This paper offers a critical assessment of the current state of the debate about the identity and individuality of material objects. Its main aim, in particular, is to show that, in a sense to be carefully specified, the opposition between the Leibnizian „reductionist‟ tradition based on discernibility and the sort of „primitivism‟ that denies that facts of identity and individuality must be an...

Discriminating among individuals is a critical social behavior in humans and many other animals and is often required for offspring and mate recognition, territorial or coalitional behaviors, signaler reliability assessment, and social hierarchies. Being individually discriminated is more difficult in larger groups, and large group size may select for increased individuality-signature informati...

This paper presents a novel non-native speech synthesis technique that preserves the individuality of a non-native speaker. Cross-lingual speech synthesis based on voice conversion or HMM-based speech synthesis, which synthesizes foreign language speech of a specific non-native speaker reflecting the speaker-dependent acoustic characteristics extracted from the speaker’s natural speech in his/h...

The individuality of handwriting is the principal underpinning of forensic handwriting examination. Studies of individuality have considered different statistical extremes to obtain handwriting samples. The first is a representative population drawn from a country. The second is a population of twins– so as to reflect genetic similarity. A third approach is to study whether teachers and schools...

Individuality of fingerprints can be quantified by computing the probabilistic metrics for measuring the degree of fingerprint individuality. In this paper, we present a novel individuality evaluation approach to estimate the probability of random correspondence (PRC). Three generative models are developed respectively to represent the distribution of fingerprint features: ridge flow, minutiae ...

Behavioural individuality is thought to be caused by differences in genes and/or environmental conditions. Therefore, if these sources of variation are removed, individuals are predicted to develop similar phenotypes lacking repeatable individual variation. Moreover, even among genetically identical individuals, direct social interactions are predicted to be a powerful factor shaping the develo...

Signatures and handwriting have long played a role in dayto-day business transactions and in forensics, e.g., to authenticate documents, as evidence to establish crime or innocence, etc. The individuality of handwriting and signatures is the basis for their relevance to authentication and forensics. This very individuality makes them also potentially useful as a biometric modality. This chapter...

Fingerprint individuality refers to the extent of uniqueness of fingerprints and is governed by the distribution of fingerprint features, termed minutiae, in a population. This paper develops a flexible class of marked point processes for minutiae and associated methodology for assessing fingerprint individuality. Inference is carried out in a Bayesian MCMC framework. The flexibility of the mod...