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Automated exposure notification for COVID-19

Summary

Private Automated Contact Tracing (PACT) was a collaborative team and effort formed during the beginning of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. PACT's mission was to enhance contact tracing in pandemic response by designing exposure-detection functions in personal digital communication devices that have maximal public health utility while preserving privacy. This report explains and discusses the use of automated exposure notification during the COVID-19 pandemic and to provide some recommendations for those who may try to design and deploy similar technologies in future pandemics.
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Summary

Private Automated Contact Tracing (PACT) was a collaborative team and effort formed during the beginning of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. PACT's mission was to enhance contact tracing in pandemic response by designing exposure-detection functions in personal digital communication devices that have maximal public health utility while preserving privacy...

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Development and use of a comprehensive humanitarian assessment tool in post-earthquake Haiti

Summary

This paper describes a comprehensive humanitarian assessment tool designed and used following the January 2010 Haiti earthquake. The tool was developed under Joint Task Force -- Haiti coordination using indicators of humanitarian needs to support decision making by the United States Government, agencies of the United Nations, and various non-governmental organizations. A set of questions and data collection methodology were developed by a collaborative process involving a broad segment of the Haiti humanitarian relief community and used to conduct surveys in internally displaced person settlements and surrounding communities for a four-month period starting on 15 March 2010. Key considerations in the development of the assessment tool and data collection methodology, representative analysis results, and observations from the operational use of the tool for decision making are reported. The paper concludes with lessons learned and recommendations for design and use of similar tools in the future.
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Summary

This paper describes a comprehensive humanitarian assessment tool designed and used following the January 2010 Haiti earthquake. The tool was developed under Joint Task Force -- Haiti coordination using indicators of humanitarian needs to support decision making by the United States Government, agencies of the United Nations, and various non-governmental...

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Automatic language identification

Published in:
Wiley Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Vol. 2, pp. 104-9, 2007.

Summary

Automatic language identification is the process by which the language of digitized spoken words is recognized by a computer. It is one of several processes in which information is extracted automatically from a speech signal.
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Summary

Automatic language identification is the process by which the language of digitized spoken words is recognized by a computer. It is one of several processes in which information is extracted automatically from a speech signal.

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Experience using active and passive mapping for network situational awareness

Published in:
5th IEEE Int. Symp. on Network Computing and Applications NCA06, 24-26 July 2006, pp. 19-26.

Summary

Passive network mapping has often been proposed as an approach to maintain up-to-date information on networks between active scans. This paper presents a comparison of active and passive mapping on an operational network. On this network, active and passive tools found largely disjoint sets of services and the passive system took weeks to discover the last 15% of active services. Active and passive mapping tools provided different, not complimentary information. Deploying passive mapping on an enterprise network does not reduce the need for timely active scans due to non-overlapping coverage and potentially long discovery times.
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Summary

Passive network mapping has often been proposed as an approach to maintain up-to-date information on networks between active scans. This paper presents a comparison of active and passive mapping on an operational network. On this network, active and passive tools found largely disjoint sets of services and the passive system...

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Measuring the readability of automatic speech-to-text transcripts

Summary

This paper reports initial results from a novel psycholinguistic study that measures the readability of several types of speech transcripts. We define a four-part figure of merit to measure readability: accuracy of answers to comprehension questions, reaction-time for passage reading, reaction-time for question answering and a subjective rating of passage difficulty. We present results from an experiment with 28 test subjects reading transcripts in four experimental conditions.
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Summary

This paper reports initial results from a novel psycholinguistic study that measures the readability of several types of speech transcripts. We define a four-part figure of merit to measure readability: accuracy of answers to comprehension questions, reaction-time for passage reading, reaction-time for question answering and a subjective rating of passage...

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Preliminary speaker recognition experiments on the NATO N4 corpus

Published in:
Proc. Workshop on Multilingual Speech and Language Processing, 8 Spetember 2001.

Summary

The NATO N4 corpus contains speech collected at naval training schools within several NATO countries. The speech utterances comprising the corpus are short, tactical transmissions typical of NATO naval communications. In this paper, we report the results of some preliminary speaker recognition experiments on the N4 corpus. We compare the performance of three speaker recognition systems developed at TNO Human Factors, the US Air Force Research Laboratory, Information Directorate and MIT Lincoln Laboratory on the segment of N4 data collected in the Netherlands. Performance is reported as a function of both training and test data duration. We also investigate the impact of cross-language training and testing.
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Summary

The NATO N4 corpus contains speech collected at naval training schools within several NATO countries. The speech utterances comprising the corpus are short, tactical transmissions typical of NATO naval communications. In this paper, we report the results of some preliminary speaker recognition experiments on the N4 corpus. We compare the...

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Evaluation of confidence measures for language identification

Published in:
6th European Conf. on Speech Communication and Technology, EUROSPEECH, 5-9 September 1999.

Summary

In this paper we examine various ways to derive confidence measures for a language identification system, using phone recognition followed by language models, and describe the application of an evaluation metric for measuring the "goodness" of the different confidence measures. Experiments are conducted on the 1996 NIST Language Identification Evaluation corpus (derived from the Callfriend corpus of conversational telephone speech). The system is trained on the NIST 96 development data and evaluated on the NIST 96 evaluation data. Results indicate that we are able to predict the performance of a system and quantitatively evaluate how well the prediction holds on new data.
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Summary

In this paper we examine various ways to derive confidence measures for a language identification system, using phone recognition followed by language models, and describe the application of an evaluation metric for measuring the "goodness" of the different confidence measures. Experiments are conducted on the 1996 NIST Language Identification Evaluation...

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Evaluating intrusion detection systems without attacking your friends: The 1998 DARPA intrusion detection evaluation

Summary

Intrusion detection systems monitor the use of computers and the network over which they communicate, searching for unauthorized use, anomalous behavior, and attempts to deny users, machines or portions of the network access to services. Potential users of such systems need information that is rarely found in marketing literature, including how well a given system finds intruders and how much work is required to use and maintain that system in a fully functioning network with significant daily traffic. Researchers and developers can specify which prototypical attacks can be found by their systems, but without access to the normal traffic generated by day-to-day work, they can not describe how well their systems detect real attacks while passing background traffic and avoiding false alarms. This information is critical: every declared intrusion requires time to review, regardless of whether it is a correct detection for which a real intrusion occurred, or whether it is merely a false alarm. To meet the needs of researchers, developers and ultimately system administrators we have developed the first objective, repeatable, and realistic measurement of intrusion detection system performance. Network traffic on an Air Force base was measured, characterized and subsequently simulated on an isolated network on which a few computers were used to simulate thousands of different Unix systems and hundreds of different users during periods of normal network traffic. Simulated attackers mapped the network, issued denial of service attacks, illegally gained access to systems, and obtained super-user privileges. Attack types ranged from old, well-known attacks, to new, stealthy attacks. Seven weeks of training data and two weeks of testing data were generated, filling more than 30 CD-ROMs. Methods and results from the 1998 DARPA intrusion detection evaluation will be highlighted, and preliminary plans for the 1999 evaluation will be presented.
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Summary

Intrusion detection systems monitor the use of computers and the network over which they communicate, searching for unauthorized use, anomalous behavior, and attempts to deny users, machines or portions of the network access to services. Potential users of such systems need information that is rarely found in marketing literature, including...

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Blind clustering of speech utterances based on speaker and language characteristics

Published in:
5th Int. Conf. Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP), 30 November - 4 December 1998.

Summary

Classical speaker and language recognition techniques can be applied to the classification of unknown utterances by computing the likelihoods of the utterances given a set of well trained target models. This paper addresses the problem of grouping unknown utterances when no information is available regarding the speaker or language classes or even the total number of classes. Approaches to blind message clustering are presented based on conventional hierarchical clustering techniques and an integrated cluster generation and selection method called the d* algorithm. Results are presented using message sets derived from the Switchboard and Callfriend corpora. Potential applications include automatic indexing of recorded speech corpora by speaker/language tags and automatic or semiautomatic selection of speaker specific speech utterances for speaker recognition adaptation.
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Summary

Classical speaker and language recognition techniques can be applied to the classification of unknown utterances by computing the likelihoods of the utterances given a set of well trained target models. This paper addresses the problem of grouping unknown utterances when no information is available regarding the speaker or language classes...

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Improving accent identification through knowledge of English syllable structure

Published in:
5th Int. Conf. on Spoken Language Processing, ICSLP, 30 November - 4 December 1998.

Summary

This paper studies the structure of foreign-accented read English speech. A system for accent identification is constructed by combining linguistic theory with statistical analysis. Results demonstrate that the linguistic theory is reflected in real speech data and its application improves accent identification. The work discussed here combines and applies previous research in language identification based on phonemic features [1] with the analysis of the structure and function of the English language [2]. Working with phonemically hand-labelled data in three accented speaker groups of Australian English (Vietnamese, Lebanese, and native speakers), we show that accents of foreign speakers can be predicted and manifest themselves differently as a function of their position within the syllable. When applying this knowledge, English vs. Vietnamese accent identification improves from 86% to 93% (English vs. Lebanese improves from 78% to 84%). The described algorithm is also applied to automatically aligned phonemes.
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Summary

This paper studies the structure of foreign-accented read English speech. A system for accent identification is constructed by combining linguistic theory with statistical analysis. Results demonstrate that the linguistic theory is reflected in real speech data and its application improves accent identification. The work discussed here combines and applies previous...

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