MARSEC: A Machine-Readable Spoken English Corpus

1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Roach ◽  
Gerry Knowles ◽  
Tamas Varadi ◽  
Simon Arnfield

The purpose of this paper is to describe a new version of the Spoken English Corpus which will be of interest to phoneticians and other speech scientists. The Spoken English Corpus is a well-known collection of spoken-language texts that was collected and transcribed in the 1980's in a joint project involving IBM UK and the University of Lancaster (Alderson and Knowles forthcoming, Knowles and Taylor 1988). One valuable aspect of it is that the recorded material on which it was based is fairly freely available and the recording quality is generally good. At the time when the recordings were made, the idea of storing all the recorded material in digital form suitable for computer processing was of limited practicality. Although storage on digital tape was certainly feasible, this did not provide rapid computer access. The arrival of optical disk technology, with the possibility of storing very large amounts of digital data on a compact disk at relatively low cost, has brought about a revolution in ideas on database construction and use. It seemed to us that the recordings of the Spoken English Corpus (hereafter SEC) should now be converted into a form which would enable the user to gain access to the acoustic signal without the laborious business of winding through large amounts of tape. Once this was done, we should be able not only to listen to the recordings in a very convenient way, but also to carry out many automatic analyses of the material by computer.

Author(s):  
H. O. Colijn

Many labs today wish to transfer data between their EDS systems and their existing PCs and minicomputers. Our lab has implemented SpectraPlot, a low- cost PC-based system to allow offline examination and plotting of spectra. We adopted this system in order to make more efficient use of our microscopes and EDS consoles, to provide hardcopy output for an older EDS system, and to allow students to access their data after leaving the university.As shown in Fig. 1, we have three EDS systems (one of which is located in another building) which can store data on 8 inch RT-11 floppy disks. We transfer data from these systems to a DEC MINC computer using “SneakerNet”, which consists of putting on a pair of sneakers and running down the hall. We then use the Hermit file transfer program to download the data files with error checking from the MINC to the PC.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Péter Telek ◽  
Béla Illés ◽  
Christian Landschützer ◽  
Fabian Schenk ◽  
Flavien Massi

Nowadays, the Industry 4.0 concept affects every area of the industrial, economic, social and personal sectors. The most significant changings are the automation and the digitalization. This is also true for the material handling processes, where the handling systems use more and more automated machines; planning, operation and optimization of different logistic processes are based on many digital data collected from the material flow process. However, new methods and devices require new solutions which define new research directions. In this paper we describe the state of the art of the material handling researches and draw the role of the UMi-TWINN partner institutes in these fields. As a result of this H2020 EU project, scientific excellence of the University of Miskolc can be increased and new research activities will be started.


Children ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 526
Author(s):  
James Ditai ◽  
Aisling Barry ◽  
Kathy Burgoine ◽  
Anthony K. Mbonye ◽  
Julius N. Wandabwa ◽  
...  

The initial bedside care of premature babies with an intact cord has been shown to reduce mortality; there is evidence that resuscitation of term babies with an intact cord may also improve outcomes. This process has been facilitated by the development of bedside resuscitation surfaces. These new devices are unaffordable, however, in most of sub-Saharan Africa, where 42% of the world’s 2.4 million annual newborn deaths occur. This paper describes the rationale and design of BabySaver, an innovative low-cost mobile resuscitation unit, which was developed iteratively over five years in a collaboration between the Sanyu Africa Research Institute (SAfRI) in Uganda and the University of Liverpool in the UK. The final BabySaver design comprises two compartments; a tray to provide a firm resuscitation surface, and a base to store resuscitation equipment. The design was formed while considering contextual factors, using the views of individual women from the community served by the local hospitals, medical staff, and skilled birth attendants in both Uganda and the UK.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 432
Author(s):  
Guenther Retscher ◽  
Alexander Leb

A guidance and information service for a University library based on Wi-Fi signals using fingerprinting as chosen localization method is under development at TU Wien. After a thorough survey of suitable location technologies for the application it was decided to employ mainly Wi-Fi for localization. For that purpose, the availability, performance, and usability of Wi-Fi in selected areas of the library are analyzed in a first step. These tasks include the measurement of Wi-Fi received signal strengths (RSS) of the visible access points (APs) in different areas. The measurements were carried out in different modes, such as static, kinematic and in stop-and-go mode, with six different smartphones. A dependence on the positioning and tracking modes is seen in the tests. Kinematic measurements pose much greater challenges and depend significantly on the duration of a single Wi-Fi scan. For the smartphones, the scan durations differed in the range of 2.4 to 4.1 s resulting in different accuracies for kinematic positioning, as fewer measurements along the trajectories are available for a device with longer scan duration. The investigations indicated also that the achievable localization performance is only on the few meter level due to the small number of APs of the University own Wi-Fi network deployed in the library. A promising solution for performance improvement is the foreseen usage of low-cost Raspberry Pi units serving as Wi-Fi transmitter and receiver.


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ohbuchi Yoshihiro ◽  
Sasaki Takanori ◽  
Sumitomo Hiroaki ◽  
Saito Susumu ◽  
Tanaka Yoshiaki

Sapporo Waterworks Bureau's (SWB's) measures for CO2 reduction started in 1982 with a hydropower project at the Moiwa Water Purification Plant (MWPP) (cap. 155,000 m3/day). Operation of the generator was temporarily discontinued in 2001 for full-scale reconstruction of the water purification plant (WPP); after the completion of the reconstruction, the power generation equipment was renewed, and the operation resumed as a joint project with a private company in 2007. Power generation is on-site since the hydropower generator within the MWPP area provides energy consumed at the MWPP and the adjoining Waterworks Museum. This power generation is expected to create an energy saving effect equivalent to 1,500 tons of CO2 and over 10 million yen of annual net benefit. In order to increase the usage rate of low-cost, clean energy like hydropower at the WPP, SWB has made a series of adjustments to the operating methods of the plant. Then, as a result, the generation covers 97% of the energy used on-site at present. Furthermore, SWB is considering introducing other hydropower facilities of this kind that harness water transmission energy from the Shiraikawa WPP (cap. 650,000 m3/day) to the major distribution reservoirs.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (23) ◽  
pp. 6774
Author(s):  
Francisco José Vivas Fernández ◽  
José Sánchez Segovia ◽  
Ismael Martel Bravo ◽  
Carlos García Ramos ◽  
Daniel Ruiz Castilla ◽  
...  

Although the cure for the SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19) will come in the form of pharmaceutical solutions and/or a vaccine, one of the only ways to face it at present is to guarantee the best quality of health for patients, so that they can overcome the disease on their own. Therefore, and considering that COVID-19 generally causes damage to the respiratory system (in the form of lung infection), it is essential to ensure the best pulmonary ventilation for the patient. However, depending on the severity of the disease and the health condition of the patient, the situation can become critical when the patient has respiratory distress or becomes unable to breathe on his/her own. In that case, the ventilator becomes the lifeline of the patient. This device must keep patients stable until, on their own or with the help of medications, they manage to overcome the lung infection. However, with thousands or hundreds of thousands of infected patients, no country has enough ventilators. If this situation has become critical in the Global North, it has turned disastrous in developing countries, where ventilators are even more scarce. This article shows the race against time of a multidisciplinary research team at the University of Huelva, UHU, southwest of Spain, to develop an inexpensive, multifunctional, and easy-to-manufacture ventilator, which has been named ResUHUrge. The device meets all medical requirements and is developed with open-source hardware and software.


Author(s):  
Bing Yi ◽  
Renkai Sun ◽  
Long Liu ◽  
Yongfeng Song ◽  
Yinggui Zhang

Abstract It is a challenge for the dynamic inspection of railway route for freight car transporting cargo that out-of-gauge. One possible way is using the inspection frame installed in the inspection train to simulate the whole procedure for cargo transportation, which costs a lot of manpower and material resources as well as time. To overcome the above problem, this paper proposes an augmented reality (AR) based dynamic inspection method for visualized railway routing of freight car with out-of-gauge. First, the envelope model of the dynamic moving train with out-of-gauge cargo is generated by using the orbital spectrum of the railway, and the envelope model is matched with a piece of homemade calibration equipment located on the position of the railway that needs to be inspected. Then, the structure from motion (SFM) algorithm is used to reconstruct the environment where the virtual envelope model occludes the buildings or equipment along the railway. Finally, the distance function is adopted to calculate the distance between the obstacle and the envelope of the freight car with out-of-gauge, determining whether the freight car can pass a certain line. The experimental results show that the proposed method performs well for the route selection of out-of-gauge cargo transportation with low cost, high precision, and high efficiency. Moreover, the digital data of the environments along the railway and the envelope of the freight car can be reused, which will increase the digitalization and intelligence for route selection of out-of-gauge cargo transportation.


2016 ◽  
Vol Volume 112 (Number 7/8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret M. Koopman ◽  
Karin de Jager ◽  
◽  

Abstract Digital data archiving and research data management have become increasingly important for institutions in South Africa, particularly after the announcement by the National Research Foundation, one of the principal South African academic research funders, recommending these actions for the research that they fund. A case study undertaken during the latter half of 2014, among the biological sciences researchers at a South African university, explored the state of data management and archiving at this institution and the readiness of researchers to engage with sharing their digital research data through repositories. It was found that while some researchers were already engaged with digital data archiving in repositories, neither researchers nor the university had implemented systematic research data management.


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