Lipreading with Long Short-Term Memory

Lipreading, i.e. speech recognition from visual-only recordings of a speaker's face, can be achieved with a processing pipeline based solely on neural networks, yielding significantly better accuracy than conventional methods. Feed-forward and recurrent neural network layers (namely Long Short-Term Memory; LSTM) are stacked to form a single structure which is trained by back-propagating error gradients through all the layers. The performance of such a stacked network was experimentally evaluated and compared to a standard Support Vector Machine classifier using conventional computer vision features (Eigenlips and Histograms of Oriented Gradients). The evaluation was performed on data from 19 speakers of the publicly available GRID corpus. With 51 different words to classify, we report a best word accuracy on held-out evaluation speakers of 79.6% using the end-to-end neural network-based solution (11.6% improvement over the best feature-based solution evaluated).Comment: Accepted for publication at ICASSP 201

Design of maglev train

Hlavní náplní této diplomové práce je uplatnit myšlenky a nápady k vytvoření inovativního designu magnetického vlaku a ukázat na tomto zadání vlastní tvůrčí aktivitu a schopnost posunout objekt z oblasti funkčnosti do oblasti estetiky, ergonomie a praktičnosti.The main contents of this diploma thesis is apply inventions and ideas to create innovative design of maglev and show own creative activity and ability of object displacement from function sphere to sphere of aesthetic, ergonomy and serviceability.

Recurrent Highway Networks

Many sequential processing tasks require complex nonlinear transition functions from one step to the next. However, recurrent neural networks with 'deep' transition functions remain difficult to train, even when using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. We introduce a novel theoretical analysis of recurrent networks based on Gersgorin's circle theorem that illuminates several modeling and optimization issues and improves our understanding of the LSTM cell. Based on this analysis we propose Recurrent Highway Networks, which extend the LSTM architecture to allow step-to-step transition depths larger than one. Several language modeling experiments demonstrate that the proposed architecture results in powerful and efficient models. On the Penn Treebank corpus, solely increasing the transition depth from 1 to 10 improves word-level perplexity from 90.6 to 65.4 using the same number of parameters. On the larger Wikipedia datasets for character prediction (text8 and enwik8), RHNs outperform all previous results and achieve an entropy of 1.27 bits per character.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 3 table

Design of an alarmclock

Hlavní náplní této bakalářské práce je uplatnit myšlenky a nápady k vytvoření inovativního designu a ukázat na tomto zadání vlastní tvůrčí aktivitu a schopnost posunout objekt z oblasti funkčnosti do oblasti estetiky, ergonomie a praktičnosti.The main contents of this bachelor thesis is apply inventions and ideas to create innovative design and show own creative activity and ability of object displacement from function sphere to sphere of aesthetic, ergonomy and serviceability.

Energy policy of the EU towards Russia: 2000-2013

Vzájemná závislost EU a Ruska v energetickém sektoru vyústila v roce 2000 ve vytvoření tzv. Energetického dialogu EU-Rusko. Od svého založení musel Dialog čelit řadě vnějších vlivů, především dvěma rusko-ukrajinským plynovým krizím v letech 2006 a 2009, kdy došlo k přerušení dodávek zemního plynu do EU. Bakalářská práce zkoumá, jakým způsobem dokázal Dialog odpovědět na důsledky obou krizí. Práce nejprve analyzuje fungování Dialogu mezi lety 2000-2013, včetně krizí a jejich dopadů. Následným srovnáním vývoje Dialogu před a po krizích dochází k rozboru jeho reakcí na proběhlé události. Autor dochází k závěru, že přes znatelné odezvy a změny v Dialogu, nedokázaly EU a Rusko dostatečně odpovědět na důsledky krizí, zejména protože zůstal nevyřešen problém tranzitních států a bezpečnosti energetické infrastruktury.The interdependence of the EU and Russia in the energy sector led to the establishment of "EU-Russia Energy Dialogue" in 2000. Since its formation the Dialogue had to face various external influences, including two Russia-Ukraine gas disputes in 2006 and 2009 during which the gas supplies to the EU were interrupted. The Bachelor's thesis examines, how the Dialogue answered to the consequences of the gas crises. Firstly this paper analyses the development of the Dialogue between 2000 and 2013, as well as the impacts of the two crises. The reactions of the Dialogue to the crises are presented by the comparison of the Dialogues work before and after they occurred. The author concludes that although there were some responses, EU and Russia didn't manage to sufficiently resolve the most challenging issues, including the ongoing problems with the transit states and the energy infrastructure security.Institut mezinárodních studiíInstitute of International StudiesFakulta sociálních vědFaculty of Social Science