Multimodal One-Shot Learning of Speech and Images

Imagine a robot is shown new concepts visually together with spoken tags, e.g. "milk", "eggs", "butter". After seeing one paired audio-visual example per class, it is shown a new set of unseen instances of these objects, and asked to pick the "milk". Without receiving any hard labels, could it learn to match the new continuous speech input to the correct visual instance? Although unimodal one-shot learning has been studied, where one labelled example in a single modality is given per class, this example motivates multimodal one-shot learning. Our main contribution is to formally define this task, and to propose several baseline and advanced models. We use a dataset of paired spoken and visual digits to specifically investigate recent advances in Siamese convolutional neural networks. Our best Siamese model achieves twice the accuracy of a nearest neighbour model using pixel-distance over images and dynamic time warping over speech in 11-way cross-modal matching.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables; accepted to ICASSP 201

Teacher Attrition: Supporting Teachers Through Mentorship

A wealth of research demonstrates that teachers of all career levels are leaving the profession due to dissatisfaction with a variety of working conditions and lack of growth opportunities. Teachers desire a better work-life balance, opportunities to progress in their careers, and collaboration with co-workers and school leaders. Additionally, the research shows that teachers stay in education when they are valued and given the opportunity to use their expertise and voice. Mentorship programs support early-career teachers, while giving midto-late career teachers the opportunity to use their expertise. This project is the development of a two-tiered mentorship program that combines instructional coaching and support from a job-alike mentor for those entering their teaching career. Mentees will provide and receive formative feedback that will be used to select personalized professional development. Through the development of the project, new teachers at Hudsonville Christian School made it known that there is also a need for support with student faith formation. Mentors in this program will assist teachers with implementation of student faith formation and will support teachers in the development of the instructional skills and goals the mentees set with their instructional coaches. This mentorship program distributes leadership to the instructional coaches, teacher leaders, and the mentors

Contribution of thermal noise to the line width of Josephson radiation from superconducting point contacts

Contribution of thermal noise to line width of Josephson radiation from superconducting point contact

Analytical prediction of rotor eddy current loss due to stator slotting in PM machines

Paper presented during the 2010 IEEE Conference, Electrical Machines and Systems, 2001. ICEMS 2001, Shenyang . The original publication is available at http://research.ee.sun.ac.za/emr/files/u1/2010-ECCE-Wills.pdf and also http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=971799&tag=1Wills, D. A. & Kamper, M. J.2010. Analytical prediction of rotor eddy current loss due to stator slotting in PM machines, in Electrical Machines and Systems, 2001. ICEMS 2001. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference, 2:806 - 809, doi:10.1109/ICEMS.2001.971799.Certain types of PM electric machines are particularly susceptible to the proliferation of eddy currents flowing within the solid conducting regions in the rotor. These eddy currents can be induced by current winding harmonics, but also by the interaction of the static rotor magnetic field with the permeance variation of the slotted stator known as ‘slotting’. This work focuses on the analytical calculation of eddy current loss that occurs in the conducting regions within a rotor under no-load conditions. The results are compared with finite element analysis and measured results from a machine test. Good agreement is achieved between the three methods of comparison.Post-prin

Research and development of superconducting thin films Final report, 15 Dec. 1965 - 15 Dec. 1966

Superconducting niobium thin film productio

Towards Learning to Speak and Hear Through Multi-Agent Communication over a Continuous Acoustic Channel

While multi-agent reinforcement learning has been used as an effective means to study emergent communication between agents, existing work has focused almost exclusively on communication with discrete symbols. Human communication often takes place (and emerged) over a continuous acoustic channel; human infants acquire language in large part through continuous signalling with their caregivers. We therefore ask: Are we able to observe emergent language between agents with a continuous communication channel trained through reinforcement learning? And if so, what is the impact of channel characteristics on the emerging language? We propose an environment and training methodology to serve as a means to carry out an initial exploration of these questions. We use a simple messaging environment where a "speaker" agent needs to convey a concept to a "listener". The Speaker is equipped with a vocoder that maps symbols to a continuous waveform, this is passed over a lossy continuous channel, and the Listener needs to map the continuous signal to the concept. Using deep Q-learning, we show that basic compositionality emerges in the learned language representations. We find that noise is essential in the communication channel when conveying unseen concept combinations. And we show that we can ground the emergent communication by introducing a caregiver predisposed to "hearing" or "speaking" English. Finally, we describe how our platform serves as a starting point for future work that uses a combination of deep reinforcement learning and multi-agent systems to study our questions of continuous signalling in language learning and emergence.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables; under review as a conference paper at ICLR 202

Superconduction thin films

Superconduction thin films, and properties and applications of Josephson effect at radio frequencie