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Sinewave representations of nonmodality

Summary

Regions of nonmodal phonation, exhibiting deviations from uniform glottal-pulse periods and amplitudes, occur often and convey information about speaker- and linguistic-dependent factors. Such waveforms pose challenges for speech modeling, analysis/synthesis, and processing. In this paper, we investigate the representation of nonmodal pulse trains as a sum of harmonically-related sinewaves with time-varying amplitudes, phases, and frequencies. We show that a sinewave representation of any impulsive signal is not unique and also the converse, i.e., frame-based measurements of the underlying sinewave representation can yield different impulse trains. Finally, we argue how this ambiguity may explain addition, deletion, and movement of pulses in sinewave synthesis and a specific illustrative example of time-scale modification of a nonmodal case of diplophonia.
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Summary

Regions of nonmodal phonation, exhibiting deviations from uniform glottal-pulse periods and amplitudes, occur often and convey information about speaker- and linguistic-dependent factors. Such waveforms pose challenges for speech modeling, analysis/synthesis, and processing. In this paper, we investigate the representation of nonmodal pulse trains as a sum of harmonically-related sinewaves with...

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Language recognition via i-vectors and dimensionality reduction

Published in:
2011 INTERSPEECH, 27-31 August 2011, pp. 857-860.

Summary

In this paper, a new language identification system is presented based on the total variability approach previously developed in the field of speaker identification. Various techniques are employed to extract the most salient features in the lower dimensional i-vector space and the system developed results in excellent performance on the 2009 LRE evaluation set without the need for any post-processing or backend techniques. Additional performance gains are observed when the system is combined with other acoustic systems.
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Summary

In this paper, a new language identification system is presented based on the total variability approach previously developed in the field of speaker identification. Various techniques are employed to extract the most salient features in the lower dimensional i-vector space and the system developed results in excellent performance on the...

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Latent topic modeling for audio corpus summarization

Published in:
INTERSPEECH 2011, 27-31 August 2011, pp. 913-916.

Summary

This work presents techniques for automatically summarizing the topical content of an audio corpus. Probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) is used to learn a set of latent topics in an unsupervised fashion. These latent topics are ranked by their relative importance in the corpus and a summary of each topic is generated from signature words that aptly describe the content of that topic. This paper presents techniques for producing a high quality summarization. An example summarization of conversational data from the Fisher corpus that demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach is presented and evaluated.
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Summary

This work presents techniques for automatically summarizing the topical content of an audio corpus. Probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) is used to learn a set of latent topics in an unsupervised fashion. These latent topics are ranked by their relative importance in the corpus and a summary of each topic...

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Phonologically-based biomarkers for major depressive disorder

Summary

Of increasing importance in the civilian and military population is the recognition of major depressive disorder at its earliest stages and intervention before the onset of severe symptoms. Toward the goal of more effective monitoring of depression severity, we introduce vocal biomarkers that are derived automatically from phonologically-based measures of speech rate. To assess our measures, we use a 35-speaker free-response speech database of subjects treated for depression over a 6-week duration. We find that dissecting average measures of speech rate into phone-specific characteristics and, in particular, combined phone-duration measures uncovers stronger relationships between speech rate and depression severity than global measures previously reported for a speech-rate biomarker. Results of this study are supported by correlation of our measures with depression severity and classification of depression state with these vocal measures. Our approach provides a general framework for analyzing individual symptom categories through phonological units, and supports the premise that speaking rate can be an indicator of psychomotor retardation severity.
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Summary

Of increasing importance in the civilian and military population is the recognition of major depressive disorder at its earliest stages and intervention before the onset of severe symptoms. Toward the goal of more effective monitoring of depression severity, we introduce vocal biomarkers that are derived automatically from phonologically-based measures of...

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Experiences in cyber security education: the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Capture-the-Flag exercise

Published in:
Proc. 4th Cyber Security Experimentation Test, 8 August 2011.

Summary

Many popular and well-established cyber security Capture the Flag (CTF) exercises are held each year in a variety of settings, including universities and semi-professional security conferences. CTF formats also vary greatly, ranging from linear puzzle-like challenges to team-based offensive and defensive free-for-all hacking competitions. While these events are exciting and important as contests of skill, they offer limited educational opportunities. In particular, since participation requires considerable a priori domain knowledge and practical computer security expertise, the majority of typical computer science students are excluded from taking part in these events. Our goal in designing and running the MIT/LL CTF was to make the experience accessible to a wider community by providing an environment that would not only test and challenge the computer security skills of the participants, but also educate and prepare those without an extensive prior expertise. This paper describes our experience in designing, organizing, and running an education-focused CTF, and discusses our teaching methods, game design, scoring measures, logged data, and lessons learned.
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Summary

Many popular and well-established cyber security Capture the Flag (CTF) exercises are held each year in a variety of settings, including universities and semi-professional security conferences. CTF formats also vary greatly, ranging from linear puzzle-like challenges to team-based offensive and defensive free-for-all hacking competitions. While these events are exciting and...

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Eigenspace analysis for threat detection in social networks

Published in:
Int. Conf. on Information Fusion, 5 July 2011.

Summary

The problem of detecting a small, anomalous subgraph within a large background network is important and applicable to many fields. The non-Euclidean nature of graph data, however, complicates the application of classical detection theory in this context. A recent statistical framework for anomalous subgraph detection uses spectral properties of a graph's modularity matrix to determine the presence of an anomaly. In this paper, this detection framework and the related algorithms are applied to data focused on a specific application: detection of a threat subgraph embedded in a social network. The results presented use data created to simulate threat activity among noisy interactions. The detectability of the threat subgraph and its separability from the noise is analyzed under a variety of background conditions in both static and dynamic scenarios.
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Summary

The problem of detecting a small, anomalous subgraph within a large background network is important and applicable to many fields. The non-Euclidean nature of graph data, however, complicates the application of classical detection theory in this context. A recent statistical framework for anomalous subgraph detection uses spectral properties of a...

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Anomalous subgraph detection via sparse principal component analysis

Published in:
Proc. 2011 IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop (SSP), 28-30 June 2011, pp. 485-488.

Summary

Network datasets have become ubiquitous in many fields of study in recent years. In this paper we investigate a problem with applicability to a wide variety of domains - detecting small, anomalous subgraphs in a background graph. We characterize the anomaly in a subgraph via the well-known notion of network modularity, and we show that the optimization problem formulation resulting from our setup is very similar to a recently introduced technique in statistics called Sparse Principal Component Analysis (Sparse PCA), which is an extension of the classical PCA algorithm. The exact version of our problem formulation is a hard combinatorial optimization problem, so we consider a recently introduced semidefinite programming relaxation of the Sparse PCA problem. We show via results on simulated data that the technique is very promising.
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Summary

Network datasets have become ubiquitous in many fields of study in recent years. In this paper we investigate a problem with applicability to a wide variety of domains - detecting small, anomalous subgraphs in a background graph. We characterize the anomaly in a subgraph via the well-known notion of network...

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Efficient reconstruction of block-sparse signals

Published in:
IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop, 28-30 June 2011.

Summary

In many sparse reconstruction problems, M observations are used to estimate K components in an N dimensional basis, where N > M ¿ K. The exact basis vectors, however, are not known a priori and must be chosen from an M x N matrix. Such underdetermined problems can be solved using an l2 optimization with an l1 penalty on the sparsity of the solution. There are practical applications in which multiple measurements can be grouped together, so that K x P data must be estimated from M x P observations, where the l1 sparsity penalty is taken with respect to the vector formed using the l2 norms of the rows of the data matrix. In this paper we develop a computationally efficient block partitioned homotopy method for reconstructing K x P data from M x P observations using a grouped sparsity constraint, and compare its performance to other block reconstruction algorithms.
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Summary

In many sparse reconstruction problems, M observations are used to estimate K components in an N dimensional basis, where N > M ¿ K. The exact basis vectors, however, are not known a priori and must be chosen from an M x N matrix. Such underdetermined problems can be solved...

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Graph relational features for speaker recognition and mining

Published in:
Proc. 2011 IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop (SSP), 28-30 June 2011, pp. 525-528.

Summary

Recent advances in the field of speaker recognition have resulted in highly efficient speaker comparison algorithms. The advent of these algorithms allows for leveraging a background set, consisting a large numbers of unlabeled recordings, to improve recognition. In this work, a relational graph, where nodes represent utterances and links represent speaker similarity, is created from the background recordings in which the recordings of interest, train and test, are then embedded. Relational features computed from the embedding are then used to obtain a match score between the recordings of interest. We show the efficacy of these features in speaker verification and speaker mining tasks.
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Summary

Recent advances in the field of speaker recognition have resulted in highly efficient speaker comparison algorithms. The advent of these algorithms allows for leveraging a background set, consisting a large numbers of unlabeled recordings, to improve recognition. In this work, a relational graph, where nodes represent utterances and links represent...

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Matched filtering for subgraph detection in dynamic networks

Published in:
2011 IEEE Statistical Signal Processing Workshop (SSP), 28-30 June 2011, pp. 509-512.

Summary

Graphs are high-dimensional, non-Euclidean data, whose utility spans a wide variety of disciplines. While their non-Euclidean nature complicates the application of traditional signal processing paradigms, it is desirable to seek an analogous detection framework. In this paper we present a matched filtering method for graph sequences, extending to a dynamic setting a previous method for the detection of anomalously dense subgraphs in a large background. In simulation, we show that this temporal integration technique enables the detection of weak subgraph anomalies than are not detectable in the static case. We also demonstrate background/foreground separation using a real background graph based on a computer network.
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Summary

Graphs are high-dimensional, non-Euclidean data, whose utility spans a wide variety of disciplines. While their non-Euclidean nature complicates the application of traditional signal processing paradigms, it is desirable to seek an analogous detection framework. In this paper we present a matched filtering method for graph sequences, extending to a dynamic...

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