Audacity to Believe

The audacity of determination.

Hard to Believe

This article presents a review of Hard to Believe, a compelling documentary reporting the forced organ procurement and death of Chinese prisoners of conscience. The documentary is targeted to ignite political and public pressure to stop these practices that are thought to be motivated by financial and political gain. Narrated by journalist and author Ethan Gutmann, the documentary pricks at the...

Conclusive Reasons to Believe

How should we understand reasons-based knowledge? According to the counterfactual or modal account of conclusive reasons, famously defended by Dretske, R is conclusive for P just in case [R would not be the case unless P were the case]. I argue that while knowing is plausibly related to having conclusive reasons to believe, having such reasons cannot be understood in terms of the obtaining of t...

Extending Audacity for Audio Annotation

By implementing a cached region selection scheme and automatic label completion, we extended an open-source audio editor to become a more convenient audio annotation tool for tasks such as ground-truth annotation for audio and music classification. A usability experiment was conducted with encouraging preliminary results.

To believe is to understand

This paper is about language understanding using Belief Networks. Language understanding is a key technology in human-computer conversational systems. These systems often need to handle information-seeking queries from the user regarding a restricted domain. We devised a method for identifying the user’s communicative goal(s) out of a finite set of within-domain goals. The problem is formulated...