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