Educational Technology and Education Conferences, June to December 2012

The conference list contains events such as "Learning and Teaching","Innovation in e-Learning", "Online Teaching", "Distance Learning Administration", "The World Open Educational Resources Congress", "Mobile Health", and "Realizing Dreams"

Leveraging audio-visual speech effectively via deep learning

The rising popularity of neural networks, combined with the recent proliferation of online audio-visual media, has led to a revolution in the way machines encode, recognize, and generate acoustic and visual speech. Despite the ubiquity of naturally paired audio-visual data, only a limited number of works have applied recent advances in deep learning to leverage the duality between audio and video within this domain. This thesis considers the use of neural networks to learn from large unlabelled datasets of audio-visual speech to enable new practical applications. We begin by training a visual speech encoder that predicts latent features extracted from the corresponding audio on a large unlabelled audio-visual corpus. We apply the trained visual encoder to improve performance on lip reading in real-world scenarios. Following this, we extend the idea of video learning from audio by training a model to synthesize raw speech directly from raw video, without the need for text transcriptions. Remarkably, we find that this framework is capable of reconstructing intelligible audio from videos of new, previously unseen speakers. We also experiment with a separate speech reconstruction framework, which leverages recent advances in sequence modeling and spectrogram inversion to improve the realism of the generated speech. We then apply our research in video-to-speech synthesis to advance the state-of-the-art in audio-visual speech enhancement, by proposing a new vocoder-based model that performs particularly well under extremely noisy scenarios. Lastly, we aim to fully realize the potential of paired audio-visual data by proposing two novel frameworks that leverage acoustic and visual speech to train two encoders that learn from each other simultaneously. We leverage these pre-trained encoders for deepfake detection, speech recognition, and lip reading, and find that they consistently yield improvements over training from scratch.Open Acces

Drug wastage among the elderly living in old aged homes in Hong Kong

The extend of drug wastage among elderly living in old aged homes was never investigated. Upon the completion of the previous study on pharmaceutical services provided to elderly living in old aged homes, the amount of drugs wasted from 3,020 residents in one of the delegated pharmacies over a 4-month period were counted and their costs were calculated. The total cost of wasted drugs amounted to be HKD$96,924, with drugs acting on the central nervous system contributed to the highest cost of HKD$26,872 (27.7%), followed by respiratory drugs of HKD$23,875 (24.6$22,965 (23.7%). The results showed that for health institutes dispensing prescriptions of long duration to the elderly could lead to considerable amount of drug wastage and this issue should be addressed.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

The pharmaceutical services to the elderly in the old aged homes in Hong Kong: a scope exercise

Various models of pharmaceutical services have been provided by pharmacists to old aged home residents, however, these models have never been summarised and compared. The aim of this scoping exercise is to identify different kinds of pharmaceutical services currently available to the old aged home residents, by means of systemic literature review, qualitative in-depth interviews with service providers in order to understand their models and qualitative semi-structured interviews with non-pharmaceutical service users in an attempt to investigate reasons why some homes do not subscribe to these services. The results showed that none of the pharmaceutical services currently available can uproot the causes of medication errors, and there is a need to elaborate the roles of pharmacists in a primary care setting.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

CIRA annual report FY 2014/2015

Reporting period July 1, 2014-March 31, 2015

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 3: People

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 3 includes papers from People track of the conference

2012-2013 Undergraduate Bulletin

https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/bulletins/1013/thumbnail.jp