Early and adequate diagnosis of speech disorders can contribute to the quality of the treatment a... more Early and adequate diagnosis of speech disorders can contribute to the quality of the treatment and thus to treatment success rates. Using acoustic analysis of the speech of children with speech disorders may aid therapists in the diagnostic process by identifying the acoustic characteristics that are unique to a specific disorder and that distinguish it from normal speech development. The purpose of this work is to investigate the feasibility of the automatic detection of speech disorders based on children’s voices. In this preliminary study, using a dataset of utterance recordings of 24 children whose mother tongue is Hebrew, we propose an automatic system that may facilitate accurate speech assessment by therapists by providing a preliminary diagnosis and explainable insights about the model’s predictions. We built a serial, two-step network that is both powerful and possibly interpretable. The first step can model the complex relations between acoustic features and the speech di...
A profit maximising auctioneer can provide a public good to a group of agents. Each group member ... more A profit maximising auctioneer can provide a public good to a group of agents. Each group member has a private value for the good being provided to the group. We investigate an auction mechanism where the auctioneer provides the good to the group, only if the sum of their bids exceeds a reserve price declared previously by the auctioneer.
We characterize the space of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compatible, individually ... more We characterize the space of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compatible, individually rational, and Pareto-optimal combinatorial auctions where efficiency is not required. We examine a model with two players and k nonidentical items (2k outcomes), multidimensional types, private values, non-negative prices, and quasilinear preferences for the players with one relaxation — the players are subject to publicly-known budget constraints. We show that if it is publicly known that the players value the bundles more than the smaller of their budgets then the studied space includes one type of mechanism: autocratic mechanisms (a form of dictatorship). Furthermore, we prove that there are families of autocratic mechanisms that uniquely fulfill the basic properties of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compatible, individually rational, and Pareto-optimal. Interestingly the above basic properties are a weaker requirement than it may initially appear, as the property of Paret...
In this paper we present a proof-of-concept study which aims to model a conceptual framework to a... more In this paper we present a proof-of-concept study which aims to model a conceptual framework to analyze structures of dialogues. We demonstrate our approach on a specific research question – how speaker’s role is realized along the dialogue? To this end, we use a unified set of Map Task dialogues that are unique in the sense that each speaker participated twice – once as a follower and once as a leader, with the same interlocutor playing the other role. This pairwise setting enables to compare prosodic differences in three facets: Role, Speaker, and Session. For this POC, we analyze a basic set of prosodic features: Talk proportions, pitch, and intensity. To create comparable methodological framework for dialogues, we created three plots of the three prosodic features, in ten equal sized intervals along the session. We used a simple distance measure between the resulting ten-dimensional vectors of each facet for each feature. The prosodic plots of these dialogues reveal the interact...
It is often the case that economic mechanisms can have hidden characteristics with unexpected con... more It is often the case that economic mechanisms can have hidden characteristics with unexpected consequences in practice. This is especially true when real-world budgets come into play. For instance, the infamous German and British 3G spectrum auctions that generated revenue so successfully that cellular service providers delayed the rollout of 3G networks for lack of funds.
We study the limitations of the general space of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compa... more We study the limitations of the general space of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compatible, individually rational, and Pareto-optimal combinatorial auctions in a model with two players and two nonidentical items. Our model has multidimensional types, private values, nonnegative prices, quasilinear preferences for players with one relaxation - one of the players is subject to publicly-known budget constraints. The study concludes that the space described above includes dictatorial mechanisms even if only a single player is subject to publicly-known budget constraints. Moreover we show that if it is publicly known that the player's budget restricts his ability to pay then for mechanisms with two possible outcomes there are two families of dictatorial mechanisms that uniquely fulfill the properties of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compatible, individually rational, and Pareto optimal.
A profit-maximizing auctioneer can provide a public good to at most one of a number of groups of ... more A profit-maximizing auctioneer can provide a public good to at most one of a number of groups of agents. The groups may have non-empty intersections. Each group member has a private value for the good being provided to the group. We investigate an auction mechanism where the auctioneer provides the good to the group with the highest sum of the agents' bids, only if this sum exceeds a minimum price declared previously by the auctioneer.
A profit-maximizing auctioneer can provide a public good to at most one of a number of groups of ... more A profit-maximizing auctioneer can provide a public good to at most one of a number of groups of agents. The groups may have non-empty intersections. Each group member has a private value for the good being provided to the group. We investigate an auction mechanism where the auctioneer provides the good to the group with the highest sum of the
International Conference on Grid Computing and Applications, 2007
Photoconductive layers and elements and methods for their use are disclosed. The layers and eleme... more Photoconductive layers and elements and methods for their use are disclosed. The layers and elements include polycarbonate binders and overcoats having pendant polar groups.
Proceedings of the 4th ACM workshop on Performance monitoring and measurement of heterogeneous wireless and wired networks, 2009
Data routing in wireless sensor networks has attracted much research interest in recent years. Or... more Data routing in wireless sensor networks has attracted much research interest in recent years. Orthogonal Rendezvous Routing Protocol (ORRP) [1] was recently proposed and analyzed for use in wireless mesh networks. The protocol is based on a simple idea that two pairs of orthogonal lines in a plane intersect with a high probability and it utilizes the directional antennas for
We study the possibility space of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compatible, individu... more We study the possibility space of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compatible, individually rational, and Pareto efficient combinatorial auctions in a model with two players and two nonidentical items (four outcomes). Our model has multidimensional types, private values, nonnegative prices, and quasilinear preferences for the players with one relaxation – the players are subject to publicly known budget constraints. We show that the space we study essentially includes one type of mechanisms: autocratic mechanisms (a form of dictatorship). Furthermore, we prove that there are families of autocratic mechanisms that uniquely fulfill the basic properties of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compatible, individually rational, and Pareto efficient. The mechanisms in the autocratic families are identical except for two to three price parameters that differentiate them.
This study examines the diversity of silences in unbalanced dialogues, i.e. dialogues between spe... more This study examines the diversity of silences in unbalanced dialogues, i.e. dialogues between speakers with different participation levels: responder and reporter. We examined two genres: therapeutic sessions and private dialogues that are based on this responder-reporter structure. When looking at silences versus speech ratios, we found no differences between the genres nor between the roles. However, when grouping the silences by their types: Pauses (intra-speaker silences), gaps (interspeakers’ silences) and silences that occur in the vicinity of speech overlaps, we found that the silence duration of pauses are role dependent in both genres, while the silence duration of gaps were found genre dependent, but not role dependent. Moreover, speech rate was not found genre dependent. It seems that although silences in unbalanced dialogues vary considerably, genre and speaker’s role are influential.
Early and adequate diagnosis of speech disorders can contribute to the quality of the treatment a... more Early and adequate diagnosis of speech disorders can contribute to the quality of the treatment and thus to treatment success rates. Using acoustic analysis of the speech of children with speech disorders may aid therapists in the diagnostic process by identifying the acoustic characteristics that are unique to a specific disorder and that distinguish it from normal speech development. The purpose of this work is to investigate the feasibility of the automatic detection of speech disorders based on children’s voices. In this preliminary study, using a dataset of utterance recordings of 24 children whose mother tongue is Hebrew, we propose an automatic system that may facilitate accurate speech assessment by therapists by providing a preliminary diagnosis and explainable insights about the model’s predictions. We built a serial, two-step network that is both powerful and possibly interpretable. The first step can model the complex relations between acoustic features and the speech di...
A profit maximising auctioneer can provide a public good to a group of agents. Each group member ... more A profit maximising auctioneer can provide a public good to a group of agents. Each group member has a private value for the good being provided to the group. We investigate an auction mechanism where the auctioneer provides the good to the group, only if the sum of their bids exceeds a reserve price declared previously by the auctioneer.
We characterize the space of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compatible, individually ... more We characterize the space of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compatible, individually rational, and Pareto-optimal combinatorial auctions where efficiency is not required. We examine a model with two players and k nonidentical items (2k outcomes), multidimensional types, private values, non-negative prices, and quasilinear preferences for the players with one relaxation — the players are subject to publicly-known budget constraints. We show that if it is publicly known that the players value the bundles more than the smaller of their budgets then the studied space includes one type of mechanism: autocratic mechanisms (a form of dictatorship). Furthermore, we prove that there are families of autocratic mechanisms that uniquely fulfill the basic properties of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compatible, individually rational, and Pareto-optimal. Interestingly the above basic properties are a weaker requirement than it may initially appear, as the property of Paret...
In this paper we present a proof-of-concept study which aims to model a conceptual framework to a... more In this paper we present a proof-of-concept study which aims to model a conceptual framework to analyze structures of dialogues. We demonstrate our approach on a specific research question – how speaker’s role is realized along the dialogue? To this end, we use a unified set of Map Task dialogues that are unique in the sense that each speaker participated twice – once as a follower and once as a leader, with the same interlocutor playing the other role. This pairwise setting enables to compare prosodic differences in three facets: Role, Speaker, and Session. For this POC, we analyze a basic set of prosodic features: Talk proportions, pitch, and intensity. To create comparable methodological framework for dialogues, we created three plots of the three prosodic features, in ten equal sized intervals along the session. We used a simple distance measure between the resulting ten-dimensional vectors of each facet for each feature. The prosodic plots of these dialogues reveal the interact...
It is often the case that economic mechanisms can have hidden characteristics with unexpected con... more It is often the case that economic mechanisms can have hidden characteristics with unexpected consequences in practice. This is especially true when real-world budgets come into play. For instance, the infamous German and British 3G spectrum auctions that generated revenue so successfully that cellular service providers delayed the rollout of 3G networks for lack of funds.
We study the limitations of the general space of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compa... more We study the limitations of the general space of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compatible, individually rational, and Pareto-optimal combinatorial auctions in a model with two players and two nonidentical items. Our model has multidimensional types, private values, nonnegative prices, quasilinear preferences for players with one relaxation - one of the players is subject to publicly-known budget constraints. The study concludes that the space described above includes dictatorial mechanisms even if only a single player is subject to publicly-known budget constraints. Moreover we show that if it is publicly known that the player's budget restricts his ability to pay then for mechanisms with two possible outcomes there are two families of dictatorial mechanisms that uniquely fulfill the properties of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compatible, individually rational, and Pareto optimal.
A profit-maximizing auctioneer can provide a public good to at most one of a number of groups of ... more A profit-maximizing auctioneer can provide a public good to at most one of a number of groups of agents. The groups may have non-empty intersections. Each group member has a private value for the good being provided to the group. We investigate an auction mechanism where the auctioneer provides the good to the group with the highest sum of the agents' bids, only if this sum exceeds a minimum price declared previously by the auctioneer.
A profit-maximizing auctioneer can provide a public good to at most one of a number of groups of ... more A profit-maximizing auctioneer can provide a public good to at most one of a number of groups of agents. The groups may have non-empty intersections. Each group member has a private value for the good being provided to the group. We investigate an auction mechanism where the auctioneer provides the good to the group with the highest sum of the
International Conference on Grid Computing and Applications, 2007
Photoconductive layers and elements and methods for their use are disclosed. The layers and eleme... more Photoconductive layers and elements and methods for their use are disclosed. The layers and elements include polycarbonate binders and overcoats having pendant polar groups.
Proceedings of the 4th ACM workshop on Performance monitoring and measurement of heterogeneous wireless and wired networks, 2009
Data routing in wireless sensor networks has attracted much research interest in recent years. Or... more Data routing in wireless sensor networks has attracted much research interest in recent years. Orthogonal Rendezvous Routing Protocol (ORRP) [1] was recently proposed and analyzed for use in wireless mesh networks. The protocol is based on a simple idea that two pairs of orthogonal lines in a plane intersect with a high probability and it utilizes the directional antennas for
We study the possibility space of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compatible, individu... more We study the possibility space of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compatible, individually rational, and Pareto efficient combinatorial auctions in a model with two players and two nonidentical items (four outcomes). Our model has multidimensional types, private values, nonnegative prices, and quasilinear preferences for the players with one relaxation – the players are subject to publicly known budget constraints. We show that the space we study essentially includes one type of mechanisms: autocratic mechanisms (a form of dictatorship). Furthermore, we prove that there are families of autocratic mechanisms that uniquely fulfill the basic properties of deterministic, dominant-strategy incentive compatible, individually rational, and Pareto efficient. The mechanisms in the autocratic families are identical except for two to three price parameters that differentiate them.
This study examines the diversity of silences in unbalanced dialogues, i.e. dialogues between spe... more This study examines the diversity of silences in unbalanced dialogues, i.e. dialogues between speakers with different participation levels: responder and reporter. We examined two genres: therapeutic sessions and private dialogues that are based on this responder-reporter structure. When looking at silences versus speech ratios, we found no differences between the genres nor between the roles. However, when grouping the silences by their types: Pauses (intra-speaker silences), gaps (interspeakers’ silences) and silences that occur in the vicinity of speech overlaps, we found that the silence duration of pauses are role dependent in both genres, while the silence duration of gaps were found genre dependent, but not role dependent. Moreover, speech rate was not found genre dependent. It seems that although silences in unbalanced dialogues vary considerably, genre and speaker’s role are influential.
Hyrax automatic voice elements detection is a meaningful challenge for researchers. It is a poten... more Hyrax automatic voice elements detection is a meaningful challenge for researchers. It is a potential monitoring tool, that can assist in learning the daily and seasonally activity patterns or identify associated hyrax behaviors. Manual detection techniques , that require experts' active listening and labeling are not efficient or scalable. This paper aims to shed light on non-human vocal communication. This research is based on a corpus of thousands of element vocal recordings of female rock hyraxes (Procavia capensis), originated in Ein Gedi, Israel. Two of us (VD and NG) performed the recordings and their manual labeling. Based on this corpus, we developed a vocal-based elements detection method, using a multilayer neural network. The current model consists of five vocal elements. The classification process achieved an F1-score of 0.94. The model can be further extended to additional species.
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Papers by Anat Lerner