Digital phase-measuring interferometry and characterization of optical waveguides

Thesis--University of Tsukuba, D.Eng.(A), no. 888, 1991. 3. 2

Data encoding efficiency in pixel detector readout with charge information

The average minimum number of bits needed for lossless readout of a pixel detector is calculated, in the regime of interest for particle physics where only a small fraction of pixels have a non-zero value per frame. This permits a systematic comparison of the readout efficiency of different encoding imple- mentations. The calculation is compared to the number of bits used by the FE-I4 pixel readout chip of the ATLAS experiment.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

The Royalflush System for VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge 2022

In this technical report, we describe the Royalflush submissions for the VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge 2022 (VoxSRC-22). Our submissions contain track 1, which is for supervised speaker verification and track 3, which is for semi-supervised speaker verification. For track 1, we develop a powerful U-Net-based speaker embedding extractor with a symmetric architecture. The proposed system achieves 2.06% in EER and 0.1293 in MinDCF on the validation set. Compared with the state-of-the-art ECAPA-TDNN, it obtains a relative improvement of 20.7% in EER and 22.70% in MinDCF. For track 3, we employ the joint training of source domain supervision and target domain self-supervision to get a speaker embedding extractor. The subsequent clustering process can obtain target domain pseudo-speaker labels. We adapt the speaker embedding extractor using all source and target domain data in a supervised manner, where it can fully leverage both domain information. Moreover, clustering and supervised domain adaptation can be repeated until the performance converges on the validation set. Our final submission is a fusion of 10 models and achieves 7.75% EER and 0.3517 MinDCF on the validation set

Expression of monocyte chemotactic protein-3 mRNA in rat vascular smooth muscle cells and in carotid artery after balloon angioplasty

AbstractMonocyte chemotactic protein-3 (MCP-3) is a CC chemokine that functions in chemoattraction and activation of monocytes, T lymphocytes, eosinophils, basophils, natural killer cells and dendritic cells. The activation of the target cells by MCP-3 is via specific chemokine receptors CCR2 and CCR3, of which CCR2 is shared with MCP-1. MCP-1 and CCR2 have been implicated in vascular diseases including atherosclerosis and restenosis, that are known to be involved in inflammation (accumulation of T lymphocytes and monocytes) and smooth muscle cell (SMC) activation (proliferation, migration and matrix deposition). To investigate a potential role of MCP-3 in vascular injury, the present work examined its mRNA expression in rat aortic SMCs stimulated with various inflammatory stimuli including LPS, TNF-α, IL-1β, IFN-γ and TGF-β. A time- and concentration-dependant induction of MCP-3 mRNA in SMCs was observed by means of Northern analysis. A strikingly similar expression profile was observed for MCP-3 and MCP-1 mRNA in SMCs. Furthermore, MCP-3 mRNA expression was induced in rat carotid artery after balloon angioplasty. A significant induction in MCP-3 mRNA was observed in the carotid artery at 6 h (41-fold increase over control, P<0.001), 1 day (13-fold increase, P<0.001) and 3 days (6-fold increase, P<0.01) after balloon angioplasty as quantitated by reverse transcription and polymerase chain reaction. These data provide evidence for the cytokine-induced expression of MCP-3 in SMCs and in carotid artery after balloon angioplasty, suggesting a potential role of MCP-3 in the pathogenesis of restenosis and atherosclerosis

LE-SSL-MOS: Self-Supervised Learning MOS Prediction with Listener Enhancement

Recently, researchers have shown an increasing interest in automatically predicting the subjective evaluation for speech synthesis systems. This prediction is a challenging task, especially on the out-of-domain test set. In this paper, we proposed a novel fusion model for MOS prediction that combines supervised and unsupervised approaches. In the supervised aspect, we developed an SSL-based predictor called LE-SSL-MOS. The LE-SSL-MOS utilizes pre-trained self-supervised learning models and further improves prediction accuracy by utilizing the opinion scores of each utterance in the listener enhancement branch. In the unsupervised aspect, two steps are contained: we fine-tuned the unit language model (ULM) using highly intelligible domain data to improve the correlation of an unsupervised metric - SpeechLMScore. Another is that we utilized ASR confidence as a new metric with the help of ensemble learning. To our knowledge, this is the first architecture that fuses supervised and unsupervised methods for MOS prediction. With these approaches, our experimental results on the VoiceMOS Challenge 2023 show that LE-SSL-MOS performs better than the baseline. Our fusion system achieved an absolute improvement of 13% over LE-SSL-MOS on the noisy and enhanced speech track. Our system ranked 1st and 2nd, respectively, in the French speech synthesis track and the challenge's noisy and enhanced speech track.Comment: accepted in IEEE-ASRU202

Characterization of human cysteine-rich protein, a member of the lim/double zinc-finger family, as a primary response gene

Human cysteine-rich protein (hCRP) is a highly conserved and widely distributed 23.4 kDa zinc finger protein. The unusual zinc fingers of hCRP constitute a highly characteristic 52 amino acid motif referred to as the LIM/double zinc finger motif, (CXXC-X\sb{17-19}HXXC)-XX-(CXXC-X\sb{16-20}-CXXC/D/H), shared with a number of proteins that are involved in transcriptional regulation and/or developmental control: mouse/rat cysteine-rich intestinal protein (CRIP), rhombotin, rIsl-1, lin-11, mec-3, and Xlim-1. The characterization of crp as a primary response gene to serum stimulation in quiescent mouse and human cells suggests that crp may play a regulatory role in the cell cycle. The crp mRNA induction profile is remarkably parallel to that of c-myc in both human and mouse cell lines upon serum stimulation. The 5\sp\prime-flanking sequence of the hcrp gene that shares several cis-regulatory elements with c-myc and other immediate early genes, and the parallel increases of the CRP protein with RNA levels upon serum stimulation further support the functional role of crp in the G\sb0 to S phase transition. The failure of hcrp promoter function assays to define a serum response element in the 5\sp\prime-flanking region may suggest a complicated regulatory mechanism for c-myc type immediate early genes. The cloning and characterization of the 23.2 kb hcrp gene, and the assignment of hcrp to human chromosome 1q24-1q32 provide valuable information for the future study of the biological function of this gene. Taking advantage of these primary studies, we found that crp may be involved in the oncogenesis of B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in our initial survey of B-cell ALL patients with chromosomal rearrangements in 1q21-1q32