Multilingual models can improve language processing, particularly for low resource situations, by sharing parameters across languages. Multilingual acoustic models, however, generally ignore the difference between phonemes (sounds that can support lexical contrasts in a particular language) and their corresponding phones (the sounds that are actually spoken, which are language independent). This can lead to performance degradation when combining a variety of training languages, as identically annotated phonemes can actually correspond to several different underlying phonetic realizations. In this work, we propose a joint model of both language-independent phone and language-dependent phoneme distributions. In multilingual ASR experiments over 11 languages, we find that this model improves testing performance by 2% phoneme error rate absolute in low-resource conditions. Additionally, because we are explicitly modeling language-independent phones, we can build a (nearly-)universal phone recognizer that, when combined with the PHOIBLE [1] large, manually curated database of phone inventories, can be customized into 2,000 language dependent recognizers. Experiments on two low-resourced indigenous languages, Inuktitut and Tusom, show that our recognizer achieves phone accuracy improvements of more than 17%, moving a step closer to speech recognition for all languages in the world. 1

The nickel-catalyzed β-thioetherification of unactivated C(sp(3))-H bond of propionamides is established with the assistance of 8-aminoquinoline auxiliary, leading to the β-thio carboxylic acid derivatives. A broad range of functional groups is compatible with this thioetherfication reaction. The process represents the first successful example of metal-catalyzed C-S bond formation from unactivated C(sp(3))-H bonds.

A novel copper-mediated annulation of alkyl ketones with α,β-unsaturated carboxylic acids has been accomplished. This reaction provides a facile and regio-defined method for the synthesis of 2,3,5-trisubstituted furans from simple chemical reagents.

Pd(OAc)2-catalyzed oxidative acetoxylation of benzylic C-H bonds utilizing a bidentate system has been explored. A variety of picolinoyl- or quinoline-2-carbonyl-protected toluidine derivatives react with PhI(OAc)2 in the presence of Pd(OAc)2 to afford the acetoxylated products in synthetically useful yields. A broad of functionalities, such as CH3, F, Cl, Br, I, COCH3, CO2Et, SO2CH3, and NO2, were tolerated. This transformation provides easy access to 2-hydroxymethylaniline derivatives.

Compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) is a burgeoning single-shot computational imaging technique that provides an imaging speed as high as 10 trillion frames per second and a sequence depth of up to a few hundred frames. This technique synergizes compressed sensing and the streak camera technique to capture nonrepeatable ultrafast transient events with a single shot. With recent unprecedented technical developments and extensions of this methodology, it has been widely used in ultrafast optical imaging and metrology, ultrafast electron diffraction and microscopy, and information security protection. We review the basic principles of CUP, its recent advances in data acquisition and image reconstruction, its fusions with other modalities, and its unique applications in multiple research fields.

The direct thiolation of arenes and alkenes with diaryl disulfides was developed by nickel catalysis. The reaction displayed exceptional compatibility with a wide range of functional groups to regioselectively give the diaryl sulfides and alkenyl sulfides in high yields.

A novel palladium-catalyzed ortho-C(sp(2))-H olefination protocol has been developed by the use of sulfoxide as the directing group. Importantly, relatively remote coordination can be accessed to achieve the ortho olefination of benzyl, 2-arylethyl, and 3-arylpropenyl sulfoxide substrates, and the olefinated sulfoxide can be easily transformed to other functionalities.

An efficient palladium-catalyzed decarboxylative ortho-acylation of 2-aryloxypyridines with a-oxocarboxylic acids is described. In this new transformation, the aromatic CA C H T U N G T R E N N U N G (sp 2 ) À H bond was successfully acylated to give diverse aromatic ketones regioselectively in moderate to good yields. The pyridine group can be removed easily after the acylation to give the corresponding 2-hydroxy aromatic ketones.