A general-purpose isiZulu text-to-speech (TTS) system was developed, based on the ‘Multisyn’ unitselection approach supported by the Festival TTS toolkit. The development involved a number of challenges related to the interface between speech technology and linguistics – for example, choosing an appropriate set of phonetic units, producing reliable pronunciations, and developing appropriate cos...

The highly influential framework of conceptual spaces provides a geometric way of representing knowledge. Instances are represented by points and concepts are represented by regions in a highdimensional space. Based on our recent formalization, we present a generalpurpose implementation of the conceptual spaces framework that is not only capable of representing concepts with inter-domain correl...

We employ a general purpose technology model with endogenous stochastic growth to simulate the effects of different energy policy schemes. An R&D sector produces endogenous growth by developing radical and incremental technologies. These innovations result in blueprints for capital intermediates, which require raw capital and either carbon or noncarbon-based fuels. A carbon tax therefore affect...

The principal role of the operating system is that of resource management. Its task is to present a set of appropriate services to the applications and users it supports. Traditionally, generalpurpose operating systems, including Windows NT, federate resource sharing in a fair manner, with the predominant goal of efficient resource utilisation. As a result the chosen scheduling algorithms are n...

A huge installed base of general-purpose (often sequential) applications cannot take advantage of distributed systems. This paper presents a design and initial prototypes of a set of techniques, called adaptive virtualization, that endows regular applications with features for exploiting a distributed environment. These features include the ability to be scheduled on diverse CPUs, adapting to a...

Agent-Based Software Integration (ABSI) entails the development of intelligent software agents and knowledge-sharing protocols that enhance interoperability of multiple software packages. Although some past ABSI projects reported in the literature have been concerned with the integration of relatively large software frameworks from separate engineering disciplines, the discussion in this paper ...

Simty is a massively multi-threaded processor core that dynamically assembles SIMD instructions from scalar multi-thread code. It runs the RISC-V (RV32-I) instruction set. Unlike existing SIMD or SIMT processors like GPUs, Simty takes binaries compiled for generalpurpose processors without any instruction set extension or compiler changes. Simty is described in synthesizable RTL. A FPGA prototy...

Instruction dispatch is responsible for most of the running time of Forth interpreters, especially on modern pipelined processors. Superinstructions are an important optimisation to reduce the number of instruction dispatches. Superinstructions have been used for many years to optimise interpreters, but an open problem is the choice of superinstructions to include in the interpreter. In this pa...

The graphics processor (GPU) on current personal computers has developed into a rich and stable platform for developing scientific applications which do not fall under the category of traditional computer graphics software. The application of the GPU as a SIMD processor for scientific computing has proven to be a very powerful tool to an extent that various graphics card manufacturers have star...

Fast and accurate techniques for searching large genomic text collections are becoming increasingly important. While Information Retrieval is well-established for general-purpose text retrieval tasks, less is known about retrieval techniques for genomic text data. In this paper, we investigate and propose general-purpose search techniques for genomic text. In particular, we show that significan...