Audio fingerprinting techniques have seen great advances in recent years, enabling accurate and fast audio retrieval even in conditions when the queried audio sample has been highly deteriorated or recorded in noisy conditions. Expectedly, most of the existing work is centered around music, with popular music identification services such as Apple’s Shazam or Google’s Now Playing designed for individual audio recognition on mobile devices. However, the spectral content of speech differs from that of music, necessitating modifications to current audio fingerprinting approaches. This paper offers fresh insights into adapting existing techniques to address the specialized challenge of speech retrieval in telecommunications and cloud communications platforms. The focus is on achieving rapid and accurate audio retrieval in batch processing instead of facilitating single requests, typically on a centralized server. Moreover, the paper demonstrates how this approach can be utilized to support audio clustering based on speech transcripts without undergoing actual speech-to-text conversion. This optimization enables significantly faster processing without the need for GPU computing, a requirement for real-time operation that is typically associated with state-of-the-art speech-to-text tools.

Many public figures, companies and associations are planning events in different cities and at the same time have active profiles on social media. The planning process requires processing a large amount of data and different parameters when choosing the best event venue. Social media captures a large number of fan actions per day. This paper describes the process of selecting the most appropriate cities to organize events, aided by data collected from social media. The problem is defined as a combinatorial optimization problem. A modified metaheuristic Bat algorithm was proposed, implemented, and described in detail to solve the problem. Although the original Bat algorithm is designed to solve continuous optimization problems, the implemented bat algorithm is adapted to solve the defined problem. The algorithm is compared to the exhaustive search method for smaller instances, and to the greedy and genetic algorithm for larger instances. The algorithm was tested on benchmark data on cities in 20 European countries, as well as on real data collected from pages on the social network Facebook. Bat algorithm has shown superior results compared to other techniques, both in time and in the quality of the solutions generated.

It is well-known that determining the optimal number of guards which can cover the interior of a simple nonconvex polygon presents an NP-hard problem. The optimal guard placement can be described as a problem which seeks for the smallest number of guards required to cover every point in a complex environment. In this paper, we propose an exact twophase method as well as an approximate method for tackling the mentioned issue. The proposed exact approach in the first phase maps camera placement problem to the set covering problem, while in the second phase it uses famous state-of-the-art CPLEX solver to address set covering problem. The performance of our combined exact algorithm was compared to the performance of the approximate one. According to the results presented in the experimental analysis, it can be seen that the exact approach outperforms the approximate method for all instances.

Motivation Gene and species tree reconciliation methods can be used to root gene trees and correct uncertainties that are due to scarcity of signal in multiple sequence alignments. So far, reconciliation tools have not been integrated in standard phylogenetic software and they either lack of performance on certain functions, or usability for biologists. Results We present Treerecs, a phylogenetic software based on duplication-loss reconciliation. Treerecs is simple to install and to use, fast, versatile, with a graphic output, and can be used along with methods for phylogenetic inference on multiple alignments like PLL and Seaview. Availability Treerecs is open-source. Its source code (C++, AGPLv3) and manuals are available from https://project.inria.fr/treerecs/ Contact eric.tannier@inria.fr or david.parsons@inria.fr online.

Motivation: A reconciliation is an annotation of the nodes of a gene tree with evolutionary events—for example, speciation, gene duplication, transfer, loss, etc.—along with a mapping onto a species tree. Many algorithms and software produce or use reconciliations but often using different reconciliation formats, regarding the type of events considered or whether the species tree is dated or not. This complicates the comparison and communication between different programs. Results: Here, we gather a consortium of software developers in gene tree species tree reconciliation to propose and endorse a format that aims to promote an integrative—albeit flexible—specification of phylogenetic reconciliations. This format, named recPhyloXML, is accompanied by several tools such as a reconciled tree visualizer and conversion utilities. Availability and implementation: http://phylariane.univ‐lyon1.fr/recphyloxml/.