An investigation of grammar design in natural-language speech-recognition.

With the growing interest and demand for human-machine interaction, much work concerning speech-recognition has been carried out over the past three decades. Although a variety of approaches have been proposed to address speech-recognition issues, such as stochastic (statistical) techniques, grammar-based techniques, techniques integrated with linguistic features, and other approaches, recognition accuracy and robustness remain among the major problems that need to be addressed. At the state of the art, most commercial speech products are constructed using grammar-based speech-recognition technology. In this thesis, we investigate a number of features involved in grammar design in natural-language speech-recognition technology. We hypothesize that: with the same domain, a semantic grammar, which directly encodes some semantic constraints into the recognition grammar, achieves better accuracy, but less robustness; a syntactic grammar defines a language with a larger size, thereby it has better robustness, but less accuracy; a word-sequence grammar, which includes neither semantics nor syntax, defines the largest language, therefore, is the most robust, but has very poor recognition accuracy. In this Master\u27s thesis, we claim that proper grammar design can achieve the appropriate compromise between recognition accuracy and robustness. The thesis has been proven by experiments using the IBM Voice-Server SDK, which consists of a VoiceXML browser, IBM ViaVoice Speech Recognition and Text-To-Speech (TTS) engines, sample applications, and other tools for developing and testing VoiceXML applications. The experimental grammars are written in the Java Speech Grammar Format (JSGF), and the testing applications are written in VoiceXML. The tentative experimental results suggest that grammar design is a good area for further study. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2003 .S555. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 43-01, page: 0244. Adviser: Richard A. Frost. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2004

An investigation of the electrolytic plasma oxidation process for corrosion protection of pure magnesium and magnesium alloy AM50.

In this study, silicate and phosphate EPO coatings were produced on pure magnesium using an AC power source. It was found that the silicate coatings possess good wear resistance, while the phosphate coatings provide better corrosion protection. A Design of Experiment (DOE) technique, the Taguchi method, was used to systematically investigate the effect of the EPO process parameters on the corrosion protection properties of a coated magnesium alloy AM50 using a DC power. The experimental design consisted of four factors (treatment time, current density, and KOH and NaAlO2 concentrations), with three levels of each factor. Potentiodynamic polarization measurements were conducted to determine the corrosion resistance of the coated samples. The optimized processing parameters are 12 minutes, 12 mA/cm2 current density, 0.9 g/l KOH, 15.0 g/l NaAlO2. The results of the percentage contribution of each factor determined by the analysis of variance (ANOVA) imply that the KOH concentration is the most significant factor affecting the corrosion resistance of the coatings, while treatment time is a major factor affecting the thickness of the coatings. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .M323. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, page: 1479. Thesis (M.A.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005

External Media Announcement Approach For Media Resource Function Processor

Announcement application service is a multimedia service in IMS which plays media (audio/video) announcements to the User Equipment (UE). This thesis studies Media Resource Function Processor (MRFP), a key network component in IMS which is responsible for the announcement application service. This thesis looks into the MRFP architecture and tries to find a feasible and alternative approach to handle media announcements. The factors this thesis concentrates on are: (1) primarily, the limited availability of memory to store the media announcements within the MRFP, and (2) the possibility to reduce the number of Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) reserved for playing announcements. For a possible solution to the above mentioned research questions, this thesis proposes an external announcement approach to provide the announcement service.This is studied by using a separate server outside the MRFP node to store all the media announcement files. In this thesis, the external announcement approach is studied by using three different protocols - RTSP, HTTP or FTP as the interface between the MRFP node and the external server. The impact on the software architecture of MRFP due to the external announcement approach is studied. Also, a prototype is built to test the performance of the external announcement approach in an emulated Wide Area Network (WAN) environment. One other key area of study made in this thesis is to use the existing limited MRFP memory as a cache. The number of requests made to the external server to fetch the announcement files can be decreased by implementing an effective caching algorithm in the MRFP, which improves the performance. The study made shows that Greedy Dual-Size Popularity (GDSP) algorithm can be a relevant and very effective caching mechanism in MRFP. Through this work, it is demonstrated that an effective announcement service can be achieved in MRFP by using an external server

Supporting Real-time Pda Interaction With Virtual Environment

Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) are becoming more and more powerful with advances in technology and are expanding their applications in a variety of fields. This work explores the use of PDAs in Virtual Environments (VE). The goal is to support highly interactive bi-directional user interactions in Virtual Environments in more natural and less cumbersome ways. A proxy-based approach is adopted to support a wide-range of handheld devices and have a multi-PDA interaction with the virtual world. The architecture consists of three components in the complete system, a PDA, a desktop that acts as a proxy and Virtual Environment Software Sandbox (VESS), software developed at the Institute for Simulation and Training (IST). The purpose of the architecture is to enable issuing text and voice commands from PDA to virtual entities in VESS through the proxy. The commands are a pre-defined set of simple words such as \u27move forward\u27, \u27turn right\u27, \u27go\u27, and \u27stop\u27. These commands are matched at the proxy and sent to VESS as text in XML format. The response from VESS is received at the proxy and forwarded back to the PDA. Performance measures with respect to response time characteristics of text messages between PDA and proxy over Wi-Fi networks are conducted. The results are discussed with respect to the acceptable delays for human perception in order to have real-time interaction between a PDA and an avatar in virtual world

Products and Services

Today’s global economy offers more opportunities, but is also more complex and competitive than ever before. This fact leads to a wide range of research activity in different fields of interest, especially in the so-called high-tech sectors. This book is a result of widespread research and development activity from many researchers worldwide, covering the aspects of development activities in general, as well as various aspects of the practical application of knowledge

Ubiquitous Computing

The aim of this book is to give a treatment of the actively developed domain of Ubiquitous computing. Originally proposed by Mark D. Weiser, the concept of Ubiquitous computing enables a real-time global sensing, context-aware informational retrieval, multi-modal interaction with the user and enhanced visualization capabilities. In effect, Ubiquitous computing environments give extremely new and futuristic abilities to look at and interact with our habitat at any time and from anywhere. In that domain, researchers are confronted with many foundational, technological and engineering issues which were not known before. Detailed cross-disciplinary coverage of these issues is really needed today for further progress and widening of application range. This book collects twelve original works of researchers from eleven countries, which are clustered into four sections: Foundations, Security and Privacy, Integration and Middleware, Practical Applications

Visual programming in a heterogeneous multi-core environment

É do conhecimento geral de que, hoje em dia, a tecnologia evolui rapidamente. São criadas novas arquitecturas para resolver determinadas limitações ou problemas. Por vezes, essa evolução é pacífica e não requer necessidade de adaptação e, por outras, essa evolução pode Implicar mudanças. As linguagens de programação são, desde sempre, o principal elo de comunicação entre o programador e o computador. Novas linguagens continuam a aparecer e outras estão sempre em desenvolvimento para se adaptarem a novos conceitos e paradigmas. Isto requer um esforço extra para o programador, que tem de estar sempre atento a estas mudanças. A Programação Visual pode ser uma solução para este problema. Exprimir funções como módulos que recebem determinado Input e retomam determinado output poderá ajudar os programadores espalhados pelo mundo, através da possibilidade de lhes dar uma margem para se abstraírem de pormenores de baixo nível relacionados com uma arquitectura específica. Esta tese não só mostra como combinar as capacidades do CeII/B.E. (que tem uma arquitectura multi­processador heterogénea) com o OpenDX (que tem um ambiente de programação visual), como também demonstra que tal pode ser feito sem grande perda de performance. ABSTRACT; lt is known that nowadays technology develops really fast. New architectures are created ln order to provide new solutions for different technology limitations and problems. Sometimes, this evolution is pacific and there is no need to adapt to new technologies, but things also may require a change every once ln a while. Programming languages have always been the communication bridge between the programmer and the computer. New ones keep coming and other ones keep improving ln order to adapt to new concepts and paradigms. This requires an extra-effort for the programmer, who always needs to be aware of these changes. Visual Programming may be a solution to this problem. Expressing functions as module boxes which receive determined Input and return determined output may help programmers across the world by giving them the possibility to abstract from specific low-level hardware issues. This thesis not only shows how the CeII/B.E. (which has a heterogeneous multi-core architecture) capabilities can be combined with OpenDX (which has a visual programming environment), but also demonstrates that lt can be done without losing much performance