by Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm and Xavier Llorà (2006). Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (INTERSPEECH 2006), paper 1741. Also as IlliGAL TR No 2006018. Link to the PDF. Abstract Emotion is expressed by prosodic cues, and this study uses the active interactive Genetic Algorithm to search a wide space for sad and angry parameters of intensity, F0, and duration in perceptual resynthesis experiments with users. This method avoids large recorded databases and is flexible for exploring prosodic emotion parameters. Solutions from multiple runs are analyzed graphically and statistically. Average results indicate parameter evolution by emotion, and appear best forsad speech. Solutions are quite successfully classified by CART, with duration as main predictor. ...

Vacations were over quite a while ago, but things kept piling on my desk. Finally I succeeded clearing some big chunks of matters out of it. Enough that I could go to the Design Theory and Methodology (DTM 2006) conference in Philadelphia last Tuesday. The conference is held as part of the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences (IDETC 2006) . Yan Jin invited me to join the panel he organized on Intelligent Systems and Innovation. I had a great time joining the DTM people, very interesting work—if you are interested on innovation and creativity. ...

by Xavier Llorà (2006). ACM SIGEvolution, Volume 1 , Issue 3, pp. 10-17. Link to the Journal. Abstract Evolution to Knowledge (E2K) is a set of Data to Knowledge (D2K) modules and itineraries that perform genetic algorithms (GA) and genetics-based machine learning (GBML) related tasks. The goal of E2K is to fold: simplify the process of building GA/GBML related tasks, and provide a simple exploratory workbench for the evolutionary computation community to help users to interact with evolutionary processes. It can help to create complex tasks or help the newcomer to get familiarized and trained with the evolutionary methods and techniques provided. Moreover, due to its integration into D2K, the creation of combined data mining and evolutionary task can be effortlessly done via the visual programming paradigm provided by the workflow environment and also wrap other evolutionary computation software. ...

In the mid 90’s I started reading Quim Monzó-–maybe a after everybody did. The funny history is that I never start reading his articles on the Sunday edition of the Avui. I just learned about him when he started showing up in a talk show at Catalunya Radio, together with Sergi Pàmies. They were hilarious and refreshingly new, something not easy back then. In the last twenty years Quim has made his way into one of the most prevalent figures in Catalan contemporary literature. The other day I just run into a collection of his early articles published on the Catalan newspapers. They were compiled into “El dia del senyor” book. It covers the articles from 1982 till 1985. I am just going over it during my vacations and I cannot belief what I read. Twenty years after, they are still about hot topics in Catalonia. I can just change the actors’ and places for current ones, but most of the topics in those articles are in still today’s newspaper headlines. Maybe the tune never changes much in Catalonia… ...

Piled Higher and Deeper the amazing fun of the PhD life. If the comic strip is not enough, Cecilia’s blog is a must read.