Crowd Saliency Detection via Global Similarity Structure

It is common for CCTV operators to overlook inter- esting events taking place within the crowd due to large number of people in the crowded scene (i.e. marathon, rally). Thus, there is a dire need to automate the detection of salient crowd regions acquiring immediate attention for a more effective and proactive surveillance. This paper proposes a novel framework to identify and localize salient regions in a crowd scene, by transforming low-level features extracted from crowd motion field into a global similarity structure. The global similarity structure representation allows the discovery of the intrinsic manifold of the motion dynamics, which could not be captured by the low-level representation. Ranking is then performed on the global similarity structure to identify a set of extrema. The proposed approach is unsupervised so learning stage is eliminated. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of exploiting such extrema in identifying salient regions in various crowd scenarios that exhibit crowding, local irregular motion, and unique motion areas such as sources and sinks.Comment: Accepted in ICPR 2014 (Oral). Mei Kuan Lim and Ven Jyn Kok share equal contribution

The Sign of Fourier Coefficients of Half-Integral Weight Cusp Forms

From a result of Waldspurger, it is known that the normalized Fourier coefficients $a(m)$ of a half-integral weight holomorphic cusp eigenform \f are, up to a finite set of factors, one of $\pm \sqrt{L(1/2, f, \chi_m)}$ when $m$ is square-free and $f$ is the integral weight cusp form related to \f by the Shimura correspondence. In this paper we address a question posed by Kohnen: which square root is $a(m)$? In particular, if we look at the set of $a(m)$ with $m$ square-free, do these Fourier coefficients change sign infinitely often? By partially analytically continuing a related Dirichlet series, we are able to show that this is so

A prediction module to optimize scheduling in a grid computing environment

Heterogeneous computing environment such as grid computing allows sharing and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed computational resources (such as supercomputers, clusters, data sources, people and storage systems) and present them as a single, unified resource for solving large-scale and data-intensive computing applications. A common problem arising in grid computing is to select the most efficient resource to run a particular program. Also users are required to reserve in advance the resources needed to run their program on the grid. At present the execution time of any program submission depends on guesswork by the user. This leads to inefficient use of resources, incurring extra operation costs such as idling queues or machines. Thus a prediction module was designed and developed to aid the user. This module estimates the execution time of a program by using aspects of static analysis, analytical benchmarking and compiler based approach. It consists of 4 main stages; each with its own functionality. An incoming program is categorized accordingly, parsed and then broken down into smaller units known as tokens. The complexity and relationship amongst these tokens are then analyzed and finally the execution time is estimated for the entire program that was submitted

Effects of transfusion and splenectomy on globin chain expression in NTDT HbE/β-thalassaemia

Introduction: Majority of HbE/β-thalassaemia patients resembles the phenotype of non-transfusion dependent thalassaemia (NTDT). Current management strategies are highly diverse, and the objective of this study is to examine the effects of different treatments on multiple parameters in NTDT HbE/β-thalassaemia to further streamline the management of this disorder. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, we analysed the correlation between different treatment strategies with variable parameters including haematological parameter and globin gene expression. Statistical analyses were carried out using non-parametric tests such as Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests. Results: A total of 29 HbE/β-thalassaemia patients were included in the study. Data showed statistically significant differences were observed in the MCV, MCHC levels, reticulocyte count and log α/β fold change between the groups. Further analysis showed higher log α/β fold change in the transfusion only group compared to the non-treated group. Red blood cell count was found to be lower in transfused and splenectomised group compared to transfusion only. Significantly higher MCV level and reticulocyte count was seen in transfusion and splenectomised group compared to both non-treated and transfusion only groups and higher MCH level in the transfusion and splenectomised group compared to transfusion only group. Conclusion: In general, regardless of single or double combined therapies, HbE/β-thalassaemia showed variable changes in laboratory parameters to the therapies received particularly splenectomy

Data on the Lignosus rhinocerotis water soluble sclerotial extract affecting intracellular calcium level in rat dorsal root ganglion cells

The data in this article contain supporting evidence for the research manuscript entitled “Bronchodilator effects of Lignosus rhinocerotis extract on rat isolated airways is linked to the blockage of calcium entry” by Lee et al. (2018) [1]. The data were obtained by calcium imaging technique with fluorescent calcium indicator dyes, Fura 2-AM, to visualize calcium ion movement in the rat dorsal ganglion (DRG) cells. The effects of L. rhinocerotis cold water extract (CWE1) on intracellular calcium levels in the DRG cells were presented. Keywords: Lignosus rhinocerotis, Medicinal mushroom, Bronchodilators, Calcium dynamic

Synthesizing Speech Test Cases with Text-to-Speech? An Empirical Study on the False Alarms in Automated Speech Recognition Testing

Recent studies have proposed the use of Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems to automatically synthesise speech test cases on a scale and uncover a large number of failures in ASR systems. However, the failures uncovered by synthetic test cases may not reflect the actual performance of an ASR system when it transcribes human audio, which we refer to as false alarms. Given a failed test case synthesised from TTS systems, which consists of TTS-generated audio and the corresponding ground truth text, we feed the human audio stating the same text to an ASR system. If human audio can be correctly transcribed, an instance of a false alarm is detected. In this study, we investigate false alarm occurrences in five popular ASR systems using synthetic audio generated from four TTS systems and human audio obtained from two commonly used datasets. Our results show that the least number of false alarms is identified when testing Deepspeech, and the number of false alarms is the highest when testing Wav2vec2. On average, false alarm rates range from 21% to 34% in all five ASR systems. Among the TTS systems used, Google TTS produces the least number of false alarms (17%), and Espeak TTS produces the highest number of false alarms (32%) among the four TTS systems. Additionally, we build a false alarm estimator that flags potential false alarms, which achieves promising results: a precision of 98.3%, a recall of 96.4%, an accuracy of 98.5%, and an F1 score of 97.3%. Our study provides insight into the appropriate selection of TTS systems to generate high-quality speech to test ASR systems. Additionally, a false alarm estimator can be a way to minimise the impact of false alarms and help developers choose suitable test inputs when evaluating ASR systems. The source code used in this paper is publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/julianyonghao/FAinASRtest.Comment: 12 pages, Accepted at ISSTA202

Search for heavy resonances decaying to two Higgs bosons in final states containing four b quarks

A search is presented for narrow heavy resonances X decaying into pairs of Higgs bosons (H) in proton-proton collisions collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC at root s = 8 TeV. The data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb(-1). The search considers HH resonances with masses between 1 and 3 TeV, having final states of two b quark pairs. Each Higgs boson is produced with large momentum, and the hadronization products of the pair of b quarks can usually be reconstructed as single large jets. The background from multijet and t (t) over bar events is significantly reduced by applying requirements related to the flavor of the jet, its mass, and its substructure. The signal would be identified as a peak on top of the dijet invariant mass spectrum of the remaining background events. No evidence is observed for such a signal. Upper limits obtained at 95 confidence level for the product of the production cross section and branching fraction sigma(gg -> X) B(X -> HH -> b (b) over barb (b) over bar) range from 10 to 1.5 fb for the mass of X from 1.15 to 2.0 TeV, significantly extending previous searches. For a warped extra dimension theory with amass scale Lambda(R) = 1 TeV, the data exclude radion scalar masses between 1.15 and 1.55 TeV