Reducing Costs in Human Assisted Speech Transcription

The only official documentation of the lawmaking process at the California Legislature is unedited video recordings of committee hearings, bill texts, votes and analyses. While the bills resulting from these hearings are clear, using video recordings to understand how a bill was created is far too laborious for the average citizen. To increase public transparency, a service that provides easier access to the bill creation process was needed. In response to this need, the Digital Democracy initiative was established at Cal Poly by the Honorable Sam Blakeslee, former California State Senator and founder of the Institute for Advanced Technology and Public Policy. The Digital Democracy initiative seeks to create a web platform that organizes, generates, and indexes large amounts of information about the legislative process. To accomplish this, automatic speech recognition is performed on the video recordings of committee hearings and the resulting text is manually improved and annotated with a web application called the Transcription Tool . Unfortunately, this process is costly, labor intensive, and prohibits the scaling and long term viability of the platform. Early efforts to reduce transcription costs involved the development of improved transcription tool UI and systems for speaker diarization and text correction. This thesis evaluates the effectiveness of these improvements on the human assisted transcription process employed by the Digital Democracy initiative. To facilitate this evaluation, a pipeline for automatic transcription improvement was developed, the improvements were incorporated into the transcription process, and a controlled experiment was run to measure the effects of these improvements. The results of the experiment demonstrate that the improvements reduced transcription editing costs by 16.89% while maintaining similar transcription quality

\u3ci\u3e Expression of HCMV IE1 in the U87MG Cell Line Augments Resistance to Temozolomide \u3c/i\u3e

INTRODUCTION: Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) DNA and protein are found in gliomas but not in normal brain or other primary brain tumors. The role of HCMV infection in glioma biology is unclear. While it is unlikely that HCMV infection causes glioma, viral proteins might impart a proliferative and antiapoptotic phenotype that confers a survival advantage. Does this oncomodulation translate into a clinically relevant effect in glioma cells? To answer this question, we compared the response of the U87IE1 and U87MG malignant glioma cell lines to temozolomide. U87IE1 cells are U87MG cells that have been genetically engineered to produce HCMV IE1 protein. (The U87IE1 cell line is a generous gift from Charles Cobbs.) METHODS: Approximately 5,000 U87IE1 and U87MG cells in normal culture media were placed into wells of a 96-well plate. After 24 hours, the media was replaced with culture media containing temozolomide in increasing concentration. After 48 hours, cell viability was assessed using a luminescent assay. A dose-response curve for each cell line was generated using statistical software. The concentration of temozolomide resulting in 50% of cell death (the EC50 value) for each cell line was determined. Results: The EC50 for temozolomide in the U87MG cell line is 565.6 micromolar, while in the U87IE1 cell line it is 1319 micromolar. This difference is statistically significant (p \u3c 0.0001) and indicates that the U87IE1 cells are more resistant to temozlomide than are the U87MG cells. CONCLUSION: HCMV IE1 expression by U87MG cells enhances their proliferation and survival. In this study, we show that this oncomodulatory effect is clinically relevant: the U87IE1 cell line is more resistant than the U87MG cell line to temozolomide. This finding suggests that HCMV is a viable treatment target for patients with glioma