cometadata/datacite-rtg-text-other-reclassification-records huggingface dataset:
A Secure File Sharing System Based on IPFS and Blockchain
Creators: name: Huang, Hsiao-Shan
name: Chang, Tian-Sheuan
name: Wu, Jhih-Yi
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)
subject: Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: There is a great interest in many approaches towards blockchain in providing a solution to record transactions in a decentralized way. However, there are some limitations when storing large files or documents on the blockchain. In order to meet the requirements of storing relatively large data, a decentralized storage medium is produced. IPFS is a distributed file system which is content-addressable. It works very similar to the blockchain network. There are some attempts which take advantage of the blockchain concept and IPFS to design new approaches. Unfortunately, there are some inefficiencies in sharing data using the combination of IPFS and blockchain. In this paper, we proposed a secure file sharing system that brings a distributed access control and group key management by the adoption of the IPFS proxy. The IPFS proxy which plays an important role in the design is adopted to take responsibility for the control policies. The combination of the IPFS server and the blockchain network with the adoption of the IPFS proxy make a secure file sharing system which the members on the system can create new groups or join different groups by their own choice. Although there is no access control mechanism in IPFS server and blockchain network, the secure file sharing system manages the access control policies. The members access files only belong to the group they authorized.
description: 4 pages, 4 figures, published in Proceedings of the 2020 2nd International Electronics Communication Conference
Pre-RTL DNN Hardware Evaluator With Fused Layer Support
Creators: name: Yang, Chih-Chyau
name: Chang, Tian-Sheuan
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Hardware Architecture (cs.AR)
subject: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: With the popularity of the deep neural network (DNN), hardware accelerators are demanded for real time execution. However, lengthy design process and fast evolving DNN models make hardware evaluation hard to meet the time to market need. This paper proposes a pre-RTL DNN hardware evaluator that supports conventional layer-by-layer processing as well as the fused layer processing for low external bandwidth requirement. The evaluator supports two state-of-the-art accelerator architectures and finds the best hardware and layer fusion group The experimental results show the layer fusion scheme can achieve 55.6% memory bandwidth reduction, 36.7% latency improvement and 49.2% energy reduction compared with layer-by-layer operation.
description: 2 pages, 2 figures, published in IEEE ISOCC 2021
TrustNavGPT: Modeling Uncertainty to Improve Trustworthiness of Audio-Guided LLM-Based Robot Navigation
Creators: name: Sun, Xingpeng
name: Zhang, Yiran
name: Tang, Xindi
name: Bedi, Amrit Singh
name: Bera, Aniket
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Robotics (cs.RO)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: While LLMs are proficient at processing text in human conversations, they often encounter difficulties with the nuances of verbal instructions and, thus, remain prone to hallucinate trust in human command. In this work, we present TrustNavGPT, an LLM based audio guided navigation agent that uses affective cues in spoken communication elements such as tone and inflection that convey meaning beyond words, allowing it to assess the trustworthiness of human commands and make effective, safe decisions. Our approach provides a lightweight yet effective approach that extends existing LLMs to model audio vocal features embedded in the voice command and model uncertainty for safe robotic navigation.
Reflection – Learning from Unspeakable Subjects
Creators: name: Jackson, Emily
Publisher: name: feminists@law
Year: 2018

description: Reflects on the influence of Nicola Lacey's work in teaching the author how to think and write critically about law, and applies insights gained from Lacey's book Unspeakable Subjects to the field of medical law.
description: feminists@law, Vol 8 No 2 (2018)
Academic Reflection – Narratives of Justice and the Welfare State in Times of Austerity
Creators: name: Gedalof, Irene
Publisher: name: feminists@law
Year: 2018

description: Considers the continuing relevance of chapter 2 of Nicola Lacey's Unspeakable Subjects (1998), on 'Theories of Justice and the Welfare State', to welfare reform within the contemporary neo-liberal state in Britain. Concludes that Lacey’s concern in that chapter, to open ideas of social justice to a recognition of collective differences and to challenge the public/private divide that stabilises and reinforces normative gender, is ever-more urgent in a political moment that refuses precisely these recognitions.
description: feminists@law, Vol 8 No 2 (2018)
CHINNI TARIXI VA UNING XALQ XO'JALIGIDA AHAMIYATI
Creators: name: Maxsudova, Yodgoroy
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: Ushbu  maqolada nafis keramika va ularning birinchi vakili sopol haqida m a ’lumot berildi. Quyida nafis keramikaning ikkinchi vakili chinni haqidagi ma’lumotlar keltiriladi. Hozirgi mustaqil O'zbekiston ham chinnisozlik rivojlangan markazlardan biriga aylandi. Toshkent, Samarqand, Quvasoy va Xivadagi korxonalaming dovrug‘i butun dunyoga yoyildi. Respublika bo'yicha o'nlab kichik chinni korxonalari qurildi va ko'pgina yoshlar ish bilan ta’minlandi. Yoshlar orasidan bu sohani yoqtiradigan chinnisoz mutaxassislar yetishib chiqdi. Chinni buyumlari xalqimizning kundalik ehtiyojida keng qo'llaniladigan, tibbiyot sohasida, uy-ro‘zg‘orda, qurilish va boshqa tarmoqlarda ishlatiladigan mustahkam, badiiy bezalgan, sirlangan buyumlardir. Ular ishlatilish sohalari va xususiyatlariga ko'ra turlichadir. Chinnilar tarkibi, ishlab chiqarish texnologiyasi va pishirish haroratlari bo'yicha ham ajralib turadi. Chinni buyumlarga bo'lgan ehtiyoj katta bo'lganligi sababli ularni keng miqyosda ishlab chiqarish, yangi xomashyo turlarini topish borasida ilmiy-tadqiqot ishlarini olib borish maqsadga muvofiqdir.
Public Attitudes toward Animal Research: A Review
Creators: name: Ormandy, Elisabeth H.
name: Schuppli, Catherine A.
Publisher: name: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Year: 2019

description: The exploration of public attitudes toward animal research is important given recent developments in animal research (e.g., increasing creation and use of genetically modified animals, and plans for progress in areas such as personalized medicine), and the shifting relationship between science and society (i.e., a move toward the democratization of science). As such, public engagement on issues related to animal research, including exploration of public attitudes, provides a means of achieving socially acceptable scientific practice and oversight through an understanding of societal values and concerns. Numerous studies have been conducted to explore public attitudes toward animal use, and more specifically the use of animals in research. This paper reviews relevant literature using three categories of influential factors: personal and cultural characteristics, animal characteristics, and research characteristics. A critique is given of survey style methods used to collect data on public attitudes, and recommendations are given on how best to address current gaps in public attitudes literature.
Academic Reflection – The Matriarchs of the Home: Unspeakable Subjects in Times of Austerity
Creators: name: Koch, Insa
Publisher: name: feminists@law
Year: 2018

description: Investigates the gendered effects of austerity politics with reference to the case of working class ‘matriarchs of family homes’ who find that contemporary British ‘welfare reforms’ are far from ‘neutral’. On the contrary, they target precisely those areas of life that working class mothers often remain responsible for: the family homes that constitute the domain for social reproduction. It is here then that we see at play what Nicola Lacey identifies in Unspeakable Subjects (1998) as a central move: a shift from ‘private to public patriarchy’ at the heart of welfare provision.
description: feminists@law, Vol 8 No 2 (2018)
Academic Reflection – Gender, Subjectivity and Criminal Responsibility
Creators: name: Loughnan, Arlie
Publisher: name: feminists@law
Year: 2018

description: The topic of gender and criminal responsibility has long attracted critical scholarly attention. Several cohorts of feminist scholars in law, criminology and history have examined various dimensions of women’s responsibility for crime. Nicola Lacey’s work is at the forefront of this critical examination of gender and criminal responsibility. Lacey tackles this topic from both a feminist legal theory perspective and a criminal law theory perspective. This short paper offers some further comments on gender and criminal responsibility, with an examination of what I call the atypical criminal legal forms that govern women’s responsibility for crime in the current era. In so doing, I consider how some of the different dimensions of Lacey’s impressive oeuvre come together.
description: feminists@law, Vol 8 No 2 (2018)
Regulation of a LATS-homolog by Ras GTPases is important for the control of cell division
Creators: name: Müller-Taubenberger, Annette
name: Kastner, Peter M
name: Schleicher, Michael
name: Bolourani, Parvin
name: Weeks, Gerald
Publisher: name: BioMed Central
Year: 2015

description: Background. Nuclear Dbf-related/large tumor suppressor (NDR/LATS) kinases have been shown recently to control pathways that regulate mitotic exit, cytokinesis, cell growth, morphological changes and apoptosis. LATS kinases are core components of the Hippo signaling cascade and important tumor suppressors controlling cell proliferation and organ size in flies and mammals, and homologs are also present in yeast and Dictyostelium discoideum. Ras proto-oncogens regulate many biological functions, including differentiation, proliferation and apoptosis. Dysfunctions of LATS kinases or Ras GTPases have been implicated in the development of a variety of cancers in humans. Results In this study we used the model organism Dictyostelium discoideum to analyze the functions of NdrC, a homolog of the mammalian LATS2 protein, and present a novel regulatory mechanism for this kinase. Deletion of the ndrC gene caused impaired cell division and loss of centrosome integrity. A yeast two-hybrid analysis, using activated Ras proteins as bait, revealed NdrC as an interactor and identified its Ras-binding domain. Further in vitro pull-down assays showed that NdrC binds RasG and RasB, and to a lesser extent RasC and Rap1. In cells lacking NdrC, the levels of activated RasB and RasG are up-regulated, suggesting a functional connection between RasB, RasG, and NdrC. Conclusions Dictyostelium discoideum NdrC is a LATS2-homologous kinase that is important for the regulation of cell division. NdrC contains a Ras-binding domain and interacts preferentially with RasB and RasG. Changed levels of both, RasB or RasG, have been shown previously to interfere with cell division. Since a defect in cell division is exhibited by NdrC-null cells, RasG-null cells, and cells overexpressing activated RasB, we propose a model for the regulation of cytokinesis by NdrC that involves the antagonistic control by RasB and RasG.
Article – On Feminist Legal Methodologies: Spilt, Plural and Speaking Subjects
Creators: name: Heathcote, Gina
Publisher: name: feminists@law
Year: 2018

description: This article uses Nicola Lacey’s 1998 book Unspeakable Subjects as a prompt to consider the potential of feminist jurisprudence to develop methodologies that focus on the foundational dimensions of law. I therefore explore possibilities for a feminist account of legal subjectivity that uses Lacey’s account of critique, utopias and reform to articulate three interlocking feminist methodologies which I label split subjectivities, plural subjectivities and political responsible listening. I argue that these feminist inspired methodologies draw in understandings of difference and of the centrality of inter-subject relations as the important dimensions of humanness that accounts of autonomy overlook, before challenging the text to further consider which voices, and knowledge practices, remain silenced by feminist legal methodologies. To realise these ideas in strategies for law reform I argue for feminist listening that exercises care through the centring of accounts that emerge from those whose normative universe is more often particularised or discounted in law arrangements. As such, the article addresses legal subjectivity through the lens of intersectionality but with a jurisprudence that seeks to transcends the constraints of identity politics and through attention to indigenous Australian feminisms.
description: feminists@law, Vol 8 No 2 (2018)
Social Practice Cards: Research material to study social contexts as interwoven practice constellations
Creators: name: Uhde, Alarith
name: Mesenhöller, Mena
name: Hassenzahl, Marc
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)
subject: Computers and Society (cs.CY)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: Studying how social contexts shape technology interactions and how we experience them is hard. One challenge is that social contexts are very dynamic and shaped by the situated practices of everyone involved. As a result, the same human-technology interaction can be experienced quite differently depending on what other people around us do. As a first step to study interpersonal and interpractice dynamics, we collected a broad range of visual representations of practices, such as "riding a bike" or "skipping the rope". This material can be used to further explore how different, co-located practices relate to each other.
description: 4 pages, 2 figures
Response – Revisiting Unspeakable Subjects: A Retrospective on (and in…) Good Company…
Creators: name: Lacey, Niki
Publisher: name: feminists@law
Year: 2018

description: Response from the author to the collection of papers celebrating 20 years since the publication of Unspeakable Subjects (1998).
description: feminists@law, Vol 8 No 2 (2018)
Analyzing and Simulating User Utterance Reformulation in Conversational Recommender Systems
Creators: name: Zhang, Shuo
name: Wang, Mu-Chun
name: Balog, Krisztian
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: User simulation has been a cost-effective technique for evaluating conversational recommender systems. However, building a human-like simulator is still an open challenge. In this work, we focus on how users reformulate their utterances when a conversational agent fails to understand them. First, we perform a user study, involving five conversational agents across different domains, to identify common reformulation types and their transition relationships. A common pattern that emerges is that persistent users would first try to rephrase, then simplify, before giving up. Next, to incorporate the observed reformulation behavior in a user simulator, we introduce the task of reformulation sequence generation: to generate a sequence of reformulated utterances with a given intent (rephrase or simplify). We develop methods by extending transformer models guided by the reformulation type and perform further filtering based on estimated reading difficulty. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using both automatic and human evaluation.
description: Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
Editorial: Gender, Conflict and Political Settlements: What Do We Know?
Creators: name: O'Rourke, Catherine
Publisher: name: feminists@law
Year: 2019

description: This Editorial introduces the Political Settlements Research Programme (PSRP) at the University of Edinburgh, and this Special Issue on Engendering Political Settlements which draws together findings and analysis from the gender theme of the PSRP.
description: feminists@law, Vol 9 No 1 (2019)
Data-Consistent Non-Cartesian Deep Subspace Learning for Efficient Dynamic MR Image Reconstruction
Creators: name: Chen, Zihao
name: Chen, Yuhua
name: Xie, Yibin
name: Li, Debiao
name: Christodoulou, Anthony G.
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Image and Video Processing (eess.IV)
subject: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
subject: FOS: Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: Non-Cartesian sampling with subspace-constrained image reconstruction is a popular approach to dynamic MRI, but slow iterative reconstruction limits its clinical application. Data-consistent (DC) deep learning can accelerate reconstruction with good image quality, but has not been formulated for non-Cartesian subspace imaging. In this study, we propose a DC non-Cartesian deep subspace learning framework for fast, accurate dynamic MR image reconstruction. Four novel DC formulations are developed and evaluated: two gradient decent approaches, a directly solved approach, and a conjugate gradient approach. We applied a U-Net model with and without DC layers to reconstruct T1-weighted images for cardiac MR Multitasking (an advanced multidimensional imaging method), comparing our results to the iteratively reconstructed reference. Experimental results show that the proposed framework significantly improves reconstruction accuracy over the U-Net model without DC, while significantly accelerating the reconstruction over conventional iterative reconstruction.
description: Accepted by IEEE ISBI 2022
Coachment: the path to success for small and medium-sized enterprises
Creators: name: Schwarz, Steffen
Publisher: name: Swinburne
Year: 2024

description: 'The path to success for small and medium-sized enterprises' by Johann Garnitschnig and Steffen Schwarz is a wonderfully clear and well written description of the key steps companies need to take in order to prosper. The essence of the book, and its key point of brilliance, is the placement of coaching within the context of strategic management-thus the notion of 'coachment.' Strategic management is the process of defining and reaching goals. Coaching is the process of enhancing the performance capacity necessary to reach strategic objectives. Just like a sports team, a company needs to have a good strategic understanding of their 'game plan' and then secure the coaching necessary to help the team perform effectively in order to implement that plan. The authors provide a wise and practical road map for bringing these two critical success factors together in a manner that is easy to read and easy to follow. Through their COACHMENT 3 x 7 Model the authors guide readers through the steps of analyzing their present situation, analyzing their goals, considering their long term planning horizon and then navigating the path to a successful future through the 7 step COACHMENT process. This process involves having a clear idea of where you are now and at the same time understanding and maintaining the positive legacy of your company. It also involves viewing your goals in the context of your longer term vision, exploring alternatives and selecting the best path to your future, and then determining what measures can give you the best feedback with respect to your progress. It is particularly rewarding and impressive to see how effectively the authors make use of my notion of logical levels of change. A key part of the COACHMENT process involves considering each step from several key levels including environment, behaviors, capabilities, beliefs and values, identity, purpose and vision. The result is a comprehensive and solid approach to creating a thriving business. This book should be considered an essential travel guide for anyone who desires to build a successful and sustainable company.
Principled Pragmatism and the ‘Inclusion Project’: Implementing a Gender Perspective in Peace Agreements
Creators: name: Bell, Christine
name: McNicholl, Kevin
Publisher: name: feminists@law
Year: 2019

description: UN Security Council Resolution 1325 of 2000 provided that peace agreements should adopt a ‘gender perspective’. This commitment has been reiterated in women, peace and security resolutions since that time. This article uses a mixed qualitative and quantitative analysis to consider when and how peace agreements have adopted a gender perspective, using a new PA-X peace agreement database to analyse over 1500 peace and transition agreements from between 1990 and 2016. It goes further to consider how inclusion of women is related to the other forms of political and group inclusion contemplated to form part of the new political settlement. The article begins by examining what might be meant by a ‘gender perspective in peace agreements’. It maps out when and how peace agreements provide for women, girls and gender, but also for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans communities, and for ‘men and boys’ and ‘family’ at different stages of a peace process. The article provides new data on the implementation of agreement commitments and specifically those issues singled out for attention by UNSC 1325. Finally, we consider the inclusion project on offer to women and its relationship to the conceptualisation of the conflict and its solution, by considering the relationship between gender, power-sharing and transitional justice. In summary, analysis of the dataset provides three main findings. First provision for women is still largely limited to once-off provisions, or issues relating to the victimhood of women, with holistic attempts to adopt a ‘gender perspective’ relatively rare. Second, the inclusion of women in peace agreement texts tends to be located in the more comprehensive stages of the agreement, with little consideration given to women and gender at either pre-negotiation stages of a peace process, or implementation stages. Third, surprisingly perhaps, political power-sharing is shown to be strongly correlated with several measures of gender inclusion rather than marking an exclusive focus on the inclusion of the groups at the heart of the conflict. In conclusion we argue that peace agreements indicate the presence of ‘principled pragmatism’ whereby elite commitments to political equality are used by a range of groups to push for a more pluralist conception of the peace settlement as also concerned with the political equality of groups beyond the conflict actors.
description: feminists@law, Vol 9 No 1 (2019)
Synthesized Speech Detection Using Convolutional Transformer-Based Spectrogram Analysis
Creators: name: Bartusiak, Emily R.
name: Delp, Edward J.
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Sound (cs.SD)
subject: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
subject: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
subject: Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences
subject: FOS: Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering

description: Synthesized speech is common today due to the prevalence of virtual assistants, easy-to-use tools for generating and modifying speech signals, and remote work practices. Synthesized speech can also be used for nefarious purposes, including creating a purported speech signal and attributing it to someone who did not speak the content of the signal. We need methods to detect if a speech signal is synthesized. In this paper, we analyze speech signals in the form of spectrograms with a Compact Convolutional Transformer (CCT) for synthesized speech detection. A CCT utilizes a convolutional layer that introduces inductive biases and shared weights into a network, allowing a transformer architecture to perform well with fewer data samples used for training. The CCT uses an attention mechanism to incorporate information from all parts of a signal under analysis. Trained on both genuine human voice signals and synthesized human voice signals, we demonstrate that our CCT approach successfully differentiates between genuine and synthesized speech signals.
description: Accepted to the 2021 IEEE Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers
Effects of Silica and Titanium Oxide Particles on a Human Neural Stem Cell Line: Morphology, Mitochondrial Activity, and Gene Expression of Differentiation Markers
Creators: name: Fujioka, Kouki
name: Hanada, Sanshiro
name: Inoue, Yuriko
name: Sato, Keisuke
name: Hirakuri, Kenji
name: Shiraishi, Kouichi
name: Kanaya, Fumihide
name: Ikeda, Keiichi
name: Usui, Ritsuko
name: Yamamoto, Kenji
name: Kim, Seung U.
name: Manome, Yoshinobu
Publisher: name: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Year: 2019

description: Several in vivo studies suggest that nanoparticles (smaller than 100 nm) have the ability to reach the brain tissue. Moreover, some nanoparticles can penetrate into the brains of murine fetuses through the placenta by intravenous administration to pregnant mice. However, it is not clear whether the penetrated nanoparticles affect neurogenesis or brain function. To evaluate its effects on neural stem cells, we assayed a human neural stem cell (hNSCs) line exposed in vitro to three types of silica particles (30 nm, 70 nm, and <44 μm) and two types of titanium oxide particles (80 nm and < 44 μm). Our results show that hNSCs aggregated and exhibited abnormal morphology when exposed to the particles at concentrations ≥ 0.1 mg/mL for 7 days. Moreover, all the particles affected the gene expression of Nestin (stem cell marker) and neurofilament heavy polypeptide (NF-H, neuron marker) at 0.1 mg/mL. In contrast, only 30-nm silica particles at 1.0 mg/mL significantly reduced mitochondrial activity. Notably, 30-nm silica particles exhibited acute membrane permeability at concentrations ≥62.5 μg/mL in 24 h. Although these concentrations are higher than the expected concentrations of nanoparticles in the brain from in vivo experiments in a short period, these thresholds may indicate the potential toxicity of accumulated particles for long-term usage or continuous exposure.
Splicing Detection and Localization In Satellite Imagery Using Conditional GANs
Creators: name: Bartusiak, Emily R.
name: Yarlagadda, Sri Kalyan
name: Güera, David
name: Bestagini, Paolo
name: Tubaro, Stefano
name: Zhu, Fengqing M.
name: Delp, Edward J.
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
subject: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
subject: Image and Video Processing (eess.IV)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences
subject: FOS: Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering

description: The widespread availability of image editing tools and improvements in image processing techniques allow image manipulation to be very easy. Oftentimes, easy-to-use yet sophisticated image manipulation tools yields distortions/changes imperceptible to the human observer. Distribution of forged images can have drastic ramifications, especially when coupled with the speed and vastness of the Internet. Therefore, verifying image integrity poses an immense and important challenge to the digital forensic community. Satellite images specifically can be modified in a number of ways, including the insertion of objects to hide existing scenes and structures. In this paper, we describe the use of a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) to identify the presence of such spliced forgeries within satellite images. Additionally, we identify their locations and shapes. Trained on pristine and falsified images, our method achieves high success on these detection and localization objectives.
description: Accepted to the 2019 IEEE Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval (MIPR)
Frequency Domain-Based Detection of Generated Audio
Creators: name: Bartusiak, Emily R.
name: Delp, Edward J.
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Sound (cs.SD)
subject: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
subject: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
subject: Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences
subject: FOS: Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering

description: Attackers may manipulate audio with the intent of presenting falsified reports, changing an opinion of a public figure, and winning influence and power. The prevalence of inauthentic multimedia continues to rise, so it is imperative to develop a set of tools that determines the legitimacy of media. We present a method that analyzes audio signals to determine whether they contain real human voices or fake human voices (i.e., voices generated by neural acoustic and waveform models). Instead of analyzing the audio signals directly, the proposed approach converts the audio signals into spectrogram images displaying frequency, intensity, and temporal content and evaluates them with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Trained on both genuine human voice signals and synthesized voice signals, we show our approach achieves high accuracy on this classification task.
description: Accepted to the 2021 Media Watermarking, Security, and Forensics Conference, IS&T Electronic Imaging Symposium (EI)
Monitoring Forest Change in Landscapes Under-Going Rapid Energy Development: Challenges and New Perspectives
Creators: name: Pickell, Paul D.
name: Gergel, Sarah E.
name: Coops, Nicholas C.
name: Andison, David W.
Publisher: name: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Year: 2019

description: The accelerated development of energy resources around the world has substantially increased forest change related to oil and gas activities. In some cases, oil and gas activities are the primary catalyst of land-use change in forested landscapes. We discuss the challenges associated with characterizing ecological change related to energy resource development using North America as an exemplar. We synthesize the major impacts of energy development to forested ecosystems and offer new perspectives on how to detect and monitor anthropogenic disturbance during the Anthropocene. The disturbance of North American forests for energy development has resulted in persistent linear corridors, suppression of historical disturbance regimes, novel ecosystems, and the eradication of ecological memory. Characterizing anthropogenic disturbances using conventional patch-based disturbance measures will tend to underestimate the ecological impacts of energy development. Suitable indicators of anthropogenic impacts in forests should be derived from the integration of multi-scalar Earth observations. Relating these indicators to ecosystem condition will be a capstone in the progress toward monitoring forest change in landscapes undergoing rapid energy development.
Assessing Dataset Bias in Computer Vision
Creators: name: Deviyani, Athiya
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
subject: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: A biased dataset is a dataset that generally has attributes with an uneven class distribution. These biases have the tendency to propagate to the models that train on them, often leading to a poor performance in the minority class. In this project, we will explore the extent to which various data augmentation methods alleviate intrinsic biases within the dataset. We will apply several augmentation techniques on a sample of the UTKFace dataset, such as undersampling, geometric transformations, variational autoencoders (VAEs), and generative adversarial networks (GANs). We then trained a classifier for each of the augmented datasets and evaluated their performance on the native test set and on external facial recognition datasets. We have also compared their performance to the state-of-the-art attribute classifier trained on the FairFace dataset. Through experimentation, we were able to find that training the model on StarGAN-generated images led to the best overall performance. We also found that training on geometrically transformed images lead to a similar performance with a much quicker training time. Additionally, the best performing models also exhibit a uniform performance across the classes within each attribute. This signifies that the model was also able to mitigate the biases present in the baseline model that was trained on the original training set. Finally, we were able to show that our model has a better overall performance and consistency on age and ethnicity classification on multiple datasets when compared with the FairFace model. Our final model has an accuracy on the UTKFace test set of 91.75%, 91.30%, and 87.20% for the gender, age, and ethnicity attribute respectively, with a standard deviation of less than 0.1 between the accuracies of the classes of each attribute.
description: 51 pages
Diverse Image Captioning with Grounded Style
Creators: name: Klein, Franz
name: Mahajan, Shweta
name: Roth, Stefan
Publisher: name: arXiv
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
subject: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
subject: FOS: Computer and information sciences

description: Stylized image captioning as presented in prior work aims to generate captions that reflect characteristics beyond a factual description of the scene composition, such as sentiments. Such prior work relies on given sentiment identifiers, which are used to express a certain global style in the caption, e.g. positive or negative, however without taking into account the stylistic content of the visual scene. To address this shortcoming, we first analyze the limitations of current stylized captioning datasets and propose COCO attribute-based augmentations to obtain varied stylized captions from COCO annotations. Furthermore, we encode the stylized information in the latent space of a Variational Autoencoder; specifically, we leverage extracted image attributes to explicitly structure its sequential latent space according to different localized style characteristics. Our experiments on the Senticap and COCO datasets show the ability of our approach to generate accurate captions with diversity in styles that are grounded in the image.
description: In the 43rd DAGM German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR) 2021
How Can The Sexual Contract Help Us to Understand the Relationship Between Prostitution and Domestic Service?
Creators: name: Weiss, Catherine
Publisher: name: feminists@law
Year: 2018

description: Researchers studying prostitution and/or domestic service in a wide range of times and places have long recognised a relationship between these two activities. Among other things, they have observed women moving between them in order to generate enough income to support themselves and their children. The relationship has become particularly noticeable in the present day in the context of increasing numbers of women migrating from poorer to richer parts of the world in order to engage in domestic work, caring work, or ‘sex work’. This relationship between prostitution and domestic service is highlighted by researchers taking the ‘sex work position’ on prostitution, but such approaches hardly recognise relations of domination among the sexes. On the other hand, researchers taking an abolitionist position on prostitution, who do recognise relations of domination among the sexes, tend to ignore or deny the existence of any link between prostitution and domestic service. How, then, can the relation between prostitution and domestic service be theorised? In this talk, I develop a theoretical account of this relation by drawing on insights on the relationship between marriage and prostitution from abolitionist feminists and from French materialist feminists. Carole Pateman’s analysis of paid work, marriage and prostitution in The Sexual Contract provides the key to reconciling the fundamental disagreements between these two theoretical traditions, allowing the development of a finer analysis of the relationship between women’s bodies and work.
description: feminists@law, Vol 8 No 1 (2018)
An analysis of the controlling function of national culture in product choice preferences of Japanese consumers
Creators: name: Perera, Chamila
name: Hewege, Chandana
Publisher: name: Swinburne
Year: 2024

description: The aim of this paper is to analyse the controlling function of national culture in regulating product choice behaviour of consumers. Japanese consumers showed signs of a high culture enabling remarkable economic achievements during 70s and 80s. Nationalistic feeling coming from this high culture initially favoured indigenous products creating a natural control of the influx of foreign products to the country. However, with the dilution of indigenous nature of culture, product preferences have begun to incline towards western products in general with marked preference toward American products. The Study investigates the controlling function of national culture on consumer product preferences relating to local products and products of western origin. The paper reviews socio-economic developments that cause changes in product choice behaviour and the process of western influence on the Japanese culture. Methodology used in the study is qualitative and it includes case analysis of individuals' purchase preferences. In-depth interviews were conducted to unearth dynamics caused by cultural change and control function of the national culture affecting product choice behaviour. The study illustrates as to how national culture controls product choice preferences of Japanese consumers relating to Western products. The main implication is that by changing core values of national culture, product preferences relating to foreign products can be regulated and controlled.
A Feminist Discourse on the Global Indian Surrogacy Bazaar
Creators: name: Saravanan, Sheela
Publisher: name: feminists@law
Year: 2018

description: The transnational Indian surrogacy markets are a classic case of how rampant violations of human and child rights, women’s bodily integrity and medical ethics thrive on global structural inequalities. In the garb of reproductive liberty, the surrogacy practice promotes deeply embedded pronatalist, patriarchal, racial and ableist hegemony. This raises globally relevant questions of geneticisation, alienation of the gestational role, human and child rights violations, trafficking and reproductive injustice. In her book, The Sexual Contract, Carole Pateman critiques the fact that patriarchal control prevails in the marriage contract, the prostitution contract, and the contract for surrogate motherhood. My research, recently also published as a book titled A Transnational Feminist View of Surrogacy Biomarkets in India, shows the link between the three kinds of sexual contracts elaborated in Carole Pateman’s book. India banned surrogacy on reported deaths of surrogate mothers and egg donors, custody battles for children, abandonment of disabled and undesired children and exploitation of women, apart from trafficking for surrogacy. The illegal chain of networks trafficking young girls from poor localities in India for prostitution and domestic work has also been used for surrogacy. The surrogacy practice maintains patriarchy through familial persuasion and contracts that control and exploit women’s bodies and effect triple-alienation: from the children born, from their own body and physical alienation. Applying the reproductive justice framework, I argue that surrogacy is likely to put the surrogate mother through multiple forms of indignity and injustice along with life risk and hence cannot be considered the intended parent’s reproductive right.
description: feminists@law, Vol 8 No 1 (2018)
The Absence of the ‘Surrogacy Contract’ from Judicial Constructions of Surrogacy
Creators: name: Brown, Alan
Publisher: name: feminists@law
Year: 2018

description: This paper explores the absence of the ‘surrogacy contract’ from recent judicial decisions on surrogacy. In The Sexual Contract Pateman argued that, ‘[o]nly masculine beings are endowed with the attributes and capacities necessary to enter into contracts’ and therefore that the sexual contract was ignored in the establishment of patriarchal norms. The central principles of the regulation of surrogacy in the UK are set out in the Surrogacy Arrangements Act 1985; s.1A states that surrogacy arrangements are unenforceable and s.2 prohibits commercial surrogacy. This paper argues that one of the consequences of these principles has been an absence of consideration of the underlying ‘surrogacy contract’ in judicial decisions concerning ‘parental orders’: the post birth order that transfers legal parenthood from the surrogate to the intended parent, set out in s.54 of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008. Instead, other interests have been focused upon within judicial language, particularly the ‘best interests of the child’ and a related emphasis on reflecting the ‘status’ and ‘identity’ of the child(ren). Moreover, this language is reflected within the wider ‘reform’ agenda regarding the regulation of surrogacy. This conceptual approach obscures the contract between the parties which is at the heart of any surrogacy arrangement. Thus, this paper argues that this absence of contemporary consideration of the contractual nature of surrogacy arrangements reflects the disregarding of the sexual contract that Pateman identified 30 years ago.
description: feminists@law, Vol 8 No 1 (2018)
Marian Duggan (ed.), Revisiting the 'ideal victim': Developments in critical victimology, Policy Press: Bristol 2018
Creators: name: Grace, Jamie
Publisher: name: feminists@law
Year: 2018

description: The book contains insightful chapters on the concept of the 'ideal victim' in relation to, for example: hate crime victims generally; Muslim women who wear the veil; LGB/T women; female sex worker victims; migrants; survivors of childhood sexual abuse; victims of domestic violence; elderly rape victims; online fraud victims; and male prisoners as victims. The book explores, particularly, why too many victims of crime, and particularly too many female victims of sexual offending and crimes such as domestic abuse in its many forms, are treated as 'non-ideal' victims, and suffer a loss of dignity, respect, and any proper avenue to justice as a result.
description: feminists@law, Vol 8 No 2 (2018)
Exploring Relationships between Time, Law and Social Ordering: A Curated Conversation
Creators: name: Grabham, Emily
name: Cunliffe, Emma
name: Douglas, Stacy
name: Keenan, Sarah
name: Mawani, Renisa
name: M'charek, Amade
Publisher: name: feminists@law
Year: 2018

description: This interdisciplinary and international 'curated conversation' focuses on the relationship between time, law and social ordering. Participants were drawn from law, sociology and anthropology in the UK, Canada and the Netherlands. Their research is inspired by, and engaged with, feminist theory, post- or anti-colonial perspectives and/or critical race theory. In an extended written conversation lasting several days (and later edited), participants reflected on how questions of time have emerged in their research, the ways in which they have struggled with conceptual or methodological dilemmas to do with analysing time in relation to law or social ordering. The conversation focused in particular on how constructions of race are co-imbricated with dominant temporal idioms and practices and the challenges this poses for researchers interesting in unpicking the knotted relationships between race, colonialism, and specific legal technicalities or approaches.
description: feminists@law, Vol 8 No 2 (2018)
“The Enemy of the Good”: Reflections on Ireland’s New Abortion Legislation
Creators: name: Enright, Mairead
Publisher: name: feminists@law
Year: 2018

description: This short reflection presents a personal account of the process and outcome, the achievements and disappointments of legislative reform following the Irish referendum to repeal the 8th Amendment to the Irish Constitution. While the new Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 will afford access to legal abortion to many women for the first time in Ireland, it does not meet feminist demands and is likely to exclude a range of women in difficult and marginalised circumstances. The piece reflects on the frustrations and compromises of feminist law reform and concludes that the process of abortion law reform in Ireland will be ongoing.
description: feminists@law, Vol 8 No 2 (2018)
Introduction – Speaking Subjects: Celebrating Twenty Years of Lacey’s Unspeakable Subjects
Creators: name: Heathcote, Gina
name: Loughnan, Arlie
Publisher: name: feminists@law
Year: 2018

description: Introduction to the collection of papers celebrating 20 years since the publication of Nicola Lacey's Unspeakable Subjects: Feminist Essays in Legal and Social Theory (1998).
description: feminists@law, Vol 8 No 2 (2018)
A scoping study to identify opportunities to advance the ethical implementation and scale-up of HIV treatment as prevention: priorities for empirical research
Creators: name: Knight, Rod E.
name: Small, Will
name: Pakula, Basia
name: Thomson, Kimberly
name: Shoveller, Jean
Publisher: name: BioMed Central
Year: 2015

description: Background. Despite the evidence showing the promise of HIV treatment as prevention (TasP) in reducing HIV incidence, a variety of ethical questions surrounding the implementation and “scaling up” of TasP have been articulated by a variety of stakeholders including scientists, community activists and government officials. Given the high profile and potential promise of TasP in combatting the global HIV epidemic, an explicit and transparent research priority-setting process is critical to inform ongoing ethical discussions pertaining to TasP. Methods We drew on the Arksey and O’Malley framework for conducting scoping review studies as well as systematic approaches to identifying empirical and theoretical gaps within ethical discussions pertaining to population-level intervention implementation and scale up. We searched the health science database PubMed to identify relevant peer-reviewed articles on ethical and implementation issues pertaining to TasP. We included English language articles that were published after 2009 (i.e., after the emergence of causal evidence within this field) by using search terms related to TasP. Given the tendency for much of the criticism and support of TasP to occur outside the peer-reviewed literature, we also included grey literature in order to provide a more exhaustive representation of how the ethical discussions pertaining to TasP have and are currently taking place. To identify the grey literature, we systematically searched a set of search engines, databases, and related webpages for keywords pertaining to TasP. Results Three dominant themes emerged in our analysis with respect to the ethical questions pertaining to TasP implementation and scale-up: (a) balancing individual- and population-level interests; (b) power relations within clinical practice and competing resource demands within health care systems; (c) effectiveness considerations and socio-structural contexts of HIV treatment experiences within broader implementation contexts. Conclusion Ongoing research and normative deliberation is required in order to successfully and ethically scale-up TasP within the continuum of HIV care models. Based on the results of this scoping review, we identify several ethical and implementation dimensions that hold promise for informing the process of scaling up TasP and that could benefit from new research.