Personalized Predictive ASR for Latency Reduction in Voice Assistants

Streaming Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in voice assistants can utilize prefetching to partially hide the latency of response generation. Prefetching involves passing a preliminary ASR hypothesis to downstream systems in order to prefetch and cache a response. If the final ASR hypothesis after endpoint detection matches the preliminary one, the cached response can be delivered to the user, thus saving latency. In this paper, we extend this idea by introducing predictive automatic speech recognition, where we predict the full utterance from a partially observed utterance, and prefetch the response based on the predicted utterance. We introduce two personalization approaches and investigate the tradeoff between potential latency gains from successful predictions and the cost increase from failed predictions. We evaluate our methods on an internal voice assistant dataset as well as the public SLURP dataset.Comment: Accepted for Interspeech 202

Enhancing Chromium (VI) removal from synthetic and real tannery effluents by using diatomite-embedded nanopyroxene

A commercial filter aid material of Diatomite was modified via loading it with a low mass fraction of polyethylenimine-functionalized pyroxene nanoparticles (PEI-PNs) to enhance its adsorption activities. The modified Diatomite was then used for Cr(VI) removal from dichromate solution and from real tannery wastewater. For the synthetic wastewater, batch adsorption experiments were first performed at various pH and Cr(VI) initial concentrations. Then, the obtained kinetic parameters were used to investigate the continuous adsorption inside the fixed-bed column. The continuous removal of the Cr(VI) was performed inside a fixed-bed column under various influent flow rates, Cr(VI) initial concentrations, and bed-heights. In the column experiments, high adsorption of Cr(VI) was observed at low flow rates, high bed heights, and low influent initial concentrations. A dimensionless form of the advection-axial dispersion model, featuring Peclet number as a fitting parameter, was then used to study the breakthrough behavior under various dynamic parameters. Afterward, the modified Diatomite was used to remediate well characterized real tannery wastewater. For the treatment of the tannery wastewater, our modified filter aid, compared with the non-modified one, showed an outstanding performance and a higher removal efficiency.The authors are grateful to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) (Grant No. RGPIN-2015- 05222). A special acknowledgement to Dr. Tobias Fürstenhaupt for access to the Microscopy and Imaging Facility of the Health Science Center at the University of Calgary and Dr. Christopher Debuhr for providing access to the Instrumentation Facility for Analytical Electron Microscopy at the University of Calgary and Dr. Gerardo Vitale for drawing the CPK representation of nanopyroxene and diatomite surface

Poly(ethylenimine)-Functionalized Pyroxene Nanoparticles Embedded on Diatomite for Removal of Total Organic Carbon from Industrial Wastewater: Batch and Fixed-bed studies

Abstract Providing clean and affordable water to meet the human needs is a big challenge in this century. Globally, the water supply for many industries struggles to keep up with the strong demand. This demand issue is exacerbated by industrialization, which led to water quality deterioration, forming polluted wastewater. Existence of treatment processes to overcome wastewater problems are not efficient and appropriate to maintaining the industrial effluent composition within the standard limits. Specifically, presence of dissolved organic compounds not properly eliminated during the wastewater treatment has a negative impact on human health and the environment. As a novel solution, nanotechnology holds great potential in water and wastewater treatment to improve water quality efficiently. Here, we introduce an innovative technique using environmentally friendly, multifunctional, and effective poly(ethylenimine)-functionalized pyroxene nanoparticles to provide an efficient removal of the dissolved total organic carbon from industrial wastewater in batch and contenuious fixed-bed column studies under various conditions. Our study includes arrays of characterization techniques for the prepared nanoparticles and for Diatomite (commonly used filter aid) before and after embedding it with the nanoparticles at a very low mass ratio (<5 wt%). Diatomite, on its own, has a very low adsorption capacity for the dissolved organic contaminants in field applications. Among these applications is the employment of Diatomite with a rotary drum filter (RDF). Therefore, we embedded the nanoparticles to improve the performance of the Diatomite employed with a rotary drum filter used for the removal of dissolved organic pollutants. This followed our bench scale adsorption experiment using a continuous fixed-bed column that is considered to be the best lab scale model for the rotary drum filter. The experimental results showed that, compared to using activated carbon and magnetic nanoparticles, the prepared nanoparticles were very effective in the removal of dissolved organic contaminants in batch and continuous fixed-bed column experiments. In continuous fixed-bed column experiments, the breakthrough behavior was described using a convection-axial dispersion model that had a good fit with the obtained experimental data. Interestingly, this innovative technique was successfully applied at Executive Mat Ltd, here in Calgary in their rotary drum filter after optimizing some operational conditions