We study the problem of learning robust acoustic models in adverse environments, characterized by a significant mismatch between training and test conditions. This problem is of paramount importance for the deployment of speech recognition systems that need to perform well in unseen environments. First, we characterize data augmentation theoretically as an instance of vicinal risk minimization, which aims at improving risk estimates during training by replacing the delta functions that define the empirical density over the input space with an approximation of the marginal population density in the vicinity of the training samples. More specifically, we assume that local neighborhoods centered at training samples can be approximated using a mixture of Gaussians, and demonstrate theoretically that this can incorporate robust inductive bias into the learning process. We then specify the individual mixture components implicitly via data augmentation schemes, designed to address common sources of spurious correlations in acoustic models. To avoid potential confounding effects on robustness due to information loss, which has been associated with standard feature extraction techniques (e.g., fbank and mfcc features), we focus on the waveform-based setting. Our empirical results show that the approach can generalize to unseen noise conditions, with 150% relative improvement in out-of-distribution generalization compared to training using the standard risk minimization principle. Moreover, the results demonstrate competitive performance relative to models learned using a training sample designed to match the acoustic conditions characteristic of test utterances.

A novel method for calculating power output from wind turbines using Newtonian mechanics is proposed. This contrasts with current methods based on interception rates by aerofoils of kinetic energy to estimate power output, governed by the Betz limit of propeller theory. Radial action [mrωrδφ =@, J.sec] generates torques from impulses from air molecules at differing radii on rotor surfaces, both windward and leeward. Dimensionally, torque is a rate of action [(mrωδφ)/δt, MLT, Nm]. Integration of the windward torque [Tw, Nm] is achieved numerically using inputs of rotor dimensions, the angle of incidence (θ) of elastic wind impulse [δMv] on the blade surface, chord and blade lengths and the tip-speed ratio with wind speed. The rate of leeward or back torque [Tb , Nm] in the plane of rotation is estimated from radial impulses from the blade’s rotation on material particles, with magnitude varying with the square of the blade radius and its angular velocity. The net torque (Tw Tb) from these rates of action and reaction is converted to power by its product with the angular velocity of the turbine rotors [P = (Tw Tb)Ω, Watts or J sec], considered as an ideal Carnot cycle for wind turbines; its design should assist optimisation of the aerodynamic elements of turbine operation. A matter of concern must be predictions for a significant rate of heat production by wind turbines, represented partly by the magnitude of the leeward reaction torque but also by a greater release of heat downwind caused by a turbulent cascade in the wake of air flow following its impacts with the blades. Given the widespread occurrence of wind farms as sources of renewable energy and a need to minimise environmental impacts this new method should promote improved theory and practice regarding wind energy.

The goal of this study is to analyse the scientific productivity of Montenegrin researchers in the field of sports sciences, as well as the trend of publishing in Montenegrin sports sciences journals. The research covers studies with a focus on the sports sciences issues published in the period from 2002 to 2019. Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science (the electronic databases) were searched for articles available until September 22, 2021. Results were summarized according to the instructions of PRISMA guidelines and present the number of citations, h-index, i10-index and the number of articles by the authors. The study results shows that researchers from the field of sports sciences publish multiple publications in 2021 compared to 2002. In Google scholar database citation rate is highest, and span from 596 and 14959. On the other side, the same researchers were cited quite less in Scopus and Web of Science databases. When we talk about Montenegrin journals, three are registered in the Google Scholar Database. The Sport Mont journal is the most cited one with the highest h-index (44); the Montenegrin Journal of Sports Science and Medicine is the best ranked Montenegrin journal according to the bibliometric data from the Scopus and Web of Science databases; the Journal of Anthropology of Sport and Physical Education have constant progress in the last years. It was indicated the highest impact was recognized in the last four years, according to citations of available articles published by Montenegrin authors. Also, the number of published articles in the last four year is significant, and progress can be expected in the future.

Early-stage entrepreneurs struggle to find financial access to different types of services that help develop their businesses. In recent research, complementary currency systems have been identified as promising alternatives to the deficit of money for accessing goods and services. The purpose of this study is to explore the potential of service design as a tool to create more resilient currency services that enable the exchange of digital credits between entrepreneurs. The theoretical investigation focused on relationships between complementary currency systems as resilient strategies and sociological interpretations of value exchange. Furthermore, service design tools, methods, and approaches are applied to the thinking towards social currency innovation. The resulting Conceptual Framework for Social Currency Innovation (CFSCI) highlights the potential of service design in making services more accessible, transparent, and affordable. Service design is relevant in understanding financial transactions, as it helps to perceive exchanges between entrepreneurs as services. Service design research can contribute to a reframing of issues of unaffordable services by conceptualizing service systems that enable skilled individuals to exchange their knowledge through social currencies. These new currencies make transactions between entrepreneurs possible and the service design perspective makes them more meaningful for the users.

Although the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina ended a quarter of a century ago, a large number of war crimes suspects are still being prosecuted. One of the visible issues arising in domestic courts are aged defendants, whose trials are delayed due to old age and illness. The aim of this article is to give an overview of case law and analyze the process of prosecuting aged defendants at the War Crimes Chamber within the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which carries the largest workload of war crimes cases in the region. This article focuses on two main aspects: portrayal of these cases in the media and the legal reasoning of the court.

Significant deviations from Standard Model (SM) predictions have been observed in $ b \to s \mu^+ \mu^-$ decays and in the muon $g-2$. Scalar leptoquark extensions of the SM are known to be able to address these anomalies, but generically give rise to lepton flavor violation (LFV) or even proton decay. We propose new muon flavored gauge symmetries as a guiding principle for leptoquark models that preserve the global symmetries of the SM and explain the non-observation of LFV. A minimal model is shown to easily accommodate the anomalies without encountering other experimental constraints. This talk is mainly based on Ref. [1].

T-cell epitopes with broad population coverage may form the basis for a new generation of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. However, published studies on immunoprevalence are limited by small test cohorts, low frequencies of antigen-specific cells and lack of data correlating eluted HLA ligands with T-cell responsiveness. As the protective role of pre-existing cross-reactivity to homologous peptides is unclear, we aimed to identify SARS-CoV-2-specific minimal epitopes recognized by CD8 T-cells among 48 peptides eluted from prevalent HLA alleles, and an additional 84 predicted binders, in a large cohort of convalescents (n=83) and pre-pandemic control samples (n=19). We identified nine conserved SARS-CoV-2-specific epitopes restricted by four of the most prevalent HLA class I alleles in the Norwegian study cohort, to which responding CD8 T cells were detected in 70-100% of convalescents expressing the relevant HLA allele. Only two of these were derived from the Spike protein, included in current vaccines. We found a strong correlation between immunoprevalence and immunodominance. Thus, the CD8 T-cell response to SARS-CoV-2 is more focused than previously believed. Using a new algorithm, we predict that a vaccine including these epitopes could induce a T-cell response in 83% of Caucasians.

The effects of graded sodium chloride (NaCl) concentrations (0-, 50-, 100-, 150-, and 200-mM) on photosynthetic pigment contents in in vitro grown shoots of important medicinal plant species (Centaurium erythraea Rafn) were investigated. Non-transformed, one AtCKX1 and two AtCKX2 transgenic centaury lines, with altered cytokinin profiles, were used in this study. The chlorophyll (Chl) and carotenoid contents differed in the non-transformed and transgenic lines. In general, salinity significantly reduced the Chl a and Chl b contents in comparison to the NaCl-free medium. The lowest Chl content was observed in AtCKX2 transgenic shoots grown on all the culture media. The total carotenoid content was increased in shoots of non-transformed and both AtCKX2 transgenic lines grown in 50-mM NaCl. On the other hand, in concentrations >50-mM NaCl, the total carotenoid content was decreased in all analysed centaury shoots. The Chl a/Chl b ratio in all the shoots increased progressively in the graded NaCl concentrations. Contrarily, the addition of NaCl in the culture medium reduced the Chl/carotenoid ratio in centaury shoots. Taken together, the results of this study partly explained the mode of centaury plant adaptations to salt stress in vitro. Thus, the results on centaury shoots confirmed that the determination of the photosynthetic pigment contents can be a very useful non-destructive screening method in order to discriminate susceptible and resistant plant species/lines to salt stress conditions.

Low-rise residential and public masonry structures constitute a large portion of the building patrimony, yet they were erected during the massive reconstruction of Southeast Europe after World War II before any design rules existed in the engineering praxis. Unreinforced unconfined masonry buildings (URM) were proven rather vulnerable during stronger earthquake motions in the recent past. To determine lateral strength, stiffness, and capacity of energy dissipation of the URM walls, in-plane tests were performed at the University of Sarajevo. Two full-scale plain walls (233 × 241 × 25 cm) built with solid clay brick and lime-cement mortar and two walls strengthened with RC jacketing on both sides were subjected to cyclic lateral loading under constant vertical precompression. Plain walls failed in shear with a typical cross-diagonal crack pattern. Jacketed walls exhibited rocking with characteristic S-shaped hysteretic curves and significantly larger ductility compared with plain walls. Wallets were tested for modulus of elasticity and compressive strength of masonry and the results showed considerable variations.

. The limited availability of large image datasets, mainly due to data privacy and differences in acquisition protocols or hardware, is a significant issue in the development of accurate and generalizable machine learning methods in medicine. This is especially the case for Magnetic Resonance (MR) images, where different MR scanners introduce a bias that limits the performance of a machine learning model. We present a novel method that learns to ignore the scanner-related features present in MR images, by introducing specific additional constraints on the latent space. We focus on a real-world classification scenario, where only a small dataset provides images of all classes. Our method Learn to Ignore (L2I) outperforms state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods on a multi-site MR dataset for a classification task between multiple sclerosis patients and healthy controls.

Abstract To provide the most comprehensive picture of species phylogeny and phylogeography of European roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), we analyzed mtDNA control region (610 bp) of 1469 samples of roe deer from Central and Eastern Europe and included into the analyses additional 1541 mtDNA sequences from GenBank from other regions of the continent. We detected two mtDNA lineages of the species: European and Siberian (an introgression of C. pygargus mtDNA into C. capreolus). The Siberian lineage was most frequent in the eastern part of the continent and declined toward Central Europe. The European lineage contained three clades (Central, Eastern, and Western) composed of several haplogroups, many of which were separated in space. The Western clade appeared to have a discontinuous range from Portugal to Russia. Most of the haplogroups in the Central and the Eastern clades were under expansion during the Weichselian glacial period before the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), while the expansion time of the Western clade overlapped with the Eemian interglacial. The high genetic diversity of extant roe deer is the result of their survival during the LGM probably in a large, contiguous range spanning from the Iberian Peninsula to the Caucasus Mts and in two northern refugia.

The Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) of the InSight mission to Mars, has been providing direct information on Martian interior structure and dynamics of that planet since it landed. Compared to seismic recordings on Earth, ground motion measurements acquired by SEIS on Mars are made under dramatically different ambient noise conditions, but include idiosyncratic signals that arise from coupling between different InSight sensors and spacecraft components. This work is to synthesize what is known about these signal types, illustrate how they can manifest in waveforms and noise correlations, and present pitfalls in structural interpretations based on standard seismic analysis methods. We show that glitches, a type of prominent transient signal, can produce artifacts in ambient noise correlations. Sustained signals that vary in frequency, such as lander modes which are affected by variations in temperature and wind conditions over the course of the Martian Sol, can also contaminate ambient noise results. Therefore, both types of signals have the potential to bias interpretation in terms of subsurface layering. We illustrate that signal processing in the presence of identified nonseismic signals must be informed by an understanding of the underlying physical processes in order for high fidelity waveforms of ground motion to be extracted. While the origins of most idiosyncratic signals are well understood, the 2.4 Hz resonance remains debated and the literature does not contain an explanation of its fine spectral structure. Even though the selection of idiosyncratic signal types discussed in this paper may not be exhaustive, we provide guidance on best practices for enhancing the robustness of structural interpretations.

Background Microvascular dysfunction might be a major determinant of clinical deterioration and outcome in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). However, long‐term prognostic value of transthoracic Doppler echocardiography (TDE) coronary flow velocity reserve (CFVR) on clinical outcome is uncertain in HCM patients. Therefore, the aim of our study was to assess long‐term prognostic value of CFVR on clinical outcome in HCM population. Methods and Results We prospectively included 150 HCM patients (82 women; mean age 48±15 years). Patients’ clinical characteristics, echocardiographic and CFVR findings (both for left anterior descending [LAD] and posterior descending artery [PD]), were assessed in all patients. The primary outcome was a composite of: HCM related death, heart failure requiring hospitalization, sustained ventricular tachycardia and ischemic stroke. Patients were stratified into 2 subgroups depending on CFVR LAD value: Group 1 (CFVR LAD>2, [n=87]) and Group 2 (CFVR LAD≤2, [n=63]). During a median follow‐up of 88 months, 41/150 (27.3%) patients had adverse cardiac events. In Group 1, there were 8/87 (9.2%), whereas in Group 2 there were 33/63 (52.4%, P<0.001 vs. Group 1) adverse cardiac events. By Kaplan‐Meier analysis, patients with preserved CFVR LAD had significantly higher cumulative event‐free survival rate compared to patients with impaired CFVR LAD (96.4% and 90.9% versus 66.9% and 40.0%, at 5 and 8 years, respectively: log‐rank 37.2, P<0.001). Multivariable analysis identified only CFVR LAD≤2 as an independent predictor for adverse cardiac outcome (HR 6.54; 95% CI 2.83–16.30, P<0.001), while CFVR PD was not significantly associated with outcome. Conclusions In patients with HCM, impaired CFVR LAD (≤2) is a strong, independent predictor of adverse cardiac outcome. When the aim of testing is HCM risk stratification and CFVR LAD data are available, the evaluation of CFVR PD is redundant.