Local limit theory and large deviations for supercritical Branching processes

In this paper we study several aspects of the growth of a supercritical Galton-Watson process {Z_n:n\ge1}, and bring out some criticality phenomena determined by the Schroder constant. We develop the local limit theory of Z_n, that is, the behavior of P(Z_n=v_n) as v_n\nearrow \infty, and use this to study conditional large deviations of {Y_{Z_n}:n\ge1}, where Y_n satisfies an LDP, particularly of {Z_n^{-1}Z_{n+1}:n\ge1} conditioned on Z_n\ge v_n

A refinement of the coupling method in renewal theory

AbstractAn overjump Markov chain associated with a pair of random walks is used to obtain a sharp estimate of their coupling time; and thence of the convergence rate of a renewal process. Lattice valued and non-singular cases are treated

Notes on Dominating Points and Large Deviations

In these notes ( which supplement my SINAPE lecture) I will survey some early and some current results and applications of the dominating point construction in large deviation theory

Cesaro mean distribution of group automata starting from measures with summable decay

Consider a finite Abelian group (G,+), with |G|=p^r, p a prime number, and F: G^N -> G^N the cellular automaton given by {F(x)}_n= A x_n + B x_{n+1} for any n in N, where A and B are integers relatively primes to p. We prove that if P is a translation invariant probability measure on G^Z determining a chain with complete connections and summable decay of correlations, then for any w= (w_i:i<0) the Cesaro mean distribution of the time iterates of the automaton with initial distribution P_w --the law P conditioned to w on the left of the origin-- converges to the uniform product measure on G^N. The proof uses a regeneration representation of P

Comparative Analysis of the wav2vec 2.0 Feature Extractor

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems typically use handcrafted feature extraction pipelines. To avoid their inherent information loss and to achieve more consistent modeling from speech to transcribed text, neural raw waveform feature extractors (FEs) are an appealing approach. Also the wav2vec 2.0 model, which has recently gained large popularity, uses a convolutional FE which operates directly on the speech waveform. However, it is not yet studied extensively in the literature. In this work, we study its capability to replace the standard feature extraction methods in a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) ASR model and compare it to an alternative neural FE. We show that both are competitive with traditional FEs on the LibriSpeech benchmark and analyze the effect of the individual components. Furthermore, we analyze the learned filters and show that the most important information for the ASR system is obtained by a set of bandpass filters.Comment: Accepted at ITG 202

VideoPoetry: Integrating Video, Poetry and History in the Classroom

VideoPoetry integrates video and poetry to explore historical or geographic subjects. VideoPoetry is both a process and a product. This paper will use a short VideoPoem, Mary Hallock Foote at Stone House, to demonstrate how students of all educational levels can become engaged in creating VideoPoetry. Each VideoPoem offers students a cross-disciplinary experience that involves research, analysis of information, imaginative writing and video composition leading to a classroom presentation of the final product. As a process VideoPoetry requires the investigation of a subject, in this case, Mary Hallock Foote, artist and illustrator of the Western United States. Based on the historical research including her published reminiscences, one of the authors wrote a narrative poem imagining Foote\u27s reflections on her life at Stone House. The poem evoked mental images which we brought into the video through historical photographs, Foote\u27s woodblock drawings and present-day video footage of the landscape. Spoken by a woman narrator, the poem along with appropriate sound effects became the soundtrack and structuring element for the VideoPoem. Preceding the VideoPoem is an introduction which uses an objective voice to establish the historical context. As a product, this VideoPoem expresses an interpretation of the life and thoughts of an historical person and the place where she lived. The pictures both illustrate the poem and extend its evocative quality. As such Mary Hallock Foote at Stone House is an example of Imaginative Writing, an instructional strategy that encourages students to use their imaginations to create valid contexts in which historical figures lived and acted. For viewers, VideoPoetry conveys both historical information and a sense of what it was like to live in another era. VideoPoetry expands the possibilities of studying history by providing a multi-media and multi-sensory experience

VideoPoetry: Collaboration as Imaginative Method

Three Idaho professors (a poet, videographer, and historian) have been collaborating for eight years on a cross-disciplinary project called VideoPoetry, which integrates historical narration, narrative poetry, historical photographs, and videography into the video medium. To this point we\u27ve worked primarily on a specific program, Culture of Reclamation, which explores the culture of the early irrigated landscape communities in southern Idaho. In reflecting on our work-process, we’ve discovered that we’ve fundamentally changed as scholars as a result of our collaboration. This paper identifies the nature of our changes and documents instances of the ways in which we have been challenged to expand our ideas about other academic disciplines and our own. To work within the constraints of VideoPoetry, a new mode of expression, each of us has had to modify our traditional methods. For example, the poet altered a poem’s imagery to suit the sequence and duration of video images. Through the poet’s exploration of the inner lives of historical figures, the historian learned how the imagination can take us beyond what historical sources are willing to tell. Culture of Reclamation is grounded in the transformation of the arid American West, which occurred about one hundred years ago. By focusing our work on the irrigation of southern Idaho, we have come to a greater understanding of the region where we work and live. The video medium allows us to share these insights as public history—the dissemination of scholarship and research to audiences outside of the academy. VideoPoetry compels us to envision collaboratively a narrative about our regional foundations. Through video, we are able to present to a broad audience the often overlooked but transformational power of irrigation projects to turn the arid West into a land of bounty

VideoPoetry: Historical Photography in the Desert Garden

This paper presents an integration of poetry, history and photography through the video medium to convey a cultural history of the irrigated desert in southern Idaho, USA, around 1900. The VideoPoetry project is an investigation of cultural history that employs video and poetry to make it come alive. This social history is revealed through the lives of Clarence E. Bisbee and Jessie Robinson Bisbee of Twin Falls, Idaho. Their marriage focused on their photography business that involved documenting the transformation of the desert into farms, towns, and cities. This project brings out for public view a selection of historical photographs from a vast archive of images, most of which were produced by Clarence E. Bisbee over a thirty-year period. His remarkable technical competence and extraordinary breadth of subject matter reveal the texture of daily life as the settlers struggled with an inhospitable environment. In the video, a narrator provides historical contextualization, linking the photos together to create a cultural narrative. Following the narrative introduction, spoken poetry provides an imaginative, but historically based, personal perspective within this new society. Video- Poetry integrates these elements to make these photographs accessible and engaging to viewers a hundred years later, especially to young viewers who may have very few images of the early history of their state. Such dissemination of scholarship is especially important now. Budget cuts, emphasis on external funding rates, and charges of irrelevance have degraded the role of the arts and humanities on many campuses. Public scholarship and scholarship of engagement with communities—known as public history in the field of history—are essential to the preservation of humanities in higher education. VideoPoetry offers a dissemination method that engages audiences in non-traditional ways and highlights the complex, important social functions of humanities research

Developing a Culture of Reclamation: Integrating History, Poetry and Video

Culture of Reclamation (Armstrong, Lutze, & Woodworth-Ney, in progress) is a sequence of videopoems about Idaho, integrating poetry, historical photographs, music and videography in a video presentation, which also includes historical narrative. Three Idaho scholars in the fields of history, literacy education, and communication—the historian (Laura), poet (Jamie), and videographer (Peter)—collaborated on this cross-disciplinary project to reclaim a portion of the history of this state in a creative and engaging medium. Culture of Reclamation expresses a response to the culture of the early irrigated settlement communities along the Snake and Boise rivers. Between 1894 and 1920, a land rush to the arid western United States occurred as private investors and the federal government built irrigation projects to reclaim the sagebrush desert for farmland. Both men and women settlers contributed to the culture of the early communities, the men with a vision of an irrigated Utopia (Smythe, 1895) and the women with literary endeavors and civic participation (Woodworth-Ney, in progress-b). In responding to the landscape and to the creative work of the early settlers, such as Clarence E. Bisbee, Annie Pike Greenwood, Mary Hallock Foote, and numerous clubwomen, we have deepened our sense of belonging to this place. Our work is both professional and personal. Through this project, each of us has developed new ideas about working within our disciplines and discovered creative ways to engage the history and geography of southwestern Idaho. Our project represents just one example of the potential for university faculty from different field to collaborate on arts-based scholarly projects. According to Diamond and Mullen, Arts-based inquiry is art pursued for inquiry’s sake, not for art’s own sake (1999, p. 25). We also intend our project to serve as a prototype for cross-disciplinary projects in secondary schools. We hope to inform and inspire students in the future to explore the past with imagination as well as historical records