Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1993. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, April 30, 1993." Also available in print.

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1996. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, April 29, 1996." Also available in print.

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, 14th May, 1999." Also available in print.

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2006. / Advisor: Julie Stierwalt, Florida State University, College of Communication, Dept. of Communication Disorders. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 22, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 26 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)—Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1981. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 185-192). / This electronic version was scanned from a copy of the thesis on file at the Speech Communication Group. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Whitaker Health Sciences Fund.

Thesis (M.S.L.P.)--Duquesne University, 2005. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-76) and index.

In the spirit of interdisciplinary critical accounting studies and in light of the IASB’s on-going Conceptual Framework project, this thesis problematises and proposes a re-conceptualisation of two fundamental financial accounting practices: recognition and measurement of assets. In order to do so, the thesis steps outside financial accounting’s conventional disciplinary resources of economics and finance. It proposes to mobilise Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiology, which, defined as a theory of social sign systems, provides a meaningful delineation of financial accounting as a purposeful sign technology. With such a lens and with a research approach of going beyond IASB’s proclaimed concepts and narrative to its nuanced prescriptions, the thesis challenges taken-for-granted assumptions with regard to the market-based nature of Fair Value measurement and the characterisation of judgement involved in recognition. With respect to value measurement, the thesis harness semiology to fracture the dichotomy between the market and the entity perspectives, which is generally assumed in extant accounting research and policy-making. It is shown how the IASB’s Fair Value measurement prescriptions demonstrate semiology's two-dimensional 'value constellation', where the asset’s value is not merely relational (and not intrinsic) but, importantly, relational in two distinct dimensions. It is a product, first, of differentiation from other values in the market and, second, of interrelation with other values in the specific entity. With a semiological theorisation of the financial statement, market-based and entity-specific perspectives serve as complementary inputs rather than contradictory outputs. With respect to recognition, the thesis proposes to shift the locus of judgment from questions of recognition thresholds (probability and reliability) to the under-investigated issue of the asset’s separability from the firm’s general cash flow. It is shown how the IASB’s procedures manifest the semiological principle of ‘reciprocal articulation’: accounting entities (e.g., ‘assets’) are not passive representations of pre-existing economic resources, but rather a product of delimiting – carving out – the asset/resource from the broader category (or the entire firm). With such theorisation, the crux of recognition is separability, which is never natural or technical, but rather anchorless and reciprocal. The thesis thereby sheds light on the plasticity of recognition for both tangible and intangible assets. With its theory-informed analysis the thesis offers a set of conceptual instruments – value constellation and reciprocal articulation – as the logic of the balance sheet as a sign technology: its semio-logic. With Saussure’s ground-breaking linguistic semiology, it offers a parallel financial-numeric semiology: an Accounting Semiology.

abstract: Audio signals, such as speech and ambient sounds convey rich information pertaining to a user’s activity, mood or intent. Enabling machines to understand this contextual information is necessary to bridge the gap in human-machine interaction. This is challenging due to its subjective nature, hence, requiring sophisticated techniques. This dissertation presents a set of computational methods, that generalize well across different conditions, for speech-based applications involving emotion recognition and keyword detection, and ambient sounds-based applications such as lifelogging. The expression and perception of emotions varies across speakers and cultures, thus, determining features and classification methods that generalize well to different conditions is strongly desired. A latent topic models-based method is proposed to learn supra-segmental features from low-level acoustic descriptors. The derived features outperform state-of-the-art approaches over multiple databases. Cross-corpus studies are conducted to determine the ability of these features to generalize well across different databases. The proposed method is also applied to derive features from facial expressions; a multi-modal fusion overcomes the deficiencies of a speech only approach and further improves the recognition performance. Besides affecting the acoustic properties of speech, emotions have a strong influence over speech articulation kinematics. A learning approach, which constrains a classifier trained over acoustic descriptors, to also model articulatory data is proposed here. This method requires articulatory information only during the training stage, thus overcoming the challenges inherent to large-scale data collection, while simultaneously exploiting the correlations between articulation kinematics and acoustic descriptors to improve the accuracy of emotion recognition systems. Identifying context from ambient sounds in a lifelogging scenario requires feature extraction, segmentation and annotation techniques capable of efficiently handling long duration audio recordings; a complete framework for such applications is presented. The performance is evaluated on real world data and accompanied by a prototypical Android-based user interface. The proposed methods are also assessed in terms of computation and implementation complexity. Software and field programmable gate array based implementations are considered for emotion recognition, while virtual platforms are used to model the complexities of lifelogging. The derived metrics are used to determine the feasibility of these methods for applications requiring real-time capabilities and low power consumption. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 2015

abstract: The purpose of this study was to identify acoustic markers that correlate with accurate and inaccurate /r/ production in children ages 5-8 using signal processing. In addition, the researcher aimed to identify predictive acoustic markers that relate to changes in /r/ accuracy. A total of 35 children (23 accurate, 12 inaccurate, 8 longitudinal) were recorded. Computerized stimuli were presented on a PC laptop computer and the children were asked to do five tasks to elicit spontaneous and imitated /r/ production in all positions. Files were edited and analyzed using a filter bank approach centered at 40 frequencies based on the Mel-scale. T-tests were used to compare spectral energy of tokens between accurate and inaccurate groups and additional t-tests were used to compare duration of accurate and inaccurate files. Results included significant differences between the accurate and inaccurate productions of /r/, notable differences in the 24-26 mel bin range, and longer duration of inaccurate /r/ than accurate. Signal processing successfully identified acoustic features of accurate and inaccurate production of /r/ and candidate predictive markers that may be associated with acquisition of /r/. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Communication Disorders 2017

A diadococinesia (DDC) é a habilidade para realizar repetições rápidas de padrões relativamente simples de contrações musculares opostas, utilizada para avaliar a maturação e a integração neuromotora. A DDC oral e laríngea, associada aos demais procedimentos de avaliação fonoaudiológica, é um importante recurso na compreensão das manifestações dos distúrbios da comunicação. A partir disso, objetivou-se estabelecer valores de referência quanto à normalidade em relação aos resultados da avaliação da DDC oral e laríngea nos diferentes gêneros e faixas etárias de crianças falantes do português brasileiro, bem como analisar a diferença entre os gêneros e faixas etárias. Participaram 150 crianças, distribuídas nas faixas de oito, nove e dez anos de idade. A DDC oral foi avaliada por meio da repetição de \"pa\", ta\", \"ca\" e \"pataca\" e a DDC laríngea, pela repetição de \"a\" e \"i\". Foram utilizados os programas Motor Speech Profile Advanced e Mult Speech Main Program, da Kay Elemetrics Corp. Os parâmetros da DDC foram apresentados como média, mediana e percentil para cada emissão. A comparação entre gênero e idade foi realizada por meio da Análise de Variância a dois critérios e do teste de Tuckey. Quanto à DDC oral, a análise estatística dos resultados demonstrou que, com o avanço da idade: houve aumento do número de emissões de monossílabas por segundo, redução do tempo médio entre essas emissões; houve aumento do coeficiente de variação do período durante a sílaba \"ca\" e aumento do coeficiente de variação do pico da intensidade para a sílaba \"ta\". O número de emissões por segundo da monossílaba \"ta\" foi maior para as meninas que para os meninos. Na emissão da trissílaba, o número de emissões por segundo foi diferente entre os gêneros e, considerando-se os subgrupos de idade e gênero, as meninas de oito anos apresentaram menor número de emissões que todos os demais subgrupos. Quanto à DDC laríngea, com o avanço da idade houve aumento do número de emissões por segundo e períodos mais curtos da vogal \"i\" para as meninas; menor valor do desvio padrão do período e da perturbação do período para essa mesma vogal. Conclui-se que foi possível estabelecer os valores de normalidade da DDC oral e laríngea para o grupo de crianças estudado e que houve diferenças quanto ao gênero e à idade, o que demonstra que o desenvolvimento da DDC oral e laríngea deve ser considerado na avaliação da comunicação oral de crianças. / Diadochokinesis (DDK) is the ability to perform fast repetitions of relatively simple patterns of opposite muscle contractions and it is employed for the evaluation of the neuromotor maturation and integration. The oral and laryngeal DDK, associated with other procedures for the speech evaluation, are important resources in the understanding of communication disorders. Thus, this study was conducted to establish reference values of normality of the outcomes of oral and laryngeal DDK for the different genders and age ranges of Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children, as well as to analyze the presence of difference between genders and among age ranges. The study sample was composed of 150 children aged 8, 9 and 10 years. The oral DDK was evaluated by repetition of \"pa\", \"ta\", \"ka\" and \"pataka\", and laryngeal DDK was assessed by repetition of \"a\" and \"i\". The softwares Motor Speech Profile Advanced and Mult Speech Main Program, of Kay Elemetrics Corp, were employed analysis. The DDK parameters were presented as mean, median and percentile for each emission. Comparison among genders and age ranges was performed by twoway analysis of variance and the Tukey test. Statistical analysis of oral DDK revealed with an increase in age: there were an increase in the number of emissions of monosyllables per second, a reduced mean time between emissions; an increase in the coefficient of variation of the period during the syllable \"ka\", and an increase in the coefficient of variation of the peak intensity for the syllable \"ta\". The number of emissions of the syllable \"ta\" per second was higher for females than to males. In the trisyllabic emission, the number of emissions per second was different among the genders. Besides, regarding the subgroups of age and gender, the 8 year-old-girls showed a decreased number of emissions than the other subgroups. With regard to laryngeal DDK, there was an increased number of emissions per second and shorter periods of vowel \"i\" for females with the increase in age; there was also a smaller standard deviation and perturbations of the period on for this same vowel. It was concluded that it was possible to establish values of normality of oral and laryngeal DDK for the group of children investigated; and that there were differences as to gender and age, which demonstrates that the development of oral and laryngeal DDK should be considered in the evaluation of oral communication of children.