Earthquake engineering becomes a media issue for the four/six weeks which follow a catastrophic event. These periods of interaction between the societal actors and the topic experts is fruitful in terms of understanding how the scientists should arrange a state of the art. In particular, after the Central Italy event of April 6, 2009, among others, the following items arose: how coarse has to b...

A database of non-native German productions was annotated by three different groups: by experts using detailed, localised labels as well as coarse, global labels, and by phoneticians and naı̈ve subjects, using the same coarse global labels. For the detailed annotation, segmental and supra-segmental labels were given segment-based and word-based. The global annotation consisted of a turn-based as...

BACKGROUND Different criteria regarding outcome measures in smoking research are used, which can lead to confusion about study results. Consensus in outcome criteria may enhance the comparability of future studies. This study aims (1) to provide an overview of tobacco researchers' considered preferences regarding outcome criteria in randomized controlled smoking cessation trials, and (2) to ide...

With rapid developments in communications technology and digital multimedia, there has been increasing demand in recent years for realistic broadcasting technology beyond conventional audio-visual media. In response to this demand, this paper presents an example of the construction of a haptic-enabled broadcasting system based on the MPEG-V standard that was established recently. The constructi...

In this paper, we show how a topographic mapping can be created from a product of experts. We learn the parameters of the mapping using gradient descent on the negative logarithm of the probability density function of the data under the model. We show that the mapping, though retaining its product of experts form, becomes more like a mixture of experts during training.

It is possible to combine multiple non-linear probabilistic models of the same data by multiplying the probability distributions together and then renormalizing. A “product of experts” is a very efficient way to model data that simultaneously satisfies many different constraints. It is difficult to fit a product of experts to data using maximum likelihood because the gradient of the log likelih...

This paper studies a market for new projects with endogenous information acquisition by experts (venture capitalists). It nds that the crowd-like behavior of experts is characteristic of investments in new elds where prospects of new projects are unknown but correlated and experts independently collect small bits of information: each expert acquires a signal about a project and invests when the...

Selective encryption of visual data and especially MPEG has attracted a considerable number of researchers in recent years. Scalable visual formats are offering additional functionality, which is of great benefit for streaming and networking applications. The MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 standards provide a scalability profile in which a resolution scalable mode is specified. In this paper we evaluate a s...