The Perception of Mandarin Tones in Bubble Noise by Native and L2 Listeners

Previous studies have revealed the complexity of Mandarin Tones. For example, similarities in the pitch contours of tones 2 and 3 and tones 3 and 4 cause confusion for listeners. The realization of a tone\u27s contour is highly dependent on its context, especially the preceding pitch. This is known as the coarticulation effect. Researchers have demonstrated the robustness of tone perception by both native and non-native listeners, even with incomplete acoustic information or in noisy environment. However, non-native listeners were observed to behave differently from native listeners in their use of contextual information. For example, the disagreement between the end of a preceding pitch and the beginning of a target pitch degraded L2 listeners\u27 identification performance, but not native listeners\u27. In this thesis, we use the ``bubble\u27\u27 noise techniques (Mandel et al., 2016) to explore the difference between native and L2 listeners\u27 tone perception. We focus on whether the two groups of listeners use different time-frequency cues to identify tones, and especially if they use cues from preceding tones differently. We conducted a tone identification listening test on 5 native listeners and 5 L2 listeners. Stimuli consisted of 6 meaningful sentences with the target syllable at the end. The target syllable used one of tones 2, 3 and 4 and was preceded by either tone 1 (high) or 4 (low). These sentences were mixed with ``bubble\u27\u27 noise. Our results showed some difference in the use of preceding context between the two groups. Statistical analysis of the difficulty level of the task supported that this difference is prominent in harder listening tasks and not in easier tasks

AGReE: A system for generating Automated Grammar Reading Exercises

We describe the AGReE system, which takes user-submitted passages as input and automatically generates grammar practice exercises that can be completed while reading. Multiple-choice practice items are generated for a variety of different grammar constructs: punctuation, articles, conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, verbs, and nouns. We also conducted a large-scale human evaluation with around 4,500 multiple-choice practice items. We notice for 95% of items, a majority of raters out of five were able to identify the correct answer and for 85% of cases, raters agree that there is only one correct answer among the choices. Finally, the error analysis shows that raters made the most mistakes for punctuation and conjunctions.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2022 Demonstration Trac

Towards an interoperability certification method for semantic federated experimental IoT testbeds

IoT deployments and then related experiments tend to be highly heterogeneous leading to fragmented and non-interoperable silo solutions. Yet there is a growing need to interconnect such experiments to create rich infrastructures that will underpin the next generation of cross sector IoT applications in particular as using massive number of data. While research have been carried out for IoT test beds and interoperability for some infrastructures less has been done on the data. In this paper, we present the first step of the FIESTA certification method for federated semantic IoT test bed, which provides stakeholders with the means of assessing the interoperability of a given IoT testbed and how it can be federated with other ones to create large facility for experimenter. Focus is given on data and semantic context of the test beds and how they can interoperate together for larger experiments with data

Energy management considering multiple power markets and microgrid storage

The operational cost of a microgrid is significantly influenced by the response of storage systems and the complexities of the power market’s tariff structures. This paper addresses the challenges arising from the coexistence of new market entries and traditional tariffs, which contribute to a complex market environment. To tackle this issue, the paper establishes a microgrid market environment encompassing four types of tariffs. By modeling the response of electric storage and cold storage in a microgrid, the study formulates a non-linear mixed-integer optimization problem. Numerical studies are then conducted to verify the model and analyze market performance. The results reveal a trade-off in behavior among different market entries when optimizing the total cost of microgrid operation. These findings shed light on the complexities and trade-offs involved in microgrid operational cost optimization within a diverse market environment, offering valuable insights for market participants

PharmacyGPT: The AI Pharmacist

In this study, we introduce PharmacyGPT, a novel framework to assess the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 in emulating the role of clinical pharmacists. Our methodology encompasses the utilization of LLMs to generate comprehensible patient clusters, formulate medication plans, and forecast patient outcomes. We conduct our investigation using real data acquired from the intensive care unit (ICU) at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC) Hospital. Our analysis offers valuable insights into the potential applications and limitations of LLMs in the field of clinical pharmacy, with implications for both patient care and the development of future AI-driven healthcare solutions. By evaluating the performance of PharmacyGPT, we aim to contribute to the ongoing discourse surrounding the integration of artificial intelligence in healthcare settings, ultimately promoting the responsible and efficacious use of such technologies

FESTIVAL: design and implementation of federated interoperable smart ICT services development and testing platform

FESTIVAL EU-Japan collaborative project aims at federating existing Smart ICT testbeds of different nature to provide a platform for developing and testing emergent Smart ICT services. The federation of testbeds covering heterogeneous domains has been a great challenge and FESTIVAL provides a uniform access to different resources, such as Open Data resources, IoT devices, IT resources and Living Labs. In this paper, design and implementation of the current FESTIVAL platform are introduced with approaches to federate and interoperate existing resources. Integration of all the components, including the existing testbeds, will also be described to finalize and validate the federation.A part of the study was carried out by the FESTIVAL project, the Commissioned Research of National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), JAPA

Experimentation as a service over semantically interoperable Internet of Things testbeds

Infrastructures enabling experimental assessment of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions are scarce. Moreover, such infrastructures are typically bound to a specific application domain, thus, not facilitating the testing of solutions with a horizontal approach. This paper presents a platform that supports Experimentation as s Service (EaaS) over a federation of IoT testbeds. This platform brings two major advances. Firstly, it leverages semantic web technologies to enable interoperability so that testbed agnostic access to the underlying facilities is allowed. Secondly, a set of tools ease both the experimentation workflow and the federation of other IoT deployments, independently of their domain of interest. Apart from the platform specification, the paper presents how this design has been actually instantiated into a cloud-based EaaS platform that has been used for supporting a wide variety of novel experiments targeting different research and innovation challenges. In this respect, the paper summarizes some of the experiences from these experiments and the key performance metrics that this instance of the platform has exhibited during the experimentation

Identification of Causal Relationship between Amyloid-beta Accumulation and Alzheimer's Disease Progression via Counterfactual Inference

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that is beginning with amyloidosis, followed by neuronal loss and deterioration in structure, function, and cognition. The accumulation of amyloid-beta in the brain, measured through 18F-florbetapir (AV45) positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, has been widely used for early diagnosis of AD. However, the relationship between amyloid-beta accumulation and AD pathophysiology remains unclear, and causal inference approaches are needed to uncover how amyloid-beta levels can impact AD development. In this paper, we propose a graph varying coefficient neural network (GVCNet) for estimating the individual treatment effect with continuous treatment levels using a graph convolutional neural network. We highlight the potential of causal inference approaches, including GVCNet, for measuring the regional causal connections between amyloid-beta accumulation and AD pathophysiology, which may serve as a robust tool for early diagnosis and tailored care

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Contrôle Discret pour l’Internet des Objets et les Environnements Intelligents au travers d'une infrastructure partagée

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Environments (SE) have attracted a lot of research and development activities during the last decade. Yet many present-day IoT/SE applications are still limited to the acquisition and processing of sensor data and its context, with control, if any, using either basic solutions or requiring human intervention, far away from the automatic control which is an essential factor to promote the technologies. This thesis targets to bring knowhow from control theory and reactive systems to the IoT/SE domain to achieve a solution with a formal method for the missing control aspect. We propose the extension of a framework in order to build a shared generic IoT/SE infrastructure offering high-level interfaces to reduce design effort, and enabling the self-configuration and adaptation of control applications over generic properties of the environment without human interaction by using general knowledge over the domain that applies to each target instance of IoT/SE system. In this extended framework, individual physical entities (including all relevant "things", appliances and subsets of space) may be grouped as virtual entities by shared properties to provide a higher level abstraction for control and other applications and better adaptation to lower level configuration changes. Requiring a generic common denominator solution shared by all IoT/SE applications in a given environment, we propose for this infrastructure, to model by finite state automata the target entities to be monitored and controlled, including both individual entities and their groupings, as well as things and space entities, to be able to apply discrete controller synthesis (DCS) technique over any of these at different levels of abstraction and granularity. DCS is a formal method which constructs automatically a controller, if it exists, guaranteeing the required control objectives regarding to the given system behavior model in terms of synchronous parallel automata. The existing BZR programming language and Sigali tools are employed to perform DCS and generate a controller in an automatic way. Necessary supporting software modules are proposed in the implementation such as the relation maintenance module keeping the correct association between individual entity instances and groups, and dispatching the action orders from the high level control to corresponding actuators. This module would evolve later to a more generic solution such as a graph data base including both the general knowledge base and specific environment instance relations. Conflict resolution between objectives of control coming from concurrent controllers is also indispensable due to the intended openness of the platform. A java based context simulator has been developed to simulate the home environment within several scenarios proposed for the validation, such as electrical load control and activity context adaptation.L'Internet des Objets (IdO) et les Environnements Intelligents (EI) ont attiré beaucoup d'activités de recherche et développement au cours de la dernière décennie. Pourtant, de nombreuses applications IdO/EI d'aujourd'hui sont encore limitées à l'acquisition et au traitement des données de capteurs et de leur contexte, avec un contrôle, le cas échéant, utilisant soit des solutions de base ou demandant l'intervention humaine, loin du contrôle automatique qui est un facteur essentiel de promouvoir ces technologies. Cette thèse vise à apporter le savoir-faire de la théorie du contrôle et des systèmes réactifs dans le domaine IdO/EI pour arriver à une solution avec une méthode formelle pour l'aspect de contrôle qui fait défaut. Nous proposons l'extension d'un canevas logiciel pour une infrastructure générique et partagée IdO/EI qui offre des interfaces de haut niveau pour réduire l'effort de conception, et qui permet l'auto-configuration et l'adaptation des applications de contrôle sur des propriétés génériques de l'environnement sans intervention humaine en utilisant les connaissances générales sur le domaine qui s'appliquent à chaque instance cible de système IdO/EI. Dans cette infrastructure étendue, les entités physiques individuelles (y compris toutes les "choses", appareils électriques et sous-ensembles de l'espace) peuvent être regroupées comme des entités virtuelles par des propriétés communes afin de fournir un niveau d'abstraction plus élevé pour le contrôle et d'autres applications, ainsi qu'une meilleure adaptation aux changements des configurations au niveau inférieur. Sur le requis d'une solution générique et commun dénominateur partagée par toutes les applications de l'IdO/EI dans un environnement donné, nous proposons pour cette infrastructure, de modéliser les entités cibles supervisées et contrôlées, y compris les entités individuelles et de leurs regroupements, ainsi que les choses et les entités spatiales, par des automates à états finis, pour être en mesure d'appliquer la technique de la synthèse des contrôleur discrets (SCD) aux différents niveaux d'abstraction et de granularité. SCD est une méthode formelle qui construit automatiquement un contrôleur, s'il existe, en assurant les objectifs de contrôle exigés concernant le modèle de comportement du système donné en termes d'automates parallèles synchrones. Les langages de programmation BZR et les outils Sigali existants sont utilisés pour effectuer la SCD et de générer un contrôleur de manière automatique. Les modules logiciels nécessaires sont proposés dans l'implémentation tels que le module de maintenance de relation qui garde une association correcte entre les instances d'entités individuelles et les groupes, et répercute des commandes d'action du contrôle de haut niveau aux actionneurs correspondants. Ce module est destiné à évoluer plus tard vers une solution plus générique comme une base de données graphes comprenant à la fois la base de connaissances générales et relations spécifiques d'instance environnement. La résolution des conflits entre les objectifs de contrôle venant de contrôleurs concurrent est également indispensable en raison des objectifs de l'ouverture de la plateforme. Un simulateur de contexte basé sur Java a été développé pour simuler l'environnement de la maison au sein de plusieurs scénarios proposés pour la validation, tels que le contrôle de la charge électrique et l'adaptation au contexte de l'activité