Abstract
The usage of application-specific hardware based on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) has proven its benefits. Current system-on-chips, which contain FPGA fabric, supporting dynamic partial reconfiguration, enable a dynamic hardware acceleration for hardware/software co-designs. With the trend to consolidate multiple computing systems into a single system, applications with mixed criticalities can come into conflict. With our approach, we are exploring the possibility to utilize dedicated hardware for the system management and benefit from possible parallelization of applications and system management tasks.

Abstract

Abstract
The incidence of chronic diseases is increasing and monitoring patients in a home environment is recommended. Noncompliance with prescribed medication regimens is a concern, especially among older people. Heart failure is a chronic disease that requires patients to follow strict medication plans permanently. With the objective of helping these patients managing information about their medicines and increasing adherence, the personal medication advisor CARMIE was developed as a conversational agent capable of interacting, in Portuguese, with users through spoken natural language. The system architecture is based on a language parser, a dialog manager, and a language generator, integrated with already existing tools for speech recognition and synthesis. All modules work together and interact with the user through an Android application, supporting users to manage information about their prescribed medicines. The authors also present a preliminary usability study and further considerations on CARMIE.

Abstract
Acoustic parameters are very useful in voice screening, diagnosis and rehabilitation, and also in forensic voice comparison tasks. In this paper we present results for the acoustic analysis performed by two different voice analysis platforms and involving five sustained vowels uttered by 10 female speakers and 9 male speakers. We consider contemporaneous high-quality (HQ) and GSM voice recordings, as well as HQ and VOIP voice recordings. The analysis of the consistency of the acoustic analysis results by the two platforms provides useful insight regarding the intrinsic robustness of each acoustic parameter, the impact of the communication channel, and appropriate procedures seeking to extract full benefit of the available data in a forensic voice context. © 2017 IEEE.

Abstract
GSM and VOIP telephonic voice recordings are frequently used in forensic voice comparisons. However, speech compression, enhancement and error correction algorithms are likely to modify speaker specific voice characteristics. We performed high-quality voice recordings and concomitant GSM and VOIP telephonic voice recordings so that clean high-quality and telephonic versions of the same speech are available. Sustained vowel tasks are also included allowing F0 (AVG and STD), Jitter, Shimmer and HNR extraction for pairs of contemporaneous recordings. Twenty female and seventeen male volunteer subjects participated in the study. We describe the voice recording experiments, present results for five vowels and five acoustic parameters for each subject in GSM and VOIP communication, and we discuss the implications of the main results.

Abstract
The incidence of chronic diseases is increasing and monitoring patients in a home environment is recommended. Noncompliance with prescribed medication regimens is a concern, especially among older people. Heart failure is a chronic disease that requires patients to follow strict medication plans permanently. With the objective of helping these patients managing information about their medicines and increasing adherence, the personal medication advisor CARMIE was developed as a conversational agent capable of interacting, in Portuguese, with users through spoken natural language. The system architecture is based on a language parser, a dialog manager, and a language generator, integrated with already existing tools for speech recognition and synthesis. All modules work together and interact with the user through an Android application, supporting users to manage information about their prescribed medicines. The authors also present a preliminary usability study and further considerations on CARMIE.