The increasing need for more natural human machine interfaces has generated intensive research work directed toward designing and implementing natural speech enabled systems. The Spectrum of speech recognition applications ranges from understanding simple commands to getting all the information in the speech signal such as words, meaning and emotional state of the user. Because it is very hard to constrain a speaker when expressing a voice-based request, speech recognition systems have to be able to handle (by filtering out) out of vocabulary words in the users speech utterance, and only extract the necessary information (keywords) related to the application to deal correctly with the user query. In this thesis, we investigate an approach that can be deployed in keyword spotting systems. We propose a confidence measure feedback module that provides confidence values to be compared against existing Automatic Speech Recognizer word confidences. The feedback module mainly consists of a soft computing tool-based system using fuzzy Gaussian mixture models to identify all English phonemes. Testing has been carried out on the JULIUS system and the preliminary results show that our feedback module outperforms JULIUS confidence measures for both the correct spotted words and the falsely mapped ones. The results obtained could be refined even further using other type of confidence measure and the whole system could be used for a Natural Language Understanding based module for speech understanding applications.

Background: The rehabilitation of older persons is often complicated by increased frailty and medical complexity – these in turn present challenges for the development of health information systems. Objective investigation and comparison of the effectiveness of geriatric rehabilitation services requires information systems that are comprehensive, reliable, valid, and sensitive to clinically relevant changes in older persons. The Functional Independence Measure is widely used in rehabilitation settings – in Canada this is used as the central component of the National Rehabilitation Reporting System of the Canadian Institute of Health Information. An alternative system has been developed by the interRAI consortium. We conducted a literature review to compare the development and measurement properties of these two systems and performed a direct empirical comparison of the operating characteristics and validity of the FIM motor and the ADL items on the PAC in a sample of older adults receiving rehabilitation. Methods: For the first objective english language literature published between 1983 (initial development of the FIM) and 2008 was searched using Medline and CINAHL databases, and the reference lists of retrieved articles. Additionally, attention was paid to the ability of the two systems to address issues particularly relevant to older rehabilitation clients, such as medical complexity, comorbidity, and responsiveness to small but clinically meaningful improvements. For the second objective we used Rasch analysis and responsiveness statistics to investigate and compare the instruments dimensionality, item difficulty, item fit, differential item function, number of response options and ability to detect clinically relevant change. Results: The majority of FIM articles studied inpatient rehabilitation settings; while the majority of interRAI/MDS articles focused on nursing home settings. There is evidence supporting the reliability of both instruments. There were few articles that investigated the construct validity of the interRAI/MDS. The analysis showed that the FIM may be slightly more responsive than the PAC, especially in the MSK patients. However, both scales had similar limitations with regards the large ceiling effect and many unnecessary response options. Conclusions: Additional psychometric research is needed on both the FIM and MDS, especially with regard to their use in different settings and ability to discriminate between subjects with functional higher ability.

Resilience engineering first appeared as a new approach for both system design and system safety in the last decade. One of the first substantive publications on resilience as applied to engineering was Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts [Hollnagel et al. 2006]. Hollnagel, Woods, and Leveson developed the basic concepts behind resilience engineering in order to understand and prevent tragedies such as the Columbia Challenger accident and the September 11 terrorist attack.<p> In its present stage, resilience engineering has several fundamental problems. 1. There is not an appropriate definition for resilience. 2. The differences between resilience and other similar concepts are not clarified. 3. There is no quantitative method which can measure resilience. The three questions need to be addressed in order to advance the concept of resilience engineering and form a theoretical concept to an applied science. These three issues then form the foundation of this thesis.<p> As a first step, a resilience definition is presented based on the concepts of system function and damage. Then, the differences between resilience and five similar concepts (reliability, robustness, repairing, redundancy, and sustainability) are clearly elaborated. As a last step, a method for quantifying resilience is proposed in the form of a resilience index. This method exclusively measures system resilience by analyzing the system recoverability from two points of view: reconfiguration and replacement of components.<p> In order to illustrate the approach to and definitions of resilience, an actual application is considered: a water pumping station operated by SaskWater in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (the Clarence Booster Station). This pumping station is a complicated system consisting of mechanical electrical and chemical subsystems. The resilience of Clarence Booster Station is analyzed using the proposed definition of resilience and resilience index.<p> This thesis is just an initial step establishing a comprehensive definition (qualitatively and quantitatively) for resilience. The resilience index so defined in this work appears to have potential but much more scrutiny and refinement must be pursued to ensure that it is truly applicable to more universal engineering applications.

The Internet has become popular and many traditional services have changed into web service stage by stage. The web server with single architecture is no longer satisfying a large number of user requests and the cluster-based web server architecture becomes another suitable solution. Dispatch mechanism play an important role in web server cluster and there are many load balancing policies have been proposed recently. But, these research has only simulation, performance of these policies operate in a real system is unknown. In these simulation all has an assumption that web traffic is heavy-tailed distribution. However, in our experience, the assumption has changed. Web content has become large because network bandwidth increasing and more and more large files like video¡Baudio and tail software, etc. coming in. We defined this web traffic is a data-intensive workload. In this study, we use a real and data-intensive web site to measure and compare these scheduling policies.

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Abstract The valuation of equity swap under the condition of risk neutral is similar to the forward interest rate swap with the same period. Therefore, its valuation formula is consistent to interest rate swap model in the traditional methods. But it is not the same as in pricing the cross-currency equity swap. The dymanic prices of foreign stock index and exchange rate, and the correlation coefficients between exchange rates and foreign assets also affect the swap rate. In this paper, we extend Chance and Rich(1998)¡¦s valuation formula of equity swaps, and apply Amin (1991)¡BAmin and Bodurtha(1995)¡BLin(1997)¡¦s dymanic prices of assets in discrete time period. To derive the risk neutral valuation formula of equity swap, it uses the method of transfer probability measure. This study finds the expected return of foreign stock index in the no arbitrage condition, in addition equal to foreign forward interest rate with the same period , must be add a correction term to reflect the exchange rate risk and the transfer of forward martingale measure. This paper also derives the pricing formula of equity swaptions¡Bcaps¡Bfloors¡Bvariable notional principal and blended equity swap. Finally, we find the volatility of foreign forward interest rate is the most important factor of pricing the swap rate from numerical simulation. And if the correlation of the volatility of exchange rate and foreign stock index¡Bthe correlation of the volatility of exchange rate and foreign forward interest rate are negative, the swap rate will be higher.

To detect dependence among variables is an essential task in many scientific investigations. In this study we propose a new measure of association, the coefficient of intrinsic dependence (CID), which takes value in [0,1] and faithfully reflects the full range of dependence for two random variables. The CID is free of distributional and functional assumptions. It can be easily implemented and extended to multivariate situations. Traditionally, the correlation coefficient is the preferred measure of association. However, it's effectiveness is considerably compromised when the random variables are not normally distributed. Besides, the interpretation of the correlation coefficient is difficult when the data are categorical. By contrast, the CID is free of these problems. In our simulation studies, we find that the ability of the CID in differentiating different levels of dependence remains robust across different data types (categorical or continuous) and model features (linear or curvilinear). Also, the CID is particularly effective when the dependence is strong, making it a powerful tool for variable selection. As an illustration, the CID is applied to variable selection in two aspects: classification and prediction. The analysis of actual data from a study of breast cancer gene expression is included. For the classification problem, we identify a pair of genes that best classify a patient's prognosis signature, and for the prediction problem, we identify a pair of genes that best relates to the expression of a specific gene.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2008. Graduate Programme in Mathematics and Statistics. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-167). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR45921

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The current models for stigma measurement are disease-specific and created for use with adults, despite the fact that stigma may be experienced also by adolescents and may be layered, and not simply the result of one disease. Stigma in adolescents may effect their life outcome, as many emotional and social changes are happening at this point in life, therefore developing a measure to address stigma in youth is important. Focus groups of youth will be chosen based on sexual orientation, ethnic minority, street involvement, visible physical disability and history of sexual exploitation, with an eye to ensuring the sample contains individuals experiencing layered stigma. The result of research will be an adolescent- specific measure of perceived stigma, enacted stigma and internalized stigma that can be used to understand how stigma effects the perceptions, risk-behaviours and futures of youth, and to develop stigma reduction strategies.