Current state and future directions of bioeconomy in the Czech Republic.

This article presents the current status of the development of bioeconomy in the Czech Republic. Although the country has no unified strategy on bioeconomy, there are ambitious governmental innovation strategies and focused strategies for each region. Traditionally, the country has had a strong research performance in chemistry and biology, which together with developed agriculture, forestry and food industries, provides a good foundation for the development of locally based circular systems. Moreover, the government supports research on tools and applications of new plant breeding technologies, including genome editing, and there is a strong initiative from the research community calling to update EU regulatory policy in this area.

Noise-robust speech triage.

A method is presented in which conventional speech algorithms are applied, with no modifications, to improve their performance in extremely noisy environments. It has been demonstrated that, for eigen-channel algorithms, pre-training multiple speaker identification (SID) models at a lattice of signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) levels and then performing SID using the appropriate SNR dependent model was successful in mitigating noise at all SNR levels. In those tests, it was found that SID performance was optimized when the SNR of the testing and training data were close or identical. In this current effort multiple i-vector algorithms were used, greatly improving both processing throughput and equal error rate classification accuracy. Using identical approaches in the same noisy environment, performance of SID, language identification, gender identification, and diarization were significantly improved. A critical factor in this improvement is speech activity detection (SAD) that performs reliably in extremely noisy environments, where the speech itself is barely audible. To optimize SAD operation at all SNR levels, two algorithms were employed. The first maximized detection probability at low levels (-10 dB ≤ SNR < +10 dB) using just the voiced speech envelope, and the second exploited features extracted from the original speech to improve overall accuracy at higher quality levels (SNR ≥ +10 dB).