Breaking the scale invariance of the primordial power spectrum in Horava-Lifshitz Cosmology

We study the spectral tilt of primordial perturbations in Horava-Lifshitz cosmology. The uniform approximation, which is a generalization of the familiar Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) method, is employed to compute the spectral index both numerically and analytically in a closed form. We clarify how the spectral index depends on the inflation model and parameters in the modified dispersion relation.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review

Observational Constraints on Kinetic Gravity Braiding from the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe Effect

The cross-correlation between the integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect and the large scale structure (LSS) is a powerful tool to constrain dark energy and alternative theories of gravity. In this paper, we obtain observational constraints on kinetic gravity braiding from the ISW-LSS cross-correlation. We find that the late-time ISW effect in the kinetic gravity braiding model anti-correlates with large scale structures in a wide range of parameters, which clearly demonstrates how one can distinguish modified gravity theories from the LCDM model using the ISW effect. In addition to the analysis based on a concrete model, we investigate a future prospect of the ISW-LSS cross-correlation by using a phenomenological parameterization of modified gravity models.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review

A Case Study of Bootstrap Masker Quality Assessment for Speech-Privacy Protection

In this paper, we discuss the quality assessment of a new method for thegeneration of a masker for speech privacy protection. This masker includes speech characteristicsthat prevent eavesdroppers from overhearing conversations in public spaces.Previous research shows that maskers generated from the target speech perform betterin interfering with the listening, than the other maskers. Therefore, we propose a bootstrap(BS) masker method that efficiently generates a masker from a small sample of therecorded speech. We evaluate the subjective speech intelligibility and establish that the BSmasker can achieve the same level of intelligibility as that of the conventional additionalmasker at an approximately 4 dB lower target-to-masker ratio

Efficient Enumerations for Minimal Multicuts and Multiway Cuts

Let $G = (V, E)$ be an undirected graph and let $B \subseteq V \times V$ be a set of terminal pairs. A node/edge multicut is a subset of vertices/edges of $G$ whose removal destroys all the paths between every terminal pair in $B$. The problem of computing a {\em minimum} node/edge multicut is NP-hard and extensively studied from several viewpoints. In this paper, we study the problem of enumerating all {\em minimal} node multicuts. We give an incremental polynomial delay enumeration algorithm for minimal node multicuts, which extends an enumeration algorithm due to Khachiyan et al. (Algorithmica, 2008) for minimal edge multicuts. Important special cases of node/edge multicuts are node/edge {\em multiway cuts}, where the set of terminal pairs contains every pair of vertices in some subset $T \subseteq V$, that is, $B = T \times T$. We improve the running time bound for this special case: We devise a polynomial delay and exponential space enumeration algorithm for minimal node multiway cuts and a polynomial delay and space enumeration algorithm for minimal edge multiway cuts

Analysis of anisotropic subgrid-scale stress for coarse large-eddy simulation

This study discusses the necessity of anisotropic subgrid-scale (SGS) stress in large-eddy simulations (LESs) of turbulent shear flows using a coarse grid resolution. We decompose the SGS stress into two parts to observe the role of SGS stress in turbulent shear flows in addition to the energy transfer between grid-scale (GS or resolved scale) and SGS. One is the isotropic eddy-viscosity term, which contributes to energy transfer, and the other is the residual anisotropic term, which is separated from the energy transfer. We investigate the budget equation for GS Reynolds stress in turbulent channel flows accompanied by the SGS stress decomposition. In addition, we examine the medium and coarse filter length cases; the conventional eddy-viscosity models can fairly predict the mean velocity profile for the medium filter case and fails for the coarse filter case. The budget for GS turbulent kinetic energy shows that the anisotropic SGS stress has a negligible contribution to energy transfer. In contrast, the anisotropic stress has a large and non-dissipative contribution to the streamwise and spanwise components of GS Reynolds stress when the filter size is large. Even for the medium-size filter case, the anisotropic stress contributes positively to the budget for the spanwise GS Reynolds stress. Spectral analysis of the budget reveals that the positive contribution is prominent at a scale consistent with the spacing of streaks in the near-wall region. Therefore, we infer that anisotropic stress contributes to the generation mechanism of coherent structures. Predicting the positive contribution of the anisotropic stress to the budget is key to further improving SGS models.Comment: 40 pages, 17 figure

Collapsed speech segment detection and suppression for WaveNet vocoder

In this paper, we propose a technique to alleviate the quality degradation caused by collapsed speech segments sometimes generated by the WaveNet vocoder. The effectiveness of the WaveNet vocoder for generating natural speech from acoustic features has been proved in recent works. However, it sometimes generates very noisy speech with collapsed speech segments when only a limited amount of training data is available or significant acoustic mismatches exist between the training and testing data. Such a limitation on the corpus and limited ability of the model can easily occur in some speech generation applications, such as voice conversion and speech enhancement. To address this problem, we propose a technique to automatically detect collapsed speech segments. Moreover, to refine the detected segments, we also propose a waveform generation technique for WaveNet using a linear predictive coding constraint. Verification and subjective tests are conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. The verification results indicate that the detection technique can detect most collapsed segments. The subjective evaluations of voice conversion demonstrate that the generation technique significantly improves the speech quality while maintaining the same speaker similarity.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures. Proc. Interspeech, 201

VLBI Imagings of Kilo-parsec Knot in 3C 380

We investigate observational properties of a kilo-parsec scale knot in radio-loud quasar 3C 380 by using two epoch archival data obtained by Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) at 5 GHz on 1998 July and 2001 April. We succeed in obtaining the highest spatial resolution image of the bright knot K1 located at 732 milliarcseconds, or more than 20 kpc de-projected, downstream from the nucleus three times better than previously obtained highest resolution image by Papageorgiou et al. (2006). Our images reveal, with new clarity, "inverted bow-shock" structure in K1 facing the nucleus and its morphology resembles a conical shock wave. By comparing the two epoch images directly, we explore the kinematics of K1 and obtain the upper limit of apparent velocity, 0.25 mas/yr or 9.8 c of K1 for the first time. The upper limit of apparent velocity is marginally smaller than superluminal motions seen in the core region. Further new epoch VLBI observations are necessary to measure the proper motion at K1.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in PAS