Rm2072

A descriptive narration of a project to create a 3-D computer animated film, Rm2072, set in an art museum. In this film, an old man walks into a room in a Chinese art department. The artworks have their own secret life, and they move whenever humans aren\u27t watching. The old man catches some ancient Chinese figurines moving, and he chooses to keep their secret. Includes original thesis proposal, original storyboard, and color stills

Parylene stiction

This paper presents a preliminary study into stiction between parylene C and substrate surfaces for biocompatible check-valve applications. During fabrication, parylene C is used as the structural material for the check-valve. The substrate surfaces studied include Au, Al, Si, parylene C, XeF_2 treated Si, and silicon dioxide. Stiction between different surfaces is created after sacrificial photoresist etching. Then, the stiction is measured using blister tests, and stiction mechanisms for different materials are investigated. The devices are released with different recipes to examine their effects. Finally, the results of the study reveal methods to control the cracking pressure of parylene check-valves

An Ensemble Classifier for Stock Trend Prediction Using Sentence-Level Chinese News Sentiment and Technical Indicators

In the financial market, predicting stock trends based on stock market news is a challenging task, and researchers are devoted to developing forecasting models. From the existing literature, the performance of the forecasting model is better when news sentiment and technical analysis are considered than when only one of them is used. However, analyzing news sentiment for trend forecasting is a difficult task, especially for Chinese news, because it is unstructured data and extracting the most important features is difficult. Moreover, positive or negative news does not always affect stock prices in a certain way. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an approach to build an ensemble classifier using sentiment in Chinese news at sentence level and technical indicators to predict stock trends. In the training stages, we first divide each news item into a set of sentences. TextRank and word2vec are then used to generate a predefined number of key sentences. The sentiment scores of these key sentences are computed using the given financial lexicon. The sentiment values of the key phrases, the three values of the technical indicators and the stock trend label are merged as a training instance. Based on the sentiment values of the key sets, the corpora are divided into positive and negative news datasets. The two datasets formed are then used to build positive and negative stock trend prediction models using the support vector machine. To increase the reliability of the prediction model, a third classifier is created using the Bollinger Bands. These three classifiers are combined to form an ensemble classifier. In the testing phase, a voting mechanism is used with the trained ensemble classifier to make the final decision based on the trading signals generated by the three classifiers. Finally, experiments were conducted on five years of news and stock prices of one company to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, and results show that the accuracy and P / L ratio of the proposed approach are 61% and 4.0821 are better than the existing approach

Rhythm-Flexible Voice Conversion without Parallel Data Using Cycle-GAN over Phoneme Posteriorgram Sequences

Speaking rate refers to the average number of phonemes within some unit time, while the rhythmic patterns refer to duration distributions for realizations of different phonemes within different phonetic structures. Both are key components of prosody in speech, which is different for different speakers. Models like cycle-consistent adversarial network (Cycle-GAN) and variational auto-encoder (VAE) have been successfully applied to voice conversion tasks without parallel data. However, due to the neural network architectures and feature vectors chosen for these approaches, the length of the predicted utterance has to be fixed to that of the input utterance, which limits the flexibility in mimicking the speaking rates and rhythmic patterns for the target speaker. On the other hand, sequence-to-sequence learning model was used to remove the above length constraint, but parallel training data are needed. In this paper, we propose an approach utilizing sequence-to-sequence model trained with unsupervised Cycle-GAN to perform the transformation between the phoneme posteriorgram sequences for different speakers. In this way, the length constraint mentioned above is removed to offer rhythm-flexible voice conversion without requiring parallel data. Preliminary evaluation on two datasets showed very encouraging results.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, Submitted to SLT 201