Background noise can have a significant impact on the performance of speech recognition systems. A range of fast featurespace and model-based schemes have been investigated to increase robustness. Model-based approaches typically achieve lower error rates, but at an increased computational load compared to feature-based approaches. Thismakes their use inmany situations impractical. The uncertai...

A conventional approach for noise robust automatic speech recognition consists of using a speech enhancement before recognition. However, speech enhancement cannot completely remove noise, thus a mismatch between the enhanced speech and the acoustic model inevitably remains. Uncertainty decoding approaches have been used to mitigate such a mismatch by accounting for the feature uncertainty duri...

Motivation: The uncertainty principle [2] says that using linear systems we cannot extract precise frequency and timing information from a signal simultaneously. Due to this principle sound processing techniques using versions of the Fourier transform [1] have extreme difficulty trying to approximate human hearing capabilities. Well known problem areas in speech recognition are ones in which th...

Uncertainty propagation techniques achieve a more robust automatic speech recognition by modeling the information missing after speech enhancement in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) domain in probabilistic form. This information is then propagated into the feature domain where recognition takes place and combined with observation uncertainty techniques like uncertainty decoding. In this...

OBJECTIVES We document the properties of experiences of continued presence (ECPs) helping to resolve controversies about their significance. METHOD We used qualitative methods in data collection and analysis. This enabled us to document the properties of ECPs. Narrative biographic interviews were carried out with 17 bereaved informants, and conversation analysis was used to identify the sourc...

The ability of social agents, be it virtually-embodied avatars or physically-embodied robots, to display social behavior and interact with their users in a natural way represents an important factor in how effective such agents are during interactions. In particular, endowing the agent with effective communicative abilities, well-suited for the target application or task, can make a significant...