186 research outputs found
Examining Technology Resistance: A Cognitive Load Perspective
Technology adoption has been studied through two perspectives – of acceptance and of resistance. While acceptance has been sufficiently researched, resistance is understudied resulting in a less comprehensive understanding of technology adoption. This study examines technology resistance within the framework of task-technology interaction. Task-technology interaction has been defined based on the level of task-technology integration which has led to the identification of two types of interaction: intrinsic and extrinsic tasks to the technology. Within this framework, the study adopts cognitive load perspective to argue that introduction of a technology generates cognitive load by challenging the status quo of required working memory to perform the task which results in the technology resistance. The study further argues that level and influence of cognitive load on resistance are higher in extrinsic tasks compared to intrinsic tasks to the technology. Keywords Technology resistance, technology adoption, intrinsic and extrinsic task, cognitive loa
DEVLOPMENT OF NOVEL FUNCTIONAL
Rare-earth doped thin films are drawing increasing attention for their use in amplifiers
and lasers and their suitability for integrated optics. The optical properties of rareearth
ions in solids have been investigated widely and are well understood. Er3+-doped
materials are attracting much attention because of the search for solid-state-laser
devices operating in the green region, optical devices for 3D displays and for
waveguides, which can work in telecommunication window.
In this dissertation we researched and fabricated different novel functional thin films
for photonics devices fabricated by RF-magnetron sputtering method as –
Erbium-doped SiO2
Tantalum pentoxide [Ta2O5]
Erbium-doped Tantalum pentoxide [Er-TaOx]
Erbium- Ytterbium co-doped Tantalum pentoxide
We fabricated different thin films using the RF-sputtering method and then annealed
them at various temperatures and time durations. PL peaks were observed at
wavelengths of 550 and 670 nm from the Er-TaOx films. We observed the strongest
intensities of the 550 and 670 nm peaks from the samples with 0.96 and 0.63 mol% Er
concentrations after annealing at 900° C for 20 min, respectively. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first report of light emission from Er-TaOx films fabricated by
the RF-sputtering method. These results demonstrate that Er-TaOx films fabricated by
RF sputtering can serve as high quality luminescent layers.
These can easily be combined with other passive devices to realize novel active
devices (e.g., a green-light-emitting photonic crystal), as only sputtering and
annealing processes are needed for fabrication.
Recent reports of optical waveguides fabricated on Ta2O5, higher nonlinear
susceptibility χ3 of Ta2O5, and light emission from thin films makes Ta2O5 a
promising material for novel photonic devices.学位記番号:工博甲39
Iteratively Improving Speech Recognition and Voice Conversion
Many existing works on voice conversion (VC) tasks use automatic speech
recognition (ASR) models for ensuring linguistic consistency between source and
converted samples. However, for the low-data resource domains, training a
high-quality ASR remains to be a challenging task. In this work, we propose a
novel iterative way of improving both the ASR and VC models. We first train an
ASR model which is used to ensure content preservation while training a VC
model. In the next iteration, the VC model is used as a data augmentation
method to further fine-tune the ASR model and generalize it to diverse
speakers. By iteratively leveraging the improved ASR model to train VC model
and vice-versa, we experimentally show improvement in both the models. Our
proposed framework outperforms the ASR and one-shot VC baseline models on
English singing and Hindi speech domains in subjective and objective
evaluations in low-data resource settings
Robust One-Shot Singing Voice Conversion
Recent progress in deep generative models has improved the quality of voice
conversion in the speech domain. However, high-quality singing voice conversion
(SVC) of unseen singers remains challenging due to the wider variety of musical
expressions in pitch, loudness, and pronunciation. Moreover, singing voices are
often recorded with reverb and accompaniment music, which make SVC even more
challenging. In this work, we present a robust one-shot SVC (ROSVC) that
performs any-to-any SVC robustly even on such distorted singing voices. To this
end, we first propose a one-shot SVC model based on generative adversarial
networks that generalizes to unseen singers via partial domain conditioning and
learns to accurately recover the target pitch via pitch distribution matching
and AdaIN-skip conditioning. We then propose a two-stage training method called
Robustify that train the one-shot SVC model in the first stage on clean data to
ensure high-quality conversion, and introduces enhancement modules to the
encoders of the model in the second stage to enhance the feature extraction
from distorted singing voices. To further improve the voice quality and pitch
reconstruction accuracy, we finally propose a hierarchical diffusion model for
singing voice neural vocoders. Experimental results show that the proposed
method outperforms state-of-the-art one-shot SVC baselines for both seen and
unseen singers and significantly improves the robustness against distortions
Analysis of a Compact Squeeze Film Damper with Magneto Rheological Fluid
Rotor systems play vital role in many modern day machinery such as turbines, pumps, aeroengines, gyroscopes, to name a few. Due to unavoidable unbalance in the rotor systems, there are lateral and torsional vibrations. Ignoring these effects may cause the system serious damages, which sometimes lead to catastrophic failures. Vibration level in rotor systems is acceptable within a range. Focus in this work is to minimize the vibration level to the acceptable range. One of the ways vibration level can be minimised is by means of providing damping. To accomplish this task in this work a new concept squeeze film damper is made by electro discharge machining which is compact in configuration, is filled with magneto-rheological (MR) fluid and tested out on one support of a Jeffcott rotor. This compact squeeze film damper (SFD) produces damping in a compact volume of the device compared to a conventional SFD. MR fluid is a smart fluid, for which apparent viscosity changes with the application of external magnetic field. This compact damper with MR fluid provides the variable damping force, controlled by an external magnetic field. In this work, proportional controller has been used for providing the control feedback. This MR damper is seen to reduce vibrations in steady state and transient input to the Jeffcott rotor. Parametric study for important design parameters has been done with the help of the simulation model. These controlled dampers can be used for reducing vibrations under different operating conditions and also crossing critical speed
ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMISTRY: MONITORING AND REMEDIATION OF POLLUTANTS IN AIR, WATER, AND SOIL
The purpose of this study is to determine pollutants present in air, water, and soil. Highlighting the impacts of these pollutants and ways to monitor and control these pollutants are other objectives of this research. Further, air pollution, water pollution, and soil pollution are illustrated as a part of environmental pollutio
- …