Evaluating the Usability of Automatically Generated Captions for People who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

The accuracy of Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) technology has improved, but it is still imperfect in many settings. Researchers who evaluate ASR performance often focus on improving the Word Error Rate (WER) metric, but WER has been found to have little correlation with human-subject performance on many applications. We propose a new captioning-focused evaluation metric that better predicts the impact of ASR recognition errors on the usability of automatically generated captions for people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing (DHH). Through a user study with 30 DHH users, we compared our new metric with the traditional WER metric on a caption usability evaluation task. In a side-by-side comparison of pairs of ASR text output (with identical WER), the texts preferred by our new metric were preferred by DHH participants. Further, our metric had significantly higher correlation with DHH participants' subjective scores on the usability of a caption, as compared to the correlation between WER metric and participant subjective scores. This new metric could be used to select ASR systems for captioning applications, and it may be a better metric for ASR researchers to consider when optimizing ASR systems.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, published in ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17

Four quadrant 120 A, 10 V power converters for LHC

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) particle accelerator makes extensive use of true bipolar power converters, with a high precision regulated output current requirement. A special design and topology is required to allow high performance within the converter operating area, including quadrant transition. This paper presents the ±120A ±10V power converter, well represented in the LHC power converters (300 units). The design is adapted for a wide range of magnet loads [from 10mH to 4 Henry] (time constant load [0.1s..1050s]) with stringent EMC requirements. A quick-connect system was applied to the converter modules allowing easy installation and maintenance operations. Discussion of 4 quadrant control and practical results are presented

Loss of anti-tumour immunogenicity of a somatic cell hybrid line with increasing subculture.

Good immunoprotection was afforded by A9/SEWA somatic hybrid cells in the C3H mouse/C3H Py tumour system, confirming results previously obtained in the A.SW mouse/SEWA tumour system. However, in this study the immunogenicity decreased with increasing serial subculture of the hybrid line and concomitant chromosome loss

Beam test results of 3D fine-grained scintillator detector prototype for a T2K ND280 neutrino active target

An upgrade of the long baseline neutrino experiment T2K near detector ND280 is currently being developed with the goal to reduce systematic uncertainties in the prediction of number of events at the far detector Super-Kamiokande. The upgrade program includes the design and construction of a new highly granular fully active scintillator detector with 3D WLS fiber readout as a neutrino target. The detector of about $200\times 180\times 60~cm^3$ in size and a mass of $\sim$2.2~tons will be assembled from about $2\times10^6$ plastic scintillator cubes of $1\times1\times1~cm^3$. Each cube is read out by three orthogonal Kuraray Y11 Wave Length Shifting (WLS) fibers threaded through the detector. A detector prototype made of 125 cubes was assembled and tested in a charged particle test beam at CERN in the fall of 2017. This paper presents the results obtained on the light yield and timing as well as on the optical cross-talk between the cubes.Comment: 5 pages, 8 figure

Local tetragonal distortion in La_{0.7}Sr_{0.3}MnO_3 strained thin films probed by x-ray absorption spectroscopy

We report on an angular resolved X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy study of $La_{0.7}Sr_{0.3}MnO_{3}$ thin films epitaxially grown by pulsed laser deposition on slightly mismatched substrates which induce tensile or compressive strains. XANES spectra give evidence of tetragonal distortion within the $MnO_{6}$ octahedra, with opposite directions for tensile and compressive strains. Quantitative analysis has been done and a model of tetragonal distortion reflecting the strain has been established. EXAFS data collected in plane for tensile substrate confirm the change in the $Mn-O$ average bond distance and the increase of $Mn-Mn$ length matching with the enlargement of the cell parameter. From these results we conclude that there is no significant change in the $Mn-O-Mn$ angle. Our observations conflict with the scenarios which this angle is the main driving parameter in the sensitivity of manganite films properties to external strains and suggest that the distortion within the octahedra plays a key role in the modification of the transport and magnetic properties.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Local syzygies of multiplier ideals

In recent years, multiplier ideals have found many applications in local and global algebraic geometry. Because of their importance, there has been some interest in the question of which ideals on a smooth complex variety can be realized as multiplier ideals. Other than integral closure no local obstructions have been known up to now, and in dimension two it was established by Favre-Jonsson and Lipman-Watanabe that any integrally closed ideal is locally a multiplier ideal. We prove the somewhat unexpected result that multiplier ideals in fact satisfy some rather strong algebraic properties involving higher syzygies. It follows that in dimensions three and higher, multiplier ideals are very special among all integrally closed ideals.Comment: 8 page

Application of large area SiPMs for the readout of a plastic scintillator based timing detector

In this study an array of eight 6 mm x 6 mm area SiPMs was coupled to the end of a long plastic scintillator counter which was exposed to a 2.5 GeV/c muon beam at the CERN PS. Timing characteristics of bars with dimensions 150 cm x 6 cm x 1 cm and 120 cm x 11 cm x 2.5 cm have been studied. An 8-channel SiPM anode readout ASIC (MUSIC R1) based on a novel low input impedance current conveyor has been used to read out and amplify SiPMs independently and sum the signals at the end. Prospects for applications in large-scale particle physics detectors with timing resolution below 100 ps are provided in light of the results