Neural Predictive Coding (NPC)
Learning speaker-specific features is vital in many applications like speaker recognition, diarization and speech recognition. This paper provides a novel approach, we term Neural Predictive Coding (NPC), to learn speaker-specific characteristics in a completely unsupervised manner from large amounts of unlabeled training data that even contain multi-speaker audio streams. The NPC framework exploits the proposed short-term active-speaker stationarity hypothesis which assumes two temporally-close short speech segments belong to the same speaker, and thus a common representation that can encode the commonalities of both the segments, should capture the vocal characteristics of that speaker. We train a convolutional deep siamese network to produce ‘speaker embeddings’ by optimizing a loss function that increases between-speaker variability and decreases within-speaker variability. The trained NPC model can produce these embeddings by projecting any test audio stream into a high dimensional manifold where speech frames of the same speaker come closer than they do in the raw feature space. Results in the frame-level speaker classification experiment along with the visualization of the embeddings manifest the distinctive ability of the NPC model to learn short-term speaker-specific features as compared to raw MFCC features and i-vectors. The utterance-level speaker classification experiments show that concatenating simple statistics of the short-term NPC embeddings over the whole utterance with the utterance-level i-vectors can give useful complimentary information to the i-vectors and boost the classification accuracy. The results also show the efficacy of this technique to learn those characteristics from large amounts of unlabeled training set which has no prior information about the environment of the test set. …

GraphChain
Blockchain technology is ushering in another break- out year, the challenge of blockchain still remains to be solved. This paper analyzes the features of Bitcoin and Bitcoin-NG system based on blockchian, proposes an improved method of implementing blockchain systems by replacing the structure of the original chain with the graph data structure. It was named GraphChain. Each block represents a transaction and contains the balance status of the traders. Additionally, as everyone knows all the transactions in Bitcoin system will be baled by only one miner that will result in a lot of wasted effort, so another way to improve resource utilization is to change the original way to compete for miner to election and parallel mining. Researchers simulated blockchain with graph structure and parallel mining through python, and suggested the conceptual new graph model which can improve both capacity and performance. …

Leap
In complex transfer learning scenarios new tasks might not be tightly linked to previous tasks. Approaches that transfer information contained only in the final parameters of a source model will therefore struggle. Instead, transfer learning at a higher level of abstraction is needed. We propose Leap, a framework that achieves this by transferring knowledge across learning processes. We associate each task with a manifold on which the training process travels from initialization to final parameters and construct a meta learning objective that minimizes the expected length of this path. Our framework leverages only information obtained during training and can be computed on the fly at negligible cost. We demonstrate that our framework outperforms competing methods, both in meta learning and transfer learning, on a set of computer vision tasks. Finally, we demonstrate that Leap can transfer knowledge across learning processes in demanding Reinforcement Learning environments (Atari) that involve millions of gradient steps. …

Apache Forrest
Apache Forrest software is a publishing framework that transforms input from various sources into a unified presentation in one or more output formats. The modular and extensible plug-in architecture of Apache Forrest is based on Apache Cocoon and the relevant industry standards that separate presentation from content. Forrest can generate static documents, or be used as a dynamic server, or be deployed by its automated facility. …