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Sinewave representations of nonmodality

Summary

Regions of nonmodal phonation, exhibiting deviations from uniform glottal-pulse periods and amplitudes, occur often and convey information about speaker- and linguistic-dependent factors. Such waveforms pose challenges for speech modeling, analysis/synthesis, and processing. In this paper, we investigate the representation of nonmodal pulse trains as a sum of harmonically-related sinewaves with time-varying amplitudes, phases, and frequencies. We show that a sinewave representation of any impulsive signal is not unique and also the converse, i.e., frame-based measurements of the underlying sinewave representation can yield different impulse trains. Finally, we argue how this ambiguity may explain addition, deletion, and movement of pulses in sinewave synthesis and a specific illustrative example of time-scale modification of a nonmodal case of diplophonia.
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Summary

Regions of nonmodal phonation, exhibiting deviations from uniform glottal-pulse periods and amplitudes, occur often and convey information about speaker- and linguistic-dependent factors. Such waveforms pose challenges for speech modeling, analysis/synthesis, and processing. In this paper, we investigate the representation of nonmodal pulse trains as a sum of harmonically-related sinewaves with...

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Language recognition via i-vectors and dimensionality reduction

Published in:
2011 INTERSPEECH, 27-31 August 2011, pp. 857-860.

Summary

In this paper, a new language identification system is presented based on the total variability approach previously developed in the field of speaker identification. Various techniques are employed to extract the most salient features in the lower dimensional i-vector space and the system developed results in excellent performance on the 2009 LRE evaluation set without the need for any post-processing or backend techniques. Additional performance gains are observed when the system is combined with other acoustic systems.
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Summary

In this paper, a new language identification system is presented based on the total variability approach previously developed in the field of speaker identification. Various techniques are employed to extract the most salient features in the lower dimensional i-vector space and the system developed results in excellent performance on the...

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Latent topic modeling for audio corpus summarization

Published in:
INTERSPEECH 2011, 27-31 August 2011, pp. 913-916.

Summary

This work presents techniques for automatically summarizing the topical content of an audio corpus. Probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) is used to learn a set of latent topics in an unsupervised fashion. These latent topics are ranked by their relative importance in the corpus and a summary of each topic is generated from signature words that aptly describe the content of that topic. This paper presents techniques for producing a high quality summarization. An example summarization of conversational data from the Fisher corpus that demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach is presented and evaluated.
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Summary

This work presents techniques for automatically summarizing the topical content of an audio corpus. Probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) is used to learn a set of latent topics in an unsupervised fashion. These latent topics are ranked by their relative importance in the corpus and a summary of each topic...

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Silicon single photon imaging detectors

Published in:
SPIE Vol. 8155, Infrared Sensors, Devices, and Applications; Single Photon Imaging II, 21 August 2011, 81551C.

Summary

Single-photon imaging detectors promise the ultimate in sensitivity by eliminating read noise. These devices could provide extraordinary benefits for photon-starved applications, e.g., imaging exoplanets, fast wavefront sensing, and probing the human body through transluminescence. Recent implementations are often in the form of sparse arrays that have less-than-unity fill factor. For imaging, fill factor is typically enhanced by using microlenses, at the expense of photometric and spatial information loss near the edges and corners of the pixels. Other challenges include afterpulsing and the potential for photon self-retriggering. Both effects produce spurious signal that can degrade the signal-to-noise ratio. This paper reviews development and potential application of single-photon-counting detectors, including highlights of initiatives in the Center for Detectors at the Rochester Institute of Technology and MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Current projects include single-photon-counting imaging detectors for the Thirty Meter Telescope, a future NASA terrestrial exoplanet mission, and imaging LIDAR detectors for planetary and Earth science space missions.
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Summary

Single-photon imaging detectors promise the ultimate in sensitivity by eliminating read noise. These devices could provide extraordinary benefits for photon-starved applications, e.g., imaging exoplanets, fast wavefront sensing, and probing the human body through transluminescence. Recent implementations are often in the form of sparse arrays that have less-than-unity fill factor. For...

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Phonologically-based biomarkers for major depressive disorder

Summary

Of increasing importance in the civilian and military population is the recognition of major depressive disorder at its earliest stages and intervention before the onset of severe symptoms. Toward the goal of more effective monitoring of depression severity, we introduce vocal biomarkers that are derived automatically from phonologically-based measures of speech rate. To assess our measures, we use a 35-speaker free-response speech database of subjects treated for depression over a 6-week duration. We find that dissecting average measures of speech rate into phone-specific characteristics and, in particular, combined phone-duration measures uncovers stronger relationships between speech rate and depression severity than global measures previously reported for a speech-rate biomarker. Results of this study are supported by correlation of our measures with depression severity and classification of depression state with these vocal measures. Our approach provides a general framework for analyzing individual symptom categories through phonological units, and supports the premise that speaking rate can be an indicator of psychomotor retardation severity.
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Summary

Of increasing importance in the civilian and military population is the recognition of major depressive disorder at its earliest stages and intervention before the onset of severe symptoms. Toward the goal of more effective monitoring of depression severity, we introduce vocal biomarkers that are derived automatically from phonologically-based measures of...

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Convective weather avoidance modeling in low-altitude airspace

Published in:
AIAA Modeling and Simulation Technologies Conf., 8-11 August 2011.

Summary

Thunderstorms are a leading cause of delay in the National Airspace System (NAS), and significant research has been conducted to predict the areas pilots will avoid during a storm. An example of such research is the Convective Weather Avoidance Model (CWAM), which provides the likelihood of pilot deviation due to convective weather in a given area. This paper extends the scope of CWAM to include low-altitude flights, which typically occur below the tops of convective weather and have slightly different operational constraints. In general, the set of low-altitude flights includes short-hop routes and low-altitude escape routes used to reduce the impact of convective weather in the terminal area. This paper will discuss the classification procedure, present the performance of low-altitude CWAM on observed and forecasted weather, analyze areas of poor performance, and suggest potential improvements to the model.
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Summary

Thunderstorms are a leading cause of delay in the National Airspace System (NAS), and significant research has been conducted to predict the areas pilots will avoid during a storm. An example of such research is the Convective Weather Avoidance Model (CWAM), which provides the likelihood of pilot deviation due to...

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Hazard alerting based on probabilistic models

Published in:
AIAA Modeling and Simulation Technologies Conf., 8-11 August 2011.

Summary

Hazard alerting systems alert operators to potential future undesirable events so that action may be taken to mitigate risk. One way to develop a hazard alerting system based on probabilistic models is by using a threshold-based approach, where the probability of the undesirable event without mitigation is compared against a threshold. Another way to develop such a system is to model the system as a Markov decision process and solve for the hazard alerting strategy that maximizes expected utility. This paper analyzes and compares these two methods. The experiments reveal that an expected utility approach performs better than threshold-based approaches when the dynamic stochasticity is high, where accounting for delays or changes in the alert becomes more important. However, for certain system parameters and operating environments, a threshold-based approach may provide comparable performance.
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Summary

Hazard alerting systems alert operators to potential future undesirable events so that action may be taken to mitigate risk. One way to develop a hazard alerting system based on probabilistic models is by using a threshold-based approach, where the probability of the undesirable event without mitigation is compared against a...

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Experiences in cyber security education: the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Capture-the-Flag exercise

Published in:
Proc. 4th Cyber Security Experimentation Test, 8 August 2011.

Summary

Many popular and well-established cyber security Capture the Flag (CTF) exercises are held each year in a variety of settings, including universities and semi-professional security conferences. CTF formats also vary greatly, ranging from linear puzzle-like challenges to team-based offensive and defensive free-for-all hacking competitions. While these events are exciting and important as contests of skill, they offer limited educational opportunities. In particular, since participation requires considerable a priori domain knowledge and practical computer security expertise, the majority of typical computer science students are excluded from taking part in these events. Our goal in designing and running the MIT/LL CTF was to make the experience accessible to a wider community by providing an environment that would not only test and challenge the computer security skills of the participants, but also educate and prepare those without an extensive prior expertise. This paper describes our experience in designing, organizing, and running an education-focused CTF, and discusses our teaching methods, game design, scoring measures, logged data, and lessons learned.
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Summary

Many popular and well-established cyber security Capture the Flag (CTF) exercises are held each year in a variety of settings, including universities and semi-professional security conferences. CTF formats also vary greatly, ranging from linear puzzle-like challenges to team-based offensive and defensive free-for-all hacking competitions. While these events are exciting and...

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Update on COSPA storm forecasts

Summary

Air traffic congestion in the United States (US) is a serious national problem resulting in a critical need for timely, reliable and high quality forecasts of precipitation and echo tops with forecast time horizons of up to 8 hours. In order to address the short-term needs of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as well as the long-term goals of the US's Next Generation Airspace System (NextGen), MIT Lincoln Laboratory, NCAR Research Applications Laboratory and NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory (ESRL) Global Systems Division (GSD) are collaborating on developing a forecast system under funding from the FAA's Aviation Weather Research Program (AWRP). The CoSPA system combines the latest technologies in heuristic nowcasting, extrapolation, statistical techniques and numerical weather prediction to produce rapidly updating (15 min) 0-8 hour forecasts of storm locations, echo tops and intensities. The system blends highly-skillful heuristic nowcasts with output from NOAA's High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) using phase correction and statistical weighting functions. The CoSPA 0-8 hour forecasts are accessible to the aviation community via an operational situation display and a website that builds upon the FAA's Corridor Integrated Weather System (CIWS) and shows current time situational awareness products including: VIL, echo tops, lightning, growth and decay, forecasts and verification contours, as well as an animation of the weather from 8 hours in the past to 8 hours into the future. This presentation will include a brief description of the CoSPA forecast system and display, examples of forecast performance, and provide an overview of recent enhancements to CoSPA as well as ongoing research.
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Summary

Air traffic congestion in the United States (US) is a serious national problem resulting in a critical need for timely, reliable and high quality forecasts of precipitation and echo tops with forecast time horizons of up to 8 hours. In order to address the short-term needs of the Federal Aviation...

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Coherent combining of a 4 kW, eight-element fiber amplifier array

Published in:
Opt. Lett., vol. 36, No. 14, 15 July 2011, pp. 2686-2688.

Summary

Commercial 0:5kW Yb-doped fiber amplifiers have been characterized and found to be suitable for coherent beam combining. Eight such fiber amplifiers have been coherently combined in a tiled-aperture configuration with 78% combining efficiency and total output power of 4kW. The power-in-the-bucket vertical beam quality of the combined output is 1.25 times diffraction limited at full power. The beam-combining performance is independent of output power.
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Summary

Commercial 0:5kW Yb-doped fiber amplifiers have been characterized and found to be suitable for coherent beam combining. Eight such fiber amplifiers have been coherently combined in a tiled-aperture configuration with 78% combining efficiency and total output power of 4kW. The power-in-the-bucket vertical beam quality of the combined output is 1.25...

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