Brno University of Technology

About: Brno University of Technology is a education organization based out in Brno, Czechia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Fracture mechanics & Filter (video). The organization has 6339 authors who have published 15226 publications receiving 194088 citations. The organization is also known as: Vysoké učení technické v Brně & BUT.

The Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2019: TTS Without T.

Abstract: We present the Zero Resource Speech Challenge 2019, which proposes to build a speech synthesizer without any text or pho-netic labels: hence, TTS without T (text-to-speech without text). We provide raw audio for a target voice in an unknown language (the Voice dataset), but no alignment, text or labels. Participants must discover subword units in an unsupervised way (using the Unit Discovery dataset) and align them to the voice recordings in a way that works best for the purpose of synthesizing novel utterances from novel speakers, similar to the target speaker's voice. We describe the metrics used for evaluation , a baseline system consisting of unsupervised subword unit discovery plus a standard TTS system, and a topline TTS using gold phoneme transcriptions. We present an overview of the 19 submitted systems from 10 teams and discuss the main results.

Two-Step Sintering of oxide ceramics with various crystal structures

Abstract: The influence of Two-Step Sintering (TSS) process on the final microstructure of oxide ceramic materials with three different crystal structures was studied. Two kinds of alumina (particle size 100 nm resp. 240 nm) as well as tetragonal zirconia (stabilized with 3 mol% Y2O3, particle size 60 nm) and cubic zirconia (8 mol% Y2O3, 140 nm) powders were cold isostatically pressed and pressurelessly sintered with different heating schedules. The microstructures achieved with TSS method were compared with microstructures achieved with conventional Single-Step Sintering (SSS) schedule. The results showed that the efficiency of the TSS of these oxide ceramics was more dependent on their crystal structure than on their particle size and green body microstructure. The method of TSS brought only negligible improvement of the microstructure of tetragonal zirconia and hexagonal alumina ceramics. On the other hand, TSS was successful in the sintering of cubic zirconia ceramics; it led to a decrease in grain size by a factor of 2.

pqsfinder: an exhaustive and imperfection-tolerant search tool for potential quadruplex-forming sequences in R.

Abstract: Motivation: G-quadruplexes (G4s) are one of the non-B DNA structures easily observed in vitro and assumed to form in vivo. The latest experiments with G4-specific antibodies and G4-unwinding helicase mutants confirm this conjecture. These four-stranded structures have also been shown to influence a range of molecular processes in cells. As G4s are intensively studied, it is often desirable to screen DNA sequences and pinpoint the precise locations where they might form. Results: We describe and have tested a newly-developed Bioconductor package for identifying potential quadruplex-forming sequences (PQS). The package is easy-to-use, flexible and customizable. It allows for sequence searches that accommodate possible divergences from the optimal G4 base composition. A novel aspect of our research was the creation and training (parametrization) of an advanced scoring model which resulted in increased precision compared to similar tools. We demonstrate that the algorithm behind the searches has a 96% accuracy on 392 currently known and experimentally observed G4 structures. We also carried out searches against the recent G4-seq data to verify how well we can identify the structures detected by that technology. The correlation with pqsfinder predictionswas 0.622, higher than the correlation 0.491 obtained with the second best G4Hunter. Availability:http://bioconductor.org/packages/pqsfinder/ This paper is based on pqsfinder-1.4.1.