An analysis of facial description in static images and video streams

[ES]This paper describes an analysis performed for facial description in static images and video streams. The still image context is first analyzed in order to decide the optimal classifier configuration for each problem: gender recognition, race classification, and glasses and moustache presence. These results are later applied to significant samples which are automatically extracted in real-time from video streams achieving promising results in the facial description of 70 individuals by means of gender, race and the presence of glasses and moustache.

Identity and gender recognition using the ENCARA real-time face detector

[EN]This paper presents recognition results based on a PCA representation and classification with SVMs and temporal coherence.

Faulkner revisited : narrating property, race, gender and history in William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day

My thesis explores the formation of the subject in the novels of Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. I attach the concept of property in terms of how male protagonists are obsessed with materialistic ownership and with the subordination of women who, as properties, consolidate their manhood. The three novelists despite their racial, gendered, and literary differences share the view that identity and truth are mere social and cultural constructs. I incorporate the work of Judith Butler and other poststructuralist figures, who see identity as a matter of performance rather than a natural entity. My thesis explores the theme of freedom, which I attached to the ways characters use their bodies either to confine or to emancipate themselves from the restricting world of race, class, and gender. The three novelists deconstruct any system of belief that promulgates the objectivity of truth in historical documents. History in the three novels, as with the protagonists, perception of identity, remains a social construct laden with distortions to serve particular political or ideological agendas. My thesis gives voice to African American female characters who are associated with love and racial and gender resistance. They become the reservoirs of the African American legacy in terms of their association with the oral and intuitionist mode of knowing, which subverts the male characters’ obsession with property and with the mainstream empiricist world. In this dissertation, I use the concept of hybridity as a literary and theoretical devise that African-American writers employ. In effect, I embark on the postcolonial studies of Henry Louise Gates, Paul Gilroy, W. E. B Du Bois, James Clifford, and Arjun Appadurai in order to reflect upon the fluidity of Morrison’s and Naylor’s works. I show how these two novelists subvert Faulkner’s essentialist perception of truth, and of racial and gendered identity. They associate the myth of the Flying African with the notion of hybridity by making their male protagonists criss-cross Northern and Southern regions. I refer to Mae Gwendolyn Henderson’s article on “Speaking in Tongues” in my analysis of how Naylor subverts the patriarchal text of both Faulkner and Morrison in embarking on a more feminine version of the flying African, which she relates to an ex-slave, Sapphira Wade, a volatile female character who resists fixed claim over her story and identity. In dealing with the concept of hybridity, I show that Naylor rewrites both authors’ South by making Willow Springs a more fluid space, an assumption that unsettles the scores of critics who associate the island with authenticity and exclusive rootedness.

Volunteering, social cohesion and race: the German Technical Relief Service

This paper contributes to the debate on whether volunteering influences social cohesion, and argues that issues of race equality should be considered in this discussion. Whilst the German government, like other European states, promotes volunteering as a way of improving social cohesion, discussions on social cohesion in Germany tend not to mention race explicitly, whilst studies on volunteering tend to neglect to explore race at all. When they do, race is simply considered a factor influencing engagement, rather than a structural issue. Employing the example of the German Technical Relief Service for civil defence, the paper explores race relations and representation in Germany, where discussions on race generally remain taboo, drawing on theories of structural racism and whiteness. The paper concludes that it cannot be unproblematically assumed that volunteering leads to social cohesion in an ethnically diverse society if racial inequalities are not addressed.

Global Trade Governance and ASEAN: Studies of Trade-Related Aspects of Labor, Environment and Culture in Southeast Asia

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-08

IntelliChair: a non-intrusive sitting posture and sitting activity recognition system

Current Ambient Intelligence and Intelligent Environment research focuses on the interpretation of a subject’s behaviour at the activity level by logging the Activity of Daily Living (ADL) such as eating, cooking, etc. In general, the sensors employed (e.g. PIR sensors, contact sensors) provide low resolution information. Meanwhile, the expansion of ubiquitous computing allows researchers to gather additional information from different types of sensor which is possible to improve activity analysis. Based on the previous research about sitting posture detection, this research attempts to further analyses human sitting activity. The aim of this research is to use non-intrusive low cost pressure sensor embedded chair system to recognize a subject’s activity by using their detected postures. There are three steps for this research, the first step is to find a hardware solution for low cost sitting posture detection, second step is to find a suitable strategy of sitting posture detection and the last step is to correlate the time-ordered sitting posture sequences with sitting activity. The author initiated a prototype type of sensing system called IntelliChair for sitting posture detection. Two experiments are proceeded in order to determine the hardware architecture of IntelliChair system. The prototype looks at the sensor selection and integration of various sensor and indicates the best for a low cost, non-intrusive system. Subsequently, this research implements signal process theory to explore the frequency feature of sitting posture, for the purpose of determining a suitable sampling rate for IntelliChair system. For second and third step, ten subjects are recruited for the sitting posture data and sitting activity data collection. The former dataset is collected byasking subjects to perform certain pre-defined sitting postures on IntelliChair and it is used for posture recognition experiment. The latter dataset is collected by asking the subjects to perform their normal sitting activity routine on IntelliChair for four hours, and the dataset is used for activity modelling and recognition experiment. For the posture recognition experiment, two Support Vector Machine (SVM) based classifiers are trained (one for spine postures and the other one for leg postures), and their performance evaluated. Hidden Markov Model is utilized for sitting activity modelling and recognition in order to establish the selected sitting activities from sitting posture sequences.2. After experimenting with possible sensors, Force Sensing Resistor (FSR) is selected as the pressure sensing unit for IntelliChair. Eight FSRs are mounted on the seat and back of a chair to gather haptic (i.e., touch-based) posture information. Furthermore, the research explores the possibility of using alternative non-intrusive sensing technology (i.e. vision based Kinect Sensor from Microsoft) and find out the Kinect sensor is not reliable for sitting posture detection due to the joint drifting problem. A suitable sampling rate for IntelliChair is determined according to the experiment result which is 6 Hz. The posture classification performance shows that the SVM based classifier is robust to “familiar” subject data (accuracy is 99.8% with spine postures and 99.9% with leg postures). When dealing with “unfamiliar” subject data, the accuracy is 80.7% for spine posture classification and 42.3% for leg posture classification. The result of activity recognition achieves 41.27% accuracy among four selected activities (i.e. relax, play game, working with PC and watching video). The result of this thesis shows that different individual body characteristics and sitting habits influence both sitting posture and sitting activity recognition. In this case, it suggests that IntelliChair is suitable for individual usage but a training stage is required.

Multiresolution analysis (discrete wavelet transform) through Daubechies family for emotion recognition in speech

We propose a study of the mathematical properties of voice as an audio signal -- This work includes signals in which the channel conditions are not ideal for emotion recognition -- Multiresolution analysis- discrete wavelet transform – was performed through the use of Daubechies Wavelet Family (Db1-Haar, Db6, Db8, Db10) allowing the decomposition of the initial audio signal into sets of coefficients on which a set of features was extracted and analyzed statistically in order to differentiate emotional states -- ANNs proved to be a system that allows an appropriate classification of such states -- This study shows that the extracted features using wavelet decomposition are enough to analyze and extract emotional content in audio signals presenting a high accuracy rate in classification of emotional states without the need to use other kinds of classical frequency-time features -- Accordingly, this paper seeks to characterize mathematically the six basic emotions in humans: boredom, disgust, happiness, anxiety, anger and sadness, also included the neutrality, for a total of seven states to identify

Viral Bodies: Uncontrollable Blackness in Popular Culture and Everyday Life

Viral Bodies: Uncontrollable Blackness in Popular Culture and Everyday Life maps rapidly circulated performances of Blackness across visual media that collapse Black bodies into ubiquitous “things.” Throughout my dissertation, I use viral performance to describe the uncontrollable discursive circulation of bodies, their behaviors, and the ideas around them. In particular, viral performance is employed to describe the complicated ways that (mis)understandings of Black bodies spread and are often transformed into common-sense beliefs. As viral performances, Black bodies are often made more visible, while simultaneously becoming more opaque. This dissertation examines the recurrence of viral performances of Blackness in viral videos online, film, and photography/images. I argue that viral performances make products that reinscribe stereotypical notions of Blackness while also generating paths of alterity—which contradict the normalized clichés and provide desirable possibilities for Black performance. Viral Bodies forges a new dialogue between visual and aural technologies, performance, and larger historic discourses that script Black bodies as visually (and sonically) deviant subjects. I am interested in how technologies complicate the re-presentation of images, ideas, and ideologies—producing a necessity for new decipherings of performances of Blackness in popular culture and everyday life.

Multiraciality Enters the University: Mixed Race Identity and Knowledge Production in Higher Education

“Multiraciality Enters the University: Mixed Race Identity and Knowledge Production in Higher Education,” explores how the category of “mixed race��� has underpinned university politics in California, through student organizing, admissions debates, and the development of a new field of study. By treating the concept of privatization as central to both multiraciality and the neoliberal university, this project asks how and in what capacity has the discourses of multiracialism and the growing recognition of mixed race student populations shaped administrative, social, and academic debates at the state’s flagship universities—the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles. This project argues that the mixed race population symbolizing so-called “post-racial societies” is fundamentally attached to the concept of self-authorship, which can work to challenge the rights and resources for college students of color. Through a close reading of texts, including archival materials, policy and media debates, and interviews, I assert that the contemporary deployment of mixed race within the US academy represents a particularly post-civil rights development, undergirded by a genealogy of U.S. liberal individualism. This project ultimately reveals the pressing need to rethink ways to disrupt institutionalized racism in the new millennium.

Redefinição da identidade corporativa: a perspetiva dos colaboradores internos

A procura pelo sucesso empresarial tornou-se uma batalha diária das organizações. O reconhecimento por parte do mercado global tomou conta dos empresários que por sua vez, esquecem-se que o sucesso vem dos recursos internos das suas empresas. Este trabalho de investigação pretende fazer uma reflexão sobre a construção de uma Identidade Corporativa sólida, e focar a perspetiva dos Colaboradores. Neste sentido tornou-se necessário fazer uma pesquisa bibliográfica em torno do tema Identidade Corporativa, com enfoque no papel dos Colaboradores neste campo, Imagem e Cultura Corporativas, assim como outros conceitos inerentes. Assim, a presente pesquisa teve como propósito avaliar a perceção dos Colaboradores da CaetanoBus, empresa do Grupo Salvador Caetano, após a redefinição da Identidade Corporativa, que foi executada durante o estágio curricular que realizei nessa empresa. O estudo incidiu sobre a forma como os Colaboradores da Empresa percecionam a Nova Identidade Corporativa, assim como elementos inerentes a essa mudança, ou seja, Plataformas de Comunicação, Assinatura, Imagem e Valores da Empresa. Este estudo foi realizado durante um estágio curricular na CaetanoBus. Esta junção entre a dissertação e o minirelatório de estágio surge no âmbito da diversidade de tarefas realizadas e da minha própria ambição. Tal como é demonstrado pelo resumo de algumas tarefas realizadas durante o estágio curricular, estas proporcionaram o enquadramento do estudo que dá título a este trabalho. O estudo realizado permitiu verificar diversos pontos, principalmente:  O perfil da CaetanoBus, sendo que os Colaboradores caracterizam-na sobretudo como Confiante, Sincera e Honesta;  A avaliação geral dos Colaboradores relativamente aos Valores da CaetanoBus: a Tradição é o principal valor que os Colaboradores identificam com a Empresa, a seguir destaca-se o Respeito e a Inovação. O Valor com a classificação mais baixa é o Rigor, assim deverá ser feita a identificação das razões para que os Colaboradores não considerem tão presente o Valor Rigor, e definidas estratégias que contribuam para a futura resolução deste problema, o que ultrapassa o âmbito e objetivos do presente estudo.  Quase todas as hipóteses de pesquisa não são suportadas pelos dados estatísticos do estudo, este facto poderá evidenciar que as variáveis Personalidade da marca, Imagem da CaetanoBus e a Satisfação com a Nova Identidade Corporativa não variam consoante as variáveis – sexo, escolaridade, idade, função e antiguidade – dos seus Colaboradores.  Entre outras conclusões finais.

Classificação como Conjunto de Interesse Público (CIP) dos Vestígios Arqueológicos de Lourosa

O presente projeto tem como principal objetivo a Classificação como Conjunto de Interesse Público (CIP) dos Vestígios Arqueológicos de Lourosa, associando ao estudo o potencial turístico que advém da ligação aos recursos patrimoniais. Outros objetivos: A Criação de um Centro Interpretativo da Cultura Judaica e o Reconhecimento e Notoriedade Internacional. O Turismo Cultural e Religioso, considerado como um produto emergente e inovador e uma das apostas do Plano Estratégico Nacional do Turismo (PENT) 2013/2015 continua a ser um recurso turístico do projeto Turismo 2020. A presença judaica em Portugal é tida pela comunidade científica como muito significativa e o seu valor patrimonial muito relevante. Constituem aspetos deste património histórico-cultural: as comunas e as judiarias, as sinagogas e os armários sagrados, as inscrições e as marcas de simbologia judaica e cristã-nova, as tradições e os costumes. A confluência entre a cultura, a religião e o turismo dá origem ao denominado Turismo Cultural e Religioso. A Organização Mundial do Turismo, identifica o turismo cultural como sendo: O movimento de pessoas essencialmente por motivos culturais, incluindo visitas de grupo, visitas culturais, viagens a festivais, visitas a sítios históricos e monumentos, folclore e peregrinação (OMT, 1985, citado por McKercher e du Cros, 2002). O turismo cultural tem sido considerado a área de maior crescimento no turismo global. O turismo religioso tem igualmente uma relação forte com o património existente sendo que, o principal objetivo é a participação em rituais de culto. Assim sendo, o turismo é uma atividade multifacetada que apresenta uma forte ligação com o património material e imaterial existente contribuindo desta forma, para o desenvolvimento económico e social de uma determinada região.

An ontology for risk management of digital collections

Maintaining accessibility to and understanding of digital information over time is a complex challenge that often requires contributions and interventions from a variety of individuals and organizations. The processes of preservation planning and evaluation are fundamentally implicit and share similar complexity. Both demand comprehensive knowledge and understanding of every aspect of to-be-preserved content and the contexts within which preservation is undertaken. Consequently, means are required for the identification, documentation and association of those properties of data, representation and management mechanisms that in combination lend value, facilitate interaction and influence the preservation process. These properties may be almost limitless in terms of diversity, but are integral to the establishment of classes of risk exposure, and the planning and deployment of appropriate preservation strategies. We explore several research objectives within the course of this thesis. Our main objective is the conception of an ontology for risk management of digital collections. Incorporated within this are our aims to survey the contexts within which preservation has been undertaken successfully, the development of an appropriate methodology for risk management, the evaluation of existing preservation evaluation approaches and metrics, the structuring of best practice knowledge and lastly the demonstration of a range of tools that utilise our findings. We describe a mixed methodology that uses interview and survey, extensive content analysis, practical case study and iterative software and ontology development. We build on a robust foundation, the development of the Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment. We summarise the extent of the challenge facing the digital preservation community (and by extension users and creators of digital materials from many disciplines and operational contexts) and present the case for a comprehensive and extensible knowledge base of best practice. These challenges are manifested in the scale of data growth, the increasing complexity and the increasing onus on communities with no formal training to offer assurances of data management and sustainability. These collectively imply a challenge that demands an intuitive and adaptable means of evaluating digital preservation efforts. The need for individuals and organisations to validate the legitimacy of their own efforts is particularly prioritised. We introduce our approach, based on risk management. Risk is an expression of the likelihood of a negative outcome, and an expression of the impact of such an occurrence. We describe how risk management may be considered synonymous with preservation activity, a persistent effort to negate the dangers posed to information availability, usability and sustainability. Risk can be characterised according to associated goals, activities, responsibilities and policies in terms of both their manifestation and mitigation. They have the capacity to be deconstructed into their atomic units and responsibility for their resolution delegated appropriately. We continue to describe how the manifestation of risks typically spans an entire organisational environment, and as the focus of our analysis risk safeguards against omissions that may occur when pursuing functional, departmental or role-based assessment. We discuss the importance of relating risk-factors, through the risks themselves or associated system elements. To do so will yield the preservation best-practice knowledge base that is conspicuously lacking within the international digital preservation community. We present as research outcomes an encapsulation of preservation practice (and explicitly defined best practice) as a series of case studies, in turn distilled into atomic, related information elements. We conduct our analyses in the formal evaluation of memory institutions in the UK, US and continental Europe. Furthermore we showcase a series of applications that use the fruits of this research as their intellectual foundation. Finally we document our results in a range of technical reports and conference and journal articles. We present evidence of preservation approaches and infrastructures from a series of case studies conducted in a range of international preservation environments. We then aggregate this into a linked data structure entitled PORRO, an ontology relating preservation repository, object and risk characteristics, intended to support preservation decision making and evaluation. The methodology leading to this ontology is outlined, and lessons are exposed by revisiting legacy studies and exposing the resource and associated applications to evaluation by the digital preservation community.

A three-dimensional representation method for noisy point clouds based on growing self-organizing maps accelerated on GPUs

The research described in this thesis was motivated by the need of a robust model capable of representing 3D data obtained with 3D sensors, which are inherently noisy. In addition, time constraints have to be considered as these sensors are capable of providing a 3D data stream in real time. This thesis proposed the use of Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) as a 3D representation model. In particular, we proposed the use of the Growing Neural Gas (GNG) network, which has been successfully used for clustering, pattern recognition and topology representation of multi-dimensional data. Until now, Self-Organizing Maps have been primarily computed offline and their application in 3D data has mainly focused on free noise models, without considering time constraints. It is proposed a hardware implementation leveraging the computing power of modern GPUs, which takes advantage of a new paradigm coined as General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU). The proposed methods were applied to different problem and applications in the area of computer vision such as the recognition and localization of objects, visual surveillance or 3D reconstruction.

ENEOLITHIC, YAMNAYA, CATACOMB AND BABYNO CULTURE CEMETERIES, PIDLISIVKA, BARROW 1, YAMPIL REGION, VINNITSA OBLAST: ARCHAEOMETRY, CHRONOMETRY AND TAXONOMY

The paper presents excavation results and analytical studies concerning the taxonomic classification of a funerary site identified with the communities of the early ‘barrow cultures’ settling the north-western Black Sea Coast in the 4th/3rd-2nd millennium BC. The study focuses on the ceremonial centres of the Eneolithic, Yamnaya, Catacomb and Babyno cultures.

ENEOLITHIC, YAMNAYA AND NOUA CULTURE CEMETERIES FROM THE FIRST HALF OF THE 3RD AND THE MIDDLE OF THE 2ND MILLENNIUM BC, POROHY, SITE 3A, YAMPIL REGION, VINNITSA OBLAST: ARCHAEOMETRIC AND CHRONOMETRIC DESCRIPTION, RITUAL AND TAXONOMIC-TOPOGENETIC IDENTIFICATION

The paper presents the results of excavations and analytical studies regarding the taxonomic classification of a funeral site associated with the societies of ‘barrow cultures’ of the north-western Black Sea Coast in the first half of the 3rd and the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. The study discusses the ceremonial centres of the Eneolithic, Yamnaya and Noua cultures.