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Nowadays virtual communities are spread all over the web, providing users a cyber-place to share a common purpose and interact with each other around the world. These environments face new challenges in order to provide their users with better tools to interact and fulfill the environment's goals. In this context we propose a model to create regulated interaction environments based on the theater...
Granuloma is a medical term for a ball-like collection of immune cells that attempts to remove foreign substances from a host organism. This response is a special type of inflammatory reaction common to a wide variety of diseases. Granulomas are an organised collection of macrophages, whose formation involves the stimulation of macrophages as well as T-Cells. Fault tolerance in swarm robotic systems...
In speech recognition systems language model (LMs) are often constructed by training and combining multiple n-gram models. They can be either used to represent different genres or tasks found in diverse text sources, or capture stochastic properties of different linguistic symbol sequences, for example, syllables and words. Unsupervised LM adaptation may also be used to further improve robustness...
We propose supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms to extract dialect discriminating phonetic rules and use these rules to adapt biphones to identify dialects. Despite many challenges (e.g., sub-dialect issues and no word transcriptions), we discovered dialect discriminating biphones compatible with the linguistic literature, while outperforming a baseline monophone system by 7.5% (relative)...
This paper demonstrates how unsupervised cross-lingual adaptation of HMM-based speech synthesis models may be performed without explicit knowledge of the adaptation data language. A two-pass decision tree construction technique is deployed for this purpose. Using parallel translated datasets, cross-lingual and intralingual adaptation are compared in a controlled manner. Listener evaluations reveal...
Many computer systems and applications must be “non-stop” that is, provide continuous and uninterrupted services. Meanwhile, Service-Based Applications (SBAs) should be dynamic in terms of adap¬tability in order to operate and evolve in highly dynamic environments. Thus, in general, non-stop service-based applications require the ability to be updated without interruption. Flurry of researches on...
Expressive speech synthesis has recently attracted great interest. Word-level emphasis is an important form of expressiveness to distinguish between what is the focus of the utterance, and what the computer system expects to be known by the user. Previous work on emphasis synthesis requires emphatic data collected specifically for that task. In this paper, a statistical approach that models and extracts...
During the recent years, a great change in engineering was replacing the conventional CAD/CAM/CAE systems with highly integrated product lifecycle management (PLM) systems. Earlier concentrations on specific fields of engineering replaced by a product concentration where an integrated product model has capability to accommodate all information needed during the lifecycle of the product from the first...
Although highly promising to meet the challenges of pervasive network security, self-managed protection has been little addressed in this setting. This paper adopts a policy-based management approach to the problem, and presents a policy-driven security framework called ASPF. Enforced authorization policies in a device are adapted according to the security context, both at the network and device levels...
Driven by the ever increasing need for mastering systems complexity in dynamic environments, self-adaptation becomes an important requirement for software systems. Crucially, system consistency must not be compromised during adaptation. In this paper, we approach behavioural adaptations of component-based systems and address the challenge of consistency preservation. To safely adapt an individual...
Due to the fact that the group playing a core role in the collaborative applications, it is necessary provide models which allow us to supply a shared workspace in which users perform their tasks using shared resources, to coordinate the interaction among users and between them and the shared resources, to facilitate the user access to the collaborative applications and shared resources, to support...
Since software systems become more and more complex, the efforts for developing, documenting and executing meaningful test cases increases. Testing is a vital, but time- and resource-consuming activity. To avoid running out of time or budget, new test methodologies had to be established in order to increase reliable, yet maintainable test scenarios. In the last years the Model-Driven idea matures...
In many cases, we would like to enhance the predefined adaptability of a running application, for example, to enable it to cope with a strange environment. To make such kind of runtime modifications is a challenging task. In existing engineering practices, the online policy upgrade approach just focuses on the modification of adaptation decision logic and lacks system-level means to assess the validity...
Reconfiguration and self-management are important properties for systems that operate in hazardous and uncontrolled environments, such as inter-planetary space. These systems need a reconfiguration mechanism that provides recovery from individual component failures as well as the ability to dynamically adapt to evolving mission goals. One way to provide this functionality is to define a model of alternative...
When engineering complex software systems, the key Architectural Design Decisions (ADD) and the reasoning underlying those decisions need to be fully understood by all stakeholders. Achieving such understanding usually requires the use of ADD management tools. Most existing ADD management tools apply prescriptive ADD models and do not provide sufficient customizability. However, forcing architects...
Summary form only given.The hierarchical Edge-Guided techniques (called E-Gfc) enhance the original E-G approach to support high-order text statistics. These consider the same graph-based model to represent an extended input alphabet obtained by using a variant of the Re-Pair algorithm. E-Gfc adapts the previous coding scheme to grasp the features of the bit-oriented canonical Huffman code chosen...
The enormous quantity of available information in penal justice systems and the urgent need for judges to accomplish their tasks in due time present a new challenge for juridical applications: to reduce explicit computer system interactions, filtering out information needed for a desired result. Context is knowledge that enables the definition of what is or is not relevant in a given situation. Applications...
This paper identifies and discusses a set of conceptual issues relating to institutional strategies for enabling the embedding of learner-centric hybrid learning processes within educational institutions. Starting with the Ecology of Resources model of learning, we identify "filters" that limit the adoption of new and hybrid learning processes in formal contexts. The related "boundary"...
A self adaptive communication protocol is proposed for peer to peer distributed computing. This protocol can configure itself automatically in function of application requirements and topology changes by choosing the most appropriate communication mode between peers. The protocol was designed in order to be used in conjunction with a decentralized environment for high performance distributed computing...
In a pervasive environment, it is essential for computing applications to be context-aware. However, one of the major challenges is the establishment of a generic and dynamic context model. Many different approaches to modeling the context exist, but an application- and domain-agnostic context model, that captures various types of context information and the dependencies between them, that could be...
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