A technique for high-accuracy tracking of formants or vocal tract resonances is presented in this paper using a novel nonlinear predictor and using a target-directed temporal constraint. The nonlinear predictor is constructed from a parameter-free, discrete mapping function from the formant (frequencies and bandwidths) space to the LPC-cepstral space, with trainable residuals. We examine in thi...

Current Automatic Speech Recognition systems convert the speech signal into a sequence of discrete units, such as phonemes, and then apply statistical methods on the units to produce the linguistic message. Similar methodology has also been applied to recognize speaker and language, except that the output of the system can be the speaker or language information. Therefore, we propose the use of...

In this paper, we investigate achievable rates for data transmission from sources to sinks through multiple relay networks. We consider myopic coding, a constrained communication strategy in which each node has only a local view of the network, meaning that nodes can only transmit to and decode from neighboring nodes. We compare this with omniscient coding, in which every node has a global view...

Speaker verification systems require some kind of background model to reliably perform the verification task. Several algorithms have been proposed for the selection of cohort models to form a background model. This paper proposes a new cohort selection method called the Close Impostor Clustering (CIC). The new method is shown to outperform several other methods in a text-dependent verification...

Over the past few decades, obesity has become a global epidemic that affects diverse societies across developed and developing countries. Obe­ sity rates correlate well with recent developments such as incessant enticements to sit and an un­ precedented availability, at low or no cost, of foods and beverages rich in poorly satiating calo­ ries. These rapid environmental changes interact with pr...

Recent auditory physiological evidence points to a modulation frequency dimension in the auditory cortex. This dimension exists jointly with the tonotopic acoustic frequency dimension. Thus, audition can be considered as a relatively slowly-varying two-dimensional representation, the “modulation spectrum,” where the first dimension is the well-known acoustic frequency and the second dimension i...

The future of the biomedical enterprise and the biomedical libraries that serve it is tied closely to digital information. The changing nature of this type of information will create new pressures on libraries, particularly in health care organizations. Libraries must learn to deal with these pressures. Currently, libraries depend on the Internet primarily for connections to resources and other...

State-of-the-art speech recognition systems are trained using human transcriptions of speech utterances. In this paper, we describe a method to combine active and unsupervised learning for automatic speech recognition (ASR). The goal is to minimize the human supervision for training acoustic and language models and to maximize the performance given the transcribed and untranscribed data. Active...

We present a study analyzing the response times of users to questions on Twitter. We investigate estimating these response times using an exponential distribution-based wait time model learned from users’ previous responses. Our analysis considers several different model building approaches, including personalized models for each user, general models built for all users, and time-sensitive mode...