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.

Free tools and resources for Brazilian Portuguese speech recognition

Abstract: An automatic speech recognition system has modules that depend on the language and, while there are many public resources for some languages (e.g., English and Japanese), the resources for Brazilian Portuguese (BP) are still limited. This work describes the development of resources and free tools for BP speech recognition, consisting of text and audio corpora, phonetic dictionary, grapheme-to-phone converter, language and acoustic models. All of them are publicly available and, together with a proposed application programming interface, have been used for the development of several new applications, including a speech module for the OpenOffice suite. Performance tests are presented, comparing the developed BP system with a commercial software. The paper also describes an application that uses synthesis and speech recognition together with a natural language processing module dedicated to statistical machine translation. This application allows the translation of spoken conversations from BP to English and vice versa. The resources make easier the adoption of BP speech technologies by other academic groups and industry.

High-Resolution Nondestructive Test Probes Based on Magnetoresistive Sensors

Abstract: This paper discloses two high-sensitivity probes for Eddy Current Nondestructive Test (NDT) of buried and surface defects. These probes incorporate eight and 32 magnetoresistive sensors, respectively, which are optimized for high sensitivity and spatial resolution. The signal processing and interfacing are carried out by a full-custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). The ASIC signal chain performs with a thermal input-referred noise of 30 nV/ $\sqrt{\text{Hz}}$ at 1 kHz, with 66 mW of power consumption, in a die with 3.7×3.4 mm $^2$ . NDT results are presented, showing that there is an increase in spatial resolution of surface defects when contrasted to prior art, enabling the probes to resolve defects with diameters of 0.44 mm, pitches of 0.6 mm, and minimum edge distance as low as 0.16 mm. The results also show that the probe for buried defects is a good all-round tool for detection of defects under cladding and multiple-plate flat junctions.

The PathoYeastract database: an information system for the analysis of gene and genomic transcription regulation in pathogenic yeasts.

Abstract: We present the PATHOgenic YEAst Search for Transcriptional Regulators And Consensus Tracking (PathoYeastract - http://pathoyeastract.org) database, a tool for the analysis and prediction of transcription regulatory associations at the gene and genomic levels in the pathogenic yeasts Candida albicans and C. glabrata Upon data retrieval from hundreds of publications, followed by curation, the database currently includes 28 000 unique documented regulatory associations between transcription factors (TF) and target genes and 107 DNA binding sites, considering 134 TFs in both species. Following the structure used for the YEASTRACT database, PathoYeastract makes available bioinformatics tools that enable the user to exploit the existing information to predict the TFs involved in the regulation of a gene or genome-wide transcriptional response, while ranking those TFs in order of their relative importance. Each search can be filtered based on the selection of specific environmental conditions, experimental evidence or positive/negative regulatory effect. Promoter analysis tools and interactive visualization tools for the representation of TF regulatory networks are also provided. The PathoYeastract database further provides simple tools for the prediction of gene and genomic regulation based on orthologous regulatory associations described for other yeast species, a comparative genomics setup for the study of cross-species evolution of regulatory networks.

Design of Digit-Serial FIR Filters: Algorithms, Architectures, and a CAD Tool

Abstract: In the last two decades, many efficient algorithms and architectures have been introduced for the design of low-complexity bit-parallel multiple constant multiplications (MCM) operation which dominates the complexity of many digital signal processing systems. On the other hand, little attention has been given to the digit-serial MCM design that offers alternative low-complexity MCM operations albeit at the cost of an increased delay. In this paper, we address the problem of optimizing the gate-level area in digit-serial MCM designs and introduce high-level synthesis algorithms, design architectures, and a computer-aided design tool. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed optimization algorithms and of the digit-serial MCM architectures in the design of digit-serial MCM operations and finite impulse response filters.