Personalising speech-to-speech translation in the EMIME project

In the EMIME project we have studied unsupervised cross-lingual speaker adaptation. We have employed an HMM statistical framework for both speech recognition and synthesis which provides transformation mechanisms to adapt the synthesized voice in TTS (text-to-speech) using the recognized voice in ASR (automatic speech recognition). An important application for this research is personalised speech-to-speech translation that will use the voice of the speaker in the input language to utter the translated sentences in the output language. In mobile environments this enhances the users' interaction across language barriers by making the output speech sound more like the original speaker's way of speaking, even if she or he could not speak the output language. © 2010 Association for Computational Linguistics

Mg-Doped CuFeO 2

Mg-doped CuFeO2 delafossite is reported to be photoelectrochemically active for CO2 reduction. The material was prepared via conventional solid-state methods, and subsequently assembled into an electrode as a pressed pellet. Addition of a Mg2+ dopant is found to substantially improve the conductivity of the material, with 0.05% Mg-doped CuFeO2 electrodes displaying photocathodic currents under visible irradiation. Photocurrent is found to onset at irradiation wavelengths of ∼800 nm with the incident photon-to-current efficiency reaching a value of 14% at 340 nm using an applied electrode potential of −0.4 V vs SCE. Photoelectrodes were determined to have a −1.1 V vs SCE conduction band edge and were found capable of the reduction of CO2 to formate at 400 mV of underpotential. The conversion efficiency is maximized at −0.9 V vs SCE, with H2 production contributing as a considerable side reaction. These results highlight the potential to produce Mg-doped p-type metal oxide photocathodes with a band structure tuned to optimize CO2 reduction