SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for December
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Multi-modal Sensing and Analysis of Poster Conversations toward Smart Posterboard
Thu, Dec 06, 2012 @ 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Tatsuya Kawahara, Kyoto University
Talk Title: Multi-modal Sensing and Analysis of Poster Conversations toward Smart Posterboard
Abstract: Conversations in poster sessions in academic events, referred to as poster conversations, pose interesting and challenging topics on multi-modal analysis of multi-party dialogue. This article gives an overview of our project on multi-modal sensing, analysis and ``understanding'' of poster conversations. We focus on the audience's feedback behaviors such as non-lexical backchannels (reactive tokens) and noddings as well as joint eye-gaze events by the presenter and the audience. We investigate whether we can predict when and who will ask what kind of questions and also interest level of the audience. Based on these analyses, we design a smart posterboard which can sense human behaviors and annotate interactions and interest level during poster sessions.
Biography: Tatsuya Kawahara received his B.E. in 1987, M.E. in 1989, and Ph.D. in 1995, all in information science, from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. In 1990, he became a Research Associate in the Department of Information Science, Kyoto University. From 1995 to 1996, he was a Visiting Researcher at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. Currently, he is a Professor in the Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies and an Affiliated Professor in the School of Informatics, Kyoto University. He has also been an Invited Researcher at ATR and NICT. He has published more than 250 technical papers on speech recognition, spoken language processing, and spoken dialogue systems. He has been conducting several speech-related projects in Japan including free large vocabulary continuous speech recognition software (http://julius.sourceforge.jp/) and the automatic transcription system for the Japanese Parliament (Diet). From 2003 to 2006, he was a member of IEEE SPS Speech Technical Committee. From 2011, he is a secretary of IEEE SPS Japan Chapter. He was a general chair of IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition & Understanding workshop (ASRU 2007). He also served as a Tutorial Chair of INTERSPEECH 2010 and a Local Arrangement Chair of IEEE ICASSP 2012. He is an editorial board member of Elsevier Journal of Computer Speech and Language, ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, and APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information.
http://www.ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp/members/kawahara/mybib/Biography_e.html
Host: Professor Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Multi-view Learning of Speech Features Using Articulatory Measurements
Fri, Dec 07, 2012 @ 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Karen Livescu, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago
Talk Title: Multi-view Learning of Speech Features Using Articulatory Measurements
Abstract: Articulatory information has been used in automatic speech recognition in a number of ways. For example, phonetic recognition can be improved if articulatory measurements are available at test time. However, it is usually not feasible to measure articulation at test time, due to the expense and inconvenience of the machinery involved. In this work, we ask whether it is possible to use articulatory measurements that are available only at training time to help learn which aspects of the acoustic feature vector are useful. We apply ideas from multi-view learning, in which multiple âviewsâ of the data are available for training but possibly not for prediction (testing). In our case, the views are acoustics on the one hand and articulatory measurements on the other. In particular, we use canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and kernel CCA (KCCA), which find projections of vectors in each view that are maximally correlated with projections of vectors in the other view.
A typical approach to acoustic feature vector generation in speech recognition is to first construct a very high-dimensional feature vector by concatenating multiple consecutive frames of raw features (MFCCs, PLPs, etc.), and then to reduce dimensionality using either an unsupervised transformation such as principal components analysis, a linear supervised transformation such as linear discriminant analysis and its extensions, or a nonlinear supervised transformation (e.g. using neural networks). Our approach here is unsupervised transformation learning, but using the second view (the articulatory measurements) as a form of âsoft supervisionâ. The approach we take, using CCA and KCCA, avoids some of the disadvantages of other unsupervised approaches, such as PCA, which are sensitive to noise and data scaling, and possibly of supervised approaches, which are more task-specific.
This talk will cover the basic techniques, as well as several issues that come up in their application, such as large-scale data issues, speaker-independence, and combination of the learned features with standard ones. The talk will include our results to date, showing that the approach can be used to improve performance on tasks such as phonetic classification and recognition.
Joint work with Raman Arora (TTIC), Sujeeth Bharadwaj (UIUC), and Mark Hasegawa-Johnson (UIUC)
Biography: Karen Livescu is an Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC). She completed her PhD in 2005 at MIT and spent the next two years as a post-doctoral lecturer in the MIT EECS department. Karen's interests are in speech and language processing, with a slant toward combining machine learning with knowledge from linguistics and speech science. Her recent work has been on articulatory models, multi-view learning, nearest-neighbor approaches, and automatic sign language recognition.
Host: Kartik Audhkhasi, Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Recent Work at National Taiwan University on Spoken Content Retrieval and Computer-Assisted Language Learning
Fri, Dec 07, 2012 @ 02:00 PM - 03:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Prof. Lin-shan Lee, National Taiwan University
Talk Title: Recent Work at National Taiwan University on Spoken Content Retrieval and Computer-Assisted Language Learning
Abstract: In this talk some recent work on speech processing research at National Taiwan University (NTU) will be summarized. The first part of the talk will be on retrieval of spoken content semantically related to the query but not necessarily including the query terms. This problem has been widely studied in text information retrieval. In this talk we will show how text-based techniques can be translated into approaches for spoken content. The second part of the talk will be on a dialogue game framework for computer-assisted language learning. This work extends our previous work of NTU Chinese, a Chinese pronunciation evaluation software tool, to develop a dialogue game. We use reinforcement learning to train the dialogue manager with a goal to offer learning materials adapted to the learning progress of each individual learner.
Biography: Lin-shan Lee has been a professor of National Taiwan University since 1982. He developed several early versions of Chinese spoken language systems (text-to-speech synthesis, large vocabulary continuous speech recognition, etc.) in the world, and was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 1992. His recent work is more focused on speech recognition fundamentals (features, models, robustness, etc.) and network environment problems (e.g. retrieval, semantic analysis and educational issues of spoken content). He served as the Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) (2007-08), a member of the Overview Paper Editorial Board of IEEE SPS (since 2009), and the general chair of ICASSP 2009 at Taipei. He also served as a Board member of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) (2001-09), in which he initiated and coordinated (2006-09) the ISCA Distinguished Lecturers Program. He was elected as an ISCA Fellow in 2010.
Host: Dogan Can and Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: RTH 320
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Integrated Systems Seminar Series
Fri, Dec 07, 2012 @ 03:00 PM - 04:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ali Afsahi, Broadcom
Talk Title: Integrated CMOS Power Amplifier for WLAN Applications
Abstract: Consumer demand for WiFi-enabled products has increased over the last several years, and analyst reports conclude that the sales momentum is expected to continue for the next several years. From laptops to cell phones to television sets, our desire to share
broadband information is making wireless connectivity a must-have feature for a range of devices. In order to keep the cost down and have smaller form-factor especially for embedded applications, the transceiver has been integrated with the baseband PHY and MAC as an SoC solution in a pure CMOS process. One of the main contributors to the cost and size of the solution is the external power amplifier (PA). Recently, there has
been a significant amount of effort to implement PAs in CMOS technology. However, the low supply voltage, lossy substrate and lower breakdown voltage make the design of a linear, high power and reliable PA quite challenging in CMOS technology. In addition, the advanced modulation schemes such as OFDM, possesses a very high peak-to-average ratio (PAR) and requires a very linear power amplifier to preserve the integrity of the
signal. This talk will go over the design of a fully integrated, reliable, linear and efficient CMOS power amplifier for Wireless LAN applications while meeting the stringent requirements of WLAN standards. In addition, several linearization and power combining
techniques will be discussed to boost the output power efficiently for watt-level applications.
Biography: Ali Afsahi received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, in 1998, and the M.S.E. degree in RF/analog IC design from Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, in 2006. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree part-time at the University of California at San Diego. He joined Broadcom Corporation in 2004 as an RFIC designer. Since then, he has been involved in the design of various blocks for wireless LAN transceivers. He is currently a manager, IC design engineering, leading the transmitter and CMOS power amplifier designs for all of the Broadcomâs WLAN products. He has more than 30 issued and pending patents. He is on his fourth year serving as a member of RFIC Technical Program Committee. Mr. Afsahi was the recipient of the 2009 Analog Devices Outstanding Designer Award for his work on CMOS power amplifiers.
Host: Prof. Hossein Hashemi, Prof. Mahta Moghaddam, Prof. Mike Chen
More Info: http://mhi.usc.edu/activities/integrated-systems/
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Hossein Hashemi
Event Link: http://mhi.usc.edu/activities/integrated-systems/
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Machine Learning for Speech and Language Processing
Fri, Dec 07, 2012 @ 03:30 PM - 05:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Jen-Tzung Chien, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu
Talk Title: Machine Learning for Speech and Language Processing
Abstract: In this lecture, I will present a series of machine learning approaches to various applications relevant to speech and language processing including acoustic modelling, language modelling, blind source separation and document summarization. In general, speech and language processing involves extensive knowledge of statistical models which are learnt from observation data. However, in the real world, observation data are inevitably acquired from heterogeneous environments in the presence of mislabeled, misaligned, mismatched and ill-posed conditions. The estimated models suffer from large complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty. Model regularization becomes a crucial issue when constructing the speech and text models for different information systems. In statistical machine learning, the uncertainty and sparse coding algorithms provide attractive and effective solution to model regularization. This lecture will address recent works on Bayesian and sparse learning. In particular, I will present Bayesian sensing hidden Markov models and Dirichlet class language models for speech recognition, online Gaussian process for blind source separation, and Bayesian nonparametrics for document summarization. In these works, robust models are established against improper model assumption, over-determined model complexity, ambient noise interference, and nonstationary environment variations. Finally, I will point out some potential topics on machine learning for speech and language processing.
Biography: Jen-Tzung Chien received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 1997. During 1997-2012, he was with the National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan. Since 2012, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, where he is currently a Distinguished Professor. He held the Visiting Researcher positions at the Panasonic Technologies Inc., Santa Barbara, CA, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, the Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China, and the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. His research interests include machine learning, speech recognition and blind source separation.
Dr. Chien served as the associate editor of the IEEE Signal Processing Letters, in 2008-2011, and the tutorial speaker of the ICASSP, in 2012. He is appointed as the APSIPA Distinguished Lecturer for 2012-2013. He was a co-recipient of the Best Paper Award of the IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop in 2011. He received the Distinguished Research Awards from the National Science Council, Taiwan, in 2006 and 2010.
Host: Kartik Audhkhasi, Dr. Maarten Van Segbroeck, Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
On Positioning Algorithms that are Robust Against Non-Line-of-Sight Measurements
Mon, Dec 10, 2012 @ 01:30 PM - 02:30 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Erik Strom, Chalmers University
Talk Title: On Positioning Algorithms that are Robust Against Non-Line-of-Sight Measurements
Abstract: In this talk, we will discuss distance-based positioning, i.e., given a number of noisy distance measurements from nodes at fixed and known positions (anchor nodes), determine the position of one or several other nodes (target nodes). GPS and other global satellite navigation systems solve these type of problems. However, in non-line-of-sight conditions, distance measurements tend to suffer from large positive biases, which cause large position errors if not properly compensated for. We will present a number of positioning algorithms, based on Projection Onto Convex Sets (POCS), which are very robust against positive errors. In fact, if there are a few measurements with small errors, POCS-based algorithms can handle arbitrary large positive errors in arbitrarily many other measurements. The price to pay is less accuracy compared to conventional algorithms, such as nonlinear least squares, when there are no large positive errors.
Biography: Erik G. Ström (https://sites.google.com/site/erikgstrom/) received the M.S. degree from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden, in 1990, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Florida, Gainesville, in 1994, both in electrical engineering. He accepted a postdoctoral position at the Department of Signals, Sensors, and Systems at KTH in 1995. In February 1996, he was appointed Assistant Professor at KTH, and in June 1996 he joined Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, where he is now a Professor in Communication Systems since June 2003. Dr. Ström currently heads the Division for Communications Systems, Information Theory, and Antennas at the Department of Signals and Systems at Chalmers and leads the competence area Sensors and Communications at the traffic safety center SAFER, which is hosted by Chalmers. His research interests include signal processing and communication theory in general, and constellation labelings, channel estimation, synchronization, multiple access, medium acccess, multiuser detection, wireless positioning, and vehicular communications in particular. Since 1990, he has acted as a consultant for the Educational Group for Individual Development, Stockholm, Sweden. He is a contributing author and associate editor for Roy. Admiralty Publishers FesGas-series, and was a co-guest editor for the Proceedings of the IEEE special issue on Vehicular Communications (2011) and the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications special issues on Signal Synchronization in Digital Transmission Systems (2001) and on Multiuser Detection for Advanced Communication Systems and Networks (2008). Dr. Ström was a member of the board of the IEEE VT/COM Swedish Chapter 2000--2006. He received the Chalmers Pedagogical Prize in 1998 and the Chalmers Ph.D. Supervisor of the Year award in 2009.
Host: Urbashi Mitra, x04667, ubli@usc.edu
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 539
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
EE-Electrophysics Seminar
Fri, Dec 14, 2012 @ 09:30 AM - 10:30 AM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Mina Rais-Zadeh, University of Michigan
Talk Title: Integrated Microsystems for Communication and Sensing Applications
Abstract: In the recent past, there has been growing interest in reconfigurable or software defined radios. One of the critical requirements of a software defined radio is to have the ability to reconfigure the RF front-end. RF MEMS capacitors, inductors, and tunable filters serve this need and can offer a wide tuning range while consuming very small power. In the first part of this talk, I will present the design and characterization of some high-performance reconfigurable RF modules and explain the challenges with implementing tunable components, specifically at the UHF range. In the second part of the talk, I will go over the design of acoustic filters, resonators and resonant sensors, and discuss the application of these devices and systems in timing and navigation units, night vision, and infrared sensing. I will explain the need for high-Q devices and discuss the physical phenomena that limit the performance and scaling of RF MEMS.
Biography: Professor Mina Rais-Zadeh received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees both in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, in 2005 and 2008, respectively. From August 2008 to 2009, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Integrated MEMS Group, Georgia Institute of Technology. Since January 2009, she has been with the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Mina is the recipient of NASA Early Career Faculty Award (2012), NSF CAREER Award (2011), IEEE Electron Device Society Early Career Award (2011), and the finalist in student paper competitions at the SiRF (2007) and IMS (2011) conferences. She is a senior member of IEEE and serves as a member of the technical program committee of IEEE IEDM, IEEE Sensors, and Hilton Head workshop. She is the leader of the âHigh Frequency MEMSâ Thrust of the Center on Wireless Integrated MicroSensing and Systems (WIMS2) at the University of Michigan.
Host: EE-Electrophysics
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Marilyn Poplawski
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
Advances in Sign Language Recognition and Morphological Systems
Mon, Dec 17, 2012 @ 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Professor Petros Maragos, School of E.C.E., National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and Athena â Research and Innovation Center
Talk Title: Advances in Sign Language Recognition and Morphological Systems
Abstract: This talk presents an overview of some advances in two broad research areas in image analysis and computer vision and in related nonlinear systems. The first area deals with some major problems in sign language recognition including efficient algorithms for visual processing and the development of multimodal subunits, data-driven or phonetically-based, that provide a temporal sequential structure and allow for both temporal segmentation as well as automatic recognition and signer adaptation in continuous sign language videos. The talk will address several topics in multimodality such as motion-position cues, handshapes, and facial events. The second area deals with the nonlinear geometric approach to image analysis based on morphological operators and a new lattice-theoretic generalization which has a rich algebraic structure. The talk will summarize results on the variational formulation of some morphological operators, their extensions on graphs, and some applications in image simplification and segmentation as well as in nonlinear dynamical systems on lattices.
Biography: Petros Maragos received the Diploma in E.E. from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 1980 and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Georgia Tech, Atlanta, in 1982 and 1985. In 1985, he joined the faculty of the Division of Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he worked for eight years as professor of electrical engineering affiliated with the Harvard Robotics Lab. In 1993, he joined the faculty of the School of ECE at Georgia Tech. During periods of 1996-98 he had a joint appointment as director of research at the Institute of Language and Speech Processing in Athens. Since 1998, he has been working as a professor at the NTUA School of ECE. His research and teaching interests include signal processing, systems theory, pattern recognition, and their applications to image processing and computer vision, audio, speech and language processing, cognitive systems, and robotics. He has served as Associate Editor for the IEEE Trans. on ASSP, IEEE Trans. on PAMI, and editorial board member and guest editor for several journals on signal processing, image analysis and vision; co-organizer of several conferences and workshops, including VCIP'92, ISMM'96, VLBV'01, MMSP'07, ECCV'10, EUSIPCO'12; and member of the IEEE committees on DSP, IMDSP and MMSP.
He is the recipient or co-recipient of several awards, including a 1983 Sigma Xi best thesis award, a 1987-1992 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the 1988 IEEE SPS Young Author Best Paper Award for the paper `Morphological Filters',Âthe 1994 IEEE SPS Senior Best Paper Award and the 1995 IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Award for the paper `Energy Separation in Signal Modulations with Application to Speech Analysis', the 1996 Pattern Recognition Society's Honorable Mention Award for the paper `Min-Max Classifiers', the EURASIP 2007 Technical Achievement Award for contributions to nonlinear signal, image and speech processing, and the Best Paper Award of the IEEE CVPR-2011 Gesture Recognition Workshop. He was elected a Fellow of IEEE in 1995 and of EURASIP in 2010 for his research contributions. http://cvsp.cs.ntua.gr/maragos
Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 320
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Mary Francis
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
An Optical Turing Machine
Mon, Dec 17, 2012 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Joseph Touch, USC/ISI
Talk Title: An Optical Turing Machine
Abstract: The Optical Turing Machine (OTM) is our effort to design and implement a digital device that processes network data in an optical multibit/symbol modulation format. Its goal is to support high-speed computation using an encoding capable of high-speed, long-distance transmission. OTM explores the unification of communication and computation, and investigates the nature of Turing-equivalent computation. This talk introduces the OTM approach and discusses its key challenges. We discuss our current OTM projects, including the extension of our earlier all-optical packet hopcount decrement to multibit encoding, and the design and implementation of the world's first all-optical Internet checksum.
The OTM project is supported by grants from USC/ISI's New Research Initiatives (NRI) and the NSF Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN).
For those of you that are unable to attend in person, please use the following webcast link to view:
http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=83c9a7910ac34185b9e2c61eacff55ec1d
Host: John Wroclawski
Webcast: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=83c9a7910ac34185b9e2c61eacff55ec1dLocation: 11th Floor Large Conference Room
WebCast Link: http://webcasterms1.isi.edu/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=83c9a7910ac34185b9e2c61eacff55ec1d
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Gerrielyn Ramos
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
