Conversational interfaces have received much attention as a promising natural communication channel between humans and computers. A typical conversational interface consists of three major systems: speech understanding, dialog management and spoken language generation. In such a conversational interface, speech recognition…

La participación de la población urbana en las labores de recuperación de los bosques es esencial, ya
que constituyen más del 80% de la población total del país y son los benefi ciarios de los servicios que
ellos prestan. Por…

(cont.) updates. It produces plan-ready information, by exploiting the self-serving and opportunistic pursuit of instant return-on-investment by frontline offices. Thanks to its emergent qualities, City Knowledge engenders unexpected plan-demanding situations, where the ability to conduct second-order analyses leads to deeper…

Tendências do mundo atual giram em torno de manter-se atualizado e conectado às diversas e rápidas informações que
surgem a todo instante nos mais diversos lugares. As Tecnologias da Informação e Comunicação (TIC’s), dessa forma,
possuem o objetivo…

"La región del Alto Golfo de California (AGC) posee gran interés biológico, geológico, químico y físico debido a sus características endémicas, que han sido fuertemente modificadas por actividades humanas en el último siglo. El conocimiento del transporte de sedimentos en…

Effective document retrieval using domain knowledge and semantics is one of the major challenges in Information Retrieval. Over the last years, there has been a growing interest in ontologies as an artifact for human knowledge representation and a critical component…

IntraCavity Laser Absorption Spectroscopy (ICLAS) is a high-resolution, high sensitivity spectroscopic method capable of measuring line positions, linewidths, lineshapes, and absolute line intensities with a sensitivity that far exceeds that of a traditional multiple pass absorption cell or Fourier Transform…

This thesis explores a novel approach to visual speech modeling. Visual speech, or a sequence of images of the speaker's face, is traditionally viewed as a single stream of contiguous units, each corresponding to a phonetic segment. These units are…

A fuzzy controller is usually designed by formulating the knowledge of a human expert into a set of linguistic variables and fuzzy rules. As it is well known, the use of prior knowledge can dramatically improve the performance and quality…

Ensuring flexible and efficient manufacturing of customized products in an increasing dynamic and turbulent environment without sacrificing cost effectiveness, product quality and on-time delivery has become a key issue for most industrial enterprises. A promising approach to cope with this…