DiffusionTalker: Personalization and Acceleration for Speech-Driven 3D Face Diffuser

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has been an attractive task in both academia and industry. Traditional methods mostly focus on learning a deterministic mapping from speech to animation. Recent approaches start to consider the non-deterministic fact of speech-driven 3D face animation and employ the diffusion model for the task. However, personalizing facial animation and accelerating animation generation are still two major limitations of existing diffusion-based methods. To address the above limitations, we propose DiffusionTalker, a diffusion-based method that utilizes contrastive learning to personalize 3D facial animation and knowledge distillation to accelerate 3D animation generation. Specifically, to enable personalization, we introduce a learnable talking identity to aggregate knowledge in audio sequences. The proposed identity embeddings extract customized facial cues across different people in a contrastive learning manner. During inference, users can obtain personalized facial animation based on input audio, reflecting a specific talking style. With a trained diffusion model with hundreds of steps, we distill it into a lightweight model with 8 steps for acceleration. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released

Towards the generation of synchronized and believable non-verbal facial behaviors of a talking virtual agent

This paper introduces a new model to generate rhythmically relevant non-verbal facial behaviors for virtual agents while they speak. The model demonstrates perceived performance comparable to behaviors directly extracted from the data and replayed on a virtual agent, in terms of synchronization with speech and believability. Interestingly, we found that training the model with two different sets of data, instead of one, did not necessarily improve its performance. The expressiveness of the people in the dataset and the shooting conditions are key elements. We also show that employing an adversarial model, in which fabricated fake examples are introduced during the training phase, increases the perception of synchronization with speech. A collection of videos demonstrating the results and code can be accessed at: https://github.com/aldelb/non_verbal_facial_animation

Assistive and Augmentative Communication: Ethics and Possibilities in Music Therapy with Non-Speaking clients

Music therapy is a healthcare field wherein music experiences and the myriad relationships formed between client(s), board-certified music therapist(s), and music activates health-oriented changes (Bruscia, 2014). Within this field there are multiple facets that directly impact the client’s experiences; these include: arrangement of the therapy environment, role and function of music experiences, therapeutic relationships, and communication in verbal and non-verbal forms. However, there is a gap in the education and training of music therapists concerning alternatives to verbal communication, and the use of these alternatives in therapy. Through interviews and analysis, this thesis presents findings regarding the experiences of one non-speaking music therapy participant, and three board certified music therapists with relevant expertise, to empower professional and student music therapists to advance their engagement with non-speaking clients in music therapy

Le vedute di Pietro Fabris e il collezionismo britannico a Napoli durante il Grand Tour: tempi, modi e formule di un successo

Il lavoro di ricerca condotto nel triennio dottorale è incentrato sul pittore anglo-napoletano Pietro Fabris, attivo a Napoli nella seconda metà del XVIII secolo come autore di vedute e scene di genere. Protetto dall'ambasciatore britannico William Hamilton, Fabris entrò in contatto con i Grand Tourists e con la Corte borbonica, riscuotendo largo consenso a Napoli e in Inghilterra. Esaminando l'evoluzione del fenomeno del Grand Tour a Napoli dal XVII al XVIII secolo, vengono delineate le ragioni e le dinamiche che hanno decretato il successo dei dipinti di Pietro Fabris presso i viaggiatori stranieri, in particolare britannici, mentre attraverso l'analisi di documenti inediti, rinvenuti nell'Archivio Storico del Banco di Napoli e nell'Archivio di Stato di Napoli, sono state ricostruite la vicenda biografica e le relazioni del pittore con acquirenti e collezionisti. La tesi è dunque punto di partenza per studi futuri sul pittore e sul collezionismo di vedute napoletane

Burocrazia e fisco a Napoli tra XV e XVI secolo. La Camera della Sommaria e il Repertorium alphabeticum solutionum fiscalium Regni

Il libro ripercorre i processi di “burocratizzazione” degli uffici finanziari del Regno di Napoli soffermandosi sulla prassi amministrativa della Regia Camera della Sommaria. Esso prende avvio dall’edizione critica del Repertorium Alphabeticum Solutionum Fiscalium Regni Siciliae, un manoscritto cinquecentesco prodotto dalla Sommaria, ricco di informazioni relative all’intera area del Mezzogiorno, divenuto particolarmente prezioso dopo la distruzione della documentazione aragonese dell’Archivio di Stato di Napoli nell’incendio del settembre 1943. La ricerca ha quindi origine dalla lettura “lenta” di un testo, dall’indagine sui suoi caratteri e sulla sua struttura, sulle sue fonti, sul contesto e sulle vicende che condussero alla sua redazione, sulle pratiche di lavoro amministrativo che esso intendeva descrivere e orientare. Il volume ricostruisce poi il lungo processo che portò alla formazione dell’ufficio della Sommaria tra gli ultimi decenni del Duecento e primi del Quattrocento. Ne delinea in seguito le competenze e le modalità di funzionamento in età aragonese, per seguirne infine le vicende fino alla metà del Cinquecento, sulla base di fonti edite e inedite, conservate in diversi archivi e biblioteche, italiane ed europee, senza mai tralasciare il confronto con un’ampia bibliografia internazionale

Burocrazia e fisco a Napoli tra XV e XVI secolo. La Camera della Sommaria e il Repertorium alphabeticum solutionum fiscalium Regni Siciliae Cisfretanae

ITALIANO: Il libro ripercorre i processi di "burocratizzazione" degli uffici finanziari del Regno di Napoli soffermandosi sulla prassi amministrativa della Regia Camera della Sommaria. Esso prende avvio dall'edizione critica del "Repertorium Alphabeticum Solutionum Fiscalium Regni Siciliae", un manoscritto cinquecentesco prodotto dalla Sommaria, ricco di informazioni relative all'intera area del Mezzogiorno, divenuto particolarmente prezioso dopo la distruzione della documentazione aragonese dell'Archivio di Stato di Napoli nell'incendio del settembre 1943. La ricerca ha quindi origine dalla lettura "lenta" di un testo, dall'indagine sui suoi caratteri e sulla sua struttura, sulle sue fonti, sul contesto e sulle vicende che condussero alla sua redazione, sulle pratiche di lavoro amministrativo che esso intendeva descrivere e orientare. Il volume ricostruisce poi il lungo processo che portò alla formazione dell'ufficio della Sommaria tra gli ultimi decenni del Duecento e primi del Quattrocento. Ne delinea in seguito le competenze e le modalità di funzionamento in età aragonese, per seguirne infine le vicende fino alla metà del Cinquecento, sulla base di fonti edite e inedite, conservate in diversi archivi e biblioteche, italiane ed europee, senza mai tralasciare il confronto con un’ampia bibliografia internazionale. / ENGLISH: The book outlines the processes of "bureaucratization" of the financial offices of the Kingdom of Naples, dwelling on the administrative praxis of the Regia Camera della Sommaria. It starts from the critical edition of Repertorium Alphabeticum Solutionum Fiscalium Regni Siciliae, a XVIth century manuscipt produced by Sommaria, rich with information about the whole area of Southern Italy, which became particularly precious after the destruction of the Aragonese documentation of the State Archive in Naples in the fire of September 1943. The research originates in the "slow" reading of a text, in the inquiry on its characteristics, structure, sources, context, events which led to its writing and on the practices of administrative work which it was to describe and orientate. This volume reconstructs also the long process which led to the Sommaria office, between the last decades of the XIIIth century and the first of the XVth century, its competences and working from the Aragonese age, up to the middle of the XVIth centuryt, on the basis of published and unpublished sources, kept in various Italian and European archives and libraries, in a costant comparison with the wide international bibliography

Burocrazia e fisco a Napoli tra XV e XVI secolo

The book outlines the processes of "bureaucratization" of the financial offices of the Kingdom of Naples, dwelling on the administrative praxis of the Regia Camera della Sommaria. It starts from the critical edition of Repertorium Alphabeticum Solutionum Fiscalium Regni Siciliae, a XVIth century manuscipt produced by Sommaria, rich with information about the whole area of Southern Italy, which became particularly precious after the destruction of the Aragonese documentation of the State Archive in Naples in the fire of September 1943. The research originates in the "slow" reading of a text, in the inquiry on its characteristics, structure, sources, context, events which led to its writing and on the practices of administrative work which it was to describe and orientate. This volume reconstructs also the long process which led to the Sommaria office, between the last decades of the XIIIth century and the first of the XVth century, its competences and working from the Aragonese age, up to the middle of the XVIth centuryt, on the basis of published and unpublished sources, kept in various Italian and European archives and libraries, in a costant comparison with the wide international bibliography

Towards An Intelligent Fuzzy Based Multimodal Two Stage Speech Enhancement System

This thesis presents a novel two stage multimodal speech enhancement system, making use of both visual and audio information to filter speech, and explores the extension of this system with the use of fuzzy logic to demonstrate proof of concept for an envisaged autonomous, adaptive, and context aware multimodal system. The design of the proposed cognitively inspired framework is scalable, meaning that it is possible for the techniques used in individual parts of the system to be upgraded and there is scope for the initial framework presented here to be expanded. In the proposed system, the concept of single modality two stage filtering is extended to include the visual modality. Noisy speech information received by a microphone array is first pre-processed by visually derived Wiener filtering employing the novel use of the Gaussian Mixture Regression (GMR) technique, making use of associated visual speech information, extracted using a state of the art Semi Adaptive Appearance Models (SAAM) based lip tracking approach. This pre-processed speech is then enhanced further by audio only beamforming using a state of the art Transfer Function Generalised Sidelobe Canceller (TFGSC) approach. This results in a system which is designed to function in challenging noisy speech environments (using speech sentences with different speakers from the GRID corpus and a range of noise recordings), and both objective and subjective test results (employing the widely used Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) measure, a composite objective measure, and subjective listening tests), showing that this initial system is capable of delivering very encouraging results with regard to filtering speech mixtures in difficult reverberant speech environments. Some limitations of this initial framework are identified, and the extension of this multimodal system is explored, with the development of a fuzzy logic based framework and a proof of concept demonstration implemented. Results show that this proposed autonomous,adaptive, and context aware multimodal framework is capable of delivering very positive results in difficult noisy speech environments, with cognitively inspired use of audio and visual information, depending on environmental conditions. Finally some concluding remarks are made along with proposals for future work

Fuzzy Logic

The capability of Fuzzy Logic in the development of emerging technologies is introduced in this book. The book consists of sixteen chapters showing various applications in the field of Bioinformatics, Health, Security, Communications, Transportations, Financial Management, Energy and Environment Systems. This book is a major reference source for all those concerned with applied intelligent systems. The intended readers are researchers, engineers, medical practitioners, and graduate students interested in fuzzy logic systems

askesis, religion, science

In both ancient tradition and modern research Pythagoreanism has been understood as a religious sect or as a philosophical and scientific community. Numerous attempts have been made to reconcile these pictures as well as to analyze them separately. The most recent scholarship compartmentalizes different facets of Pythagorean knowledge, but this offers no context for exploring their origins, development, and interdependence. This collection aims to reverse this trend, addressing connections between the different fields of Pythagorean knowledge, such as eschatology, metempsychosis, metaphysics, epistemology, arithmology and numerology, music, dietetics and medicine as well as politics. In particular, the contributions discuss how the Pythagorean way of life related to more doctrinal aspects of knowledge, such as Pythagorean religion and science. The volume explores the effects of this interdependence between different kinds of knowledge both within the Pythagorean corpus and in its later reception. Chapters cover historical periods from the Archaic Period (6th century BC) to Neoplatonism, Early Christianity, the European and Arabic Middle Ages, and the Renaissance through to the Early Modern Period (17th century AD). Contributions by E. Afonasin, L. Arcari, D. Baltzly, A. Barker, H. Bartoš, A. Bernabé, J. Bremmer, L. Brisson, F. Casadesús, M. Catarzi, S. Chrysakopoulou, G. Cornelli, E. Cottrell, S. Galson, M. Giangiulio, T. Iremadze, A. Izdebska, C. L. Joost-Gaugier, S. Kouloumentas, B. La Sala, R. McKirahan, C. Montepaone, H.-P. Neumann, A. Palmer, A. Provenza, I. Ramelli, D. Robichaud, B. Roling, W. Schmidt-Biggemann, E. Spinelli, I. F. Viltanioti, and L. Zhmud