Wetlands in West Africa are among the most vulnerable ecosystems to climate change. West African wetlands are often freshwater transfer mechanisms from wetter climate regions to dryer areas, providing an array of ecosystem services and functions. Often wetland-specific data in Africa is only available on a per country basis or as point data. Since wetlands are challenging to map, their accuraci...

Biodiversity monitoring is increasingly being bolstered with high resolution data derived from remote sensing such as LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). We derived a series of topographical variables, including slope, azimuth, ground curvature and flow accumulation from LIDAR images and compared these to captures of female carabids in pitfall traps in Eastern boreal mixedwood forests. We deve...

Heterogeneous and incomplete datasets are common in many real-world applications. The probabilistic nature of the Generative Topographic Mapping (GTM), which only handles complete continuous data originally, offers the ability to extend it to also visualise mixed-type and missing data as suggested in (Bishop et al., 1998a). This paper describes this generalisation of GTM and assesses the result...

We currently know little of the role of the corporate human resource (HR) function in multinational corporations regarding global talent management (GTM). GTM is explored here from two perspectives: increasing global competition for talent, and new forms of international mobility. The first considers the mechanisms of GTM, and the second, individual willingness to be mobile, especially in emerg...

This paper describes our participation in the INTERSPEECH 2009 Emotion Challenge [1]. Starting from our previous experience in the use of automatic classification for the validation of an expressive corpus, we have tackled the difficult task of emotion recognition from speech with real-life data. Our main contribution to this work is related to the classifier sub-challenge, for which we tested ...

Cognitive psychologists posit several specific cognitive abilities that are measured with sets of cognitive tasks. Tasks that purportedly tap a specific underlying cognitive ability are strongly correlated with one another, whereas performances on tasks that tap different cognitive abilities are less strongly correlated. For these reasons, latent variables are often considered optimal for descr...

Plot data from the USFS FIA program could be combined with terrain variables to attempt to explain how terrain characteristics influence forest growth, species composition, productivity, fire behavior, wildlife habitat, and other phenomena. While some types of analyses using FIA data have been shown to be insensitive to precision of plot locations, it has been suggested that terrain-based model...

We have recently investigated a family of algorithms which use the underlying latent space model developed for the Generative Topographic mapping(GTM) but which train the parameters in a different manner. Our first model was the Topographic Product of Experts (ToPoE) which is fast but not so data-driven as our second model, the Harmonic Topographic Mapping (HaToM). However the HaToM is much slo...