There is controversy among scientists whether standards and regulations hamper or stimulate innovation. We investigate the direct effect of standards and regulations on the development and diffusion of radically new high-tech products. The radicalness and degree of inter-relatedness of the technology in these products are found to moderate this direct effect. The focus is on pre-existing standa...

Mathematical analyses and computer simulations are used to study the adaptation induced by plasticity at inhibitory synapses in a cerebellum-like structure, the electrosensory lateral line lobe (ELL) of mormyrid electric fish. Single-cell model results are compared with results obtained at the system level in vivo. The model of system level adaptation uses detailed temporal learning rules of pl...

Very-long-term (VLT) chromatic adaptation results from exposure to an altered chromatic environment for days or weeks. Color shifts from VLT adaptation are observed hours or days after leaving the altered environment. Short-term chromatic adaptation, on the other hand, results from exposure for a few minutes or less, with color shifts measured within seconds or a few minutes after the adapting ...

A simple way of implementing user adaptivity in emotion-based selection systems is the adaptation of behaviour-based control structures [6], [7]. In this case the user adaptation itself is handled as a kind of adaptive fusion of existing (collected off-line) human opinions (emotional models). Beyond the difficulties of collecting emotional models related to a set of objects from numerous indivi...

BACKGROUND Enhanced atrazine degradation has been observed in agricultural soils from around the globe. Soils exhibiting enhanced atrazine degradation may be cross-adapted with other s-triazine herbicides, thereby reducing their control of sensitive weed species. The aims of this study were (1) to determine the field persistence of simazine in atrazine-adapted and non-adapted soils, (2) to comp...

In this paper, we employ the concept of HMM-Sufficient Statistics (HMM-Suff Stat) and N-best speakers selection to realize a rapid implementation of Baum-Welch and MLLR. Only a single arbitrary utterance is required which is used to select the N-best speakers HMM-Suff Stat from the training database as adaptation data. Since HMM-Suff Stat are pre-computed offline, computation load is minimized....

Rapid speaker adaptation is becoming more important in emerging applications where storage, computation and training utterances are at a premium (e.g. PDAs, cell phones). Effective adaptation can be achieved for the task of speaker verification, based on a maximum a posteriori (MAP) learning framework, by restricting the client’s parametric model to be a linear combination of parameters estimat...

Reusing of software entities, such as components or services, to develop software systems has matured in recent years. However, it has not become standard practice yet, since using pre-existing software requires the selection, composition, adaptation, and evolution of prefabricated software parts. Recent research approaches have independently tackled the discovery, composition, or adaptation pr...

Many-to-one eigenvoice conversion (EVC) allows the conversion from an arbitrary speaker’s voice into the pre-determined target speaker’s voice. In this method, a canonical eigenvoice Gaussian mixture model is effectively adapted to any source speaker using only a few utterances as the adaptation data. In this paper, we propose a many-to-one EVC based on maximum a posteriori (MAP) adaptation for...

We assessed changes in ultrastructure, membrane lipid peroxidation and antioxidant systems for cucumbner seedlings subjected to low temperature stress (day/night temperature of 8 oC /5 oC) that had been either pre-treated with 10% PEG for 2 days or not. We found extensive cell structure damage in the non-treated seedlings, whereas the seedlings pretreated with PEG to simulate drought remain...