The process of product innovation consists of three stages, which are fuzzy front end (FFE), new product development (NPD) and commercialization (COM). Theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ) is a systematic approach to find innovative solutions for technical problems. The patterns and lines of TRIZ are applied to FFE to produce new ideas. The principles, standard solutions and effects of TR...

Parametric speech synthesis techniques depend on full context acoustic models generated by language front-ends, which analyse linguistic and phonetic structure. HTS, the leading parametric synthesis system, can use a number of different front-ends to generate full context models for synthesis and training. In this paper we explore the use of a new text processing front-end that has been added t...

Often problem solving can be reduced to the search for nite models of rst-order logic speciications. We describe the model generation method EP Tableaux that is complete for refutation and for nite satissability. To make EP Tableaux available to domain specialists unfamiliar with formal notations we added a natural language front-end that accepts Attempto Controlled English | a subset of standa...

The paper is a short tutorial on the multiscale differential geometric possibilities of the front-end visual receptive fields, modeled by Gaussian derivative kernels. The paper is written in, and interactive through the use of Mathematica 4, so each statement can be run and modified by the reader on images of choice. The notion of multiscale invariant feature detection is presented in detail, w...

In the recent years, the database community has witnessed the emergence of a new technology, namely data warehousing. A data warehouse is a global repository that stores pre-processed queries on data which resides in multiple, possibly heterogeneous, operational or legacy sources. The information stored in the data warehouse can be easily and eeciently accessed for making eeective decisions. Th...

Front-end electronics for imaging detectors with large numbers of pixels (10–10) is reviewed. The noise limits as a function of detector capacitance and power dissipation are presented for CMOS technology. Active matrix flat panel imagers (AMFPIs) are discussed and their potential noise performance is illustrated. r 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All

The HANDS question-answering and direction application, consisting of Answer Tree and Address Guesser modules is described in relation to the EDEN project from which it is derived. The use of an Open Source (OSS) model for application development and service delivery is considered in the context of European policy. The interaction of HANDS with Public Bodies’ (PBs) existing business process is ...