The purpose of the current study was to examine the effect of a blind selection process on gender discrimination. Due to persistent gender discrimination in selection processes, the intention of the current study was to investigate a blind selection process as a means to decrease gender discrimination against women. A total of 391 individuals were recruited through SONA and convenience sampling to participate in the current study. Materials included a selection scenario, three applicant résumés with applicant names and three with applicant ID numbers, a rank order form, and measures for procedural justice and fairness, modern sexism inventory, and the attitudes towards women scale. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions; one with applicant names, one with applicant ID numbers with no explanation for the ID numbers, and one with applicant ID numbers without an explanation. Results illustrated partial support for hypothesis 1a (H1a) and H2a, such that there was a significant difference in rank orders (H1a) and job suitability scores (H2a) as a function of condition assignment, though in the opposite direction than hypothesized. There was support for H1b, H1c, H2b, and H2c such that in blind conditions, qualified applicants received similar rank orders (H1b) and job suitability scores (H2b), while the unqualified applicant received the lowest rank order (H1c) and job suitability scores (H2c). Procedural justice scores were similar between the two blind conditions, and as such, H3a and H3b was not supported. Participants with an explanation perceived blind conditions as fair and non-blind conditions as unfair, thus H3c was supported. However, H3d was not supported, as participants without an explanation still perceived a blind process as fair and a non-blind process as unfair. Neither H4a nor H4b were supported, as sexism did not serve as a covariate with rank orders as a function of condition assignment. Last, H5 was not supported, as participants across all three conditions were similarly confident in their rank order decisions. Limitations included an imbalanced sample of primarily female (N = 320) psychology students (N = 380). Possible explanations for results obtained include the effects of similarity bias, identification, sophistication and education, and experimenter effects. Results expand the current body of literature in personnel selection processes and create implications for blind selection processes and practical use in organizations to decrease gender discrimination.

Automatic speech recognition has become a standard feature on many consumer electronics and automotive products, and the accuracy of the decoded speech has improved dramatically over time. Often, designers of these products achieve accuracy by employing microphone arrays and beamforming algorithms to reduce interference. However, beamforming microphone arrays are too large for small form factor products such as smart watches. Yet these small form factor products, which have precious little space for tactile user input (i.e. knobs, buttons and touch screens), would benefit immensely from a user interface based on reliably accurate automatic speech recognition. This thesis proposes a solution for interference mitigation that employs blind source separation with a compact array of commercially available unidirectional microphone elements. Such an array provides adequate spatial diversity to enable blind source separation and would easily fit in a smart watch or similar small form factor product. The solution is characterized using publicly available speech audio clips recorded for the purpose of testing automatic speech recognition algorithms. The proposal is modelled in different interference environments and the efficacy of the solution is evaluated. Factors affecting the performance of the solution are identified and their influence quantified. An expectation is presented for the quality of separation as well as the resulting improvement in word error rate that can be achieved from decoding the separated speech estimate versus the mixture obtained from a single unidirectional microphone element. Finally, directions for future work are proposed, which have the potential to improve the performance of the solution thereby making it a commercially viable product.

Visually impaired (VI) individuals struggle with grocery shopping and have to rely on either friends, family or grocery store associates for shopping. ShopMobile 2 is a proof-of-concept system that allows VI shoppers to shop independently in a grocery store using only their smartphone. Unlike other assistive shopping systems that use dedicated hardware, this system is a software only solution that relies on fast computer vision algorithms. It consists of three modules - an eyes free barcode scanner, an optical character recognition (OCR) module, and a tele-assistance module. The eyes-free barcode scanner allows VI shoppers to locate and retrieve products by scanning barcodes on shelves and on products. The OCR module allows shoppers to read nutrition facts on products and the tele-assistance module allows them to obtain help from sighted individuals at remote locations. This dissertation discusses, provides implementations of, and presents laboratory and real-world experiments related to all three modules.

Children’s interaction with their caregivers is severely restricted by blindness, but evidence of effects on their early language development is controversial. This seems partly due to the difficulties inherent in studying this low-incidence disability and partly to conflicting views of early language development and the role of maternal input. The defined focus area of my research, reviewed in the overarching statement in this portfolio, is the investigation of early interaction and how blindness affects maternal input, emotional availability, and children’s early word use. The broader context of my work is early language development for all children. At the centre of my studies are four mother-child dyads who were studied from the time the children were 18-19 months old and just beginning to use words, and then followed through until around the time of the children’s second birthday. The studies show that these mothers were no more directive than mothers whose children were sighted, but that they made few adaptations to their children’s particular needs for frequent and relevant information about the world around them. This portfolio provides an overarching statement of issues and research findings from studies of maternal interaction with young children who are blind, within the context of issues in early language development and early intervention. To represent the scope of my work, the examples of my refereed publications include those that are research-based as well as those that are more generally related to professional practice. This more general writing for teachers and caregivers provides an essential link between theory and practice. The studies of children with blindness inform, and have been informed by, current understanding of what is significant in early development for all children. Thus the significance of the work presented lies not only in the contribution to the research literature, but also in the potential for informing intervention practice and timely support for families. / Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

This thesis describes a blind beamforming technique for GPS receivers. It improves the performance of a GPS receiver by mitigating interference and enhancing GPS signals separately and has a three-stage structure. The technique is based on a linear antenna array and integrates the eigendecomposition based subspace and multiple independent beamforming techniques. A signal model is carefully constructed. Particular emphasis is placed upon the projection matrix derived from the subspace technique. The effect of interference and phase error on this technique is discussed. This technique is tested and compared to null steering and MMSE technique using simulated data for a number of interference environments. Furthermore, the proposed technique is applied to real data and shows several advantages over simple null steering. / Thesis (M.Eng.Sc.) - University of Adelaide, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2008

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

<p>ABSTRACT</p><p>The conditions on the market are rapidly changing and businesses in Sweden need to seize signals of change in time, in order to have a strong market position. The ability to make the right decisions and react in time is vital due to the increasing competition and a mistake can have devastating consequences for a company. The aim of this thesis is to investigate what tools and methods businesses use to analyse the surrounding world, which has lead to following research question:</p><p>How do businesses analyse the surrounding and predict trends and what factors in the society should a company be attentive to while performing an analysis?</p><p>Analyses of the surrounding heritage from a term called Business Intelligence, which consist of internal and external factors. This thesis focuses of analyses of external factors, in other words the surrounding. These external aspects enrich the understanding of the internal factors and together they are the foundation that strategic planning originates from. An analysis can be performed in many different ways for instance with collaborations with consultants or by observing the society. A World Mapping method can be used to chart trends or important changes and a company can also try to identify unpredicted events by using the factor X-model. Theories by Bengt Wahlström have also been used in the study to display how trends can be analysed.</p><p>This study will analyse large food producers who have established brands on the Swedish market. A qualitative approach has been conducted where six food supplier companies and three consultant companies specialised in analysing the surrounding have been interviewed. The method has been deductive where the empirical findings has been analysed with the theoretical framework. The outcome of the research shows that collaborations with consultants is a commonly used instrument and practical methods such as scenario planning and in real life scanning are preferred as visualising factors simplifies the managing of them. Media plays a significant role, both as a tool to search and track trends but also as a tool that can increase the affect of trends and unforeseen occurrences.</p>

<p>Magnetic Resonance Imaging is an established technology for both imaging and</p><p>functional studies in clinical and research environments. The field is still very</p><p>research intense. Two major research areas are acquisition time and signal quality.</p><p>The last decade has provided tools for more efficient possibilities of trading these</p><p>factors against each other through parallel imaging.</p><p>In this thesis one parallel imaging method, Sensitivity Encoding for fast</p><p>MRI (SENSE) is examined. An alternative solution CCASENSE is developed.</p><p>CCASENSE reduces the acquisition time by estimating the sensitivity maps required</p><p>for SENSE to work instead of running a reference scan. The estimation</p><p>process is done by Blind Source Separation through Canonical Correlation Analysis.</p><p>It is shown that CCASENSE appears to estimate the sensitivity maps better</p><p>than ICASENSE which is a similar algorithm.</p>

In the recent years, Independent Component Analysis (ICA) has become a fundamental tool in adaptive signal and data processing, especially in the field of Blind Source Separation (BSS). Even though there exist some methods for which an algebraic solution to the ICA problem may be found, other iterative methods are very popular. Among them is the class of information-theoretic approaches, laying on entropies. The associated objective functions are maximized based on optimization schemes, and on gradient-ascent techniques in particular. Two major issues in this field are the following: 1) Does the global maximum point of these entropic objectives correspond to a satisfactory solution of BSS ? and 2) as gradient techniques are used, optimization algorithms look in fact for local maximum points, so what about the meaning of these local optima from the BSS problem point of view? Even though there are some partial answers to these questions in the literature, most of them are based on simulation and conjectures; formal developments are often lacking. This thesis aims at filling this lack and providing intuitive justifications, too. We focus the analysis on Rényi's entropy-based contrast functions. Our results show that, generally speaking, Rényi's entropy is not a suitable contrast function for BSS, even though we recover the well-known results saying that Shannon's entropy-based objectives are contrast functions. We also show that the range-based contrast functions can be built under some conditions on the sources. The BSS problem is stated in the first chapter, and viewed under the information (theory) angle. The two next chapters address specifically the above questions. Finally, the last chapter deals with range-based ICA, the only ``entropy-based contrast' which, based on the enclosed results, is also a <i>discriminant</i> contrast function, in the sense that it is theoretically free of spurious local optima. Geometrical interpretations and surprising examples are given. The interest of this approach is confirmed by testing the algorithm on the MLSP 2006 data analysis competition benchmark; the proposed method outperforms the previously obtained results on large-scale and noisy mixture samples obtained through ill-conditioned mixing matrices.

[by] Thomas P. Barnwell III. / Also issued as a Ph.D. thesis in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering, 1970. / Bibliography: p.114-115. / Contract DA 28-043-AMC-02536(E).