In this paper, we discuss the choice and use of benchmarks in each of five areas relevant to an assessment of the progress of EU electricity sector liberalisation. These areas are market design, market power, EU enlargement, regulation, and sustainability. Our aim is to discuss the most important benchmarks for each area, and to do so in the context of that area. Where a benchmark can be used a...

Face detection is still one of the core problems in computer vision, especially in unconstrained real-world situations where variations in face pose or bad imaging conditions have to be handled. These problems are covered by recent benchmarks such as Face Detection Dataset and Benchmark (FDDB) [2], which reveals that established methods, e.g, Viola and Jones [8] suffer a drop in performance. Mo...

Many real world optimization problems are dynamic, meaning that their optimal solutions are time-varying. In recent years, an effective approach to address these problems has been the multi-swarm PSO (mPSO). Despite this, we believe that there is still room for improvement and, in this contribution we propose two simple strategies to increase the effectiveness of mPSO. The first one faces the d...

Semi-supervised learning methods based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) obtained strong empirical results, but it is not clear 1) how the discriminator benefits from joint training with a generator, and 2) why good semi-supervised classification performance and a good generator cannot be obtained at the same time. Theoretically we show that given the discriminator objective, good semis...

This paper introduces the Toshiba Mandarin Text-to-Speech (TTS) system submitted to the Mandarin benchmark of the Blizzard Challenge 2009. The basic framework keeps unchanged with the system in 2008 and we modify the system in several aspects: automatically find bad units in the database when preparing the speech corpus, add a G2P procedure after the text analysis to increase accuracy of the pr...