A complex service-based system (CSBS), which comprises a multi-layer structure possibly spanning multiple organizations, operates in a highly dynamic and heterogeneous environment. At run time the quality of service provided by a CSBS may suddenly change, so that violations of the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) established within and across the boundaries of organizations can occur. Hence, a k...

With weakening prospects of prompt mitigation, it is increasingly likely that the world will experience 4°C and more of global warming. In such a world, adaptation decisions that have long lead times or that have implications playing out over many decades become more uncertain and complex. Adapting to global warming of 4°C cannot be seen as a mere extrapolation of adaptation to 2°C; it will be ...

Mendelsohn and Dinar review much of the important work on the implications of climate change for agriculture, focusing particularly on developing countries. Their message is that efficient economic adaptation significantly reduces the estimated effects of climate change. Few dispute that some amount of adaptation is likely and that its potential contribution to reducing the negative impacts of ...

Speech recognition applications are known to require a significant amount of resources. However, embedded speech recognition only authorizes few KB of memory, few MIPS and small a amount of training data. In order to fit the resource constraints of embedded applications, an approach based on a semi-continuous HMM system using stateindependent acoustic modelling is proposed. A transformation is ...

In this paper we investigate feature space transforms to improve lip-reading performance for multi-stream HMM based audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR). The feature space transforms include non-linear Gaussianization transform and feature space maximum likelihood linear regression (fMLLR). We apply Gaussianization at the various stages of visual front-end. The results show that Gaussianizing...

The use of real-time techniques in new application fields, such as multimedia computing, has extended classical algorithms to more dynamic environments, introducing the problem of controlling and adapting the quality of service provided by an application. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of integrating application-dependent adaptation strategies with reservation techniques for hand...

The performance of global affine and nonlinear transformations for speaker adaptation in a hidden Markov model (HMM) speech recognition system are compared in this paper. The nonlinear transformation was obtained with a multilayer perceptron network (MLP) which was trained during the adaptation process to transform the mean vectors of the HMMs such that the output probabilities of the HMMs for ...

When a different pattern is presented to each eye, the perceived image spontaneously alternates between the two patterns (binocular rivalry); the dynamics of these bistable alternations are known to be stochastic. Examining multistable binocular rivalry (involving four dominant percepts), we demonstrated path dependence and on-line adaptation, which were equivalent whether perceived patterns we...

Histogram equalization (HEQ) is a simple and effective feature normalization technique for robust speech recognition. Recently, we proposed to adapt HEQ transform to each test utterance using a maximum likelihood (ML) criterion and observed improved performance. In this paper, we further the study by applying attribute-based HEQ and its ML adaptation. Instead of applying a global HEQ transform ...

An anisotropic mesh adaptation strategy for finite element solution of elliptic differential equations is considered. The adaptation method generates anisotropic adaptive meshes as quasiuniform ones in some metric space. The associated metric tensor is computed by means of a posteriori hierarchical error estimates. A global hierarchical error estimate is employed in this study to obtain reliabl...