Biometric Systems

Biometric authentication has been widely used for access control and security systems over the past few years. The purpose of this book is to provide the readers with life cycle of different biometric authentication systems from their design and development to qualification and final application. The major systems discussed in this book include fingerprint identification, face recognition, iris segmentation and classification, signature verification and other miscellaneous systems which describe management policies of biometrics, reliability measures, pressure based typing and signature verification, bio-chemical systems and behavioral characteristics. In summary, this book provides the students and the researchers with different approaches to develop biometric authentication systems and at the same time includes state-of-the-art approaches in their design and development. The approaches have been thoroughly tested on standard databases and in real world applications

NBS monograph

From Introduction: "This report is the first of a series intended to provide a selective overview of research and development efforts and requirements in the somewhat overlapping fields of the computer and information sciences and technologies. The projected series of reports will attempt to outline the probable range of R & D activities in the computer and information sciences and technologies through selective reviews of the literature and to develop a reasonable consensus with respect to the opinions of workers in these and potentially related fields as to areas of continuing R & D concern for research program planning or review in these areas.

Affection and Mercy: Kinship, State, and the Management of Marriage in Jordan.

This dissertation uses a series of institutional initiatives around marriage to understand how Jordanian kinship systems are changing, bringing with them new relationships to property, labor, and political authority. The dissertation is structured around the three major prestations of Jordanian marriage exchanges: the house, the bridewealth, and the wedding. I focus on institutions that help young people fulfill these prerequisites to marriage without having to rely on their families for assistance, like Jordan’s Housing Corporation, its government-run Sharia Courts, and an Islamic charity called the Chastity Society. By basing myself in a rural, patrilocal family compound, I was able to contrast these institutional initiatives with the marital practices of people who rely heavily on their extended kin ties to facilitate their marriages. Drawing on archival evidence, participant observation, and oral history, I show how even the well-financed and self-consciously modern institutional initiatives that I studied have been repeatedly forced to accede to the prerogatives of extended kin groups. Whether through the implementation of squatter settlement standardization programs, official form marriage contracts, or Islamic mass weddings, the institutions I studied have repeatedly struggled with legitimizing the extended kin group’s authority over the property, labor, and sexual relations of its members. This dissertation also analyzes how these institutional initiatives attempt to partition the social world to create new forms of order and discipline—as well as novel escape hatches. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship exploring how various domains of modern social life like religion, the family, the state, and the market are constituted through practice and how social actors experience such domains phenomenologically. This study demonstrates the persistent and indispensible role that kinship plays in the functioning of modern institutions. It also highlights an emerging Islamic ideal of companionate marriage that challenges the primacy of the extended kin group, which I term (following a popular Quranic verse) “affection and mercy.”PhDAnthropologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116635/1/gfhugh_1.pd

Gaze-Based Human-Robot Interaction by the Brunswick Model

We present a new paradigm for human-robot interaction based on social signal processing, and in particular on the Brunswick model. Originally, the Brunswick model copes with face-to-face dyadic interaction, assuming that the interactants are communicating through a continuous exchange of non verbal social signals, in addition to the spoken messages. Social signals have to be interpreted, thanks to a proper recognition phase that considers visual and audio information. The Brunswick model allows to quantitatively evaluate the quality of the interaction using statistical tools which measure how effective is the recognition phase. In this paper we cast this theory when one of the interactants is a robot; in this case, the recognition phase performed by the robot and the human have to be revised w.r.t. the original model. The model is applied to Berrick, a recent open-source low-cost robotic head platform, where the gazing is the social signal to be considered

‘In Search of a National Idea’ Australian Intellectuals and the ‘Cultural Cringe’ 1940 – 1972

The ‘cultural cringe’ was a powerful force shaping Australian ideas in the post-war years. Struggling with both the heavy cultural shadow of Britain and the brutal apathy of Australian philistinism, intellectuals tried to find ways to escape the colonial rut of a meagre, material culture. This thesis will, for the first time, place together the work of eleven writers and explore their responses to a cultural insecurity they all felt with peculiar intensity. Ultimately, it will be argued that the ‘cultural nationalists’ – A.A. Phillips (who coined the term ‘cultural cringe’ in a 1950 essay), Clem Christesen, Nettie and Vance Palmer, Brian Fitzpatrick and Russel Ward – failed in their quest to define and celebrate a distinctive cultural tradition unique to Australia, free of the tentacles of Britishness. Others such as Manning Clark and Bernard Smith created powerful visions of Australia, but struggled to make these resonant or relevant in an Australia that by the 1960s was changing rapidly. Donald Horne and Patrick White despised cultural nationalism, seeking other ways to ‘create’ Australia; but it was Judith Wright who came closest to the successful realisation of an original idea of Australia, incorporating the Aboriginality of the continent, and in so doing a successful refutation of the hated cringe

Mid-Term Report 2019–2022

With the Midterm Report of the Cluster of Excellence “ROOTS - Social, Environmental, and Cultural Connectivity in Past Societies”, we inform you about the first years of the cluster established in 2019. The Midterm Report was prepared under the special conditions of the last pandemic and thus under extraordinary circumstances, which also applies to the first years of our research. Above all, the report gives you a broad impression of the new and interesting research activities of the cluster, which have developed in many ways in our research space. The joint research on past societies is determined by excavations, laboratory work, archival studies and source interpretations. The diversity of the archives – from soil sediments to human skeletons and from architecture to written evidence – is targeted in our six subclusters. Reconstructing the ROOTS of hazards, diet, knowledge, urbanity, inequality, and conflict and conciliation took us to different areas of the world and very different laboratory depths. The joint research on connectivity started from the basic hypothesis that the degree of connectivity within and between societies, but also between societies and the environment, is crucial for the possibilities to develop resilient and sustainable structures. This is where past societies and environments provide us with a mirror for current and future developments

The Benefits of Loneliness

Homo sapiens are a social species. Loneliness, which derives from the perceived disconnection of oneself from a valued social collective, is a core facet of the social aspect of human existence. In research, loneliness is often oversimplified, represented as a purely negative emotion that is harmful to one's health and well-being. This thesis undoes this common perception by drawing attention to the multifaceted nature of loneliness, both its negatives and its positives. It demonstrates that loneliness, while harmful if unaddressed, can also be a source of artistic expression, that it can provide an increased awareness of natural beauty and an appreciation for the world, and can facilitate greater, more meaningful connection between individuals. To achieve this aim, the thesis consists of two parts: an academic investigation, and a creative investigation in the form of a novel.N/

The role of phonology in visual word recognition: evidence from Chinese

Posters - Letter/Word Processing V: abstract no. 5024The hypothesis of bidirectional coupling of orthography and phonology predicts that phonology plays a role in visual word recognition, as observed in the effects of feedforward and feedback spelling to sound consistency on lexical decision. However, because orthography and phonology are closely related in alphabetic languages (homophones in alphabetic languages are usually orthographically similar), it is difficult to exclude an influence of orthography on phonological effects in visual word recognition. Chinese languages contain many written homophones that are orthographically dissimilar, allowing a test of the claim that phonological effects can be independent of orthographic similarity. We report a study of visual word recognition in Chinese based on a mega-analysis of lexical decision performance with 500 characters. The results from multiple regression analyses, after controlling for orthographic frequency, stroke number, and radical frequency, showed main effects of feedforward and feedback consistency, as well as interactions between these variables and phonological frequency and number of homophones. Implications of these results for resonance models of visual word recognition are discussed.postprin