Cultural Pluralism, Social Justice

Excerpt Jim Laue was a major figure in conflict resolution and he is sorely missed. His absence is particularly regretted because his was a strong voice in discussions over the ethical dimension of conflict resolution, arguing eloquently and passionately in favor of a self-consciously ethical theory and practice of conflict resolution. Sometime colleagues of Laue, our work over the last decade has argued equally passionately (if not as eloquently) in behalf of a self-consciously cultural theory and practice of conflict resolution, (see Avruch and Black 1987, 1991, 1993; Black and Avruch 1989, 1993)

A Fast and Accurate Pitch Estimation Algorithm Based on the Pseudo Wigner-Ville Distribution

Estimation of fundamental frequency (F0) in voiced segments of speech signals, also known as pitch tracking, plays a crucial role in pitch synchronous speech analysis, speech synthesis, and speech manipulation. In this paper, we capitalize on the high time and frequency resolution of the pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution (PWVD) and propose a new PWVD-based pitch estimation method. We devise an efficient algorithm to compute PWVD faster and use cepstrum-based pre-filtering to avoid cross-term interference. Evaluating our approach on a database with speech and electroglottograph (EGG) recordings yields a state-of-the-art mean absolute error (MAE) of around 4Hz. Our approach is also effective at voiced/unvoiced classification and handling sudden frequency changes

Boston Hospitality Review: Fall 2012

Lodging Update: Greater Boston by Rachel Rogisnky and Matthew Arrants -- A Sense of Place by Rachel Black -- Hospitality, Tourism, and Politics by Stephen W. Litvin -- Paris in Boston by photo essay by Jack Dzamba -- The Cradle of American Hospitality by Bradford Hudson -- Thompon’s Spa: The Most Famous Lunch Counter in the World by Peter Szende and Heather Rule -- The Restaurant as Hybrid: Lean Manufacturer and Service Provider by Christopher Mulle

Effect of quantum and thermal jitter on the feasibility of Bekenstein’s proposed experiment to search for Planck-scale signals

A proposed experiment to test whether space is discretized [J. D. Bekenstein, Phys. Rev. D 86, 124040 (2012); Found. Phys. 44, 452 (2014)] is based on the supposed impossibility of an incident photon causing a displacement of a transparent block by less than the Planck length. An analysis of the quantum and thermal jitter of the block shows that it greatly diminishes the possibility that the experiment could reveal Planck-scale signals

Role of cytoplasmic dynein in the axonal transport of microtubules and neurofilaments

Recent studies have shown that the transport of microtubules (MTs) and neurofilaments (NFs) within the axon is rapid, infrequent, asynchronous, and bidirectional. Here, we used RNA interference to investigate the role of cytoplasmic dynein in powering these transport events. To reveal transport of MTs and NFs, we expressed EGFP-tagged tubulin or NF proteins in cultured rat sympathetic neurons and performed live-cell imaging of the fluorescent cytoskeletal elements in photobleached regions of the axon. The occurrence of anterograde MT and retrograde NF movements was significantly diminished in neurons that had been depleted of dynein heavy chain, whereas the occurrence of retrograde MT and anterograde NF movements was unaffected. These results support a cargo model for NF transport and a sliding filament model for MT transport

Speaker-Independent Acoustic-to-Articulatory Speech Inversion

To build speech processing methods that can handle speech as naturally as humans, researchers have explored multiple ways of building an invertible mapping from speech to an interpretable space. The articulatory space is a promising inversion target, since this space captures the mechanics of speech production. To this end, we build an acoustic-to-articulatory inversion (AAI) model that leverages autoregression, adversarial training, and self supervision to generalize to unseen speakers. Our approach obtains 0.784 correlation on an electromagnetic articulography (EMA) dataset, improving the state-of-the-art by 12.5%. Additionally, we show the interpretability of these representations through directly comparing the behavior of estimated representations with speech production behavior. Finally, we propose a resynthesis-based AAI evaluation metric that does not rely on articulatory labels, demonstrating its efficacy with an 18-speaker dataset

Teaching HCI through magic

We discuss our use of magic to enthuse students about HCI and teach core concepts. We describe the format we trialed with student groups with a wide range of background from whole year groups to groups of gifted students. We conducted post-event surveys with students for two events and obtained teacher feedback from five others. We discuss the results of that data, showing that magic can be effective method for teaching HCI. The same tricks have since been used as part of an Interactive Systems Design MSc course

A study in engaging female students in computer science using role models

An effective approach to engaging young women to take computing in higher education is to provide examples of successful female computer scientists. Can a print publication that combines core computing concepts with inspiring stories of women in the field be effective? In this paper, we describe a campaign that distributed a 60 - page booklet on women in computing to UK secondary schools. We analyse the initial response from teachers, and draw some general conclusions from the project. Teachers expressed strong enthusiasm for the booklet, and also report the desire for recruitment and retention of girls in their computing programmes. They had confidence in the potential for this booklet to inspire young women to take computing