This book presents recent advances in nonlinear speech processing beyond nonlinear techniques. It shows that it exploits heuristic and psychological models of human interaction in order to succeed in the implementations of socially believable VUIs and applications for human health and psychological support. The book takes into account the multifunctional role of speech and what is "outside of the box" (see Bjoern Schuller's foreword). To this aim, the book is organized in 6 sections, each collecting a small number of short chapters reporting advances "inside" and "outside" themes related to nonlinear speech research. The themes emphasize theoretical and practical issues for modelling socially believable speech interfaces, ranging from efforts to capture the nature of sound changes in linguistic contexts and the timing nature of speech; labors to identify and detect speech features that help in the diagnosis of psychological and neuronal disease, attempts to improve the effectiveness and performance of Voice User Interfaces, new front-end algorithms for the coding/decoding of effective and computationally efficient acoustic and linguistic speech representations, as well as investigations capturing the social nature of speech in signaling personality traits, emotions and improving human machine interactions.

This book presents recent advances in nonlinear speech processing beyond nonlinear techniques. It shows that it exploits heuristic and psychological models of human interaction in order to succeed in the implementations of socially believable VUIs and applications for human health and psychological support. The book takes into account the multifunctional role of speech and what is "outside of the box" (see Bjoern Schuller's foreword). To this aim, the book is organized in 6 sections, each collecting a small number of short chapters reporting advances "inside" and "outside" themes related to nonlinear speech research. The themes emphasize theoretical and practical issues for modelling socially believable speech interfaces, ranging from efforts to capture the nature of sound changes in linguistic contexts and the timing nature of speech; labors to identify and detect speech features that help in the diagnosis of psychological and neuronal disease, attempts to improve the effectiveness and performance of Voice User Interfaces, new front-end algorithms for the coding/decoding of effective and computationally efficient acoustic and linguistic speech representations, as well as investigations capturing the social nature of speech in signaling personality traits, emotions and improving human machine interactions.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 6th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, BIOSTEC 2013, held in Barcelona, Spain, in February 2013. The 28 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 392 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics and are organized in four general topical sections on biomedical electronics and devices; bioinformatics models, methods and algorithms; bio-inspired systems and signal processing; health informatics.

This volume contains the proceedings of NOLISP 2009, an ISCA Tutorial and Workshop on Non-Linear Speech Processing held at the University of Vic (- talonia, Spain) during June 25-27, 2009. NOLISP2009wasprecededbythreeeditionsofthisbiannualeventheld2003 in Le Croisic (France), 2005 in Barcelona, and 2007 in Paris. The main idea of NOLISP workshops is to present and discuss new ideas, techniques and results related to alternative approaches in speech processing that may depart from the mainstream. In order to work at the front-end of the subject area, the following domains of interest have been de?ned for NOLISP 2009: 1. Non-linear approximation and estimation 2. Non-linear oscillators and predictors 3. Higher-order statistics 4. Independent component analysis 5. Nearest neighbors 6. Neural networks 7. Decision trees 8. Non-parametric models 9. Dynamics for non-linear systems 10. Fractal methods 11. Chaos modeling 12. Non-linear di?erential equations The initiative to organize NOLISP 2009 at the University of Vic (UVic) came from the UVic Research Group on Signal Processing and was supported by the Hardware-Software Research Group. We would like to acknowledge the ?nancial support obtained from the M- istry of Science and Innovation of Spain (MICINN), University of Vic, ISCA, and EURASIP. All contributions to this volume are original. They were subject to a doub- blind refereeing procedure before their acceptance for the workshop and were revised after being presented at NOLISP 2009.