Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

Digital Watermarking for Verification of Perception-based Integrity of Audio Data

In certain application fields digital audio recordings contain sensitive content. Examples are historical archival material in public archives that preserve our cultural heritage, or digital evidence in the context of law enforcement and civil proceedings. Because of the powerful capabilities of modern editing tools for multimedia such material is vulnerable to doctoring of the content and forgery of its origin with malicious intent. Also inadvertent data modification and mistaken origin can be caused by human error. Hence, the credibility and provenience in terms of an unadulterated and genuine state of such audio content and the confidence about its origin are critical factors. To address this issue, this PhD thesis proposes a mechanism for verifying the integrity and authenticity of digital sound recordings. It is designed and implemented to be insensitive to common post-processing operations of the audio data that influence the subjective acoustic perception only marginally (if at all). Examples of such operations include lossy compression that maintains a high sound quality of the audio media, or lossless format conversions. It is the objective to avoid de facto false alarms that would be expectedly observable in standard crypto-based authentication protocols in the presence of these legitimate post-processing. For achieving this, a feasible combination of the techniques of digital watermarking and audio-specific hashing is investigated. At first, a suitable secret-key dependent audio hashing algorithm is developed. It incorporates and enhances so-called audio fingerprinting technology from the state of the art in contentbased audio identification. The presented algorithm (denoted as ”rMAC” message authentication code) allows ”perception-based” verification of integrity. This means classifying integrity breaches as such not before they become audible. As another objective, this rMAC is embedded and stored silently inside the audio media by means of audio watermarking technology. This approach allows maintaining the authentication code across the above-mentioned admissible post-processing operations and making it available for integrity verification at a later date. For this, an existent secret-key ependent audio watermarking algorithm is used and enhanced in this thesis work. To some extent, the dependency of the rMAC and of the watermarking processing from a secret key also allows authenticating the origin of a protected audio. To elaborate on this security aspect, this work also estimates the brute-force efforts of an adversary attacking this combined rMAC-watermarking approach. The experimental results show that the proposed method provides a good distinction and classification performance of authentic versus doctored audio content. It also allows the temporal localization of audible data modification within a protected audio file. The experimental evaluation finally provides recommendations about technical configuration settings of the combined watermarking-hashing approach. Beyond the main topic of perception-based data integrity and data authenticity for audio, this PhD work provides new general findings in the fields of audio fingerprinting and digital watermarking. The main contributions of this PhD were published and presented mainly at conferences about multimedia security. These publications were cited by a number of other authors and hence had some impact on their works

Towards Machine Musicians Who Have Listened to More Music Than Us: Audio Database-led Algorithmic Criticism for Automatic Composition and Live Concert Systems

Databases of audio can form the basis for new algorithmic critic systems, applying techniques from the growing field of music information retrieval to meta-creation in algorithmic composition and interactive music systems. In this article, case studies are described where critics are derived from larger audio corpora. In the first scenario, the target music is electronic art music, and two corpuses are used to train model parameters and then compared with each other and against further controls in assessing novel electronic music composed by a separate program. In the second scenario, a “real-world” application is described, where a “jury” of three deliberately and individually biased algorithmic music critics judged the winner of a dubstep remix competition. The third scenario is a live tool for automated in-concert criticism, based on the limited situation of comparing an improvising pianists' playing to that of Keith Jarrett; the technology overlaps that described in the other systems, though now deployed in real time. Alongside description and analysis of these systems, the wider possibilities and implications are discussed

Evolution of Information Retrieval System: Critical Review of Multimedia Information Retrieval System Based On Content, Context, and Concept

In recent years the explosive growth of information affects the flood of information. The amount of information must be followed by the development of the effective Information Retrieval System (IRS) so that the information will be easily accessible and useful for the user. The source of Information contains various media format, beside text there is also image, audio, and video that called multimedia. A large number of multimedia information rise the Multimedia Information Retrieval System (MIRS). Most of MIRS today is monolithic or only using one media format like Google1 for text search, tineye2 for image search, youtube3 for video search or 4shared4 for music and audio search. There is a need of information in any kind of media, not only retrieve the document in text format, but also retrieve the document in an image, audio and video format at once from any kind media format of the query. This study reviews the evolution of IRS, regress from text-based to concept- based MIRS. Unified Multimedia Indexing technique is discussed along with Concept-based MIRS. This critical review concludes that the evolution of IRS follows three paces: content-based, context-based and concept-based. Each pace takes on indexing system and retrieval techniques to optimize information retrieved. The challenge is how to come up with a retrieval technique that can process unified MIRS in order to retrieve optimally the relevant document

Spartan Daily, May 4, 1967

Volume 54, Issue 113https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/4979/thumbnail.jp

A Memetic Analysis of a Phrase by Beethoven: Calvinian Perspectives on Similarity and Lexicon-Abstraction

This article discusses some general issues arising from the study of similarity in music, both human-conducted and computer-aided, and then progresses to a consideration of similarity relationships between patterns in a phrase by Beethoven, from the first movement of the Piano Sonata in A flat major op. 110 (1821), and various potential memetic precursors. This analysis is followed by a consideration of how the kinds of similarity identified in the Beethoven phrase might be understood in psychological/conceptual and then neurobiological terms, the latter by means of William Calvin’s Hexagonal Cloning Theory. This theory offers a mechanism for the operation of David Cope’s concept of the lexicon, conceived here as a museme allele-class. I conclude by attempting to correlate and map the various spaces within which memetic replication occurs

AdVersarial: Perceptual Ad Blocking meets Adversarial Machine Learning

Perceptual ad-blocking is a novel approach that detects online advertisements based on their visual content. Compared to traditional filter lists, the use of perceptual signals is believed to be less prone to an arms race with web publishers and ad networks. We demonstrate that this may not be the case. We describe attacks on multiple perceptual ad-blocking techniques, and unveil a new arms race that likely disfavors ad-blockers. Unexpectedly, perceptual ad-blocking can also introduce new vulnerabilities that let an attacker bypass web security boundaries and mount DDoS attacks. We first analyze the design space of perceptual ad-blockers and present a unified architecture that incorporates prior academic and commercial work. We then explore a variety of attacks on the ad-blocker's detection pipeline, that enable publishers or ad networks to evade or detect ad-blocking, and at times even abuse its high privilege level to bypass web security boundaries. On the one hand, we show that perceptual ad-blocking must visually classify rendered web content to escape an arms race centered on obfuscation of page markup. On the other, we present a concrete set of attacks on visual ad-blockers by constructing adversarial examples in a real web page context. For seven ad-detectors, we create perturbed ads, ad-disclosure logos, and native web content that misleads perceptual ad-blocking with 100% success rates. In one of our attacks, we demonstrate how a malicious user can upload adversarial content, such as a perturbed image in a Facebook post, that fools the ad-blocker into removing another users' non-ad content. Moving beyond the Web and visual domain, we also build adversarial examples for AdblockRadio, an open source radio client that uses machine learning to detects ads in raw audio streams