Eventness: Object Detection on Spectrograms for Temporal Localization of Audio Events

In this paper, we introduce the concept of Eventness for audio event detection, which can, in part, be thought of as an analogue to Objectness from computer vision. The key observation behind the eventness concept is that audio events reveal themselves as 2-dimensional time-frequency patterns with specific textures and geometric structures in spectrograms. These time-frequency patterns can then be viewed analogously to objects occurring in natural images (with the exception that scaling and rotation invariance properties do not apply). With this key observation in mind, we pose the problem of detecting monophonic or polyphonic audio events as an equivalent visual object(s) detection problem under partial occlusion and clutter in spectrograms. We adapt a state-of-the-art visual object detection model to evaluate the audio event detection task on publicly available datasets. The proposed network has comparable results with a state-of-the-art baseline and is more robust on minority events. Provided large-scale datasets, we hope that our proposed conceptual model of eventness will be beneficial to the audio signal processing community towards improving performance of audio event detection.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted to ICASSP 201

A Longitudinal Study Of E-Government Maturity

Extending the findings of prior cross-sectional studies, this paper presents a longitudinal analysis of the drivers of e-Government maturity. We constructed a panel dataset for the period from 2003 to 2007 using data published by various authoritative sources. We fitted a mixed-effects regression model to the data to study how the growth of e-Government around the globe is influenced by changing levels of affluence, ICT infrastructure, human capital, and governance. We found that countries’ e-Government matures as they become more affluent (in terms of GDP per capita) and as their ICT infrastructure improves. Human capital and the quality of governance have no significant effect on the development of e-Government maturity. The results suggest that countries investing in leading-edge ICT infrastructure can maintain or improve their global standing in e-Government without substantial changes to human capital or governance. We put forward plausible reasons to explain our findings, and their implications for future research and the practice of e-government

Country-Level Determinants of E-Government Maturity

This paper presents a model of the drivers of e-government maturity. We differentiate maturity from readiness on the basis that the former refers to demonstrated behavior, while the latter provides an idea of a country\u27s potential to achieve e-government, and argue that maturity is a more accurate measure of a country\u27s realized progress. We investigate the prevalence of affluent countries in many e-government rankings using a model where the relationship between GDP and e-government maturity is mediated by ICT infrastructure, human capital, and governance. Using data from authoritative sources, we find that most of the positive influence of GDP on e-government maturity occurs through ICT infrastructure. More mature e-government, however, does not necessarily reflect better governance; in fact our data show a weak but significant negative relationship between e-government maturity and the quality of governance. We suggest plausible explanations for these findings and how the future evolution of e-government might change the observed relationships

Direct Laser Fabrication of a Gas Turbine Engine Component - Microstructure and Properties - Part I

This paper presents the development of a new technique for the production of abrasive turbine blade tips by direct laser processing. This superalloy cermet component is an integral part of the low pressure turbine sealing system in a demonstrator engine. Direct laser fabrication of this component fiom a bed a loose powder results in significant cost savings and improved performance over the currently employed production technique. The technology has been demonstrated by fabricating a prototype lot of 100 blade tips, which will be subjected to an engine test. This is the first instance of a direct fabrication method applied to the production of functional engine hardware. This research was funded by the United States Air Force contract F33615-94- C-2424 titled "Affordable Turbine Blade Tips".Mechanical Engineerin

Geometry Processing for SLS/HIP

SLS/HIP is a new net shape manufacturing method that combines the strengths of direct selective laser sintering and hot isostatic pressing. Direct selective laser sintering is a rapid manufacturing technique that can produce high density metal parts of complex geornetry with an integral, gas iinpenneable skin. These parts can then be directly post-processed by containerless HIP. Sophisticated processing of the part geometry is required to facilitate the desired results from SLS/HIP. This paper presents geometry processing algorithms being developed for in-situ canning of SLS/HIP components. This research is funded by DARPA IONR contract NO00 14-95-C-0 139 titled "Low Cost Metal Processing Using SLS/HIP".Mechanical Engineerin