Optical Fiber Sensor boosts aircraft engine monitoring

A reflective, intensity-modulated optical fiber sensor enables monitoring of tip clearance and tip timing in aircraft engines at low cost and high resolution.This work has been sponsored by the institutions Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under project TEC2012-37983-C03; Gobierno Vasco/Eusko Jaurlaritza under projects IT664-13, S-PE13CA004, SPE13UN151, and S-PE12CA001; and by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) through program UFI11/16.Publicatio

Comparison of ALBAYZIN query-by-example spoken term detection 2012 and 2014 evaluations

Query-by-example spoken term detection (QbE STD) aims at retrieving data from a speech repository given an acoustic query containing the term of interest as input. Nowadays, it is receiving much interest due to the large volume of multimedia information. This paper presents the systems submitted to the ALBAYZIN QbE STD 2014 evaluation held as a part of the ALBAYZIN 2014 Evaluation campaign within the context of the IberSPEECH 2014 conference. This is the second QbE STD evaluation in Spanish, which allows us to evaluate the progress in this technology for this language. The evaluation consists in retrieving the speech files that contain the input queries, indicating the start and end times where the input queries were found, along with a score value that reflects the confidence given to the detection of the query. Evaluation is conducted on a Spanish spontaneous speech database containing a set of talks from workshops, which amount to about 7 h of speech. We present the database, the evaluation metric, the systems submitted to the evaluation, the results, and compare this second evaluation with the first ALBAYZIN QbE STD evaluation held in 2012. Four different research groups took part in the evaluations held in 2012 and 2014. In 2014, new multi-word and foreign queries were added to the single-word and in-language queries used in 2012. Systems submitted to the second evaluation are hybrid systems which integrate letter transcription- and template matching-based systems. Despite the significant improvement obtained by the systems submitted to this second evaluation compared to those of the first evaluation, results still show the difficulty of this task and indicate that there is still room for improvement.This research was funded by the Spanish Government ('SpeechTech4All Project' TEC2012 38939 C03 01 and 'CMC-V2 Project' TEC2012 37585 C02 01), the Galician Government through the research contract GRC2014/024 (Modalidade: Grupos de Referencia Competitiva 2014) and 'AtlantTIC Project' CN2012/160, and also by the Spanish Government and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under project TACTICA

Sustainability of continuous improvement systems in industry: Survey of BAC and Navarre

Este artículo analiza el grado de sostenibilidad de las empresas en la gestión de la mejora continua y los factores que apoyan la sostenibilidad en el tiempo, a través de una encuesta enviada a 350 empresas de la Comunidad Autónoma Vasca y Navarra durante el mes de junio de 2009. El estudio presenta datos sobre la evolución de los sistemas de mejora en los últimos años, y la implantación de las distintas metodologías utilizadas. A continuación realiza un análisis de los factores que las empresas asocian con el abandono de los sistemas de mejora. Dado que los sistemas de mejora se basan en la participación de las personas, el estudio caracteriza cómo es dicha participación. Finalmente se analizan los elementos que las empresas utilizan en sus sistemas de mejora, y en qué grado se han introducido indicadores y objetivos en la gestión de la mejora. Como conclusiones se apuntan las siguientes claves para la mejora sostenible: una mayor implicación del personal directo en el sistema de mejora continua, la integración del sistema de mejora continua en la organización y el establecimiento de indicadores asociados al sistema.This article will examine the level of sustainability for companies in Continuous Improvement Management and the factors which are supporting sustainability during time, through a survey to 350 companies of Basque Autonomous Community and Navarra in June of 2009. The study presents some data about the development of the improvement systems. Then, factors that companies have related to the abandonment of improvement systems are analysed. Since improvement systems are based on workers’ participation, this study characterizes this participation. Finally, the elements which have been used in the improvement systems by the companies are analyzed, and how objectives and indicators are used in their management system. To conclude, the following key issues are emphasized: a higher involvement of workforce in improvement systems, the integration of improvement system in the management system and the establishment of associated indicators to the system.Peer Reviewe

Ethical challenges in the development of virtual assistants powered by large language models

Virtual assistants (VAs) have gained widespread popularity across a wide range of applications, and the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, has opened up new possibilities for developing even more sophisticated VAs. However, this integration poses new ethical issues and challenges that must be carefully considered, particularly as these systems are increasingly used in public services: transfer of personal data, decision-making transparency, potential biases, and privacy risks. This paper, an extension of the work presented at IberSPEECH 2022, analyzes the current regulatory framework for AI-based VAs in Europe and delves into ethical issues in depth, examining potential benefits and drawbacks of integrating LLMs with VAs. Based on the analysis, this paper argues that the development and use of VAs powered by LLMs should be guided by a set of ethical principles that prioritize transparency, fairness, and harm prevention. The paper presents specific guidelines for the ethical use and development of this technology, including recommendations for data privacy, bias mitigation, and user control. By implementing these guidelines, the potential benefits of VAs powered by LLMs can be fully realized while minimizing the risks of harm and ensuring that ethical considerations are at the forefront of the development process.Agencia Gallega de Innovación (GAIN)Xunta de Galicia | Ref. ED431B 2021/2

Enhanced CORILGA: Introducing the Automatic Phonetic Alignment Tool for Continuous Speech

The Corpus Oral Informatizado da Lingua Galega (CORILGA) project aims at building a corpus of oral language for Galician, primarily designed to study the linguistic variation and change. This project is currently under development and it is periodically enriched with new contributions. The long-term goal is that all the speech recordings will be enriched with phonetic, syllabic, morphosyntactic, lexical and sentence ELAN-complaint annotations. A way to speed up the process of annotation is to use automatic speech-recognition-based tools tailored to the application. Therefore, CORILGA repository has been enhanced with an automatic alignment tool, available to the administrator of the repository, that aligns speech with an orthographic transcription. In the event that no transcription, or just a partial one, were available, a speech recognizer for Galician is used to generate word and phonetic segmentations. These recognized outputs may contain errors that will have to be manually corrected by the administrator. For assisting this task, the tool also provides an ELAN tier with the confidence measure of each recognized word. In this paper, after the description of the main facts of the CORILGA corpus, the speech alignment and recognition tools are described. Both have been developed using the Kaldi toolki

Sensitive parameter analysis for solar irradiance short-term forecasting: application to LoRa-based monitoring technology

Due to the relevant penetration of solar PV power plants, an accurate power generation forecasting of these installations is crucial to provide both reliability and stability of current grids. At the same time, PV monitoring requirements are more and more demanded by different agents to provide reliable information regarding performances, efficiencies, and possible predictive maintenance tasks. Under this framework, this paper proposes a methodology to evaluate different LoRa-based PV monitoring architectures and node layouts in terms of short-term solar power generation forecasting. A random forest model is proposed as forecasting method, simplifying the forecasting problem especially when the time series exhibits heteroscedasticity, nonstationarity, and multiple seasonal cycles. This approach provides a sensitive analysis of LoRa parameters in terms of node layout, loss of data, spreading factor and short time intervals to evaluate their influence on PV forecasting accuracy. A case example located in the southeast of Spain is included in the paper to evaluate the proposed analysis. This methodology is applicable to other locations, as well as different LoRa configurations, parameters, and networks structures; providing detailed analysis regarding PV monitoring performances and short-term PV generation forecasting discrepancies.This research was funded by the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional/Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación–Agencia Estatal de Investigación (FEDER/MICINN-AEI), project RTI2018–099139–B–C21

One photon and two photon spectroscopy in polymer optical fibres doped with conjugated polymer

The proceeding at: 22nd International Conference on Plastic Optical Fibers (POF 2013), took place in 2013 September,11-13, in Armação dos Buzios, Rio de Janeiro, (Brasil). The event Web site at: http://www.pof2013.org.br/ .In this work, we have compared the characteristics of the spectral emission of plastic optical fibers (POFs) doped with the conjugated polymer poly(9,9 dioctylfluorene)-alt-benzothiadiazole (F8BT), under oneand two-photon excitation. Measurements include evolutions of the fluorescence spectra with excitation wavelength and propagation distance, together with an analysis of the emission photostability.This work has been sponsored by the institutions Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under projects TEC2009-147-C03-01, TEC2012-37983-C03-01, Gobierno Vasco/Eusko Jaurlaritza under projects AIRHEM-II, S-PE12CA001, IT664-13, and by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) through program UFI11/16.Publicad

Study on the impact of the training corpus of the language model on the performance of a speech recognizer

Dentro del reconocimiento automático del habla, los modelos de lenguaje estadísticos basados en la probabilidad de secuencia de palabras (n-gramas) suponen uno de los dos pilares sobre los que se basa su correcto funcionamiento. En este trabajo se expone el impacto que tienen sobre las prestaciones de reconocimiento a medida que estos modelos se mejoran con más texto de mejor calidad, cuando estos se ajustan a la aplicación final del sistema, y por lo tanto, cuando se reducen el número de palabras fuera de vocabulario (Out Of Vocabulary - OOV). El reconocedor con los distintos modelos de lenguaje ha sido aplicado sobre cortes de audio correspondientes a tres marcos experimentales: oralidad formal, habla en noticiarios, y TED talks en gallego. Los resultados obtenidos muestran claramente una mejora sobre los marcos experimentales propuestos.Within the automatic speech recognition, statistical language models based on the probability of word sequences (n-grams) represent one of the two pillars on which its correct functioning is based. In this paper, the impact they have on the recognition result is exposed as these models are improved with more text of better quality, when these are adjusted to the final application of the system, and therefore, when the number out of vocabulary (OOV) words is reduced. The recognizer with the different language models has been applied to audio cuts corresponding to three experimental frames: formal orality, talk on newscasts, and TED talks in Galician. The results obtained clearly show an improvement over the experimental frameworks proposed.El trabajo realizado está enmarcado en el proyecto del Plan Nacional TraceThem TEC2015-65345-P y en la red gallega TecAnDaLi ED431D 2016/011 financiada por la Xunta de Galicia. Asimismo se beneficia de las ayudas de la Xunta de Galicia de Grupos de Referencia Competitiva GRC2014/024 y Agrupación Estratéxica Consolidada de Galicia acreditación 2016-2019 y a la Unión Europa a través de los fondos FEDER