Basic models of Data Envelopment Analysis are intrinsically preference-free, in the sense that they consider all inputs and outputs and also all decision making units of the same importance. Although this property is beneficial in many ways, it has some drawbacks simultaneously, as the decision makers’ preferences are not taken into account in the process of evaluating units.  To overcome this ...

This paper presents a new approach to unit selection for corpus-based speech synthesis, in which the units are selected according to acoustic criteria. In a learning stage, an acoustic clustering is carried out using context dependent HMM. During synthesis, an acoustic target is generated and segmented in the required diphone sequence. For each diphone to be synthesized, a pre-selection module ...

This paper proposes a GPU-based approach to real-time skinning animation of large crowds, where each character is animated independently of the others. In the first pass of the proposed approach, skinning is done by a pixel shader and the transformed vertex data are written into the render target texture. With the transformed vertices, the second pass renders the large crowds. The proposed appr...

Background: The induction of bystander effect via ionizing radiation has been well proven. However, few studies have investigated the bystander effect following non-ionizing radiation, such as ultrasound waves. Here, the bystander effect after different sonication times on human melanoma cell line (A375), is evaluated by assessing cell viability and apoptosis. Materials and Methods: The cells w...