Voice communication with computers: A primer

Due to the rapid development of speech communication interfaces, speech will be a major mode of man-machine communication. Essential to the development of speech input/output applications is the understanding of the techniques and jargon of speech by the application designer who, in most cases, has no formal speech training and, perhaps, little understanding of computers. This paper includes introductory tutorials on speech synthesis and recognition in an attempt to overcome the jargon barrier. A limited number of application examples are presented to stimulate generation of new applications.     

Automated enzymatic determination of starch in meat products

Summary An automated method is described for the enzymatic determination of starch in some meat products. After solubilization with dimethylsulfoxide/hydrochloric acid, the starch was automatically determined with amyloglucosidase (EC 3.2.1.3) and hexokinase (EC 2.7.1.1)/glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (EC 1.1.1.49) using a Technicon AutoAnalyzer II System. The analyses could be performed at a rate of forty samples per hour. The results agree very well with those obtained by the polarimetric method.

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Eine automatisierte enzymatische Bestimmung der Stärke in Fleischerzeugnissen

Zusammenfassung Eine automatische Methode zur enzymatischen Bestimmung der Stärke in Fleischerzeugnissen wird beschrieben. Nach Lösung in einer Dimethylsulfoxide/Salzsäure-Mischung, wurde Stärke mittels Amyloglucosidase (EC 3.2.1.3) and Hexokinase (EC 2.7.1.1)/Glukose-6-phosphatdehydrogenase (EC 1.1.1.49) mit Hilfe des Technicon AutoAnalyzers II automatisch bestimmt. Diese Methode ermöglicht 40 Proben pro Std. zu untersuchen. Die Ergebnisse stimmen gut mit den Analysenwerten der polarimetrischen Bestimmung überein.

     

Surface tree languages and parallel derivation trees

The surface tree languages obtained by top-down finite state transformation of monadic trees are exactly the frontier-preserving homomorphic images of sets of derivation trees of ETOL systems. The corresponding class of tree transformation languages is therefore equal to the class of ETOL languages.     

Three hierarchies of transducers

Composition of top-down tree transducers yields a proper hierarchy of transductions and of output languages. The same is true for ETOL systems (viewed as transducers) and for two-way generalized sequential machines.     

Iterated deterministic substitution

Summary Deterministic substitution of languages means substituting the same word (from a given language) for all occurrences of a symbol. For an arbitrary family K of languages the notion of deterministic K-iteration grammar is introduced, which is essentially the iteration of a finite number of deterministic substitutions of languages from K. The families of languages generated by these grammars are investigated.The work of the first author has been supported by the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Pure Research (Z.W.O.)     

Evolutionary Algorithms in Drug Design

Designing a drug is the process of finding or creating a molecule which has a specific activity on a biological organism. Drug design is difficult since there are only few molecules that are both effective against a certain disease and exhibit other necessary physiological properties, such as absorption by the body and safety of use. The main problem of drug design is therefore how to explore the chemical space of many possible molecules to find the few suitable ones. Computational methods are increasingly being used for this purpose, among them evolutionary algorithms. This review will focus on the applications of evolutionary algorithms in drug design, in which evolutionary algorithms are used both to create new molecules and to construct methods for predicting the properties of real or yet unexisting molecules. We will also discuss the progress and problems of application of evolutionary algorithms in this field, as well as possible developments and future perspectives.