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.

Workshop on Social and Emotional Intelligence in Learning Environments

Abstract: It has been long recognised in education that teaching and learning is a highly social and emotional activity. Students’ cognitive progress depends on their psychological predispositions such as their interest, confidence, sense of progress and achievement as well as on social interactions with their teachers and peers who provide them (or not) with both cognitive and emotional support. Until recently the ability to recognise students’ socio-affective needs constituted exclusively the realm of human tutors’ social competence. However, in recent years and with the development of more sophisticated computer-aided learning environments, the need for those environments to take into account the student’s affective states and traits and to place them within the context of the social activity of learning has become an important issue in the domain of building intelligent and effective learning environments. More recently, the notion of emotional intelligence has attracted increasing attention as one of tutors’ pre-requisites for improving students’ learning.

Spoken book alignment using WFSTs

Abstract: The framework of this paper is a national project known as IPSOM, whose main goal is to improve the access to digitally stored spoken books, used primarily by the visually impaired community, by providing tools for easily detecting and indexing units (words, sentences, topics). Simultaneously, the project also aims to broaden the usage of multimedia spoken books (for instance in didactic applications, etc.), by providing multimedia interfaces for access and retrieval. Hence, spoken book alignment is a major task.

REFLECT: Rendering FPGAs to Multi-core Embedded Computing

Abstract: The relentless increase in capacity of Field-Programmable Gate-Arrays (FPGAs) has made them vehicles of choice for both prototypes and final products requiring on-chip multi-core, heterogeneous and reconfigurable systems. Multiple cores can be embedded as hard- or soft-macros, have customizable instruction sets, multiple distributed RAMs and/or configurable interconnections. Their flexibility allows them to achieve orders of magnitude better performance than conventional computing systems via customization. Programming these systems, however, is extremely cumbersome and error-prone and as a result their true potential is only achieved very often at unreasonably high design efforts. This project covers developing, implementing and evaluating a novel compilation and synthesis system approach for FPGA-based platforms. We rely on Aspect-Oriented Specifications to convey critical domain knowledge to a mapping engine while preserving the advantages of a high-level imperative programming paradigm in early software development as well as program and application portability. We leverage Aspect-Oriented specifications and a set of transformations to generate an intermediate representation suitable to hardware mapping. A programming language, LARA, will allow the exploration of alternative architectures and design patterns enabling the generation of flexible hardware cores that can be easily incorporated into larger multi-core designs. We will evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach using partner-provided codes from the domain of audio processing and real-time avionics. We expect the technology developed in REFLECT to be integrated by our industrial partners, in particular by ACE, a leading compilation tool supplier for embedded systems, and by Honeywell, a worldwide solution supplier of embedded high-performance systems.

Pitch-Synchronous Time-Scaling for High-Frequency Excitation Regeneration

Abstract: The goal of bandwidth extension of speech (BWE) is to extrapolate the missing low or high frequency components of the wide-band speech (50-8000 Hz) based entirely on information contained in a narrow-band signal (300-3400 Hz). In this paper we propose a new method for high-frequency regeneration of the excitation signal, using the correlation between the shape of the glottal flow waveform and the spectrum of the voice source. The high-band excitation is generated by performing a pitch-synchronous time-scale (PSTS) transformation on the linear prediction narrow-band residual to generate an high-pass signal that retains the periodic characteristics of the original signal but with a larger open quotient. This method is easy to implement and does not introduce discontinuities in the spectrum of the regenerated excitation. It can be used in applications for BWE where no side information is transmitted or for low bit coding of wide-band speech.

Using Ontologies to Integrate Multiple Enterprise Architecture Domains

Abstract: A goal of enterprise architecture is to align the business with the underlying support systems. An enterprise architecture description encompasses an heterogeneous spectrum of domains, such as business processes, application components, metrics, people and technological infrastructure. Architectural views express the domain elements and their relationships from the perspective of the system stakeholders. As a result, a view needs to be expressed using a domain language that addresses the specific concerns of its stakeholders. However, enterprise architecture description languages are often based on generic or broad meta-models that cross-cut distinct architectural domains. But describing each domain through a specialized language and then integrating it with the other domains raises challenges at the level of traceability and consistency. This paper proposes using ontologies to specify different enterprise architecture domains and to integrate and analyse these models. This goal is realized through a domain-independent language that is extended by domain-specific languages, each focussing on a set of specific domain concerns. The approach contributes to the alignment of the different domains while ensuring traceability between then concepts. The proposal is demonstrated through an evaluation scenario that uses ArchiMate as the domain-independent language extended with a set of domain-specific languages. The demonstration shows that the architecture domains can be integrated and analysed through the use of ontologies.