Predictive biometrics: A review and analysis of predicting personal characteristics from biometric data

Interest in the exploitation of soft biometrics information has continued to develop over the last decade or so. In comparison with traditional biometrics, which focuses principally on person identification, the idea of soft biometrics processing is to study the utilisation of more general information regarding a system user, which is not necessarily unique. There are increasing indications that this type of data will have great value in providing complementary information for user authentication. However, the authors have also seen a growing interest in broadening the predictive capabilities of biometric data, encompassing both easily definable characteristics such as subject age and, most recently, `higher level' characteristics such as emotional or mental states. This study will present a selective review of the predictive capabilities, in the widest sense, of biometric data processing, providing an analysis of the key issues still adequately to be addressed if this concept of predictive biometrics is to be fully exploited in the future

Performance Testing of Distributed Component Architectures

Performance characteristics, such as response time, throughput andscalability, are key quality attributes of distributed applications. Current practice,however, rarely applies systematic techniques to evaluate performance characteristics.We argue that evaluation of performance is particularly crucial in early developmentstages, when important architectural choices are made. At first glance, thiscontradicts the use of testing techniques, which are usually applied towards the endof a project. In this chapter, we assume that many distributed systems are builtwith middleware technologies, such as the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) or theCommon Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). These provide servicesand facilities whose implementations are available when architectures are defined.We also note that it is the middleware functionality, such as transaction and persistenceservices, remote communication primitives and threading policy primitives,that dominates distributed system performance. Drawing on these observations, thischapter presents a novel approach to performance testing of distributed applications.We propose to derive application-specific test cases from architecture designs so thatthe performance of a distributed application can be tested based on the middlewaresoftware at early stages of a development process. We report empirical results thatsupport the viability of the approach

Analysis domain model for shared virtual environments

The field of shared virtual environments, which also encompasses online games and social 3D environments, has a system landscape consisting of multiple solutions that share great functional overlap. However, there is little system interoperability between the different solutions. A shared virtual environment has an associated problem domain that is highly complex raising difficult challenges to the development process, starting with the architectural design of the underlying system. This paper has two main contributions. The first contribution is a broad domain analysis of shared virtual environments, which enables developers to have a better understanding of the whole rather than the part(s). The second contribution is a reference domain model for discussing and describing solutions - the Analysis Domain Model

Towards a Novel Cooperative Logistics Information System Framework

Supply Chains and Logistics have a growing importance in global economy. Supply Chain Information Systems over the world are heterogeneous and each one can both produce and receive massive amounts of structured and unstructured data in real-time, which are usually generated by information systems, connected objects or manually by humans. This heterogeneity is due to Logistics Information Systems components and processes that are developed by different modelling methods and running on many platforms; hence, decision making process is difficult in such multi-actor environment. In this paper we identify some current challenges and integration issues between separately designed Logistics Information Systems (LIS), and we propose a Distributed Cooperative Logistics Platform (DCLP) framework based on NoSQL, which facilitates real-time cooperation between stakeholders and improves decision making process in a multi-actor environment. We included also a case study of Hospital Supply Chain (HSC), and a brief discussion on perspectives and future scope of work

A Similarity Measure for Material Appearance

We present a model to measure the similarity in appearance between different materials, which correlates with human similarity judgments. We first create a database of 9,000 rendered images depicting objects with varying materials, shape and illumination. We then gather data on perceived similarity from crowdsourced experiments; our analysis of over 114,840 answers suggests that indeed a shared perception of appearance similarity exists. We feed this data to a deep learning architecture with a novel loss function, which learns a feature space for materials that correlates with such perceived appearance similarity. Our evaluation shows that our model outperforms existing metrics. Last, we demonstrate several applications enabled by our metric, including appearance-based search for material suggestions, database visualization, clustering and summarization, and gamut mapping.Comment: 12 pages, 17 figure

A Survey of Volunteered Open Geo-Knowledge Bases in the Semantic Web

Over the past decade, rapid advances in web technologies, coupled with innovative models of spatial data collection and consumption, have generated a robust growth in geo-referenced information, resulting in spatial information overload. Increasing 'geographic intelligence' in traditional text-based information retrieval has become a prominent approach to respond to this issue and to fulfill users' spatial information needs. Numerous efforts in the Semantic Geospatial Web, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), and the Linking Open Data initiative have converged in a constellation of open knowledge bases, freely available online. In this article, we survey these open knowledge bases, focusing on their geospatial dimension. Particular attention is devoted to the crucial issue of the quality of geo-knowledge bases, as well as of crowdsourced data. A new knowledge base, the OpenStreetMap Semantic Network, is outlined as our contribution to this area. Research directions in information integration and Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) are then reviewed, with a critical discussion of their current limitations and future prospects