TELEPHONE

In 1876, Inventor Alexander Graham Bell patented the first telephone.

Important developments that took place in the past are as follows

 Miniaturization of the telephone size due to advancement in

manufacturing and fabrication of electronics chips.
 Earlier telephone exchanges were manually operated by exchange
operator. These days, all telephone exchanges are fully electronic
controlled.
 Telephone was discovered to send only voice\speech signals over
telephone lines. Later, Facsimile services were also added over
the telephone lines to send\receive text documents.
 Around 1983s, internet was invented to connect network of
networks. Telephone network was used as medium to connect
network of computer networks. So during this period, both voice
and data started travelling over telephone network.
 Today, we are pushing the data transmission limits to as far as
possible using various data compression techniques.
 Also, during 1980s, cellular phones were coming into the market.
These were operating on wireless media and allowing the user to
remain connected even mobile.
 Seeing the limitations of cellular phones as limited to areas
covered by cell towers, Satellite phones were in place during
1990s.

Two major developments which are active and still needs to be

matured:-
  Mobile Computing: Some applications of mobile cloud computing
which are still under development are mobile healthcare.
 Security Issues: Today’s phones are smart phones and every user
uses it as a means of planning and organizing their work. Even
user do all his\her banking transactions on these devices.
Ultimately lot of personal information gets stored on these
devices which needs to be protected from cyber attacks. These
attacks exploit weaknesses related to smartphones that can come
from means of wireless telecommunication.
 As the revolution in internet has connected all corners of the
world,

Iridium satellite system for telephony

Iridium satellite system is a satellite constellation which provides

satellite telephony services to special users like News Agencies/
Journalists, Militaries, Air Lines and Ship/Vessels.

The original design of Iridium satellite system for telephony services

was envisaged in 1960s as a way to reach high Earth latitudes with
reliable satellite communication services. The system was designed to
be accessed by small handheld phones. Because of small
omnidirectional antenna mounted on these small handheld phones and
also because of low battery power, the phone’s radio waves were not
sufficient to reach Geostationary satellites. In order for handset to
communicate with satellites, Iridium satellites are put into Low Earth
Orbit (LEO).
Because of LEO orbit, these satellites are not stationary in the space;
therefore the call is automatically handed off to another satellite when
one passes beyond the horizon.

This requires a large number of satellites to be put in polar (North-

South) orbits to ensure that at least one satellite is continually in view
from every point of the earth surface.

In fact, the name Iridium came from the periodic table element at 77
due to the original plan was to launch 77 LEO satellites but in actual
later it was found that 66 such LEO satellites are sufficient.

Initially, this satellite constellation was to provide only telephonic

(Voice Services) to the users. The first telephone call was made over the
network in 1998 and full global coverage was completed by 2002.

Technical Development after 2015

The second generation iridium-NEXT satellites began to be deployed in

year 2017. The technical advancements in this next generation satellite
are high bandwidth and data transmission that were not envisaged in
earlier design.

Security and Encrypted Communication: Because of the increase in

modern high speed computational power, these devices need to
secured enough so that even if enemy intercepts these signals should
not be able to decrypt.

Hybrid Cellular/ Satellite Capabilities: Today’s handsets are either

satellite or cellular models.
Reason/Justification

The prime users of satellite phones are military, news agencies, airlines,
ships and VIPs, etc. These users are always in need to transfer
video/images/texts from remote locations (not easily accessible). The
video, images and text data acquired via high resolution requires high
bandwidth for reliable and error free communication. Therefore, these
advancements are being made to enable the end users to remain
connected with very high bandwidth channel.

Also, during natural disaster and emergencies when land-based

communication services are down, the satellite phones can be easily
deployed to provide communication services to Disaster Relief Team
and Medical Teams. They will be in better position to serve if
communication can provide maps/images or even videos in near real
time.

Ref:

1. https://www.marsat.ru/en/technologies-iridiumnetwork
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation

Deep Learning based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)

The technology to develop automatic speech recognition started way

back in year 1960. Important developments that took place in ASR in
the past till Deep Learning based methods are as listed below:-

 In 1961, IBM Shoebox machine was developed. It was able to

recognize digits 0 to 9 and 06 math operations (+,-, total, subtotal,
false and off) using Formant frequencies.
 In early 1970s, the U.S. Department of Defense’s (ARPA) funded a
five year program called Speech Understanding Research. This led
to several new Automatic Speech Recognition System. The most
successful ASR was built by Carneige Mellon University’s
“HARPY”. It could understand more than 1000 words in year
1976.
 IBM and AT&T’s Bell Laboratory pushed the technology toward
possible commercial applications.
 In 1980s, a key turning point in ASR was popularization of Hidden
Markov Models (HMM). HMM approach shifted the approach of
“from simple pattern recognition methods, based on templates
and a spectral distance measure, to a statistical method for
speech processing”. This resulted in more accuracy in ASR
systems.
 In 1990s, Dragon Dictate launched a dictionary of 80,000 words
and features like natural language processing. Dragon could
initially recognize only 30–40 words a minute; people typically talk
around four times faster than that.
 By 1997 the company introduced Dragon NaturallySpeaking,
which could capture words at a more fluid pace.
 In 2012, Microsoft released the newest version of their Microsoft
Audio Video Indexing Service (MAVIS) which is a speech system
based on deep learning. Their final results clearly showed that the
word error rate (WER) reduced on four major benchmarks by 30%
compared to the state-of-the-art models based on Gaussian
mixtures .
  Time-Delay Neural Networks
o “Phoneme recognition using time-delay neural networks-
1989 by Alex Waibel, Toshiyuki Hanazawa.
 Recurrent Neural Networks
o A real time recurrent error propagation network word
recognition system – 1992 by Tony Rob.
 Hybrid Systems:
o Hybrid neural network/ hidden markov model systems for
continuous speech recognition – 1994 by Nelson Morgan.
 Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks – 1997 by Mike Schuster
 Hierarchical Neural Networks - 1998 by Fritsch and Finke.
 Tandem: Tandem connectionist feature extraction for
Convolutional HMM systems – 2000 by Hermansky, Ellis and
Sharma.
 Geoff Hinton invented Deep Belief Networks (DBN) to make
neural net learning fast and effective;
 July 2010: success of bottleneck feature coding using speech
spectrogram; Interspeech-2010 paper Deng/Hinton et al.
 August 2010: success of DNN in large vocabulary speech
recognition (voice search); paper in ICASSP-2011 (Dahl/Yu/Deng)
 Deep Learning based methods aim to learn a non-linear mapping
function F from the observed noisy signal into the desired clean
speech.
 2016: The IBM 2016 English Conversational Telephone Speech Recognition System

Topics which are still in Research and needs to get mature:

 One Language to another Language Speech system Throughout

world, different languages are spoken. Even with in a same
 country, diversity in spoken languages are also seen like India. It is
very much required that a machine which can translate one
spoken language to another spoken language. A lot of work is
being carried out in this direction. Even Machine Learning Skills
are also being exploited to achieve a good success rate in this
direction.

It is believed that the success of these machines depend on user

spoken accents. As different people always speak in different
accents, so it has become a big challenge for these machines to
achieve a very high success rate.

 Health Monitoring using Speech Signals The source of speech

signal is known to be lungs, therefore it is believed that the
speech signal has potential applications in detecting the health of
the lungs of human beings. A lot of research is going on this
direction as it has many applications in bot civil and military
applications.

The success rate is slow till date in this direction. The probable
reason for slow success rate may be lack of availability of data. As
the data required for this research is personal, it is difficult to get
a lot of data to train machine models in this subject.