Prediction of solar irradiance plays an essential role in many energy systems. The objective of this paper is to present a low-cost solar irradiance meter based on artificial neural networks (ANN). A photovoltaic (PV) mathematical model of 50 watts and 36 cells was used to extract the short-circuit current and the open-circuit voltage of the PV module. The obtained data was used to train the ANN to predict solar irradiance for horizontal surfaces. The strategy was to measure the open-circuit voltage and the short-circuit current of the PV module and then feed it to the ANN as inputs to get the irradiance. The experimental and simulation results showed that the proposed method could be utilized to achieve the value of solar irradiance with acceptable approximation. As a result, this method presents a low-cost instrument that can be used instead of an expensive pyranometer.

As generative AI (GenAI) technologies proliferate, ensuring trust and transparency in digital ecosystems becomes increasingly critical, particularly within democratic frameworks. This article examines decentralized Web3 mechanisms—blockchain, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and data cooperatives—as foundational tools for enhancing trust in GenAI. These mechanisms are analyzed within the framework of the EU’s AI Act and the Draghi Report, focusing on their potential to support content authenticity, community-driven verification, and data sovereignty. Based on a systematic policy analysis, this article proposes a multi-layered framework to mitigate the risks of AI-generated misinformation. Specifically, as a result of this analysis, it identifies and evaluates seven detection techniques of trust stemming from the action research conducted in the Horizon Europe Lighthouse project called ENFIELD: (i) federated learning for decentralized AI detection, (ii) blockchain-based provenance tracking, (iii) zero-knowledge proofs for content authentication, (iv) DAOs for crowdsourced verification, (v) AI-powered digital watermarking, (vi) explainable AI (XAI) for content detection, and (vii) privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML). By leveraging these approaches, the framework strengthens AI governance through peer-to-peer (P2P) structures while addressing the socio-political challenges of AI-driven misinformation. Ultimately, this research contributes to the development of resilient democratic systems in an era of increasing technopolitical polarization.

Recent studies in text-to-speech synthesis have shown the benefit of using a continuous pitch estimate; one that interpolates fundamental frequency (F0) even when voicing is not present. However, continuous F0 is still sensitive to additive noise in speech signals and suffers from short-term errors (when it changes rather quickly over time). To alleviate these issues, three adaptive techniques have been developed in this article for achieving a robust and accurate F0: (1) we weight the pitch estimates with state noise covariance using adaptive Kalman-filter framework, (2) we iteratively apply a time axis warping on the input frame signal, (3) we optimize all F0 candidates using an instantaneous-frequency-based approach. Additionally, the second goal of this study is to introduce an extension of a novel continuous-based speech synthesis system (i.e., in which all parameters are continuous). We propose adding a new excitation parameter named Harmonic-to-Noise Ratio (HNR) to the voiced and unvoiced components to indicate the degree of voicing in the excitation and to reduce the influence of buzziness caused by the vocoder. Results based on objective and perceptual tests demonstrate that the voice built with the proposed framework gives state-of-the-art speech synthesis performance while outperforming the previous baseline.

This paper presents an investigation of speaker adaptation using a continuous vocoder for parametric text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. In purposes that demand low computational complexity, conventional vocoder-based statistical parametric speech synthesis can be preferable. While capable of remarkable naturalness, recent neural vocoders nonetheless fall short of the criteria for real-time synthesis. We investigate our former continuous vocoder, in which the excitation is characterized employing two one-dimensional parameters: Maximum Voiced Frequency and continuous fundamental frequency (F0). We show that an average voice can be trained for deep neural network-based TTS utilizing data from nine English speakers. We did speaker adaptation experiments for each target speaker with 400 utterances (approximately 14 minutes). We showed an apparent enhancement in the quality and naturalness of synthesized speech compared to our previous work by utilizing the recurrent neural network topologies. According to the objective studies (Mel-Cepstral Distortion and F0 correlation), the quality of speaker adaptation using Continuous Vocoder-based DNN-TTS is slightly better than the WORLD Vocoder-based baseline. The subjective MUSHRA-like test results also showed that our speaker adaptation technique is almost as natural as the WORLD vocoder using Gated Recurrent Unit and Long Short Term Memory networks. The proposed vocoder, being capable of real-time synthesis, can be used for applications which need fast synthesis speed.