Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Joint Object and Pose Recognition Using Homeomorphic Manifold Analysis

Object recognition is a key precursory challenge in the fields of object manipulation and robotic/AI visual reasoning in general. Recognizing object categories, particular instances of objects and viewpoints/poses of objects are three critical subproblems robots must solve in order to accurately grasp/manipulate objects and reason about their environ- ments. Multi-view images of the same object lie on intrinsic low-dimensional manifolds in descriptor spaces (e.g. visual/depth descriptor spaces). These object manifolds share the same topology despite being geometrically different. Each object manifold can be represented as a deformed version of a unified manifold. The object manifolds can thus be parametrized by its homeomorphic mapping/reconstruction from the unified manifold. In this work, we construct a manifold descriptor from this mapping between homeomorphic manifolds and use it to jointly solve the three challenging recognition sub-problems. We extensively experiment on a challenging multi-modal (i.e. RGBD) dataset and other object pose datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results.
Agent Supported Serious Game Environment

This study proposes and applies a novel concept for an AI enhanced serious game collaborative environment as a supplementary learning tool in tertiary education. It is based on previous research that investigated pedagogical agents for a serious game in the OpenSim environment. The proposed AI features to support the serious game are the following: a) a pedagogical game agent, b) non-playing characters, c) chat bots, and d) a game interface called “Progress Map”. This study aims to explore whether the utilization of AI features in game based collaborative learning in a tertiary education course can positively affect students' attitudes towards the course and educational games, students' game performance, as well as the students' perception of their learning environment. Summarizing, even though the intelligent game environment does not affect students' attitudes, neither towards the course nor towards the educational games, it has a positive impact on the performance of the teams and so it can be considered useful in collaborative game based learning. Moreover, the intelligent game environment improves the cohesiveness in the classroom after the completion of the game activity in terms of helping, supporting, and becoming connected to each-other.
Giorgio agamben and the spatialities of the camp: an introduction

Abstract The Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben's conclusion that the camp has replaced the city as the biopolitical paradigm of the West is as difficult to digest as it is easy to see how it responds to contemporary political tendencies in the world today. In this introduction to this theme issue on Giorgio Agamben and the spatialities of the camp, a detailed exposition, emulating the structure of Agamben's seminal book Homo Sacer, is conducted, tracing the genealogies of Agamben's ideas and commenting on his swiftly enhanced importance in the social sciences and humanities. The introduction concludes by outlining some possible research fields in human geogrphy where much insight could be gained if Agamben's work is given more detailed consideration.
Exploration of the acarine fauna on coconut palm in Brazil with emphasis on Aceria guerreronis (Acari: Eriophyidae) and its natural enemies

Abstract Coconut is an important crop in tropical and subtropical regions. Among the mites that infest coconut palms, Aceria guerreronis Keifer is economically the most important. We conducted surveys throughout the coconut growing areas of Brazil. Samples were taken from attached coconuts, leaflets, fallen coconuts and inflorescences of coconut palms in 112 localities aiming to determine the occurrence and the distribution of phytophagous mites, particularly A. guerreronis, and associated natural enemies. Aceria guerreronis was the most abundant phytophagous mite followed by Steneotarsonemus concavuscutum Lofego & Gondim Jr. and Steneotarsonemus furcatus De Leon (Tarsonemidae). Infestation by A. guerreronis was recorded in 87% of the visited localities. About 81% of all predatory mites belonged to the family Phytoseiidae, mainly represented by Neoseiulus paspalivorus De Leon, Neoseiulus baraki Athias-Henriot and Amblyseius largoensis Muma; 12% were Ascidae, mainly Proctolaelaps bickleyi Bram, Proctolaelaps sp nov and Lasioseius subterraneus Chant. Neoseiulus paspalivorus and N. baraki were the most abundant predators on attached coconuts. Ascidae were predominant on fallen coconuts, while A. largoensis was predominant on leaflets; no mites were found on branches of inflorescences. Leaflets harboured higher mite diversity than the attached coconuts. Mite diversity was the highest in the state Pará and on palms surrounded by seasonal forests and Amazonian rain-forests. Neoseiulus paspalivorus, N. baraki and P. bickleyi were identified as the most promising predators of A. guerreronis. Analyses of the influence of climatic factors revealed that dry ambient conditions favour the establishment of A. guerreronis. Neoseiulus paspalivorus and N. baraki have differing climatic requirements; the former being more abundant in warm and dry areas, the latter prevailing in moderately tempered and humid areas. We discuss the significance of our findings for natural and biological control of A. guerreronis.
Research on information design of visual graphics-computer image processing and graphics recognition

The ubiquitous visual graphics are valuable because of their brief design that enables the audience to easily access the information they symbolize. As to this phenomenon, we probe into computer image processing and graphics recognition from the difference between pre-image and after-image of information field. We analyzed several methods in imagery processing so that we may contribute to theories of image transmission and information visualization.
Testing of UK Populations of Culex pipiens L. for Schmallenberg Virus Vector Competence and Their Colonization

Background Schmallenberg virus (SBV), an arboviral pathogen of ruminants, emerged in northern Europe during 2011 and has subsequently spread across a vast geographic area. While Culicoides biting midges (Diptera: Ceratopogonidae) have been identified as a biological transmission agent of SBV, the role of mosquitoes (Diptera: Culicidae) as potential vectors has not been defined beyond small-scale field collections in affected areas. Culex pipiens L. are one of the most widespread mosquitoes in northern Europe; they are present on farms across the region and have previously been implicated as vectors of several other arboviruses. We assessed the ability of three colony lines of Cx. pipiens, originating from geographically diverse field populations, to become fully infected by SBV using semi-quantitative real-time RT-PCR (sqPCR). Findings Two colony lines of Cx. pipiens were created in the UK (‘Brookwood’ and ‘Caldbeck’) from field collections of larvae and pupae and characterised using genetic markers. A third strain of Cx. pipiens from CVI Wageningen, The Netherlands, was also screened during experiments. Intrathoracic inoculation of the Brookwood line resulted in infections after 14 days that were characterised by high levels of RNA throughout individuals, but which demonstrated indirect evidence of salivary gland barriers. Feeding of 322 individuals across the three colony lines on a membrane based infection system resulted in no evidence of full dissemination of SBV, although infections did occur in a small proportion of Cx. pipiens from each line. Conclusions/Significance This study established two novel lines of Cx. pipiens mosquitoes of UK origin in the laboratory and subsequently tested their competence for SBV. Schmallenberg virus replication and dissemination was restricted, demonstrating that Cx. pipiens is unlikely to be an epidemiologically important vector of the virus in northern Europe.
A STUDY IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS AND COMMUNICATION DISORDERS

The literature regarding the syndrome of cluttering has been primarily clinical in nature. Bazin, and Kussmaul were two of the early European authorities to describe cluttering. One of the earliest descriptions of cluttering in English was written by Wyllie in 1894. Wyllie's description pointed to a rapid speech rate which manifests itself as unintelligible communication. The first monograph that dealt extensively with cluttering behavior was written by Liebman. In this monograph Liebman described the symptomatology of cluttering in great detail. Cluttering was defined as a rapid rate of articulation which was characterized by the following symptoms: (1) Omissions of sounds and words: (2) easy repetitions of sounds and words and (3) inversions of sounds and words. Liebman's description of cluttering behavior stresses the phenomena of rapid rate of articulation. Apparently, this rapid articulation rate is one of the most salient characteristics of the problem. Recently, a number of experimental investigations dealing with the problem of rapid rate have been carried out. Seeman was one of the first authors to point out that clutterers manifest a decrement or complete absence of the normal pauses between words. He called this phenomena "interverbal acceleration". Both Weiss and Luchsinger stress the importance of the clutterer's tendency to manifest an increase in temporal rate within a polysyllabic word. Weiss refers to this increase in temporal rate as "telescoping", whereas Luchsinger calls it "intraverbal acceleration". Arnold cites the above mentioned authors to support his observation that cluttering is more noticeable in long words and in long sentences. Moolenaar-Bijl agrees with Arnold's observation and also points out that most clutterers exhibit the same symptoms in reading as in speaking. Seeman and Novak investigated the articulatory ability of 52 clutterers and 52 individuals whose speech was normal. The subjects were divided into four groups. Group one was composed of individuals between the ages of seven and eleven. Group two consisted of individuals between the ages of twelve and sixteen. Group three was made up of individuals between the
Effects of Sophistication and Faking Sets on the Eysenck Personality Inventory

Personality inventories, by their very nature, are particularly susceptible to faking. Past studies have shown that instructions to fake can distort responses to a personality inventory; however, validity scales have generally detected faking. Such studies have generally assumed that Ss were naive. When the effects of different faking sets with Ss of different degrees of sophistication were investigated using the Eysenck Personality Inventory the results indicate that Ss possessing even a minimum degree of sophistication can successfully fake on this inventory.
Parents reading with their toddlers: The role of personalization in book engagement

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of personalized books on parents’ and children’s engagement during shared book reading. Seven native English parents and their children aged between 12 and 33 months were observed at home when sharing a book made specifically for the child (i.e. a personalized book), a comparable book with no personalized content, and a favourite book of the child. The interactions were videotaped and later coded to provide information about the frequency of behaviours that indicated engagement with the books. Statistical analyses revealed that children and parents showed significantly higher overall frequencies of smiles and laughs with the personalized books in comparison to the non-personalized books, and showed higher frequency of vocal activity with the personalized as opposed to the child’s favourite book. In addition, there was a significantly higher rate of children’s smiles and laughs with the personalized than with the non-personalized book. It appeared that most of the children’s positive affect with the personalized books was in response to the content of those books, while the parents’ smiles occurred mostly in response to a smile or laugh from the child. These findings are among the first to suggest that personalized features of books result in specific distinct responses in parents and children during shared book reading.
What Are the Functional Orthographic Units in Chinese Word Recognition: The Stroke or the Stroke Pattern?

We present evidence that the visual analysis of Chinese characters by skilled readers is based upon well-defined orthographic constituents. These functional units are the recurrent, integral stroke-patterns, not the individual strokes as previously thought. The speed of simultaneous “same-different” comparisons of Chinese characters is affected by the number of these orthographic units and, for “different” judgements, by the proportion of mismatching units, but not by the number of individual strokes. We further define a category of orthographic unit, referred to here as the “lexical radical”, which requires strict positional regularity within each composite character. Violation of positional regularity results in illegal non-characters. In contrast, recombination of orthographic units (stroke patterns) with the lexical radical in its regular position forms a regular pseudocharacter. We show that real characters are matched faster than pseudocharacters and non-characters—a word superiority effect in Chinese. Pseudocharacters are matched faster than non-characters, a pseudoword advantage in Chinese. We also present evidence suggesting that individual stroke patterns may be better recognized in real characters than in pseudocharacters and non-characters—a word superiority effect in terms of unit recognition. These results support the hypothesis that the functional orthographic unit in the recognition of Chinese characters, comparable to the letter in alphabetic word recognition, is the recurring integral stroke pattern.
Prevalence and clinical features of tuberculosis in Ethiopian diabetic patients.

OBJECTIVE To determine the prevalence and clinical characteristics of tuberculosis (TB) in diabetic patients. DESIGN This study was a cross-sectional survey based on the retrospective analysis of data on tuberculosis in diabetic patients. SETTINGS The study was conducted at Endocrinology and Metabolism Unit of the Department of Internal Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. SUBJECTS Seventy-eight cases of tuberculosis among 1352 diabetic patients were included from September 1989 to 1996. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Clinical evaluation, chest x-ray, acid fast bacilli (AFB) in sputum or measures tissue and histopathologic characteristic of biopsy specimens. RESULTS Seventy-eight cases of TB were identified among 1352 diabetic patients giving a prevalence of 5.8%. Among 1352 diabetic patients, 713 (52.7%) were males, 639 (43.3%) were females, 619 (45.8%) were IDDM and 733 (54.2%) were NIDDM. The mean age of the 71 TB patients whose records could be retrieved was 34.0 +/- 11.9 years, 42(59%) were males, 29 (41%) were females. Fifty-four (76.1%) were IDDM and 17(23.9%) were NIDDM, 17 of the IDDM had clinical characteristics of malnutrition-related diabetes mellitus (MRDM), 36 (56%) of 71 patients were admitted for management. The three most common symptoms of tuberculosis were fever (80.5%), sweating (80.4%) and cough (70.5%). Twenty six (36.6%) of 71 cases were positive for AFB and six (8.5%) were seropositive for HIV. Fifty-six (78.9%) had pulmonary,eight (11.2%) had extrapulmonary and seven(9.8%) had disseminated TB. Forty-eight of 53 abnormal chest x-ray showed unilateral involvement. Thirty-eight of 41 (53.6%) had completed TB treatment, relapse occurred in seven (9.8%), eight (11.2%) are currently on treatment, 13 (18.3%) were lost to follow up, four (5.6%) defaulted and three (4.2%) died. The relative risk of developing TB in IDDM and NIDDM patients was being 26 times and seven times than the general population respectively. CONCLUSION The prevalence of tuberculosis in the diabetic population is high and this warrants a prospective study to determine association between pulmonary tuberculosis and diabetes.
Automatic Acronym Acquisition and Term Variation Management within Domain-Specific Texts

In this paper we present a framework for the effective management of terms and their variants that are automatically acquired from domain-specific texts. In our approach, the term variant recognition is incorporated in the automatic term retrieval process by taking into account orthographical, morphological, syntactic, lexico-semantic and pragmatic term variations. In particular, we address acronyms as a common way of introducing term variants in scientific papers. We describe a method for the automatic acquisition of newly introduced acronyms and the mapping to their ‘meanings’, i.e. the corresponding terms. The proposed three-step procedure is based on morpho-syntactic constraints that are commonly used in acronym definitions. First, acronym definitions containing an acronym and the corresponding term are retrieved. These two elements are matched in the second step by performing morphological analysis of words and combining forms constituting the term. The problems of acronym variation and acronym ambiguity are addressed in the third step by establishing classes of term variants that correspond to specific concepts. We present the results of the acronym acquisition in the domain of molecular biology: the precision of the method ranged from 94% to 99% depending on the size of the corpus used for evaluation, whilst the recall was 73%.
Movie editing and cognitive event segmentation in virtual reality video

Traditional cinematography has relied for over a century on a well-established set of editing rules, called continuity editing, to create a sense of situational continuity. Despite massive changes in visual content across cuts, viewers in general experience no trouble perceiving the discontinuous flow of information as a coherent set of events. However, Virtual Reality (VR) movies are intrinsically different from traditional movies in that the viewer controls the camera orientation at all times. As a consequence, common editing techniques that rely on camera orientations, zooms, etc., cannot be used. In this paper we investigate key relevant questions to understand how well traditional movie editing carries over to VR, such as: Does the perception of continuity hold across edit boundaries? Under which conditions? Does viewers' observational behavior change after the cuts? To do so, we rely on recent cognition studies and the event segmentation theory, which states that our brains segment continuous actions into a series of discrete, meaningful events. We first replicate one of these studies to assess whether the predictions of such theory can be applied to VR. We next gather gaze data from viewers watching VR videos containing different edits with varying parameters, and provide the first systematic analysis of viewers' behavior and the perception of continuity in VR. From this analysis we make a series of relevant findings; for instance, our data suggests that predictions from the cognitive event segmentation theory are useful guides for VR editing; that different types of edits are equally well understood in terms of continuity; and that spatial misalignments between regions of interest at the edit boundaries favor a more exploratory behavior even after viewers have fixated on a new region of interest. In addition, we propose a number of metrics to describe viewers' attentional behavior in VR. We believe the insights derived from our work can be useful as guidelines for VR content creation.
Are We Family and Are We Treated as Family? Nonfamily Employees’ Perceptions of Justice in the Family Firm

The importance of justice perceptions in fostering positive job attitudes and value–creating behaviors in organizations is well established in the literature. Despite this, only a handful of studies have addressed justice in family firms, and none have presented a theoretical model illustrating how nonfamily employees’ justice perceptions may be influenced by family involvement in family firms. Here, we suggest that the level of family influence impacts the justice perceptions of nonfamily employees primarily through its effect on the human resource (HR) practices within family firms. Specifically, we propose that low levels of family influence tend to have little impact on the fairness of HR practices, that moderate levels of family influence tend to have positive effects on the fairness of HR practices, and that high levels of family influence tend to have negative effects on the fairness of HR decision processes and outcomes. Accordingly, we present and provide a conceptual support for a model that outlines the proposed relationships among family influence, family firms’ HR practices, and the justice perceptions of nonfamily employees.
Technology-Mediated Citizen Science Participation: A Motivational Model

We propose and test a framework of the antecedents of contribution in two technology-mediated citizen science projects, with different degrees of task granularity. Comparing earlier findings on the motivations of volunteers in a web-based image analysis project (high granularity), with new findings on the motivations of volunteers in a volunteer computing project (low granularity), we found that participation task granularity is correlated with motivation levels. Further, we found that collective and intrinsic motives are the most salient motivational factors, whereas reward motives are less important for volunteers. Intrinsic, norm-oriented and reputation-seeking motives were most strongly associated with participation intentions, which were, in turn, associated with participation. Finally, comparing the relationship between motives and participation among the two volunteer populations, we found that active-participation volunteers are characterized by significantly stronger association between collective motives and contribution intention, whereas passive-participation volunteers are characterized by significantly stronger association between identification with the community and contribution intention. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
Friends, peers and higher education

Theorists of friendship in contemporary society have suggested that our relationships with peers are characterised by their emphasis on openness, disclosure and emotional communication. Moreover, Beck and Beck‐Gernsheim argue that friendship, as a deliberately sought, trusting partnership between two people, can play an important role in countering some of the negative consequences of a market‐driven society, ‘acting as a shared lifeline to take the weight of each other’s confusions and weaknesses’. However, drawing on a series of in‐depth interviews with students from nine different higher education institutions, this paper will argue that such theorists overlook significant complexity in the ways in which young adults choose to ‘order’ their friendships. Indeed, it will suggest that highly individualised and ruthlessly competitive approaches to academic study can be maintained alongside more socially cooperative relationships with friends and peers, played out in non‐academic arenas. The paper will discuss the implications of this for both sociological theorising about friendship, and policy and practice within the higher education sector.