This paper reports on progress made to improve our understanding of the biophysical and ecological processes governing the linked exchanges of water, energy, carbon and trace gases between the terrestrial biosphere and the atmosphere by improving satellite data products for models. The project aims to tests new biophysical data products from MODIS and ASTER EOS sensors and incorporates them int...

Most entities in biological discourse are in fact classes and not singular entities. This complicates the ontological description of biomedical reality in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which is one of the fundamental standards of the Semantic Web. While the class—like nature of most biological entities seems to necessitate the use of OWL classes to describe biological reality in a consistent...

We present a computational auditory scene analysis system for separating and recognizing target speech in the presence of competing speech or noise. We estimate, in two stages, the ideal binary time-frequency (T-F) mask which retains the mixture in a local TF unit if and only if the target is stronger than the interference within the unit. In the first stage, we use harmonicity to segregate the...

This study integrated the computers as social actors (CASA) framework with objectification theory to predict that traits, such as sexism, influence perceptions of virtual representations as well as attributions of the source and message. Participants (N= 397) received a message about dating or job interviews presented by a virtual woman in either context-appropriate or context-inappropriate dre...

JIAC IV is a generic agent toolkit with an emphasis on the realisation of applications in the areas of telecommunications and electronic commerce. We motivate the need for open, scalable, and flexible systems and hence the advantages of agent technology in these areas. Then, we describe the basic architectural principles of CASA, which builds the structural and functional base of agents in JIAC...

For speech segregation, a blind separation model (BSS) is tested together with a CASA model which is based on the localisation cue and the evaluation of the time delay of arrival (TDOA). The test database is composed of 332 binary mixture sentences recorded in stereo with a static set-up. These are truncated at 1 second for the simulations. For applying the two models, we cut the frequency doma...

I describe a colour scheme that is appropriate for the screen display of intensity images. This – unlike many currently available schemes – is designed to be monotonically increasing in terms of its perceived brightness. Also, when printed on a black and white postscript printer, the scheme results in a greyscale with monotonically increasing brightness. This scheme has recently been incorporat...

The problem of separating individual sound sources from a mixture of these, known as Source Separation or Computational Auditory Scene Analysis (CASA), has become popular in the recent decades. A number of methods have emerged from the study of this problem, some of which perform very well for certain types of audio sources, e.g. speech. For separation of instruments in music, there are several...

To prevent potentially unsuitable activities during vegetation restoration, it is important to examine the impact of historical restoration activities on the target ecological system to inform future restoration policies. Taking the Loess Plateau of China as an example, a regionalization method and corresponding scheme were proposed to select suitable vegetation types (forested lands, woody gra...

Abstract A better understanding of auditory scene analysis requires uncovering the brain processes that govern the segregation of sound patterns into perceptual streams. Existing models of auditory streaming emphasize tonotopic or “spatial” separation of neural responses as the primary determinant of stream segregation. While partially true, this theory is far from complete. It overlooks the in...