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

Improving School Readiness in Home-Based Care Settings

Introduction: The purpose of this project was to create a resource guide for home-based daycare providers to promote school readiness skills in preschool-age children. Several national and local policies promote children’s school readiness in early childhood years (NEGP, 1995). Children in home-based daycares may be at-risk for lower school readiness skills upon school entry compared to similar-age children in other childcare arrangements (Bassok, Greenberg, Fitzpatrick, & Loeb, 2016). Occupational therapists can play a role in supporting home-based daycare providers to implement school readiness activities for preschool-age children into their daily routines

Unlocking the Fifth Amendment: Passwords and Encrypted Devices

Each year, law enforcement seizes thousands of electronic devices—smartphones, laptops, and notebooks—that it cannot open without the suspect’s password. Without this password, the information on the device sits completely scrambled behind a wall of encryption. Sometimes agents will be able to obtain the information by hacking, discovering copies of data on the cloud, or obtaining the password voluntarily from the suspects themselves. But when they cannot, may the government compel suspects to disclose or enter their password? This Article considers the Fifth Amendment protection against compelled disclosures of passwords—a question that has split and confused courts. It measures this right against the legal right of law enforcement, armed with a warrant, to search the device that it has validly seized. Encryption cases present the unique hybrid scenario that link and entangle the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. In a sense, this Article explores whose rights should prevail. This Article proposes a novel settlement that draws upon the best aspects of Fourth and Fifth Amendment law: the government can compel a suspect to decrypt only those files it already knows she possesses. This rule follows from existing Fifth Amendment case law and, as a corollary to the fundamental nature of strong encryption, also represents the best accommodation of law enforcement needs against individual privacy

An investigation of handwriting legibility and pencil use tasks in healthy older adults

This project explores handwriting legibility and pencil use tasks in 120 healthy older Australian adults, aged 60 to 99 years. A cross sectional study design was used. The aim of these studies was to explore if handwriting legibility or pencil use performance deteriorated as people aged. This is important to help therapists determine if handwriting difficulties following stroke, or other medical conditions, are more likely a consequence of condition-related impairments or due to ‘normal ageing’. Tasks performed under standardised test conditions included writing copied and self-composed sentences, shopping lists, transcribing a telephone message and completing the ‘lines’ and ‘dots’ pencil use Motor Assessment Scale (MAS) subtests. Handwriting legibility was scored using the Modified Four Point Scale-version 2. The first study explored the distribution of handwriting legibility scores in healthy older adults, relationships between handwriting legibility, age and writing task and reliability of rating procedures. Results indicated that handwriting generally remained legible in older adults, regardless of increasing age. The second study explored the performance of older adults without stroke on the ‘lines’ and ‘dots’ tasks, the relationship between age and task performance, and the relationship between writing speed and performance on the ‘lines’ task. Results indicated that many older adults failed the ‘lines’ task and many over 90 years of age failed the ‘dots’ task. Results suggest that impaired handwriting legibility in older adults who have had a stroke (or other medical condition) is likely due to the effects of the medical condition (or the complexity of the task) rather than ‘normal ageing’. However, failure to pass the ‘lines’ and ‘dots’ tasks is likely related to a combination of age and individual skill level and not solely due to condition-related impairment. A revised method for rating performance on the ‘lines’ and ‘dots’ tasks is also proposed

Character Recognition

Character recognition is one of the pattern recognition technologies that are most widely used in practical applications. This book presents recent advances that are relevant to character recognition, from technical topics such as image processing, feature extraction or classification, to new applications including human-computer interfaces. The goal of this book is to provide a reference source for academic research and for professionals working in the character recognition field

Evaluation of Student Progress to Goals: Tracking Positive Behavior Changes Among Students Identified with Special Needs Grades 1 to 3

There has been an increase in the number of children identified and served, in school settings, and in the community at large, under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA.) Many school-based programs focus on mainstreaming students with disabilities. However, few programs exist for children between the ages of 5 and 9 who need positive behavior intervention services because they lack socially appropriate interaction skills. The research literature revealed that students who lack appropriate social interaction skills are often placed into mainstream general class settings, where results of student improvement in social interaction skills are mixed. There is a gap in the research on the effectiveness of targeted instruction in social interaction skills for a specific subset of the population, ones who need intensive instruction in positive interpersonal communication skills. The purpose of this program evaluation study is to measure the progress of students with social skill deficiencies served under IDEA in a non-public school setting. I, as the teacher/researcher, collected data on students’ verbal social skills, which followed targeted teaching strategies that focused on the development of social skills, specifically verbal interaction skills. Results indicated that students who had targeted instruction in their social interaction skills showed improvement in their ability to communicate positively with others in a school setting. Data also showed that attendance did not play a factor in the overall gains towards students’ individualized goals. Keywords: positive intervention behavioral support, social skill deficiencies, verbal interactio

Multimodal interaction with mobile devices : fusing a broad spectrum of modality combinations

This dissertation presents a multimodal architecture for use in mobile scenarios such as shopping and navigation. It also analyses a wide range of feasible modality input combinations for these contexts. For this purpose, two interlinked demonstrators were designed for stand-alone use on mobile devices. Of particular importance was the design and implementation of a modality fusion module capable of combining input from a range of communication modes like speech, handwriting, and gesture. The implementation is able to account for confidence value biases arising within and between modalities and also provides a method for resolving semantically overlapped input. Tangible interaction with real-world objects and symmetric multimodality are two further themes addressed in this work. The work concludes with the results from two usability field studies that provide insight on user preference and modality intuition for different modality combinations, as well as user acceptance for anthropomorphized objects.Diese Dissertation präsentiert eine multimodale Architektur zum Gebrauch in mobilen Umständen wie z. B. Einkaufen und Navigation. Außerdem wird ein großes Gebiet von möglichen modalen Eingabekombinationen zu diesen Umständen analysiert. Um das in praktischer Weise zu demonstrieren, wurden zwei teilweise gekoppelte Vorführungsprogramme zum 'stand-alone'; Gebrauch auf mobilen Geräten entworfen. Von spezieller Wichtigkeit war der Entwurf und die Ausführung eines Modalitäts-fusion Modul, das die Kombination einer Reihe von Kommunikationsarten wie Sprache, Handschrift und Gesten ermöglicht. Die Ausführung erlaubt die Veränderung von Zuverlässigkeitswerten innerhalb einzelner Modalitäten und außerdem ermöglicht eine Methode um die semantisch überlappten Eingaben auszuwerten. Wirklichkeitsnaher Dialog mit aktuellen Objekten und symmetrische Multimodalität sind zwei weitere Themen die in dieser Arbeit behandelt werden. Die Arbeit schließt mit Resultaten von zwei Feldstudien, die weitere Einsicht erlauben über die bevorzugte Art verschiedener Modalitätskombinationen, sowie auch über die Akzeptanz von anthropomorphisierten Objekten