Three-dimensional imaging of random radiation sources

A method to image random three-dimensional source distributions is proposed. We show that, by using a Michelson stellar interferometer in a prescribed fashion, one is able to measure a special form of a three-dimensional degree of coherence. The inverse Fourier transform of this coherence function yields the three-dimensional intensity distribution of the source as seen from the paraxial far zone

Shared talent: an exploration of the potential of the 'Shared Talent' collaborative and hands on educational experience for enhanced learning around sustainability in fashion practice

Shared Talent is a fashion for sustainability framework, developed by Dilys Williams to facilitate a means for fashion designers to exchange expertise with other protagonists across the supply chain, transcending traditional divisions, be they linguistic, geographic, or discipline based. In 2009, Shared Talent India brought together a diverse group of like-minded designers to share their ideas about fashion, challenge their motivations as designers, and question how they create collections. Equipped with research carried out through Shared Talent 1 and 2, and geographically specific research in a number of locations across India, their collaborative concepts were realised with beautiful results. Through partnership between Defra’s led Sustainable Clothing Roadmap and the Indian Government under the UK:India Sustainable Development Dialogue, Shared Talent India explored and shared knowledge on sustainable design practice with established and emerging designers, makers and NGOs. Participants included twelve designers, based both in the UK and India, suppliers and communities of Indian textile producers, buyers and undergraduates from London College of Fashion, Pearl Academy of Fashion Delhi, and Amsterdam Fashion Institute. The research outcomes aim to innovate towards improved ecological, ethical and cultural criteria in selecting and creating collections, and a means to connect designers and buyers to more sustainable textiles in India. Outputs are available as an open-source online resource to help fashion designers, researchers, students, entrepreneurs and businesses to establish strategies for sourcing sustainability from India; the resource is a culmination of the collaboration and includes contribution by key project team members, project managed by Alex McIntosh and led by Dilys Williams

Paradigm Innovation through the Strategic Collaboration between TORAY & UNIQLO : Evolution of A New Fast Fashion Business Model

The key purpose of this study is to examine the remarkable context within the evolution of the paradigm innovation in fashion product development, in the case of Japanese fashion apparel, UNIQLO, created by Fast Retailing Corp in 1998. The key theme hereby concerns innovation, and this perspective surely necessitates Fast Retailing's strategic collaboration with a Japanese new material and artificial textile powerhouse, TORAY: as TORAY's technological provision was an essential source for the dynamic product and process innovation behind the extraordinary growth of UNIQLO. Furthermore, the technological superiority also entailed its innovative positioning in market competition. It is crucial to examine how and why the two brought about their core competences together through new combinations of concepts. This should impart a few promising research perspectives regarding their innovative model of unchallenged value creation, strong market competitiveness, and sustainable corporate growth.Paradigm Innovation, Product Development, Business Model, Japanese Apparel Industry, Fashion Apparel, Fast Fashion, Fast Retailing, UNIQLO, TORAY, Alliance, Virtual Vertical Integration

Balancing the books: creating a model of responsible fashion business education

Abstract The fashion industry has well-documented challenges around sustainability; the predominance of the low-cost-high-turnover business model raises questions about fashion’s ethics (Shaw et al., 2004). Fashion’s engagement with sustainability is most visible in design and production areas and is much less well developed in the area of socially responsible management, although integrating ethical business and sustainability into graduates’ attributes is increasingly seen as a priority for educators (Sims, Brinkmann, Sims and Nelson, 2011). The 2007 United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education are an engagement framework for Higher Education Institutions to embed CSR in education, research, and campus practices (unprme.org). This Global Compact initiative developed in response to the global economic crisis, as a framework against which business schools can audit progress towards a societally responsible curriculum and practices. Purpose, the first of the six Principles, challenges educators to develop their students’ capabilities ‘to be future generators of sustainable value for business and society and to work for an inclusive and sustainable global economy’ (unprme.org). With our position as fashion business researchers and educators we have a responsibility to guide students as they develop their positions on the serious issues the fashion industry faces today. This paper explores a series of curriculum interventions at undergraduate and postgraduate level which introduce fashion business students to the complex practical and ethical challenges for 21st century fashion businesses, using the lens of sustainability to explore every aspect of the fashion industry: production, design and promotion. Through the authors’ research and teaching, case studies, lectures, seminars and assessment tasks have been designed to engage students with a 360 degree understanding of sustainability and to promote students’ development of creative solutions to our industry’s challenges. One such teaching initiative was a finalist in the 2015 Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges (EAUC) Green Gown Awards. It involved a series of guest lectures from sustainability champions after which students carried out sustainability audits on start-up fashion brands and proposed design and marketing strategies using sustainability as a key source of differentiation and added value (Aaker & McLoughlin, 2010). Learning about issues such as textile waste and opportunities e.g. co-creation and no-waste design, engagement was high and students responded positively: ‘The sustainability part of this project has changed the way in which I look at fashion due to my heightened awareness of the sustainable issues affecting fashion’ (student feedback). Another initiative based on the authors’ research into innovative business models, uses their case study on social enterprise as the basis for a Fashion Marketing Strategy unit which uses real fashion industry examples, including our own alumni, to encourage debate about fashion’s difficult questions- the balance between economic, social and environmental sustainability. In these and other innovative fashion business curriculum examples explored in this paper, our research and teaching aims to find and respond to an increased interest in concepts of shared value (Porter & Kramer, 2011) particularly evident in new generations of students (Jarvis, 2016)

Adversarial Semi-Supervised Audio Source Separation applied to Singing Voice Extraction

The state of the art in music source separation employs neural networks trained in a supervised fashion on multi-track databases to estimate the sources from a given mixture. With only few datasets available, often extensive data augmentation is used to combat overfitting. Mixing random tracks, however, can even reduce separation performance as instruments in real music are strongly correlated. The key concept in our approach is that source estimates of an optimal separator should be indistinguishable from real source signals. Based on this idea, we drive the separator towards outputs deemed as realistic by discriminator networks that are trained to tell apart real from separator samples. This way, we can also use unpaired source and mixture recordings without the drawbacks of creating unrealistic music mixtures. Our framework is widely applicable as it does not assume a specific network architecture or number of sources. To our knowledge, this is the first adoption of adversarial training for music source separation. In a prototype experiment for singing voice separation, separation performance increases with our approach compared to purely supervised training.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 1 table. Final version of manuscript accepted for 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). Implementation available at https://github.com/f90/AdversarialAudioSeparatio