bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Global Iron and Steel Industry: From a Bilateral Oligopoly to a Thwarted Monopsony
Authors: Sourisseau Sylvain 
Published: June 2018

AbstractChina's growing urbanisation and the speed of development of its manufacturing industry has led to a shock in steel demand. This article analyses the evolution of the market structure and the related market power shift. From a stable situation in which a few steelmakers negotiated with a few mining firms to set an annual price, the market has evolved to a new price‐fixing regime as a result of supply–demand confrontation. A new composition of stakeholders in the iron and steel sectors has emerged, transitioning from an oligopoly to a thwarted monopsony.
The Survey of Income and Housing
Authors: Taylor Matthew 
Published: June 2018

AbstractThis data survey presents an introduction to the Survey of Income and Housing (SIH), a cross‐sectional household survey of individuals living in Australian private dwellings starting in 1969. This article provides an overview of the SIH and a description of the content of the most recent edition collected over the course of the 2015–16 financial year. The overview compares and contrasts the SIH to its longitudinal cousin the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, outlining strengths and limits of both data sources depending on the type of research question.
Education Policy Reforms to Boost Productivity in Australia
Authors: Foster Gigi 
Published: June 2018

AbstractChapter 3 of the 2017 Australian Productivity Commission's recent report ‘Shifting the dial’, commissioned by the Commonwealth Treasurer to interrogate ‘Australia's productivity performance’, focuses on education policy. The Treasurer explicitly asks that the report include ‘recommendations on productivity‐enhancing reform’, and Chapter 3, entitled ‘Future Skills and Work’, delivers these for the education policy sphere. In this article I evaluate the education policy reform recommendations set out in Chapter 3 against Australia's educational performance and landscape today, and what we know in general about the educational inputs to productivity. Different, though overlapping, policy recommendations emerge from my analysis.
Strategies to enhance employee well‐being and organisational performance in a postcrisis environment: A case study
Authors: Malinen Sanna , Hatton Tracy , Naswall Katharina , Kuntz Joana 
Published: June 2018

Business Continuity Management processes aim at getting businesses backup and running after a crisis or disaster, but do not necessarily have a focus on the longer‐term, people‐related challenges that can follow. This study, based on a longitudinal, action‐research case study, demonstrates how employee well‐being and organisational performance of an organisation were affected over 2 years after the Canterbury earthquakes (2010–2011), in New Zealand. It details the organisational actions taken to improve staff resilience and well‐being, and their performance, including: acknowledgement, increased autonomy, process flexibility, and focus on well‐being. These lessons are presented to guide organisational strategies for crisis recovery. The strategies can strengthen organisations’ adaptive capacity and increase performance in the long‐term aftermath of a disaster.
Laparoscopic donor hepatectomy
Authors: Chen Kuo‐Hsin , Siow Tiing Foong , Chio U‐Chon , Wu Jiann‐Ming , Jeng Kuo‐Shyang 
Published: June 2018

AbstractLaparoscopic liver resection has been applied to treat most indications for liver resection during the past two decades. According to the literature, patient numbers have increased exponentially as a result, and surgical difficulty has increased as well. In expert centers, laparoscopic anatomical hemihepatectomy and major liver resection more than 3 segments have become the acceptable treatment. Moreover, with surgical innovations and accumulated experience, living donor liver transplantation has become an established treatment choice for patients on the transplant waiting list. It is even considered an inevitable choice in regions with limited access to organs from deceased donors. However, significant morbidity and rare but catastrophic mortality are associated with donor hepatectomy and remain major concerns. Therefore, to decrease the incidence of complications, a minimally invasive approach in donor hepatectomy was adopted in the early 2000s. Initially, a minimally invasive approach was used for left lateral sectionectomy for pediatric liver transplant, then for laparoscopy‐assisted hemihepatectomy and pure laparoscopic/robotic right donor hepatectomy, and more recently, for adult living donor liver transplantation. The extent of procedure complexity and potential complications depends on the approach and the size of the graft to be harvested. Early results from expert teams have seemed promising in terms of shortened donor recovery and improved perioperative outcomes. However, the combination of these two highly sophisticated surgical procedures raise more concerns about donor safety, especially with regard to unexpected events during the operation. A high level of evidence is very difficult to achieve in this highly specialized surgical practice with limited penetration. Therefore, an international registry has been suggested to determine the risks and benefits before the use of laparoscopic right donor hepatectomy spreads.
The United Kingdom Primary Immune Deficiency (UKPID) registry 2012 to 2017
Authors: Shillitoe B , Bangs C , Guzman D , Gennery A R , Longhurst H J , Slatter M , Edgar D M , Thomas M , Worth A , Huissoon A , Arkwright P D , Jolles S , Bourne H , Alachkar H , Savic S , Kumararatne D S , Patel S , Baxendale H , Noorani S , Yong P F K , Waruiru C , Pavaladurai V , Kelleher P , Herriot R , Bernatonienne J , Bhole M , Steele C , Hayman G , Richter A , Gompels M , Chopra C , Garcez T , Buckland M 
Published: June 2018

Summary
This is the second report of the United Kingdom Primary Immunodeficiency (UKPID) registry. The registry will be a decade old in 2018 and, as of August 2017, had recruited 4758 patients encompassing 97% of immunology centres within the United Kingdom. This represents a doubling of recruitment into the registry since we reported on 2229 patients included in our first report of 2013. Minimum PID prevalence in the United Kingdom is currently 5·90/100 000 and an average incidence of PID between 1980 and 2000 of 7·6 cases per 100 000 UK live births. Data are presented on the frequency of diseases recorded, disease prevalence, diagnostic delay and treatment modality, including haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) and gene therapy. The registry provides valuable information to clinicians, researchers, service commissioners and industry alike on PID within the United Kingdom, which may not otherwise be available without the existence of a well-established registry.
Long‐term outcomes of hemi‐automated lamellar keratoplasty
Authors: Fuest Matthias , Liu Yu‐Chi , Arundhati Anshu , Li Lim , Tan Donald , Mehta Jodhbir S 
Published: June 2018

AbstractImportanceTo describe long‐term outcomes of hemi‐automated lamellar keratoplasty (HALK).BackgroundHALK is a hybrid anterior lamellar keratoplasty technique for corneas with anterior to mid‐stromal scars and topographical irregularities.DesignProspective interventional case series.ParticipantsThirty‐five eyes of 35 consecutive patients undergoing HALK at a single tertiary referral centre from 2007 to 2016.MethodsPatients were followed up for a mean period of 61.4 ± 29.2 months.Main Outcome MeasureUncorrected visual acuity (UCVA), best spectacle‐corrected visual acuity (BSCVA), spherical equivalent (SE) and cylinder, endothelial cell density (ECD), central corneal thickness (CCT), graft survival and complications were analysed.ResultsThe most common indications for HALK were scars because of contact lens associated infectious keratitis (29%), unknown origin (26%) or corneal dystrophies (14%). Five patients had a previous keratoplasty (n = 4; deep anterior lamellar keratoplasty,n = 1). Two HALKs failed at 22 and 32 months follow‐up. No graft rejections occurred. UCVA improved from 0.91 ± 0.31 to 0.58 ± 0.35 and BSCVA from 0.66 ± 0.30 to 0.21 ± 0.20 logMAR (P < 0.001) at the last follow‐up. Astigmatism (P = 0.2), SE (P = 0.8) and ECD (P = 0.4) did not change significantly during follow‐up. CCT increased from 490 to 560 μm (P = 0.004). Kaplan–Meier estimated survival for all HALK cases was 90.6 (95% confidence interval 82.6–98.5) months with a survival probability of 96% at 12 months and 92% at 3, 5 and 7 years of follow‐up.Conclusions and RelevanceHALK provides excellent graft survival in primary cases and in patients with prior keratoplasty as well as significant improvement in visual acuity with low complication rates.
A new microflake model with microscopic self‐shadowing for accurate volume downsampling
Authors: Loubet Guillaume , Neyret Fabrice 
Published: June 2018

AbstractNaïve linear methods for downsampling high‐resolution microflake volumes often produce inaccurate appearance, especially when input voxels are very opaque. Preserving correct appearance at all resolutions requires taking into account maskingshadowing effects that occur between and inside dense input voxels. We introduce a new microflake model whose additional parameters characterize self‐shadowing effects at a microscopic scale. We provide an anisotropic self‐shadowing function and microflake distributions for which the scattering coefficients and the phase functions of our model have closed‐form expressions. We use this model in a new downsampling approach in which scattering parameters are computed from local estimations of self‐shadowing probabilities in the input volume. Unlike previous work, our method handles datasets with spatially varying scattering parameters, semi‐transparent volumes and datasets with intricate silhouettes. We show that our method generates LoDs with correct transparency and consistent appearance through scales for a wide range of challenging datasets, allowing for huge memory savings and efficient distant rendering without loss of quality.
Real‐Time Rendering of Wave‐Optical Effects on Scratched Surfaces
Authors: Velinov Z. , Werner S. , Hullin M. B. 
Published: June 2018

AbstractThe visual appearance of real‐world materials is characterized by surface features across many scales and has received significant attention by the graphics community for decades. Yet, even the most advanced microfacet models have difficulties faithfully recreating materials like snow, sand, brushed metal or hair that feature scale‐violating glints and speckles and defy any traditional notion of filtering and level of detail. In this work, we address an important subset of such materials, namely metal and dielectric surfaces that are covered with microscopic scratches, e.g., from polishing processes or surface wear. The appearance of such surfaces features fine‐scale spatial detail and iridescent colors caused by diffraction, and has only recently been successfully recreated. We adopt the scratch iridescence model, which is known for plausible results in offline Monte Carlo settings but unsuitable for real‐time applications where extensive illumination sampling is prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we introduce an efficient technique for incoherently integrating the contributions of individual scratches, as well as closed‐form solutions for modeling spherical and polygonal area light sources, and for the first time bring scratch iridescence within reach of real‐time applications.
Improved Functional Mappings via Product Preservation
Authors: Nogneng D. , Melzi S. , Rodolà E. , Castellani U. , Bronstein M. , Ovsjanikov M. 
Published: June 2018

AbstractIn this paper, we consider the problem of information transfer across shapes and propose an extension to the widely used functional map representation. Our main observation is that in addition to the vector space structure of the functional spaces, which has been heavily exploited in the functional map framework, the functional algebra (i.e., the ability to take pointwise products of functions) can significantly extend the power of this framework. Equipped with this observation, we show how to improve one of the key applications of functional maps, namely transferring real‐valued functions without conversion to point‐to‐point correspondences. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that by decomposing a given function into a linear combination consisting not only of basis functions but also of their pointwise products, both the representation power and the quality of the function transfer can be improved significantly. Our modification, while computationally simple, allows us to achieve higher transfer accuracy while keeping the size of the basis and the functional map fixed. We also analyze the computational complexity of optimally representing functions through linear combinations of products in a given basis and prove NP‐completeness in some general cases. Finally, we argue that the use of function products can have a wide‐reaching effect in extending the power of functional maps in a variety of applications, in particular by enabling the transfer of high‐frequency functions without changing the representation size or complexity.
Visual Attention for Rendered 3D Shapes
Authors: Lavoué Guillaume , Cordier Frédéric , Seo Hyewon , Larabi Mohamed‐Chaker 
Published: June 2018

AbstractUnderstanding the attentional behavior of the human visual system when visualizing a rendered 3D shape is of great importance for many computer graphics applications. Eye tracking remains the only solution to explore this complex cognitive mechanism. Unfortunately, despite the large number of studies dedicated to images and videos, only a few eye tracking experiments have been conducted using 3D shapes. Thus, potential factors that may influence the human gaze in the specific setting of 3D rendering, are still to be understood.In this work, we conduct two eye‐tracking experiments involving 3D shapes, with both static and time‐varying camera positions. We propose a method for mapping eye fixations (i.e., where humans gaze) onto the 3D shapes with the aim to produce a benchmark of 3D meshes with fixation density maps, which is publicly available. First, the collected data is used to study the influence of shape, camera position, material and illumination on visual attention. We find that material and lighting have a significant influence on attention, as well as the camera path in the case of dynamic scenes. Then, we compare the performance of four representative state‐of‐the‐art mesh saliency models in predicting ground‐truth fixations using two different metrics. We show that, even combined with a center‐bias model, the performance of 3D saliency algorithms remains poor at predicting human fixations. To explain their weaknesses, we provide a qualitative analysis of the main factors that attract human attention. We finally provide a comparison of human‐eye fixations and Schelling points and show that their correlation is weak.
Efficient BVH‐based Collision Detection Scheme with Ordering and Restructuring
Authors: Wang Xinlei , Tang Min , Manocha Dinesh , Tong Ruofeng 
Published: June 2018

AbstractBounding volume hierarchy (BVH) has been widely adopted as the acceleration structure in broad‐phase collision detection. Previous state‐of‐the‐art BVH‐based collision detection approaches exploited the spatio‐temporal coherence of simulations by maintaining a bounding volume test tree (BVTT) front. A major drawback of these algorithms is that large deformations in the scenes decrease culling efficiency and slow down collision queries. Moreover, for front‐based methods, the inefficient caching on GPU caused by the arbitrary layout of BVH and BVTT front nodes becomes a critical performance issue. We present a fast and robust BVH‐based collision detection scheme on GPU that addresses the above problems by ordering and restructuring BVHs and BVTT fronts. Our techniques are based on the use of histogram sort and an auxiliary structure BVTT front log, through which we analyze the dynamic status of BVTT front and BVH quality. Our approach efficiently handles inter‐ and intra‐object collisions and performs especially well in simulations where there is considerable spatio‐temporal coherence. The benchmark results demonstrate that our approach is significantly faster than the previous BVH‐based method, and also outperforms other state‐of‐the‐art spatial subdivision schemes in terms of speed.
Aura Mesh: Motion Retargeting to Preserve the Spatial Relationships between Skinned Characters
Authors: Jin Taeil , Kim Meekyoung , Lee Sung‐Hee 
Published: June 2018

AbstractApplying motion‐capture data to multi‐person interaction between virtual characters is challenging because one needs to preserve the interaction semantics while also satisfying the general requirements of motion retargeting, such as preventing penetration and preserving naturalness. An efficient means of representing interaction semantics is by defining the spatial relationships between the body parts of characters. However, existing methods consider only the character skeleton and thus are not suitable for capturing skin‐level spatial relationships. This paper proposes a novel method for retargeting interaction motions with respect to character skins. Specifically, we introduce the aura mesh, which is a volumetric mesh that surrounds a character's skin. The spatial relationships between two characters are computed from the overlap of the skin mesh of one character and the aura mesh of the other, and then the interaction motion retargeting is achieved by preserving the spatial relationships as much as possible while satisfying other constraints. We show the effectiveness of our method through a number of experiments.
Flexible Live‐Wire: Image Segmentation with Floating Anchors
Authors: Summa B. , Faraj N. , Licorish C. , Pascucci V. 
Published: June 2018

AbstractWe introduce Flexible Live‐Wire, a generalization of the Live‐Wire interactive segmentation technique with floating anchors. In our approach, the user input for Live‐Wire is no longer limited to the setting of pixel‐level anchor nodes, but can use more general anchor sets. These sets can be of any dimension, size, or connectedness. The generality of the approach allows the design of a number of user interactions while providing the same functionality as the traditional Live‐Wire. In particular, we experiment with this new flexibility by designing four novel Live‐Wire interactions based on specific primitives: paint, pinch, probable, and pick anchors. These interactions are only a subset of the possibilities enabled by our generalization. Moreover, we discuss the computational aspects of this approach and provide practical solutions to alleviate any additional overhead. Finally, we illustrate our approach and new interactions through several example segmentations.
Semantic Segmentation for Line Drawing Vectorization Using Neural Networks
Authors: Kim Byungsoo , Wang Oliver , Öztireli A. Cengiz , Gross Markus 
Published: June 2018

AbstractIn this work, we present a method to vectorize raster images of line art. Inverting the rasterization procedure is inherently ill‐conditioned, as there exist many possible vector images that could yield the same raster image. However, not all of these vector images are equally useful to the user, especially if performing further edits is desired. We therefore define the problem of computing an instance segmentation of the most likely set of paths that could have created the raster image. Once the segmentation is computed, we use existing vectorization approaches to vectorize each path, and then combine all paths into the final output vector image. To determine which set of paths is most likely, we train a pair of neural networks to provide semantic clues that help resolve ambiguities at intersection and overlap regions. These predictions are made considering the full context of the image, and are then globally combined by solving a Markov Random Field (MRF). We demonstrate the flexibility of our method by generating results on character datasets, a synthetic random line dataset, and a dataset composed of human drawn sketches. For all cases, our system accurately recovers paths that adhere to the semantics of the drawings.
Example‐based Authoring of Procedural Modeling Programs with Structural and Continuous Variability
Authors: Ritchie Daniel , Jobalia Sarah , Thomas Anna 
Published: June 2018

AbstractProcedural models are a powerful tool for quickly creating a variety of computer graphics content. However, authoring them is challenging, requiring both programming and artistic expertise. In this paper, we present a method for learning procedural models from a small number of example objects. We focus on the modular design setting, where objects are constructed from a common library of parts. Our procedural representation is a probabilistic program that models both the discrete, hierarchical structure of the examples as well as the continuous variability in their spatial arrangements of parts. We develop an algorithm for learning such programs from examples, using combinatorial search over program structures and variational inference to estimate continuous program parameters. We evaluate our method by demonstrating its ability to learn programs from examples of ornamental designs, spaceships, space stations, and castles. Experiments suggest that our learned programs can reliably generate a variety of new objects that are perceptually indistinguishable from hand‐crafted examples.
Parallel Reinsertion for Bounding Volume Hierarchy Optimization
Authors: Meister D. , Bittner J. 
Published: June 2018

AbstractWe present a novel highly parallel method for optimizing bounding volume hierarchies (BVH) targeting contemporary GPU architectures. The core of our method is based on the insertion‐based BVH optimization that is known to achieve excellent results in terms of the SAH cost. The original algorithm is, however, inherently sequential: no efficient parallel version of the method exists, which limits its practical utility. We reformulate the algorithm while exploiting the observation that there is no need to remove the nodes from the BVH prior to finding their optimized positions in the tree. We can search for the optimized positions for all nodes in parallel while simultaneously tracking the corresponding SAH cost reduction. We update in parallel all nodes for which better position was found while efficiently handling potential conflicts during these updates. We implemented our algorithm in CUDA and evaluated the resulting BVH in the context of the GPU ray tracing. The results indicate that the method is able to achieve the best ray traversal performance among the state of the art GPU‐based BVH construction methods.
MIQP‐based Layout Design for Building Interiors
Authors: Wu Wenming , Fan Lubin , Liu Ligang , Wonka Peter 
Published: June 2018

AbstractWe propose a hierarchical framework for the generation of building interiors. Our solution is based on a mixed integer quadratic programming (MIQP) formulation. We parametrize a layout by polygons that are further decomposed into small rectangles. We identify important high‐level constraints, such as room size, room position, room adjacency, and the outline of the building, and formulate them in a way that is compatible with MIQP and the problem parametrization. We also propose a hierarchical framework to improve the scalability of the approach. We demonstrate that our algorithm can be used for residential building layouts and can be scaled up to large layouts such as office buildings, shopping malls, and supermarkets. We show that our method is faster by multiple orders of magnitude than previous methods.