Abstract

Drones are meticulously designed to control the aerodynamics of the flight, which can be negatively impacted by the use of rigid and heavy solar cells. In this review, it is shown that ultra-flexibility is needed such that the photovoltaic devices fully conform to the curved surfaces of the drone. In addition, stretchability would be necessary in advanced drones with foldable components. More details can be found in article number 2100587, Nazek El-Atab, Muhammad M. Hussain, and co-workers.

Abstract

Speech production can be regarded as a process where a time-varying vocal tract system (filter) is excited by a time-varying excitation. In addition to its linguistic message, the speech signal also carries information about, for example, the gender and age of the speaker. Moreover, the speech signal includes acoustical cues about several speaker traits, such as the emotional state and the state of health of the speaker. In order to understand the production of these acoustical cues by the human speech production mechanism and utilize this information in speech technology, it is necessary to extract features describing both the excitation and the filter of the human speech production mechanism. While the methods to estimate and parameterize the vocal tract system are well established, the excitation appears less studied. This article provides a review of signal processing approaches used for the extraction of excitation information from speech. This article highlights the importance of excitation information in the analysis and classification of phonation type and vocal emotions, in the analysis of nonverbal laughter sounds, and in studying pathological voices. Furthermore, recent developments of deep learning techniques in the context of extraction and utilization of the excitation information are discussed.

Abstract

AI applications find widespread use in a variety of domains. For further acceptance, mostly when multiple agents interact with the system, we must aim to preserve the privacy of participants information in such applications. Towards this, the Yao’s Millionaires’ problem (YMP), i.e., to determine the richer among two millionaires’ privately, finds relevance. This work presents a novel, practical, and verifiable solution to YMP, namely, Secure Comparison Protocol (SCP). We show that SCP achieves this comparison in a constant number of rounds, without using encryption and not requiring the participants’ continuous involvement. SCP uses semi-trusted third parties - which we refer to as privacy accountants - for the comparison, who do not learn any information about the values. That is, the probability of information leak is negligible in the problem size. In SCP, we also leverage the Ethereum network for

Abstract

Typical fingerprint recognition systems are comprised of a spoof detection module and a subsequent recognition module, running one after the other. In this paper, we reformulate the workings of a typical fingerprint recognition system. In particular, we posit that both spoof detection and fingerprint recognition are correlated tasks. Therefore, rather than performing the two tasks separately, we propose a joint model for spoof detection and matching1 to simultaneously perform both tasks without compromising the accuracy of either task. We demonstrate the capability of our joint model to obtain an authentication accuracy (1:1 matching) of TAR = 100% @ FAR = 0.1% on the FVC 2006 DB2A dataset while achieving a spoof detection ACE of 1.44% on the LiveDet 2015 dataset, both maintaining the performance of stand-alone methods. In practice, this reduces the time and memory requirements of the fingerprint recognition system by 50% and 40%, respectively; a significant advantage for recognition systems running on resource-constrained devices and communication channels.

Abstract

The rapid expansion of the development of hydropower in geologically and seismically active areas has numerous technological risks involved. Tunnels in rock masses have different stress and deformation responses than other engineering materials due to the existence of weak planes. This paper describes the use of numerical modeling approaches to assess tunnel deformation and tunnel stability under the earthquake loading for an 8.8 m horseshoe-shaped power tunnel excavated in Vishnugarh Pipalkoti, Uttaranchal, India. In this analysis, two different approaches are used to perform pseudo-static analyzes to understand the impacts of seismicity on tunnels. The rock mass is modeled as continuum in the first approach, and the tunnel is treated as a continuum equivalent with the inclusion of critical joint sets in the

Abstract

In this work, NiMg@OH/reduced graphene oxide (rGO) nanocomposites are synthesised through microwave-assisted synthetic methodology using various reducing agents. The structural features and surface morphology of synthesised materials are fully examined with different spectroscopy and microscopy techniques such as X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), UV-visible spectroscopy (UV-Vis), Raman and Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy. Further, this material was subjected to cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) techniques for the systematic study of the properties and impact of reducing agents at various percentages of rGO on the specific capacitance of synthesised materials. The presence of rGO gradually improves the charge transfer process at the electrode/electrolyte interface. Among these nanocomposite materials, maximum specific capacitance of 650.31 F/g was observed for NiMg@OH-1.5 wt% rGO synthesised using NH4OH reducing agent in 6 M KOH electrolyte. Hence, the result signifies these composite materials are a promising

Abstract

Automatic identification of emotions from a given music track would be of significant importance in the area of Music Information Retrieval. Several studies have found lyrics an important feature in the task of emotion classification [1]. Using lyrics, till date, a transformer-model which is a Natural-Language-Processing (NLP) based Deep-Learning model has achieved state-of-the-art results in identifying music emotion as represented in the Valence-Arousal (VA) space [2]. While transformer models rely on parsing the syntactic structure of sequential input data, we assume that semantic relations could be efficiently learned from these representations using novel capsule networks [3]. The “capsules” are akin to neuronal populations breaking down information into parts that mimics human processing of information by chunking for efficient encoding and evaluation of the stimulus. We extend the same logic further to say that capsule networks should be able to look at the semantic representation of each word in the lyrics of a song and should be able to learn the relationship between these words and the emotion that they represent as a group

Abstract

Personality is known to influence emotional experiences including those induced by music listening. Previous research has largely relied on self-report and models with limited terms, which may not adequately capture naturalistic behavior and experience. Data from the platform Last.fm allows for the analysis of listening behaviors using both musical features and semantic tags provided by listeners, for a more naturalistic exploration of personality, music and emotion.

Abstract

Large pretrained models have seen enormous success in extractive summarization tasks. In this work, we investigate the influence of pretraining on a BERT-based extractive summarization system for scientific documents. We derive significant performance improvements using an intermediate pretraining step that leverages existing summarization datasets and report state-of-the-art results on a recently released scientific summarization dataset, SciTLDR. We systematically analyze the intermediate pretraining step by varying the size and domain of the pretraining corpus, changing the length of the input sequence in the target task and varying target tasks. We also investigate how intermediate pretraining interacts with contextualized word embeddings trained on different domains.

Abstract

ECG analysis comprises the following steps: preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction, and classification of heart-beat instances to detect cardiac arrhythmias. This work focuses on the first three steps in cardiac arrhythmia analysis. Since no publicly available feature sets are available for the ECG arrhythmia detection problem, researchers have to explicitly extract the feature sets from the raw signals available in PhysioBank repository. In this work, the complete feature extraction pipeline has been developed using Matlab environment. Both the Matlab code and resulting feature sets for all records have been deposited and made publicly available in the Github repository. This is one of the major