Session varaibility compensation in automatic speaker and language recognition

Tesis doctoral inédita. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Escuela Politécnica Superior, octubre de 201

The value of diversity: teaching gender and sport through content analysis of three films

Underlining the value of diversity is of great interest resulting in a changing, flexible social context and aims to maintain the welfare state and the effectiveness of both labor organizations and school or sports in community life. Having this budget heading, we consider gauging the value of gender diversity in sport and offering cinema as an effective way to think about it doing a content analysis of three films and proposing keys to be used in the classroom tool. This work is important and represents an advance in education science by proposing a working tool for teachers who intend to teach values to their students through the confrontation of stereotypes and prejudices contained in the products released by industry film

Dynamic Daylight Metrics for Electricity Savings in Offices: Window Size and Climate Smart Lighting Management

Daylight performance metrics provide a promising approach for the design and optimization of lighting strategies in buildings and their management. Smart controls for electric lighting can reduce power consumption and promote visual comfort using different control strategies, based on affordable technologies and low building impact. The aim of this research is to assess the energy efficiency of these smart controls by means of dynamic daylight performance metrics, to determine suitable solutions based on the geometry of the architecture and the weather conditions. The analysis considers different room dimensions, with variable window size and two mean surface reflectance values. DaySim 3.1 lighting software provides the simulations for the study, determining the necessary quantification of dynamic metrics to evaluate the usefulness of the proposed smart controls and their impact on energy efficiency. The validation of dynamic metrics is carried out by monitoring a mesh of illuminance-meters in test cells throughout one year. The results showed that, for most rooms more than 3.00 m deep, smart controls achieve worthwhile energy savings and a low payback period, regardless of weather conditions and for worst-case situations. It is also concluded that dimming systems provide a higher net present value and allow the use of smaller window size than other control solutions

Von Mises-Fisher models in the total variability subspace for language recognition

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. I. Lopez-Moreno, D. Ramos, J. Gonzalez-Dominguez, and J. Gonzalez-Rodriguez, "Von Mises-Fisher models in the total variability subspace for language recognition", IEEE Signal Processing Letters, vol. 18, no. 12, pp. 705-708, October 2011This letter proposes a new modeling approach for the Total Variability subspace within a Language Recognition task. Motivated by previous works in directional statistics, von Mises-Fisher distributions are used for assigning language-conditioned probabilities to language data, assumed to be spherically distributed in this subspace. The two proposed methods use Kernel Density Functions or Finite Mixture Models of such distributions. Experiments conducted on NIST LRE 2009 show that the proposed techniques significantly outperform the baseline cosine distance approach in most of the considered experimental conditions, including different speech conditions, durations and the presence of unseen languages.This work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under FPI Grant TEC2009-14719-C02-01 and cátedra UAM-Telefónic

Frame-by-frame language identification in short utterances using deep neural networks

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Neural Networks. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Neural Networks, VOL 64, (2015) DOI 10.1016/j.neunet.2014.08.006This work addresses the use of deep neural networks (DNNs) in automatic language identification (LID) focused on short test utterances. Motivated by their recent success in acoustic modelling for speech recognition, we adapt DNNs to the problem of identifying the language in a given utterance from the short-term acoustic features. We show how DNNs are particularly suitable to perform LID in real-time applications, due to their capacity to emit a language identification posterior at each new frame of the test utterance. We then analyse different aspects of the system, such as the amount of required training data, the number of hidden layers, the relevance of contextual information and the effect of the test utterance duration. Finally, we propose several methods to combine frame-by-frame posteriors. Experiments are conducted on two different datasets: the public NIST Language Recognition Evaluation 2009 (3 s task) and a much larger corpus (of 5 million utterances) known as Google 5M LID, obtained from different Google Services. Reported results show relative improvements of DNNs versus the i-vector system of 40% in LRE09 3 second task and 76% in Google 5M LID

Study of the Contribution of Nonlinear Normal Modes (NNMs) in Large Amplitude Oscillations of Simply Supported Beams

Faculty of Civil and Industrial Engineering , Rome; Italy. 10 September 2017 through 13 September 2017This paper focuses on the Nonlinear Normal Modes of simply supported beams with unrestrained axial displacements. Two different configurations are considered, depending on whether longitudinal displacements are allowed at one end of the beam or at both ends. An integro-differential equation is obtained for the transverse displacement of the beam, upon the common assumption of inextensibility. By using a perturbation approach, the NNMs are analytically computed, which yields a frequency-amplitude relation for each NNM. These analytical curves are compared to FE results, showing a remarkable accordance. Noticeably, qualitatively different behaviors are found for the first NNM in both configurations: with one free end, the beam softens; with both ends free, it hardens

Multilevel and session variability compensated language recognition: ATVS-UAM systems at NIST LRE 2009

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. J. Gonzalez-Dominguez, I. Lopez-Moreno, J. Franco-Pedroso, D. Ramos, D. T. Toledano, and J. Gonzalez-Rodriguez, "Multilevel and Session Variability Compensated Language Recognition: ATVS-UAM Systems at NIST LRE 2009" IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, vol. 4, no. 6, pp. 1084 – 1093, December 2010This work presents the systems submitted by the ATVS Biometric Recognition Group to the 2009 Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE’09), organized by NIST. New challenges included in this LRE edition can be summarized by three main differences with respect to past evaluations. Firstly, the number of languages to be recognized expanded to 23 languages from 14 in 2007, and 7 in 2005. Secondly, the data variability has been increased by including telephone speech excerpts extracted from Voice of America (VOA) radio broadcasts through Internet in addition to Conversational Telephone Speech (CTS). The third difference was the volume of data, involving in this evaluation up to 2 terabytes of speech data for development, which is an order of magnitude greater than past evaluations. LRE’09 thus required participants to develop robust systems able not only to successfully face the session variability problem but also to do it with reasonable computational resources. ATVS participation consisted of state-of-the-art acoustic and high-level systems focussing on these issues. Furthermore, the problem of finding a proper combination and calibration of the information obtained at different levels of the speech signal was widely explored in this submission. In this work, two original contributions were developed. The first contribution was applying a session variability compensation scheme based on Factor Analysis (FA) within the statistics domain into a SVM-supervector (SVM-SV) approach. The second contribution was the employment of a novel backend based on anchor models in order to fuse individual systems prior to one-vs-all calibration via logistic regression. Results both in development and evaluation corpora show the robustness and excellent performance of the submitted systems, exemplified by our system ranked 2nd in the 30 second open-set condition, with remarkably scarce computational resources.This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education under project TEC2006-13170-C02-01. Javier Gonzalez-Dominguez also thanks Spanish Ministry of Education for supporting his doctoral research under project TEC2006-13141-C03-03. Special thanks are given to Dr. David Van Leeuwen from TNO Human Factors (Utrech, The Netherlands) for his strong collaboration, valuable discussions and ideas. Also, authors thank to Dr. Patrick Lucey for his final support on (non-target) Australian English review of the manuscript

Hábitos deportivos de la población ecuatoriana en la ciudad de Madrid: análisis de su influencia en el proceso de integración en la sociedad española

This paper presents the results of a research work on the sporting habits of the immigrant population from Ecuador in the city of Madrid and the influence of their sport practice in their integration into Spanish society.The sample consisted of 288 ecuadorians (161 men and 127 women), aged between 17 and 64.The methodology was based on the Acculturation Model of Berry et al. (2006) and the Relative Acculturation Extended Model of Navas et al. (2004) The instrument for data collection was a questionnaire developed from the works of Navas et al. (2004), Berry (2002 & 2006), Taylor (2000), Nehas (2000), Reshef (1990) and García Ferrando (2001).The results of this research might be very usefull both for the sport policies aimed at promoting the integration of immigrants in host societies, and for the management and planning of programs and interventions related to sports and immigration.Este artículo presenta los resultados de una investigación sobre los hábitos deportivos de la población inmigrante ecuatoriana en la ciudad de Madrid y el grado de influencia que ejerce la práctica deportiva en su integración en la sociedad española.La muestra estuvo constituida por 288 personas ecuatorianas (161 varones y 127 mujeres) con una edad comprendida entre los 17 y 64 años.El diseño metodológico se basó en el Modelo de Aculturación de Berry y col. (2006) y el Modelo Ampliado de Aculturación Relativa (MAAR) de Navas y col. (2004) El instrumento para la recogida de datos fue el cuestionario, elaborado a partir de los trabajos de Navas y col., Berry (2002 y 2006), Taylor (2000), Nehas (2000), Reshef (1990) y García Ferrando (2001).Los resultados de esta investigación pueden ser de gran utilidad tanto en la adopción de políticas deportivas que favorezcan la integración de la población inmigrante en las sociedades de acogida, como en la gestión y planificación de programas deportivos orientados a la población inmigrante

Automatic language identification using deep neural networks

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. I. López-Moreno, J. González-Domínguez, P. Oldrich, D. R. Martínez, J. González-Rodríguez, "Automatic language identification using deep neural networks", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing ICASSP, Florence (Italy), 2014This work studies the use of deep neural networks (DNNs) to address automatic language identification (LID). Motivated by their recent success in acoustic modelling, we adapt DNNs to the problem of identifying the language of a given spoken utterance from short-term acoustic features. The proposed approach is compared to state-of-the-art i-vector based acoustic systems on two different datasets: Google 5M LID corpus and NIST LRE 2009. Results show how LID can largely benefit from using DNNs, especially when a large amount of training data is available. We found relative improvements up to 70%, in Cavg, over the baseline system

Hábitos deportivos de la población ecuatoriana en la ciudad de Madrid: análisis de su influencia en el proceso de integración en la sociedad española

Este artículo presenta los resultados de una investigación sobre los hábitos deportivos de la población inmigrante ecuatoriana en la ciudad de Madrid y el grado de influencia que ejerce la práctica deportiva en su integración en la sociedad española.La muestra estuvo constituida por 288 personas ecuatorianas (161 varones y 127 mujeres) con una edad comprendida entre los 17 y 64 años.El diseño metodológico se basó en el Modelo de Aculturación de Berry y col. (2006) y el Modelo Ampliado de Aculturación Relativa (MAAR) de Navas y col. (2004) El instrumento para la recogida de datos fue el cuestionario, elaborado a partir de los trabajos de Navas y col., Berry (2002 y 2006), Taylor (2000), Nehas (2000), Reshef (1990) y García Ferrando (2001).Los resultados de esta investigación pueden ser de gran utilidad tanto en la adopción de políticas deportivas que favorezcan la integración de la población inmigrante en las sociedades de acogida, como en la gestión y planificación de programas deportivos orientados a la población inmigrante.This paper presents the results of a research work on the sporting habits of the immigrant population from Ecuador in the city of Madrid and the influence of their sport practice in their integration into Spanish society.The sample consisted of 288 ecuadorians (161 men and 127 women), aged between 17 and 64.The methodology was based on the Acculturation Model of Berry et al. (2006) and the Relative Acculturation Extended Model of Navas et al. (2004) The instrument for data collection was a questionnaire developed from the works of Navas et al. (2004), Berry (2002 & 2006), Taylor (2000), Nehas (2000), Reshef (1990) and García Ferrando (2001).The results of this research might be very usefull both for the sport policies aimed at promoting the integration of immigrants in host societies, and for the management and planning of programs and interventions related to sports and immigration