Ecological drivers of helminth infection patterns in the Virunga Massif mountain gorilla population

The Virunga Massif mountain gorilla population has been periodically monitored since the early 1970s, with gradually increasing effort. The population declined drastically in the 1970s, but the numbers stabilized in the 1980s. Since then, the population has been steadily increasing within their limited habitat fragment that is surrounded by a dense human population. We examined fecal samples collected during the Virunga 2015–2016 surveys in monitored and unmonitored gorilla groups and quantified strongylid and tapeworm infections using egg counts per gram to determine environmental and host factors that shape these helminth infections. We showed that higher strongylid infections were present in gorilla groups with smaller size of the 500-m buffered minimum-convex polygon (MCP) of detected nest sites per gorilla group, but in higher gorilla densities and inhabiting vegetation types occurring at higher elevations with higher precipitation and lower temperatures. On the contrary, the impact of monitoring (habituation) was minor, detected in tapeworms and only when in the interaction with environmental variables and MCP area. Our results suggest that the Virunga mountain gorilla population may be partially regulated by strongylid nematodes at higher gorilla densities. New health challenges are probably emerging among mountain gorillas because of the success of conservation efforts, as manifested by significant increases in gorilla numbers in recent decades, but few possibilities for the population expansion due to limited amounts of habitat

Český senior COMPANION: získávání dat metodou Wizard of Oz a nahrávání a anotace korpusu pro expresivní syntézu řeči

Tato práce popisuje proces získávání dat pro potřeby projektu COMPANIONS, jehož cílem je vytvoření dialogových systémů, které budou fungovat jako virtuální společníci pro lidské uživatele. Jeden z těchto dialogových systémů, který je vyvíjen i pro český jazyk, je navržen jako společník pro starší osoby, jehož úkolem bude povídat si o jejich fotografiích. Článek detailně popisuje nahrávání přirozených rozhovorů mezi staršími osobami a počítačem za použití metody Wizard of Oz. Dále je v článku popsáno využití těchto nahraných rozhovorů během nahrávání expresivního korpusu, který bude využit v českém expresivním TTS systému.This paper presents part of the data collection efforts undergone within the projectCOMPANIONS whose aim is to develop a set of dialogue systems that will be ableto act as an artificial "companions"' for human users. One of these systems, being developed in Czech language, is designed to be a partner of elderly peoplewhich will be able to talk with them about the photographs that capture mostlytheir family memories. The paper describes in detail the collection of natural dialogues using the Wizard of Oz scenario and also the re-use of thecollected data for the creation of the expressive speech corpus that is plannedfor the development of the limited-domain Czech expressive TTS system

Uncertainty of Phone Voicing and its Impact on Speech Synthesis

While unit selection speech synthesis is not at the centre of research nowadays, it shows its strengths in deployments where fast fixes and tuning possibilities are required. The key part of this method is target and concatenation costs, usually consisting of features manually designed. When there is a flaw in a feature design, the selection may behave in an unexpected way, not necessarily causing a bad quality speech output. One of such features in our systems was the requirement on the match between expected and real units voicing. Due to the flexibility of the method, we were able to narrow the behaviour of the selection algorithm without worsening the quality of synthesised speech

Introduction

ACL HLT 2011 - 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of Student Sessioniii-