As applications incorporating speech recognition technology become widely used, it is desireable to have such systems interact naturally with its users. For such natural interaction to occur, recognition systems must be able to accurately detect when a speaker has finished speaking. This research presents an analysis combining lower and higher level cues to perform the utterance endpointing tas...

The efficiency of any metaheuristic algorithm largely depends on the way of balancing local intensive exploitation and global diverse exploration. Studies show that bat algorithm can provide a good balance between these two key components with superior efficiency. In this paper, we first review some commonly used metaheuristic algorithms, and then compare the performance of bat algorithm with t...

The nature of the dark energy dominating the energy budget of the Universe and driving the observed acceleration of its expansion is a major challenge for Cosmology. Here we discuss the observational signatures of dark energy and outline a number of promising approaches to determining its nature, including the Cosmic Microwave Background from Planck, gravitational lensing from darkCAM or DES, a...

As for the East Asian countries, the total amount of government debt in Korea has risen sharply over the following several years in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. The purpose of this paper is to assess whether the current levels of government debt are sustainable for a severely attacked country, namely, Korea. Under the intertemporal budget constraint model, the study tests for fiscal ...

A number of recent studies have shown a strong link between hemispheric asymmetry in tropical precipitation and the atmospheric energy budget. The energetics framework has been used to explain why the mean position of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) is in the Northern Hemisphere (Frierson et al. 2013; Marshall et al. 2013), to demonstrate the large-scale circulation and precipitation ...

For the purpose of deriving grid-scale vertical velocity and advective tendencies from sounding measurements, an objective scheme is developed to process atmospheric soundings of winds, temperature, and water vapor mixing ratio over a network of a small number of stations. Given the inevitable uncertainties in the original data, state variables of the atmosphere are adjusted by the smallest pos...

This thesis explores a new approach to object recognition for active vision systems that integrates information across multiple observations of an object. The approach exploits the order relationship between successive frames to derive a classifier based on the characteristic motion of local features across visual sweeps. This motion model reveals structural information about the object that ca...

The relevant literature on machining operations selection in Computer-Aided Process Planning (CAPP) by decision trees, expert systems and neural networks has been reviewed, highlighting their contributions and shortcomings. This paper aims at contributing to the applicability of back-propagation neural network method for the selection of all possible operations for machining rotationally symmet...

Loggerhead turtles that nest in the Mediterranean sea are geographically and genetically distinct from the North Atlantic (NA) other populations of loggerhead turtles. The individuals belonging to the Mediterranean population, even though belonging to the same species, are consistently (at birth, puberty, and ultimate size) smaller than their conspecifics of the North Atlantic population. Becau...

The Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm (SPEA) (Zitzler and Thiele 1999) is a relatively recent technique for finding or approximating the Pareto-optimal set for multiobjective optimization problems. In different studies (Zitzler and Thiele 1999; Zitzler, Deb, and Thiele 2000) SPEA has shown very good performance in comparison to other multiobjective evolutionary algorithms, and therefore it...