<p>This thesis investigates the use of mobile phones as service-delivery devices in a sign language machine translation system. Four sign language visualization methods were evaluated on mobile phones. Three of the methods were synthetic sign language visualization methods. Three factors were considered: the intelligibility of sign language, as rendered by the method / the power consumption / and the bandwidth usage associated with each method. The average intelligibility rate was 65%, with some methods achieving intelligibility rates of up to 92%. The average le size was 162 KB and, on average, the power consumption increased to 180% of the idle state, across all methods. This research forms part of the Integration of Signed and Verbal Communication: South African Sign Language Recognition and Animation (SASL) project at the University of the Western Cape and serves as an integration platform for the group's research. In order to perform this research a machine translation system that uses mobile phones as service-delivery devices was developed as well as a 3D Avatar for mobile phones. It was concluded that mobile phones are suitable service-delivery platforms for sign language machine translation systems.</p>

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Communication

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Communication

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Communication

The Objective of this thesis is to address some interesting problems in the Indian cellular services market. The first problem we address relates to identifying important change points that marked the evolution of the telecom market since Indian Independence. We use the data on per-capita availability of telephones in India to this effect. We identify important change points that mapped to the computerization move in 1989, the liberalization and globalization policies starting from 1991 and subsequently the introduction of NTP 1997 and NTP 1999. We also identify the important change points that mark the growth of cellular services subscriber base in India. We map change points detected to some of the important macro level policy initiatives that were taken by TRAI. The second problem we address is the assessment of policy interventions on the growth of cellular subscriber base in India. We model the impact of two important policy interventions namely, the NTP 1999 and its spill-over policy the entry of the fourth player into the market to offer services. We model the abrupt temporary, abrupt permanent and gradual permanent impacts of these interventions individually and in a coupled manner. We are arguably the first to use the intervention analysis and change point analysis to study the Indian telecom market. The third problem relates to the most challenging task of forecasting the growth of cellular services subscribers in India. We use novel machine learning techniques like ε-SVR and ν-SVR and compare its performance with ANN and ARIMA using standard performance metrics. Initially, we venture to predict the aggregate subscriber growth of cellular mobile subscribers in India using the SVR techniques. This would be of interest to the policy makers from a strategic standpoint. Subsequently, we predict the marginal(monthly) subscriber growth using SVR and tabulate the results for varying depths of forecasting which would be of interest to service providers form an operation standpoint. We find that the SVR techniques performed better than ANN and ARIMA particularly with respect to forward or out-sample forecasting when the time periods increase. The final problem involves a differential game model in an oligopoly set up for the telecom service providers who tried to optimize their advertisement innovation mix in order to maximize their discounted flow of profits. We consider the situation where the service providers make Cournot conjectures about the action of their rivals. The firms would not enter into agreements or form cartels. The firms choose the quantity they want to sell simultaneously. The essence of the Cournot conjecture was that though it was a quantity based competition, no single firm could unilaterally try to improve the total quantity sold in the market. Every firm made only one decision and did so when other firms were simultaneously making decisions. We have come across papers that considered either advertisement or product/process innovation separately but not together. We incorporate both these control variables with the inverse demand function as the state variable. We propose an open-loop solution that is dependent on time. We conduct experiments with various combinations of churn and spill-over rates of advertisement and innovation and thereby get some managerial insights.

<p>This thesis investigates the use of mobile phones as service-delivery devices in a sign language machine translation system. Four sign language visualization methods were evaluated on mobile phones. Three of the methods were synthetic sign language visualization methods. Three factors were considered: the intelligibility of sign language, as rendered by the method / the power consumption / and the bandwidth usage associated with each method. The average intelligibility rate was 65%, with some methods achieving intelligibility rates of up to 92%. The average le size was 162 KB and, on average, the power consumption increased to 180% of the idle state, across all methods. This research forms part of the Integration of Signed and Verbal Communication: South African Sign Language Recognition and Animation (SASL) project at the University of the Western Cape and serves as an integration platform for the group's research. In order to perform this research a machine translation system that uses mobile phones as service-delivery devices was developed as well as a 3D Avatar for mobile phones. It was concluded that mobile phones are suitable service-delivery platforms for sign language machine translation systems.</p>

There is evidence that athermal radiofrequency radiation can alter Heat Shock Protein (HSP) expression or protein phosphorylation, or alter MAP kinase signalling. Effects of long-term exposure in brain tissue due to repeated HSP perturbation (eg an inhibition of apoptosis) have been hypothesised (French et al, 2001). This study aimed to investigate the RNA expression profile (12,000 genes) and HSP family protein expression levels after either acute 1-hour or chronic 4-day intermittent exposures to simulated GSM radiation in a human primary fibroblast model. The results found minimal or no effects of GSM. Flasks were exposed to 900 MHz (217 Hz modulation) at 0.18 W/kg SAR within a Transverse Electromagnetic Mode chamber (TEM cell). Cultures rested for 2 hours before exposures. Affymetrix U95A microarray analysis of a single pilot set of experiments showed that about 40 genes were reported as upregulated &gt=2.5 fold in each condition. There was no evidence of altered expression of any MAPK-associated genes. Target genes reported in both conditions (CBFA2T1, ZNF148, ITGA1), and genes altered in one condition (CCS, PLEC1, BIRC5), and marginally altered HSP72 were selected for PCR analysis. No other members of the HSP family were altered. In three replicate experiments assayed by real-time PCR, six genes were either unchanged or showed randomly variable expression. However HSP72 RNA showed possible consistent slight upregulation of 1.37 +/- 0.21 in the chronic condition. Western immunoblots of HSP-60, -70, -72 and -V90 proteins showed no significant changes 5 hours after exposure. In preliminary studies using a serum starvation protocol, ERK-1 phosphorylation was unaltered after 5 or 30 minutes GSM (single experiments). When flasks were transiently cooled, ERK-1 phosphorylation was increased 20 minutes later, indicating a source of artefact in some protocols. An inflammatory challenge experiment with a low-dose of the cytokine IL-1???? found that acute GSM exposure post-challenge inhibited NF????B-mediated GRO???? induction by 1.5 fold (2 experiments). Preconditioning with mild heat induces transient inhibition of both NF????B signalling and apoptosis. Other studies indicate that EMF exposures similarly evoke cytoprotection. It is suggested that GSM evoked cytoprotective signalling in this inflammatory model.

Masters of Science / This thesis investigates the use of mobile phones as service-delivery devices in a sign language machine translation system. Four sign language visualization methods were evaluated on mobile phones. Three of the methods were synthetic sign language visualization methods. Three factors were considered: the intelligibility of sign language, as rendered by the method; the power consumption; and the bandwidth usage associated with each method. The average intelligibility rate was 65%, with some methods achieving intelligibility rates of up to 92%. The average size was 162 KB and, on average, the power consumption increased to 180% of the idle state, across all methods. This research forms part of the Integration of Signed and Verbal Communication: South African Sign Language Recognition and Animation (SASL) project at the University of the Western Cape and serves as an integration platform for the group's research. In order to perform this research a machine translation system that uses mobile phones as service-delivery devices was developed as well as a 3D Avatar for mobile phones. It was concluded that mobile phones are suitable service-delivery platforms for sign language machine translation systems. / South Africa

Orientador: Plínio Almeida Barbosa / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-27T03:40:06Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Passetti_RenataRegina_M.pdf: 2198292 bytes, checksum: 75f3471d8eeffbfb0346d7705e4ea136 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015 / Resumo: Esta dissertação avalia os efeitos causados ao sinal da fala pela transmissão telefônica de linhas móveis e, com isso, busca determinar o grau de modificação fonético-acústica intralocutor causado pelo filtro de banda do canal telefônico à voz habitual e os efeitos que a transmissão telefônica exerce sobre as vogais orais do português brasileiro, pelo estudo de parâmetros acústicos que são afetados por esse tipo de transmissão. As análises investigaram quais características acústicas eram modificadas e quais permaneciam inalteradas na fala de indivíduos diante da utilização de telefones celulares quando comparadas a gravações diretas. O corpus constitui-se de gravações de 10 locutores do sexo masculino, realizadas de forma simultânea nas condições via celular e direta, pelo posicionamento de um microfone em frente aos sujeitos enquanto falavam ao celular. As vogais orais do português brasileiro foram transcritas e segmentadas e, posteriormente, foi utilizado o script ForensicDataTrecking para extração automática das seguintes classes de parâmetros: frequência dos três primeiros formantes (F1, F2 e F3), frequência fundamental (F0), ênfase espectral, frequência de base da fundamental (baseline) e duração interpicos de F0 presentes no discurso. Foram conduzidas análises acústicas com o objetivo investigar os efeitos da transmissão telefônica sobre as vogais orais do português brasileiro, sobre os locutores e no espaço vocálico dos locutores. As análises foram validadas estatisticamente. Para a análise do efeito da transmissão telefônica sobre as vogais orais do português brasileiro, os resultados revelam alterações nas frequências do primeiro e o terceiro formante de, aproximadamente, 14%, na condição telefônica. Em relação às frequências do segundo formante, os resultados da análise de dispersão mostraram que a transmissão telefônica agiu de forma a aumentar artificialmente as frequências de vogais com baixos valores de F2 e a diminuir as frequências de vogais com altos valores de F2. Dos parâmetros acústicos investigados na análise dos efeitos da transmissão telefônica sobre os locutores, apenas a baseline e a duração interpicos de F0 não apresentaram diferenças estatisticamente significativas entre as duas condições de gravação, indicando robustez aos efeitos da transmissão telefônica e podendo ser considerados como parâmetros eficazes na análise forense. Esta análise revelou, também, que a transmissão telefônica agia de maneira distinta nos sujeitos, o que permitiu que fossem agrupados a depender do parâmetro investigado. A análise do efeito telefônico no espaço vocálico dos sujeitos complementou os resultados das análises anteriores. De modo geral, observou-se um abaixamento global do espaço vocálico na gravação telefônica, influenciado pelo aumento nas frequências de F1. A diminuição dos valores de F2 para as vogais anteriores e o aumento nos valores deste formante para vogais posteriores comprimiu o espaço vocálico da maioria dos sujeitos. As modificações nas disposições das vogais têm implicações perceptuais, uma vez que o abaixamento e redução do espaço vocálico fizeram com que as vogais se situassem proximamente a regiões centrais, podendo soar como mais abertas no telefone celular / Abstract: This dissertation evaluates the effects to speech signal due to telephone transmission of mobile phones and seeks to determine the degree of intra-speaker acoustic-phonetic modification caused by the mobile phone band-pass filter to the speech signal and the telephone transmission effects over the Brazilian Portuguese oral vowels by the study of the acoustic parameters affected by this kind of transmission. The analysis investigated which are the acoustic cues which are modified and which cues remain undifferentiated in the speaker's speech by the use of a mobile phone in comparison to direct recordings. The corpus used consists of simultaneous recordings of 10 male speakers in two conditions: via mobile phone and face-to-face, by placing a microphone directly in front of the subjects. The Brazilian Portuguese oral vowels were segmented and transcribed and the ForensicDataEvaluator script was used to automatically extract the following acoustic parameters: three first formants frequencies (F1, F2 and F3), median of fundamental frequency (F0), spectral emphasis, fundamental frequency baseline and F0 inter-peaks duration. The acoustic analyses aimed at investigating the telephone transmission effects over the Brazilian Portuguese oral vowels, over the speakers and at the speakers¿ vowel space. The analyses were supported statistically. The analysis of the telephone transmission effect over the Brazilian Portuguese oral vowels showed variations of 14% in the frequencies of the first and the third formants. The analysis of the scatter plot of F2 values showed that the mobile phone band-pass filtering has an effect of shifting upwards vowels with low values of F2 and shifting downwards vowels with high values of F2. For the analysis of the telephone transmission effects over the speaker only the acoustic parameters "fundamental frequency baseline" and "F0 inter-peaks duration" did not show any difference statistically significant between the two recording conditions, demonstrating robustness to the telephone transmission effects, which make them able to be considered as powerful parameters for forensic analysis. This analysis also revealed that the telephone transmission affects the speakers in different ways, which set them into different groups of speakers depending on the parameter analyzed. The analysis of the telephone effect in the speakers¿ vowel space shed some light on the previous analyses. In general, the increase of the F1 values in the mobile phone situation caused a global downward displacement of the vowel space. The decrease of the F2 values for the front vowels and the increase of the values of this formant for back vowels reduced the area of the vowel space for the most of the subjects. The vowels rearrangement at the vowel space in the telephone situation has some perceptual implications, since the lowering and reduction of the vowel space made the vowels be placed at its center, which could result in hearing these vowels as more open over the mobile phone / Mestrado / Linguistica / Mestra em Linguística

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Communication Science at the University of Zululand, 2003. / This study begins by investigating the development of cellular technology as within the overall convergence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT's). The study briefly sketches its scope and extent in South Africa and the African continent. It examines the various communication functions of cellular technology and investigates the uses to which these functions are put, and examines the concept of praxis in this connection. As a case study, it examines the use of cellular phones by students at the main campus of the University of Zululand. A survey is carried out and comparisons to international and national trends of cellular phone usage are referred to, and students' attitudes towards its use by lecturers and administration are probed. In conclusion, recommendations are made concerning the use of cellular phones for communication purposes and for further research.