Speech de-identification with deep neural networks

Cloud-based speech services are powerful practical tools but the privacy of the speakers raises important legal concerns when exposed to the Internet. We propose a deep neural network solution that removes personal characteristics from human speech by converting it to the voice of a Text-to-Speech (TTS) system before sending the utterance to the cloud. The network learns to transcode sequences of vocoder parameters, delta and delta-delta features of human speech to those of the TTS engine. We evaluated several TTS systems, vocoders and audio alignment techniques. We measured the performance of our method by (i) comparing the result of speech recognition on the de-identified utterances with the original texts, (ii) computing the Mel-Cepstral Distortion of the aligned TTS and the transcoded sequences, and (iii) questioning human participants in A-not-B, 2AFC and 6AFC tasks. Our approach achieves the level required by diverse applications

Comparative analysis of cattle, buffalo and bison meat

Nowadays, the consumption of bison meat is becoming more widespread worldwide, while it’s experiencing a renaissance in the United States. For the industry, this could lead to the emergence of a new market sector in the future. It is important to examine the extent to which the quality of its meat differs from that of the usual cattle or buffalo returning to the public consciousness. Our measurements were performed on the loin of bison, buffalo and cattle, including Angus cattle based on the consumer price per 100 grams of product, instrumental colour measurement, instrumental stock measurement, cooking, roasting and pressing loss, instrumental analytical examination and sensory evaluation. During our research, we concluded that bison meat may become a very popular product in Hungary in the future. There is a clear place for the consumption of both buffalo meat and bison meat in a health-conscious diet based on the measured results

The Problem of Glutathione Determination: a Comparative Study on the Measurement of Glutathione from Plant Cells

The level and redox status of glutathione is a good indicator for the rate of oxidative stress and eco-toxicological injury in plant cells and subcellular organelles. Thus the determination of GSH and its redox status has special importance. A variety of spectrophotometric and HPLC methods are available to measure glutathione (GSH). The spectrophotometric DTNB-GSH recycling assay is specific due to the application of glutathione reductase, it is rather quick and easy to perform, not surprising that it is rather popular. In the present study we make an attempt to compare the DTNB-GSH recycling assay and the more sophisticated, but difficult monochlorobimane (mBCl)-HPLC method to choose the one that best suits for eco-toxicological and plant stress investigations. We found that the acidification by sulphosalicylic acid (SSA) used for the stabilization of samples for DTNB-GSH recycling assay gives lower efficiency to this method than the formation of mBCl-GSH fluorescent conjugate. The measurable GSH contents were lower in the case of DTNB-GSH recycling assay than in the case of GSH-mBCl conjugates determined by HPLC with fluorescence detection. The auto-oxidation could almost perfectly be prevented by the presence of mBCl in the organelle isolation buffer. Furthermore, this way the reduced GSH content of organelles could be determined much more precisely. However, it is worth to note that the application of mBCl significantly elevates the cost of GSH determination, especially in case of cell organelles

Comparison of foraging tool use in two species of myrmicine ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

Many ant species are known to exhibit foraging tool use, during which ants place various debris items (e.g., pieces of soil, leaves, pine needles, etc.) into liquid food, and then they carry the food-soaked tools back to the nest. In the present study, we compared the tool-using behavior in captive colonies of two closely related myrmicine ants with different feeding preferences: Aphaenogaster subterranea, an omnivorous species, and Messor structor, a mainly granivorous seed-harvester species. We supplied foraging ants with honey-water baits and six types of objects they could use as tools: sand grains, small soil grains, large soil grains, pine needles, leaves, and sponges. We found that the workers of A. subterranea both dropped more tools into honey-water baits and retrieved more of these tools than the workers of M. structor. While A. subterranea preferred smaller tools over larger ones, tool preferences for M. structor did not differ significantly from random. In addition, tool dropping was significantly faster in A. subterranea, and both the dropping and retrieving of tools began significantly earlier than in M. structor. For Aphaenogaster species that regularly utilize and compete for liquid food sources, the ability to efficiently transport liquid food via tools may be more important than it is for seed-harvester ants. Dropping tools into liquids, however, may still be useful for seed-harvester species as a means to supplement diet with liquid food during periods of seed shortage and also to serve as a means of getting rid of unwanted liquids close to the nest

New flow cytometry-based method for the assessment of the antibacterial effect of immune cells and subcellular particles

Techniques currently used for assessment of bacterial count or growth are time-consuming, offer low throughput, or they are complicated or expensive. The aim of the present work was to elaborate a new method that is able to detect the antibacterial effect of cells, subcellular particles, and soluble compounds in a fast, cost, and labor effective way. Our proposed technique is based on flow cytometry (FC) optimized for detection of small particles and on fluorescently labeled bacteria. It allows direct determination of the bacterial count in 3 hours. The effect of various human phagocytes and extracellular vesicles on gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria is investigated in parallel with the new, FC-based method, with colony counting and with our previous, OD-based method. Comparing the killing effect of wild type and NADPH oxidase-deficient murine neutrophils presents an example of detection of a clinically important deficiency. Strong correlation was obtained between the results of the different techniques, but the reproducibility of the FC-based test was superior to the OD-based test. The major advantages of the new technique are: rapidity, low cost, high throughput, and simplicity. ©2018 Society for Leukocyte Biology