Tracking Visible Features of Speech for Computer-Based Speech Therapy for Childhood Apraxia of Speech

At present, there are few, if any, effective computer-based speech therapy systems (CBSTs) that support the at-home component for clinical interventions for Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS). PROMPT, an established speech therapy intervention for CAS, has the potential to be supported via a CBST, which could increase engagement and provide valuable feedback to the child. However, the necessary computational techniques have not yet been developed and evaluated. In this thesis, I will describe the development of some of the key underlying computational components that are required for the development of such a system. These components concern camera-based tracking of visible features of speech which concern jaw kinematics. These components would also be necessary for the serious game that we have envisioned

Interplay of Superconductivity and Magnetism in the Two Dimensional Kondo Lattice Model

Since the original discovery of heavy fermion behavior in the late seventies by Andres, heavy fermions keep attracting scientific interest due to their exotic and unusual properties. These are inter-metallic compounds that contain rare earth elements, like cerium, praseodymium, and ytterbium, and actinides like uranium. The term ``heavy'' refers to their large effective electronic mass, as large as 1000 times the normal metal ones. The active physics in these materials results from the magnetic moments, associated to the partially filled $f$-shells of rare earth or actinide ions, being immersed into a quantum sea of mobile conduction electrons. In most rare earth metals and insulators, local moments tend to order magnetically, but in heavy electron metals the quantum mechanical jiggling of the local moments induced by delocalized electrons is fierce enough to melt magnetic order. The mechanism by which this takes place involves a remarkable piece of quantum physics known as the ``Kondo effect'' that describes the process by which a magnetic impurity get screened by conduction electrons, forming the so-called Kondo singlet below a characteristic temperature/energy scale named the Kondo temperature, $T_K$. Even though the Kondo effect refers strictly speaking to a very dilute concentration of magnetic ions, typically few part per million, the same physics is believed to play a role in heavy fermions. Heavy fermion materials have become recently popular also in the study of the quantum critical behavior of matter in the vicinity of a zero temperature second-order phase transition. Indeed, heavy fermions realize prototypical examples of quantum critical points that separate at zero temperature magnetic and paramagnetic phases. Experimentally, quantum critical points are attained by tuning non-thermal control parameters, such as pressure, chemical doping or applied magnetic field, so as to drive continuously to zero the magnetic ordering temperature. One of presently lively discussions up to date is about the appearance of two types of magnetic quantum critical points, depending on the behavior of the Kondo singlet as the transition is approached from paramagnetic side. If the Kondo singlet remains across the magnetic transition, the latter is of a spin-density-wave type in which the only critical degrees of freedom are the fluctuations of the magnetic order parameter. In this scenario, the Fermi volume does not change and contains both $f$ and conduction electrons. The alternative scenario invokes instead a local quantum criticality, where the Kondo singlet breaks down right at the magnetic transition, bringing about novel critical modes. Across such a quantum critical point, one expects a sudden collapse of the large Fermi surface of the paramagnetic side to a small magnetic one that contains only conduction electrons. Around a quantum critical point interesting phenomena such as non-Fermi liquid behavior or the appearance of exotic phases may appear. Indeed, many heavy fermions show superconductivity right after the magnetic transition. There are also evidences of coexisting magnetism and superconductivity. Emergence of superconductivity in heavy fermions is at first glance quite surprising, since in the conventional wisdom magnetic impurity scattering is pair-breaking. The evidence of non-$s$ wave symmetry of the order parameter brings these materials in the class of unconventional superconductors, where pairing is not phonon-mediated but likely caused by magnetic fluctuations. This issue has attracted a lot of experimental and theoretical interest. From the theoretical point of view, already building up a microscopic Hamiltonian that could capture the main physics and reproduce the phase diagram of heavy fermions is a challenge that is still ongoing. One of the first attempts to attack this issue was done by Anderson, who proposed in 1961 the model that is nowadays universally known as the Anderson impurity model. Later on, Doniach introduced a lattice version believed to describe heavy fermions, the so-called Kondo lattice model. The latter one has been studied extensively and there is a strong belief that it indeed captures the basic physics of heavy fermions. In this Thesis we study the ground-state phase diagram of various versions of the Kondo lattice model in two dimensions, starting from the simplest Doniach's one, with special focus on the possible appearance of superconductivity in the phase diagram. To attack this problem, we adopt a variational Monte Carlo scheme that allows treating quite large lattices, thus going beyond the one-dimensional and, at the opposite, the infinite-dimensional cases where most of the numerical studies have been restricted so far. Using Gutzwiller projected wave functions we are able to satisfy the local constraint of one electron per $f$ orbital locally not in average: this is the main advantage of the variational Monte Carlo against the mean-field approach. The flexibility of this variational method makes it possible to account for different types of correlations (specially pairing correlations) in the trial wave function, which are not present at the mean-field level. A full optimization of the variational wave function allows us to finally depict the phase diagram

Design of Energy-Efficient A/D Converters with Partial Embedded Equalization for High-Speed Wireline Receiver Applications

As the data rates of wireline communication links increases, channel impairments such as skin effect, dielectric loss, fiber dispersion, reflections and cross-talk become more pronounced. This warrants more interest in analog-to-digital converter (ADC)-based serial link receivers, as they allow for more complex and flexible back-end digital signal processing (DSP) relative to binary or mixed-signal receivers. Utilizing this back-end DSP allows for complex digital equalization and more bandwidth-efficient modulation schemes, while also displaying reduced process/voltage/temperature (PVT) sensitivity. Furthermore, these architectures offer straightforward design translation and can directly leverage the area and power scaling offered by new CMOS technology nodes. However, the power consumption of the ADC front-end and subsequent digital signal processing is a major issue. Embedding partial equalization inside the front-end ADC can potentially result in lowering the complexity of back-end DSP and/or decreasing the ADC resolution requirement, which results in a more energy-effcient receiver. This dissertation presents efficient implementations for multi-GS/s time-interleaved ADCs with partial embedded equalization. First prototype details a 6b 1.6GS/s ADC with a novel embedded redundant-cycle 1-tap DFE structure in 90nm CMOS. The other two prototypes explain more complex 6b 10GS/s ADCs with efficiently embedded feed-forward equalization (FFE) and decision feedback equalization (DFE) in 65nm CMOS. Leveraging a time-interleaved successive approximation ADC architecture, new structures for embedded DFE and FFE are proposed with low power/area overhead. Measurement results over FR4 channels verify the effectiveness of proposed embedded equalization schemes. The comparison of fabricated prototypes against state-of-the-art general-purpose ADCs at similar speed/resolution range shows comparable performances, while the proposed architectures include embedded equalization as well

Cryptanalysis of pairing-free certificateless authenticated key agreement protocol

Recently, He et al. [D. He, J. Chen, J. Hu, A pairing-free certificateless authenticated key agreement protocol, International Journal of Communication Systems, 25(2), pp. 221-230, 2012] proposed a pairing-free certificateless authenticated key agreement protocol and demonstrated that their protocol is provable security in the random oracle model. However, in this paper, we show that t He et al. protocol is completely broken

APPLICATION OF PROJECT BASED LEARNING MODEL TO IMPROVE SCIENCE PROCESS SKILLS AND UNDERSTANDING CONCEPT OF FLUID STUDENTS GRADE X MIPA 2 SMA NEGERI 1 KALASAN

The research purposes are (1) to describe step learning fluid with project based learning which can improve science process skills and understanding physics conceptual (2) to describe science process skills with project based learning model on fluid matter (3) to describe conceptual with application project based learning model on fluid matter. The research design was a classroom action research (CAR), which were analyzed descriptively. Research subjects were students grade X MIA 2 SMA N 1 Kalasan, followed by 26 students, consist of 18 girls students and 8 man students. Actions taken in application of project based learning model type which consists of six phases, i.e. :(1) essential question; (2) design a plan; (3) creating schedule; (4) monitor the progress; (5) assess the outcomes; (6) evaluate the experiment/experience. Result of this research indicate that project based learning model to improve science process skill and understanding conceptual is conducted clearly. There is improvement science process skill which is shown six aspect observed include kind of categories and 1 aspect improve to very kind. Improvemet of understanding concept is shown 84,62 % student reached minimal achievement categories ≥ 75 with mean value of posttest is 80,2. In addition, an improvement in N-gain score of 0.42 is considered moderate. Improvement very positive response given by students with the application of project based learning model, can be seen from as much 65 % of the students gave the reponse was very positive and the other 35 % gave a positive response. Beside that, teacher gave the response was very positive to project based learning model and continue benefit research implementation of curriculum 2013

Quantum space-time marginal problem: global causal structure from local causal information

Spatial and temporal quantum correlations can be unified in the framework of the pseudo-density operators, and quantum causality between the involved events in an experiment is encoded in the corresponding pseudo-density operator. We study the relationship between local causal information and global causal structure. A space-time marginal problem is proposed to infer global causal structures from given marginal causal structures where causal structures are represented by the pseudo-density operators; we show that there almost always exists a solution in this case. By imposing the corresponding constraints on this solution set, we could obtain the required solutions for special classes of marginal problems, like a positive semidefinite marginal problem, separable marginal problem, etc. We introduce a space-time entropy and propose a method to determine the global causal structure based on the maximum entropy principle, which can be solved effectively by using a neural network. The notion of quantum pseudo-channel is also introduced and we demonstrate that the quantum pseudo-channel marginal problem can be solved by transforming it into a pseudo-density operator marginal problem via the channel-state duality.Comment: v1: 17 pages, comments welcome; v2: re-organize the structure of the pape

Statistical inference for nonlinear state space models: an application to the analysis of forest fire counts in Canada

Nonlinear state space models occupy a predominant position in statistical stud- ies. They are widely used in various fields such as economics, finance, ecology and epidemiology. However, such models may be problematic when it comes to statistical inference, due to the fact that they could be quite sensitive to small variations in system states and parameters. In this dissertation, we present three estimation pro- cedures and their respective algorithms for the statistical inference of such nonlinear, non-Gaussian state space models. Also, simulation studies are carried out to evaluate the performance of these methods. At the end, we analyze the time series of forest fire counts that annually occurred in Canada using the proposed methodologies