Singing accent research is underexplored compared to speech accent studies, primarily due to the scarcity of suitable datasets. Existing singing datasets often suffer from detail loss, frequently resulting from the vocal-instrumental separation process. Additionally, they often lack regional accent annotations. To address this, we introduce the Multi-Accent Mandarin Dry-Vocal Singing Dataset (MADVSD). MADVSD comprises over 670 hours of dry vocal recordings from 4,206 native Mandarin speakers across nine distinct Chinese regions. In addition to each participant recording audio of three popular songs in their native accent, they also recorded phonetic exercises covering all Mandarin vowels and a full octave range. We validated MADVSD through benchmark experiments in singing accent recognition, demonstrating its utility for evaluating state-of-the-art speech models in singing contexts. Furthermore, we explored dialectal influences on singing accent and analyzed the role of vowels in accentual variations, leveraging MADVSD's unique phonetic exercises.

Advances in imaging technology and fluorescent calcium indicators have increased the popularity of the application of miniature microscopes (miniscope) in freely-moving rodents when they are performing sophisticated behaviors. The recently established analysis tools, such as Minian, allow for the efficient extraction of neuronal calcium transients from raw videos. However, there is still a gap in front of neuroscientists to draw any conclusions based on the neuronal calcium signals detected during behavioral tests. The poor signal-to-noise ratio and unreliable neuron registration in miniscope images bring significant challenges to the data analysis tasks. This paper describes a visual analytics approach to the exploration of potential neuronal clustering based on the calcium signals and the behavioral tasks. This new interactive solution can be applied for the analysis and exploration of the correlations between calcium imaging data and addiction behavioral data using a combination of visualization, user interaction, visual clustering, and event-related feature selection techniques. The associated interactive software tool is designed to help neuroscientists develop neurobiological hypotheses underlying both physiological and pathological behaviors, which could be a milestone in the field of neuroscience to understanding behavioral coding in the brain at the neuronal level.

Conserving the energy for motion is an important yet not-well-addressed problem in mobile sensor networks. In this article, we study the problem of optimizing sensor movement for energy efficiency. We adopt a complete energy model to characterize the entire energy consumption in movement. Based on the model, we propose an optimal trapezoidal velocity schedule for minimizing energy consumption when the road condition is uniform; and a corresponding velocity schedule for the variable road condition by using continuous-state dynamic programming. Considering the variety in motion hardware, we also design one velocity schedule for simple microcontrollers, and one velocity schedule for relatively complex microcontrollers, respectively. Simulation results show that our velocity planning may have significant impact on energy conservation.

We discuss information retrieval methods that aim at serving a diverse stream of user queries such as those submitted to commercial search engines. We propose methods that emphasize the importance of taking into consideration of query difference in learning effective retrieval functions. We formulate the problem as a multi-task learning problem using a risk minimization framework. In particular, we show how to calibrate the empirical risk to incorporate query difference in terms of introducing nuisance parameters in the statistical models, and we also propose an alternating optimization method to simultaneously learn the retrieval function and the nuisance parameters. We work out the details for both L1 and L2 regularization cases, and provide convergence analysis for the alternating optimization method for the special case when the retrieval functions belong to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods using modeling data extracted from a commercial search engine. We also point out how the current framework can be extended in future research.

The problem of nonlinear dimensionality reduction is considered. We focus on problems where prior information is available, namely, semi-supervised dimensionality reduction. It is shown that basic nonlinear dimensionality reduction algorithms, such as Locally Linear Embedding (LLE), Isometric feature mapping (ISOMAP), and Local Tangent Space Alignment (LTSA), can be modified by taking into account prior information on exact mapping of certain data points. The sensitivity analysis of our algorithms shows that prior information will improve stability of the solution. We also give some insight on what kind of prior information best improves the solution. We demonstrate the usefulness of our algorithm by synthetic and real life examples. 1.

We discuss information retrieval methods that aim at serving a diverse stream of user queries. We propose methods that emphasize the importance of taking into consideration of query difference in learning effective retrieval functions. We formulate the problem as a multi-task learning problem using a risk minimization framework. In particular, we show how to calibrate the empirical risk to incorporate query difference in terms of introducing nuisance parameters in the statistical models, and we also propose an alternating optimization method to simultaneously learn the retrieval function and the nuisance parameters. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods using modeling data extracted from a commercial search engine.

The problem of block noise removal is considered. It is assumed that the original image is on or close to a sub-space of admissible images in the form of a low dimensional nonlinear manifold. We propose to use a close variant of the total variation regularizer for measuring block noise. Based on this noise measure, we present an effective approach that reconstructs the original image in the presence of block noise. Our main computational task is the solution of a quadratic programming problem, for which we propose a very efficient interior point method. The effectiveness and efficiency of our approach is demonstrated by an example.

Conserving the energy for motion is an important yet not-well-addressed problem in mobile sensor networks. In this paper, we study the problem of optimizing sensor movement for energy efficiency. We adopt a complete energy model to characterize the entire energy consumption in movement. Based on the model, we propose an optimal velocity schedule for minimizing energy consumption when the road condition is uniform; and a near optimal velocity schedule for the variable road condition by using continuous-state dynamic programming. Considering the variety in motion hardware, we also design one velocity schedule for simple microcontrollers, and one velocity schedule for relatively complex microcontrollers, respectively. Simulation results show that our velocity planning may have significant impact on energy conservation