This book analyses the global diffusion of key competencies-based education (CBE) as a “global education policy” (GEP), focusing on China’s process of adoption and adaptation.Based on a six-year empirical study combining interviews, observations, and document analysis, it examines how national and local actors interpret, modify, and resist CBE. Constructing and applying a four-stage framework for the GEP transfer process, the book integrates macro-level analysis of global forces wi...

Robust Automatic Speech Recognition: A Bridge to Practical Applications establishes a solid foundation for automatic speech recognition that is robust against acoustic environmental distortion. It provides a thorough overview of classical and modern noise-and reverberation robust techniques that have been developed over the past thirty years, with an emphasis on practical methods that have been proven to be successful and which are likely to be further developed for future applications.The...

Based on years of instruction and field expertise, this volume offers the necessary tools to understand all scientific, computational, and technological aspects of speech processing. The book emphasizes mathematical abstraction, the dynamics of the speech process, and the engineering optimization practices that promote effective problem solving in this area of research and covers many years of the authors' personal research on speech processing. Speech Processing helps build valuable analy...

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the recent advancement in the field of automatic speech recognition with a focus on deep learning models including deep neural networks and many of their variants. This is the first automatic speech recognition book dedicated to the deep learning approach. In addition to the rigorous mathematical treatment of the subject, the book also presents insights and theoretical foundation of a series of highly successful deep learning models.

Advances in training models with log-linear structures, with topics including variable selection, the geometry of neural nets, and applications.Log-linear models play a key role in modern big data and machine learning applications. From simple binary classification models through partition functions, conditional random fields, and neural nets, log-linear structure is closely related to performance in certain applications and influences fitting techniques used to tr...

In recent years, deep learning has fundamentally changed the landscapes of a number of areas in artificial intelligence, including speech, vision, natural language, robotics, and game playing. In particular, the striking success of deep learning in a wide variety of natural language processing (NLP) applications has served as a benchmark for the advances in one of the most important tasks in artificial intelligence.This book reviews the state of the art of deep learning research an...

Diversity at Work: The Practice of InclusionHow can organizations, their leaders, and their people benefit from diversity? The answer, according to this cutting-edge book, is the practice of inclusion. Diversity at Work: The Practice of Inclusion (a volume in SIOP’s Professional Practice Series) presents detailed solutions for the challenge of inclusion—how to fully connect with, engage, and empower people across all types of differences. Its edit...

Neural networks are a family of powerful machine learning models and this book focuses on their application to natural language data.The first half of the book (Parts I and II) covers the basics of supervised machine learning and feed-forward neural networks, the basics of working with machine learning over language data, and the use of vector-based rather than symbolic representations for words. It also covers the computation-graph abstraction, which allows to eas...

Grappling with ethical issues is a daily challenge for those working in organizations that deliver public services. Such services are delivered through an often bewildering range of agencies and amidst this constant change, there are fears that a public service ethos, a tradition of working in the public interest, becomes blurred.Using extensive vignettes and case studies, Ethics and Management in the Public Sector illuminates the practical decisions made by public officia...

How does graduate admissions work? Who does the system work for, and who falls through its cracks? More people than ever seek graduate degrees, but little has been written about who gets in and why. Drawing on firsthand observations of admission committees and interviews with faculty in 10 top-ranked doctoral programs in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, education professor Julie Posselt pulls back the curtain on a process usually conducted in secret.“Politicia...

The advent of increasingly large consumer collections of audio (e.g., iTunes), imagery (e.g., Flickr), and video (e.g., YouTube) is driving a need not only for multimedia retrieval but also information extraction from and across media. Furthermore, industrial and government collections fuel requirements for stock media access, media preservation, broadcast news retrieval, identity management, and video surveillance. While significant advances have been made in language processing for infor...

The current fashion for rolling back the state has seen the nonprofit or third sector playing an increasing role in what were previously the heartlands of the public sphere. The growing significance of the sector and its increasing reliance on public funds mean it has also attracted increased scrutiny. From outside the sector concerns have been raised about the accountability and performance of nonprofit organizations. From within the sector there has been considerable debate about whether...