Several concepts have been used to describe potential serous accidents in industrial activities. Examples of these concepts are worst case scenarios, likelier-but-less-catastrophic scenarios, most credible scenarios etc. A worst case scenario is a sequence of events/actions/accidents for a certain place (site) and time which causes the worst magnitude of an accident. Often these kind of acciden...

Supplementing log filter-bank energies with i-vectors is a popular method for adaptive training of deep neural network acoustic models. While offline i-vectors (the target utterance or other relevant adaptation material is available for i-vector extraction prior to decoding) have been well studied, there is little analysis of online i-vectors and their robustness in multi-user scenarios where s...

We propose a formal treatment of scenarios in the context of a dialectical argumentation formalism for qualitative reasoning about uncertain propositions. Our formalism extends prior work in which arguments for and against uncertain propositions were presented and compared in interaction spaces called Agoras. We now define the notion of a scenario in this framework and use it to define a set of...

BACKGROUND Measles remains an important cause of morbidity and mortality in children in developing countries. Due to the success of the measles mortality reduction and elimination efforts thus far, the WHO has raised the question of whether global eradication of measles is economically feasible. METHODS The cost-effectiveness of various measles mortality reduction and eradication scenarios wa...

Robot utterances generally sound monotonous, unnatural, and unfriendly because their Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems are not optimized for communication but for text-reading. Here we present a nonmonologue speech synthesis for robots. The key novelty lies in speech synthesis based on Hidden Markov models (HMMs) using a non-monologue corpus: we collected a speech corpus in a nonmonologue style in w...

Energy conservation and CO2 abatement is currently an important development strategy for China. It is significant to analyze how to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions in China’s energy-intensive machinery industry. We not only employ a cointegration method and scenario analysis to predict the future energy demand and CO2 emissions in China’s machinery industry, but we also use the Mont...

Long-term outlooks are key tools for policy design in the energy sector. These outlooks should also include scenarios considering active policies that address the challenge of climate change. Consequently such a CO2 emission reduction scenario was analysed as a case study within the ACROPOLIS project. This paper presents a method to derive regional emission targets that correspond to an emissio...

∗ Work reported in this paper is partly supported by China National High Technology Research Programme (863 Programme) under grant 2002AA116070. Abstract Based on our previous work on the formal specification language SLABS as well as a methodology and modelling language for modelling and specifying multi-agent systems, we further investigate how diagrammatic models of multi-agent systems can b...

I am not going to speak about information technology (IT) today – others will. That is not to say that it is not a key driver of the change in the information environment, a change that will demand that we adapt curricula to meet new educational needs. Instead I want to focus on an important socio-cultural “force” that I believe will, as much as technology, create a transformation in scholarly ...