Determination of Formant Features in Czech and Slovak for GMM Emotional Speech Classifier

The paper is aimed at determination of formant features (FF) which describe vocal tract characteristics. It comprises analysis of the first three formant positions together with their bandwidths and the formant tilts. Subsequently, the statistical evaluation and comparison of the FF was performed. This experiment was realized with the speech material in the form of sentences of male and female speakers expressing four emotional states (joy, sadness, anger, and a neutral state) in Czech and Slovak languages. The statistical distribution of the analyzed formant frequencies and formant tilts shows good differentiation between neutral and emotional styles for both voices. Contrary to it, the values of the formant 3-dB bandwidths have no correlation with the type of the speaking style or the type of the voice. These spectral parameters together with the values of the other speech characteristics were used in the feature vector for Gaussian mixture models (GMM) emotional speech style classifier that is currently developed. The overall mean classification error rate achieves about 18 %, and the best obtained error rate is 5 % for the sadness style of the female voice. These values are acceptable in this first stage of development of the GMM classifier that should be used for evaluation of the synthetic speech quality after applied voice conversion and emotional speech style transformation

Speech Recognition

Chapters in the first part of the book cover all the essential speech processing techniques for building robust, automatic speech recognition systems: the representation for speech signals and the methods for speech-features extraction, acoustic and language modeling, efficient algorithms for searching the hypothesis space, and multimodal approaches to speech recognition. The last part of the book is devoted to other speech processing applications that can use the information from automatic speech recognition for speaker identification and tracking, for prosody modeling in emotion-detection systems and in other speech processing applications that are able to operate in real-world environments, like mobile communication services and smart homes

Factors Influencing Customer Satisfaction towards E-shopping in Malaysia

Online shopping or e-shopping has changed the world of business and quite a few people have decided to work with these features. What their primary concerns precisely and the responses from the globalisation are the competency of incorporation while doing their businesses. E-shopping has also increased substantially in Malaysia in recent years. The rapid increase in the e-commerce industry in Malaysia has created the demand to emphasize on how to increase customer satisfaction while operating in the e-retailing environment. It is very important that customers are satisfied with the website, or else, they would not return. Therefore, a crucial fact to look into is that companies must ensure that their customers are satisfied with their purchases that are really essential from the ecommerce’s point of view. With is in mind, this study aimed at investigating customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia. A total of 400 questionnaires were distributed among students randomly selected from various public and private universities located within Klang valley area. Total 369 questionnaires were returned, out of which 341 questionnaires were found usable for further analysis. Finally, SEM was employed to test the hypotheses. This study found that customer satisfaction towards e-shopping in Malaysia is to a great extent influenced by ease of use, trust, design of the website, online security and e-service quality. Finally, recommendations and future study direction is provided. Keywords: E-shopping, Customer satisfaction, Trust, Online security, E-service quality, Malaysia

Emotion Recognition from Speech with Acoustic, Non-Linear and Wavelet-based Features Extracted in Different Acoustic Conditions

ABSTRACT: In the last years, there has a great progress in automatic speech recognition. The challenge now it is not only recognize the semantic content in the speech but also the called "paralinguistic" aspects of the speech, including the emotions, and the personality of the speaker. This research work aims in the development of a methodology for the automatic emotion recognition from speech signals in non-controlled noise conditions. For that purpose, different sets of acoustic, non-linear, and wavelet based features are used to characterize emotions in different databases created for such purpose

Entrepreneurship in the Raw Materials Sector

The Entrepreneurship in the Raw Materials Sector proceeding is a collection of papers focusing on the macroeconomic aspects of green growth, the business opportunities in the raw materials sector, and the challenges in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship training. These papers were presented during the closing conference of LIMBRA (‘Decreasing the negative outcomes of brain drain in the raw materials sector‘), a project funded by EIT Raw Materials in the period of 2019-2021. LIMBRA primarily aims at generating new entrepreneurial ideas in the raw materials sector, and to encourage engineering students graduating in raw materials-related programmes to start their own businesses. This proceeding offers a good summary of our approach, and our results: identify the critical trends in the macroeconomic environment; learn about the specifics of the raw materials markets; develop new business ideas, and rely on your local ecosystem for extra knowledge, mentoring; and finally, help students to "Become stay-at-home entrepreneurs"

Entrepreneurship in the Raw Materials Sector

The Entrepreneurship in the Raw Materials Sector proceeding is a collection of papers focusing on the macroeconomic aspects of green growth, the business opportunities in the raw materials sector, and the challenges in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship training. These papers were presented during the closing conference of LIMBRA (‘Decreasing the negative outcomes of brain drain in the raw materials sector‘), a project funded by EIT Raw Materials in the period of 2019-2021. LIMBRA primarily aims at generating new entrepreneurial ideas in the raw materials sector, and to encourage engineering students graduating in raw materials-related programmes to start their own businesses. This proceeding offers a good summary of our approach, and our results: identify the critical trends in the macroeconomic environment; learn about the specifics of the raw materials markets; develop new business ideas, and rely on your local ecosystem for extra knowledge, mentoring; and finally, help students to "Become stay-at-home entrepreneurs"

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

International Conference on Management, Business and Economics

UBT Annual International Conference is the 8th international interdisciplinary peer reviewed conference which publishes works of the scientists as well as practitioners in the area where UBT is active in Education, Research and Development.The UBT aims to implement an integrated strategy to establish itself as an internationally competitive, research-intensive university, committed to the transfer of knowledge and the provision of a world-class education to the most talented students from all background. The main perspective of the conference is to connect the scientists and practitioners from different disciplines in the same place and make them be aware of the recent advancements in different research fields, and provide them with a unique forum to share their experiences. It is also the place to support the new academic staff for doing research and publish their work in international standard level. This conference consists of sub conferences in different fields like: – Computer Science and Communication Engineering – Management, Business and Economics – Mechatronics, System Engineering and Robotics– Energy Efficiency Engineering– Information Systems and Security– Architecture – Spatial Planning– Civil Engineering , Infrastructure and Environment– Law– Political Science– Journalism , Media and Communication– Food Science and Technology– Pharmaceutical and Natural Sciences– Design– Psychology– Education and Development– Fashion– Music– Art and Digital Media– Dentistry– Applied Medicine– Nursing This conference is the major scientific event of the UBT. It is organizing annually and always in cooperation with the partner universities from the region and Europe. We have to thank all Authors, partners, sponsors and also the conference organizing team making this event a real international scientific event. Edmond Hajrizi, President of UBT UBT – Higher Education Institutio

Assessing the performance of the Slovak and the Czech health systems: a case study examining the double transition and beyond

Measuring health system performance is essential for improving health and quality of care. It is relevant in any context, but especially in countries whose health care systems have undergone major changes. The 1989 transition from communism to democracy in Czechoslovakia followed by the 1993 split into two independent countries (the Czech Republic and Slovakia) have been studied extensively but little research has addressed the effects of these events on health and the quality of care provided. The overarching objective of this thesis is to examine pre- and post-transition health system performance at three levels: i) overall health and well-being, ii) quality of the health care system, and iii) quality of outpatient care. This is a policy piece intended to demonstrate the usefulness of various performance indicators, while applying a range of quantitative methods from different disciplines to unique datasets. The macro level findings suggest that the transition was not detrimental to overall health and wellbeing in neither of the two countries as demonstrated by a small continued height increase. Slovakia showed a larger capacity to benefit from the transition. The overall quality of the health care systems is measured by ‘avoidable’ mortality and also shows improvements. For some ‘avoidable’ mortality conditions Slovakia continues to lag behind the Czech Republic, while for others it outperforms its neighbour. The thesis also provides evidence on the absence of a significant relationship between health care inputs and ‘avoidable’ mortality. Finally, the assessment of the quality of outpatient care in Slovakia, using preventable hospitalisations and selected processes of care, shows that inappropriate care may be provided for asthma and diabetes. The findings also indicate a link between appropriate and inappropriate care and preventable hospitalisations. Overall, the results of this thesis provide the basis for policy makers to better understand the changes in health outcomes and quality of care in these two settings but also to inform future quality improvement efforts

A Situational Analysis of Current Speech-Synthesis Systems for Child Voices: A Scoping Review of Qualitative and Quantitative Evidence

Background: Speech synthesis has customarily focused on adult speech, but with the rapid development of speech-synthesis technology, it is now possible to create child voices with a limited amount of child-speech data. This scoping review summarises the evidence base related to developing synthesised speech for children. (2) Method: The included studies were those that were (1) published between 2006 and 2021 and (2) included child participants or voices of children aged between 2–16 years old. (3) Results: 58 studies were identified. They were discussed based on the languages used, the speech-synthesis systems and/or methods used, the speech data used, the intelligibility of the speech and the ages of the voices. Based on the reviewed studies, relative to adult-speech synthesis, developing child-speech synthesis is notably more challenging. Child speech often presents with acoustic variability and articulatory errors. To account for this, researchers have most often attempted to adapt adult-speech models, using a variety of different adaptation techniques. (4) Conclusions: Adapting adult speech has proven successful in child-speech synthesis. It appears that the resulting quality can be improved by training a large amount of pre-selected speech data, aided by a neural-network classifier, to better match the children’s speech. We encourage future research surrounding individualised synthetic speech for children with CCN, with special attention to children who make use of low-resource languages