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-attentio

A total of 48 experiments were conducted to investigate the impact of slit weir dimensions and locations on the maximum scour depth and scour area created upstream. The slit weir model was a 110 mm slit opening, and it was installed at the end of the working section in a laboratory flume. The flume was 10.0 m long, 30 cm wide, 30 cm deep, and almost middle. It includes a 2 m working section with a mobile bed with 110 mm in thickness. In the mobile bed, two types of nonuniform sand (with a geometric standard deviation of 1.58 and 1.6) were tested separately. The weir dimensions and location were changed with flow rates. Then dimensions of the slit weir were changed from 60 x 110 mm to 60 x 70 mm (width x height), while th

An accurate assessment of the pipes’ conditions is required for effective management of the trunk sewers. In this paper the semi-Markov model was developed and tested using the sewer dataset from the Zublin trunk sewer in Baghdad, Iraq, in order to evaluate the future performance of the sewer. For the development of this model the cumulative waiting time distribution of sewers was used in each condition that was derived directly from the sewer condition class and age data. Results showed that the semi-Markov model was inconsistent with the data by adopting ( 2 test) and also, showed that the error in prediction is due to lack of data on the sewer waiting times at each condition state which can be solved by using successive conditi

conventional FCM algorithm does not fully utilize the spatial information in the image. In this research, we use a FCM algorithm that incorporates spatial information into the membership function for clustering. The spatial function is the summation of the membership functions in the neighborhood of each pixel under consideration. The advantages of the method are that it is less
sensitive to noise than other techniques, and it yields regions more homogeneous than those of other methods. This technique is a powerful method for noisy image segmentation. 

Background: Poly-ether-ether-ketone(PEEK) has been introduced to many dental fields. Recently it was tested as a retainer wire‎ following orthodontic treatment. This study aimed to investigate the effect of changing the bonding spot size and location on the performance of PEEK retainer wires. Methods: A biomechanical study involving four three-dimensional finite element models was performed. The basic model was with a 0.8 mm cylindrical cross-section PEEK wire, bonded at the center of the lingual surface of the mandibular incisors with 4 mm in diameter composite spots. Two other models were designed with 3 mm and 5 mm composite sizes. The last model was created with the composite bonding spot of the canine away from the center of t

Background: Poly-ether-ether-ketone(PEEK) has been introduced to many dental fields. Recently it was tested as a retainer wire‎ following orthodontic treatment. This study aimed to investigate the effect of changing the bonding spot size and location on the performance of PEEK retainer wires. Methods: A biomechanical study involving four three-dimensional finite element models was performed. The basic model was with a 0.8 mm cylindrical cross-section PEEK wire, bonded at the center of the lingual surface of the mandibular incisors with 4 mm in diameter composite spots. Two other models were designed with 3 mm and 5 mm composite sizes. The last model was created with the composite bonding spot of the canine away from the center