The Sound Manifesto

Computing practice today depends on visual output to drive almost all user interaction. Other senses, such as audition, may be totally neglected, or used tangentially, or used in highly restricted specialized ways. We have excellent audio rendering through D-A conversion, but we lack rich general facilities for modeling and manipulating sound comparable in quality and flexibility to graphics. We need co-ordinated research in several disciplines to improve the use of sound as an interactive information channel. Incremental and separate improvements in synthesis, analysis, speech processing, audiology, acoustics, music, etc. will not alone produce the radical progress that we seek in sonic practice. We also need to create a new central topic of study in digital audio research. The new topic will assimilate the contributions of different disciplines on a common foundation. The key central concept that we lack is sound as a general-purpose information channel. We must investigate the structure of this information channel, which is driven by the co-operative development of auditory perception and physical sound production. Particular audible encodings, such as speech and music, illuminate sonic information by example, but they are no more sufficient for a characterization than typography is sufficient for a characterization of visual information.Comment: To appear in the conference on Critical Technologies for the Future of Computing, part of SPIE's International Symposium on Optical Science and Technology, 30 July to 4 August 2000, San Diego, C

Using learner corpora to redesign university-level EFL grammar education

This paper outlines the developing work in the TREACLE project, which is using learner corpora to inform the redesign of English grammar curricula in Spanish University contexts. The paper outlines the two components of the annotation: manual error analysis and automatic syntactic analysis, which together provide information as to what syntactic structures require attention at each proficiency level, and with what degree of attention. The degree of usage of a syntactic feature compared to native usage is often used to judge the criticality of the syntactic feature for learners at each proficiency level, but we argue for an alternative metric: onset of use, which measures how many of the learners at each level use the feature at all. This measure provides a clearer measure of how critical the feature is to the particular group. We finish the paper with proposed extension of the project to complement classroom teaching with intelligent online learning informed by the learner corpora.Este artículo presenta el trabajo que se está realizando en el proyecto TREACLE, que utiliza un corpus de aprendices para informar el diseño curricular de gramática inglesa en el contexto de universidades españolas. En este artículo se describen los dos componentes de la anotación: análisis manual de errores y análisis sintáctico automático, que, juntos, proporcionan información sobre qué estructuras sintácticas requieren atención, y cuánta atención, en cada nivel de competencia. A menudo se utiliza la frecuencia de uso de una estructura sintáctica en comparación con el uso nativo para determinar hasta qué punto esa estructura es crítica en el nivel de competencia de los aprendices. Sin embargo, aquí mantenemos que este enfoque presenta deficiencias. En su lugar, se propone una medida que llamamos inicio de uso, que mide cuántos de los estudiantes de cada nivel utilizan esa estructura sintáctica en algún momento. Se argumenta que el inicio de uso constituye una medida más clara de la importancia de esa estructura para un grupo determinado de aprendices. Por último, proponemos una extensión del proyecto para complementar la enseñanza en el aula con un sistema inteligente de aprendizaje en línea informado por corpus de aprendices

Flexible statistical construction of bilingual dictionaries

La mayoría de los sistemas previos para construir un diccionario bilingüe a partir de un corpus paralelo dependen de un algoritmo iterativo, usando probabilidades de traducción de palabras para alinear palabras en el corpus y sus alineamientos para estimar probabilidades de traducción, repitiendo hasta la convergencia. Si bien este enfoque produce resultados razonables, es computacionalmente lento, limitando el tamaño del corpus que se puede analizar y el del diccionario producido. Nosotros proponemos una aproximación no iterativa para producir un diccionario bilingüe unidireccional que, si bien menos precisa que las aproximaciones iterativas, es mucho más rápida, permitiendo procesar córpora mayores en un tiempo razonable. Asimismo, permite una estimación en tiempo real de la probabilidad de traducción de un par de términos, lo que significa que permite obtener un diccionario de traducción con los n términos más frecuentes, y calcular las probabilidades de traducción de términos infrecuentes cuando se encuentren en documentos reales.Most previous systems for constructing a bilingual dictionary from a parallel corpus have depended on an iterative algorithm, using word translation probabilities to align words in the corpus, and using word alignments to estimate word translation probabilities, and repeating until convergence. While this approach produces reasonable results, it is computationally slow, limiting the size of the corpus that can be analysed and the size of the dictionary produced. We propose a non-iterative approach for producing a uni-directional bilingual dictionary which, while less accurate than iterative approaches, is far quicker, allowing larger corpora to be processed in reasonable time. The approach also allows on-the-fly estimation of translation likelihoods between a pair of terms, meaning that a translation dictionary can be generated with the n most frequent terms in an initial pass, and the translation likelihood of infrequent terms can be calculated as encountered in real documents

Design of a Microgravity Hybrid Inflatable Airlock

Spacewalks, or extra-vehicular activities (EVAs), are a critical component of human space exploration for science activities and habitat construction and maintenance. For NASA's proposed lunar Gateway system, an airlock module is required for vehicle maintenance, repair, and exploration. Traditional airlock structures are fully metallic, with two chambers, known as an equipment lock and a crew lock. The larger volume, called the equipment lock, serves as the storage, logistics and electronics area, while the smaller volume, called the crew lock, serves as the volume to transition from the vacuum of space to the pressurized cabin. A traditional metallic structure design offers mass efficiency for these elements, but cannot offer volume efficiency. The potential to use an inflatable fabric pressure shell supplemented by a metallic support structure allows for efficiency in both mass and volume. Inflatable structures are being used for human habitable space modules, starting with the Bigelow Expandable Activities Module on the International Space Station. They are high-strength fabric-based structures that are compactly stowed for launch and then, once in space, they are expanded and rigidized with internal pressure. They provide significant launch volume savings over metallic structures. For Gateway, a hybrid airlock design is proposed with both metallic and inflatable structural elements, taking advantage of each material's capabilities. A metallic equipment lock serves as both a docking node and provides pressurized volume for pre-EVA activities including pre-breathe and suit donning/doffing. A rigid equipment lock offers stowage space during launch for integrated hardware and suits. Adding an integrated inflatable crew lock provides the volume required for EVAs with minimal use of launch volume. Using dual inflatable crew locks provides redundancy and the capability to move large pieces of equipment into and out of the vehicle for repair and maintenance. The inflatable crew lock is deflated and packaged in the launch shroud and expanded after installation on the Gateway. This packing capability allows additional volume to be added to the equipment lock and fully utilize the capability of the launch vehicle. This report outlines the work completed to design, analyze, and test the systems of a microgravity airlock with inflatable crew locks. In detail, it includes launch vehicles, structural sizing of the metallic equipment lock, the fabric layers of the inflatable crew lock, the internal structure of the crew lock, the space suit interface elements, the crew restraint system, the hatches and pass-throughs, the material and thermal elements, and the crew operations for the usage of the system. This paper is meant to offer a reference design for a hybrid microgravity airlock design for deep space human exploration

Using automatically generated students' clickable conceptual models for e-tutoring

Supplementary Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Conceptual Structures (ICCS'08). Toulouse, France, July 7-11, 2008.Also published online by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073)Computer methods for evaluating student's knowledge have traditionally been based on Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) or llin- the-blank exercises, which do not provide a reliable basis upon which to assess student's underlying misconceptions. Because of this lack, we have devised and implemented a procedure for automatically deriving clickable students' conceptual models from their free-text answers. A student's conceptual model can be de ned as a network of interrelated concepts associated with a con dence value that indicates how well each student knows a concept. Several knowledge representation formats are used to show the generated conceptual model to the student. Furthermore, students can click on the concepts to get more information about them. 22 English Studies students are taking advantage of this new resource to review their Pragmatics course. Initial results show that they have found it very useful and claim that it is a good support for their review of the subject.This work has been sponsored by Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, project number TIN2007-64718