The Politics of Biometric Standards: The Case of Israel Biometric Project

In 2017, after years of public debate, Israel ratified a national biometric project consisting of two initiatives: issuing of biometric ID cards and passports to all Israeli citizens and establishment of a centralized database for storing their bodily information. Design and implementation of a preceding four-year pilot study were accompanied by extensive standardization. Discourse and standard analyses of 33 official state documents – from legal records to performance reports – published by Israeli authorities during the pilot study, unravel the politics of biometric standards employed as part of this project. Biometric standards were used to establish hierarchies between individuals and groups by defining particular bodies as ‘biometrically ineligible.’ These individuals are mostly members of underprivileged and marginalized social groups. Biometric standards were also constructed discursively as scientific and objective to legitimize such discriminatory treatment. Israeli authorities used standards strategically, both as infrastructural elements and as a discursive means. As infrastructural elements, biometric standards were employed, inter alia, to achieve predetermined results and confirm the project’s success. As a discursive means, Israeli authorities actively adopted a ‘discourse of standardization’ to construct an objective and fair image to the project. Standardization of people – namely, quantification of lives, bodies and experiences – is inherently discriminatory because it necessarily results in the creation of categories and hierarchies between biometrically in/eligible bodies.     

Intelligent digital image firewall system for filtering privacy or sensitive images

As the commonest part of social networks, sharing images in social network not only provides more information, but also gives more intuitive view than text. However, images also can leak out information more easily than text, so the audit of image content is particularly essential. The disclosure of a tiny image, which involves sensitive information about individual, society even the state, may trigger a series of serious problems. In this paper, we design a kind of intelligent image firewall to detect and filter sensitive or privacy images. Two different approaches of the firewall are proposed. In the first approach, we propose an image firewall based on joint sparse representation, which can provide accurate and robust privacy prediction, and also can provide rich spatial relationship information. In the second approach, we propose a method based on the deep learning (Faster RCNN), which can predict the privacy relationships or actions (like kiss, hug and hand in hand) among the persons of an image. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the two kinds of approaches.     

Feature selection using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Road Sign Detection and Recognition (RSDR) system

Road Sign Detection and Recognition (RSDR) is aimed to enable drivers maintain basic functionality with the aim of identifying and notifying driver through the existing restrictions so that the process is a success on the present widened road. Examples for RSDR include ‘traffic light ahead’ or ‘pedestrian crossing’ signs. An innovative RSDR system has been introduced which comprises of pre-processing, edge detection, feature extraction, features selection and Ensemble Fuzzy Support Vector Machine (EFSVM) classifier. Feature selection is carried out successfully by deployment of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm to determine most prominent and definitive features. These features are then fed into the ensemble SVM to enable both road side traffic detection as well as recognition. Suggested system’s performance is analyzed and evaluated with respect to road signs having a capable recognition rate.     

Linking property crime using offender crime scene behaviour: A comparison of methods

This study compared the ability of seven statistical models to distinguish between linked and unlinked crimes. The seven models utilised geographical, temporal, and modus operandi information relating to residential burglaries (n = 180), commercial robberies, (n = 118), and car thefts (n = 376). Model performance was assessed using receiver operating characteristic analysis and by examining the success with which the seven models could successfully prioritise linked over unlinked crimes. The regression‐based and probabilistic models achieved comparable accuracy and were generally more accurate than the tree‐based models tested in this study. The Logistic algorithm achieved the highest area under the curve (AUC) for residential burglary (AUC = 0.903) and commercial robbery (AUC = 0.830) and the SimpleLogistic algorithm achieving the highest for car theft (AUC = 0.820). The findings also indicated that discrimination accuracy is maximised (in some situations) if behavioural domains are utilised rather than individual crime scene behaviours and that the AUC should not be used as the sole measure of accuracy in behavioural crime linkage research.     

A multicriteria framework for inventory classification and control with application to intermittent demand

Several papers have studied inventory classification in order to group items with a view to facilitating their management. The generated classes are then coupled with the specific reorder policies composing the overall inventory control system. However, the effectiveness of inventory classification and control system is strictly interrelated. That is to say, different classification approaches could show different performance if applied to a different set of reorder policies, and vice versa. Furthermore, when the cost structure is subjected to uncertainty, a pure cost‐based analysis of the inventory control system could be corrupted. This paper presents a multicriteria framework for the concurrent selection of the item classification approach and the inventory control system through a discrete‐event simulation approach. The key performance indicators provided by the simulator (i.e., average holding value, average number of backorders, and average number of emitted orders) are indicative of the multidimensional effectiveness of the adopted inventory control system when coupled with a specific classification approach. By this way, a multicriteria problem arises, where the alternatives are given by exhaustively coupling the item classes, which are generated by different classification approaches, with the reorder policies composing the inventory system. An analytical hierarchy process is then used for selecting the best alternative, as well as for evaluating the effect of the weights assigned to the key performance indicators through a sensitivity analysis. This approach has been validated in a real case study with a company operating in the field of electrical resistor manufacturing, with a view of facilitating the management of items showing intermittent demand.     

One night of sleep deprivation affects reaction time, but not interference or facilitation in a Stroop task

The Stroop color-naming task is one of the most widely studied tasks involving the inhibition of a prepotent response, regarded as an executive function. Several studies have examined performance on versions of the Stroop task under conditions of acute sleep deprivation. Though these studies revealed effects on Stroop performance, the results often do not differentiate between general effects of sleep deprivation on performance and effects specifically on interference in the Stroop task. To examine the effect of prolonged wakefulness on performance on the Stroop task, we studied participants in a 40-h "constant routine" protocol during which they remained awake in constant conditions and performed a Stroop color-naming task every two hours. We found that reaction time was slowest when the color and word did not match (incongruent), fastest when the color and word did match (congruent), and intermediate when participants named the color of the non-word stimulus (neutral). Performance on all three trial types degraded significantly as a function of time awake. Extended wakefulness did not significantly change the additional time needed to respond when the color and word did not match (Stroop interference), nor did it change the amount of facilitation when color and word matched. These results indicate that one night of sleep deprivation influences performance on the Stroop task by an overall increase in response time, but does not appear to impact the underlying processes of interference or facilitation. The results suggest that the degree to which an "executive function" is affected by sleep deprivation may depend on the particular executive function studied and the degree to which it is subserved by the prefrontal cortex.     

Decision-making in robotics and psychology: A distributed account

Decision-making is usually a secondary topic in psychology, relegated to the last chapters of textbooks. The psychological study of decision-making assumes a certain conception of its nature and mechanisms that has been shown wrong by research in robotics. Robotics indicate that decision-making is not—or at least not only—an intellectual task, but also a process of dynamic behavioral control, mediated by embodied and situated sensorimotor interaction. The implications of this conception for psychology are discussed.     

Lack of sleep and unethical conduct

We draw from the Ego Depletion model and research on sleep physiology to predict a relationship between lack of sleep and individuals’ unethical behavior. Laboratory studies showed that sleep quantity is positively related to self-control resources and negative associated with unethical behavior. In a cross-sectional field study examining unethical behavior in a variety of work settings, low levels of sleep, and low perceived quality of sleep, were both positively related to unethical behavior as rated by the supervisor, and cognitive fatigue mediated the influence of sleep quantity. In an experience sampling field study, we found similar effects within-individuals. We discuss the role of lost sleep in better understanding unethical behavior in organizations.     

Linking impulsivity and inhibitory control using manual and oculomotor response inhibition tasks

Separate cognitive processes govern the inhibitory control of manual and oculomotor movements. Despite this fundamental distinction, little is known about how these inhibitory control processes relate to more complex domains of behavioral functioning. This study sought to determine how these inhibitory control mechanisms relate to broadly defined domains of impulsive behavior. Thirty adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 28 comparison adults performed behavioral measures of inhibitory control and completed impulsivity inventories. Results suggest that oculomotor inhibitory control, but not manual inhibitory control, is related to specific domains of self-reported impulsivity. This finding was limited to the ADHD group; no significant relations between inhibitory control and impulsivity were found in comparison adults. These results highlight the heterogeneity of inhibitory control processes and their differential relations to different facets of impulsivity.     

The premotor theory of attention and the Simon effect

In the paper by Hommel (2011-this issue), the roles of the theory of event coding (TEC) and the premotor theory of attention (PMTA) for the Simon effect were considered. PMTA was treated by Hommel in terms of the proposal that attentional orienting can be viewed as the preparation of a saccade towards a certain location, and was dismissed as providing no useful contribution for an attentional explanation of the Simon effect. Here we considered a more recent and broader conception of the PMTA, compared this approach with TEC, and confronted both approaches with a few studies focusing on the role of spatial attention for the Simon effect. It was argued that PMTA may account more easily for various studies examining the influence of spatial attention on the Simon effect. We concluded our paper by listing some elements that an overall encompassing theory on the Simon effect should contain.