Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Long-Term Spectral Statistics for Voice Presentation Attack Detection

Automatic speaker verification systems can be spoofed through recorded, synthetic, or voice converted speech of target speakers. To make these systems practically viable, the detection of such attacks, referred to as presentation attacks, is of paramount interest. In that direction, this paper investigates two aspects: 1) a novel approach to detect presentation attacks where, unlike conventional approaches, no speech signal modeling related assumptions are made, rather the attacks are detected by computing first-order and second-order spectral statistics and feeding them to a classifier, and 2) generalization of the presentation attack detection systems across databases. Our investigations on ASVspoof 2015 challenge database and AVspoof database show that, when compared to the approaches based on conventional short-term spectral features, the proposed approach with a linear discriminative classifier yields a better system, irrespective of whether the spoofed signal is replayed to the microphone or is directly injected into the system software process. Cross-database investigations show that neither the short-term spectral processing-based approaches nor the proposed approach yield systems which are able to generalize across databases or methods of attack. Thus, revealing the difficulty of the problem and the need for further resources and research.
Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology Survey of Biometric Recognition Systems and Their Applications

The term Biometrics is becoming highly important in computer security world. The human physical characteristics like fingerprints, face, hand geometry, voice and iris are known as biometrics. These features are used to provide an authentication for computer based security systems. The existing computer security systems used at various places like banking, passport, credit cards, smart cards, PIN , access control and network security are using username and passwords for person identification. The username and passwords can be replaced and/or provide double authentication by using any one of the biometric features. In this paper, the main focus is on the various biometrics, their applications and the existing biometrics recognition systems.
Occlusion culling for stereoscopic display of complex mechanical sets

This paper explores the benefits that can be achieved for stereoscopic visualization when using occlusion culling strategies. The virtual environments analysed in this paper are complex mechanical sets that are not densely occluded. Those which are built up by dense geometric sets like aerospace engines composed of thousands of components and millions of polygons. The algorithm uses occlusion queries and succeeds in improving the frame rate of the stereoscopic visualization with an effective scheduling of the queries. Different coherences, including stereo coherence, are used to achieve this effective scheduling. An aggressive approach has been also validated for inclusion in the proposal. The occlusion culling algorithm can be easily implemented and provides a significant boost in performances.
The Relationship Between the Use and Effectiveness of Imagery: An Exploratory Investigation

The major purposes of the present investigation were (a) to enhance the Sport Imagery Questionnaire (SIQ) by adding an effectiveness component to the already existing frequency component;(b) to assess when, and under what conditions, imagery is being employed by athletes; and (c) to conduct an exploratory analysis of the impact of gender and type of sport on imageryuse. Participants were 523 athletes from both individual and team sports at two NCAA Division I universities. They all completed the SIQ, Imagery Use Questionnaire (IUQ) and anopen-ended questionnaire assessing their imagery use. Results revealed that both the revised SIQ and IUQ had high internal consistency reliability. Results from the IUQ as well as theopen-ended questionnaire, revealed that athletes used imagery predominantly before competition. Open-ended findings revealed that athletes also used imagery in tough/difficult situationswhere pressure was high. Results are discussed in terms of previous imagery and socialization literature, and practical implications as well as future research directions are offered.
A Comparison of Tagging Strategies for Statistical Information Extraction

There are several approaches that model information extraction as a token classification task, using various tagging strategies to combine multiple tokens. We describe the tagging strategies that can be found in the literature and evaluate their relative performances. We also introduce a new strategy, called Begin/After tagging or BIA, and show that it is competitive to the best other strategies.
Disordered Integration of Heteromodal Short-Term Cognitive Operations : A Breakdown of Working Memory

Abstract We report a patient with bilateral frontal lobe infarcts with a symptom that has not yet been documented in the literature. He complained of severe difficulty in making a phone call. On examination, he demonstrated extreme difficulty in pointing to a series of numbers, although he had normal vision, normal motor and sensory functions, fair auditory memory for numbers and memory for spatial span. Based on a number of tests, we concluded that the patient's principal disorder was difficulty in converting one mode of information into another mode of information. This unexpected symptom can be best explained in terms of a working memory paradigm. Although individual modal systems, or slave systems, retained nearly normal function, simultaneous holding of heteromodal information and its modal transformation in the central executive system seemed to have been at fault.
Pref Shop A Web Shop with User Preference Search Capabilities

The main topic of this paper is description of a proposal of a web shop with user preference searching - PrefShop. A typical web shop was implemented, but new capabilities were added to help the user with finding desired object. Besides preference search, visual hints that clarify the object relevance or the lack of relevance are proposed.
Fimbrial hemagglutinin in stationary and shake cultures of Bordetella pertussis

Bordetella pertussis produced hemagglutinin in stationary cultures; in cultures kept under constant shaking, hemagglutinin was found only during the first 48 h of incubation but not after 3 to 5 days. The type of medium had a pronounced effect on production of hemagglutinin. Strain differences in ability to produce hemagglutinin were also detected.
Effect of Playing Violent Video Games Cooperatively or Competitively on Subsequent Cooperative Behavior

Research on video games has yielded consistent findings that violent video games increase aggression and decrease prosocial behavior. However, these studies typically examined single-player games. Of interest is the effect of cooperative play in a violent video game on subsequent cooperative or competitive behavior. Participants played Halo II (a first-person shooter game) cooperatively or competitively and then completed a modified prisoner's dilemma task to assess competitive and cooperative behavior. Compared with the competitive play conditions, players in the cooperative condition engaged in more tit-for-tat behaviors-a pattern of behavior that typically precedes cooperative behavior. The social context of game play influenced subsequent behavior more than the content of the game that was played.
Linking Empirical and Critical Media Study: Implications for Human Health

Mass communication research almost certainly has varied effects on human health. For example, applications may boost the effectiveness of advertising for products that hinder and also for those that enhance human well-being. In addition, research may help legitimize university skills courses, which also might magnify the impact of messages. This article argues that joining the empirical and critical traditions in media education can help clarify such issues. In this light, it presents a theoretical framework for the study of the health impact of media research. It relies in part upon philosopher John Dewey's idea of a means-ends continuum, in which all ends represent means to other ends. Thus, research is seen not merely as an end but as an activity with sometimes-unrecognized consequences for human health, as well. Ultimately, the forms that media education takes represent a key to addressing health-related concerns.
A 3-D U-Shaped Meander-Line Slow-Wave Structure for Traveling-Wave-Tube Applications

A novel 3-D U-shaped meander-line (ML) slow-wave structure (SWS) is proposed for traveling-wave-tube applications. This 3-D structure has the potential to have a better performance than the corresponding 2-D ML SWSs proposed in the literature. Simulation results at S-band obtained using CST Microwave Studio are presented to compare the phase velocity, interaction impedance, and circuit attenuation of the proposed structure with those of a recently reported symmetric double V-shaped microstrip ML SWS, showing advantages with respect to circuit attenuation, bandwidth, and feed design. Particle-in-cell simulations are also carried out for the proposed structure for a cylindrical electron beam using CST Particle Studio. The saturated gain and electronic efficiency of the 3-D U-shaped ML SWS is significantly higher than that of the symmetric double V-shaped ML SWS. The proposed structure has been designed and fabricated with a microstrip-line feed at S-band. The measured return loss, phase velocity, and circuit attenuation match well with the simulation results. By using microfabrication techniques, the proposed SWS has the potential to operate at millimeter-wave and higher frequencies.
Digital Watermarking in the Singular Vector Domain

Many current watermarking algorithms insert data in the spatial or transform domains like the discrete cosine, the discrete Fourier, and the discrete wavelet transforms. In this paper, we present a data-hiding algorithm that exploits the singular value decomposition (SVD) representation of the data. We compute the SVD of the host image and the watermark and embed the watermark in the singular vectors of the host image. The proposed method leads to an imperceptible scheme for digital images, both in grey scale and color and is quite robust against attacks like noise and JPEG compression.
Are leaders' well-being, behaviours and style associated with the affective well-being of their employees? A systematic review of three decades of research

Abstract This study is an overview of published empirical research on the impact of leaders and leadership styles on employee stress and affective well-being. A computerized search and systematic review of nearly 30 years of empirical research was conducted. Forty-nine papers fulfilled the inclusion criteria, which include the requirements for papers to report empirical studies and to be published during the period 1980 to 2009 in English-language peer-reviewed journals. The studies were mostly cross-sectional (43/49 papers) and examined the impact of leaders' stress (4 papers), leaders' behaviours (e.g. support, consideration and empowerment) (30 papers) and specific leadership styles (20 papers) on employees' stress and affective well-being. Three research questions were addressed. The review found some support for leader stress and affective well-being being associated with employee stress and affective well-being. Leader behaviours, the relationship between leaders and their employees and specific leadership styles were all associated with employee stress and affective well-being. It is recommended that future studies include more qualitative data, use standardize questionnaires and examine the processes linking leaders with employee stress. This may lead to effective interventions.
Digital piracy intention: a comparison of theoretical models

Digital piracy intention research has yielded different sets of piracy intention determinants based on various theoretical models. In this study, we reviewed the digital piracy literature and empirically compared two theoretical models, which are the models most often used: the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and the Hunt–Vitell ethical decision model. Data were obtained from university students in South Korea, and structural equation modelling (SEM) was employed to examine and compare the two competing theoretical models in terms of explanatory power, overall model fit and paths' significance. The findings of this study revealed that the TPB is a more appropriate model for predicting digital piracy than the Hunt–Vitell ethical decision model.
Semantic HTML Page Segmentation using Type Analysis

Semantic information is necessary for semantic Web processing and is useful to Web adaptation services such as personalization of users' browsing activities on small screen devices. However, semantic information is always implicitly encoded in most existing HTML documents. This paper describes a page segmentation method to parse Web pages into rectangular segments containing some semantic information, namely blocks. Existing page segmentation techniques are mainly built on HTML DOM structure or purely vision based, not accurate enough either in visual presentation or in semantic sense. Our approach is automatic, and based on a refined typing system which tightly couples type analysis with indispensable visual cues to generate blocks into the tree structure, aiming to achieve high degree of coherence in both semantic and visual views. Experimental results show better accuracy and completeness of our method over existing ones
The study of the three‐dimensional structural relationships in connective tissues by high voltage electron microscopy

An examination of stereo‐electron micrographs taken at 1 MV in an AEI EM7 high voltage electron microscope of sections 0.5–1.0 μm thick has provided three‐dimensional information of the structural relationships in connective tissues. Sufficient contrast is obtained after block staining with uranyl acetate and with prolonged staining of the sections with lead citrate. Selective staining was observed when either the uranyl acetate or lead staining was omitted. Preliminary results indicate that there may be regions of fusion of the cisternae of the rough endoplasmic reticulum and the plasma membrane in chondrocytes that are secreting collagen. The observations also suggest that matrix vesicles in regions of calcification are formed from long cytoplasmic processes of osteoblasts by a ‘pinching off’ mechanism and that bone crystallites form within the vesicles only after the vesicles have completely separated from the surrounding cells. It is concluded that the high voltage electron microscope is capable of making a significant contribution to the understanding of the three‐dimensional structural relationships associated with specific biochemical events.
CSX: an extended compression format for spmv on shared memory systems

The Sparse Matrix-Vector multiplication (SpMV) kernel scales poorly on shared memory systems with multiple processing units due to the streaming nature of its data access pattern. Previous research has demonstrated that an effective strategy to improve the kernel's performance is to drastically reduce the data volume involved in the computations. Since the storage formats for sparse matrices include metadata describing the structure of non-zero elements within the matrix, we propose a generalized approach to compress metadata by exploiting substructures within the matrix. We call the proposed storage format Compressed Sparse eXtended (CSX). In our implementation we employ runtime code generation to construct specialized SpMV routines for each matrix. Experimental evaluation on two shared memory systems for 15 sparse matrices demonstrates significant performance gains as the number of participating cores increases. Regarding the cost of CSX construction, we propose several strategies which trade performance for preprocessing cost making CSX applicable both to online and offline preprocessing.
An efficient dynamically reconfigurable on-chip network architecture

In this paper, we present a reconfigurable architecture for NoCs on which arbitrary application-specific topologies can be implemented. The proposed NoC can dynamically tailor its topology to the traffic pattern of different applications at run-time. The run-time topology construction mechanism involves monitoring the network traffic and changing the inter-node connections in order to reduce the number of intermediate routers between the source and destination nodes of heavy communication flows. This mechanism should also preserve the NoC connectivity. In this paper, we first introduce the proposed reconfigurable topology and then address the problem of run-time topology reconfiguration. Experimental results show that this architecture effectively improves the NoC power and performance over the existing conventional architectures.
3D structure of the influenza virus polymerase complex: Localization of subunit domains

The 3D structure of the influenza virus polymerase complex was determined by electron microscopy and image processing of recombinant ribonucleoproteins (RNPs). The RNPs were generated by in vivo amplification using cDNAs of the three polymerase subunits, the nucleoprotein, and a model virus-associated RNA containing 248 nt. The polymerase structure obtained is very compact, with no apparent boundaries among subunits. The position of specific regions of the PB1, PB2, and PA subunits was determined by 3D reconstruction of either RNP–mAb complexes or tagged RNPs. This structural model is available for the polymerase of a negative-stranded RNA virus and provides a general delineation of the complex and its interaction with the template-associated nucleoprotein monomers in the RNP.
Group apology under unstable status relations: Perceptions of insincerity hinder reconciliation and forgiveness

This research examined the effects of structural conditions on perceptions of and responses to an apology offered by an advantaged majority group to a disadvantaged minority group. We used the dramatic regional changes of the Arab Spring to manipulate the instability of status relations between Israeli Arabs and Jews. In two studies, we found that under instability (vs. control), both Israeli Jews (advantaged group members; Study 1) and Israeli Arabs (disadvantaged group members; Study 2) perceived an apology offered to the Arab minority by the Israeli Prime Minister as insincere and manipulative (i.e., intended to serve the Jews rather than the Arabs). Perceived insincerity, in turn, led to reduced forgiveness and conciliatory tendencies among Israeli Arabs (Study 2). These findings shed light on how structural factors might render group apologies counterproductive in promoting positive intergroup relations. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Perceptions regarding standards for evaluating pay equity and their determinants

The paper reports the results of a research study dealing with perceptions regarding standards and norms of pay equity evaluation. The research was carried out among a sample of blue-collar and white-collar industrial employees in Israel. The major aims were to investigate what standards of evaluation are perceived as relevant and how they are scaled, what normative frameworks guide these perceptions, and what factors account for the variances in these variables. The findings reveal the existence of considerable variances in perceptions and indicate that a number of variables specified in the hypotheses explain a substantial amount of the variances. Occupational status was found to be the most important of these variables. The implications of these findings are discussed.
Backbone colorings for graphs: Tree and path backbones

We introduce and study backbone colorings, a variation on classical vertex colorings: Given a graph G = (V,E) and a spanning subgraph H of G (the backbone of G), a backbone coloring for G and H is a proper vertex coloring V → {1,2,…} of G in which the colors assigned to adjacent vertices in H differ by at least two. We study the cases where the backbone is either a spanning tree or a spanning path. We show that for tree backbones of G the number of colors needed for a backbone coloring of G can roughly differ by a multiplicative factor of at most 2 from the chromatic number χ(G); for path backbones this factor is roughly ${{3}\over{2}}$. We show that the computational complexity of the problem “Given a graph G, a spanning tree T of G, and an integer ℓ, is there a backbone coloring for G and T with at most ℓ colors? ” jumps from polynomial to NP‐complete between ℓ = 4 (easy for all spanning trees) and ℓ = 5 (difficult even for spanning paths). We finish the paper by discussing some open problems. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 55: 137–152, 2007
Using Participatory Design with Proxies with Children with Limited Communication

Including children with communication disorders in the participatory design and evaluation of digital technologies is challenging, as communication between designers and users - an important part of this approach - can be impacted. Using Participatory Design with Proxies (PDwP) supports the inclusion of input from different stakeholders, such as parents, teachers and Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs), who can provide valuable insight and feedback to augment direct input from users, which may be severely limited. We describe how we used PDwP to design a digital living media system that motivates children with disabilities to use digital therapeutic and learning applications and supports communication and collaboration between users. We employed an iterative design process to fabricate three functional prototypes and used them as design probes in participants' home and school settings. We present lessons learned in the form of the strengths and shortcomings of using PDwP for designing systems for children with limited communication abilities.
New Questions for Vocational Psychology: Premises, Paradigms, and Practices

The innovative responses of vocational psychology and career counseling to the important questions raised by people living in information societies will continue the disciplines’ tradition of helping individuals link their lives to the economic context. The questions pertaining to perspectives, paradigms, and practices arise mainly from the increasing dominance of ‘‘jobless work,’’ which moves people from project to project and from one culture to another culture. These recurring transitions mean that individuals cannot maintain their employment, so they must maintain their employability and actively manage their careers through adaptability, intentionality, life-long learning, and autobiographical reasoning. The emerging practice of career counseling seems to take the general form of constructing career through small stories, deconstructing and reconstructing the small stories into a large story, and co-constructing intention and action to begin the next episode in that large story.
Spatiotemporal Windows for Fixation Detection

Eye fixations are periods of relative stability derived from continuous eye position (or eye movement) data. In order to define eye fixations, research- ers often assume that the eye(s) will not move beyond a particular spatiotem- poral window (i.e., a spatial area towards which the eye is directed within a par- ticular period of time). However, exact specifications of this window vary from field to field and even from one experiment to another. Efforts to standardize these specifications have assumed (either implicitly or explicitly) that there is one appropriate window size for describing eye behavior. The present paper ex- plores an alternative approach. Specifically, we provide a method for determin- ing the most appropriate spatiotemporal window that can vary from participant to participant (or task to task). This approach may also be extended to provide a metric for detection algorithm comparison.