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, intemucleoside linkages or finctionalized 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: The invention relates to modulation of the immune system. More particularly, the invention relates to modulating the immune system through the use of oligonucleotide-derived compounds. The invention provides immunostimulatory agents that are less expensive to make than existing immunostimulatory oligonucleotides. The immunostimulatory agents according to the invention can, in preferred embodiments, cause immune stimulation across species lines.

Abstract: The invention relates to the therapeutic use of oligonucleotides or oligonucleotide analogs as immunostimulatory agents in immunotherapy applications. The invention provides methods for enhancing the immune response caused by immunostimulatory oligonucleotide compounds.

Abstract: To provide application developers with the ability to easily form customized grammars, grammar extensions are provided that allow application developers to selectively include portions of grammar templates and to easily combine grammar elements to form new grammar structures.

Abstract: The invention relates to the therapeutic use of oligonucleotides as immunostimulatory agents in immunotherapy applications. More particularly, the invention provides immunomers and an immunostimulatory oligonucleotides for use in methods for generating an immune response or for treating a patient in need of immunostimulation. The immunomers and an immunostimulatory oligonucleotides of the invention preferably comprise novel purines. The immunomers 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 immunomodulatory oligonucleotide and having an accessible 5? end.

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 computer-implemented method is provided for training a hidden trajectory model, of a speech recognition system, which generates Vocal Tract Resonance (VTR) targets. The method includes obtaining generic VTR target parameters corresponding to a generic speaker used by a target selector to generate VTR target sequences. The generic VTR target parameters are scaled for a particular speaker using a speaker-dependent scaling factor for the particular speaker to generate speaker-adaptive VTR target parameters. This scaling is performed for both the training data and the test data, and for the training data, the scaling is performed iteratively with the process of obtaining the generic targets. The computation of the scaling factor makes use of the results of a VTR tracker. The speaker-adaptive VTR target parameters for the particular speaker are then stored in order to configure the hidden trajectory model to perform speech recognition for the particular speaker using the speaker-adaptive VTR target parameters.

Abstract: The invention relates to the therapeutic use of oligonucleotides as immunostimulatory agents in immunotherapy applications. More particularly, the invention provides immunomers and an immunostimulatory oligonucleotides for use in methods for generating an immune response or for treating a patient in need of immunostimulation. The immunomers and an immunostimulatory oligonucleotides of the invention preferably comprise novel purines. The immunomers 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 immunomodulatory oligonucleotideand 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: A method of identifying problems in a speech recognition application is provided and includes the step of obtaining a speech application call log containing log data on question-answer (QA) states and transitions. Then, in accordance with the method, for each of a multiple transitions between states, a parameter is generated which is indicative of a gain in a success rate of the speech recognition application if all calls passing through the transition passed instead through other transitions. In exemplary embodiments, the parameter is an Arc Cut Gain in Success Rate (ACGSR) parameter. Methods of generating the ACGSR, as well as systems and tools for aiding developers are also disclosed.

Abstract: Charge-splitting networks, optoelectronic devices, methods for making optoelectronic devices, power generation systems utilizing such devices and method for making charge-splitting networks are disclosed. An optoelectronic device may include a porous nano-architected (e.g., surfactant-templated) film having interconnected pores that are accessible from both the underlying and overlying layers. A pore-filling material substantially fills the pores. The interconnected pores have diameters of about 1-100 nm and are distributed in a substantially uniform fashion with neighboring pores separated by a distance of about 1-100 nm. The nano-architected porous film and the pore-filling material have complementary charge-transfer properties with respect to each other, i.e., one is an electron-acceptor and the other is a hole-acceptor. The nano-architected porous, film may be formed on a substrate by a surfactant temptation technique such as evaporation-induced self-assembly.

Abstract: The method and apparatus utilize a filter to remove a variety of non-dictated words from data based on probability and improve the effectiveness of creating a language model.

Abstract: A method of aiding a speech recognition program developer by grouping calls passing through an identified question-answer (QA) state or transition into clusters based on causes of problems associated with the calls is provided. The method includes determining a number of clusters into which a plurality of calls will be grouped. Then, the plurality of calls is at least partially randomly assigned to the different clusters. Model parameters are estimated using clustering information based upon the assignment of the plurality of calls to the different clusters. Individual probabilities are calculated for each of the plurality of calls using the estimated model parameters. The individual probabilities are indicative of a likelihood that the corresponding call belongs to a particular cluster. The plurality of calls is then re-assigned to the different clusters based upon the calculated probabilities. These steps are then repeated until the grouping of the plurality of calls achieves a desired stability.

Abstract: The invention relates to the therapeutic use of oligonucleotides or oligonucleotide analogs as immunostimulatory agents in immunotherapy applications. The invention provides methods for enhancing the immune response caused by immunostimulatory oligonucleotide compounds.

Abstract: The invention relates to the therapeutic use of oligonucleotides or oligonucleotide analogs as immunostimulatory agents in immunotherapy applications. The invention provides methods for enhancing the immune response caused by immunostimulatory oligonucleotide compounds.

Abstract: In accordance with one embodiment of the present invention, unanticipated semantic intents are discovered in audio data in an unsupervised manner. For instance, the audio acoustics are clustered based on semantic intent and representative acoustics are chosen for each cluster. The human then need only listen to a small number of representative acoustics for each cluster (and possibly only one per cluster) in order to identify the unforeseen semantic intents.

Abstract: A method of producing at least one possible sequence of vocal tract resonance (VTR) for a fixed sequence of phonetic units, and producing the acoustic observation probability by integrating over such distributions is provided. The method includes identifying a sequence of target distributions for a VTR sequence corresponding to a phone sequence with a given segmentation. The sequence of target distributions is applied to a finite impulse response filter to produce distributions for possible VTR trajectories. Then these distributions are applied to a linearized nonlinear function to produce the acoustic observation probability for the given sequence of phonetic units. This acoustic observation probability is used for phonetic recognition.

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 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 present invention relates a method and an apparatus for enhancing ultrasound image quality through a post-processing. A method for enhancing an image quality of a two-dimensional (2D) ultrasound image, comprises the steps of: a) decomposing the 2D ultrasound image into a plurality of images having a multi-resolution by N levels, wherein N is a positive integer; b) determining characteristics of each pixel in the decomposed image; c) performing an enhancement process for the decomposed image based on the pixel characteristics; d) performing 1st-level composition for the decomposed image; and e) repeatedly performing steps b) to d) until a size of the composed image is identical to that of the 2D ultrasound image.