pinecone/core-2020-05-10-deduplication huggingface dataset:
Towards User Acceptance of Biometric Technology in E-Government: A Survey Study in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The paper discussed an exploratory study of government employees' perceptions of the introduction of biometric authentication at the workplace in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We suggest that studying the factors affecting employees' acceptance of new technology will help ease the adoption of biometric technology in other e-government applications. A combination of survey and interviews was used to collect the required data. Interviews were conducted with managers and questionnaires were given to employees from two different government organisations in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to investigate the employees' perceptions of using biometrics. The results of this study indicate a significant digital and cultural gap between the technological awareness of employees and the preferred authentication solutions promoted by management. A lack of trust in technology, its potential for misuse and management motives reflect the managers' need to consider their responsibilities for narrowing these gaps. It was apparent that overcoming employees' resistance is an essential issue facing biometric implementation. Based on the research we recommend that an awareness and orientation process about biometrics should take place before the technology is introduced into the organisation.Griffith Sciences, School of Information and Communication TechnologyFull Tex
Transmit frequency optimization for ultrasound constrast agent response

International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering copyrightInternational audienceIntroduction: Since the introduction of ultrasound (US) contrast imaging, the imaging systems use a fixed emitting frequency. However it is known that the insonified medium is time-varying and therefore an adapted time-varying excitation is expected. We suggest an adaptive imaging technique which selects the optimal transmit frequency that maximizes the acoustic contrast. Two algorithms have been proposed to find an US excitation for which the frequency was optimal with microbubbles. Methods and Materials: Simulations were carried out for encapsulated microbubbles of 2 microns by considering the modified Rayleigh-Plesset equation for 2 MHz transmit fre-quency and for various pressure levels (20 kPa up to 420kPa). In vitro experiments were carried out using a transducer oper-ating at 2 MHz and using a programmable waveform genera-tor. Contrast agent was then injected into a small container filled with water. Results and discussions: We show through simulations and in vitro experiments that our adaptive imaging technique gives: 1) in case of simulations, a gain of acoustic contrast which can reach 9 dB compared to the traditional technique without optimization and 2) for in vitro experiments, a gain which can reach 18 dB. There is a non negligible discrepancy between simulations and experiments. These differences are certainly due to the fact that our simulations do not take into account the diffraction and nonlinear propagation effects. Further optimizations are underway
Shape Operator Metric for Surface Normal Approximation

This work deals with the problem of practical mesh generation for surface normal approximation. Part of its contribution is in presenting previous work in a uniﬁed framework. A new algorithm for surface normal approximation is then introduced which improves upon existing ones in a number of aspects. In particular, it produces better approximations of surfaces both in practice and in the theoretical limit regime.  Additionally, it resolves in a simple way some of the problems that previous methods for surface approximation suﬀered from.Engineering and Applied Science
The DiSCmap project : overview and first results

Traditionally, digitisation of cultural and scientific heritage material for use by the scholarly community has been led by supply rather than demand. The DiSCmap project commissioned by JISC in 2008, aimed to study what refocussing of digitisation efforts will suit best the users of digitised materials, especially in the context of the research and teaching in the higher education institutions in the UK. The paper presents some of its initial outcomes based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of 945 special collections nominated for digitisation by intermediary users (librarians, archivist and museum curators), as well as end users' study involving a combination of online survey, focus groups and in-depth interviews. The criteria for prioritising digitisation advanced by intermediaries and end users were analysed and cross-mapped to a range of existing digitisation frameworks. A user-driven prioritisation framework which synthesises the findings of the project is presented
Impact of Expressive Wrinkles on Perception of a Virtual Character’s Facial Expressions of Emotions

Facial animation has reached a high level of photorealism. Skin is rendered with grain and translucency, wrinkles are accurate and dynamic. These recent visual improvements are not fully tested for their contribution to the perceived expressiveness of virtual characters. This paper presents a perceptual study assessing the impact of different rendering modes of expressive wrinkles on users’ perception of facial expressions of basic and complex emotions. Our results suggest that realistic wrinkles increase agent’s expressivity and user’s preference, but not the recognition of emotion categories. This study was conducted using our real time facial animation platform that is designed for perceptive evaluations of affective interaction
Biometrics beyond the visible spectrum: Imaging technologies and applications

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04391-8_20Proceedings of Joint COST 2101 and 2102 International Conference, BioID_MultiComm 2009, Madrid (Spain)Human body images acquired at visible spectrum have inherent restrictions that hinder the performance of person recognition systems built using that kind of information (e.g. scene artefacts under varying illumination conditions). One promising approach for dealing with those limitations is using images acquired beyond the visible spectrum. This paper reviews some of the existing human body imaging technologies working beyond the visible spectrum (X-ray, Infrared, Millimeter and Submillimeter Wave imaging technologies). The benefits and drawbacks of each technology and their biometric applications are presented.This work has been supported by Terasense (CSD2008-00068) Consolider project of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology
Biometric system verification close to "real world" conditions

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04391-8_31Proceedings of Joint COST 2101 and 2102 International Conference, BioID_MultiComm 2009, Madrid, Spain.In this paper we present an autonomous biometric device developed in the framework of a national project. This system is able to capture speech, hand-geometry, online signature and face, and can open a door when the user is positively verified. Nevertheless the main purpose is to acquire a database without supervision (normal databases are collected in the presence of a supervisor that tells you what to do in front of the device, which is an unrealistic situation). This system will permit us to explain the main differences between what we call "real conditions" as opposed to "laboratory conditions".This work has been supported by FEDER and MEC, TEC2006-13141-C03/TCM, and COST-2102
Anchor model fusion for emotion recognition in speech

Proceedings of Joint COST 2101 and 2102 International Conference, BioID_MultiComm 2009, Madrid (Spain)The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04391-8_7In this work, a novel method for system fusion in emotion recognition for speech is presented. The proposed approach, namely Anchor Model Fusion (AMF), exploits the characteristic behaviour of the scores of a speech utterance among different emotion models, by a mapping to a back-end anchor-model feature space followed by a SVM classifier. Experiments are presented in three different databases: Ahumada III, with speech obtained from real forensic cases; and SUSAS Actual and SUSAS Simulated. Results comparing AMF with a simple sum-fusion scheme after normalization show a significant performance improvement of the proposed technique for two of the three experimental set-ups, without degrading performance in the third one.This work has been financed under project TEC2006-13170-C02-01
Optimizing data transformations for classification tasks

Proceeding of: 10th International Conference, IDEAL 2009, Burgos, Spain, September 23-26, 2009Many classification algorithms use the concept of distance or similarity between patterns. Previous work has shown that it is advantageous to optimize general Euclidean distances (GED). In this paper, data transformations are optimized instead. This is equivalent to searching for GEDs, but can be applied to any learning algorithm, even if it does not use distances explicitly. Two optimization techniques have been used: a simple Local Search (LS) and the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES). CMA-ES is an advanced evolutionary method for optimization in difficult continuous domains. Both diagonal and complete matrices have been considered. Results show that in general, complete matrices found by CMA-ES either outperform or match both Local Search, and the classifier working on the original untransformed data.Work supported by project TIN2008-06491-C04-04 funded by Spanish MICINNPublicad
The winning advantage: using opponent models in robot Soccer

Proceeding of: Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, IDEAL 2009, 10th International Conference, Burgos, Spain, September, 23-26th, 2009.Opponent modeling is a skill in multi-agent systems (MAS) which attempts to create a model of the behavior of the opponent. This model can be used to predict the future actions of the opponent and generate appropriate strategies to play against it. Several researches present different methods to create an opponent model in the RoboCup environment. However, how these models can impact the performance of teams is an essential aspect. This paper introduces a novel approach to use efficiently opponent models in order to improve our own team behavior. The basis of this approach is the research done by CAOS Coach Team for modeling and recognizing behaviors evaluated in the RoboCup Coach Competition 2006. For using these models, it is necessary a special agent (coach) which can model the observed opponent team (based on the previous research) and communicate a counter-strategy to the coached players (using the approach proposed in this paper). The evaluation of this approach is a hard problem, but we have conducted several experiments that can help us to know if we are going in a promising direction.This work has been supported by the Spanish Government under project TRA2007-67374-C02-02.Publicad
Distances on Lozenge Tilings

International audienceIn this paper, a structural property of the set of lozenge tilings of a 2n-gon is highlighted. We introduce a simple combinatorial value called Hamming-distance, which is a lower bound for the flipdistance (i.e. the number of necessary local transformations involving three lozenges) between two given tilings. It is here proven that, for n<5, the flip-distance between two tilings is equal to the Hamming-distance. Conversely, for n>5, We show that there is some deficient pairs of tilings for which the flip connection needs more flips than the combinatorial lower bound indicates
Personalizing the interface in rich Internet applications

Recently, existing design methodologies targeting traditional Web applications have been extended for Rich Internet Application modeling support. These extended methodologies currently cover the traditionally well-established design concerns, i.e. data and navigation design, and provide additional focus on user interaction and presentation capabilities. However, there is still a lack of design support for more advanced functionality that now is typically offered in state-of-the-art Web applications. One yet unsupported design concern is the personalization of content and presentation to the specific user and his/her context, making use of the extra presentational possibilities offered by RIAs. This article addresses this concern and presents an extension of the RIA design approach OOH4RIA, to include presentation personalization support. We show how to extend the RIA development process to model the required personalization at the correct level of abstraction, and how these specifications can be realized using present RIA technology
The Quantum Probability Ranking Principle for Information Retrieval

While the Probability Ranking Principle for Information Retrieval provides the basis for formal models, it makes a very strong assumption regarding the dependence between documents. However, it has been observed that in real situations this assumption does not always hold. In this paper we propose a reformulation of the Probability Ranking Principle based on quantum theory. Quantum probability theory naturally includes interference effects between events. We posit that this interference captures the dependency between the judgement of document relevance. The outcome is a more sophisticated principle, the Quantum Probability Ranking Principle, that provides a more sensitive ranking which caters for interference/dependence between documents’ relevance
Formal support for QVT-Relations with Coloured Petri nets

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04425-0_19Proceedings of 12th International Conference, MODELS 2009, Denver, CO, USA, October 4-9, 2009QVT is the OMG standard language for specifying model-to-model transformations in MDA. Even though it plays a crucial role in model driven development, there are scarce tools supporting the execution of its sublanguage QVT-Relations, and none for its analysis or verification. In order to alleviate this situation, this paper provides a formal semantics for QVT-Relations through its compilation into Coloured Petri nets, enabling the execution and validation of QVT specifications. The theory of Petri nets provides useful techniques to analyse transformations (e.g. reachability, model-checking, boundedness and invariants) and to determine their confluence and termination given a starting model. We also report on using CPNTools for the execution, debugging, and analysis of transformations, and on a tool chain to transform QVT-Relations specifications into the input format of CPNTools.Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, projects METEORIC (TIN2008-02081) and MODUWEB (TIN2006-09678
Manipulating Tournaments in Cup and Round Robin Competitions

In sports competitions, teams can manipulate the result by, for instance,
throwing games. We show that we can decide how to manipulate round robin and
cup competitions, two of the most popular types of sporting competitions in
polynomial time. In addition, we show that finding the minimal number of games
that need to be thrown to manipulate the result can also be determined in
polynomial time. Finally, we show that there are several different variations
of standard cup competitions where manipulation remains polynomial.Comment: Proceedings of Algorithmic Decision Theory, First International
  Conference, ADT 2009, Venice, Italy, October 20-23, 200
Extending the Belgian eID technology with mobile security functionality

The Belgian Electronic Identity Card was introduced in 2002. The card enables Belgian citizens to prove their identity digitally and to sign electronic documents. Today, only a limited number of citizens really use the card in electronic applications. A major reason is the lack of killer functionality and killer applications.
This paper presents two reusable extensions to the Belgian eID technology that opens up new opportunities for application developers. First, a secure and ubiquitously accessible remote storage service is presented. Second, we show how the eID card can be used to issue new certificates. To demonstrate the applicability and feasibility of both extensions, they are combined in the development of a secure e-mail application. The proposed solution offers strong privacy, security and key management properties while increasing the accessibility of confidential e-mail compared to existing solutions (such as PGP and S/MIME).status: publishe
On the Performance of Wavelet Decomposition Steganalysis with JSteg Steganography

In this paper, we study the wavelet decomposition based steganalysis technique due to Lyu and Farid. Specifically we focus on its performance with JSteg steganograpy. It has been claimed that the Lyu-Farid technique can defeat JSteg; we confirm this using different images for the training and test sets of the SVM classifier. We also show that the technique heavily depends on the characteristics of training and test set. This is a problem for real-world implementation since the image source cannot necessarily be determined. With a wide range of image sources, training the classifier becomes problematic. By focusing only on different camera makes we show that steganalysis performances significantly less effective for cover images from certain sources
UJM at ImageCLEFwiki 2008

International audienceThis paper reports our multimedia information retrieval experiments carried out for the ImageCLEF track. We propose a new multimedia model combining textual and/or visual information which enables to perform textual, visual, or multimedia queries. We experiment the model on ImageCLEF data and we compare the results obtained using the different modalities. Our multimedia document model is based on a vector of textual and visual terms. Textual terms correspond to textual words while the visual ones are computed using local colour features. We obtain good results using only the textual part and we show that the visual information is useful in some particular cases
Integrating methods from IR and QA for geographic information retrieval

This paper describes the participation of GIRSA at Geo-\ud
CLEF 2008, the geographic information retrieval task at CLEF. GIRSA combines information retrieval (IR) on geographically annotated data and question answering (QA) employing query decomposition. For the monolingual German experiments, several parameter settings were varied: using a single index or separate indexes for content and geographic annotation, using complex term weighting, adding location\ud
names from the topic narrative, and merging results from IR and QA, which yields the highest mean average precision (0.2608 MAP). For bilingual experiments, English and Portuguese topics were translated via the web services Applied Language Solutions, Google Translate, and Promt Online Translator. For both source languages, Google Translate seems to return the best translations. For English (Portuguese) topics, 60.2% (80.0%) of the maximum MAP for monolingual German experiments, or 0.1571 MAP (0.2085 MAP), is achieved. As a post-ocial experiment, translations of English topics were analysed with a parser. The results were employed to select the best translation for topic titles and descriptions. The corresponding retrieval experiment achieved 69.7% of the MAP of the best monolingual experiment
GeoTextMESS: result fusion with fuzzy Borda ranking in geographical information retrieval

In this paper we discuss the integration of different GIR systems by means of a fuzzy Borda method for result fusion. Two of the systems, the one by the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia and the one of the Universidad of Jaén participated to the GeoCLEF task under the name TextMess. The proposed result fusion method takes as input the document lists returned by the different systems and returns\ud
a document list where the documents are ranked according to the fuzzy Borda voting scheme. The obtained results show that the fusion method allows to improve the results of the component systems, although the\ud
fusion is not optimal, because it is effective only if the components return\ud
a similar set of relevant documents.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft
IdSay: question answering for portuguese

IdSay is an open domain Question Answering (QA) system for Portuguese. Its current version can be considered a baseline version, using mainly techniques from the area of Information Retrieval (IR). The only external information it uses besides the text collections is lexical information for Portuguese. It was submitted to the monolingual Portuguese task of the QA track of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum 2008 (QA@CLEF) for the first time, and it answered correctly to 65 of the 200 questions in the first answer, and to 85 answers considering the three answers that could be returned per question. Generally, the types of questions that are answered better by IdSay system are measure factoids, count factoids and definitions, but there is still work to be done in these areas, as well as in the treatment of time. List questions, location and people/organization factoids are the types of question with more room for improvement.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Why Are People's Decisions Sometimes Worse with Computer Support?

In many applications of computerised decision support, a recognised source of undesired outcomes is operators' apparent over-reliance on automation. For instance, an operator may fail to react to a potentially dangerous situation because a computer fails to generate an alarm. However, the very use of terms like "over-reliance" betrays possible misunderstandings of these phenomena and their causes, which may lead to ineffective corrective action (e.g. training or procedures that do not counteract all the causes of the apparently "over-reliant" behaviour). We review relevant literature in the area of "automation bias" and describe the diverse mechanisms that may be involved in human errors when using computer support. We discuss these mechanisms, with reference to errors of omission when using "alerting systems", with the help of examples of novel counterintuitive findings we obtained from a case study in a health care application, as well as other examples from the literature
Semantic Annotation and Reasoning for Sensor Data

Developments in (wireless) sensor and actuator networks and the capabilities to manufacture low cost and energy efficient networked embedded devices have lead to considerable interest in adding real world sense to the Internet and the Web. Recent work has raised the idea towards combining the Internet of Things (i.e. real world resources) with semantic Web technologies to design future service and applications for the Web. In this paper we focus on the current developments and discussions on designing Semantic Sensor Web, particularly, we advocate the idea of semantic annotation with the existing authoritative data published on the semantic Web. Through illustrative examples, we demonstrate how rule-based reasoning can be performed over the sensor observation and measurement data and linked data to derive additional or approximate knowledge. Furthermore, we discuss the association between sensor data, the semantic Web, and the social Web which enable construction of context-aware applications and services, and contribute to construction of a networked knowledge framework