Investigating the impact of combining handwritten signature and keyboard keystroke dynamics for gender prediction

© 2019 IEEE. The use of soft-biometric data as an auxiliary tool on user identification is already well known. Gender, handorientation and emotional state are some examples which can be called soft-biometrics. These soft-biometric data can be predicted directly from the biometric templates. It is very common to find researches using physiological modalities for soft-biometric prediction, but behavioural biometric is often not well explored for this context. Among the behavioural biometric modalities, keystroke dynamics and handwriting signature have been widely explored for user identification, including some soft-biometric predictions. However, in these modalities, the soft-biometric prediction is usually done in an individual way. In order to fill this space, this study aims to investigate whether the combination of those two biometric modalities can impact the performance of a soft-biometric data, gender prediction. The main aim is to assess the impact of combining data from two different biometric sources in gender prediction. Our findings indicated gains in terms of performance for gender prediction when combining these two biometric modalities, when compared to the individual ones

Exploring gender prediction from iris biometrics

Prediction of gender characteristics from iris images has been investigated and some successful results have been reported in the literature, but without considering performance for different iris features and classifiers. This paper investigates for the first time an approach to gender prediction from iris images using different types of features (including a small number of very simple geometric features, texture features and a combination of geometric and texture features) and a more versatile and intelligent classifier structure. Our proposed approaches can achieve gender prediction accuracies of up to 90% in the BioSecure Database

Unexpectedly long incubation period of Plasmodium vivax malaria, in the absence of chemoprophylaxis, in patients diagnosed outside the transmission area in Brazil

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In 2010, Brazil recorded 3343,599 cases of malaria, with 99.6% of them concentrated in the Amazon region. <it>Plasmodium vivax </it>accounts for 86% of the cases circulating in the country. The extra-Amazonian region, where transmission does not occur, recorded about 566 cases imported from the Amazonian area in Brazil and South America, from Central America, Asia and African countries. Prolonged incubation periods have been described for <it>P. vivax </it>malaria in temperate climates. The diversity in essential biological characteristics is traditionally considered as one possible explanation to the emergence of relapse in malaria and to the differences in the duration of the incubation period, which can also be explained by the use of chemoprophylaxis. Studying the reported cases of <it>P. vivax </it>malaria in Rio de Janeiro, where there is no vector transmission, has made it possible to evaluate the extension of the incubation period and to notice that it may be extended in some cases.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Descriptive study of every malaria patients who visited the clinic in the last five years. The mean, standard deviation, median, minimum and maximum of all incubation periods were analysed.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>From the total of 80 patients seen in the clinic during the study time, with confirmed diagnosis of malaria, 49 (63%) were infected with <it>P. vivax</it>. Between those, seven had an estimated incubation period varying from three to 12 months and were returned travellers from Brazilian Amazonian states (6) and Indonesia (1). None of them had taken malarial chemoprophylaxis.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The authors emphasize that considering malaria as a possible cause of febrile syndrome should be a post-travel routine, independent of the time elapsed after exposure in the transmission area, even in the absence of malaria chemoprophylaxis. They speculate that, since there is no current and detailed information about the biological cycle of human malaria plasmodia's in Brazil, it is possible that new strains are circulating in endemic regions or a change in cycle of preexisting strains is occurring. Considering that a prolonged incubation period may confer advantages on the survival of the parasite, difficulties in malaria control might arise.</p

Experiences, attitudes and barriers towards research amongst junior faculty of Pakistani medical universities

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The developing world has had limited quality research and in Pakistan, research is still in its infancy. We conducted a study to assess the proportion of junior faculty involved in research to highlight their attitude towards research, and identify the factors associated with their research involvement.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A cross-sectional study was conducted in four medical universities/teaching hospitals in Pakistan, representing private and public sectors. A pre-tested, self-administered questionnaire was used to collect information from 176 junior faculty members of studied universities/hospitals. Logistic regression analysis was used to identify factors related to attitudes and barriers in research among those currently involved in research with those who were not.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Overall, 41.5% of study subjects were currently involved in research. A highly significant factor associated with current research involvement was research training during the post-graduate period (p < 0.001). Other factors associated with current involvement in research were male gender, working in the public sector and previous involvement in research. Overall, a large majority (85.2%) of doctors considered research helpful in their profession and had a positive attitude towards research; nevertheless this positive attitude was more frequently reported by doctors who were currently involved in research compared to those who were not (OR = 4.69; 95% CI = 1.54-14.26). Similarly, a large proportion (83.5%) of doctors considered research difficult to conduct; higher by doctors who were not presently involved in research (OR = 2.74; 95% CI = 1.20-6.22)</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Less than half of the study participants were currently involved in research. Research output may improve if identified barriers are rectified. Further studies are recommended in this area.</p

Financial considerations in the conduct of multi-centre randomised controlled trials: evidence from a qualitative study.

National Coordinating Centre for Research Methodology; Medical Research Council, UK Department of Health; Chief Scientist OfficeNot peer reviewedPublisher PD

Experimental investigation on the effect of wear flat inclination on the cutting response of a blunt tool in rock cutting

A vast majority of experimental researches focuses on the cutting action of a sharp cutter, while there has been limited experimental work devoted to the study of the contact process at the wear flat-rock interface. The specific objective of this study is to determine the effect of the wear flat inclination angle ( β ) with respect to the cutter velocity vector ( vv ) on both the contact stress ( σ ) and friction coefficient ( μ ) mobilized at the wear flat-rock interface. An extensive and comprehensive set of cutting experiments was carried out on thirteen different sedimentary quarry rock samples using a state-of-the-art rock cutting equipment. A unique cutter holder was purposely designed and manufactured along with a precise experimental protocol implemented in order to change the back rake angle and therefore the inclination β by steps of 0.10∘ . The experimental observations confirm the existence of three regimes of frictional contact (identified as elastic, elasto-plastic and plastic) for all rock samples. Further, the results suggest that the scaled contact stress is predominantly controlled by a dimensionless number η=E∗tanβq with E∗ the plane strain elastic modulus and q the rock strength

An investigation of the predictability of the Brazilian three-modal hand-based behavioural biometric: a feature selection and feature-fusion approach

Abstract: New security systems, methods or techniques need to have their performance evaluated in conditions that closely resemble a real-life situation. The effectiveness with which individual identity can be predicted in different scenarios can benefit from seeking a broad base of identity evidence. Many approaches to the implementation of biometric-based identification systems are possible, and different configurations are likely to generate significantly different operational characteristics. The choice of implementational structure is, therefore, very dependent on the performance criteria, which is most important in any particular task scenario. The issue of improving performance can be addressed in many ways, but system configurations based on integrating different information sources are widely adopted in order to achieve this. Thus, understanding how each data information can influence performance is very important. The use of similar modalities may imply that we can use the same features. However, there is no indication that very similar (such as keyboard and touch keystroke dynamics, for example) basic biometrics will perform well using the same set of features. In this paper, we will evaluate the merits of using a three-modal hand-based biometric database for user prediction focusing on feature selection as the main investigation point. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first thought-out analysis of a database with three modalities that were collected from the same users, containing keyboard keystroke, touch keystroke and handwritten signature. First, we will investigate how the keystroke modalities perform, and then, we will add the signature in order to understand if there is any improvement in the results. We have used a wide range of techniques for feature selection that includes filters and wrappers (genetic algorithms), and we have validated our findings using a clustering technique

The Environment of the Binary Neutron Star Merger GW170817

We present Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and Chandra imaging, combined with Very Large Telescope MUSE integral field spectroscopy of the counterpart and host galaxy of the first binary neutron star merger detected via gravitational-wave emission by LIGO and Virgo, GW170817. The host galaxy, NGC 4993, is an S0 galaxy at z = 0.009783. There is evidence for large, face-on spiral shells in continuum imaging, and edge-on spiral features visible in nebular emission lines. This suggests that NGC 4993 has undergone a relatively recent ($\lesssim 1$ Gyr) "dry" merger. This merger may provide the fuel for a weak active nucleus seen in Chandra imaging. At the location of the counterpart, HST imaging implies there is no globular or young stellar cluster, with a limit of a few thousand solar masses for any young system. The population in the vicinity is predominantly old with lesssim1% of any light arising from a population with ages $\lt 500\,\mathrm{Myr}$. Both the host galaxy properties and those of the transient location are consistent with the distributions seen for short-duration gamma-ray bursts, although the source position lies well within the effective radius (${r}_{e}\sim 3$ kpc), providing an r e -normalized offset that is closer than $\sim 90 \%$ of short GRBs. For the long delay time implied by the stellar population, this suggests that the kick velocity was significantly less than the galaxy escape velocity. We do not see any narrow host galaxy interstellar medium features within the counterpart spectrum, implying low extinction, and that the binary may lie in front of the bulk of the host galaxy

Search for Gravitational Waves from Primordial Black Hole Binary Coalescences in the Galactic Halo

We use data from the second science run of the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors to search for the gravitational waves from primordial black hole (PBH) binary coalescence with component masses in the range 0.2--$1.0 M_\odot$. The analysis requires a signal to be found in the data from both LIGO observatories, according to a set of coincidence criteria. No inspiral signals were found. Assuming a spherical halo with core radius 5 kpc extending to 50 kpc containing non-spinning black holes with masses in the range 0.2--$1.0 M_\odot$, we place an observational upper limit on the rate of PBH coalescence of 63 per year per Milky Way halo (MWH) with 90% confidence.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, to be submitted to Phys. Rev.

The Emergence of a Lanthanide-rich Kilonova Following the Merger of Two Neutron Stars

We report the discovery and monitoring of the near-infrared counterpart (AT2017gfo) of a binary neutron-star merger event detected as a gravitational wave source by Advanced LIGO/Virgo (GW170817) and as a short gamma-ray burst by Fermi/GBM and Integral/SPI-ACS (GRB170817A). The evolution of the transient light is consistent with predictions for the behaviour of a "kilonova/macronova", powered by the radioactive decay of massive neutron-rich nuclides created via r-process nucleosynthesis in the neutron-star ejecta. In particular, evidence for this scenario is found from broad features seen in Hubble Space Telescope infrared spectroscopy, similar to those predicted for lanthanide dominated ejecta, and the much slower evolution in the near-infrared Ks-band compared to the optical. This indicates that the late-time light is dominated by high-opacity lanthanide-rich ejecta, suggesting nucleosynthesis to the 3rd r-process peak (atomic masses A~195). This discovery confirms that neutron-star mergers produce kilo-/macronovae and that they are at least a major - if not the dominant - site of rapid neutron capture nucleosynthesis in the universe