The ear as a biometric

It is more than 10 years since the first tentative experiments in ear biometrics were conducted and it has now reached the “adolescence” of its development towards a mature biometric. Here we present a timely retrospective of the ensuing research since those early days. Whilst its detailed structure may not be as complex as the iris, we show that the ear has unique security advantages over other biometrics. It is most unusual, even unique, in that it supports not only visual and forensic recognition, but also acoustic recognition at the same time. This, together with its deep three-dimensional structure and its robust resistance to change with age will make it very difficult to counterfeit thus ensuring that the ear will occupy a special place in situations requiring a high degree of protection

Multi-scale Crowd Feature Detection using Vision Sensing and Statistical Mechanics Principles

Crowd behaviour analysis using vision has been subject to many different approaches. Multi-purpose crowd descriptors are one of the more recent approaches. These descriptors provide an opportunity to compare and categorise various types of crowds as well as classify their respective behaviours. Nevertheless, the automated calculation of descriptors which are expressed as measurements with accurate interpretation is a challenging problem. In this paper, analogies between human crowds and molecular thermodynamics systems are drawn for the measurement of crowd behaviour. Specifically, a novel descriptor is defined and measured for crowd behaviour at multiple scales. This descriptor uses the concept of Entropy for evaluating the state of crowd disorder. By results, the descriptor Entropy does indeed appear to capture the desired outcome for crowd entropy while utilizing easily detectable image features. Our new approach for machine understanding of crowd behaviour is promising, while it offers new complementary capabilities to the existing crowd descriptors, for example, as will be demonstrated, in the case of spectator crowds. The scope and performance of this descriptor is further discussed in details in this paper

Cosmological Models with Variable Gravitational and Cosmological constants in R2R^{2} Gravity

We consider the evolution of a flat Friedmann-Roberstson-Walker Universe in a higher derivative theories, including $\alpha R^{2}$ terms to the Einstein-Hilbert action in the presence of a variable gravitational and cosmological constants. We study here the evolution of the gravitational and cosmological constants in the presence of radiation and matter domination era of the universe. We present here new cosmological solutions which are physically interesting for model building.Comment: 14 pages, no figure. to be published in Int. J. Mod. Phys.

Terahertz PHASR Scanner with 2 kHz, 100 picosecond Time-Domain Trace Acquisition Rate and an Extended Field-of-View Based on a Heliostat Design

Recently, we introduced a Portable HAndheld Spectral Reflection (PHASR) Scanner to allow THz Time-Domain Spectroscopic (THz-TDS) imaging in clinical and industrial settings using a fiber-coupled and alignment-free telecentric beam steering design. The key limitations of the version 1.0 of the PHASR Scanner were its field-of-view and speed of time-domain trace acquisition. In this paper, we address these limitations by introducing a heliostat geometry for beam scanning to achieve an extended field-of-view, and by reconfiguring the ASynchronous OPtical Sampling (ASOPS) system to perform Electronically Controlled OPtical Sampling (ECOPS) measurements. The former change improved the deflection range of the beam, while also drastically reducing the coupling of the two scanning axes, the combination of which resulted in a larger than four-fold increase in the FOV area. The latter change significantly improves the acquisition speed and frequency domain performance simultaneously by improving measurement efficiency. To accomplish this, we characterized the non-linear time-axis sampling behavior of the electro-mechanical system in the ECOPS mode. We proposed methods to model and correct the non-linear time-axis distortions and tested the performance of the high-speed ECOPS trace acquisition. Therefore, here we introduce the PHASR Scanner version 2.0, which is capable of imaging a 40$\times$27 mm$^2$ FOV with 2000 traces per second over a 100 picosecond TDS range. This new scanner represents a significant leap towards translating the THz-TDS technology from the lab bench to the bedside for real-time clinical imaging applications.Comment: 15 pages; submitted to IEEE Transactions on Terahertz Science and Technolog

Intravenous Formulation of HET0016 Decreased Human Glioblastoma Growth and Iimplicated Survival Benefit in Rat Xenograft Models

Glioblastoma (GBM) is a hypervascular primary brain tumor with poor prognosis. HET0016 is a selective CYP450 inhibitor, which has been shown to inhibit angiogenesis and tumor growth. Therefore, to explore novel treatments, we have generated an improved intravenous (IV) formulation of HET0016 with HPssCD and tested in animal models of human and syngeneic GBM. Administration of a single IV dose resulted in 7-fold higher levels of HET0016 in plasma and 3.6-fold higher levels in tumor at 60 min than that in IP route. IV treatment with HPssCD-HET0016 decreased tumor growth, and altered vascular kinetics in early and late treatment groups (p \u3c 0.05). Similar growth inhibition was observed in syngeneic GL261 GBM (p \u3c 0.05). Survival studies using patient derived xenografts of GBM811, showed prolonged survival to 26 weeks in animals treated with focal radiation, in combination with HET0016 and TMZ (p \u3c 0.05). We observed reduced expression of markers of cell proliferation (Ki-67), decreased neovascularization (laminin and alphaSMA), in addition to inflammation and angiogenesis markers in the treatment group (p \u3c 0.05). Our results indicate that HPssCD-HET0016 is effective in inhibiting tumor growth through decreasing proliferation, and neovascularization. Furthermore, HPssCD-HET0016 significantly prolonged survival in PDX GBM811 model

Parallel, distributed-memory implementation of sparse-grid methods for three-dimensional fluid-flow computations

A workable approach for modernization of existing software into parallel/distributed applications is through coarse-grain restructuring. If, for instance, entire subroutines of legacy code can be plugged into a new structure, the investment required for the re-discovery o

Geospatial intelligence and visual classification of environmentally observed species in the future Internet

The rapid development of advanced smart communication tools with good quality and resolution video cameras,audio and GPS devices in the last few years shall lead to profound impacts on the way future environmentalobservations are conducted and accessed by communities. The resulting large scale interconnections of these"Future Internet Things" form a large environmental sensing network which will generate large volumes of qualityenvironmental observations and at highly localised spatial scales. This enablement in environmental sensing atlocal scales will be of great importance to contribute in the study of fauna and flora in the near future, particularlyon the effect of climate change on biodiversity in various regions of Europe and beyond. The Future Internet couldalso potentially become the de facto information space to provide participative real-time sensing by communitiesand improve our situation awarness of the effect of climate on local environments. In the ENVIROFI(2011-2013)Usage Area project in the FP7 FI-PPP programme, a set of requirements for specific (and generic) enablers isachieved with the potential establishement of participating community observatories of the future. In particular,the specific enablement of interest concerns the building of future interoperable services for the management ofenvironmental data intelligently with tagged contextual geo-spatial information generated by multiple operatorsin communities (Using smart phones). The classification of observed species in the resulting images is achievedwith structured data pre-processing, semantic enrichement using contextual geospatial information, and high levelfusion with controlled uncertainty estimations. The returned identification of species is further improved usingfuture ground truth corrections and learning by the specific enablers

Parallel, distributed-memory implementation of a sparse-grid method for time-dependent advection-diffusion problems

A workable approach for modernizing existing software into parallel/distributed applications is through coarse-grain restructuring. If, for instance, entire subroutines of legacy code can be plugged into a new structure, the investment required for the re-discovery of the d

Input-output Conformance Testing for Channel-based Service Connectors

Service-based systems are software systems composed of autonomous components or services provided by different vendors, deployed on remote machines and accessible through the web. One of the challenges of modern software engineering is to ensure that such a system behaves as intended by its designer. The Reo coordination language is an extensible notation for formal modeling and execution of service compositions. Services that have no prior knowledge about each other communicate through advanced channel connectors which guarantee that each participant, service or client, receives the right data at the right time. Each channel is a binary relation that imposes synchronization and data constraints on input and output messages. Furthermore, channels are composed together to realize arbitrarily complex behavioral protocols. During this process, a designer may introduce errors into the connector model or the code for their execution, and thus affect the behavior of a composed service. In this paper, we present an approach for model-based testing of coordination protocols designed in Reo. Our approach is based on the input-output conformance (ioco) testing theory and exploits the mapping of automata-based semantic models for Reo to equivalent process algebra specifications