320 research outputs found
Looking back, looking forward: a review of the new literature on diatom teratological forms (2010–2020)
Modeling speech imitation and ecological learning of auditory-motor maps.
Classical models of speech consider an antero-posterior distinction between perceptive and productive functions. However, the selective alteration of neural activity in speech motor centers, via transcranial magnetic stimulation, was shown to affect speech discrimination. On the automatic speech recognition (ASR) side, the recognition systems have classically relied solely on acoustic data, achieving rather good performance in optimal listening conditions. The main limitations of current ASR are mainly evident in the realistic use of such systems. These limitations can be partly reduced by using normalization strategies that minimize inter-speaker variability by either explicitly removing speakers' peculiarities or adapting different speakers to a reference model. In this paper we aim at modeling a motor-based imitation learning mechanism in ASR. We tested the utility of a speaker normalization strategy that uses motor representations of speech and compare it with strategies that ignore the motor domain. Specifically, we first trained a regressor through state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to build an auditory-motor mapping, in a sense mimicking a human learner that tries to reproduce utterances produced by other speakers. This auditory-motor mapping maps the speech acoustics of a speaker into the motor plans of a reference speaker. Since, during recognition, only speech acoustics are available, the mapping is necessary to "recover" motor information. Subsequently, in a phone classification task, we tested the system on either one of the speakers that was used during training or a new one. Results show that in both cases the motor-based speaker normalization strategy slightly but significantly outperforms all other strategies where only acoustics is taken into account
Results of low energy background measurements with the Liquid Scintillation Detector (LSD) of the Mont Blanc Laboratory
The 90 tons liquid scintillation detector (LSD) is fully running since October 1984, at a depth of 5,200 hg/sq cm of standard rock underground. The main goal is to search for neutrino bursts from collapsing stars. The experiment is very sensitive to detect low energy particles and has a very good signature to gamma-rays from (n,p) reaction which follows the upsilon e + p yields n + e sup + neutrino capture. The analysis of data is presented and the preliminary results on low energy measurements are discussed
Fluctuations of Atmospheric Pressure and the Sound of Underground Karst Systems: The Antro del Corchia Case (Apuane Alps, Italy)
Mountains that contain subterranean voids can inhale fresh and clean air, and their breath is a fascinating natural phenomenon that speleologists know very well. Air flow through the entrances of underground systems is also an interesting geophysical problem. Basically it is caused by temperature and pressure gradients between the internal and external atmospheres, but the dynamic interplay between these two driving forces is still not well understood. We contribute to dissect out the physics of underground winds. Wind velocity, internal and external temperature and pressure have been measured synchronously at two entrances of the vast (~64 km) underground system beneath the Mount Corchia, Apuane Alps, Italy. The data show that, within time scales of minutes to days, pressure fluctuations of the external atmosphere primarily force air to flow underground, whereas temperature gradients play only a minor role. We model the cave as a system that takes the external atmospheric pressure as the input signal and outputs wind from its entrances. This wind, on its turn, contain information about the system's response, and hence on the structure of the subterranean voids. This information can be extracted by standard signal processing techniques, and using deconvolution methods we identify the same infrasound resonances in signals sampled at both entrances. These are the characteristic frequencies of the cave, and by using the Helmholtz resonance formalism it can be estimated that the explored volume of this important underground system is less than a half of its probable real extension
The Use of Phonetic Motor Invariants Can Improve Automatic Phoneme Discrimination
affiliation: Castellini, C (Reprint Author), Univ Genoa, LIRA Lab, Genoa, Italy. Castellini, Claudio; Metta, Giorgio; Tavella, Michele, Univ Genoa, LIRA Lab, Genoa, Italy. Badino, Leonardo; Metta, Giorgio; Sandini, Giulio; Fadiga, Luciano, Italian Inst Technol, Genoa, Italy. Grimaldi, Mirko, Salento Univ, CRIL, Lecce, Italy. Fadiga, Luciano, Univ Ferrara, DSBTA, I-44100 Ferrara, Italy.
article-number: e24055
keywords-plus: SPEECH-PERCEPTION; RECOGNITION
research-areas: Science & Technology - Other Topics
web-of-science-categories: Multidisciplinary Sciences
author-email: [email protected]
funding-acknowledgement: European Commission [NEST-5010, FP7-IST-250026]
funding-text: The authors acknowledge the support of the European Commission project CONTACT (grant agreement NEST-5010) and SIEMPRE (grant agreement number FP7-IST-250026). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
number-of-cited-references: 31
times-cited: 0
journal-iso: PLoS One
doc-delivery-number: 817OO
unique-id: ISI:000294683900024We investigate the use of phonetic motor invariants (MIs), that is, recurring kinematic patterns of the human phonetic articulators, to improve automatic phoneme discrimination. Using a multi-subject database of synchronized speech and lips/tongue trajectories, we first identify MIs commonly associated with bilabial and dental consonants, and use them to simultaneously segment speech and motor signals. We then build a simple neural network-based regression schema (called Audio-Motor Map, AMM) mapping audio features of these segments to the corresponding MIs. Extensive experimental results show that (a) a small set of features extracted from the MIs, as originally gathered from articulatory sensors, are dramatically more effective than a large, state-of-the-art set of audio features, in automatically discriminating bilabials from dentals; (b) the same features, extracted from AMM-reconstructed MIs, are as effective as or better than the audio features, when testing across speakers and coarticulating phonemes; and dramatically better as noise is added to the speech signal. These results seem to support some of the claims of the motor theory of speech perception and add experimental evidence of the actual usefulness of MIs in the more general framework of automated speech recognition
The research program of the Liquid Scintillation Detector (LSD) in the Mont Blanc Laboratory
A massive (90 tons) liquid scintillation detector (LSD) has been running since October 1984 in the Mont Blanc Laboratory at a depth of 5,200 hg/sq cm of standard rock. The research program of the experiment covers a variety of topics in particle physics and astrophysics. The performance of the detector, the main fields of research are presented and the preliminary results are discussed
Management of feline hyperthyroidism and the need to prevent oxidative stress: What can we learn from human research?
Feline hyperthyroidism is a clinical syndrome related to an excessive production of thyroid hormones, and it is considered as a spontaneous animal model for human thyrotoxicosis. Many shared features between the feline and the human disease have been identified so far, including pathogenesis, clinical signs, and treatment options. Although methimazole is considered the first-choice drug in both species, several side effects have been described. Furthermore, methimazole could interfere with the oxidative status, already perturbated by the disease. It has been reported in humans that dietary management, mainly through antioxidant supplementation, could mitigate this oxidative burden. The purpose of the review is to describe current therapeutic options in the course of feline hyperthyroidism and to summarize the state of the art relationship between dietary antioxidants administration and the reduction of methimazole side-effects in humans to support the use of this approach also in cats
{SelfPose}: {3D} Egocentric Pose Estimation from a Headset Mounted Camera
We present a solution to egocentric 3D body pose estimation from monocular
images captured from downward looking fish-eye cameras installed on the rim of
a head mounted VR device. This unusual viewpoint leads to images with unique
visual appearance, with severe self-occlusions and perspective distortions that
result in drastic differences in resolution between lower and upper body. We
propose an encoder-decoder architecture with a novel multi-branch decoder
designed to account for the varying uncertainty in 2D predictions. The
quantitative evaluation, on synthetic and real-world datasets, shows that our
strategy leads to substantial improvements in accuracy over state of the art
egocentric approaches. To tackle the lack of labelled data we also introduced a
large photo-realistic synthetic dataset. xR-EgoPose offers high quality
renderings of people with diverse skintones, body shapes and clothing,
performing a range of actions. Our experiments show that the high variability
in our new synthetic training corpus leads to good generalization to real world
footage and to state of theart results on real world datasets with ground
truth. Moreover, an evaluation on the Human3.6M benchmark shows that the
performance of our method is on par with top performing approaches on the more
classic problem of 3D human pose from a third person viewpoint.Comment: 14 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1907.1004
The largest prehistoric mound in Europe is the Bronze-Age Hill of Udine (Italy) and legend linked its origin to Attila the Hun
Prehistoric monuments often constitute evident landmarks and sometimes, after falling into disuse, fascinated local people enough to stimulate speculations about their origin over time. According to legend, the Hill of Udine (NE Italy) was built by Attila the Hun's soldiers, but its origin (natural or anthropogenic) has been debated until now. Our research analyzed five new 40-m long stratigraphic cores, investigating for the first time the total thickness of the hill and compared the data with the available archaeological information. Moreover, we considered other hills and mounds in northern Italy and other European regions where folklore traditions relate their origin to Attila. The geoarchaeological and ethnographic data prove that the Hill of Udine is a Bronze Age anthropogenic mound erected between 1400 and 1150 BCE and that, later, folklore has transformed the ancestral memory of its origin into legend. By measuring 30 m in height and over 400,000 m(3) in volume, the flat-topped hill is the largest prehistoric mound in Europe. This discovery reveals unprecedented skills in earth construction and confirms significant anthropogenic modifications of the environment during Bronze Age
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