This paper presents a perceptual experiment on the friendliness of the synthesized Standard Chinese. Based on the acoustic investigation of friendly speech, tonal pitch, phone duration and spectral energy distribution were adjusted in synthesis and the synthesized stimuli were subjected to perception test. It was found that: (1) Friendliness of synthesized speech could be achieved via adjusting...

In this work, we study how TCP-friendliness of a ratebased control protocol is affected by the different parameterisation of RED. We also explore the range of optimal RED parameter values for ensuring the TCP-friendliness of the competing connections. We choose TCP-Friendly Rate Control (TFRC) protocol [5] as the competing source againsts TCP Sack. Our results show that different RED parameteri...

Efficient emergency management requires on the one hand collecting distributed pieces of information in order to get an aggregated situation overview, and on the other hand distributing and presenting the gathered information to all levels of decision making. IT-supported emergency management systems can support these tasks, but need to be carefully designed in order to reflect the actual needs...

Providing good service quality is of great strategic importance in the management any organization. Besides ensuring excellent clinical care, hospitals should also focus on providing to their patients and visitors. The findings from this study could provide useful information as how better manage services harness technologies enhance quality. shows that there still a lot room for improvement he...

The paper is focused on the friendliness analysis and perception of dialogue speech. To do that, the paper uses a concept of the “perception vector” which contains the information of emotions and softness. In creating the “perception vector”, and to simulate the perception ambiguity, the paper allows the listeners to label the speech with multiple emotions, and align them into “one choice”, “fi...

Many of today’s websites have recognised the importance of mobile friendly pages to keep users engaged and to provide a satisfying user experience. However, next to the experience provided by the sites themselves, advertisements, when clicked, present users with landing pages that are not necessarily mobile friendly. We explore what type of features are able to characterise the mobile friendlin...

Age-friendliness, promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO), aims to enable and support individuals in different aspects of life for fostering life satisfaction and personal well-being as they age. We identified specific aspect(s) of age-friendliness associated with life satisfaction and examined similarities and differences in age-friendliness and life satisfaction in young-old and old-o...

BACKGROUND Health is associated with amount of daily physical activity. Recently, the identification of sedentary time as an independent factor, has gained interest. A valid and easy to use activity monitor is needed to objectively investigate the relationship between physical activity, sedentary time and health. We compared validity and reproducibility of physical activity measurement and post...