INESC-ID

About: INESC-ID is a nonprofit organization based out in Lisbon, Portugal. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Field-programmable gate array & Control theory. The organization has 932 authors who have published 2618 publications receiving 37658 citations.

Measuring brain activity with magnetoresistive sensors integrated in micromachined probe needles

Abstract: An alternative neuroscience tool for magnetic field detection is described in this work, providing both micrometer-scale spatial resolution and high sensitivity to detect the extremely small magnetic fields (nT range) induced by the ionic currents flowing within electrically active neurons. The system combines an array of magnetoresistive sensors incorporated on micro-machined Si probes capable of being inserted within the brain current sources. The Si-etch based micromachining process for neural probes is demonstrated in the manufacture of a probe with 15 magnetoresistive sensors in the tip of each shaft. The probe shafts are formed by double-sided deep reactive ion etching on a double-side polished silicon wafer. The shafts typically have the dimensions 1.2 mm × 40 μm × 300 μm and end in chisel-shaped tips with an incorporated magnetoresistive sensor with dimensions of 30 μm × 2 μm. An accompanying interconnect flexible cable is glued and wirebonded enabling precise and flexible positioning of the probes in the neural tissue. Our analyses showed sharply defined probes and probe tips. The electrical and magnetic behavior of the sensors was verified, and a preliminary test with brain slices were performed.

A MMSE estimator in mel-cepstral domain for robust large vocabulary automatic speech recognition using uncertainty propagation.

Abstract: Uncertainty propagation techniques achieve a more robust automatic speech recognition by modeling the information missing after speech enhancement in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) domain in probabilistic form. This information is then propagated into the feature domain where recognition takes place and combined with observation uncertainty techniques like uncertainty decoding. In this paper we show how uncertainty propagation can also be used to yield minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimates of the clean speech directly in the recognition domain. We develop a MMSE estimator for the Mel-cepstral features by propagation of the Wiener filter posterior distribution and show how it outperforms conventional MMSE methods in the STFT domain on the AURORA4 large vocabulary test environment.

Methods and techniques for maturity assessment

Abstract: A Maturity Model is a widely used technique that is proved to be valuable to assess business processes or certain aspects of organizations, as it represents a path towards an increasingly organized and systematic way of doing business. A maturity assessment can be used to measure the current maturity level of a certain aspect of an organization in a meaningful way, enabling stakeholders to clearly identify strengths and improvement points, and accordingly prioritize what to do in order to reach higher maturity levels. However, in order to make that possible, maturity assessments must be performed. Doing that can range from simple self-assessment questionnaires to full blown assessment methods, such as recommended by the ISO15504 or the SEI CMMI. However, a main caveat of these assessments is the resources they encompass, as well as, a lack of actual automation, which many times renders benchmarks not possible. Assuming that the modeling of business domains is becoming a fact with the wide spread of Enterprise Architecture practices, and also considering the recent state of the art on the representation of Enterprise Architecture models using ontologies, this work proposes to follow that trend and innovate by using existing semantic technology to automate maturity models assessment methods.

Information Security Management Systems - A Maturity Model Based on ISO/IEC 27001

Abstract: An Information Security Management System, according with the ISO/IEC 27001 is the set of “that part of the overall management system, based on a business risk approach, to establish, implement, operate, monitor, review, maintain and improve information security”. ISO/IEC 27001 defines the requirements and process for implementing an Information Security Management System. However, implementing this standard without a detailed plan can become a burden on organizations. This paper presents a maturity model for the planning, implementation, monitoring and improvement of an Information Security Management System based on ISO/IEC 27001. The purpose of this model is to provide an assessment tool for organizations to use in order to get their current Information Security Management System maturity level. The results can then be used to create an improvement plan which will guide organizations to reach their target maturity level. This maturity model allows organizations to assess their current state of affairs according to the best practices defined in ISO/IEC 27001. The maturity model proposed in this paper is evaluated through a multi-step perspective that is used to confirm that the maturity model makes a useful and novel contribution to the Information Security Management domain by taking in consideration the best practice of the domain.