Com o uso de um conceito ainda não explorado para fins de classificação de dados, baseado em Lógica Paraconsistente Anotada (LPA), este trabalho visa à construção de um sistema inteligente para classificação de gêneros musicais (Music Genre Classification - MGC). Este tema, de caráter emergente na literatura, tem recebido atenção crescente da comunidade científica, tendo em vista a sua grande aplicabilidade, destacando-se o potencial de comercialização de dados multimídia pela Internet, assim como a automatização de inúmeras tarefas de data mining que envolvem sinais musicais. Utilizando uma base de dados composta por amostras de músicas representativas de cada gênero musical, tais como jazz, bolero, bossa nova, forró, salsa e sertanejo, assim como de um classificador discriminativo paraconsistente, uma abordagem supervisionada é proposta para solucionar o problema. O primeiro módulo do sistema realiza a extração de características dos diversos segmentos das músicas com base na análise tempo-frequência associada com as bandas críticas do ouvido humano. Por outro lado, o segundo módulo utiliza o classificador proposto, que deve permitir a manipulação de sinais com características contraditórias de uma maneira mais semelhante àquela realizada pelo cérebro humano. Os resultados, quando comparados com as abordagens pré-existentes para MGC, demonstram a viabilidade do uso da LPA para tal fim. Além disso, caracteriza-se neste trabalho, uma contribuição original ao estado-da-arte no tema, que consiste justamente no uso da LPA para MGC, procedimento para o qual inexiste descrição na literatura até este momento. / By using a new concept, which is based on Paraconsistent Logic (LPA) and has not yet been applied for classification, this work aims at constructing an intelligent system for Music Genre Classification (MGC). This topic, that is emergent in the literature, has received an increasing attention from the scientific community due to its applicability, emphazising both a commercial potential to commercialize multimedia content on the Internet and data mining tasks involving music signals. By adopting a database formed by samples of songs, which represent different styles of music, such as jazz, bolero, bossa nova, forró, salsa and sertanejo, and a discriminative paraconsistent classifier, a supervised procedure is used to solve the problem. The system is divided in two modules. The first extracts features from the music files, based on the concepts of time-frequency analysis and crictical bands of the human ear. On the other hand, the second implements the proposed classifier, which allows an efficient treatment of contradictions in such a way that is more similar to the human brain. The results obtained, when compared with existing approaches used to MGC, demonstrate how LPA is suitable for this purpose. Additionally, this is the original contribution to the state-of-the-art: the use of LPA for MGC, an inexistent approach up to date.

The somatosensory system concerns the sense of touch. It is sectioned into various kinds of touch, such as the proprioceptive sense, providing information of sense of self and position of limbs, and the cutaneous sense, informing of the modalities of touching or being touched. The cutaneous sense is further divided into discriminative touch and affective touch. Discriminative touch is an exteroceptive sense of touch that responds to stimuli of pressure and vibration, and affective touch is an interoceptive sense of touch that corresponds to e.g. pleasant and painful stimuli, communicating information to the brain through A-delta and C-fibers. Recent studies investigates affective touch to have emotional affect on the subjective experience of touch, affecting subjective wellbeing. The aim of this thesis is to examine the sense of touch and its relevant neural correlates, focusing on affective touch and its role in subjective wellbeing and social relations. A presentation of physiological and neural aspects of touch will be held as well as a description of subjective wellbeing. The conclusion for this thesis is that affective touch appears to activate brain areas of orbitofrontal cortex, frontal polar cortice, prefrontal cortex and insula cortex, which are brain areas processing subjective wellbeing, e.g. evaluating positive and negative effect and processing emotional information and behavior. Examining correlations between affective touch and positive affect, negative affect, oxytocin release, social relations and affiliative behavior shows influence from affective touch on subjective wellbeing. A discussion of the current findings is provided, including directions for future research.

The somatosensory system concerns the sense of touch. It is sectioned into various kinds of touch, such as the proprioceptive sense, providing information of sense of self and position of limbs, and the cutaneous sense, informing of the modalities of touching or being touched. The cutaneous sense is further divided into discriminative touch and affective touch. Discriminative touch is an exteroceptive sense of touch that responds to stimuli of pressure and vibration, and affective touch is an interoceptive sense of touch that corresponds to e.g. pleasant and painful stimuli, communicating information to the brain through A-delta and C-fibers. Recent studies investigates affective touch to have emotional affect on the subjective experience of touch, affecting subjective wellbeing. The aim of this thesis is to examine the sense of touch and its relevant neural correlates, focusing on affective touch and its role in subjective wellbeing and social relations. A presentation of physiological and neural aspects of touch will be held as well as a description of subjective wellbeing. The conclusion for this thesis is that affective touch appears to activate brain areas of orbitofrontal cortex, frontal polar cortice, prefrontal cortex and insula cortex, which are brain areas processing subjective wellbeing, e.g. evaluating positive and negative effect and processing emotional information and behavior. Examining correlations between affective touch and positive affect, negative affect, oxytocin release, social relations and affiliative behavior shows influence from affective touch on subjective wellbeing. A discussion of the current findings is provided, including directions for future research.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T13:18:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Lilian Evelin dos Santos.pdf: 696473 bytes, checksum: 4b3297aade76d4ea7d8436d44b6b10d8 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005-04-19 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The present study was a replication of Dymond & Barnes (1994). The study aimed: (a) to verify if the establishment of a pattern of responding as a discriminative stimulus, consistently paired with a stimulus that belonged to a class of equivalent stimuli, would establish the pattern of responding as a member of the same equivalence class, and (b) to verify if the other stimuli of the stimulus class would control responding as a discriminative stimulus, through the insertion of the response pattern in the class. The experimental procedure had 4 phases: (1) a conditional discrimination training and tests for the emergence of two equivalence classes of 3 stimuli (A1, B1, C1 and A2, B2, C2); (2) a self-discrimination training where two distinct response patterns (clicking or not clicking a mouse, in a 5s period) each one systematically paired with one stimulus of each of the equivalence classes (B1 or B2) were established as conditional stimuli controlling the discriminative function of two stimuli (B1 and B2); (3) Test 1: of the possible control of the self-discrimination response over new stimuli, where it was tested if the response patterns with the mouse also controlled the choice between two other stimuli of the equivalence class (C1 and C2), which were never before paired with responding with the mouse; and (4) Test 2: of the possible control, by the stimuli of the equivalence class, over the pattern of responding with the mouse, where it was tested if a choice of either C1 or C2 was followed by responding / not responding with the mouse. Of the 11 adults who started the experiment, 6 completed the study: the performance of 4 of these 6 participants on Test 1 and of 3 of them on Test 2 were successful. Results were similar to the ones found by Dymond & Barnes (1994), suggesting that: (a) response patterns may acquire behavioral functions as stimuli and may become part of equivalence stimulus classes, and (b) stimuli that are part of a equivalent stimulus class may share behavioral functions, because of a history of differential reinforcement related to only one member of the stimulus class / O presente estudo foi uma replicação de Dymond e Barnes (1994). Seu objetivo foi verificar se (1) o estabelecimento de um padrão de respostas como estímulo discriminativo para outras respostas de um individuo tornaria a resposta (como SD)_membro de uma classe de estímulos equivalentes da qual faz parte um estímulo sistematicamente pareado com a resposta discriminada (e discriminativa), sem qualquer treino direto e se, por outro lado, (2) a participação dessa resposta como membro da classe de estímulos equivalentes tornaria os outros estímulos membros da classe estímulos discriminativos para as mesmas respostas controladas dicriminativamente pela resposta. O procedimento consistiu em quatro fases: 1) treino de discriminação condicional e teste de formação de estímulos equivalentes para a formação de duas classes de três estímulos (A1, B1, C1 e A2, B2 e C2); 2) treino de autodiscriminação, no qual dois diferentes padrões de responder (clicar ou não clicar o mouse num período de 5s) pareados, cada um deles com um estímulo de cada classe de estímulos equivalentes (B1 e B2) - foram estabelecidos como estímulos condicionais numa segunda tarefa - de escolha entre dois estímulos (B1 e B2), cada um deles membro de uma das classes de estímulo equivalente estabelecidas anteriormente; 3) Teste 1: do controle da resposta de autodiscriminação sobre novos estímulos, no qual se testou se os padrões de responder (clicar / não clicar o mouse) controlariam a resposta de escolha entre dois estímulos das classes de equivalência (C1 ou C2), jamais pareados com esses desempenhos e; 4) Teste 2: do controle dos estímulos da classe de estímulos equivalentes sobre o responder , no qual se testou se a escolha entre os estímulos C1 e C2 (que seria controlada pelo desempenho no mouse) passaria a controlar o desempenho posterior no mouse. Participaram deste estudo 11 adultos, dos quais 6 concluíram o experimento. Dos participantes que concluíram, 4 tiveram um desempenho positivo no Teste 1, e destes, 3 tiveram também um desempenho positivo no Teste 2. Os resultados sugeriram que: a) padrões de respostas podem adquirir funções comportamentais de estímulos e podem fazer parte de classes de estímulos equivalentes e b) estímulos que participam de uma classe de estímulos equivalentes podem compartilhar as mesmas funções comportamentais, a partir de uma história de reforçamento diferencial em relação a apenas um estímulo pertencente à classe

An important part of gene regulation is mediated by specific proteins, called transcription factors, which influence the transcription of a particular gene by binding to specific sites on DNA sequences, called transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) or, simply, motifs. Such binding sites are relatively short segments of DNA, normally 5 to 25 nucleotides long, over- represented in a set of co-regulated DNA sequences. There are two different problems in this setup: motif representation, accounting for the model that describes the TFBS's; and motif discovery, focusing in unravelling TFBS's from a set of co-regulated DNA sequences. This thesis proposes a discriminative scoring criterion that culminates in a discriminative mixture of Bayesian networks to distinguish TFBS's from the background DNA. This new probabilistic model supports further evidence in non-additivity among binding site positions, providing a superior discriminative power in TFBS's detection. On the other hand, extra knowledge carefully selected from the literature was incorporated in TFBS discovery in order to capture a variety of characteristics of the TFBS's patterns. This extra knowledge was combined during the process of motif discovery leading to results that are considerably more accurate than those achieved by methods that rely in the DNA sequence alone.

This dissertation presents segmental discriminative analysis techniques for American Sign Language (ASL) recognition and verification. ASL recognition is a sequence classification problem. One of the most successful techniques for recognizing ASL is the hidden Markov model (HMM) and its variants. This dissertation addresses two problems in sign recognition by HMMs. The first is discriminative feature selection for temporally-correlated data. Temporal correlation in sequences often causes difficulties in feature selection. To mitigate this problem, this dissertation proposes segmentally-boosted HMMs (SBHMMs), which construct the state-optimized features in a segmental and discriminative manner. The second problem is the decomposition of ASL signs for efficient and accurate recognition. For this problem, this dissertation proposes discriminative state-space clustering (DISC), a data-driven method of automatically extracting sub-sign units by state-tying from the results of feature selection. DISC and SBHMMs can jointly search for discriminative feature sets and representation units of ASL recognition. ASL verification, which determines whether an input signing sequence matches a pre-defined phrase, shares similarities with ASL recognition, but it has more prior knowledge and a higher expectation of accuracy. Therefore, ASL verification requires additional discriminative analysis not only in utilizing prior knowledge but also in actively selecting a set of phrases that have a high expectation of verification accuracy in the service of improving the experience of users. This dissertation describes ASL verification using CopyCat, an ASL game that helps deaf children acquire language abilities at an early age. It then presents the "probe" technique which automatically searches for an optimal threshold for verification using prior knowledge and BIG, a bi-gram error-ranking predictor which efficiently selects/creates phrases that, based on the previous performance of existing verification systems, should have high verification accuracy. This work demonstrates the utility of the described technologies in a series of experiments. SBHMMs are validated in ASL phrase recognition as well as various other applications such as lip reading and speech recognition. DISC-SBHMMs consistently produce fewer errors than traditional HMMs and SBHMMs in recognizing ASL phrases using an instrumented glove. Probe achieves verification efficacy comparable to the optimum obtained from manually exhaustive search. Finally, when verifying phrases in CopyCat, BIG predicts which CopyCat phrases, even unseen in training, will have the best verification accuracy with results comparable to much more computationally intensive methods.

Parent training programs are widely used to remediate ineffective strategies being used by parents of children with maladaptive behaviors. While there are a multitude of parenting workshops available, it has been estimated that over half have no established effectiveness. The purpose of this study was to advance our knowledge regarding the effects of modeling and role-playing (in an experimentally controlled design), used to supplement the parent workshop called “Winning at Parenting” and enhance development of adaptive parenting skills of participants. This study trained parents in the behavioral techniques of clear communication, differential attention, and time-out procedures via modeling by the instructor, roleplaying with the parents, and instructor feedback to parents. A multiple-baseline design across four participants was used in an experimentally controlled manner to demonstrate the positive effect of modeling and role-playing on the development of these adaptive skills in a parent training program. Two research questions were analyzed. The first considered whether participants would increase their use of adaptive parenting strategies via modeling, role-playing and instructor feedback, within the multiple baseline design. The results clearly showed a mean increase in correct demonstration of each target behavior for each parent only after the treatment condition was introduced, indicating a significant treatment effect. Furthermore, because there was no overlap of data points from baseline to treatment, changes in level were evident, providing a strong case that behavior was changed due to treatment effects. Although trend of the behaviors in baseline varied, data points in the treatment phase for each target behavior for each parent made such a dramatic and immediate jump that they each were indicative of a treatment effect. These findings are consistent with previous research demonstrating that the use of modeling and roleplaying are superior to readings and lecture-style for parent training programs. The second question considered whether or not parent’s ratings of competence, depression, and life stress, as measured on the Parenting Stress Index (PSI), would change as a result of the intervention. Results showed no clear trends in data for the effects of treatment on the PSI scores.

Mondialement, l’infanticide est une cause importante de mortalité infantile. Dans ce mémoire, les infanticides sont analysés en fonction du statut parental, du mode de décès et de l’âge de l’enfant. La première hypothèse de ce mémoire propose qu’il y ait une surreprésentation des parents non biologiques dans les cas d’infanticides chez les enfants de moins de douze ans, et ce, en regard des taux de base de la population. L’hypothèse 2 prédit que les infanticides des parents biologiques devraient revêtir un caractère plus létal (utilisation d’arme à feu, empoisonnement, etc.) que ceux des parents non biologiques qui devraient être caractérisés principalement par des mauvais traitements et de la négligence. D’autres hypothèses sont examinées en fonction des taux de suicide et du sexe de l’agresseur. La présente étude porte sur les cas d’infanticides d’enfants de douze ans et moins sur le territoire du Québec provenant des archives du bureau du coroner pour la période se situant entre 1990 et 2007 (n=182). Les résultats obtenus appuient partiellement l’hypothèse 1 et confirment l’hypothèse 2. En ce sens, les résultats de cette étude viennent appuyer les hypothèses évolutionnistes qui soutiennent une influence du statut parental sur le comportement de l’infanticide. De façon générale, ces résultats mettent en lumière les différences qualitatives qui existent entre les parents biologiques et les parents non biologiques dans les cas d’infanticides. Les implications des résultats obtenus sont discutées. / Infanticide is considered as being an important part of infantile mortality. In this study, infanticide is studied according to the parental status (biological parent versus non biological parent), method of death and differential rates of suicide. The first hypothesis proposed that there should be an over-representation of the non biological parents in the homicide cases with the children of less than twelve years and this in look of the population rates. The second hypothesis proposed that the murders of the biological parents should clothe a more final character (weapon usage to fire, poisoning) that the homicides of the non biological parents that should be principally characterized by bad treatments. Other hypotheses are examined according to the rates of suicide and of the sex of the aggressor. The present study is based on the cases of homicides of child under the age of twelve on the territory of the Quebec from 1990 to 2007 (N = 182). The results support partially the hypothesis 1 and confirm the hypothesis 2. In this direction, the results of this study come to support the evolutionist hypotheses that principally are based on the theory of the parental investment. Implications of the obtained results are discussed.

Com o uso de um conceito ainda não explorado para fins de classificação de dados, baseado em Lógica Paraconsistente Anotada (LPA), este trabalho visa à construção de um sistema inteligente para classificação de gêneros musicais (Music Genre Classification - MGC). Este tema, de caráter emergente na literatura, tem recebido atenção crescente da comunidade científica, tendo em vista a sua grande aplicabilidade, destacando-se o potencial de comercialização de dados multimídia pela Internet, assim como a automatização de inúmeras tarefas de data mining que envolvem sinais musicais. Utilizando uma base de dados composta por amostras de músicas representativas de cada gênero musical, tais como jazz, bolero, bossa nova, forró, salsa e sertanejo, assim como de um classificador discriminativo paraconsistente, uma abordagem supervisionada é proposta para solucionar o problema. O primeiro módulo do sistema realiza a extração de características dos diversos segmentos das músicas com base na análise tempo-frequência associada com as bandas críticas do ouvido humano. Por outro lado, o segundo módulo utiliza o classificador proposto, que deve permitir a manipulação de sinais com características contraditórias de uma maneira mais semelhante àquela realizada pelo cérebro humano. Os resultados, quando comparados com as abordagens pré-existentes para MGC, demonstram a viabilidade do uso da LPA para tal fim. Além disso, caracteriza-se neste trabalho, uma contribuição original ao estado-da-arte no tema, que consiste justamente no uso da LPA para MGC, procedimento para o qual inexiste descrição na literatura até este momento. / By using a new concept, which is based on Paraconsistent Logic (LPA) and has not yet been applied for classification, this work aims at constructing an intelligent system for Music Genre Classification (MGC). This topic, that is emergent in the literature, has received an increasing attention from the scientific community due to its applicability, emphazising both a commercial potential to commercialize multimedia content on the Internet and data mining tasks involving music signals. By adopting a database formed by samples of songs, which represent different styles of music, such as jazz, bolero, bossa nova, forró, salsa and sertanejo, and a discriminative paraconsistent classifier, a supervised procedure is used to solve the problem. The system is divided in two modules. The first extracts features from the music files, based on the concepts of time-frequency analysis and crictical bands of the human ear. On the other hand, the second implements the proposed classifier, which allows an efficient treatment of contradictions in such a way that is more similar to the human brain. The results obtained, when compared with existing approaches used to MGC, demonstrate how LPA is suitable for this purpose. Additionally, this is the original contribution to the state-of-the-art: the use of LPA for MGC, an inexistent approach up to date.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T20:30:57Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 6111.pdf: 3303479 bytes, checksum: a794b2d5ef800fd6a551d19ad8ba0390 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-03-07 / Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos / This study has its origins in the search for teaching reading procedures that meet the needs of all of the apprentices, based on different discriminative problems for the construction of the network of relationships between stimuli and between stimuli and responses that make up the repertoire of reading. Study 1 was to investigate the effectiveness of teaching procedures with different discrimination trainings based on specific teaching conditions simple discrimination, simple discrimination with differential and specific reinforcement, and conditional discrimination and untreated condition (control) eight isolated words. Each discriminative training applied differently for each individual, was scheduled involving a pair of three simple syllable words: girl (menina) and mustache (bigode), salad (salada) and drawer (gaveta), popcorn (pipoca) and horse (cavalo), window (janela) and tomato (tomate). This study was held in a special school with 12 learners with intellectual disabilities. We tested the formation of classes between the pictures and printed words and the reading of teaching and generalization words. We used a randomized alternated treatment between teaching conditions that alternated the different workouts in a quickly and balanced way. The participants were exposed to a specific sequence of teaching so as to minimize the effect of the sequence itself and only five learners achieved a significant learning on the proposed procedure. The same procedure was replicated for four more typically developing children with reading difficulties and were obtained similar learning outcomes. Then the Study 2 was held with the proposal to determine the influence of progressively teaching prior repertoires for the establishment of classes of stimuli and, consequently, for the skills of reading, from the range of learning criteria. We selected two of the students of the last study with the lowest input relational repertoires. The identity relations were taught between stimuli, matching to sample (conditional discrimination), identity constructed response, naming of pictures and echoic behavior to them. Both learners had learned relational relations between pictures to printed words, and printed words to pictures and its reading. It was argued, therefore, that the alternated sequence of instruction in Study 1 was not enough in isolation to control the effectiveness of each training condition, and that Study 2 verified the effectiveness of teaching basic skills for expanding the repertoire of reading. / O presente estudo tem origem na busca por procedimentos de ensino de leitura que atendam a totalidade dos aprendizes, baseados em diferentes problemas discriminativos e visando a construção da rede de relações entre estímulos e entre estímulos e respostas que compõem o repertório de leitura. O Estudo 1 visou investigar a efetividade de procedimentos de ensino com diferentes treinos de discriminação a partir de condições de ensino específicas discriminação simples, discriminação simples com reforçamento diferencial e específico, discriminação condicional e condição não tratamento (controle) de oito palavras isoladas. Cada treino discriminativo, aplicado diferentemente para cada indivíduo, foi programado envolvendo um dos pares de palavras trissílabas simples: menina e bigode, salada e gaveta, pipoca e cavalo, janela e tomate. Esse ensino foi realizado em uma instituição especial com 12 aprendizes com deficiência intelectual. Foi testada a formação de classes entre as figuras e as palavras impressas e a leitura das palavras de ensino e de generalização. Utilizou-se um delineamento de tratamento alternado entre condições de ensino que alternou os diferentes treinos de forma rápida e balanceada. Os participantes foram expostos a uma sequência específica de ensino como forma de minimizar o próprio efeito da sequência, e apenas cinco aprendizes obtiveram uma aprendizagem significativa diante do procedimento proposto. Replicou-se o mesmo procedimento a mais quatro crianças de desenvolvimento típico com dificuldades de leitura e obtiveram-se resultados similares de aprendizagem. Realizou-se, então, o Estudo 2 com a proposta de verificar a influência do ensino gradual de repertórios prévios ao estabelecimento de classes de estímulos e, consequentemente, para as habilidades de leitura, a partir do alcance de critérios de aprendizagem. Selecionaram-se dois dos alunos do estudo anterior com os repertórios relacionais mais baixos de entrada. A eles foram ensinadas as relações de identidade entre estímulos, de seleção conforme um estímulo modelo (discriminação condicional), de construção de palavra impressa, de nomeação de figuras e de ecoar conforme o modelo auditivo. Ambos os aprendizes aprenderam respostas relacionais entre figuras e palavras impressas, palavras impressas e figuras e palavra impressa e a sua leitura. Discutiu-se, portanto, que a sequência alternada de ensino utilizada no Estudo 1 não foi suficiente para controlar de maneira isolada a efetividade de cada condição de treino, e que no Estudo 2 verificou-se a eficácia do ensino de habilidades básicas para a ampliação do repertório de leitura.