Beyond the immediate content of speech, the voice can provide rich information about a speaker's demographics, including age and gender. Estimating a speaker's age and gender offers a wide range of applications, spanning from voice forensic analysis to personalized advertising, healthcare monitoring, and human-computer interaction. However, pinpointing precise age remains intricate due to age ambiguity. Specifically, utterances from individuals at adjacent ages are frequently indistinguishable. Addressing this, we propose a novel, end-to-end approach that deploys Mozilla's Common Voice dataset to transform raw audio into high-quality feature representations using Wav2Vec2.0 embeddings. These are then channeled into our self-attention-based convolutional neural network (CNN) model. To address age ambiguity, we evaluate the effects of different loss functions such as focal loss and Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence loss. Additionally, we evaluate the accuracy of the estimation at different durations of speech. Experimental results from the Common Voice dataset underscore the efficacy of our approach, showcasing an accuracy of 87% for male speakers, 91% for female speakers and 89% overall accuracy, and an accuracy of 99.1% for gender prediction.
This paper proposes a hybrid speech enhancement estimator that integrates the Perceptually-motivated Karhunen–Loève Transform (PKLT) with the Dual-Masking Harmonic-based (DMH) algorithm in a unified framework termed PKDMH. The main novelty lies in combining perceptual subspace projection with harmonic-residual suppression, enabling the system to jointly remove noise while preserving speech-relevant spectral cues. PKLT first performs perceptual subspace projection and suppresses inaudible components, after which DMH eliminates remaining broadband and harmonic residuals. The proposed PKDMH system was evaluated using the TIMIT dataset contaminated with five noise types: White, Pink, F16, Airport, and Car noise—across five SNR leve
... Show MorePrecarity means the lack of social and economic networks; a considerable exposure to danger and harm. Minority groups are precariat for they lack rights and full citizenship. Precarity is related, states Judith Butler, with the individual’s performativity, and his ability to perform his gender role. Toni Morrison continually goes to past to retell the history of African Americans. The issues of race, gender and national identity are recurrent in her work. Reading her book Home (2012) evokes the idea of precarity and performativity since the two main characters, Frank and Cee are precarious characters that fail to perform their gender role properly, and eventually are exposed to hazard and harm. This research displays how African American
... Show MoreBackground: The formation of white spot lesions around fixed orthodontic attachments is a common complication during and after fixed orthodontic treatment, which hinders the result of a successfully completed orthodontic treatment. The aim of the study was to assess the effectiveness of the Caries Infiltrant (ICON®) on prevention of caries on the smooth enamel surface when applied alone or combined with conventional adhesives. Materials and methods: Seventy eight human premolar enamel discs were randomly assigned to six groups (n=13). The discs were etched and treated with resins of different monomer content forming the following groups: (1)Untreated etched samples served as the negative control, (2) ICON® (DMG), (3) Adper™ S
... Show MoreOld Iraq includes the first experiences in establishing the first residential settlements in the Mesopotamian, and model villages designed and the pulp units in it and their natural matter, that made it perennial, and construction continues until now with it. These experiences were the basis for the emergence of the Iraqi civilization and thus the world and the beginning of writing, trade and the religions of the divine since before history, and then the Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations, and their villages that formed the Fertile Crescent.
There is a lack of knowledge and disregard for the distant and near history of Iraq in the field of rural housing, despite Iraq's leadership in this field, with the aim of the re
... Show MoreKnowledge of the distribution of the rock mechanical properties along the depth of the wells is an important task for many applications related to reservoir geomechanics. Such these applications are wellbore stability analysis, hydraulic fracturing, reservoir compaction and subsidence, sand production, and fault reactivation. A major challenge with determining the rock mechanical properties is that they are not directly measured at the wellbore. They can be only sampled at well location using rock testing. Furthermore, the core analysis provides discrete data measurements for specific depth as well as it is often available only for a few wells in a field of interest. This study presents a methodology to generate synthetic-geomechani
... Show MoreThe Neutron Fermi Age, t, and the neutron slowing down density, q (r, t) , have been measured for some materials such as Graphite and Iron by using gamma spectrometry system UCS-30 with NaI (Tl) detector. This technique was applied for Graphite and Iron materials by using Indium foils covered by Cadmium and the measurements done at the Indium resonance of 1.46 eV. These materials are exposed to a plane 241Am/Be neutron source with recent activity 38 mCi. The measurements of the Fermi Age were found to be t = 297 ± 21 cm2 for Graphite, t = 400 ± 28 cm2 for Iron. Neutron slowing down density was also calculated depending on the recent experimental t value and distance.
This study investigates the impacts of climate change (CC) on the emergence and proliferation of fungal pathogens, with a particular focus on global food security and the potential of medicinal plants and their by-products as sustainable mitigation strategies. Through a systematic literature review of articles published up to 2024, we analyze how CC exacerbates the spread and severity of fungal diseases in crops, leading to significant agricultural losses and threats to food availability. The findings highlight that, alongside conventional approaches such as genetic resistance and precision farming, bioactive compounds derived from medicinal plants and their by-products offer promising, eco-friendly alternatives for the management of fungal
... Show MoreProsthetic is an artificial tool that replaces a member of the human frame that is absent because of ailment, damage, or distortion. The current research activities in Iraq draw interest to the upper limb discipline because of the growth in the number of amputees. Thus, it becomes necessary to increase researches in this subject to help in reducing the struggling patients. This paper describes the design and development of a prosthesis for people able and wear them from persons who have amputation in the hands. This design is composed of a hand with five fingers moving by means of a gearbox ism mechanism. The design of this artificial hand has 5 degrees of freedom. This artificial hand works based on the principle of &n
... Show MoreThe present study is concerned with the role of income tax in implementing economic goals in Iraq and treating the problems and pitfalls in the Iraq economy.
The study also aims at investigating the role of income tax in attracting promising favorite effects into economy.
The study was performed on data covering the period (2003 - 2012) with respect to the variables of (income tax, oil profits) as independent variables and (private consuming expenditure, private investmental expenditure, and standard figure of prices) as dependent variables. To analyze these data, a number of statistical descriptive and analytical techniques were used such as (percentage, standard variance, mediums, F test, T test and SPSS). It has been c
... Show MoreCloud computing provides huge amount of area for storage of the data, but with an increase of number of users and size of their data, cloud storage environment faces earnest problem such as saving storage space, managing this large data, security and privacy of data. To save space in cloud storage one of the important methods is data deduplication, it is one of the compression technique that allows only one copy of the data to be saved and eliminate the extra copies. To offer security and privacy of the sensitive data while supporting the deduplication, In this work attacks that exploit the hybrid cloud deduplication have been identified, allowing an attacker to gain access to the files of other users based on very small hash signatures of
... Show More