The simulation of different reading styles (mainly by adapting prosodic parameters) can improve the naturalness of synthetic speech and supports a more intelligent human machine interaction. The article exemplarily investigates the reading styles News and Tale. For comparison, all examined texts contained the same genre-neutral paragraphs which have been read without a specific style instructio...

Tailored approaches to restore defective transcription responsible for severe diseases have been poorly explored. We tested transcription activator-like effectors fused to an activation domain (TALE-TFs) in a coagulation factor VII (FVII) deficiency model. In this model, the deficiency is caused by the -94C > G or -61T > G mutation, which abrogate the binding of Sp1 or HNF-4 transcription facto...

A short history of mortality: being itself a cautionary tale!

Priti Joshi, “Mutiny Echoes: India, Britons, and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities” (pp. 48–87) This essay asks what, if any, import the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857 had on A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens’s fictionalized account of the French Revolution. Begun shortly after the Indian uprising started, Dickens’s historical novel appears studiously to avoid any mention of events on ...

This study evaluates the effectiveness of geographic diversification in reducing housing investment risk. To characterize diversification potential, we estimate spatial correlation and integration among 401 U.S. metropolitan housing markets. The 2000s boom brought a marked uptrend in housing market integration associated with eased residential lending standards and rapid growth in private mortg...

Recent evaluations such as ASVspoof 2015 and the similarly-named AVspoof have stimulated a great deal of progress to develop spoofing countermeasures for automatic speaker verification. This paper reports an approach which combines speech signal analysis using the constant Q transform with traditional cepstral processing. The resulting constant Q cepstral coefficients (CQCCs) were introduced re...

The present work initiates the study of the learnability of automatic indexable classes which are classes of regular languages of a certain form. Angluin’s tell-tale condition characterises when these classes are explanatorily learnable. Therefore, the more interesting question is when learnability holds for learners with complexity bounds, formulated in the automata-theoretic setting. The lear...

This paper summarizes a long-term project to install and maintain socially interactive, autonomous mobile robots in public spaces. We have deployed four robots over the past five years, accumulating a total operational time exceeding seven years. This document introduces the robots, then focuses on lessons learned from each deployment. Finally, this paper describes how this entire project came ...

Vengono presentati i risultati di uno studio condotto su una prateria di barriera (récif barrière) a Posidonia oceanica (L.) Delile, presente nella baia di Brucoli, frazione del comune di Augusta (SR) (Sicilia, Italia). Tale prateria risale fino in superficie formando il récif barrière caratterizzando così un particolare ambiente di retro prateria con un basso regime idrodinamico e con caratter...

Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) suffer from distortions of memory. Among such distortions, intrusions in memory tests are frequently observed. In this study we describe the performance of a group of mild AD patients and a group of normal controls on the recall of three different types of stories: a previously unknown story, a well-known fairy-tale (Cinderella), and a modified well-known ...