We present a systematic analysis on the performance of a phonetic recogniser when the window of input features is not symmetric with respect to the current frame. The recogniser is based on Context Dependent Deep Neural Networks (CD-DNNs) and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). The objective is to reduce the latency of the system by reducing the number of future feature frames required to estimate the current output. Our tests performed on the TIMIT database show that the performance does not degrade when the input window is shifted up to 5 frames in the past compared to common practice (no future frame). This corresponds to improving the latency by 50 ms in our settings. Our tests also show that the best results are not obtained with the symmetric window commonly employed, but with an asymmetric window with eight past and two future context frames, although this observation should be confirmed on other data sets. The reduction in latency suggested by our results is critical for specific applications such as real-time lip synchronisation for tele-presence, but may also be beneficial in general applications to improve the lag in human-machine spoken interaction.

In recent years, data streaming has gained prominence due to advances in technologies that enable many applications to generate continuous flows of data. This increases the need to develop algorithms that are able to efficiently process data streams. Additionally, real-time requirements and evolving nature of data streams make stream mining problems, including clustering, challenging research problems. In this paper, we propose a one-pass streaming soft clustering (membership of a point in a cluster is described by a distribution) algorithm which approximates the "soft" version of the k-means objective function. Soft clustering has applications in various aspects of databases and machine learning including density estimation and learning mixture models. We first achieve a simple pseudo-approximation in terms of the "hard" k-means algorithm, where the algorithm is allowed to output more than $k$ centers. We convert this batch algorithm to a streaming one (using an extension of the k-means++ algorithm recently proposed) in the "cash register" model. We also extend this algorithm when the clustering is done over a moving window in the data stream.