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Deep Speech Enhancement Challenge is the 5th edition of deep noise suppression (DNS) challenges organized at ICASSP 2023 Signal Processing Grand Challenges. DNS challenges were organized during 2019-2023 to stimulate research in deep speech enhancement (DSE). Previous DNS challenges were organized at INTERSPEECH 2020, ICASSP 2021, INTERSPEECH 2021, and ICASSP 2022. From prior editions, we learnt that improving signal quality (SIG) is challenging particularly in presence of simultaneously active interfering talkers and noise. This challenge aims to develop models for joint denosing, dereverberation and suppression of interfering talkers. When primary talker wears a headphone, certain acoustic properties of their speech such as direct-to-reverberation (DRR), signal to noise ratio (SNR) etc. make it possible to suppress neighboring talkers even without enrollment data for primary talker. This motivated us to create two tracks for this challenge: (i) Track-1 Headset; (ii) Track-2 Speakerphone. Both tracks has fullband (48kHz) training data and testset, and each testclips has a corresponding enrollment data (10-30s duration) for primary talker. Each track invited submissions of personalized and non-personalized models all of which are evaluated through same subjective evaluation. Most models submitted to challenge were personalized models, same team is winner in both tracks where the best models has improvement of 0.145 and 0.141 in challenge's Score as compared to noisy blind testset., Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2202.13288

The Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) challenge is designed to foster innovation in the area of noise suppression to achieve superior perceptual speech quality. This is the 4th DNS challenge, with the previous editions held at INTERSPEECH 2020, ICASSP 2021, and INTERSPEECH 2021. We open-source datasets and test sets for researchers to train their deep noise suppression models, as well as a subjective evaluation framework based on ITU-T P.835 to rate and rank-order the challenge entries. We provide access to DNSMOS P.835 and word accuracy (WAcc) APIs to challenge participants to help with iterative model improvements. In this challenge, we introduced the following changes: (i) Included mobile device scenarios in the blind test set; (ii) Included a personalized noise suppression track with baseline; (iii) Added WAcc as an objective metric; (iv) Included DNSMOS P.835; (v) Made the training datasets and test sets fullband (48 kHz). We use an average of WAcc and subjective scores P.835 SIG, BAK, and OVRL to get the final score for ranking the DNS models. We believe that as a research community, we still have a long way to go in achieving excellent speech quality in challenging noisy real-world scenarios.

With the recent growth of remote work, online meetings often encounter challenging audio contexts such as background noise, music, and echo. Accurate real-time detection of music events can help to improve the user experience. In this paper, we present MusicNet, a compact neural model for detecting background music in the real-time communications pipeline. In video meetings, music frequently co-occurs with speech and background noises, making the accurate classification quite challenging. We propose a compact convolutional neural network core preceded by an in-model featurization layer. MusicNet takes 9 seconds of raw audio as input and does not require any model-specific featurization in the product stack. We train our model on the balanced subset of the Audio Set~\cite{gemmeke2017audio} data and validate it on 1000 crowd-sourced real test clips. Finally, we compare MusicNet performance with 20 state-of-the-art models. MusicNet has a true positive rate (TPR) of 81.3% at a 0.1% false positive rate (FPR), which is significantly better than state-of-the-art models included in our study. MusicNet is also 10x smaller and has 4x faster inference than the best performing models we benchmarked.

The Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) challenge is designed to foster innovation in the area of noise suppression to achieve superior perceptual speech quality. We recently organized a DNS challenge special session at INTERSPEECH and ICASSP 2020. We open-sourced training and test datasets for the wideband scenario. We also open-sourced a subjective evaluation framework based on ITU-T standard P.808, which was also used to evaluate participants of the challenge. Many researchers from academia and industry made significant contributions to push the field forward, yet even the best noise suppressor was far from achieving superior speech quality in challenging scenarios. In this version of the challenge organized at INTERSPEECH 2021, we are expanding both our training and test datasets to accommodate full band scenarios. The two tracks in this challenge will focus on real-time denoising for (i) wide band, and(ii) full band scenarios. We are also making available a reliable non-intrusive objective speech quality metric called DNSMOS for the participants to use during their development phase., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2009.06122

The Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) challenge is designed to foster innovation in the area of noise suppression to achieve superior perceptual speech quality. We recently organized a DNS challenge special session at INTERSPEECH 2020. We open sourced training and test datasets for researchers to train their noise suppression models. We also open sourced a subjective evaluation framework and used the tool to evaluate and pick the final winners. Many researchers from academia and industry made significant contributions to push the field forward. We also learned that as a research community, we still have a long way to go in achieving excellent speech quality in challenging noisy real-time conditions. In this challenge, we are expanding both our training and test datasets. There are two tracks with one focusing on real-time denoising and the other focusing on real-time personalized deep noise suppression. We also make a non-intrusive objective speech quality metric called DNSMOS available for participants to use during their development stages. The final evaluation will be based on subjective tests.

The INTERSPEECH 2020 Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) Challenge is intended to promote collaborative research in real-time single-channel Speech Enhancement aimed to maximize the subjective (perceptual) quality of the enhanced speech. A typical approach to evaluate the noise suppression methods is to use objective metrics on the test set obtained by splitting the original dataset. While the performance is good on the synthetic test set, often the model performance degrades significantly on real recordings. Also, most of the conventional objective metrics do not correlate well with subjective tests and lab subjective tests are not scalable for a large test set. In this challenge, we open-sourced a large clean speech and noise corpus for training the noise suppression models and a representative test set to real-world scenarios consisting of both synthetic and real recordings. We also open-sourced an online subjective test framework based on ITU-T P.808 for researchers to reliably test their developments. We evaluated the results using P.808 on a blind test set. The results and the key learnings from the challenge are discussed. The datasets and scripts can be found here for quick access https://github.com/microsoft/DNS-Challenge., Comment: Interspeech 2020. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2001.08662

This paper investigates several aspects of training a RNN (recurrent neural network) that impact the objective and subjective quality of enhanced speech for real-time single-channel speech enhancement. Specifically, we focus on a RNN that enhances short-time speech spectra on a single-frame-in, single-frame-out basis, a framework adopted by most classical signal processing methods. We propose two novel mean-squared-error-based learning objectives that enable separate control over the importance of speech distortion versus noise reduction. The proposed loss functions are evaluated by widely accepted objective quality and intelligibility measures and compared to other competitive online methods. In addition, we study the impact of feature normalization and varying batch sequence lengths on the objective quality of enhanced speech. Finally, we show subjective ratings for the proposed approach and a state-of-the-art real-time RNN-based method.

The INTERSPEECH 2020 Deep Noise Suppression Challenge is intended to promote collaborative research in real-time single-channel Speech Enhancement aimed to maximize the subjective (perceptual) quality of the enhanced speech. A typical approach to evaluate the noise suppression methods is to use objective metrics on the test set obtained by splitting the original dataset. Many publications report reasonable performance on the synthetic test set drawn from the same distribution as that of the training set. However, often the model performance degrades significantly on real recordings. Also, most of the conventional objective metrics do not correlate well with subjective tests and lab subjective tests are not scalable for a large test set. In this challenge, we open-source a large clean speech and noise corpus for training the noise suppression models and a representative test set to real-world scenarios consisting of both synthetic and real recordings. We also open source an online subjective test framework based on ITU-T P.808 for researchers to quickly test their developments. The winners of this challenge will be selected based on subjective evaluation on a representative test set using P.808 framework., Comment: Details about Deep Noise Suppression Challenge

Audio event classification is an important task for several applications such as surveillance, audio, video and multimedia retrieval etc. There are approximately 3M people with hearing loss who can't perceive events happening around them. This paper establishes the CURE dataset which contains curated set of specific audio events most relevant for people with hearing loss. We propose a ladder network based audio event classifier that utilizes 5s sound recordings derived from the Freesound project. We adopted the state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN) embeddings as audio features for this task. We also investigate extreme learning machine (ELM) for event classification. In this study, proposed classifiers are compared with support vector machine (SVM) baseline. We propose signal and feature normalization that aims to reduce the mismatch between different recordings scenarios. Firstly, CNN is trained on weakly labeled Audioset data. Next, the pre-trained model is adopted as feature extractor for proposed CURE corpus. We incorporate ESC-50 dataset as second evaluation set. Results and discussions validate the superiority of Ladder network over ELM and SVM classifier in terms of robustness and increased classification accuracy. While Ladder network is robust to data mismatches, simpler SVM and ELM classifiers are sensitive to such mismatches, where the proposed normalization techniques can play an important role. Experimental studies with ESC-50 and CURE corpora elucidate the differences in dataset complexity and robustness offered by proposed approaches., Comment: 6 pages, 2 Figures

Linear and non-linear measures of heart rate variability (HRV) are widely investigated as non-invasive indicators of health. Stress has a profound impact on heart rate, and different meditation techniques have been found to modulate heartbeat rhythm. This paper aims to explore the process of identifying appropriate metrices from HRV analysis for sonification. Sonification is a type of auditory display involving the process of mapping data to acoustic parameters. This work explores the use of auditory display in aiding the analysis of HRV leveraged by unsupervised machine learning techniques. Unsupervised clustering helps select the appropriate features to improve the sonification interpretability. Vocal synthesis sonification techniques are employed to increase comprehension and learnability of the processed data displayed through sound. These analyses are early steps in building a real-time sound-based biofeedback training system., Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures

Speaker diarization determines who spoke and when? in an audio stream. In this study, we propose a model-based approach for robust speaker clustering using i-vectors. The ivectors extracted from different segments of same speaker are correlated. We model this correlation with a Markov Random Field (MRF) network. Leveraging the advancements in MRF modeling, we used Toeplitz Inverse Covariance (TIC) matrix to represent the MRF correlation network for each speaker. This approaches captures the sequential structure of i-vectors (or equivalent speaker turns) belonging to same speaker in an audio stream. A variant of standard Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is adopted for deriving closed-form solution using dynamic programming (DP) and the alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM). Our diarization system has four steps: (1) ground-truth segmentation; (2) i-vector extraction; (3) post-processing (mean subtraction, principal component analysis, and length-normalization) ; and (4) proposed speaker clustering. We employ cosine K-means and movMF speaker clustering as baseline approaches. Our evaluation data is derived from: (i) CRSS-PLTL corpus, and (ii) two meetings subset of the AMI corpus. Relative reduction in diarization error rate (DER) for CRSS-PLTL corpus is 43.22% using the proposed advancements as compared to baseline. For AMI meetings IS1000a and IS1003b, relative DER reduction is 29.37% and 9.21%, respectively., Comment: 6 Pages, 3 Fiigures, 5 Equations

Speaker Diarization (i.e. determining who spoke and when?) for multi-speaker naturalistic interactions such as Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) sessions is a challenging task. In this study, we propose robust speaker clustering based on mixture of multivariate von Mises-Fisher distributions. Our diarization pipeline has two stages: (i) ground-truth segmentation; (ii) proposed speaker clustering. The ground-truth speech activity information is used for extracting i-Vectors from each speechsegment. We post-process the i-Vectors with principal component analysis for dimension reduction followed by lengthnormalization. Normalized i-Vectors are high-dimensional unit vectors possessing discriminative directional characteristics. We model the normalized i-Vectors with a mixture model consisting of multivariate von Mises-Fisher distributions. K-means clustering with cosine distance is chosen as baseline approach. The evaluation data is derived from: (i) CRSS-PLTL corpus; and (ii) three-meetings subset of AMI corpus. The CRSSPLTL data contain audio recordings of PLTL sessions which is student-led STEM education paradigm. Proposed approach is consistently better than baseline leading to upto 44.48% and 53.68% relative improvements for PLTL and AMI corpus, respectively. Index Terms: Speaker clustering, von Mises-Fisher distribution, Peer-led team learning, i-Vector, Naturalistic Audio., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures

Wrist-bands such as smartwatches have become an unobtrusive interface for collecting physiological and contextual data from users. Smartwatches are being used for smart healthcare, telecare, and wellness monitoring. In this paper, we used data collected from the AnEAR framework leveraging smartwatches to gather and store physiological data from patients in naturalistic settings. This data included temperature, galvanic skin response (GSR), acceleration, and heart rate (HR). In particular, we focused on HR and acceleration, as these two modalities are often correlated. Since the data was unlabeled we relied on unsupervised learning for multi-modal signal analysis. We propose using k-means clustering, GMM clustering, and Self-Organizing maps based on Neural Networks for group the multi-modal data into homogeneous clusters. This strategy helped in discovering latent structures in our data., Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, 1 table

In certain applications such as zero-resource speech processing or very-low resource speech-language systems, it might not be feasible to collect speech activity detection (SAD) annotations. However, the state-of-the-art supervised SAD techniques based on neural networks or other machine learning methods require annotated training data matched to the target domain. This paper establish a clustering approach for fully unsupervised SAD useful for cases where SAD annotations are not available. The proposed approach leverages Hartigan dip test in a recursive strategy for segmenting the feature space into prominent modes. Statistical dip is invariant to distortions that lends robustness to the proposed method. We evaluate the method on NIST OpenSAD 2015 and NIST OpenSAT 2017 public safety communications data. The results showed the superiority of proposed approach over the two-component GMM baseline. Index Terms: Clustering, Hartigan dip test, NIST OpenSAD, NIST OpenSAT, speech activity detection, zero-resource speech processing, unsupervised learning., Comment: 5 Pages, 4 Tables, 1 Figure

The present manuscript concentrates on the application of Fog computing to a Smart Grid Network that comprises of a Distribution Generation System known as a Microgrid. It addresses features and advantages of a smart grid. Two computational methods for on-demand processing based on shared information resources is discussed. Fog Computing acts as an additional layer of computational and/or communication nodes that offload the Cloud backend from multi-tasking while dealing with large amounts of data. Both Fog computing and Cloud computing hierarchical architecture is compared with respect to efficient utilization of resources. To alleviate the advantages of Fog computing, a Fog computing framework based on Intel Edison is proposed. The proposed architecture has been hardware implemented for a microgrid system. The results obtained show the efficacy of Fog Computing for smart grid network in terms of low power consumption, reduced storage requirement and overlay analysis capabilities., Comment: 6 pages, 10 figures, INDICON-2017 14TH IEEE India Council International Conference 2017, Dec 15-17, IIT Roorkee, India

Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is an important concept for sharing spatial data across the web. With cumulative techniques with spatial cloud computing and fog computing, SDI has the greater potential and has been emerged as a tool for processing, analysis and transmission of spatial data. The Fog computing is a paradigm where Fog devices help to increase throughput and reduce latency at the edge of the client with respect to cloud computing environment. This paper proposed and developed a fog computing based SDI framework for mining analytics from spatial big data for mineral resources management in India. We built a prototype using Raspberry Pi, an embedded microprocessor. We validated by taking suitable case study of mineral resources management in India by doing preliminary analysis including overlay analysis. Results showed that fog computing hold a great promise for analysis of spatial data. We used open source GIS i.e. QGIS and QIS plugin for reducing the transmission to cloud from the fog node., Comment: 5 pages

The smart health paradigms employ Internet-connected wearables for telemonitoring, diagnosis for providing inexpensive healthcare solutions. Fog computing reduces latency and increases throughput by processing data near the body sensor network. In this paper, we proposed a secure serviceorientated edge computing architecture that is validated on recently released public dataset. Results and discussions support the applicability of proposed architecture for smart health applications. We proposed SoA-Fog i.e. a three-tier secure framework for efficient management of health data using fog devices. It discuss the security aspects in client layer, fog layer and the cloud layer. We design the prototype by using win-win spiral model with use case and sequence diagram. Overlay analysis was performed using proposed framework on malaria vector borne disease positive maps of Maharastra state in India from 2011 to 2014. The mobile clients were taken as test case. We performed comparative analysis between proposed secure fog framework and state-of-the art cloud-based framework., Comment: 6 pages, 2 Figures, 1 Table. 5th IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing GlobalSIP 2017, November 14-16, 2017, Montreal, Canada

The increasing use of wearables in smart telehealth generates heterogeneous medical big data. Cloud and fog services process these data for assisting clinical procedures. IoT based ehealthcare have greatly benefited from efficient data processing. This paper proposed and evaluated use of low resource machine learning on Fog devices kept close to the wearables for smart healthcare. In state of the art telecare systems, the signal processing and machine learning modules are deployed in the cloud for processing physiological data. We developed a prototype of Fog-based unsupervised machine learning big data analysis for discovering patterns in physiological data. We employed Intel Edison and Raspberry Pi as Fog computer in proposed architecture. We performed validation studies on real-world pathological speech data from in home monitoring of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Proposed architecture employed machine learning for analysis of pathological speech data obtained from smartwatches worn by the patients with PD. Results showed that proposed architecture is promising for low-resource clinical machine learning. It could be useful for other applications within wearable IoT for smart telehealth scenarios by translating machine learning approaches from the cloud backend to edge computing devices such as Fog., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. 5th IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing GlobalSIP 2017

In era of ever-expanding data and knowledge, we lack a centralized system that maps all the faculties to their research works. This problem has not been addressed in the past and it becomes challenging for students to connect with the right faculty of their domain. Since we have so many colleges and faculties this lies in the category of big data problem. In this paper, we present a model which works on the distributed computing environment to tackle big data. The proposed model uses apache spark as an execution engine and hive as database. The results are visualized with the help of Tableau that is connected to Apache Hive to achieve distributed computing., Comment: 6 pages, 11 figures, 2017 International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Control(I2C2'17), IEEE, June 23-24, 2017, Coimbatore, India

In the era when the market segment of Internet of Things (IoT) tops the chart in various business reports, it is apparently envisioned that the field of medicine expects to gain a large benefit from the explosion of wearables and internet-connected sensors that surround us to acquire and communicate unprecedented data on symptoms, medication, food intake, and daily-life activities impacting one's health and wellness. However, IoT-driven healthcare would have to overcome many barriers, such as: 1) There is an increasing demand for data storage on cloud servers where the analysis of the medical big data becomes increasingly complex, 2) The data, when communicated, are vulnerable to security and privacy issues, 3) The communication of the continuously collected data is not only costly but also energy hungry, 4) Operating and maintaining the sensors directly from the cloud servers are non-trial tasks. This book chapter defined Fog Computing in the context of medical IoT. Conceptually, Fog Computing is a service-oriented intermediate layer in IoT, providing the interfaces between the sensors and cloud servers for facilitating connectivity, data transfer, and queryable local database. The centerpiece of Fog computing is a low-power, intelligent, wireless, embedded computing node that carries out signal conditioning and data analytics on raw data collected from wearables or other medical sensors and offers efficient means to serve telehealth interventions. We implemented and tested an fog computing system using the Intel Edison and Raspberry Pi that allows acquisition, computing, storage and communication of the various medical data such as pathological speech data of individuals with speech disorders, Phonocardiogram (PCG) signal for heart rate estimation, and Electrocardiogram (ECG)-based Q, R, S detection., Comment: 29 pages, 30 figures, 5 tables. Keywords: Big Data, Body Area Network, Body Sensor Network, Edge Computing, Fog Computing, Medical Cyberphysical Systems, Medical Internet-of-Things, Telecare, Tele-treatment, Wearable Devices, Chapter in Handbook of Large-Scale Distributed Computing in Smart Healthcare (2017), Springer

Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) is a learning methodology where a peer-leader co-ordinate a small-group of students to collaboratively solve technical problems. PLTL have been adopted for various science, engineering, technology and maths courses in several US universities. This paper proposed and evaluated a speech system for behavioral analysis of PLTL groups. It could help in identifying the best practices for PLTL. The CRSS-PLTL corpus was used for evaluation of developed algorithms. In this paper, we developed a robust speech activity detection (SAD) by fusing the outputs of a DNN-based pitch extractor and an unsupervised SAD based on voicing measures. Robust speaker diarization system consisted of bottleneck features (from stacked autoencoder) and informed HMM-based joint segmentation and clustering system. Behavioral characteristics such as participation, dominance, emphasis, curiosity and engagement were extracted by acoustic analyses of speech segments belonging to all students. We proposed a novel method for detecting question inflection and performed equal error rate analysis on PLTL corpus. In addition, a robust approach for detecting emphasized speech regions was also proposed. Further, we performed exploratory data analysis for understanding the distortion present in CRSS-PLTL corpus as it was collected in naturalistic scenario. The ground-truth Likert scale ratings were used for capturing the team dynamics in terms of student's responses to a variety of evaluation questions. Results suggested the applicability of proposed system for behavioral analysis of small-group conversations such as PLTL, work-place meetings etc.. Keywords- Behavioral Speech Processing, Bottleneck Features, Curiosity, Deep Neural Network, Dominance, Auto-encoder, Emphasis, Engagement, Peer-Led Team Learning, Speaker Diarization, Small-group Conversations, Comment: 24 pages, 8 Tables, 14 Figures, 6 Equations, Computer Speech & Language 2017

Today, wearable internet-of-things (wIoT) devices continuously flood the cloud data centers at an enormous rate. This increases a demand to deploy an edge infrastructure for computing, intelligence, and storage close to the users. The emerging paradigm of fog computing could play an important role to make wIoT more efficient and affordable. Fog computing is known as the cloud on the ground. This paper presents an end-to-end architecture that performs data conditioning and intelligent filtering for generating smart analytics from wearable data. In wIoT, wearable sensor devices serve on one end while the cloud backend offers services on the other end. We developed a prototype of smart fog gateway (a middle layer) using Intel Edison and Raspberry Pi. We discussed the role of the smart fog gateway in orchestrating the process of data conditioning, intelligent filtering, smart analytics, and selective transfer to the cloud for long-term storage and temporal variability monitoring. We benchmarked the performance of developed prototypes on real-world data from smart e-textile gloves. Results demonstrated the usability and potential of proposed architecture for converting the real-world data into useful analytics while making use of knowledge-based models. In this way, the smart fog gateway enhances the end-to-end interaction between wearables (sensor devices) and the cloud., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, The 23rd IEEE Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture HPCA 2017, (Feb. 4, 2017 - Feb. 8, 2017), Austin, Texas, USA

In this digitalised world where every information is stored, the data a are growing exponentially. It is estimated that data are doubles itself every two years. Geospatial data are one of the prime contributors to the big data scenario. There are numerous tools of the big data analytics. But not all the big data analytics tools are capabilities to handle geospatial big data. In the present paper, it has been discussed about the recent two popular open source geospatial big data analytical tools i.e. Spatial- Hadoop and GeoSpark which can be used for analysis and process the geospatial big data in efficient manner. It has compared the architectural view of SpatialHadoop and GeoSpark. Through the architectural comparison, it has also summarised the merits and demerits of these tools according the execution times and volume of the data which has been used., Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures,table1

About 90 percent of people with Parkinson's disease (PD) experience decreased functional communication due to the presence of voice and speech disorders associated with dysarthria that can be characterized by monotony of pitch (or fundamental frequency), reduced loudness, irregular rate of speech, imprecise consonants, and changes in voice quality. Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) work with patients with PD to improve speech intelligibility using various intensive in-clinic speech treatments. SLPs also prescribe home exercises to enhance generalization of speech strategies outside of the treatment room. Even though speech therapies are found to be highly effective in improving vocal loudness and speech quality, patients with PD find it difficult to follow the prescribed exercise regimes outside the clinic and to continue exercises once the treatment is completed. SLPs need techniques to monitor compliance and accuracy of their patients exercises at home and in ecologically valid communication situations. We have designed EchoWear, a smartwatch-based system, to remotely monitor speech and voice exercises as prescribed by SLPs. We conducted a study of 6 individuals; three with PD and three healthy controls. To assess the performance of EchoWear technology compared with high quality audio equipment obtained in a speech laboratory. Our preliminary analysis shows promising outcomes for using EchoWear in speech therapies for people with PD. Keywords: Dysarthria; knowledge-based speech processing; Parkinson's disease; smartwatch; speech therapy; wearable system., Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, 1 table, 1 equation in Proceedings of the conference on ACM Wireless Health (WH 2015), National Institute of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA

Cloud Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has emerged as a tool for analysis, processing and transmission of geospatial data. The Fog computing is a paradigm where Fog devices help to increase throughput and reduce latency at the edge of the client. This paper developed a Fog-based framework named Fog GIS for mining analytics from geospatial data. We built a prototype using Intel Edison, an embedded microprocessor. We validated the FogGIS by doing preliminary analysis. including compression, and overlay analysis. Results showed that Fog computing hold a great promise for analysis of geospatial data. We used several open source compression techniques for reducing the transmission to the cloud., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, 3rd IEEE Uttar Pradesh Section International Conference on Electrical, Computer and Electronics (09-11 December, 2016) Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University) Varanasi, India

Wearable photoplethysmography (WPPG) has recently become a common technology in heart rate (HR) monitoring. General observation is that the motion artifacts change the statistics of the acquired PPG signal. Consequently, estimation of HR from such a corrupted PPG signal is challenging. However, if an accelerometer is also used to acquire the acceleration signal simultaneously, it can provide helpful information that can be used to reduce the motion artifacts in the PPG signal. By dint of repetitive movements of the subjects hands while running, the accelerometer signal is found to be quasi-periodic. Over short-time intervals, it can be modeled by a finite harmonic sum (HSUM). Using the harmonic sum (HSUM) model, we obtain an estimate of the instantaneous fundamental frequency of the accelerometer signal. Since the PPG signal is a composite of the heart rate information (that is also quasi-periodic) and the motion artifact, we fit a joint harmonic sum (HSUM) model to the PPG signal. One of the harmonic sums corresponds to the heart-beat component in PPG and the other models the motion artifact. However, the fundamental frequency of the motion artifact has already been determined from the accelerometer signal. Subsequently, the HR is estimated from the joint HSUM model. The mean absolute error in HR estimates was 0.7359 beats per minute (BPM) with a standard deviation of 0.8328 BPM for 2015 IEEE Signal Processing (SP) cup data. The ground-truth HR was obtained from the simultaneously acquired ECG for validating the accuracy of the proposed method. The proposed method is compared with four methods that were recently developed and evaluated on the same dataset., Comment: 14 Pages, 11 Figures, 2 Tables, 27 Equations, Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, Oct. 2016

This paper presents a study of improvement in stability in a single machine connected to infinite bus (SMIB) power system by using static compensator (STATCOM). The gains of Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller in STATCOM are being optimized by heuristic technique based on Particle swarm optimization (PSO). Further, Bacterial Foraging Optimization (BFO) as an alternative heuristic method is also applied to select optimal gains of PID controller. The performance of STATCOM with the above soft-computing techniques are studied and compared with the conventional PID controller under various scenarios. The simulation results are accompanied with performance indices based quantitative analysis. The analysis clearly signifies the robustness of the new scheme in terms of stability and voltage regulation when compared with conventional PID., Comment: 5 pages, 7 figures, 2016 IEEE Students' Technology Symposium (TechSym 2016), At IIT Kharagpur, India

Wavelet transform is proposed in this paper for detection of islanding and fault disturbances distributed generation (DG) based power system. An IEEE 14-bus system with DG penetration is considered for the detection of disturbances under different operating conditions. The power system is a hybrid combination of photovoltaic, and wind energy system connected to different buses with different level of penetration. The voltage signal is retrieved at the point of common coupling (PCC) and processed through wavelet transform to detect the disturbances. Further, energy and standard deviation (STD) as performance indices are evaluated and compared with a suitable threshold in order to analyze a disturbance condition. Again, a comparative analysis between the existing and proposed detection is studied to prove the better performance of wavelet transform., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 1 table

Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) is a structured learning model where a team leader is appointed to facilitate collaborative problem solving among students for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) courses. This paper presents an informed HMM-based speaker diarization system. The minimum duration of short conversationalturns and number of participating students were fed as side information to the HMM system. A modified form of Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) was used for iterative merging and re-segmentation. Finally, we used the diarization output to compute a novel dominance score based on unsupervised acoustic analysis., Comment: 8 pages, 1 figures, 2 tables

Peer-led team learning (PLTL) is a model for teaching STEM courses where small student groups meet periodically to collaboratively discuss coursework. Automatic analysis of PLTL sessions would help education researchers to get insight into how learning outcomes are impacted by individual participation, group behavior, team dynamics, etc.. Towards this, speech and language technology can help, and speaker diarization technology will lay the foundation for analysis. In this study, a new corpus is established called CRSS-PLTL, that contains speech data from 5 PLTL teams over a semester (10 sessions per team with 5-to-8 participants in each team). In CRSS-PLTL, every participant wears a LENA device (portable audio recorder) that provides multiple audio recordings of the event. Our proposed solution is unsupervised and contains a new online speaker change detection algorithm, termed G 3 algorithm in conjunction with Hausdorff-distance based clustering to provide improved detection accuracy. Additionally, we also exploit cross channel information to refine our diarization hypothesis. The proposed system provides good improvements in diarization error rate (DER) over the baseline LIUM system. We also present higher level analysis such as the number of conversational turns taken in a session, and speaking-time duration (participation) for each speaker., Comment: 5 Pages, 2 Figures, 2 Tables, Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2016, San Francisco, USA

This paper presents a novel BigEAR big data framework that employs psychological audio processing chain (PAPC) to process smartphone-based acoustic big data collected when the user performs social conversations in naturalistic scenarios. The overarching goal of BigEAR is to identify moods of the wearer from various activities such as laughing, singing, crying, arguing, and sighing. These annotations are based on ground truth relevant for psychologists who intend to monitor/infer the social context of individuals coping with breast cancer. We pursued a case study on couples coping with breast cancer to know how the conversations affect emotional and social well being. In the state-of-the-art methods, psychologists and their team have to hear the audio recordings for making these inferences by subjective evaluations that not only are time-consuming and costly, but also demand manual data coding for thousands of audio files. The BigEAR framework automates the audio analysis. We computed the accuracy of BigEAR with respect to the ground truth obtained from a human rater. Our approach yielded overall average accuracy of 88.76% on real-world data from couples coping with breast cancer., Comment: 6 pages, 10 equations, 1 Table, 5 Figures, IEEE International Workshop on Big Data Analytics for Smart and Connected Health 2016, June 27, 2016, Washington DC, USA

This paper proposes a novel fault detector for digital relaying based on independent component analysis (leA). The index for effective detection is derived from independent components of fault current. The proposed fault detector reduces the computational burden for real time applications and is therefore more accurate and robust as compared to other approaches. Further, a comparative assessment is carried out to establish the effectiveness of the proposed method as compared to the existing methods. This approach can be applied for fault classification and localization of a distance relay reflecting its consistency in all system changing conditions and thus validates its efficacy in the real time applications. The method is tested under a variety of fault and other disturbance conditions of typical power system., Comment: 6 page, 6 figures

In this work, a pattern recognition system is investigated for blind automatic classification of digitally modulated communication signals. The proposed technique is able to discriminate the type of modulation scheme which is eventually used for demodulation followed by information extraction. The proposed system is composed of two subsystems namely feature extraction sub-system (FESS) and classifier sub-system (CSS). The FESS consists of continuous wavelet transform (CWT) for feature generation and principal component analysis (PCA) for selection of the feature subset which is rich in discriminatory information. The CSS uses the selected features to accurately classify the modulation class of the received signal. The proposed technique uses probabilistic neural network (PNN) and multilayer perceptron forward neural network (MLPFN) for comparative study of their recognition ability. PNN have been found to perform better in terms of classification accuracy as well as testing and training time than MLPFN. The proposed approach is robust to presence of phase offset and additive Gaussian noise., Comment: 6 Pages, 12 Figures, 12 Tables

This paper presents a novel approach for fault classification and section identification in a series compensated transmission line based on least square support vector machine. The current signal corresponding to one-fourth of the post fault cycle is used as input to proposed modular LS-SVM classifier. The proposed scheme uses four binary classifier; three for selection of three phases and fourth for ground detection. The proposed classification scheme is found to be accurate and reliable in presence of noise as well. The simulation results validate the efficacy of proposed scheme for accurate classification of fault in a series compensated transmission line., Comment: 5 Pages, 6 Figures, 3 Tables

The size of multi-modal, heterogeneous data collected through various sensors is growing exponentially. It demands intelligent data reduction, data mining and analytics at edge devices. Data compression can reduce the network bandwidth and transmission power consumed by edge devices. This paper proposes, validates and evaluates Fog Data, a service-oriented architecture for Fog computing. The center piece of the proposed architecture is a low power embedded computer that carries out data mining and data analytics on raw data collected from various wearable sensors used for telehealth applications. The embedded computer collects the sensed data as time series, analyzes it, and finds similar patterns present. Patterns are stored, and unique patterns are transmited. Also, the embedded computer extracts clinically relevant information that is sent to the cloud. A working prototype of the proposed architecture was built and used to carry out case studies on telehealth big data applications. Specifically, our case studies used the data from the sensors worn by patients with either speech motor disorders or cardiovascular problems. We implemented and evaluated both generic and application specific data mining techniques to show orders of magnitude data reduction and hence transmission power savings. Quantitative evaluations were conducted for comparing various data mining techniques and standard data compression techniques. The obtained results showed substantial improvement in system efficiency using the Fog Data architecture., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures in ASE BD&SI '15 Proceedings of the ASE BigData & SocialInformatics 2015, ACM, NY

There is an increasing demand for smart fogcomputing gateways as the size of cloud data is growing. This paper presents a Fog computing interface (FIT) for processing clinical speech data. FIT builds upon our previous work on EchoWear, a wearable technology that validated the use of smartwatches for collecting clinical speech data from patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). The fog interface is a low-power embedded system that acts as a smart interface between the smartwatch and the cloud. It collects, stores, and processes the speech data before sending speech features to secure cloud storage. We developed and validated a working prototype of FIT that enabled remote processing of clinical speech data to get speech clinical features such as loudness, short-time energy, zero-crossing rate, and spectral centroid. We used speech data from six patients with PD in their homes for validating FIT. Our results showed the efficacy of FIT as a Fog interface to translate the clinical speech processing chain (CLIP) from a cloud-based backend to a fog-based smart gateway., Comment: 3 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, 2nd IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing SMARTCOMP 2016, Missouri, USA, 2016

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) frequently use vocal exercises in the treatment of patients with speech disorders. Patients receive treatment in a clinical setting and need to practice outside of the clinical setting to generalize speech goals to functional communication. In this paper, we describe the development of technology that captures mixed speech signals in a group setting and allows the SLP to analyze the speech signals relative to treatment goals. The mixed speech signals are blindly separated into individual signals that are preprocessed before computation of loudness, pitch, shimmer, jitter, semitone standard deviation and sharpness. The proposed method has been previously validated on data obtained from clinical trials of people with Parkinson disease and healthy controls., Comment: 6 page, 9 figure, 1 table, 8 equations, Proceedings e-Health Networking, Applications and Services (Healthcom), 2015 IEEE 17th International Conference on, Boston, USA. 2015