A method that combines expertise on neural networks with expertise on speech recognition is used to build the recognition systems. For transient sounds, eventdriven property extractors with variable resolution in the time and frequency domains are used. For sonorant speech, a model of the human auditory system is preferred to FFT as a front-end module. INTRODUCTION Combining a structural or knowledge-based approach for describing speech units with neural networks capable of automatically learning relations between acoustic properties and speech units is the research effort we are attempting.

The application of neural networks to the demodulation of spread-spectrum signals in a multiple-access environment is considered. This study is motivated in large part by the fact that, in a multiuser system, the conventional (matched ter) fil receiver suffers severe performance degradation as the relative powers of the interfering signals become large (the "near-far" problem). Furthermore, the optimum receiver, which alleviates the near-far problem, is too complex to be of practical use. Receivers based on multi-layer perceptrons are considered as a simple and robust alternative to the optimum solution. The optimum receiver is used to benchmark the performance of the neural net receiver; in particular, it is proven to be instrumental in identifying the decision regions of the neural networks. The back-propagation algorithm and a modified version of it are used to train the neural net. An importance sampling technique is introduced to reduce the number of simulations necessary to evaluate the performance of neural nets.

The Boltzmann Machine has been introduced as a means to perform global optimization for multimodal objective functions using the principles of simulated annealing. In this paper we consider its utility as a spurious-free content-addressable memory, and provide bounds on its performance in this context. We show how to exploit the machine's ability to escape local minima, in order to use it, at a constant temperature, for unambiguous associative pattern-retrieval in noisy environments. An association rule, which creates a sphere of influence around each stored pattern, is used along with the Machine's dynamics to match the machine's noisy input with one of the pre-stored patterns. Spurious fIxed points, whose regions of attraction are not recognized by the rule, are skipped, due to the Machine's fInite probability to escape from any state. The results apply to the Boltzmann machine and to the asynchronous net of binary threshold elements (Hopfield model'). They provide the network designer with worst-case and best-case bounds for the network's performance, and allow polynomial-time tradeoff studies of design parameters.

We propose a new neural network model and its learning algorithm. The proposed neural network consists of four layers - input, hidden, output and final output layers. The hidden and output layers are multiple. Using the proposed SICL(Spread Pattern Information and Cooperative Learning) algorithm, it is possible to learn analog data accurately and to obtain smooth outputs. Using this neural network, we have developed a speech production system consisting of a phonemic symbol production subsystem and a speech parameter production subsystem. We have succeeded in producing natural speech waves with high accuracy.

ABSTRACf The Space Environment Laboratory in Boulder has collaborated with the University of Colorado to construct a small expert system for solar flare forecasting, called THEa. It performed as well as a skilled human forecaster. We have constructed TheoNet, a three-layer back-propagation connectionist network that learns to forecast flares as well as THEa does. TheoNet's success suggests that a connectionist network can perform the task of knowledge engineering automatically. A study of the internal representations constructed by the network may give insights to the "microstructure" of reasoning processes in the human brain.

This paper describes the construction of a system that recognizes hand-printed digits, using a combination of classical techniques and neural-net methods. The system has been trained and tested on real-world data, derived from zip codes seen on actual U.S. Mail. The system rejects a small percentage of the examples as unclassifiable, and achieves a very low error rate on the remaining examples. The system compares favorably with other state-of-the art recognizers. While some of the methods are specific to this task, it is hoped that many of the techniques will be applicable to a wide range of recognition tasks.

Published by AlP Press, New York, N.Y (1988).

ABSTRACT This report describes the design of a programmable general purpose analog neural computer and simulator. It is intended primarily for real-world real-time computations such as analysis of visual or acoustical patterns, robotics and the development of special purpose neural nets. The machine is scalable and composed of interconnected modules containing arrays of neurons, modifiable synapses and switches. It runs entirely in analog mode but connection architecture, synaptic gains and time constants as well as neuron parameters are set digitally. Each neuron has a limited number of inputs and can be connected to any but not all other neurons.

Classifier systems are machine learning systems incotporating a genetic algorithm as the learning mechanism. Although they respond to inputs that neural networks can respond to, their internal structure, representation fonnalisms, and learning mechanisms differ marlcedly from those employed by neural network researchers in the same sorts of domains. As a result, one might conclude that these two types of machine learning fonnalisms are intrinsically different. This is one of two papers that, taken together, prove instead that classifier systems and neural networks are equivalent. In this paper, half of the equivalence is demonstrated through the description of a transfonnation procedure that will map classifier systems into neural networks that are isomotphic in behavior. Several alterations on the commonly-used paradigms employed by neural networlc researchers are required in order to make the transfonnation worlc.

The use of a one-stage dynamic programming algorithm for connected word recognition.