Agreement and reliability using reference-matching paradigm in perceptual voice quality rating in Chinese and English

published_or_final_versio

Issues for computer modelling of room acoustics in non-concert hall settings

The basic principle of common room acoustics computer models is the energy-based geometrical room acoustics theory. The energy-based calculation relies on the averaging effect provided when there are many reflections from many different directions, which is well suited for large concert halls at medium and high frequencies. In recent years computer modelling has become an established tool in architectural acoustics design thanks to the advance in computing power and improved understanding of the modelling accuracy. However concert hall is only one of many types of built environments that require good acoustic design. Increasingly computer models are being sought for non-concert hall applications, such as in small rooms at low frequencies, flat rooms in workplace surroundings, and long enclosures such as underground stations. In these built environments the design issues are substantially difference from that of concert halls and in most cases the common room acoustics models will needed to be modified or totally re-formulated in order to deal with these new issues. This paper looks at some examples of these issues. In workplace environments we look at the issues of directional propagation and volume scattering by furniture and equipment instead of the surface scattering that is common assumed in concert hall models. In small rooms we look at the requirement of using wave models, such as boundary element models, or introducing phase information into geometrical room acoustics models to determine wave behaviours. Of particular interest is the ability of the wave models to provide phase information that is important not only for room modes but for the construction of impulse response for auralisation. Some simulated results using different modelling techniques will be presented to illustrate the problems and potential solutions

The automorphism group of separable states in quantum information theory

We show that the linear group of automorphism of Hermitian matrices which preserves the set of separable states is generated by \emph{natural} automorphisms: change of an orthonormal basis in each tensor factor, partial transpose in each tensor factor, and interchanging two tensor factors of the same dimension. We apply our results to preservers of the product numerical range.Comment: 15 page

In vitro expressed dystrophin fragments do not associate with each other

AbstractDystrophin, a component of the muscle membrane cytoskeleton, is the protein altered in Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) and Becker Muscular Dystrophy (BMD). Dystrophin shares significant homology with other cytoskeletal proteins, such as α-actinin and spectrin. On the basis of its sequence similarity with α-actinin and spectrin, dystrophin has been proposed to function as dimer. However, the existence of both dimers and monomers have been observed by electron microscopy. To address this apparent discrepancy, we expressed dystrophin fragments composed of different domains in an in vitro translation system. The expressed fragments were tested for their ability to interact with each other and full-length dystrophin by both immunoprecipitation and blot overlay assays. These assays were successfully used to demonstrate the dimerization of α-actinin and spectrin, yet failed to detect any interaction between dystrophin fragments. Although these in vitro results do not prove that dystrophin is not a dimer in vivo, they do indicate that this interaction is not like that of the α-actinin and spectrin

On the sparse beamformer design

In designing acoustic broadband beamformers, the complexity can grow significantly when the number of microphones and the filter length increase. It is advantageous if many of the filter coefficients are zeroes so that the implementation can be executed with less computation. Moreover, the size of the array can also be pruned to reduce complexity. These problems are addressed in this paper. A suitable optimization model is proposed. Both array pruning and filter thinning can be solved together as a two-stage optimization problem to yield the final sparse designs. Numerical results show that the complexity of the designed beamformers can be reduced significantly with minimal effect on performance

Range Queries on Uncertain Data

Given a set $P$ of $n$ uncertain points on the real line, each represented by its one-dimensional probability density function, we consider the problem of building data structures on $P$ to answer range queries of the following three types for any query interval $I$: (1) top-$1$ query: find the point in $P$ that lies in $I$ with the highest probability, (2) top-$k$ query: given any integer $k\leq n$ as part of the query, return the $k$ points in $P$ that lie in $I$ with the highest probabilities, and (3) threshold query: given any threshold $\tau$ as part of the query, return all points of $P$ that lie in $I$ with probabilities at least $\tau$. We present data structures for these range queries with linear or nearly linear space and efficient query time.Comment: 26 pages. A preliminary version of this paper appeared in ISAAC 2014. In this full version, we also present solutions to the most general case of the problem (i.e., the histogram bounded case), which were left as open problems in the preliminary versio