Building Trust Through Voice: How Vocal Tone Impacts User Perception of Attractiveness of Voice Assistants

Voice Assistants (VAs) are popular for simple tasks, but users are often hesitant to use them for complex activities like online shopping. We explored whether the vocal characteristics like the VA's vocal tone, can make VAs perceived as more attractive and trustworthy to users for complex tasks. Our findings show that the tone of the VA voice significantly impacts its perceived attractiveness and trustworthiness. Participants in our experiment were more likely to be attracted to VAs with positive or neutral tones and ultimately trusted the VAs they found more attractive. We conclude that VA's perceived trustworthiness can be enhanced through thoughtful voice design, incorporating a variety of vocal tones.

Re-Think and Re-Design Graph Neural Networks in Spaces of Continuous Graph Diffusion Functionals

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used in domains like social networks and biological systems. However, the locality assumption of GNNs, which limits information exchange to neighboring nodes, hampers their ability to capture long-range dependencies and global patterns in graphs. To address this, we propose a new inductive bias based on variational analysis, drawing inspiration from the Brachistochrone problem. Our framework establishes a mapping between discrete GNN models and continuous diffusion functionals. This enables the design of application-specific objective functions in the continuous domain and the construction of discrete deep models with mathematical guarantees. To tackle over-smoothing in GNNs, we analyze the existing layer-by-layer graph embedding models and identify that they are equivalent to l2-norm integral functionals of graph gradients, which cause over-smoothing. Similar to edge-preserving filters in image denoising, we introduce total variation (TV) to align the graph diffusion pattern with global community topologies. Additionally, we devise a selective mechanism to address the trade-off between model depth and over-smoothing, which can be easily integrated into existing GNNs. Furthermore, we propose a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) that predicts spreading flows in graphs through a neural transport equation. To mitigate vanishing flows, we customize the objective function to minimize transportation within each community while maximizing inter-community flows. Our GNN models achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on popular graph learning benchmarks such as Cora, Citeseer, and Pubmed.

Enhancing Breast Cancer Risk Prediction by Incorporating Prior Images

Recently, deep learning models have shown the potential to predict breast cancer risk and enable targeted screening strategies, but current models do not consider the change in the breast over time. In this paper, we present a new method, PRIME+, for breast cancer risk prediction that leverages prior mammograms using a transformer decoder, outperforming a state-of-the-art risk prediction method that only uses mammograms from a single time point. We validate our approach on a dataset with 16,113 exams and further demonstrate that it effectively captures patterns of changes from prior mammograms, such as changes in breast density, resulting in improved short-term and long-term breast cancer risk prediction. Experimental results show that our model achieves a statistically significant improvement in performance over the state-of-the-art based model, with a C-index increase from 0.68 to 0.73 (p < 0.05) on held-out test sets.

Improving Perceptual Quality, Intelligibility, and Acoustics on VoIP Platforms

In this paper, we present a method for fine-tuning models trained on the Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) 2020 Challenge to improve their performance on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications. Our approach involves adapting the DNS 2020 models to the specific acoustic characteristics of VoIP communications, which includes distortion and artifacts caused by compression, transmission, and platform-specific processing. To this end, we propose a multi-task learning framework for VoIP-DNS that jointly optimizes noise suppression and VoIP-specific acoustics for speech enhancement. We evaluate our approach on a diverse VoIP scenarios and show that it outperforms both industry performance and state-of-the-art methods for speech enhancement on VoIP applications. Our results demonstrate the potential of models trained on DNS-2020 to be improved and tailored to different VoIP platforms using VoIP-DNS, whose findings have important applications in areas such as speech recognition, voice assistants, and telecommunication.

Speech Enhancement for Virtual Meetings on Cellular Networks

We study speech enhancement using deep learning (DL) for virtual meetings on cellular devices, where transmitted speech has background noise and transmission loss that affects speech quality. Since the Deep Noise Suppression (DNS) Challenge dataset does not contain practical disturbance, we collect a transmitted DNS (t-DNS) dataset using Zoom Meetings over T-Mobile network. We select two baseline models: Demucs and FullSubNet. The Demucs is an end-to-end model that takes time-domain inputs and outputs time-domain denoised speech, and the FullSubNet takes time-frequency-domain inputs and outputs the energy ratio of the target speech in the inputs. The goal of this project is to enhance the speech transmitted over the cellular networks using deep learning models.

Embedded System Performance Analysis for Implementing a Portable Drowsiness Detection System for Drivers

Drowsiness on the road is a widespread problem with fatal consequences; thus, a multitude of solutions implementing machine learning techniques have been proposed by researchers. Among existing methods, Ghoddoosian et al.'s drowsiness detection method utilizes temporal blinking patterns to detect early signs of drowsiness. Although the method reported promising results, Ghoddoosian et al.'s algorithm was developed and tested only on a powerful desktop computer, which is not practical to apply in a moving vehicle setting. In this paper, we propose an embedded system that can process Ghoddoosian's drowsiness detection algorithm on a small minicomputer and interact with the user by phone; combined, the devices are powerful enough to run a web server and our drowsiness detection server. We used the AioRTC protocol on GitHub to conduct real-time transmission of video frames from the client to the server and evaluated the communication speed and processing times of the program on various platforms. Based on our results, we found that a Mini PC was most suitable for our proposed system. Furthermore, we proposed an algorithm that considers the importance of sensitivity over specificity, specifically regarding drowsiness detection algorithms. Our algorithm optimizes the threshold to adjust the false positive and false negative rates of the drowsiness detection models. We anticipate our proposed platform can help many researchers to advance their research on drowsiness detection solutions in embedded system settings.

ST-BERT: Cross-modal Language Model Pre-training For End-to-end Spoken Language Understanding

Language model pre-training has shown promising results in various downstream tasks. In this context, we introduce a cross-modal pre-trained language model, called Speech-Text BERT (ST-BERT), to tackle end-to-end spoken language understanding (E2E SLU) tasks. Taking phoneme posterior and subword-level text as an input, ST-BERT learns a contextualized cross-modal alignment via our two proposed pre-training tasks: Cross-modal Masked Language Modeling (CM-MLM) and Cross-modal Conditioned Language Modeling (CM-CLM). Experimental results on three benchmarks present that our approach is effective for various SLU datasets and shows a surprisingly marginal performance degradation even when 1% of the training data are available. Also, our method shows further SLU performance gain via domain-adaptive pre-training with domain-specific speech-text pair data.

Neuropsychiatric Disease Classification Using Functional Connectomics -- Results of the Connectomics in NeuroImaging Transfer Learning Challenge

Large, open-source consortium datasets have spurred the development of new and increasingly powerful machine learning approaches in brain connectomics. However, one key question remains: are we capturing biologically relevant and generalizable information about the brain, or are we simply overfitting to the data? To answer this, we organized a scientific challenge, the Connectomics in NeuroImaging Transfer Learning Challenge (CNI-TLC), held in conjunction with MICCAI 2019. CNI-TLC included two classification tasks: (1) diagnosis of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) within a pre-adolescent cohort; and (2) transference of the ADHD model to a related cohort of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) patients with an ADHD comorbidity. In total, 240 resting-state fMRI time series averaged according to three standard parcellation atlases, along with clinical diagnosis, were released for training and validation (120 neurotypical controls and 120 ADHD). We also provided demographic information of age, sex, IQ, and handedness. A second set of 100 subjects (50 neurotypical controls, 25 ADHD, and 25 ASD with ADHD comorbidity) was used for testing. Models were submitted in a standardized format as Docker images through ChRIS, an open-source image analysis platform. Utilizing an inclusive approach, we ranked the methods based on 16 different metrics. The final rank was calculated using the rank product for each participant across all measures. Furthermore, we assessed the calibration curves of each method. Five participants submitted their model for evaluation, with one outperforming all other methods in both ADHD and ASD classification. However, further improvements are needed to reach the clinical translation of functional connectomics. We are keeping the CNI-TLC open as a publicly available resource for developing and validating new classification methodologies in the field of connectomics.

Question-Aware Sentence Gating Networks for Question and Answering

Machine comprehension question answering, which finds an answer to the question given a passage, involves high-level reasoning processes of understanding and tracking the relevant contents across various semantic units such as words, phrases, and sentences in a document. This paper proposes the novel question-aware sentence gating networks that directly incorporate the sentence-level information into word-level encoding processes. To this end, our model first learns question-aware sentence representations and then dynamically combines them with word-level representations, resulting in semantically meaningful word representations for QA tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach consistently improves the accuracy over existing baseline approaches on various QA datasets and bears the wide applicability to other neural network-based QA models.

PixelSNE: Visualizing Fast with Just Enough Precision via Pixel-Aligned Stochastic Neighbor Embedding

Embedding and visualizing large-scale high-dimensional data in a two-dimensional space is an important problem since such visualization can reveal deep insights out of complex data. Most of the existing embedding approaches, however, run on an excessively high precision, ignoring the fact that at the end, embedding outputs are converted into coarse-grained discrete pixel coordinates in a screen space. Motivated by such an observation and directly considering pixel coordinates in an embedding optimization process, we accelerate Barnes-Hut tree-based t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (BH-SNE), known as a state-of-the-art 2D embedding method, and propose a novel method called PixelSNE, a highly-efficient, screen resolution-driven 2D embedding method with a linear computational complexity in terms of the number of data items. Our experimental results show the significantly fast running time of PixelSNE by a large margin against BH-SNE, while maintaining the minimal degradation in the embedding quality. Finally, the source code of our method is publicly available at https://github.com/awesome-davian/PixelSNE