BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Control of obsessive thoughts in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) involves both avoidance and removal of undesirable intrusive thoughts. Thought suppression tasks tap both of these processes but experimental results have been inconsistent. Experimental tasks allowing more focused study of the processes involved in controlling intrusive thoughts may be needed. In two...

Speech quality, as perceived by the users of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony, is critically important to the uptake of this service. VoIP quality can be degraded by network layer problems (delay, jitter, packet loss). This paper presents a method for real-time, non-intrusive speech quality estimation for VoIP that emulates the subjective listening quality measures based on Mean Op...

A technique evaluating liveness in face image sequences is presented. To ensure the actual presence of a live face in contrast to a photograph (playback attack), is a significant problem in face authentication to the extent that anti-spoofing measures are highly desirable. The purpose of the proposed system is to assist in a biometric authentication framework, by adding liveness awareness in a ...

Activity recognition approaches have been applied in home ambient systems to monitor the status and wellbeing of occupant especially for home care systems. With the advancement of embedded wireless sensing devices, various applications have been proposed to monitor userâĂŹs activities and maintain a healthy lifestyle. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a Smart Medication Alert and Treatment...

Performance and high-availability are the crucial factors in the development of nowadays distributed database systems. Both of these challenges are commonly addressed by means of the same technique, database replication. The overall throughput of the system is increased by leveraging parallel computation on different sites, and in case of replica failures, availability is improved by redirectin...

Many organisations are becoming increasingly aware that the usefulness of their data is limited by its poor quality. Surprising (and sometimes alarming) proportions of data in databases are inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent or out of date. One-off data cleaning methods can help the situation in the short term, but they are costly and do little to improve data quality in the long term. Howeve...

This paper presents an algorithm that enables estimation of the speed of a single induction motor in an aggregate current signal supplying several motors from a common utility feed. This algorithm maintains accuracy of speed estimation while using shorter lengths of data, and can distinguish the activation of individual motors in the aggregate signal. The ability to separate and track distinct ...

An information management system should reduce the workload of the user. It should also learn about user's preferences and reduce the e ort in managing information. We propose a non-intrusive approach to building information management systems, based on software agents. Software agents are programs that carry out actions on behalf of the user autonomously. We describe the issues involved in des...