The design of unmanned material collection systems requires a great deal of foresight and innovative design on the engineer's part in order to produce solutions to problems operators may encounter in the field. In this thesis, the development of a particulate collection system for use onboard a lightweight, helicopter deployable ground robot is presented. The Unmanned Systems Laboratory at Virginia Tech is developing a ground sampling robot to be carried in the payload pod of a Yamaha RMAX unmanned aerial vehicle. The robot's ultimate objective is to collect material samples from a hazardous environment. The pneumatic system presented here is a novel design developed to collect particulate without draining the resources of the robot. Vacuum samplers have been developed in the past, but they are large and cumbersome and require large amounts of electrical energy to operate. The pneumatic particulate collection system utilizes the kinetic energy from the release of compressed air to transport the particulate to a collection chamber. Consideration is given to the drop in pressure of the air supply tank as it empties, and a feasible air supply tank design is presented. Two forms of particulate collection are investigated experimentally: jet impingement and particle entrainment (i.e. steep attack angle and parallel flow). Turbulent, free jet characteristics and critical velocities of particles are studied. Ultimately, a final design is presented that effectively collects particulate material from the top 5/8" layer of both thick and thin particle beds. / Master of Science

An experimental study was conducted to measure the effects of oxygen entrainment on the transport of CO in building fires, and to develop a procedure for estimating CO levels during a building fire. Experiments were performed with an insulated 1/4-scale room connected to the side of a 1/4-scale hallway forming a L-shape. Measurements of CO, unburned hydrocarbons (UHC), CO₂, and O₂ concentrations and temperature were performed within the compartment, the hallway and post-hallway in the exhaust duct. The level of CO transported to remote locations from the burning room was hypothesized to be most significantly affected by the oxygen entrainment into the compartment fire gases entering the hallway. With a fixed size opening connecting the compartment to the hallway, the oxygen entrainment was varied by changing the depth of the oxygen deficient hallway upper-layer. In experiments where compartment fire gases entered the hallway completely surrounded by oxygen deficient combustion gases, post-hallway CO yields were measured to be as much as 23% greater than CO yields measured inside the compartment, despite the presence of external burning. With deep upper-layers in the hallway, geometric effects were not observed to significantly affect the transported level of CO. Instead, the CO level was a function of the compartment stoichiometry and the occurrence of external burning. / Ph. D.

Nesta tese de doutorado abordamos modelos cognitivos de percepção da métrica musical e entrainment a partir de questões musicológicas, como a ambiguidade métrica decorrente de exemplos da literatura. Partindo de uma verificação do estado da arte em pesquisas rítmicas que envolvem o estudo de anacruses, realizamos um percurso experimental que investiga a efetividade da chamada percepção da acentuação subjetiva revelada por Povel e Okkerman (1981), por acreditarmos que o fenômeno da acentuação subjetiva esteja envolvido na desambiguação da percepção de referenciais métricos dúbios. Para tanto, desenvolvemos uma metodologia de quantificação das similaridades entre os padrões de acentuação coletados em grupo universitário da cidade de São Paulo e os padrões de referência da literatura, sobretudo de Povel e Essens (1985). Estes experimentos revelaram que há uma tendência significativa à percepção da acentuação subjetiva predominantemente em grupo sem estudo formal de música. Por outro lado, os estudantes de música revelaram uma tendência de acentuação mais relacionada à pulsação musical. / In this doctoral thesis we address cognitive models of perception of musical meter and entrainment from musicological issues, such as the metric ambiguity arising from examples of literature. Based on a state-of-the-art check on rhythmic researches involving the study of anacruses, we conducted an experimental study that investigates the effectiveness of the so-called subjective accent revealed by Povel and Okkerman (1981), because we believe that the phenomenon of subjective accent is Involved in the disambiguation of dubious beat references perception. Therefore, we developed a methodology to quantify the similarities between the accentuation patterns collected in university group of São Paulo and the literature reference standards, especially Povel and Essens (1985). These experiments revealed that there is a significant tendency to subjective perception of accent predominantly in people without formal music study. On the other hand, the students of music revealed a tendency of accentuation more related to the musical beat.

Title: Novel Methods for Natural Language Generation in Spoken Dialogue Systems Author: Ondřej Dušek Department: Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics Supervisor: Ing. Mgr. Filip Jurčíček, Ph.D., Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics Abstract: This thesis explores novel approaches to natural language generation (NLG) in spoken dialogue systems (i.e., generating system responses to be presented the user), aiming at simplifying adaptivity of NLG in three respects: domain portability, language portability, and user-adaptive outputs. Our generators improve over state-of-the-art in all of them: First, our gen- erators, which are based on statistical methods (A* search with perceptron ranking and sequence-to-sequence recurrent neural network architectures), can be trained on data without fine-grained semantic alignments, thus simplifying the process of retraining the generator for a new domain in comparison to previous approaches. Second, we enhance the neural-network-based gener- ator so that it takes preceding dialogue context into account (i.e., user's way of speaking), thus producing user-adaptive outputs. Third, we evaluate sev- eral extensions to the neural-network-based generator designed for producing output in morphologically rich languages, showing improvements in Czech generation. In...

Nesta tese de doutorado abordamos modelos cognitivos de percepção da métrica musical e entrainment a partir de questões musicológicas, como a ambiguidade métrica decorrente de exemplos da literatura. Partindo de uma verificação do estado da arte em pesquisas rítmicas que envolvem o estudo de anacruses, realizamos um percurso experimental que investiga a efetividade da chamada percepção da acentuação subjetiva revelada por Povel e Okkerman (1981), por acreditarmos que o fenômeno da acentuação subjetiva esteja envolvido na desambiguação da percepção de referenciais métricos dúbios. Para tanto, desenvolvemos uma metodologia de quantificação das similaridades entre os padrões de acentuação coletados em grupo universitário da cidade de São Paulo e os padrões de referência da literatura, sobretudo de Povel e Essens (1985). Estes experimentos revelaram que há uma tendência significativa à percepção da acentuação subjetiva predominantemente em grupo sem estudo formal de música. Por outro lado, os estudantes de música revelaram uma tendência de acentuação mais relacionada à pulsação musical. / In this doctoral thesis we address cognitive models of perception of musical meter and entrainment from musicological issues, such as the metric ambiguity arising from examples of literature. Based on a state-of-the-art check on rhythmic researches involving the study of anacruses, we conducted an experimental study that investigates the effectiveness of the so-called subjective accent revealed by Povel and Okkerman (1981), because we believe that the phenomenon of subjective accent is Involved in the disambiguation of dubious beat references perception. Therefore, we developed a methodology to quantify the similarities between the accentuation patterns collected in university group of São Paulo and the literature reference standards, especially Povel and Essens (1985). These experiments revealed that there is a significant tendency to subjective perception of accent predominantly in people without formal music study. On the other hand, the students of music revealed a tendency of accentuation more related to the musical beat.

Neural entrainment quite recently became considered an important mechanism used by the brain to process stimuli with periodic qualities, such as the frequency and duration time of signals reaching sensory organs. An increasing amount of data strongly implies that the brain might be using neural entrainment as a mechanism to either directly process speech and/or to facilitate speech interpretation. Neural entrainment is therefore a promising marker to use for research of speech perception. This literature review aims to summarize the most recent findings within this area with the end-goal to be used as a basis for designing an EEG experiment intended to analyze speech perception as a means to distinguish human voices.    For this reason, data was collected from the scientific databases Europe PMC, Academic Search Premier, PsycINFO, PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science, where the keywords “EEG” + either the phrase “neural entrainment”, “neural oscillation”, or “cortical oscillation” were used to gather articles. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were then applied and the data was analyzed with the intention to answer the following research questions: “is it possible to observe neural entrainment to human voice/speech using EEG?”, “if so, what are the possibilities to use such neural entrainment as a marker for differentiating human voices from each other?” and “what is the nature of the mechanisms used by the brain to attain this entrainment?”. The resulting data from the articles indicated that, in order to yield reliable results when investigating neural entrainment to speech, the technique for analysis of brain activity could be done with EEG, a number of participants between 15-30 persons is enough, the spectral bands of interest are delta (<3 Hz), theta (4-8 Hz), beta (15-35 Hz) and gamma (>40 Hz), the method of analysis could be looking at both frequency and amplitude in the speech envelope, and finally the anatomical areas for investigating the brain’s ability to distinguish human voices using speech entrainment could be either areas within the auditory cortex or prefrontal areas involved in behavioral responses to speech processing.

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Direct Contact Condensation between steam and water as well as bubble entrainment below the water surface play an important role in different accident scenarios for light water reactors. One example is the emergency core cooling water injection into a two-phase mixture. It has to be considered for example to evaluate potential pressurized thermal shock phenomena. This report documents experiments conducted in flat basin inside the TOPFLOW pressure chamber aiming on the generation of a database useful for CFD model development and validation. It comprises 3 different setups: condensation at a stratified flow of sub-cooled water, condensation at a sub-cooled water jet and a combination of both phenomena with steam bubble entrainment. The documentation includes all details on the experimental set up, on experimental conditions (experimental matrices), on the conduction of the experiments, on measuring techniques used and on data evaluation procedures. In addition, selected results are presented.

Thesis (MMus (Music))--University of Stellenbosch, 2009. / The evolutionary origins of music, defined as “an intentional action in which complex, learned vocalizations (and/or instrumentally produced sound) are combined with the movement of the body in synchrony to a beat” is investigated through an appraisal of the musilanguage theory and relevant literature. The biological adaptations allowing the production and perception of music are identified and their evolutionary histories investigated. The critical adaptations that made rhythmical body movement possible evolved around 1.6 million years ago. These include habitual bipedalism and changes in the vestibular system. There is almost no fossil evidence to inform on the timing and nature of the complex, learned vocalization. However, that the thoracic vertebrate canal had modern proportions by 600 000 years ago indicates that archaic humans were able to achieve the respiratory control necessary to sing. The size of this canal is a proxy for the number of nerve cells that control respiration via the intercostal and abdominal muscles. Musicality is essential to the human mind. Infants are born with rudimentary musical skills with regard to melody, temporal sequences and vocal and bodily imitation. These capabilities are central to the newborns’ innate ability to elicit care by synchronizing their vocal and bodily actions with that of the caregivers. Musical rhythm is further used to entrain bodily and neural oscillations and this permit the creation of trust and social bonding. It is concluded that protomusic developed between 1.6 million and 600 000 years ago. Protomusic consisted of entrained rhythmical whole body movements initially combined with grunt-like vocalizations. The evidence investigated cannot be used to infer the origins of modern music. KEYWORDS: Music, Evolution, Synchronisation, Melody, Dance, Bipedality, Vestibular system, Thoracic vertebrate canal, Infant-directed communication, Neural entrainment