432 research outputs found
Who Spoke What? A Latent Variable Framework for the Joint Decoding of Multiple Speakers and their Keywords
In this paper, we present a latent variable (LV) framework to identify all
the speakers and their keywords given a multi-speaker mixture signal. We
introduce two separate LVs to denote active speakers and the keywords uttered.
The dependency of a spoken keyword on the speaker is modeled through a
conditional probability mass function. The distribution of the mixture signal
is expressed in terms of the LV mass functions and speaker-specific-keyword
models. The proposed framework admits stochastic models, representing the
probability density function of the observation vectors given that a particular
speaker uttered a specific keyword, as speaker-specific-keyword models. The LV
mass functions are estimated in a Maximum Likelihood framework using the
Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. The active speakers and their keywords
are detected as modes of the joint distribution of the two LVs. In mixture
signals, containing two speakers uttering the keywords simultaneously, the
proposed framework achieves an accuracy of 82% for detecting both the speakers
and their respective keywords, using Student's-t mixture models as
speaker-specific-keyword models.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures Submitted to : IEEE Signal Processing Letter
Are metabolic syndrome, obstructive sleep apnoea & syndrome Z sequential?-a hypothesis
Background & Objectives: The metabolic syndrome (MS) is a risk factor for development of cardiovascular disease and is closely associated with obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA). Co-occurrence of both OSA and MS is called syndrome Z. It has been hypothesized that the OSA may be a manifestation of MS. We collected data on polysomnography (PSG) and biochemical investigations on middle aged urban Indians during a community based study in South Delhi while studying prevalence of obstructive sleep apnoea and analysed to find out the ages at which the OSA, MS and syndrome Z exist in these subjects. Methods: A 2-stage, cross-sectional, population-based study in subjects of either gender between 30-65 yr of age in 4 different socio-economic zones of the South Delhi, India, was performed earlier (from April 2005 through June 2007). In-hospital, supervised PSG studies were performed and biochemical investigations for the MS using National Cholesterol Education Programmme Adult Treatment Panel (NCEP ATP) III criteria were carried out. In this communication, the data were further analysed to estimate the prevalences of MS alone, OSA alone and syndrome Z and average ages of 3 conditions. Results: Three hundred and fifty one subjects had satisfactory PSG studies. The MS alone was present in 105 [29.9%; (95% CI 25.1-34.7)] while OSA alone was present in 24 [6.8%; (95% CI 4.2-9.5)] subjects and the syndrome Z was present in 70 [19.9%; (95% CI 15.8-24.1)] subjects. Median ages of normal subjects, and subjects with MS, OSA and syndrome Z were 40, 43, 43 and 47 yr respectively. Minimum ages of normal subjects, and subjects with MS, OSA and syndrome Z were 30, 30, 32 and 32 yr respectively. Interpretation & Conclusions: When body mass index (BMI) was normal, the increasing median ages of these conditions indicated that the MS may be the first event followed by OSA and eventually syndrome Z develops. With BMI >25 or >30 no clear-cut difference was noted, indicating that the BMI itself could have an independent role in MS, OSA and syndrome Z
Stipe anatomical studies on selected pteridophytes of South India
Present study is based on the stipe anatomy of 13 selected species of pteridophytes of South India. Detailed description, key to the taxa based on stipe anatomy, photographs and descriptions are provided
Robust parameters for automatic segmentation of speech
Automatic segmentation of speech ir on important problem that is useful in speed recognition, synthesis and coding. We explore in this paper: the robust parameter set, weightingfunction and distance measure for reliable segmentation of noisy speech. It is found that the MFCC parometers, successful in speech recognition. holds the best promise far robust segmentation also. We also explored a variery of symmetric and asymmetric weighting lifter, from which it is found that a symmetric lifter of the form , , for MFCC dimension L, is most effective. With regard to distance measure. the direct norm is found adequate
Geometry Meets Vectors: Approximation Algorithms for Multidimensional Packing
We study the generalized multidimensional bin packing problem (GVBP) that
generalizes both geometric packing and vector packing. Here, we are given
rectangular items where the item has width , height
, and nonnegative weights . Our
goal is to get an axis-parallel non-overlapping packing of the items into
square bins so that for all , the sum of the
weight of items in each bin is at most 1. This is a natural problem arising in
logistics, resource allocation, and scheduling. Despite being well studied in
practice, surprisingly, approximation algorithms for this problem have rarely
been explored.
We first obtain two simple algorithms for GVBP having asymptotic
approximation ratios and . We then
extend the Round-and-Approx (R&A) framework [Bansal-Khan, SODA'14] to wider
classes of algorithms, and show how it can be adapted to GVBP. Using more
sophisticated techniques, we obtain better approximation algorithms for GVBP,
and we get further improvement by combining them with the R&A framework. This
gives us an asymptotic approximation ratio of
for GVBP, which improves to for the special case of .
We obtain further improvement when the items are allowed to be rotated. We also
present algorithms for a generalization of GVBP where the items are high
dimensional cuboids
DSPatch: Dual Spatial Pattern Prefetcher
High main memory latency continues to limit performance of modern
high-performance out-of-order cores. While DRAM latency has remained nearly the
same over many generations, DRAM bandwidth has grown significantly due to
higher frequencies, newer architectures (DDR4, LPDDR4, GDDR5) and 3D-stacked
memory packaging (HBM). Current state-of-the-art prefetchers do not do well in
extracting higher performance when higher DRAM bandwidth is available.
Prefetchers need the ability to dynamically adapt to available bandwidth,
boosting prefetch count and prefetch coverage when headroom exists and
throttling down to achieve high accuracy when the bandwidth utilization is
close to peak. To this end, we present the Dual Spatial Pattern Prefetcher
(DSPatch) that can be used as a standalone prefetcher or as a lightweight
adjunct spatial prefetcher to the state-of-the-art delta-based Signature
Pattern Prefetcher (SPP). DSPatch builds on a novel and intuitive use of
modulated spatial bit-patterns. The key idea is to: (1) represent program
accesses on a physical page as a bit-pattern anchored to the first "trigger"
access, (2) learn two spatial access bit-patterns: one biased towards coverage
and another biased towards accuracy, and (3) select one bit-pattern at run-time
based on the DRAM bandwidth utilization to generate prefetches. Across a
diverse set of workloads, using only 3.6KB of storage, DSPatch improves
performance over an aggressive baseline with a PC-based stride prefetcher at
the L1 cache and the SPP prefetcher at the L2 cache by 6% (9% in
memory-intensive workloads and up to 26%). Moreover, the performance of
DSPatch+SPP scales with increasing DRAM bandwidth, growing from 6% over SPP to
10% when DRAM bandwidth is doubled.Comment: This work is to appear in MICRO 201
Guaranteeing Envy-Freeness under Generalized Assignment Constraints
We study fair division of goods under the broad class of generalized
assignment constraints. In this constraint framework, the sizes and values of
the goods are agent-specific, and one needs to allocate the goods among the
agents fairly while further ensuring that each agent receives a bundle of total
size at most the corresponding budget of the agent. Since, in such a constraint
setting, it may not always be feasible to partition all the goods among the
agents, we conform -- as in recent works -- to the construct of charity to
designate the set of unassigned goods. For this allocation framework, we obtain
existential and computational guarantees for envy-free (appropriately defined)
allocation of divisible and indivisible goods, respectively, among agents with
individual, additive valuations for the goods.
We deem allocations to be fair by evaluating envy only with respect to
feasible subsets. In particular, an allocation is said to be feasibly envy-free
(FEF) iff each agent prefers its bundle over every (budget) feasible subset
within any other agent's bundle (and within the charity). The current work
establishes that, for divisible goods, FEF allocations are guaranteed to exist
and can be computed efficiently under generalized assignment constraints.
In the context of indivisible goods, FEF allocations do not necessarily
exist, and hence, we consider the fairness notion of feasible envy-freeness up
to any good (FEFx). We show that, under generalized assignment constraints, an
FEFx allocation of indivisible goods always exists. In fact, our FEFx result
resolves open problems posed in prior works. Further, for indivisible goods and
under generalized assignment constraints, we provide a pseudo-polynomial time
algorithm for computing FEFx allocations, and a fully polynomial-time
approximation scheme (FPTAS) for computing approximate FEFx allocations.Comment: 29 page
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