FloWaveNet : A Generative Flow for Raw Audio

Most modern text-to-speech architectures use a WaveNet vocoder for synthesizing high-fidelity waveform audio, but there have been limitations, such as high inference time, in its practical application due to its ancestral sampling scheme. The recently suggested Parallel WaveNet and ClariNet have achieved real-time audio synthesis capability by incorporating inverse autoregressive flow for parallel sampling. However, these approaches require a two-stage training pipeline with a well-trained teacher network and can only produce natural sound by using probability distillation along with auxiliary loss terms. We propose FloWaveNet, a flow-based generative model for raw audio synthesis. FloWaveNet requires only a single-stage training procedure and a single maximum likelihood loss, without any additional auxiliary terms, and it is inherently parallel due to the characteristics of generative flow. The model can efficiently sample raw audio in real-time, with clarity comparable to previous two-stage parallel models. The code and samples for all models, including our FloWaveNet, are publicly available.Comment: 9 pages, ICML'201

Colonial Media Space and the Intelligentsia in Kyŏngsŏng during the 1920s and 1930s: The Case of Choi Seung-Ils Life History

Translated from the article published in Journal of Communication Research vol. 47, no. 1 (February 2010): 121-169, with permission from the Seoul National University Institute of Communication ResearchThis study attempts to reconstitute the life history of Choi Seung-il (崔承一, 1901-?), a famous Korean intellectual of the colonial period. It especially focuses on his media career. As did his many fellow literati, Choi played an active part in diverse media and cultural arenas. During the period of 1920-1930s, he held various positions (magazine editor, writer, play director, radio program director, stage manager, etc.) with a socialist orientation in the Korean cultural scene. He also wrote several moderrnologist essays on the media culture in Kyŏngsŏng. However, he became a pro-Japanese film producer in the late 1930s, and produced Volunteer, a militarist propaganda movie. We assume that Chois media career and writings reveal, beyond his personal idiosyncrasy, the specific relationship between colonial media space and the intelligentsia. In this context, we try to clarify this relationship, conceptualizing media space as an important structural space of opportunity and phenomenological space of experience for the colonial intelligentsia. Chois life history clearly shows how the colonial intelligentsia continued to reconstruct media space by his thoughts and activities

Production and Organization of Entertainment Programs in Early Stages of the Gyeongseong Broadcasting Station

Translated from the article published in Media and Society vol. 20, no. 3 (2012), with permission from the Sungkok Foundation for Media and Culture.This research has its purpose in providing systematic studies on production and organization patterns of radio programs during unified dual language broadcasting era while exploring its social and cultural significance. In particular, this research focused on entertainment programs during the first year since the opening of the Gyeongseong Broadcasting Station. In view of the production and organization of programs, the first year was a meaningful time for the Station as various materials, formats, and technical possibilities were tried. There are several reasons why the research has its focus on entertainment programs. In terms of program organizations, JODK consistently maintained the principle of report, culture and comfort. Since its establishment, comfort broadcasting has always been one of the most popular programs for Korean citizens. Entertainment broadcasting, which constituted another main pillar of the comfort broadcasting along with music, served as a venue where new types of various programs emerged but there has not been enough research on the broadcasting before the separate broadcasting era. In this research, production and organization of entertainment programs such as Book Reading, Script Reading, Movie Review and Radio Drama were analyzed based on the radio program schedules reported on Maeil Daily and Dong-A Daily from February 16, 1927 when JODK was set up to February 15, 1928. The research newly found that the first radio drama was not Dolls House (Act III) as it is widely known but rather Fame and the Poet and there were two more radio movies tried such as The Way of Sunset and Fallen Blossoms on a Stream in addition to Goldfish. It also found that altogether 20 plays, including foreign and Korean plays, were produced into radio dramas under the Radio Play Research Association. This paper, however, goes beyond delivering such new information and findings yet examines social and cultural context that led to the popular spread of entertainment programs and engages in in-depth discussion on the meaning of the programs in terms of colonial modernity and hybrid characteristics of media cultures

Edit-A-Video: Single Video Editing with Object-Aware Consistency

Despite the fact that text-to-video (TTV) model has recently achieved remarkable success, there have been few approaches on TTV for its extension to video editing. Motivated by approaches on TTV models adapting from diffusion-based text-to-image (TTI) models, we suggest the video editing framework given only a pretrained TTI model and a single pair, which we term Edit-A-Video. The framework consists of two stages: (1) inflating the 2D model into the 3D model by appending temporal modules and tuning on the source video (2) inverting the source video into the noise and editing with target text prompt and attention map injection. Each stage enables the temporal modeling and preservation of semantic attributes of the source video. One of the key challenges for video editing include a background inconsistency problem, where the regions not included for the edit suffer from undesirable and inconsistent temporal alterations. To mitigate this issue, we also introduce a novel mask blending method, termed as sparse-causal blending (SC Blending). We improve previous mask blending methods to reflect the temporal consistency so that the area where the editing is applied exhibits smooth transition while also achieving spatio-temporal consistency of the unedited regions. We present extensive experimental results over various types of text and videos, and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared to baselines in terms of background consistency, text alignment, and video editing quality

Minocycline markedly reduces acute visceral nociception via inhibiting neuronal ERK phosphorylation

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Minocycline prevents the development of neuropathic and inflammatory pain by inhibiting microglial activation and postsynaptic currents. But, how minocycline obviates acute visceral pain is unclear. The present study investigated whether minocycline had an any antinociceptive effect on acetic acid-induced acute abdominal pain after intraperitoneal (i.p.) administration of saline or minocycline 1 hour before acetic acid injection (1.0%, 250 μl, i.p.).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Minocycline (4, 10, or 40 mg/kg) significantly decreased acetic acid-induced nociception (0-60 minutes post-injection) and the enhancement in the number of c-Fos positive cells in the T5-L2 spinal cord induced by acetic acid injection. Also, the expression of spinal phosphorylated extracellular signal-regulated kinase (p-ERK) induced by acetic acid was reduced by minocycline pre-administration. Interestingly, intrathecal introduction of PD98059, an ERK upstream kinase inhibitor, markedly blocked the acetic acid-stimulated pain responses.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These results demonstrate that minocycline effectively inhibits acetic acid-induced acute abdominal nociception via the inhibition of neuronal p-ERK expression in the spinal cord, and that minocycline may have therapeutic potential in suppressing acute abdominal pain.</p

Direct observation of CD4 T cell morphologies and their cross-sectional traction force derivation on quartz nanopillar substrates using focused ion beam technique

Direct observations of the primary mouse CD4 T cell morphologies, e.g., cell adhesion and cell spreading by culturing CD4 T cells in a short period of incubation (e.g., 20 min) on streptavidin-functionalized quartz nanopillar arrays (QNPA) using a high-content scanning electron microscopy method were reported. Furthermore, we first demonstrated cross-sectional cell traction force distribution of surface-bound CD4 T cells on QNPA substrates by culturing the cells on top of the QNPA and further analysis in deflection of underlying QNPA via focused ion beam-assisted technique