The Journey of Inspiration: From Snow Art to Film Scoring

This thesis described all the processes of rescored the short film One Man’s Walk in the Snow Creates a Giant Masterpiece. From searching for music and video materials, getting inspirations from the materials, compositional process, to scores analysis.https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-scoring/1173/thumbnail.jp

Closed-loop auditory-based representation for robust speech recognition

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-96).A closed-loop auditory based speech feature extraction algorithm is presented to address the problem of unseen noise for robust speech recognition. This closed-loop model is inspired by the possible role of the medial olivocochlear (MOC) efferent system of the human auditory periphery, which has been suggested in [6, 13, 42] to be important for human speech intelligibility in noisy environment. We propose that instead of using a fixed filter bank, the filters used in a feature extraction algorithm should be more flexible to adapt dynamically to different types of background noise. Therefore, in the closed-loop model, a feedback mechanism is designed to regulate the operating points of filters in the filter bank based on the background noise. The model is tested on a dataset created from TIDigits database. In this dataset, five kinds of noise are added to synthesize noisy speech. Compared with the standard MFCC extraction algorithm, the proposed closed-loop form of feature extraction algorithm provides 9.7%, 9.1% and 11.4% absolution word error rate reduction on average for three kinds of filter banks respectively.by Chia-ying Lee.S.M

Semantic ambiguity effects on traditional Chinese character naming: A corpus-based approach.

Words are considered semantically ambiguous if they have more than one meaning and can be used in multiple contexts. A number of recent studies have provided objective ambiguity measures by using a corpus-based approach and have demonstrated ambiguity advantages in both naming and lexical decision tasks. Although the predictive power of objective ambiguity measures has been examined in several alphabetic language systems, the effects in logographic languages remain unclear. Moreover, most ambiguity measures do not explicitly address how the various contexts associated with a given word relate to each other. To explore these issues, we computed the contextual diversity (Adelman, Brown, & Quesada, Psychological Science, 17; 814-823, 2006) and semantic ambiguity (Hoffman, Lambon Ralph, & Rogers, Behavior Research Methods, 45; 718-730, 2013) of traditional Chinese single-character words based on the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus, where contextual diversity was used to evaluate the present semantic space. We then derived a novel ambiguity measure, namely semantic variability, by computing the distance properties of the distinct clusters grouped by the contexts that contained a given word. We demonstrated that semantic variability was superior to semantic diversity in accounting for the variance in naming response times, suggesting that considering the substructure of the various contexts associated with a given word can provide a relatively fine scale of ambiguity information for a word. All of the context and ambiguity measures for 2,418 Chinese single-character words are provided as supplementary materials

Perioperative Stroke Following General Surgery

AbstractPerioperative stroke is rare; however, patients undergoing cardiovascular surgery are considered to be at high risk for perioperative stroke. Here, we outline a case where perioperative stroke occurred following total hip replacement surgery. The risk factors and possible causes of the stroke in this patient are discussed. In addition, we reiterate the appropriate management approaches needed to prevent perioperative stroke. Briefly, the importance of precise preoperative evaluation and of proper intraoperative and postoperative management should not be overlooked. Finally, it is important to realize that decreasing perioperative strokes and the disabilities associated with them will lower the financial burden on families and the community

Exploring orthographic neighborhood size effects in a computational model of Chinese character naming

Orthographic neighborhood (N) size effects have been extensively studied in English consistently producing a facilitatory effect in word naming tasks. In contrast, several recent studies on Chinese character naming have demonstrated an inhibitory effect of neighborhood size. Response latencies tend to be inhibited by inconsistent characters with large neighborhoods relative to small neighborhoods. These differences in neighborhood effects between languages may depend on the characteristics (depth) of the mapping between orthography and phonology. To explore this, we first conducted a behavioral experiment to investigate the relationship between neighborhood size, consistency and reading response. The results showed an inhibitory effect of neighborhood size for inconsistent characters but a facilitatory effect for consistent characters. We then developed two computational models based on parallel distributed processing principles to try and capture the nature of the processing that leads to these results in Chinese character naming. Simulations using models based on the triangle model of reading indicated that consistency and neighborhood size interact with the division of labor between semantics and phonology to produce these effects