Abstract: There are provided a semiconductor light emitting device that can be manufactured by a simple process and has excellent light extraction efficiency and a method of manufacturing a semiconductor light emitting device that has high reproducibility and high throughput. A semiconductor light emitting device having a substrate and a lamination in which a first conductivity type semiconductor layer, an active layer, and a second conductivity type semiconductor layer are sequentially laminated onto the substrate according to an aspect of the invention includes a silica particle layer; and an uneven part formed at a lower part of the silica particle layer.

Abstract: The invention relates to the therapeutic use of oligonucleotides as immunostimulatory agents in immunotherapy applications. More particularly, the invention provides an immunostimulatory oligonucleotides for use in methods for generating an immune response or for treating a patient in need of immunostimulation. The immunostimulatory oligonucleotides of the invention preferably comprise novel purines. The immunostimulatory oligonucleotides according to the invention further comprise at least two oligonucleotides linked at their 3? ends, internucleoside linkages or functionalized nucleobase or sugar to a non-nucleotidic linker, at least one of the oligonucleotides being an immunostimulatory oligonucleotide and having an accessible 5? end.

Abstract: A data structure for a flash memory and data reading/writing method thereof are disclosed. A 512 bytes data and a redundant code derived from the data encoded with a 6-bit error correcting code scheme are stored in a first sector and a second sector with sequential address in a block of the flash memory respectively. A logic block address information of this block is divided into two parts that are stored in the first sector and the second sector respectively.

Abstract: The invention provides novel oligonucleotide-based compounds that individually provide distinct immune response profiles through their interactions as agonists with TLR9. The TLR9 agonists according to the invention are characterized by specific and unique chemical modifications, which provide their distinctive immune response activation profiles.

Abstract: A data writing method for flash memory and an error correction encoding/decoding method thereof are disclosed. In an embodiment of the data writing method, a 6-bit ECC scheme using a Reed-Solomon code derived from a Galois Field GF (29) is used to encode a data for generating a redundant which requires smaller storing space. In an embodiment of the error correction encoding/decoding method, an erase checking value corresponding to the status where all the bytes of data area and parameter storing area are “0xff” is provided to improve the security of stored data.

Abstract: A database having listings rather than long documents is searched using a term frequency-inverse document frequency (Tf/Idf) algorithm.

Abstract: The invention provides an immunostimulatory nucleic acid. In certain embodiments according to this aspect of the invention, the sequence of the immunostimulatory oligonucleotide and/or immunomer is at least partially self-complementary.

Abstract: A multi-modal human computer interface (HCI) receives a plurality of available information inputs concurrently, or serially, and employs a subset of the inputs to determine or infer user intent with respect to a communication or information goal. Received inputs are respectively parsed, and the parsed inputs are analyzed and optionally synthesized with respect to one or more of each other. In the event sufficient information is not available to determine user intent or goal, feedback can be provided to the user in order to facilitate clarifying, confirming, or augmenting the information inputs.

Abstract: An ink for forming CIGS photovoltaic cell active layers is disclosed along with methods for making the ink, methods for making the active layers and a solar cell made with the active layer. The ink contains a mixture of nanoparticles of elements of groups IB, IIIA and (optionally) VIA. The particles are in a desired particle size range of between about 1 nm and about 500 nm in diameter, where a majority of the mass of the particles comprises particles ranging in size from no more than about 40% above or below an average particle size or, if the average particle size is less than about 5 nanometers, from no more than about 2 nanometers above or below the average particle size. The use of such ink avoids the need to expose the material to an H2Se gas during the construction of a photovoltaic cell and allows more uniform melting during film annealing, more uniform intermixing of nanoparticles, and allows higher quality absorber films to be formed.

Abstract: The invention relates to the therapeutic use of immunostimulatory oligonucleotides and/or immunomers in combination with chemotherapeutic agents to provide a synergistic therapeutic effect.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for training an acoustic model are disclosed. A training corpus is accessed and converted into an initial acoustic model. Scores are calculated for a correct class and competitive classes, respectively, for each token given the initial acoustic model. Also, a sample-adaptive window bandwidth is calculated for each training token. From the calculated scores and the sample-adaptive window bandwidth values, loss values are calculated based on a loss function. The loss function, which may be derived from a Bayesian risk minimization viewpoint, can include a margin value that moves a decision boundary such that token-to-boundary distances for correct tokens that are near the decision boundary are maximized. The margin can either be a fixed margin or can vary monotonically as a function of algorithm iterations. The acoustic model is updated based on the calculated loss values. This process can be repeated until an empirical convergence is met.

Abstract: The invention provides an immunostimulatory nucleic acid. In certain embodiments according to this aspect of the invention, the sequence of the immunostimulatory oligonucleotide and/or immunomer is at least partially self-complementary.

Abstract: The invention relates to the therapeutic use of oligonucleotides as immunostimulatory agents in immunotherapy applications. More particularly, the invention provides immunomers for use in methods for generating an immune response or for treating a patient in need of immunostimulation. The immunomers of the invention comprise at least two oligonucleotides linked at their 3? ends, internucleoside linkages or functionalized nucleobase or sugar to a non-nucleotidic linker, at least one of the oligonucleotides being an immunostimulatory oligonucleotide and having an accessible 5? end.

Abstract: A structured generative model of a speech coarticulation and reduction is described with a novel two-stage implementation. At the first stage, the dynamics of formants or vocal tract resonance (VTR) are generated using prior information of resonance targets in the phone sequence. Bi-directional temporal filtering with finite impulse response (FIR) is applied to the segmental target sequence as the FIR filter's input. At the second stage the dynamics of speech cepstra are predicted analytically based on the FIR filtered VTR targets. The combined system of these two stages thus generates correlated and causally related VTR and cepstral dynamics where phonetic reduction is represented explicitly in the hidden resonance space and implicitly in the observed cepstral space. The combined system also gives the acoustic observation probability given a phone sequence. Using this probability, different phone sequences can be compared and ranked in terms of their respective probability values.

Abstract: The invention provides an immunostimulatory nucleic acid. In certain embodiments according to this aspect of the invention, the sequence of the immunostimulatory oligonucleotide and/or immunomer is at least partially self-complementary.

Abstract: A novel system for speech recognition uses differential cepstra over time frames as acoustic features, together with the traditional static cepstral features, for hidden trajectory modeling, and provides greater accuracy and performance in automatic speech recognition. According to one illustrative embodiment, an automatic speech recognition method includes receiving a speech input, generating an interpretation of the speech, and providing an output based at least in part on the interpretation of the speech input. The interpretation of the speech uses hidden trajectory modeling with observation vectors that are based on cepstra and on differential cepstra derived from the cepstra. A method is developed that can automatically train the hidden trajectory model's parameters that are corresponding to the components of the differential cepstra in the full acoustic feature vectors.

Abstract: A novel system integrates speech recognition and semantic classification, so that acoustic scores in a speech recognizer that accepts spoken utterances may be taken into account when training both language models and semantic classification models. For example, a joint association score may be defined that is indicative of a correspondence of a semantic class and a word sequence for an acoustic signal. The joint association score may incorporate parameters such as weighting parameters for signal-to-class modeling of the acoustic signal, language model parameters and scores, and acoustic model parameters and scores. The parameters may be revised to raise the joint association score of a target word sequence with a target semantic class relative to the joint association score of a competitor word sequence with the target semantic class. The parameters may be designed so that the semantic classification errors in the training data are minimized.

Abstract: The invention relates to the therapeutic use of stabilized oligoribonucleotides as immune modulatory agents for immune therapy applications. Specifically, the invention provides RNA based oligoribonucleotides with improved nuclease and RNase stability and that have immune modulatory activity through TLR7 and/or TLR8.

Abstract: A computer-implemented method is disclosed for providing a directory assistance service. The method includes generating an indexing file that is a representation of information associated with a collection of listings stored in an index. The indexing file is utilized as a basis for ranking listings in an index based on the strength of association with a query. Based at least in part on the ranking, an output is provided and is indicative of listings in the index that are likely correspond to the query. At least one particular listing in the index is excluded from the output without there ever being a comparison of features in the query with features in the one particular listing.

Abstract: CIGS absorber layers fabricated using coated semiconducting nanoparticles and/or quantum dots are disclosed. Core nanoparticles and/or quantum dots containing one or more elements from group IB and/or IIIA and/or VIA may be coated with one or more layers containing elements group IB, IIIA or VIA. Using nanoparticles with a defined surface area, a layer thickness could be tuned to give the proper stoichiometric ratio, and/or crystal phase, and/or size, and/or shape. The coated nanoparticles could then be placed in a dispersant for use as an ink, paste, or paint. By appropriate coating of the core nanoparticles, the resulting coated nanoparticles can have the desired elements intermixed within the size scale of the nanoparticle, while the phase can be controlled by tuning the stochiometry, and the stoichiometry of the coated nanoparticle may be tuned by controlling the thickness of the coating(s).