Towards designing a high intelligibility rule based standard malay text-to-speech synthesis system

Although text-to-speech (TTS) technology has gained some interest from amateur and professional researchers in developing a Standard Malay (SM) text- to- speech synthesizer, however, up to this day, there is rarely any high intelligible TTS system which is freely accessible to be implemented and introduced to the community of SM speakers. Therefore, identification of the core components required for the development of SM TTS system especially in establishing the NLP module should be carried out intensively. This paper presents a rule-based text- to- speech synthesis system for Standard Malay, named SMaTTS. An intelligible and adequately natural sounding formant-based speech synthesis system with a light and user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) was developed. Result and suggestion for future improvements is discussed. The available Malay TTS synthesizers, the algorithms and speech engine in used, as well as their strong and weak points for each of the system are discussed in this paper. Assessment was made at all possible levels; phoneme, word and sentence level. The overall performance of the system is analyzed using Categorical Estimation (CE) for a comprehensive analysis. Result and suggestion for future improvements is discussed

A study on the effects of environment on curing characteristics of thixotropic and room temperature cured epoxy-based adhesives using DMTA

This study investigated the thermal properties of three room temperature curing adhesives containing nano-particles which were thixotropic and shear thinning which allowed injection into overhead holes when exposed to different environmental conditions. Viscosity and shear stress of the adhesives were measured as a function of shear rate. The thermal behaviour of the adhesives were measured using dynamic mechanical thermal analysis following exposure to different temperatures and humidities which included temperatures of 20°C. 30°C and 50°C, relative humidities of 65% RH, 75% RH and 95% RH, soaked in water at 20°C and placed in the oven at 50°C. The dynamic thermal properties reported include storage and loss modulus, the loss tangent and the glass transition temperature (Tg). For nano- and micro-particles filled adhesives, the Tg increased with the temperature increase, even though the adhesives were subjected to high humidity and this was due to further cross-linking. The results showed that room temperature cured epoxies were only partially cured at room temperature

Sago starch based hydrogel prepared using electron beam irradiation technique for controlled release application

Carboxymethyl Sago starch (CMSS) is one of the natural polymers with high value as a polymeric device for medical application due to its potential as biocompatible materials. The monomer blending with modified natural polymers by irradiation technique has received wide attention due to the simple method of preparation, more promising material and free chemical residue in the product. CMSS/methacrylic acid (MAA) hydrogels were synthesized by Electron Beam irradiation at 2meV, 10mA. The objective of this study was to evaluate the ability of hydrogels from modified carboxymethyl sago starch CMSS for oral drug delivery. The hydrogels were characterized by FT-IR, TGA and DTG. The effects of the preparation conditions such as the,monomer composition and irradiation dose on the gel fraction of the synthesized hydrogel were investigated. The swelling properties of the hydrogel were carried out in acidic media, neutral and alkaline media at different temperatures (27˚C – 60 ˚C).The pH sensitive properties of CMSS/MAA hydrogel showed that it can be used as drug delivery devices due to suitability of pH response to the environment in gastrointestine tract

Pembuatan Prototip Dye Sensitized Solar Cell (DSSC) Berbasis Zat Warna Buah Senduduk (Melastoma Malabathricum L.) : Pengaruh Suhu Sintering TiO2 dan Konsentrasi Elektrolit

Increasing demand of energy consumption enforces the development of alternative energy source to solve the world energy crisis. Dye Sensitized Solar Cell (DSCC) is a promising alternative for solar cell application of future generation which is based in semiconductors that utilizes photoelectrochemical phenomenon as basic principle to generate electricity. This research tries to make DSSC prototype with dye from melastome fruit (Melastoma Melabathricum L.). The examined variables are TiO2 sintering temperature at 300oC, 350oC, 400oC, and electrolyte concentration 0.025M, 0.05M and 0.075M of iodine. On the first step, the dye was made by diluting 20 gr of melastome fruit in aquadest, methanol, and acetic acid. Next, the coating of TiO2 by solving TiO2 powder in ethanol and deposited on spin coater and sintered by using furnace. Then the making of carbon electrode, making of electrolyte, and finally characterization of DSSC. UV-Vis spectroscopy examination result showed that melastome fruit contains anthocyanin that was proved from absorbance on wavelength of 515 nm. DSSC voltage examination showed that the higher TiO2 sintering temperature and electrolyte concentration, then the voltage generated was higher as well. The highest voltage was showed on sample with iodine electrolyte concentration of 0,075 M which is 2,385 Volt/cm2. Morphollogy test showed that TiO2 coating has porous structure with equal particle dispersion on every increment of TiO2 sintering temperature. XRD examination showed that the coating is in anatase phase and adhesion test showed that DSSC with highest voltage has adhesivity of 3B (Good)

SMaTTS: standard malay text to speech system

This paper presents a rule-based text- to- speech (TTS) Synthesis System for Standard Malay, namely SMaTTS. The proposed system using sinusoidal method and some pre- recorded wave files in generating speech for the system. The use of phone database significantly decreases the amount of computer memory space used, thus making the system very light and embeddable. The overall system was comprised of two phases the Natural Language Processing (NLP) that consisted of the high-level processing of text analysis, phonetic analysis, text normalization and morphophonemic module. The module was designed specially for SM to overcome few problems in defining the rules for SM orthography system before it can be passed to the DSP module. The second phase is the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) which operated on the low-level process of the speech waveform generation. A developed an intelligible and adequately natural sounding formant-based speech synthesis system with a light and user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) is introduced. A Standard Malay Language (SM) phoneme set and an inclusive set of phone database have been constructed carefully for this phone-based speech synthesizer. By applying the generative phonology, a comprehensive letter-to-sound (LTS) rules and a pronunciation lexicon have been invented for SMaTTS. As for the evaluation tests, a set of Diagnostic Rhyme Test (DRT) word list was compiled and several experiments have been performed to evaluate the quality of the synthesized speech by analyzing the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) obtained. The overall performance of the system as well as the room for improvements was thoroughly discussed

Wear and corrosion behavior of tungsten carbide based coating on carbon steel

High velocity oxy-fuel (HVOF) coating techniques are employed mainly to improve the service life of engineering components, which is exposed to wear, erosion, corrosion or combination of both; wear and corrosion. The aim of this study is to investigate the wear and corrosion behavior of WC-10Ni and WC-12Co coating deposited onto medium carbon steel (Cast steel BS 3100 GR A3) blade. The blade was used to stir the mixture of sulfuric acid (H2SO4) with ilmenite to produce titanium dioxide (TiO2) pigments. The microstructures of both coatings before and after wear and corrosion testing were evaluated using scanning electron microscope (SEM). Vickers microhardness testing was used to examine the coatings hardness. The three-body wear test with wet condition using silicon carbide (SiC) slurry was used to investigate the wear behavior for both coating. The experiment was based on weight loss of the sample and Archard’s law to determine the wear rate of the coating. In addition, the three-electrode electrochemical test was used to investigate the corrosion behavior of the coatings. The mixture of H2SO4 and ilmenite used as an electrolyte of the test. It is found that the wear rate will increase with increasing of the weight loss. This is consistent with decreases of the volume fraction loss and hardness of the coating. After corrosion test, it can be observed that the existence of the crack and porosity on the coating increasing the corrosion behavior of coating. With high volume fraction and hardness, WC-12Co shows higher wear resistance compared to WC-10Ni. However, the value of corrosion rate for both coating has a slight difference due to better corrosion resistance of Ni binder itself.Â

Characterization of fatigue properties of bonded-in pultruded rod timber connection / Zakiah Ahmad and Adiza Jamadin

Timber is one of the oldest construction materials used by mankind, due to it being a readily available natural resource. Timber has many advantages over other commonly used building material (such as steel and concrete) including its availability, workability, strength to weight ratio, renewable resources and very importantly its low impact on the environment. By adopting the timber as the construction material or structural members, timber needed to be connected or to become longer or jointed to other members. Due to structural application, timber must go through proper jointing or connecting process. Not like as the steel or concrete structure, it can be welded or re-fabricate to connect each members. The traditional timber connection systems based on fasteners such as nails, bolts, screws and dowels, may not be preferred choice of systems for heavy timber structures because of some disadvantages associated, e.g. long manufacturing times, high labour cost, heavy joints and corrosion problems (Mehrab and Martin, 2003). New types of timber connections such as glued-in bolts or rod and bonded-in connection have been introduced to remove some disadvantages of traditional joints. This study focused only on bonded-in timber connection system into the selected timber species

Impacts of IoT and big data to automotive industry

With the recent advancement in technologies such as embedded system, wireless distributed sensor, light weight material, smart cognitive radio networks, cloud computing, higher efficiency and ultra-low emission internal combustion engines, intelligent converter, high performance battery and fuel cell technology, the production of smarter, safer, energy efficient and zero emission vehicles is possible in near future. Apart from vehicle technologies, other factors such as road users', well maintained road infrastructure, well maintained vehicles, drivers' attitudes and law and enforcement are also important to be considered and they should work together in order to make our world natural resources can be preserved and maintain cleaner environment and produce sustainable mobility. This paper will discuss the impacts of IoT and Big Data and other emerging technologies mentioned above to the automotive industry. It will include discussion on education, economy, advanced technology, environment, safety and energy

Performance evaluation of an efficient RZ-MQAM modulation scheme in all-optical OFDM transmission systems

All optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (AO-OFDM) technique is a promising technique and employed in many military applications for data transmission over long distance. But AO-OFDM signals are very sensitive to nonlinear distortion and these systems suffer from nonlinear impairments. This paper describes a novel nonlinear phase noise reduction technique by decreasing interaction time between subcarriers in AO-OFDM transmission systems. This technique mitigates the effects of nonlinearity on all-optical OFDM transmission systems and improves performance of transmission systems. The proposed AO-OFDM transmission system has been successfully simulated and analyzed for estimating phase noise due to cross-phase modulation, self-phase modulation and four-wave mixing. The proposed RZ-8QAM AO-OFDM system with 29 subcarriers is examined and the transmission distance is fixed at 550km