Springer Science and Business Media LLC

In automatic speech recognition systems, the information in the speech signal is traditionally retrieved in the form of feature vectors representing sub-word units and thereby converting the features into human readable text form. However, these systems perform poorly due to degradations of speech under varying environmental conditions. To improve the performance, the main issues to be considered are: (a) Determination of speech regions in the speech data collected in degraded environments, and (b) Recognition of speech sounds from the degraded speech in the detected speech regions. Although there exist wide variety of techniques which address these issues, most of them are applicable for clean speech synthetically degraded by stationary noise conditions, due to the need for large amount of training data for statistical modeling. The present work focuses on methods of processing the signals so as to determine the desired speech regions in degraded conditions. For this, signal processing methods are being explored to extract speech-specific characteristics independent of the characteristics of degradations.

The metro rail links many parts of a large city and offers one of the best modes of transit across it. However, the construction phase of the metro causes inconveniences to the people living in cities by significantly escalating the noise and dust pollution. During the construction of metro rails, citizens face problems in their everyday lives, especially as the elevated corridors go through thick-populated areas and high-vehicle traffic areas, creating traffic snarls and impediments. The literature review revealed additional concerns, such as public green cover depletion, potholes, building waste disposal, and vibrational issues. With the advent of social media, urban citizens use platforms like Twitter to express their opinions on inconveniences. The interactions over these social media platforms constitute big data. This data has immense potential for public engagement, accountability, and timely resolution of public inconvenience. The examination and analysis of social media posts on these issues are important as such analysis would inform the metro rail agency about the factors that affect the public and their emotional reaction to a specific activity or series of activities performed by the construction team. In this work, Twitter posts about the inconveniences associated with metro rail projects in four cities across India were analyzed. Social network analysis (SNA), text analytics, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis were conducted to analyze the data. SNA helped find the Twitter accounts with above-average betweenness centralities, while text analytics and topic modeling helped find latent discussion topics among the stakeholders. Sentiment analysis gave an idea of the public sentiments towards the projects.

Growing digitization will establish a digital fabric all around us for anytime and anywhere access. This will revolutionize the way we communicate. Wireless networks like Ad hoc and Sensor networks, mesh networks and pico-net etc. will play a crucial role in such materialization. Internet of Things is one such revolution which derives its roots from Ad hoc and Sensor networks. A lot many issues related to privacy and security of the contents, resources and access will also appear on the horizon. Several typical characteristics of these networks like unattended operation, battery operated device, limited transmission range and storage limits the scope of full-fledged secure solutions in terms of routing and information dissemination. Through this proposal we establish a novel approach for selection of next-hop on the path from source to destination. The proposal is evaluated for performance through simulation. The results of the simulations establish the viability and effectiveness of the complete proposal.

Organic semiconductor based photodetectors would be very attractive, innovative and well suited for light detection applications. The requirement of organic semiconductor in photonic device is to low cost, light weight, mechanical flexibility, chemical modification, tunability of absorption range with co-evaporation and co-mixing of molecules and easy to integrate. In fact, organic optoelectronics devices are more eco-friendly and energy efficient. In this research work, main objective is to fabricate and characterize organic semiconductor based photo detector with a proper choice of organic semiconductor as donor and acceptor and optimize by employing diversified organic semiconductors for fast response time, high photosensitivity, high quantum efficiency, low dark current, large dynamic range and long life time. The equivalent circuit model of the proposed organic photo detector (OPD) structure has been designed and simulated using MATLAB Simulink in which Rubrene and BPPC are used as active layer of OPD. 500 MHz of Operating frequency is to be found in this proposed OPD that is much higher than the speed of the red light illumined Bi-layer OPDs reported till today.

Unforeseen data is a mostly encountered problem in the water distribution system (WDS) application. The WDS is considered to be significant component in the social framework. This paper proposes an improved version of window based Kalman filter known to be customized Kalman filter (CKF). The academic section WDS of National Institute of Technology-Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India is considered as the case-study. The flows across the pipes and head level of the reservoir tanks are measurement of interest which has significant data loss due to the randomly varying sampling interval. The available measurements are also corrupted with the state and input dependent noises along with the conventional uncertainties. This is due to the interconnection between the consumers and structural complexity of the considered case-study which causes the direct and indirect impact over the other states due to the propagation of the disturbance occurring at any spatial instance of the interconnected WDS. The proposed CKF is equipped with the necessary remedies to have an optimal estimates of unforeseen data even in the presence of state and input dependent noises. The CKF algorithm is incorporated along with the mean imputation technique as a priori of the estimates, which improves the estimation accuracy. The estimated results are validated through the quantative and qualitative analysis for the considered case-study.

In this era of cutting edge computing research, there have been gigantic advancements in ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Due to mass deployment of these devices, there have been multifarious constraints in terms of memory, computing power, and battery supply coupled with an inherent need for security. This calls for the design and development of lightweight ciphers so as to ensure security and integrity of the information being shared. There have been numerous attempts to create these security protocols. Two of the most popular primitives are block cipher and stream cipher. In this paper, we study stream ciphers like Grain, Trivium, Mickey, and Fruit, and do a comparative analysis on them.

Digital health interventions refer to the use of digital technology and connected devices to improve health outcomes and healthcare delivery. This includes telemedicine, electronic health records, wearable devices, mobile health applications, and other forms of digital health technology. To this end, several research and developmental activities in various fields are gaining momentum. For instance, in the medical devices sector, several smart biomedical materials and medical devices that are digitally enabled are rapidly being developed and introduced into clinical settings. In the pharma and allied sectors, digital health-focused technologies are widely being used through various stages of drug development, viz. computer-aided drug design, computational modeling for predictive toxicology, and big data analytics for clinical trial management. In the biotechnology and bioengineering fields, investigations are rapidly growing focus on digital health, such as omics biology, synthetic biology, systems biology, big data and personalized medicine. Though digital health-focused innovations are expanding the horizons of health in diverse ways, here the development in the fields of medical devices, pharmaceutical technologies and biotech sectors, with emphasis on trends, opportunities and challenges are reviewed. A perspective on the use of digital health in the Indian context is also included.

Compressed sensing (CS) is capable of reconstructing the data signal from very small number of measurements. However the reconstructed image quality gets highly affected in the case of far end reconstruction involving transmission through a channel. In this work, a novel small length binary low density parity check (LDPC) code for far-end transmission of compressively sampled signals is proposed. Smaller length of LDPC code means faster computation. Also the code rate of proposed LDPC code is constructed to be 0.6 as in an earlier work by the same group it has been demonstrated that quasi-cyclic LDPC codes, with code rate 0.67 gives optimum performance with CS. The proposed code has a base matrix of size 4 × 10. The length of the LDPC code constructed, can be adjusted by a base matrix multiplying factor. The multiplying factor varies from 10 to 30 in steps of 4. The constructed code has a variable length between 100 and 300, in steps of 40. Simulation results of the proposed LDPC code show good performance when decoded iteratively by min-sum decoding algorithm. The proposed LDPC code also gives improved CS reconstruction for far end reconstruction.

In this report, we study different device applications which utilizes oxide layers grown by dual ion beam sputtering (DIBS) system. DIBS system is noteworthy since it produces high-quality thin films with reasonably better compositional stoichiometry, small surface roughness and good adhesion to the substrate even for films grown at room temperature. DIBS system parameters affect the oxide and non-oxide layer in a very significant manner and control of these parameters allows for fine-tuning the as-grown thin films specialize for specific applications.