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The Czech Political Science: A Slow March Towards Relevance?
- from Czech Republic
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- By Karel Kouba, University of Hradec Králové, Palacký University, Ondřej Císař, Charles University, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Jiří Navrátil, Masaryk University in Brno, Charles University in Prague
- Edited by Barbara Krauz-Mozer, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Małgorzata Kułakowska, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Piotr Borowiec, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Paweł Ścigaj, Jagiellonian University, Krakow
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- Book:
- Political Science in Europe at the Beginning of the 21st Century
- Published by:
- Jagiellonian University Press
- Published online:
- 12 January 2018
- Print publication:
- 01 January 2015, pp 63-86
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- Chapter
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Summary
Summary: The chapter traces both the indisputable successes of Czech political science as well as persistent problems that have characterized the discipline since its founding in 1990. First, a descriptive overview of the discipline, its institutions, academic journals and students as well as its academic personnel is provided. Second, prevailing research practices and publication strategies of Czech political scientists are analysed. Two practices in particular are critically evaluated: academic inbreeding and publishing in domestic journals often run by the department of the author. The chapter is based on original data obtained through a survey of the heads of departments, coding of articles published in Czech political science journals, and participant observation by the authors.
Introduction
In the Czech Republic, the development of the academic discipline of political science is linked to the political changes that the country has experienced since 1989. The fall of communism resulted in the opening of academic space. With the brief exception of the 1960s during the short period of the Prague Spring, political science as such did not officially exist throughout the 41 years of the Czechoslovak communist regime. Such discontinuity has strongly impacted the development of Czech political science since 1989. The first departments were established only in 1990 at the Charles University in Prague, Palacký University of Olomouc and Masaryk University in Brno. Currently, Czech universities include fifteen departments of Political Science and/or International Relations (Kouba, 2011, p. 362) signalling a huge growth of the discipline. There are also centres of political science research unaffiliated to universities but carrying out political science research, such as the Institute of International Relations (Ústav mezinárodních vztahů) and the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (Sociologický ústav AV ČR).
Although the discipline currently enjoys a higher degree of institutionalization than in its founding period (Šanc, 2009), there remain many unresolved challenges that may hinder its development. Chief among them are the small portion of high quality research that would be internationally competitive, the limited dialogue of the Czech community with international political science, and limited cooperation even among those in the Czech political science community.
2 - Audiovisual Speech Synchrony Detection by a Family of Bimodal Linear Prediction Models
- from PART I - MULTIMODAL AND MULTISENSOR BIOMETRIC SYSTEMS
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- By Kshitiz Kumar, Carnegie Mellon University, Gerasimos Potamianos, Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, Jiri Navratil, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, Etienne Marcheret, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, Vit Libal, Honeywell Prague Laboratory
- Edited by Bir Bhanu, University of California, Riverside, Venu Govindaraju, State University of New York, Buffalo
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- Book:
- Multibiometrics for Human Identification
- Published online:
- 25 October 2011
- Print publication:
- 29 April 2011, pp 31-50
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
Detecting whether the video of a speaking person in frontal head pose corresponds to the accompanying audio track is of interest in numerous multimodal biometrics-related applications. In many practical occasions, the audio and visual modalities may not be in sync; for example, we may observe static faces in images, the camera may be focusing on a nonspeaker, or a subject may be speaking in a foreign language with audio being translated to another language. Spoofing attacks in audiovisual biometric systems also often involve audio and visual data streams that are not in sync. Audiovisual (AV) synchrony indicates consistency between the audio and visual streams and thus the reliability for the segments to belong to the same individual. Such segments could then serve as building blocks for generating bimodal fingerprints of the different individuals present in the AV data, which can be important for security, authentication, and biometric purposes. AV segmentation can also be important for speaker turn detection, as well as automatic indexing and retrieval of different occurrences of a speaker.
The problem of AV synchrony detection has already been considered in the literature. We refer to Bredin and Chollet (2007) for a comprehensive review on this topic, where the authors present a detailed discussion on different aspects of AV synchrony detection, including feature processing, dimensionality reduction, and correspondence detection measures. In that paper, AV synchrony detection is applied to the problem of identity verification, but the authors also mention additional applications in sound source localization, AV sequence indexing, film postproduction, and speech separation.