjautuu tutkimukselliseen tietoon. Empiirisen aineiston avulla haettiin vastausta tutkimuskysymykseen siitä, mistä läheisensä menettäneet saivat tukea ja apua silloin, kun heitä kohtasi ehkä elämänsä vaikein tilanne. Tutkimus toi samalla esille kunnan ja seurakunnan palvelutarjontaa läheisensä menettäneille. Tavoitteena oli selvittää, mistä omaiset saivat apua, minkälaista tuki oli ja kokivatko he sen tarpeelliseksi. Aineiston keruumenetelminä käytettiin kirjallisuutta, lehtiartikkeleita, opinnäytetöitä, www-sivustoja, paikallisen kunnan ja seurakunnan työntekijöiden asiantuntemusta sekä vuosina 2000 - 2010 kuolleiden henkilöiden omaisten kokemuksia. Kunnan ja seurakunnan työntekijät kertoivat vapaamuotoisesti palvelutarjonnastaan ja käytännöistään heille asetettujen kysymysten turvin. Omaisten kokemuksia koottiin haastatteluilla kyselylomakkeen avulla, joka suoritettiin henkilökohtaisesti paikkakunnan hautausmaalla. Kyselyyn osallistuivat 12 henkilöä, joista yksi oli mies ja loput naisia. Lähestymistapa opinnäytetyön aineiston keruu- ja analysointimenetelmiin oli pääsääntöisesti fenomenologisen tutkimuksen kvalitatiivista sisällön analyysiä. tutkimuksessa pyrittiin ymmärtämään inhimillisen toiminnan ja kokemuksen subjektiivista merkitystä silloin, kun ihminen on menettänyt läheisensä. Päätulokset osoittivat, että läheisten tuki oli merkittävintä pienellä paikkakunnalla, jossa sukulaisia oli runsaasti ja ihmiset tunsivat naapurustonsa. Vaikeuksia ei myöskään ollut tarpeellisen avun hakemisessa eri palveluntuottajilta niiden näkyvyyden vuoksi. Johtopäätöksenä voi pitää sitä, että tukitoimenpiteitä läheisensä menettäneille oli myös pienellä paikkakunnalla saatavissa, jos asianomainen vain halusi hakeutua niiden piiriin tai ottaa niitä vastaan. Luonnollisesti pienen paikkakunnan palvelutarjonta oli kapea-alaista, mutta tarvittaessa apua sai pyytää myös naapurikunnista ja -seurakunnista.Krueger, Merja. Relatives to Receive Subsidies And Coping Ways after The Death of a Close. 41 p., 2 appendices. Language: Finnish. Pori, Autumn 2012. Diaconia University of Applied Sciences. Degree Programme in Social Services, Option in Diaconal Social Work. Degree: Bachelor of Social Services + Deacon. The thesis based on researched empirical data. Using these data, the aim was to answer how people who had lost their near relatives got support in the situation, where they faced one of the most difficult situations in their lives. The thesis also found out what kind of services the municipality and the congregation provided to the bereaved. The research questions were, where the bereaved got support, what the quality of the support was and if they considered it valuable? The data were collected from literature, articles, theses, Internet repositories, specialists in local municipality and congregation and from interviewing people who had lost their family member during 2000 – 2010. The specialists casually explained their supply of services and their institutions. The experiences of the bereaved were collected by an enquiry conducted personally at the graveyard of the municipality. In all, 12 closest relatives responded. One of them was male and eleven female. The approach to collecting data and the analysis of the material were mainly phenomenological qualitative content analysis. The thesis was trying to understand the subjective meaning of human behaviour and experience in a situation where a family member had passed away. The main results were proved, that in a small municipality, where one had lots of relatives and people knew their neighbours, the support given by the family and intimate friends was considered most important. It seems that it was not difficult to ask for support when needed from different service providers because of their broad coverage. The conclusion was that measures of support for the bereaved was also in a small municipality, if the bereaved considered it necessary. Naturally, the services of a small municipality were restricted, but help could be solicited on demand from nearby municipalities and congregations. Keywords: death, sorrow, social services, relatives, social work done by a church, suppor

Equilibrios minerales y zonación de granates en el nucleo del domo del Tormes (provincias de Salamanca y Zamora)

El estudio de la zonación en 1os granates de gneises pelíticos pertenecientes al núcleo del domo del Tormes indica el carácter retrógrado de estos y confirma la existencia de las siguientes reacciones observadas petrográficamente en anteriores trabajos: Gt+Als+Qz+H,O -> Cd ; Bi+Als+Qz -> Cd+Fk+H,O ; Bi+Als+Qz->Gt+Cd+Fk+H20; CaGt+Als+Qz ->Capl. El conocimiento de 1os campos de estabilidad de las reacciones que se producen en estas rocas y las observaciones petrográficas indican que ha tenido lugar la reacción de retrogradación Cd+Fk+H,O --> Bi+Mu+Qz, siendo probable además que parte del granate se haya formado según Bi+Mu+Qz -> Gt+Fk+H,O. Finalmente se propone una trayectoria P-T para 1os estadios finales de evolución del núcleo del domo basada en 1os anteriores equilibrios y en sus campos de estabilidad teóricos.Garnets in the Tormes dome core area show a conspicuous retrograde diffusion zoning. The Fe, Mg, Ca, and Mn distribution in this mineral is consistent whith the reactions Gt+Als+Qz+H,O > Cd; Bi+Als+Qz -> Cd+Fk+H,O;Bi+Als+Qz -> Gt+Cd+Fk+H,O CaGt+Als+Qz-> CaPl petrographicaly predicted in previous papers. In addition, petrographic observations contrasted with a petrogenetic grid developed for these rocks suggest that reactions Cd+Fk+H,O -> Bi+Mu+Qz and Gt+Fk+H,O -> Bi+Mu+Qz take place. Previous data allow to draw a semiquantitative P-T-t path for the latest metamorphic stages

Domain adaptation for staff-region retrieval of music score images

Optical music recognition (OMR) is the field that studies how to automatically read music notation from score images. One of the relevant steps within the OMR workflow is the staff-region retrieval. This process is a key step because any undetected staff will not be processed by the subsequent steps. This task has previously been addressed as a supervised learning problem in the literature; however, ground-truth data are not always available, so each new manuscript requires a preliminary manual annotation. This situation is one of the main bottlenecks in OMR, because of the countless number of existing manuscripts , and the associated manual labeling cost. With the aim of mitigating this issue, we propose the application of a domain adaptation technique, the so-called Domain-Adversarial Neural Network (DANN), based on a combination of a gradient reversal layer and a domain classifier in the inference neural architecture. The results from our experiments support the benefits of our proposed solution, obtaining improvements of approximately 29% in the F-score.Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. This paper is part of the I+D+i PID2020-118447RA-I00 (MultiScore) project funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. The first author acknowledges support from the “Programa I+D+i de la Generalitat Valenciana” through grants ACIF/2019/042 and CIBEFP/2021/72. This work also draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (895-2013-1012) and the Fonds de recherche du Québec-Société et Culture (2022-SE3-303927)

Region-based layout analysis of music score images

The Layout Analysis (LA) stage is of vital importance to the correct performance of an Optical Music Recognition (OMR) system. It identifies the regions of interest, such as staves or lyrics, which must then be processed in order to transcribe their content. Despite the existence of modern approaches based on deep learning, an exhaustive study of LA in OMR has not yet been carried out with regard to the performance of different models, their generalization to different domains or, more importantly, their impact on subsequent stages of the pipeline. This work focuses on filling this gap in the literature by means of an experimental study of different neural architectures, music document types, and evaluation scenarios. The need for training data has also led to a proposal for a new semi-synthetic data-generation technique that enables the efficient applicability of LA approaches in real scenarios. Our results show that: (i) the choice of the model and its performance are crucial for the entire transcription process; (ii) the metrics commonly used to evaluate the LA stage do not always correlate with the final performance of the OMR system, and (iii) the proposed data-generation technique enables state-of-the-art results to be achieved with a limited set of labeled data.This paper is part of the I+D+i PID2020-118447RA-I00 (MultiScore) project funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, Spain and the GV/2020/030, Spain project funded by the Generalitat Valenciana, Spain. The first and third authors acknowledge support from the “Programa I+D+i de la Generalitat Valenciana, Spain ” through grants ACIF/2019/042 and ACIF/2021/356, respectively

Corona discharge characteristics of narrow coaxial wire- pipe discharge tubes with gas flow

An experimental investigation has been conducted to study corona discharge in a narrow tube. Narrow or capillary corona discharge (dis- charge tube diameter d = 1 to 20 mm) is used for many industrial applications such as flue gas cleaning corona induced plasma reactors, ion sources and electrohydrodynamic heat exchangers. In this work, corona discharge characteristics of narrow coaxial wire-pipe discharge tubes with gas flow are experimentally investigated. The results show that, unlike normal corona discharge, a hysteresis in the corona discharge current-voltage characteristics were observed for narrow tube discharges. The on-set of the corona discharge observed to be significantly depends on the gas temperature and gas flow rates 1.588 cm 0.d. copper tube was placed coaxially outside the system. Entrance and exit gas temperature of the wire-pipe corona discharge zone and outer-grounded pipe gas cooling zone were measured by T-type thermocouples. Time-averaged current was measured by the Keithly electrometer, and air flow rate in both flow channels was measured by a rotameter. The air flow flowing through the corona discharge zone was electrically heated at upstream of the system. Experiments are conducted for the gas flow rate from 0 to 20 [/min., the inlet gas temperature from 10 to 60°C, and the applied voltage from 0 to It 10 k

Multimodal recognition of frustration during game-play with deep neural networks

Frustration, which is one aspect of the field of emotional recognition, is of particular interest to the video game industry as it provides information concerning each individual player’s level of engagement. The use of non-invasive strategies to estimate this emotion is, therefore, a relevant line of research with a direct application to real-world scenarios. While several proposals regarding the performance of non-invasive frustration recognition can be found in literature, they usually rely on hand-crafted features and rarely exploit the potential inherent to the combination of different sources of information. This work, therefore, presents a new approach that automatically extracts meaningful descriptors from individual audio and video sources of information using Deep Neural Networks (DNN) in order to then combine them, with the objective of detecting frustration in Game-Play scenarios. More precisely, two fusion modalities, namely decision-level and feature-level, are presented and compared with state-of-the-art methods, along with different DNN architectures optimized for each type of data. Experiments performed with a real-world audiovisual benchmarking corpus revealed that the multimodal proposals introduced herein are more suitable than those of a unimodal nature, and that their performance also surpasses that of other state-of-the–art approaches, with error rate improvements of between 40% and 90%.Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. The first author acknowledges the support from the Spanish “Ministerio de Educación y Formación Profesional” through grant 20CO1/000966. The second and third authors acknowledge support from the “Programa I+D+i de la Generalitat Valenciana” through grants ACIF/2019/042 and APOSTD/2020/256, respectively

The Use of Amniotic Membrane in the Management of Complex Chronic Wounds

Chronic wounds do not follow the usual wound healing process; instead, they are stuck in the inflammatory or proliferative phase. This is particularly evident in large, massive wounds with considerable tissue loss, which become senescent and do not epithelialize. In these wounds, we need to remove all the factors that prevent or delay normal wound healing. After that, soft tissue granulation is stimulated by local negative pressure therapy. Lastly, after the granulation is completed, the epithelialization process must be activated. Although a plethora of wound dressings and devices are available, chronic wounds persist as a unresolved medical concern. We have been using frozen amniotic membrane (AM) to treat this type of wounds with good results. Our studies have shown that AM is able to induce epithelialization in large wounds that were unable to epithelialize. AM induces several signaling pathways involved in cell migration and/or proliferation. Among those, we can highlight the mitogen‐activated protein kinase (MAPK) and Jun N‐terminal kinase (JNK) signaling pathways. Additionally, AM is able to selectively antagonise the anti-proliferative effect of TGFß by modifying its genetic program on keratinocytes. The combined effect of AM on keratinocytes, promoting cell proliferation/migration and antagonising TGFß-effect, is the perfect combination allowing chronic wounds to progress into epithelialization

Satellite Tracking of Manta Rays Highlights Challenges to Their Conservation

We describe the real-time movements of the last of the marine mega-vertebrate taxa to be satellite tracked – the giant manta ray (or devil fish, Manta birostris), the world's largest ray at over 6 m disc width. Almost nothing is known about manta ray movements and their environmental preferences, making them one of the least understood of the marine mega-vertebrates. Red listed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as ‘Vulnerable’ to extinction, manta rays are known to be subject to direct and incidental capture and some populations are declining. Satellite-tracked manta rays associated with seasonal upwelling events and thermal fronts off the Yucatan peninsula, Mexico, and made short-range shuttling movements, foraging along and between them. The majority of locations were received from waters shallower than 50 m deep, representing thermally dynamic and productive waters. Manta rays remained in the Mexican Exclusive Economic Zone for the duration of tracking but only 12% of tracking locations were received from within Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). Our results on the spatio-temporal distribution of these enigmatic rays highlight opportunities and challenges to management efforts

Clinical measurement of tooth wear: tooth Wear Indices

Attrition, erosion, and abrasion result in alterations to the tooth and manifest as tooth wear. Each classification corresponds to a different process with specific clinical features. Classifications made so far have no accurate prevalence data because the indexes do not necessarily measure a specific etiology, or because the study populations can be diverse in age and characteristics. Tooth wears (attrition, erosion and abrasion) is perceived internationally as a growing problem. However, the interpretation and comparison of clinical and epidemiological studies, it is increasingly difficult because of differences in terminology and the large number of indicators/indices that have been developed for the diagnosis, classification and monitoring of the loss of dental hard tissue. These indices have been designed to identify increasing severity and are usually numerical, none have universal acceptance, complicating the evaluation of the true increase in prevalence reported. This article considers the ideal requirements for an erosion index. A literature review is conducted with the aim of analyzing the evolution of the indices used today and discuss whether they meet the clinical needs and research in dentistr