A Biometric expert, or an expert in biometric recognition context, refers to a method that expresses an opinion on the likelihood of an identity by analyzing a signal that it is specialized on, e.g. a fingerprint expert using minutiae, a lip-motion expert using statistics of optical-flow. Accordingly, there can be several experts associated with the same sensor data, each analyzing the data in ...

We scientists have a dilemma. We are experts in our area of research, but our job demands that we constantly remain sceptical of our latest results even when we deeply believe we have unfolded new layers of truth. This is the world of science and, for the most part, we accept its contradictions. For those on the outside, however, this creates a problem of whom to believe. When a scientist is ca...

In this paper we present a neural network architecture that discovers a recursive decomposition of its input space. Based on a generalization of the modular architecture of Jacobs, Jordan, Nowlan, and Hinton (1991), the architecture uses competition among networks to recursively split the input space into nested regions and to learn separate associative mappings within each region. The learning...

We address the task of (blog) feed distillation: to find blogs that are principally devoted to a given topic. The task may be viewed as an association finding task, between topics and bloggers. Under this view, it resembles the expert finding task, for which a range of models have been proposed. We adopt two language modelingbased approaches to expert finding, and determine their effectiveness ...

Crowdsourcing promises to quasi-automate tasks that cannot be automated otherwise. Success stories like natural language translation or recognition of cats in images show that carefully crafted crowdsourcing tasks solve large problem instances which could not be solved otherwise. To utilize crowdsourcing, one has to define the problem in a way that is easy to split into small tasks, that the ta...

Buyers frequently delegate purchase decisions to sellers who are better informed about supply options and the cost of service. This paper analyzes how buyers optimally contract with sellers who vary in their expertise at prescribing service. We show that the most expert suppliers offer the greatest variation in advice. Buyers benefit from dealing with experts provided they contract sequentially...

We study the combination of face verification algorithms in order to improve the verification performance. Although the different face experts that we consider provide their output scores on the basis of the same image, they are complementary to each other and their combination, using a simple sum rule, outperforms the best individual expert. Our experiments were conducted on the standard XM2VT...