Operators with smooth functional calculi

We introduce a class of (tuples of commuting) unbounded operators on a Banach space, admitting smooth functional calculi, that contains all operators of Helffer-Sj\"ostrand type and is closed under the action of smooth proper mappings. Moreover, the class is closed under tensor product of commuting operators. In general an operator in this class has no resolvent in the usual sense so the spectrum must be defined in terms of the functional calculus. We also consider invariant subspaces and spectral decompositions

Dreaming with The Pantheon in Rome

Dreaming with The Pantheon in Rome is a process-based speculative essay engaging in the questions of agency and responsivity in matter which depart from current research into the durability of ancient Roman concrete. This is mixed (pun intended) with material engagement theory, quantum field theory and the theory of formative causation to explore possibilities of entanglement between matter and mind in architectural practices. In the history of human architecture, The Pantheon in Rome is probably the best-preserved work of ancient Roman engineering. Significant for Roman engineering was its empirical base for knowledge production. When The Pantheon was built, there would have been thousands of people working in different locations across the empire, producing, and engaging in experiments with the material world for the purpose of architecture and construction. This, the immensity of the collective effort together with the massive amount of material engagement and holistic relational inquiries into the material world we argue is one reason that Roman engineering was so eminent. In this essay we will be exploring ancient Roman architecture and engineering by looking at material engagement, responsivity, and agency in/of matter.Att drömma med Pantheon i Rom, är en spekulativ essä om byggnadskonsten i det antika Rom med utgångspunkt i frågor som rör agens hos materia och respons, eller svarande, i det vi kallar material. I denna undersökning utgår vi ifrån vetenskapliga upptäckter inom en rad fält som undersöker dessa frågor på olika sätt. Utmärkande för byggnadskonsten i antikens Rom var att den i hög grad baserades på en direkt materialkännedom, vilket i sin tur var ett resultat av ett till synes oändligt antal experiment. Om vi föreställer oss alla byggplatser i det Romerska riket under tiden då Pantheon byggdes ser vi kanske tusentals människor som på olika sätt arbetar med och samtidigt undersöker material på olika sätt för att dessa skall komma till användning inom arkitekturen. Den massiva kollektiva insatsen och mängden experiment och undersökande tror vi är en av anledningarna till att just Romersk arkitektur var så framstående. I den här essän undersöker vi arkitektur och byggnadskonst genom att studera och fantisera om relationerna mellan människa och material

Evaluation of cultural ecosystem services using GIS

This master project has been carried out in collaboration with a research project named “Valuation of cultural ecosystem services based on contributions to quality of life” at Lund University. In this thesis, Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) are evaluated from people’s own perceptions. The very aim of the study is to develop a method to assess CES non-monetarily by using a bottom-up perspective. People’s direct emotional response and CES are connected to locations and land cover classes. Gullåkra mosse, located close to Staffanstorp, was used as study site. A smart phone application was developed for collecting data. It registers answers from participants, GPS coordinates and participants direction of view. All data was analysed statistically and spatially. 18 people participated in the study and each participant was asked to choose three locations which were special and positive according to their own perceptions. Four types of questions were asked regarding physical elements, environmental qualities, activities and emotional response. The questions capture CES and the affective well-being of the participants. The location and view direction of each participant were obtained from the registered answers. The CES and its qualities were connected to specific land cover classes. Qualities of CES most closely related to affective well-being where established by selecting the area with the highest perceived affective well-being. A CES index, which makes it possible to rank CES, was developed. The conclusion is that CES can be evaluated by considering people’s own perceptions. It suggests that it should be possible, with more research, to rank ecosystems in terms of CES on the basis of land cover classes.Inom ramen för ett masterarbete har en metod utvecklats som kopplar människors upplevelser av natur med den fysiska miljön i form av marktäckning. Deltagarna fick välja tre platser inom ett rekreationsområde som de tyckte var speciella. Med hjälp av en applikation i mobiltelefonen svarade de på frågor om vilka fysiska element som var viktiga, hur de uppfattade miljön, vilka aktiviteter som platsen lämpade sig för och hur de kände sig på platsen. Svaren analyserades tillsammans med klassificeringar av marktäckningen inom området som utgick från flygfoton och observationer på plats. Studien visar att det är möjligt att särskilja och värdera platser utifrån upplevelse i kombination med den fysiska miljön med hjälp av GIS i ett specifik och småskaligt område. Projektet är utfört inom ramen för Kulturella ekosystemtjänster och livskvalitet, ett forskningsprojekt finansierat av Naturvårdsverket

The Cerevoice Blizzard Entry 2007: Are Small Database Errors Worse than Compression Artifacts?

In commercial systems the memory footprint of unit selection systems is often a key issue. This is especially true for PDAs and other embedded devices. In this years Blizzard entry CereProc R○gave itself the criteria that the full database system entered would have a smaller memory footprint than either of the two smaller database entries. This was accomplished by applying speex speech compression to the full database entry. In turn a set of small database techniques used to improve the quality of small database systems in last years entry were extended. Finally, for all systems, two quality control methods were applied to the underlying database to improve the lexicon and transcription match to the underlying data. Results suggest that mild audio quality artifacts introduced by lossy compression have almost as much impact on MOS perceived quality as concatenation errors introduced by sparse data in the smaller systems with bulked diphones. Index Terms: speech synthesis, unit selection. 1

Fast GPU Accelerated Stereo Correspondence for Embedded Surveillance Camera Systems

Many surveillance applications could benefit from the use of stereo cam- eras for depth perception. While state-of-the-art methods provide high quality scene depth information, many of the methods are very time consuming and not suitable for real-time usage in limited embedded systems. This study was conducted to examine stereo correlation methods to find a suitable algorithm for real-time or near real-time depth perception through disparity maps in a stereo video surveillance camera with an embedded GPU. Moreover, novel refinements and alternations was investigated to further improve performance and quality. Quality tests were conducted in Octave while GPU suitability and performance tests were done in C++ with the OpenGL ES 2.0 library. The result is a local stereo correlation method using Normalized Cross Correlation together with sparse support windows and a suggested improvement for pixel-wise matching confidence. Applying sparse support windows increased frame rate by 35% with minimal quality penalty as compared to using full support windows

Utilising Spontaneous Conversational Speech in HMM-Based Speech Synthesis

Spontaneous conversational speech has many characteristics that are currently not well modelled in unit selection and HMM-based speech synthesis. But in order to build synthetic voices more suitable for interaction we need data that exhibits more conversational characteristics than the generally used read aloud sentences. In this paper we will show how carefully selected utterances from a spontaneous conversation was instrumental for building an HMM-based synthetic voices with more natural sounding conversational characteristics than a voice based on carefully read aloud sentences. We also investigated a style blending technique as a solution to the inherent problem of phonetic coverage in spontaneous speech data. But the lack of an appropriate representation of spontaneous speech phenomena probably contributed to results showing that we could not yet compete with the speech quality achieved for grammatical sentences

Regionförstoring i ett miljöperspektiv

Den här uppsatsen belyser hur regionerna Skåne och Västra Götaland ser på regionförstoring som utvecklingsstrategi, vilka drivkrafter som ligger bakom detta mål, samt vad det innebär för ett ökat resande. Vidare undersöks huruvida dessa regioner ser en konflikt mellan regionförstoring, och därmed ökande transportvolymer, och å andra sidan en miljömässigt hållbar utveckling. Uppsatsen kommer fram till att den främsta drivkraften bakom regionförstoringsmålet är ökad ekonomisk tillväxt, vilket är ett överordnat mål för regionerna. Andra drivkrafter som också lyfts fram är bättre regional balans och en större individuell frihet för regionernas invånare. Regionerna Skåne och Västra Götaland ser inte nödvändigtvis en konflikt i att de strävar efter regionförstoring och samtidigt förväntas bidra till en miljömässigt hållbar utveckling. Genom olika strategier för att miljöanpassa transportsystemet kan resandet öka utan att miljöeffekterna förvärras. Man kan dock problematisera att regionerna säger sig vilja öka andelen kollektivtrafik samtidigt som de förbättrar framkomligheten på vägarna. Sådana insatser tenderar att ha motsatt effekt. I ett lite vidare perspektiv kan man också ifrågasätta den ökade rörligheten som företeelse, vilket har visat sig vara centralt för den regionala utvecklingen. En slutsats som den här uppsatsen tar med sig är att rörlighetsbehovet är något som tycks vara svårt att kritisera inom regional utveckling

Context dependent speech recognition

Poor speech recognition is a problem when developing spoken dialogue systems, but several studies has showed that speech recognition can be improved by post-processing of recognition output that use the dialogue context, acoustic properties of a user utterance and other available resources to train a statistical model to use as a filter between the speech recogniser and dialogue manager. In this thesis a corpus of logged interactions between users and a dialogue system was used to extract features from previous dialogue context, acoustics from the user utterance and n-best recognition hypotheses. The features were used to train maximum entropy models with different feature sets to rerank the n-best hypotheses. The models fail to some extent to predict intended labels but using the reranked output in effect means that 94.9% of the adequate hypotheses will be sent to the dialogue manager, a decrease in relative error over baseline with 44.6% showing that contextual reranking can improve speech recognition for dialogue systems. Future work involves developing the current feature sets and maxEnt models to better classify whether a hypothesis should be accepted or rejected by the dialogue system rather than rerank them

Synthesis and Evaluation of Conversational Characteristics in Speech Synthesis

Conventional synthetic voices can synthesise neutral read aloud speech well. But, to make synthetic speech more suitable for a wider range of applications, the voices need to express more than just the word identity. We need to develop voices that can partake in a conversation and express, e.g. agreement, disagreement, hesitation, in a natural and believable manner. In speech synthesis there are currently two dominating frameworks: unit selection and HMM-based speech synthesis. Both frameworks utilise recordings of human speech to build synthetic voices. Despite the fact that the content of the recordings determines the segmental and prosodic phenomena that can be synthesised, surprisingly little research has been made on utilising the corpus to extend the limited behaviour of conventional synthetic voices. In this thesis we will show how natural sounding conversational characteristics can be added to both unit selection and HMM-based synthetic voices, by adding speech from a spontaneous conversation to the voices. We recorded a spontaneous conversation, and by manually transcribing and selecting utterances we obtained approximately two thousand utterances from it. These conversational utterances were rich in conversational speech phenomena, but they lacked the general coverage that allows unit selection and HMM-based synthesis techniques to synthesise high quality speech. Therefore we investigated a number of blending approaches in the synthetic voices, where the conversational utterances were augmented with conventional read aloud speech. The synthetic voices that contained conversational speech were contrasted with conventional voices without conversational speech. The perceptual evaluations showed that the conversational voices were generally perceived by listeners as having a more conversational style than the conventional voices. This conversational style was largely due to the conversational voices’ ability to synthesise utterances that contained conversational speech phenomena in a more natural manner than the conventional voices. Additionally, we conducted an experiment that showed that natural sounding conversational characteristics in synthetic speech can convey pragmatic information, in our case an impression of certainty or uncertainty, about a topic to a listener. The conclusion drawn is that the limited behaviour of conventional synthetic voices can be enriched by utilising conversational speech in both unit selection and HMM-based speech synthesis