Waseda University

About: Waseda University is a education organization based out in Tokyo, Japan. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Catalysis & Large Hadron Collider. The organization has 24220 authors who have published 46859 publications receiving 837855 citations. The organization is also known as: Waseda daigaku & Sōdai.

Recent Developments on ESPnet Toolkit Boosted by Conformer

Abstract: In this study, we present recent developments on ESPnet: End-to-End Speech Processing toolkit, which mainly involves a recently proposed architecture called Conformer, Convolution-augmented Transformer. This paper shows the results for a wide range of end-to-end speech processing applications, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech translations (ST), speech separation (SS) and text-to-speech (TTS). Our experiments reveal various training tips and significant performance benefits obtained with the Conformer on different tasks. These results are competitive or even outperform the current state-of-art Transformer models. We are preparing to release all-in-one recipes using open source and publicly available corpora for all the above tasks with pre-trained models. Our aim for this work is to contribute to our research community by reducing the burden of preparing state-of-the-art research environments usually requiring high resources.

The mammalian circadian clock and its entrainment by stress and exercise

Abstract: The mammalian circadian clock regulates day–night fluctuations in various physiological processes. The circadian clock consists of the central clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus and peripheral clocks in peripheral tissues. External environmental cues, including light/dark cycles, food intake, stress, and exercise, provide important information for adjusting clock phases. This review focuses on stress and exercise as potent entrainment signals for both central and peripheral clocks, especially in regard to the timing of stimuli, types of stressors/exercises, and differences in the responses of rodents and humans. We suggest that the common signaling pathways of clock entrainment by stress and exercise involve sympathetic nervous activation and glucocorticoid release. Furthermore, we demonstrate that physiological responses to stress and exercise depend on time of day. Therefore, using exercise to maintain the circadian clock at an appropriate phase and amplitude might be effective for preventing obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

Dynamics and neutrino signal of black hole formation in non-rotating failed supernovae. I. EOS dependence

Abstract: We study the black hole formation and the neutrino signal from the gravitational collapse of a non-rotating massive star of 40 Msun. Adopting two different sets of realistic equation of state (EOS) of dense matter, we perform the numerical simulations of general relativistic neutrino-radiation hydrodynamics under the spherical symmetry. We make comparisons of the core bounce, the shock propagation, the evolution of nascent proto-neutron star and the resulting re-collapse to black hole to reveal the influence of EOS. We also explore the influence of EOS on the neutrino emission during the evolution toward the black hole formation. We find that the speed of contraction of the nascent proto-neutron star, whose mass increases fast due to the intense accretion, is different depending on the EOS and the resulting profiles of density and temperature differ significantly. The black hole formation occurs at 0.6-1.3 sec after bounce when the proto-neutron star exceeds its maximum mass, which is crucially determined by the EOS. We find that the average energies of neutrinos increase after bounce because of rapid temperature increase, but at different speeds depending on the EOS. The duration of neutrino emission up to the black hole formation is found different according to the different timing of re-collapse. These characteristics of neutrino signatures are distinguishable from those for ordinary proto-neutron stars in successful core-collapse supernovae. We discuss that a future detection of neutrinos from black-hole-forming collapse will contribute to reveal the black hole formation and to constrain the EOS at high density and temperature.