Reverberation time estimation on the ACE corpus using the SDD method

Reverberation Time (T60) is an important measure for characterizing the properties of a room. The author's T60 estimation algorithm was previously tested on simulated data where the noise is artificially added to the speech after convolution with a impulse responses simulated using the image method. We test the algorithm on speech convolved with real recorded impulse responses and noise from the same rooms from the Acoustic Characterization of Environments (ACE) corpus and achieve results comparable results to those using simulated data.Comment: In Proceedings of the ACE Challenge Workshop - a satellite event of IEEE-WASPAA 2015 (arXiv:1510.00383

Trisection diagrams and twists of 4-manifolds

A theorem of Katanaga, Saeki, Teragaito, and Yamada shows that the Price twist generalizes the Gluck twist of a 4-manifold. We are able to give a new proof of this theorem using certain trisection diagrams and recent techniques of Gay and Meier, and Kim and Miller. In particular, this answers a question of Kim and Miller.Comment: 14 pages, 24 figures. Comments welcome

Funding Source Impact on Nonprofit Advocacy Activity

Nonprofit organizations are often a tool by which citizens can engage in the policy process. Many nonprofit organizations engage in issue advocacy. For some nonprofit organizations issue advocacy is the purpose for their existence. For others, issue advocacy is a means of meeting organizational goals. Many nonprofits avoid issue advocacy altogether. The IRS places a financial limit on how much issue advocacy a nonprofit organization may engage in. However, most nonprofits won’t ever come close to this limit. Most simply don’t have as great a need for advocacy, while some will self regulate to avoid losing funding sources. Some literature suggests that there is a negative relationship between some funding sources and the level of advocacy a nonprofit is willing to engage in. Literature from the field is researched to present a study of nonprofit advocacy, their structures and methods, and the political and financial environment within which they operate. Using data from IRS Form 990 this study then analyzes the relationship between lobbying expenses and funding sources. The funding sources studied are direct public support, indirect public support, government grants, program service revenue, and membership fees and assessments. The study finds a statistically significant positive relationship between several sources of funding (direct public support, indirect public support, and program service revenue) and the level of lobbying expenses reported. The study does not find any statistically significant negative impact of funding source on advocacy activity. Further conclusions are problematic, however, due to limitations in the research design. To truly focus on how nonprofits engage citizens in the policy process through advocacy activities and how they self regulate to protect funding sources will require further research with more and richer data. A recommendation for further studies is made in the conclusion of this paper

Distributed Remote Vector Gaussian Source Coding for Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks

In this paper, we consider the problem of remote vector Gaussian source coding for a wireless acoustic sensor network. Each node receives messages from multiple nodes in the network and decodes these messages using its own measurement of the sound field as side information. The node's measurement and the estimates of the source resulting from decoding the received messages are then jointly encoded and transmitted to a neighboring node in the network. We show that for this distributed source coding scenario, one can encode a so-called conditional sufficient statistic of the sources instead of jointly encoding multiple sources. We focus on the case where node measurements are in form of noisy linearly mixed combinations of the sources and the acoustic channel mixing matrices are invertible. For this problem, we derive the rate-distortion function for vector Gaussian sources and under covariance distortion constraints.Comment: 10 pages, to be presented at the IEEE DCC'1

Distributed Remote Vector Gaussian Source Coding with Covariance Distortion Constraints

In this paper, we consider a distributed remote source coding problem, where a sequence of observations of source vectors is available at the encoder. The problem is to specify the optimal rate for encoding the observations subject to a covariance matrix distortion constraint and in the presence of side information at the decoder. For this problem, we derive lower and upper bounds on the rate-distortion function (RDF) for the Gaussian case, which in general do not coincide. We then provide some cases, where the RDF can be derived exactly. We also show that previous results on specific instances of this problem can be generalized using our results. We finally show that if the distortion measure is the mean squared error, or if it is replaced by a certain mutual information constraint, the optimal rate can be derived from our main result.Comment: This is the final version accepted at ISIT'1