Audio impairment recognition using a correlation-based feature representation

Audio impairment recognition is based on finding noise in audio files and categorising the impairment type. Recently, significant performance improvement has been obtained thanks to the usage of advanced deep learning models. However, feature robustness is still an unresolved issue and it is one of the main reasons why we need powerful deep learning architectures. In the presence of a variety of musical styles, hand-crafted features are less efficient in capturing audio degradation characteristics and they are prone to failure when recognising audio impairments and could mistakenly learn musical concepts rather than impairment types. In this paper, we propose a new representation of hand-crafted features that is based on the correlation of feature pairs. We experimentally compare the proposed correlation-based feature representation with a typical raw feature representation used in machine learning and we show superior performance in terms of compact feature dimensionality and improved computational speed in the test stage whilst achieving comparable accuracy

The Education Quality Measuring: American Experience

The US Higher Education Reform is due to certain processes of competitiveness, market orientation, the tendency to form a single space for education. The American system of Higher Education has integrated the best in the education of other countries and thus helped the country overcome crises, to some extent solve the problems of racial discrimination, unemployment, poverty, improved the situation of women, people with disabilities, national minorities. The historical events, socio-economic transformations, aspiration to be a leader in the world market respectively have influenced the development of Higher Education. Due to reforms in American society, education has become more open, various, versatile. The Americans highly value the Higher Education and believe that education is necessary for a conscious political life, the functioning of a democratic government, the development of economic and political International relations. The American education serving the dynamic and global economy is effective and capable of developing in the conditions of limited public resources. This article focuses on the measurement of education quality and accreditation of Higher Learning Institutions in the USA; the analysis of educational activities of American universities; the coverage of accreditation and education performance of Higher Learning Institutions in the United States; these indicators usage in the process of education quality assessing in American universities; the essence disclosure of measurement the education quality with helping "added value" on the basis by American scientists research; the borrowing American experience into the Higher Learning Institutions in Ukraine

Monitoring the quality of tourism experience

The new economic era the experience economy that we entered in the XXI century is challenging the overall tourism industry and destinations to respond to visitor expectations in a radically different way, demanding a new vision on what is truly being delivered to them. Within the current era, tourism businesses and destinations, in order to thrive and compete globally, are bound to recognize that experience, not goods or services, are what motivates visitors to travel, repeat visits to the destinations and recommend it to friends and relatives. Being so, a research agenda for tourism development and quality should place at its centre the nature of tourist experience and meanings of quality tourist experience from the stakeholders point of view, so that the industry actors can take joint action supported by in-depth knowledge of meanings attached to experience. With few exceptions, in tourism related literature, quality tourism experience has been largely overlooked. However, tourist experience and tourism experience have been discussed by Clawson [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9] among others. Clawson[1] wrote about recreation experience; Boorstin[2] discoursed on authenticity in tourist experience; Cohen[3], [4] studied the phenomenological tourist experience frames; MacCannell's[5] presented contemporaneous writings on tourist experience and authenticity. Pearce and Caltabiano[7] further extended consideration of traveller and tourist experience and authenticity with connections to motivations. Smith [6], Smith and Brent [8] addressed the interaction of host and guest in travel experience. Ryan [9] focused particularly on the `tourist experience'. Tourism and tourist experience past research have also focused on temporary and activity-based relationships [1] and some only on activity [10], [11]. Borrie and Birzell[12] presented four ways used to understand tourist and tourism experience. Those four ways include (1) meaningsbased[13], (2) benefits, (3) satisfaction[14], and (4) experience based means[4], [15]. Urry[16] introduced the notion of 'gaze' into considerations of tourist experience albeit 'his gazes' were challenged by Perkins and Thorns[17]. Although there has been considerable theoretical thinking on the subject, not much empirical research is available. One reason for this to happen is the multidimensional, complex and highly diversified nature of the tourist experience. Another reason is related to the fact that supporting constructs, namely satisfaction, quality and value, continue relatively ambiguous and are not always part of an integrated vision and consistent research. And yet, understanding of major and relevant dimensions of the tourist experience are of utmost importance to construct operationalization for effective experience management at destination level. The article proposes an integrated vision on how to monitor the quality of tourism in a mass tourism coastal destination the Algarve (Portugal). While analyzing the quality of the tourism experience from tourists' perspective represents the overall purpose of this paper, and the specific objectives are threefold. Firstly, the research intends to assess the tourists' perceptions on the four dimensions of the experience destination, attributes and compares them with satisfaction felt in terms of the same attributes. Secondly, it expects to provide an overall assessment of tourism experience. Thirdly, the study proposes to establish the relationship between tourist satisfaction and the tourist experience and destination loyalty.The questionnaires were based on the work of Oh, Fiori and Jeong [18], after having been adapted to the Algarve tourist destination context, and refer to the four areas of the Experience Economy: Education (items a, b, c, d), aesthetics (items e, f, g, h), Entertainment (i, j, k, l) and Escapism (m, n, o, p). The last three items- q, r, s are related to memory and memories. To that end, a survey was carried out sampling 405 individuals. Of the 397 valid questionnaires obtained, 90% were answered by tourists from Portugal, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland and the United Kingdom. The results show about 95% of the respondents are satisfied and very satisfied. Approximately 95.3% of the respondents say they are satisfied and very satisfied with their stay in the Algarve. About the quality of lived experience, 77.3% classified very good and excellent. One of the important findings of this research is that the majority of the respondents (93`)/0) intends to recommend the Algarve to friends and relatives. With this research, the team expects to contribute to a thorough understanding of tangible and intangible activities and attributes that form the underlying basis of the tourist experience in coastal tourism

Multi-agent quality of experience control

In the framework of the Future Internet, the aim of the Quality of Experience (QoE) Control functionalities is to track the personalized desired QoE level of the applications. The paper proposes to perform such a task by dynamically selecting the most appropriate Classes of Service (among the ones supported by the network), this selection being driven by a novel heuristic Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithm. The paper shows that such an approach offers the opportunity to cope with some practical implementation problems: in particular, it allows to face the so-called “curse of dimensionality” of MARL algorithms, thus achieving satisfactory performance results even in the presence of several hundreds of Agents

An exploration of how domains of quality of care relate to overall care experience

Purpose: To determine the relative influence of the different domains of healthcare quality from the Care Experience Feedback Improvement Tool and identify key predictors of healthcare quality from the patients’ perspective. Measurement is necessary to determine whether quality of healthcare is improving. The Care Experience Feedback Improvement Tool was developed as a brief measure of patient experience. It is important to determine the relative influence of the different domains of healthcare quality to further clarify how the Care Experience Feedback Improvement Tool can be used and identify key predictors of healthcare quality from the patients’ perspective. Methods: 802 people with a healthcare experience during the previous 12 months were telephoned to complete the Care Experience Feedback Improvement Tool questions and an additional eleven-point global rating of patient experience. To estimate the influence of different domains of healthcare quality on patient overall ratings of quality of healthcare experience, we regressed the overall rating of patient experience with each component of quality (safety, effectiveness, timely, caring, enables system navigation and person-centred). Findings: We found that all of the domains of the Care Experience Feedback Improvement Tool, influenced patient experience ratings of healthcare quality. Specifically, results show the degree of influence, the impact of demographics and how high scores for overall rating of patient experience can be predicted. Originality: Our findings suggest that all of the Care Experience Feedback Improvement Tool domains are important in terms of capturing the wholeness of the patient experience of healthcare quality to direct local quality improvement

User quality of experience of mulsemedia applications

User Quality of Experience (QoE) is of fundamental importance in multimedia applications and has been extensively studied for decades. However, user QoE in the context of the emerging multiple-sensorial media (mulsemedia) services, which involve different media components than the traditional multimedia applications, have not been comprehensively studied. This article presents the results of subjective tests which have investigated user perception of mulsemedia content. In particular, the impact of intensity of certain mulsemedia components including haptic and airflow on user-perceived experience are studied. Results demonstrate that by making use of mulsemedia the overall user enjoyment levels increased by up to 77%