Outcomes of CCAFS Work in Vietnam

The study explored how CCAFS SEA outputs have helped the country achieve its development outcomes in the agricultural sector. The assessment showed that CCAFS SEA, although still on-going, has contributed to specific outcomes in Vietnam, which include changes in knowledge, approaches, practices, and strategies related to climate change, particularly in the agricultural sector. These outcomes were observed among decision makers, policymakers, technical staff, and farmers

Fuzzy reasoning in confidence evaluation of speech recognition

Confidence measures represent a systematic way to express reliability of speech recognition results. A common approach to confidence measuring is to take profit of the information that several recognition-related features offer and to combine them, through a given compilation mechanism , into a more effective way to distinguish between correct and incorrect recognition results. We propose to use a fuzzy reasoning scheme to perform the information compilation step. Our approach opposes the previously proposed ones because ours treats the uncertainty of recognition hypotheses in terms ofPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A second opinion approach for speech recognition verification

In order to improve the reliability of speech recognition results, a verifying system, that takes profit of the information given from an alternative recognition step is proposed. The alternative results are considered as a second opinion about the nature of the speech recognition process. Some features are extracted from both opinion sources and compiled, through a fuzzy inference system, into a more discriminant confidence measure able to verify correct results and disregard wrong ones. This approach is tested in a keyword spotting task taken form the Spanish SpeechDat database. Results show a considerable reduction of false rejections at a fixed false alarm rate compared to baseline systems.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Contextual confidence measures for continuous speech recognition

This paper explores the repercussion of contextual information into confidence measuring for continuous speech recognition results. Our approach comprises three steps: to extract confidence predictors out of recognition results, to compile those predictors into confidence measures by means of a fuzzy inference system whose parameters have been estimated, directly from examples, with an evolutionary strategy and, finally, to upgrade the confidence measures by the inclusion of contextual information. Through experimentation with two different continuous speech application tasks, results show that the context re-scoring procedure improves the capabilities of confidence measures to discriminate between correct and incorrect recognition results for every level of thresholding, even when a rather simple method to add contextual information is considered.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A Living heritage: The Villa E. 1021 by the see

The work tells the story of a holiday home with a mysterious code name E.1027. The house is in one of the most beautiful places on the French Riviera, Roque-brune-Cap-Martin, a few kilometers from the Italian border. The villa was designed in 1926 by Eileen Gray in collaboration with her lover of the time, Jean Badovici. The name of the villa is an alphanumeric code with the initials of their names. Gray planned every little detail of the house, from the garden to the fur-nishing, and built a place where guests or permanent resident can relax and feel comfortable. Gray claimed that “Entering a house should be like the sensation of entering a mouth which will close behind you”. The Villa E.1027 is a masterpiece of modern architecture that overcomes the cold rationalism of Le Corbusier with the passion of a clever woman. Between 1938 and 1939, Le Corbusier wanted to take revenge on this woman by painting obscene sexist murals on every white wall in the house and he spent his life to control the villa’s fate. Today, after a long period of neglect and memory loss, we can finally visit the house, which has been restored to its original beauty and intimacy by a critical restoration that preserved also the Le Corbusier’s murals