Towards Affordable Disclosure of Spoken Word Archives

This paper presents and discusses ongoing work aiming at affordable disclosure of real-world spoken word archives in general, and in particular of a collection of recorded interviews with Dutch survivors of World War II concentration camp Buchenwald. Given such collections, the least we want to be able to provide is search at different levels and a flexible way of presenting results. Strategies for automatic annotation based on speech recognition – supporting e.g., within-document search– are outlined and discussed with respect to the Buchenwald interview collection. In addition, usability aspects of the spoken word search are discussed on the basis of our experiences with the online Buchenwald web portal. It is concluded that, although user feedback is generally fairly positive, automatic annotation performance is still far from satisfactory, and requires additional research

Project Retrosight. Understanding the returns from cardiovascular and stroke research: Case Studies

Copyright @ 2011 RAND Europe. All rights reserved. The full text article is available via the link below.This project explores the impacts arising from cardiovascular and stroke research funded 15-20 years ago and attempts to draw out aspects of the research, researcher or environment that are associated with high or low impact. The project is a case study-based review of 29 cardiovascular and stroke research grants, funded in Australia, Canada and UK between 1989 and 1993. The case studies focused on the individual grants but considered the development of the investigators and ideas involved in the research projects from initiation to the present day. Grants were selected through a stratified random selection approach that aimed to include both high- and low-impact grants. The key messages are as follows: 1) The cases reveal that a large and diverse range of impacts arose from the 29 grants studied. 2) There are variations between the impacts derived from basic biomedical and clinical research. 3) There is no correlation between knowledge production and wider impacts 4) The majority of economic impacts identified come from a minority of projects. 5) We identified factors that appear to be associated with high and low impact. This report presents the key observations of the study and an overview of the methods involved. It has been written for funders of biomedical and health research and health services, health researchers, and policy makers in those fields. It will also be of interest to those involved in research and impact evaluation.This study was initiated with internal funding from RAND Europe and HERG, with continuing funding from the UK National Institute for Health Research, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada and the National Heart Foundation of Australia. The UK Stroke Association and the British Heart Foundation provided support in kind through access to their archives

INTEGRATING IPTV AND SOCIAL NETWORKING WITH VOICE INPUT

Elderly people comprise the highest proportion of television viewers. Elderly people often struggle with new technology and reject it due to complexity. We propose a system to help people keep up with certain new technologies, such as IPTV and social networks with reduced efforts. We specifically propose a system to integrate IPTV with Twitter, a social networking website with an aid of a mobile phone. The system uses speech to text technology on mobile phone, as input to reduce the difficulty involved in the interaction with Twitter, while viewing television. As speech is a more convenient and natural way of expression than text, we anticipate that people from other age groups can also benefit from the system

An unsupervised acoustic fall detection system using source separation for sound interference suppression

We present a novel unsupervised fall detection system that employs the collected acoustic signals (footstep sound signals) from an elderly person’s normal activities to construct a data description model to distinguish falls from non-falls. The measured acoustic signals are initially processed with a source separation (SS) technique to remove the possible interferences from other background sound sources. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features are next extracted from the processed signals and used to construct a data description model based on a one class support vector machine (OCSVM) method, which is finally applied to distinguish fall from non-fall sounds. Experiments on a recorded dataset confirm that our proposed fall detection system can achieve better performance, especially with high level of interference from other sound sources, as compared with existing single microphone based methods

Methods of Improving Speech Intelligibility for Listeners with Hearing Resolution Deficit

ABSTRACT: Methods developed for real-time time scale modification (TSM) of speech signal are presented. They are based on the non-uniform, speech rate depended SOLA algorithm (Synchronous Overlap and Add). Influence of the proposed method on the intelligibility of speech was investigated for two separate groups of listeners, i.e. hearing impaired children and elderly listeners. It was shown that for the speech with average rate equal to or higher than 6.48 vowels/s, all of the proposed methods have statistically significant impact on the improvement of speech intelligibility for hearing impaired children with reduced hearing resolution and one of the proposed methods significantly improves comprehension of speech in the group of elderly listeners with reduced hearing resolution. VIRTUAL SLIDES: http://www.diagnosticpathology.diagnomx.eu/vs/206548637176199

Poverty: Major Themes in Past Debates and Current Proposals

[Excerpt] Poverty in the United States—and initiatives to address poverty—is a current topic of discussion among policy makers and researchers. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, launched in 1964 by President Lyndon Johnson. The rate of poverty has declined since then, yet poverty persists. The number of people officially counted as poor in 2013 was 45.3 million and the official poverty rate was 14.5%. Numerous research articles, editorials, statements by Members of Congress, and congressional hearings have marked the 50th anniversary, revealing different viewpoints on the effectiveness of past and current policies, and offering new initiatives for consideration. The topic of poverty is much broader than a single program or set of programs. In public policy discussions, the terms “poverty” and “welfare” are often intertwined, with “welfare” generally thought of as cash assistance for the poor. However, more universal social insurance programs— such as Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment Insurance—may be the nation’s most important antipoverty programs. Looking more broadly, poverty is affected by many aspects of public policy, ranging from macroeconomic policies to antidiscrimination laws to a national commitment for universal public education. Reducing or ameliorating poverty has not been widely articulated as the explicit goal of major policy debates in many years, although the impact of policy decisions might directly affect the incidence or characteristics of poverty. For example, the decades-long discussion that resulted in the 1996 welfare reform law focused on moving recipients of cash assistance off the rolls and into jobs, along with related policies designed to “make work pay” better than welfare receipt. The debate preceding enactment of health reform in 2010 focused on expanding access to health insurance for uncovered populations and making coverage more secure for those who had it, among other things. Both of these initiatives were implicitly related to poverty, but neither was promoted explicitly for antipoverty purposes. Most recently, some Members of Congress have introduced legislation, or announced elements of potential proposals, framed in the broad context of addressing poverty. These proposals would touch upon numerous existing federal programs. While the specifics differ—and in some cases are still being developed, these proposals reflect certain common themes that have characterized discussions of antipoverty policy for many years. Likewise, policies advocated by the Obama Administration also can be examined in the context of these overarching historic themes

Case Study on Human-Robot Interaction of the Remote-Controlled Service Robot for Elderly and Disabled Care

The tendency of continuous aging of the population and the increasing number of people with mobility difficulties leads to increased research in the field of Assistive Service Robotics. These robots can help with daily life tasks such as reminding to take medications, serving food and drinks, controlling home appliances and even monitoring health status. When talking about assisting people in their homes, it should be noted that they will, most of the time, have to communicate with the robot themselves and be able to manage it so that they can get the most out of the robot's services. This research is focused on different methods of remote control of a mobile robot equipped with robotic manipulator. The research investigates in detail methods based on control via gestures, voice commands, and web-based graphical user interface. The capabilities of these methods for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) have been explored in terms of usability. In this paper, we introduce a new version of the robot Robco 19, new leap motion sensor control of the robot and a new multi-channel control system. The paper presents methodology for performing the HRI experiments from human perception and summarizes the results in applications of the investigated remote control methods in real life scenarios