Acoustic environment as an indicator of social and physical context

Acoustic environments provide many valuable cues for context-aware computing applications. From the acoustic environment we can infer the types of activity, communication modes and other actors involved in the activity. Environmental or background noise can be classified with a high degree of accuracy using recordings from microphones commonly found in PDAs and other consumer devices. We describe an acoustic environment recognition system incorporating an adaptive learning mechanism and its use in a noise tracker. We show how this information is exploited in a mobile context framework. To illustrate our approach we describe a context-aware multimodal weather forecasting service, which accepts spoken or written queries and presents forecast information in several forms, including email, voice and sign languages.

1993: Axline's eight principles of play therapy revisited.

Examined V. Axlines's book, Play Therapy (1947) which includes 8 basic principles on non-directive play therapy. Student responses to learning these principles in play therapy classes were also examined. Each student was assigned a play therapy client and was observed and assisted directly by the instructor, a licensed clinical psychologist. Clients were mildly trouble children (aged 5–10 yrs) and were selected from a referral base by the instructor as appropriate for the course. As the semester progressed and students gained direct experience, weekly small (3–4 student) group discussions were held to explore in-depth understanding of play therapy principles and how these principles are put into practice. It is concluded that Axline's book remains a classic text and a foremost resource in the field. Coupling it with experiential learning is an invaluable basis for teaching play therapy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Superintelligent Will: Motivation and Instrumental Rationality in Advanced Artificial Agents

This paper discusses the relation between intelligence and motivation in artificial agents, developing and briefly arguing for two theses. The first, the orthogonality thesis, holds (with some caveats) that intelligence and final goals (purposes) are orthogonal axes along which possible artificial intellects can freely vary??more or less any level of intelligence could be combined with more or less any final goal. The second, the instrumental convergence thesis, holds that as long as they possess a sufficient level of intelligence, agents having any of a wide range of final goals will pursue similar intermediary goals because they have instrumental reasons to do so. In combination, the two theses help us understand the possible range of behavior of superintelligent agents, and they point to some potential dangers in building such an agent.     

Recursive segmentation and recognition templates for image parsing

In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Image Model (HIM) which parses images to perform segmentation and object recognition. The HIM represents the image recursively by segmentation and recognition templates at multiple levels of the hierarchy. This has advantages for representation, inference, and learning. First, the HIM has a coarse-to-fine representation which is capable of capturing long-range dependency and exploiting different levels of contextual information (similar to how natural language models represent sentence structure in terms of hierarchical representations such as verb and noun phrases). Second, the structure of the HIM allows us to design a rapid inference algorithm, based on dynamic programming, which yields the first polynomial time algorithm for image labeling. Third, we learn the HIM efficiently using machine learning methods from a labeled data set. We demonstrate that the HIM is comparable with the state-of-the-art methods by evaluation on the challenging public MSRC and PASCAL VOC 2007 image data sets.     

Very low-noise ENG amplifier system using CMOS technology.

In this paper, we describe the design and testing of a system for recording electroneurographic signals (ENG) from a multielectrode nerve cuff (MEC). This device, which is an extension of the conventional nerve signal recording cuff, enables ENG to be classified by action potential velocity. In addition to electrical measurements, we provide preliminary in vitro data obtained from frogs that demonstrate the validity of the technique for the first time. Since typical ENG signals are extremely small, on the order of 1 1 microV, very low-noise, high-gain amplifiers are required. The ten-channel system we describe was realized in a 0.8 microm CMOS technology and detailed measured results are presented. The overall gain is 10 000 and the total input-referred root mean square (rms) noise in a bandwidth 1 Hz-5 kHZ is 291 nV. The active area is 12 mm(2) and the power consumption is 24 mW from +/-2.5 V power supplies.     

粘结剂处理的铁基混合粉的温压特性

研究的目标是结合粉末粘结技术和温压技术以制备高质量、高性能的粉末冶金材料。预粘结粉末的一大优点是能有效地降低成分偏析，因此在混粉过程中应尽量避免偏聚。本文采用两种混粉工艺制备预粘结铁基混合粉，通过不同的压制压力、不同的粘结剂含量以常温压制和温压压制制备出铁基粉末冶金材料，测量其压坯密度并进行比较分析。研究结果表明，不同预粘结工艺、压制温度和粘结剂含量对压坯密度影响很大。在一定的粘结剂含量范围内，生坯密度随粘结剂含量增加而呈线性减少。不同的预粘结工艺对生坯密度的影响随着粘结剂含量的增加而增大。     

The share of items of highly productive sources as a function of the size of the system

Summary The research in this paper is based on the paper of D.W. Aksnes & G. Sivertsen: The effect of highly cited papers on national citation indicators, Scientometrics 59 (2) (2004), 213-224, where one states that “the few highly cited papers account for the highest share of the citations in the smallest fields”. This, at first sight, evident property is examined in the theoretical models that exist in the literature. We first define exactly what we mean by “size of a field” (i.e. when is a field “smaller” or “larger” than another one). We show that there are two, non-equivalent possible definitions. Next we define exactly the possible property under study. This leads us again to two possible, non-equivalent formulations. Hence, in total, there are four different formulations to consider. We show, by giving counterexamples, that none of these four formulations are true in general. We also express conditions (in Lotkaian and Zipfian informetrics), under which the property of Aksnes and Sivertsen is true. All these results are not only valid in the papers-citations relationships but in any informetric source-item relationship. In this connection we present formulae describing the share of items of highly productive sources as a function of the parameters of the system (e.g. the size of the system).     

Synthesis of MCM-41 frameworks incorporating oxygen-sulphur derivates of molybdenum and tungsten

The first examples of mesostructured materials containing Mo- and W-oxo-sulphur species incorporated into a poorly ordered MCM-41 framework have been prepared under hydrothermal condition and alkaline medium. The incorporation of oxygen-sulphur derivates of molybdenum and tungsten not only increases significantly the pore diameter, but also improves the thermal stability of the MCM-41-related mesoporous material.     

Speech-as-data technologies for personal information devices

 For small, portable devices, speech input has the advantages of low-cost and small hardware, can be used on the move or whilst the eyes & hands are busy, and is natural and quick. Rather than rely on imperfect speech recognition we propose that information entered as speech is kept as speech and suitable tools are provided to allow quick and easy access to the speech-as-data records. This paper summarises our work on the technologies needed for these tools – for organising, browsing, searching and compressing the stored speech. These technologies go a long way towards giving stored speech the characteristics of text without the associated input problems. Received: 5 March 2002 / Accepted: 1 September 2002 Nick Haddock Consultant Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the whole HP Labs Gryphon team for their valuable contributions to this work - Mike Collins for the hierarchical chunking algorithm, Erik Geelhoed and David Frohlich for the users perspective, Richard Hull for starting off the compression work, Steve Loughran for productisation, and Dave Reynolds for his consistent advice and support. We would also like to thank our partners at Cambridge University, Steve Young and Tony Robinson, whose expertise and technology formed the foundation for this work, as well as the efforts of Kate Knill on wordspotting, Carl Seymour on compression, James Christie on recognition, and Robin Valenza whose brief excursion into the world of speech technology helped develop a simple and effective summarisation technique. Finally we would like to thank the reviewers for their many helpful comments.