This article presents a theory in which automatization is construed as the acquisition of a domain-specific knowledge base, formed of separate representations, instances, of each exposure to the task. Processing is considered automatic if it relies on retrieval of stored instances, which will occur only after practice in a consistent environment. Practice is important because it increases the amount retrieved and the speed of retrieval; consistency is important because it ensures that the retrieved instances will be useful. The theory accounts quantitatively for the power-function speed-up and predicts a power-function reduction in the standard deviation that is constrained to have the same exponent as the power function for the speed-up. The theory accounts for qualitative properties as well, explaining how some may disappear and others appear with practice. More generally, it provides an alternative to the modal view of automaticity, arguing that novice performance is limited by a lack of knowledge rather than a scarcity of resources. The focus on learning avoids many problems with the modal view that stem from its focus on resource limitations. Automaticity is an important phenomenon in everyday men-tal life. Most of us recognize that we perform routine activities quickly and effortlessly, with little thought and conscious aware-ness--in short, automatically (James, 1890). As a result, we of-ten perform those activities on "automatic pilot " and turn our minds to other things. For example, we can drive to dinner while conversing in depth with a visiting scholar, or we can make coffee while planning dessert. However, these benefits may be offset by costs. The automatic pilot can lead us astray, caus-ing errors and sometimes catastrophes (Reason & Myceilska, 1982). If the conversation is deep enough, we may find ourselves and the scholar arriving at the office rather than the restaurant, or we may discover that we aren't sure whether we put two or three scoops of coffee into the pot. Automaticity is also an important phenomenon in skill acqui-sition (e.g., Bryan & Harter, 1899). Skills are thought to consist largely of collections of automatic processes and procedures

Abstract—An automatic personal identification system based solely on fingerprints or faces is often not able to meet the system performance requirements. Face recognition is fast but not extremely reliable, while fingerprint verification is reliable but inefficient in database retrieval. We have developed a prototype biometric system which integrates faces and fingerprints. The system overcomes the limitations of face recognition systems as well as fingerprint verification systems. The integrated prototype system operates in the identification mode with an admissible response time. The identity established by the system is more reliable than the identity established by a face recognition system. In addition, the proposed decision fusion scheme enables performance improvement by integrating multiple cues with different confidence measures. Experimental results demonstrate that our system performs very well. It meets the response time as well as the accuracy requirements. Index Terms—Biometrics, fingerprint matching, minutiae, face recognition, eigenface, decision fusion.

Background: Many trans-acting noncoding RNA genes and cis-acting RNA regulatory elements conserve secondary structure rather than primary sequence. Most homology search tools only look at the primary sequence level, however.

This paper presents a novel approach to prole-prole comparison. The method compares two input proles (like those that are generated by PSI-BLAST) and assigns a similarity score to assess their statistical similarity. Our prole-prole comparison tool, which allows for gaps, can be used to detect weak similarities between protein families. It has also been optimized to produce alignments that are in very good agreement with structural alignments. Tests show that the prole-prole alignments are indeed highly correlated with similarities between secondary structure elements and tertiary structure. Exhaustive evaluations show that our method is signicantly more sensitive in detecting distant homologies than the popular prole-based search programs PSI-BLAST and IMPALA. The relative improvement is the same order of magnitude as the improvement of PSI-BLAST relative to BLAST. Our new tool often detects similarities that fall within the twilight zone of sequence similarity

. Huge data sets from the teletraffic industry exhibit many non-standard characteristics such as heavy tails and long range dependence. Various estimation methods for heavy tailed time series with positive innovations are reviewed. These include parameter estimation and model identification methods for autoregressions and moving averages. Parameter estimation methods include those of Yule-Walker and the linear programming estimators of Feigin and Resnick as well estimators for tail heaviness such as the Hill estimator and the qq-estimator. Examples are given using call holding data and inter-arrivals between packet transmissions on a computer network. The limit theory makes heavy use of point process techniques and random set theory. 1. Introduction Classical queuing and network stochastic models contain simplifying assumptions guaranteeing the Markov property and insuring analytical tractability. Frequently inter-arrivals and service times are assumed to be iid and typically underlyi...

Noise spectrum estimation is a fundamental component of speech enhancement and speech recognition systems. In this paper, we present an Improved Minima Controlled Recursive Averaging (IMCRA) approach, for noise estimation in adverse environments involving non-stationary noise, weak speech components, and low input signal-tonoise ratio (SNR). The noise estimate is obtained by averaging past spectral power values, using a time-varying frequency-dependent smoothing parameter that is adjusted by the signal presence probability. The speech presence probability is controlled by the minima values of a smoothed periodogram. The proposed procedure comprises two iterations of smoothing and minimum tracking. The first iteration provides a rough voice activity detection in each frequency band. Then, smoothing in the second iteration excludes relatively strong speech components, which makes the minimum tracking during speech activity robust. We show that in non-stationary noise environments and under low SNR conditions, the IMCRA approach is very e#ective. In particular, compared to a competitive method, it obtains a lower estimation error, and when integrated into a speech enhancement system achieves improved speech quality and lower residual noise.

this article is to introduce the ideas and methods of reliability theory to a wider audience interested in understanding the mechanisms of aging, mortality, survival, and longevity. It is also important to review and summarize the recent scienti"c literature on reliability approach to the problem of biological aging (Miller, 1989; Gavrilov & Gavrilova, 1991; Abernethy, 1998; Bains, 2000). The main emphasis here is made on the accomplishments of the reliability approach rather than previous occasional mistakes, because some questionable models (Murphy, 1978; Skurnick & Kemeny, 1978; Koltover, 1983, 1997; Witten, 1985) were already reviewed elsewhere (Gavrilov, 1984, 1987; Gavrilov & Gavrilova, 1991). This theoretical review article also elaborates further some results and ideas published in the book on a related topic (Gavrilov & Gavrilova, 1991)

The statistical significance of gapped local alignments is characterized by analyzing the extremal statistics of the scores obtained from the alignment of random amino acid sequences. By identifying a complete set of linked clusters, "islands," we devise a method which accurately predicts the extremal score statistics by using only one to a few pairwise alignments. The success of our method relies crucially on the link between the statistics of island scores and extremal score statistics. This link is motivated by heuristic arguments, and firmly established by extensive numerical simulations for a variety of scoring parameter settings and sequence lengths. Our approach is several orders of magnitude faster than the widely used shuffling method, since island counting is trivially incorporated into the basic Smith-Waterman alignment algorithm with minimal computational cost, and all islands are counted in a single alignment. The availability of a rapid and accurate si...

Introduction Modeling travel behavior is a key aspect of demand analysis, where aggregate demand is the accumulation of individuals' decisions. In this chapter, we focus on "short-term" travel decisions. The most important short-term travel decisions include choice of destination for a non-work trip, choice of travel mode, choice of departure time and choice of route. It is important to note that short-term decisions are conditional on long-term travel and mobility decisions such as car ownership and residential and work locations. The analysis of travel behavior is typically disaggregate, meaning that the models represent the choice behavior of individual travelers. Discrete choice analysis is the methodology used to analyze and predict travel decisions. Therefore, we begin this chapter with a review of the theoretical and practical aspects of discrete choice models. After a brief discussion of general assumptions, we introduce the random utility model, which is the most c

Statistical extreme value theory provides a flexible and theoretically well motivated approach to the study of large losses in insurance. We give a brief review of the modern version of this theory and a "step by step" example of how to use it in large claims insurance. The discussion is based on a detailed investigation of a wind storm insurance problem. New results include a simulation study of estimators in the peaks over thresholds method with Generalised Pareto excesses, a discussion of Pareto and lognormal modelling and methods to detect trends. Further results concern the use of meteorological information in wind storm insurance and, of course, the results of the study of the wind storm claims.