Hybrid Method for Digits Recognition using Fixed-Frame Scores and Derived Pitch

This paper presents a procedure of frame normalization based on the traditional dynamic time warping (DTW) using the LPC coefficients. The redefined method is called as the DTW frame-fixing method (DTW-FF), it works by normalizing the word frames of the input against the reference frames. The enthusiasm to this study is due to neural network limitation that entails a fix number of input nodes for when processing multiple inputs in parallel. Due to this problem, this research is initiated to reduce the amount of computation and complexity in a neural network by reducing the number of inputs into the network. In this study, dynamic warping process is used, in which local distance scores of the warping path are fixed and collected so that their scores are of equal number of frames. Also studied in this paper is the consideration of pitch as a contributing feature to the speech recognition. Results showed a good performance and improvement when using pitch along with DTW-FF feature. The convergence rate between using the steepest gradient descent is also compared to another method namely conjugate gradient method. Convergence rate is also improved when conjugate gradient method is introduced in the back-propagation algorithm

Stability of Rock Slopes along Raidah Escarpment Road, Asir Area, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The Raidah Escarpment road is located north west of Abha city, Asir region, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This escarpment road represents an important corridor in the area which connects different villages and tourist resorts with each other. The total length of this road section is about 9 km which passes through a highly mountainous area. The road also passes through areas of different geological hazards (rock, debris flow, soil, and weathered zones). The different environmental factors (e.g. intensive rainy summer), variable geological and structural elements (weak rocks, slide debris weak soils, shear zones, and faults) difficult road characteristics (narrow roads with tight horizontal andvertical curvature) and various human activities in the area make the road susceptible to frequent slope failures (rockfalls, rock sliding, debris flow, soil slides, and raveling) from time to time. This paper deals with the evaluation of the stability of the rock cuts along the Raidah escarpment road using two methods including a structural controlled method and a raveling type method. Raidah escarpment rock cuts have been classified into sixty nine stations which were investigated and subsequently rated. Results of this study indicated that: (1) Based on the structiural control mode of failures, it was found that 12 stations are potentially unstable due to planar, wedge, and toppling failures, and out of them five stations have a major impact on the road in the event of failure, including stations 11, 17, 20, 31, and 40. (2) According to the Modified Colorado Rockfall hazard rating system, it was found that 13, 12, 13, 17, and 49 stations are of high, high to moderate, moderate, moderate to low, and low hazard. On the other hand, it was found that 13, 11, 11, and 69 stations have a high, high to moderate, moderate, and low impact on the road in the case of failure. (3) According to the field simulation tests it was found that 6 stations potentially show highly problems from rolling and bouncing rocks. However, out of these sites it was found that only 4 stations have a high impact on the road due to rolling and bouncing. (4) the areas that are impacted by the debris flows have been mapped and determined. Finally, different recommendations and remediation methods have been discussed to minimise the impact of problimatic sites

Towards an understanding of ICT in the Hamad Health Science Library in the State of Qatar

Information and communication technologies (lCTs) are increasingly changing the way in which working, learning, doing research and administrations are carried out. ICTs have the changed natute of many academic, public and organisations libraries. Health service is an important and essential element of any modern society. Therefore, development of this service and updating its services is a priority for most of modern governments. Current developments in ICTs are changing the nature of health science libraries. Therefore research in this area is important to provide guidelines, recommendations to improve the health services. This study explores the impact of ICTs in Hamad Health Science Library in Qatar. Physicians and staff in the Hamad Medical Corporation were surveyed by questionnaire to identify the use of ICTs and their effect on them. Then personal interviews detertnined their perceptions of the impact on the research productivity of end-users. There is a lack of this type of study in the literature. Those that there are specifically address the impact of ICTs in health science library. ICTs have become a major link to health care resources for many health care workers. The study employs a systems methodological approach in order to better understand the impact and value of ICTs in Hamad Health Sciences Library (HHSL). Using the systems intervention, issues that affect the system were identified (technological issues, cooperation issues, cultural issues and staff (and user) training and development) and the problem situation improved. An ordered roadmap of elements necessary to bring about change was produced and a HHSL systems model constructed to understand the change processes in context. Conclusions drawn reflect the level of success of the aims and objectives and indicate ways in which the problem situation can be improved from a systemic standpoint. Recommendations to management include aspects associated with operational planning, policy objectives and strategic formulation.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Forward Analysis and Model Checking for Trace Bounded WSTS

We investigate a subclass of well-structured transition systems (WSTS), the bounded---in the sense of Ginsburg and Spanier (Trans. AMS 1964)---complete deterministic ones, which we claim provide an adequate basis for the study of forward analyses as developed by Finkel and Goubault-Larrecq (Logic. Meth. Comput. Sci. 2012). Indeed, we prove that, unlike other conditions considered previously for the termination of forward analysis, boundedness is decidable. Boundedness turns out to be a valuable restriction for WSTS verification, as we show that it further allows to decide all $\omega$-regular properties on the set of infinite traces of the system

Interprocedural Reachability for Flat Integer Programs

We study programs with integer data, procedure calls and arbitrary call graphs. We show that, whenever the guards and updates are given by octagonal relations, the reachability problem along control flow paths within some language w1* ... wd* over program statements is decidable in Nexptime. To achieve this upper bound, we combine a program transformation into the same class of programs but without procedures, with an Np-completeness result for the reachability problem of procedure-less programs. Besides the program, the expression w1* ... wd* is also mapped onto an expression of a similar form but this time over the transformed program statements. Several arguments involving context-free grammars and their generative process enable us to give tight bounds on the size of the resulting expression. The currently existing gap between Np-hard and Nexptime can be closed to Np-complete when a certain parameter of the analysis is assumed to be constant.Comment: 38 pages, 1 figur

Dynamics of axialized laser-cooled ions in a Penning trap

We report the experimental characterization of axialization - a method of reducing the magnetron motion of a small number of ions stored in a Penning trap. This is an important step in the investigation of the suitability of Penning traps for quantum information processing. The magnetron motion was coupled to the laser-cooled modified cyclotron motion by the application of a near-resonant oscillating quadrupole potential (the "axialization drive"). Measurement of cooling rates of the radial motions of the ions showed an order-of-magnitude increase in the damping rate of the magnetron motion with the axialization drive applied. The experimental results are in good qualitative agreement with a recent theoretical study. In particular, a classical avoided crossing was observed in the motional frequencies as the axialization drive frequency was swept through the optimum value, proving that axialization is indeed a resonant effect.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figure

An approach to computing downward closures

The downward closure of a word language is the set of all (not necessarily contiguous) subwords of its members. It is well-known that the downward closure of any language is regular. While the downward closure appears to be a powerful abstraction, algorithms for computing a finite automaton for the downward closure of a given language have been established only for few language classes. This work presents a simple general method for computing downward closures. For language classes that are closed under rational transductions, it is shown that the computation of downward closures can be reduced to checking a certain unboundedness property. This result is used to prove that downward closures are computable for (i) every language class with effectively semilinear Parikh images that are closed under rational transductions, (ii) matrix languages, and (iii) indexed languages (equivalently, languages accepted by higher-order pushdown automata of order 2).Comment: Full version of contribution to ICALP 2015. Comments welcom