This thesis is devoted to the control of intelligent buildings and a smart home. It presents the possibilities of building/home automation and changes the subject to a particular subsystem: door speaker. It describes a realization of communication between door speaker and rooms of the home and among rooms as well.

Language is central to all teaching and learning. The ability to communicate effectively, and more specifically during instruction is one of the key competencies beginner teachers should develop. While English is the home language of ±10% of South Africans, the majority of learners are taught in English from Grade 4 onwards, many of their teachers being non-native English speakers themselves. The English proficiency level of most South African teachers has been identified as problematically low by a number of researchers. This study aimed to investigate the nature of Classroom English and the underlying oral English proficiency of native isiZulu-speaking pre-service teachers as a first step toward being able to better support Classroom English proficiency development of non-native pre-service teachers. Within my conceptual framework for the study oral English proficiency is viewed as part of and foundational to Classroom English proficiency. A mixed methods approach was used. Data were gathered through questionnaires which gauged perceptions of the pre-service teachers’ English proficiency in the classroom as well as voice recordings of lessons they presented during their practice teaching period in rural KwaZulu-Natal schools. Voice recordings of this case study were analysed with the support of existing oral English proficiency rubrics and a self-designed Classroom English proficiency rubric. In a broad sense findings correspond with previous studies in similar fields, pointing to the nature of Classroom English of this case study at a level not considered ideal for effectively facilitating teaching and learning. These isiZulu-speaking preservice teachers require more support to develop better Classroom English proficiency. An approach that specifically addresses development of language proficiencies required in the classroom, with vocabulary and grammar embedded therein, is suggested. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Humanities Education / MEd / Unrestricted

Le développement et la multiplication de dispositifs connectés, en particulier avec les \textit{smartphones}, nécessitent la mise en place de moyens d'authentification. Dans un soucis d'ergonomie, les industriels intègrent massivement des systèmes biométrique afin de garantir l'identité du porteur, et ce afin d'autoriser l'accès à certaines applications et fonctionnalités sensibles (paiements, e-banking, accès à des données personnelles : correspondance électronique..). Dans un soucis de garantir, une adéquation entre ces systèmes d'authentification et leur usages, la mise en œuvre d'un processus d'évaluation est nécessaire.L'amélioration des performances biométriques est un enjeux important afin de permettre l'intégration de telles solutions d'authentification dans certains environnement ayant d'importantes exigences sur les performances, particulièrement sécuritaires. Afin d'améliorer les performances et la fiabilité des authentifications, différentes sources biométriques sont susceptibles d'être utilisées dans un processus de fusion. La biométrie multimodale réalise, en particulier, la fusion des informations extraites de différentes modalités biométriques. / Development and spread of connected devices, in particular smartphones, requires the implementation of authentication methods. In an ergonomic concern, manufacturers integrates biometric systems in order to deal with logical control access issues. These biometric systems grant access to critical data and application (payment, e-banking, privcy concerns : emails...). Thus, evaluation processes allows to estimate the systems' suitabilty with these uses. In order to improve recognition performances, manufacturer are susceptible to perform multimodal fusion.In this thesis, the evaluation of operationnal biometric systems has been studied, and an implementation is presented. A second contribution studies the quality estimation of speech samples, in order to predict recognition performances.

In hierdie studie ondersoek ek die ek-spreker in Breyten Breytenbach se debuutbundel. Om hierdie doel te verwesenlik, het ek 'n verteenwoordigende aantal gedigte uit die drie afdelings van die bundel in die ondersoek betrek en die ek-spreker in die gedigte nagegaan. Daar bestaan verskil van mening deur die kritici oor die "ek" in hierdie bundel. In Hoofstuk 1 wys ek hierop deur kort aanhalings. F.I.J. van Rensburg en R. Schutte beskou Die ysterkoei moet sweet as ekshibisionisties; N.P. van Wyk Louw meen daar is 'n bietjie te veel "ek-Breyten-rig-heid" in hierdie verse; A.P. Grovè oordeel dat die ek in hierdie gedigte hom soms opdring aan die leser en dit kan die gevaar inhou dat die gedig as afsonderlike struktuur aangetas kan word; Andrè P. Brink en Rob. Antonissen is van mening dat dit 'n ek-bundel sonder ekkerigheid is; D.J. Opperman meen dit is poësie wat 'n voorliefde het vir selfportrettering en selfspot, maar die verse is soms gesog en ekshibisionisties. In Hoofstuk 2 gaan ek literêr-teoreties in op die ek-spreker in die gedig. Ek probeer veral - deur bekende kritici en teoretici se uitsprake te beredeneer - antwoorde vind op o.m. die volgende vrae: Watter rol speel die ek in die gedig? Is daar 'n verskil tussen die poëtiese ek en die persoonlike ek in die gedig? Dit is ou vrae in die literatuur wat op voorbeelde af al bevredigend beantwoord is deur verskillende kritici, maar Breytenbach se poësie dwing mens om jouself opnuut rekenskap hiervan te gee - soos die verskillende oordele in Hoofstuk 1 gegee, bewys. Vanaf Hoofstuk 3 ontleed ek die bundel sistematies, dit wil sê afdeling vir afdeling en in sy samehang, met besondere aandag aan die rol van die ek-spreker in die gedig. In hierdie hoofstuk konsentreer ek slegs op die eerste gedig van die bundel, "Bedreiging van die Siekes". Dit is 'n heel ongewone gedig vir Afrikaans, 'n voorstellingsgedig waarin twee markante ek-sprekers hulle verskyning maak: 'n spottende seremoniemeester wat "Die maer man met die groen trui"- "Breyten Breytenbach" - aan 'n gehoor voorstel. Laasgenoemde figuur dra dan, vol angs en vrees, 'n gedig voor, 'n gedig wat sy problematiek openbaar: die feit dat hy vasgevang sit in 'n wêreld wat hom bedreig. Hierdie wêreld word in sterk visuele beelde voorgestel. Dis 'n surrealistiese wêreld waarin die reën wat oor alles uitsak die strate in bloed verander. Die ek-Breytenbach van die gedig sien profeties sy eie onafwendbare begrafnis: hierin móét sy gehoor 'n aandeel hê, want hy beveel hulle om hom eers te wond en dan in die grond te "plant". Intussen sal hy - in die gedig uitgewys as 'n sieke - bly praat oor die saam- en naasbestaan van uiter-stes: dood en ontbinding, en "leeubekkies" en "prewelende monnike". In die slotstrofe lewer die seremoniemeester weer spottend kommentaar op die Breytenbach-van-die-gedig: hy meen hy is skadeloos en die gehoor moet hom genadig wees. Hierdie gedig kan gesien word as opdraggedig van die bundel, in besonder van die eerste afdeling, die maer man met die groen trui - 'n titel ontleen aan hierdie gedig: veral deur die besondere procédé van selfspot en die deurlopende motiewe van angs, bedreiging, dood, verrotting én groei, ensovoort, wat telkens deur die gedigte sirkuleer. Hierdie gedig is ook net 'n "voorbeeld" - in ander "voorbeelde" word hierdie motiewe sterker uitgewerk en/of gewysig. In Hoofstuk 4 bespreek ek gedigte uit genoemde eerste afdeling. Die maer man met die groen trui - duidelik 'n bepaalde masker of karikatuur van die ware Breytenbach - het in hierdie afdeling telkens 'n wisselende aard. Hy tree op as digter, malle, sieke, vreesvolle mens, eensame, reisiger, digter-kind, ensomeer. Selde kry ons in die gedig 'n direkte oop belydenis. Breytenbach skep verskillende gestaltes van Die maer man met die groen trui in hom word dikwels houdinge en gesindhede geprojekteer wat die moderne mens in die algemeen raak. Ook in die tweede afdeling, Kopatlas - waarop ek in Hoofstuk 5 ingaan - draai die gedig nog (alhoewel in mindere mate) om ek en wêreld. Ons kry nou veral verbeeldingsreise. Zen laat hom veral sterk geld. Die openingsgedig, "nirvana", waarin Gautama Boeddha sy ek opeet, werk deur in die gedigte van hierdie afdeling. Dit vind 'n mooi hoogtepunt in "Blomme vir Boeddha", waarin die ek verdwyn en een word met al die elemente van die gedig. Hierdie eenwording in die gedig van ek en wêreld geld ook vir die derde afdeling, die mond is te geheim om pyn nie te voel nie, 'n reeks liefdesverse. (Hoofstuk 6) Veral in die liefde, in die eenwording tussen man en vrou, bestaan die moontlikheid dat hiërargieë opgehef kan word. Selfs hier het die spreker 'n wisselende aard: dit wissel van 'n nederige dankbare mens oor die gawe van die liefde en die kosbaarheid van die geliefde, van die wonderlike eenwording tussen man en vrou, van die besondere spreker wat die ongenaakbare wêreld omtower - deur sy woord - tot 'n sprokieslandskap waarin hulle gelukkig woon, tot by die 'groot figuur' ('n god) van "verwoesting, die wrak", die skepper van sy geliefde en sy wêreld. In die meerderheid liefdesverse skuil die elegiese en verwordende, tog is in die liefde die wonder van metamorfose moontlik - 'n belangrike kenmerk van hierdie poësie. Dit is uit hierdie studie duidelik dat die ek-spreker in Die ysterkoei moet sweet 'n wisselende aard het. Alhoewel die spil van die gedig in die meerderheid gedigte draai om ek en wêreld, is dit oor die algemeen nie 'n ekkerige, selfopdringerige poësie nie. Dit is digwerk wat dikwels 'n korrektief van bv. selfspot op die ek bied en binne 'n Zen-sfeer trag om ek en wêreld te versoen. / ENGLISH : In this study I examine the I-speaker in Breyten Breytenbach's first volume of poetry. In order to do this a representative number of poems were selected from the three sections in this book and the role and function of the I-speaker in these were traced. Critics differ as to how the I manifests itself in these poems. In the first chapter this is pointed out by briefly quoting a few of these differences, e.g.: According to F.I.J. van Rensburg and R. Schutte Die ysterkoei moet sweet (The iron cow must sweat) is exhibisionistic; N.P. van Wyk Louw is of the opinion that the poet is somewhat too much involved with himself (" 'n bietjie te veel ek-Breyten-rig-heid"); A.P. Grové judges that the I in some of these poems enforces itself upon the reader with the danger of impairing the ontic status of the work of art; André P. Brink and Rob. Antonissen consider these poems as being poetry of the I without an egotistic tone; for D.J. Opperman this is poetry with a preference for selfportrayal and mockery of the self; however, he finds some of the poems forced and exhibisionistic. In Chapter 2 I deal theoretically with the I-speaker in the poem. By referring to and commenting on various critics I try to arrive at answers on among others the following questions: What rôle does the I fulfil in the poem? Is there a difference between the poetic I and the personal I? These questions have been satisfactorily answered in theoretical writings, but Breytenbach's poetry forces one to answer these questions anew. From Chapter 3 onwards I analysed the selected poems. The first poem "Bedreiging van die Siekes" (Threatening of the Ill) is dealt with at length. This is a most unusual poem for Afrikaans. In this introductory poem there are two conspicious I-speakers: a jeering master of ceremonies who introduces to an audience ,"Die maer man met die groen trui" (The thin man with the green sweater) - "Breyten Breytenbach ". This Breytenbach then recites a poem which is revealing of his anxiety and fear: he is entangled in a world which threatens him. This world is portrayed through strong visual images - a surrealistic world in which the streets are transformed into blood by the rain. This speaker prophetically describes his inevitable burial in which his audience shall play a part, since he demands them to wound him first and then plant him in the ground. But he - an invalid - will continue talking about the coexistence and togetherness of extremes: death and decomposition on the one hand, "leeubekkies" (snapdragons) and "prewelende monnike" (muttering monks) on the other. In the last stanza the master of ceremonies again comments jeeringly on the Breytenbach in the poem: He is harmless, have mercy on him. This poem can be read as a dedication to the remainder of poems in the volume, and in particular to those in the first section, Die maer man met die groen trui (the thin man with the green sweater) - a title taken from the poem: particularly through the precédé of selfmockery and the continual recurrence of the motives of anxiety, threat, death, decomposition and rebirth, etc. This poem is merely an "example" - in other "examples" the same motives are more thoroughly elaborated on and/or altered. In Chapter 4 I discuss certain poems taken from the first section. The thin man with the green sweater - a mask or caricature of the real Breytenbach - takes on a changing rôle: as a poet, madman, invalid, a terrified man, one who is lonely, a traveller, a poet-child and so forth. Seldom is there a direct open confession. Breytenbach creates differing portrayals of the thin man with the green sweater; he is one with fixed likes and dislikes, and attitudes which resemble modern man in general. Also in the second section Kopatlas (mind atlas) - which is dealt with in Chapter 5 - the poems revolve around the I and the world. We find for the most part imaginary journeys. Zen asserts itself strongly. In the first poem, "nirvana", Gautama Buddha devours his I. This process dominates the remainder of the poems in this section. It culminates in "Blomme vir Boeddha" (flowers for buddha) when the I disappears and is assimilated in all the elements of the poem. This unification of the I with the world also occurs in the third section, die mond is te geheim om pyn nie te voel nie (the mouth is too secret not to feel pain) - a series of love poems. (Chapter 6) In love, in the unification between man and woman lies the possibility of hierarchies being uplifted. Even here the speaker has a changing nature: it varies between being modest, thankful for the gift of love and the beloved; the wonder of man and woman becoming one; he who with the gift of the word transforms this unkind world into a fairyland in which they live happily; to the 'important speaker' (a god) in "verwoesting, die wrak" (destruction, the wreck), the creater of his beloved and his world. In most of the love poems we find the elegiac; however, in love the wonder of metamorphosis is possible - an important characteristic of this poetry. An analysis of the poems shows the I-speaker to be of a changing nature. Although the majority of the poems focus on the I and the world, in general they do not become egotistic and self-assertive. Rather it is poetry in which we find correctives towards the I and which, within Zen, aims at reconciling the I with the world. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 1977. / Afrikaans / unrestricted

In this work, speaker characteristic modeling has been applied in the fields of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and automatic speaker verification (ASV). In ASR, a key problem is that acoustic mismatch between training and test conditions degrade classification per- formance. In this work, a child exemplifies a speaker not represented in training data and methods to reduce the spectral mismatch are devised and evaluated. To reduce the acoustic mismatch, predictive modeling based on spectral speech transformation is applied. Follow- ing this approach, a model suitable for a target speaker, not well represented in the training data, is estimated and synthesized by applying vocal tract predictive modeling (VTPM). In this thesis, the traditional static modeling on the utterance level is extended to dynamic modeling. This is accomplished by operating also on sub-utterance units, such as phonemes, phone-realizations, sub-phone realizations and sound frames. Initial experiments shows that adaptation of an acoustic model trained on adult speech significantly reduced the word error rate of ASR for children, but not to the level of a model trained on children’s speech. Multi-speaker-group training provided an acoustic model that performed recognition for both adults and children within the same model at almost the same accuracy as speaker-group dedicated models, with no added model complexity. In the analysis of the cause of errors, body height of the child was shown to be correlated to word error rate. A further result is that the computationally demanding iterative recognition process in standard VTLN can be replaced by synthetically extending the vocal tract length distribution in the training data. A multi-warp model is trained on the extended data and recognition is performed in a single pass. The accuracy is similar to that of the standard technique. A concluding experiment in ASR shows that the word error rate can be reduced by ex- tending a static vocal tract length compensation parameter into a temporal parameter track. A key component to reach this improvement was provided by a novel joint two-level opti- mization process. In the process, the track was determined as a composition of a static and a dynamic component, which were simultaneously optimized on the utterance and sub- utterance level respectively. This had the principal advantage of limiting the modulation am- plitude of the track to what is realistic for an individual speaker. The recognition error rate was reduced by 10% relative compared with that of a standard utterance-specific estimation technique. The techniques devised and evaluated can also be applied to other speaker characteristic properties, which exhibit a dynamic nature. An excursion into ASV led to the proposal of a statistical speaker population model. The model represents an alternative approach for determining the reject/accept threshold in an ASV system instead of the commonly used direct estimation on a set of client and impos- tor utterances. This is especially valuable in applications where a low false reject or false ac- cept rate is required. In these cases, the number of errors is often too few to estimate a reli- able threshold using the direct method. The results are encouraging but need to be verified on a larger database. / QC 20110502 / Pf-Star / KOBRA

<p>With the advance of the technologies of Internet of things, smart devices or virtual personal assistants at home, such as Google Assistant, Apple Siri, and Amazon Alexa, have been widely used to control and access different objects like door lock, blobs, air conditioner, and even bank accounts, which makes our life convenient. Because of its ease for operations, voice control becomes a main interface between users and these smart devices. To make voice control more secure, speaker verification systems have been researched to apply human voice as biometrics to accurately identify a legitimate user and avoid the illegal access. In recent studies, however, it has been shown that speaker verification systems are vulnerable to different security attacks such as replay, voice cloning, and adversarial attacks. Among all attacks, adversarial attacks are the most dangerous and very challenging to defend. Currently, there is no known method that can effectively defend against such an attack in speaker verification systems.</p> <p>The goal of this project is to design and implement a defense system that is simple, light-weight, and effectively against adversarial attacks for speaker verification. To achieve this goal, we study the audio samples from adversarial attacks in both the time domain and the Mel spectrogram, and find that the generated adversarial audio is simply a clean illegal audio with small perturbations that are similar to white noises, but well-designed to fool speaker verification. Our intuition is that if these perturbations can be removed or modified, adversarial attacks can potentially loss the attacking ability. Therefore, we propose to add a plugin-function module to preprocess the input audio before it is fed into the verification system. As a first attempt, we study two opposite plugin functions: denoising that attempts to remove or reduce perturbations and noise-adding that adds small Gaussian noises to an input audio. We show through experiments that both methods can significantly degrade the performance of a state-of-the-art adversarial attack. Specifically, it is shown that denoising and noise-adding can reduce the targeted attack success rate of the attack from 100% to only 56% and 5.2%, respectively. Moreover, noise-adding can slow down the attack 25 times in speed and has a minor effect on the normal operations of a speaker verification system. Therefore, we believe that noise-adding can be applied to any speaker verification system against adversarial attacks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt in applying the noise-adding method to defend against adversarial attacks in speaker verification systems.</p><br>

Thesis (LLM.) -- University of Limpopo, 2021 / Although the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 does not specifically make reference to the phrase “separation of powers”, the constitutional scheme, however, subscribes to the doctrine of separation of powers. The manner in which the Constitution allocates powers and functions to the different organs of the state is indicative of the application of the doctrine of separation of powers. This study was aimed at investigating whether the separation of powers principle was not trampled upon in the light of the decision in EFF2. The study finds that there was judicial overreach in EEF2. The majority judgment encroached into the exclusive domain of Parliament. The court, in exercising its checks and balances role, failed to observe its own constitutional limits by dictating how Parliament should run its affairs. The study recommends that courts must respect the duties and functions of other organs of the state. Courts must understand that each organ of the state has a duty to perform. Only when an organ of the state has performed a duty or function in a manner that offends or violates the Constitution can the court intervene.

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