University of Paderborn

About: University of Paderborn is a education organization based out in Paderborn, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Control reconfiguration & Software. The organization has 6684 authors who have published 16929 publications receiving 323154 citations.

ESPnet: End-to-End Speech Processing Toolkit

Abstract: This paper introduces a new open source platform for end-to-end speech processing named ESPnet. ESPnet mainly focuses on end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR), and adopts widely-used dynamic neural network toolkits, Chainer and PyTorch, as a main deep learning engine. ESPnet also follows the Kaldi ASR toolkit style for data processing, feature extraction/format, and recipes to provide a complete setup for speech recognition and other speech processing experiments. This paper explains a major architecture of this software platform, several important functionalities, which differentiate ESPnet from other open source ASR toolkits, and experimental results with major ASR benchmarks.

Broadband waveguide quantum memory for entangled photons

Abstract: We report the reversible transfer of photon-photon entanglement, generated by means of spontaneous parametric down-conversion, into entanglement between a photon and a collective atomic excitation in a thulium-doped lithium niobate waveguide cooled to 3 K.

Specifying and placing chains of virtual network functions

Abstract: Network appliances perform different functions on network flows and constitute an important part of an operator’s network. Normally, a set of chained network functions process network flows. Following the trend of virtualization of networks, virtualization of the network functions has also become a topic of interest. We define a model for formalizing the chaining of network functions using a context-free language. We process deployment requests and construct virtual network function graphs that can be mapped to the network. We describe the mapping as a Mixed Integer Quadratically Constrained Program (MIQCP) for finding the placement of the network functions and chaining them together considering the limited network resources and requirements of the functions. We have performed a Pareto set analysis to investigate the possible trade-offs between different optimization objectives.