Automatic Conversion of Emotions in Speech within a Speaker Independent Framework

Emotions in speech are a fundamental part of a natural dialog. In everyday life, vocal interaction with people often implies emotions as an intrinsic part of the conversation to a greater or lesser extent. Thus, the inclusion of emotions in human-machine dialog systems is crucial to achieve an acceptable degree of naturalness in the communication. This thesis focuses on automatic emotion conversion of speech, a technique whose aim is to transform an utterance produced in neutral style to a certain emotion state in a speaker independent context. Conversion of emotions represents a challenge in the sense that emotions a affect significantly all the parts of the human vocal production system, and in the conversion process all these factors must be taken into account carefully. The techniques used in the literature are based on voice conversion approaches, with minor modifications to create the sensation of emotion. In this thesis, the idea of voice conversion systems is used as well, but the usual regression process is divided in a two-step procedure that provides additional speaker normalization to remove the intrinsic speaker dependency of this kind of systems, using vocal tract length normalization as a pre-processing technique. In addition, a new method to convert the duration trend of the utterance and the intonation contour is proposed, taking into account the contextual information

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

Measurement of the Ratio of b Quark Production Cross Sections in Antiproton-Proton Collisions at 630 GeV and 1800 GeV

We report a measurement of the ratio of the bottom quark production cross section in antiproton-proton collisions at 630 GeV to 1800 GeV using bottom quarks with transverse momenta greater than 10.75 GeV identified through their semileptonic decays and long lifetimes. The measured ratio sigma(630)/sigma(1800) = 0.171 +/- .024 +/- .012 is in good agreement with next-to-leading order (NLO) quantum chromodynamics (QCD)