DISCUS

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. ...

The DISCUS project has always supported that intuition that annotation capabilities are a must for knowledge and information exchange. For instance, imaging that you are analyzing the KeyGraph generated from a particular discussion (here you can find an example). You may want to enrich such graph with your analysis, comments, or related information. Basically, you want to add metadata to the KeyGraph. If such a capability is available, a whole new bunch of information will need to be efficiently stored to allow, not only fast and easy retrieval, but allow analysis of the added metadata. The Kowari project is an Open Source, massively scalable, transaction-safe, purpose-built database for the storage, retrieval and analysis of metadata. It provides a simple query language to interact with the metastore (iTQL). If you are familiar with SQL the resemblance will help you get up to speed very fast. The design is oriented to efficiently manage large volume metadata. Informal tests from Joe Frutelle, a NCSA colleague, have convinced me that this metastore can be the way to go for storing the large volumes of metadata that annotation may produce in DISCUS. ...

Recently Jack Park from Iris Semantic Network left a comment asking, among other things, if DISCUS was going open source. This is an interesting question. DISCUS is currently under two patent pending processes. However, the current policies at NCSA, one of the DISCUS partners, is to push toward open source. We are currently finishing a first release of DISCUS International with support for English and Japanese. When it passes the release quality standards, some parts of DISCUS will be disseminated, may be as open source code. This is, however, an issue that needs to be ultimately discussed with the Office of Technology Management (the university office handling the DISCUS patent process). ...

Keynote speaker talk in Congreso Mexicano de Computación Evolutiva (CONCEV-2005) about how evolutionary models and chance discovery can support human innovation and creativity. The presentation may be download here (PDF 8.5Mb).