<p>Automatic speaker recognition is an important key to speaker identification in media forensics and with the increase of cultures mixing, there?s an increase in bilingual speakers all around the world. The purpose of this thesis is to compare text-independent samples of one person using two different languages, Arabic and English, against a single language reference population. The hope is that a design can be started that may be useful in further developing software that can complete accurate text-independent ASR for bilingual speakers speaking either language against a single language reference population. This thesis took an Arabic model sample and compared it against samples that were both Arabic and English using and an Arabic reference population, all collected from videos downloaded from the Internet. All of the samples were text-independent and enhanced to optimal performance. The data was run through a biometric software called BATVOX 4.1, which utilizes the MFCCs and GMM methods of speaker recognition and identification. The result of testing through BATVOX 4.1 was likelihood ratios for each sample that were evaluated for similarities and differences, trends, and problems that had occurred.

No description available.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Electrical and Electronic Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

<p> The purpose of this research study was to explore the differences between faculty and students&rsquo; perceptions of electronic device usage in the classroom. A quantitative cross-sectional design was utilized with an independent samples two- tailed t-test to study the disruptiveness of electronic device usage in the classroom. Participants were asked to complete a survey concerning device usage in the classroom. The survey was sent to faculty and students of all disciplines and levels of education at two universities in a southeastern state in the United States. The literature review included electronic device usage, social media usage, benefits and challenges of electronic device usage in the classroom, and electronic device usage as helpful tool or a hindrance to the teaching and learning process. Findings from the study indicated that faculty perceived that electronic device usage was more disruptive in the classroom to the teaching and learning process than students. Recommendations included future research on technology usage in the classroom and ways to assist with decreasing the disruptions electronic devices cause in the teaching and learning process. Recommendations also included a specific approach of focusing on technology usage in the teaching and learning process based on generational groups.</p>

Live network multimedia applications (e.g., video conferencing, TV on demand) have been very popular in recent years and are expected to dominate Internet traffic in the near future. With multimedia and Internet-enabled devices being ubiquitous, mechanisms that ensure multimedia flows do not congest the Internet are crucial components of multimedia systems that are embraced rather than opposed by network service providers. The emergence of browser-based multimedia conferencing applications using the WebRTC protocol, an open source project aiming at Real-Time Communication (RTC) with Web, and wide deployment of these applications are expected to increase the traffic of interactive real-time multimedia on the Internet. RTP Media Congestion Avoidance Technique (RMCAT) may be applied to WebRTC, but this is a long-term process and WebRTC deployments will occur before RMCAT is completed. New methods and quick solutions are therefore required to protect the network from uncontrolled media flows until deployment of effective congestion control can be guaranteed. The RTP Protocol Circuit Breaker (RTP-CB) has been proposed in March 2012 within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Rather than providing congestion control, the RTP-CB is designed only to protect the network by terminating RTP/UDP flows that cause excessive congestion. While the deployment of congestion control for RTP/UDP flow remains an open issue, design a RTP-CB as a quick solution for protecting the current internet is the main focus of this work. In this work by analysing the UDP traffic over a limited path, a RTP-CB algorithm is designed. Then a packet sniffer's code (C routine) is written to sniff and analyse all RTP/UDP, TCP, RTCP SR, and RTCP RR traffic. Based on the designed algorithm the above code was developed further to work as a RTP-CB. This RTP-CB can be deployed on receiver or sender. After deployment of RTP-CB for RTP/UDP flows in a controlled network, its performance in a range of scenarios with using only its congestion rule has been evaluated. The evaluation showed some short coming in performance of RTP-CB in some certain condition when RTP-CB used only congestion rule. The performance of the RTP-CB is evaluated from two perspectives: First, the thesis considered network performance metrics, such as the frequency at which a RTP circuit breaker triggered. Then, it considered the experience of multimedia users, accounting for all outcomes to all users: those congesting the network (where the flow is terminated), those that did not (and are rewarded by reduced congestion) as well as flows that, without severely congesting the network, obtained little quality from a multimedia session and consumed network resources to no avail. Building on the knowledge gathered in these experiments, some extensions (Media Usability Rule) to the RTP-CB rules is proposed and evaluated. This work demonstrates this evaluation by streaming video flows over IP networks using a dedicated test-bed and proposed RTP-CB. These experiments assess the effect of network conditions (packet loss, jitter and network capacity constraint) on the transmission of different types of video stream with and without the proposed RTP-CB Media usability rule. The experiments prove that RTP-CB implementing the congestion rule alone can offer adequate protection to a network, but it does not perform well in some conditions, for example, when the bottleneck buffer size is small. Experiments confirm that the proposed (computationally inexpensive) modifications to the RTP-CB rules improve the RTP-CB performance. The results of these experiments and media usability rule were introduced in IETF RTP-CB draft version 07 of October 27, 2014 and later versions acknowledged contributions by the author of this thesis.

Immersive Fictions: Modern Narrative, New Media, Mixed Reality presents an approach to narrative fiction that responds to the expanded role of virtual environments in contemporary life. Despite the growing number of daily activities mediated by digital technologies, the virtual is still widely characterized as the opposite of the real. The pervasiveness of this perspective is demonstrated in the frequent use of immersion metaphors to describe virtual environments. I argue that this practice perpetuates an ontological binary that obscures the ways in which the virtual enters and participates in a wired culture. Immersive Fictions reimagines the relationship between media and its users in this context in order to trace the circuits of interaction running across the supposed boundary between the virtual and real. Because the expectation that media-generated environments be "immersive" proceeds from the long tradition of describing a reader's experience of being "lost in a book," this dissertation takes the form of a comparative study of videogames and print literature and relies on an interdisciplinary approach combining new media studies and literary criticism. I demonstrate how print works such as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves and videogames such as Ubisoft's Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Silicon Knight's Eternal Darkness, CyberConnect2's .hack//Infection position their audience not as vicarious visitors to non-actual worlds, but as book readers or game players. Their embodied engagement then becomes itself a site of the fiction as the conflicts animating these narratives are shown to be active in the material task and cultural significance of reading and play. As a result, I argue for a new understanding of "realism," exemplified by Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare series and Danny Ledonne's Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, which addresses the virtualities of fiction, not in terms of their representational or even immersive capacities, but with regard to how they situate their audience in the context of the social, political, and ethical forces bearing on their interactions with the virtual.

This thesis examines the struggle between the camps of narratology and ludology over video game narrative and what that struggle means for the existence of emergent narratives in video games. It argues that emergent narratives are clear and present in current video games but too stringent definitions can complicate their recognition. Emergent narratives are not flights of fancy but definable and repeatable narrative structures. / Video games can sustain a range of narrative structural possibilities, both unconventional and traditional, but perhaps the most interesting of these possibilities is an emergent narrative. Narrative emergence encompasses narrative structures where a player's choices drive and shape the events of the particular game's storyline. Video games support such narratives as the result of an interactive exchange between the computer game and its player. This thesis analyzes these interactive narrative exchanges as they occur in Tale of Tales' The Path, Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins, and other recent game titles in contrast with choices and structures from more traditional games. / Furthermore, this thesis discusses, with help from Psychoanalytic theory, why players seek out and play through emergent narratives. This structure's entrancing power embodies the strengths of narratives from mediums over. Players play to satisfy their own curiosity for knowing the end and feeling out death. When gamers play through emergent narratives, they play for a narrative and a final conclusion of their own making.

Thesis (M.Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-70). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

<p> The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of two television cooking shows (healthy and unhealthy) among students at California State University, Long Beach. Specifically, the study evaluated the effects cooking shows have on food preferences for side dish, entr&eacute;e and dessert options before and after viewing each show and by type of show viewed. </p><p> Participants were selected from students at California State University, Long Beach through convenience sampling. Willing participants completed two online surveys, each containing a different television cooking show episode along with an array of food images to select from. The cooking show episodes and the food images used in the survey were categorized as healthy or less healthy based on the nutrient profiling system, Model WXYfm. </p><p> Fifty-nine and 56 survey responses were included in the final analysis of the healthy and unhealthy cooking show, respectively. Food preferences were determined through the selection of food images in the surveys and analyzed using Chi-square tests. The results of this study show that television cooking shows promoting healthy and unhealthy foods have the potential to impact food preferences, particularly due to food exposure. Significant differences were found for five out of the nine hypotheses.</p>