Parent Empowerment: Respecting Their Voices

Respecting children with disabilities--and their parents.

Clustering speakers by their voices

The problem of clustering speakers by their voices is addressed. With the mushrooming of available speech data from television broadcasts to voice mail, automatic systems for archive retrieval, organizing and labeling by speaker are necessary. Clustering conversations by speaker is a solution to all three of the above tasks. Another application for speaker clustering is to group utterances toge...

Notes from Underground: Are Cognitive-Enhancing Drugs Respecting their Promises?

Cognitive deficits are increasingly acknowledged as a highly relevant clinical feature of schizophrenia, susceptible of therapeutic intervention. Considerable efforts have been devoted to identify and develop pharmacological agents that provide cognitive-enhancing benefits to patients with schizophrenia. However, results from studies are not univocal and the "real world" cognitive functioning g...

Associating Nearby Robots to their Voices

It can be useful for a robot in a team to recruit the help of others after considering their poses in space. When the initiating robot is aware of the network addresses (or IDs) of the robots it may ask for cooperation over the network. But if the initiating robot is ignorant of their IDs then it becomes rather more complex or time consuming. In this paper, robots use a simple visual (locally s...

Dendritic Ventriloquism: Inhibitory Synapses Throw Their Voices

In a theoretical study in this issue of Neuron,Gidon and Segev (2012) identify several new principles governing how inhibition interacts with excitation in active dendrites. They show that inhibitory synapses can interact with excitability at a distance, effectively "throwing their voices" in the dendritic tree, such that distributed inhibitory synapses can act synergistically to provide a glob...