The growing literature on gender inequality in academia attests to the challenge that awaits female researchers during their academic careers. However, research has not yet conclusively resolved whether these biases persist during the peer review process of research grant funding and whether they impact respective funding decisions. Whereas many have argued for the existence of gender inequality in grant peer reviews and outcomes, others have demonstrated that gender equality is upheld during these processes. In the present paper, we illustrate how these opinions have come to such opposing conclusions and consider methodological and contextual factors that render these findings inconclusive. More specifically, we argue that a more comprehensive approach is needed to further the debate, encompassing individual and systemic biases as well as more global social barriers. We also argue that examining gender biases during the peer review process of research grant funding poses critical methodological challenges that deserve special attention. We conclude by providing directions for possible future research and more general considerations that may improve grant funding opportunities and career paths for female researchers.
Summary. Tracking location is challenging due to the numerous constraints of practical systems including, but not limited to, global cost, device volume and weight, scalability and accuracy; these constraints are typically more severe for systems that should be wearable and used indoors.We investigate the use of wearable solar cells to track changing light conditions (a concept that we named LuxTrace) as a source of user displacement and activity data. We evaluate constraints of this approach and present results from an experimental validation of displacement and activity estimation. The results indicate that a distance estimation accuracy of 21 cm (80% quantile) can be achieved.A simple method to combine LuxTrace with complementary absolute location estimation methods is also presented. We apply carpet-like distributed RFID tags to demonstrate online learning of new lighting environments.
Replicating human hearing in electronics under the constraints of using only two microphones (even with more than two speakers) and the user carrying the device at all times (i.e., mobile device weighing less than 100 g) is nontrivial. Our novel contribution in this area is a two-microphone system that incorporates both blind source separation and speaker tracking. This system handles more than two speakers and overlapping speech in a mobile environment. The system also supports the case in which a feedback loop from the speaker tracking step to the blind source separation can improve performance. In order to develop and optimize this system, we have established a novel benchmark that we herewith present. Using the introduced complexity metrics, we present the tradeoffs between system performance and computational load. Our results prove that in our case, source separation was significantly more dependent on frame duration than on sampling frequency.
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