Extracting Sign Language Articulation from Videos with MediaPipe

This paper concerns evaluating methods for extracting phonological information of Swedish Sign Language signs from video data with MediaPipe’s pose estimation. The methods involve estimating i) the articulation phase, ii) hand dominance (left vs. right), iii) the number of hands articulating (one- vs. two-handed signs) and iv) the sign’s place of articulation. The results show that MediaPipe’s tracking of the hands’ location and movement in videos can be used to estimate the articulation phase of signs. Whereas the inclusion of transport movements improves the accuracy for the estimation of hand dominance and number of hands, removing transport movements is crucial for estimating a sign’s place of articulation.publishedVersio

A Statistical-Topological Feature Combination for Recognition of Isolated Hand Gestures from Kinect Based Depth Images

International audienceReliable hand gesture recognition is an important problem for automatic sign language recognition for the people with hearing and speech disabilities. In this paper, we create a new benchmark database of multi-oriented, isolated ASL numeric images using recently launched Kinect V2. Further, we design an effective statistical-topological feature combinations for recognition of the hand gestures using the available V1 sensor dataset and also over the new V2 dataset. For V1, our best accuracy is 98.4% which is comparable with the best one reported so far and for V2 we achieve an accuracy of 92.2% which is first of its kind

Examination of critical factors influencing ruminant disease dynamics in the Black Sea Basin

IntroductionRuminant production in the Black Sea basin (BSB) is critical for national economies and the subsistence of rural populations. Yet, zoonoses and transboundary animal diseases (TADs) are limiting and threatening the sector. To gain a more comprehensive understanding, this study characterizes key aspects of the ruminant sector in nine countries of the BSB, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, Türkiye, and Ukraine.MethodsWe selected six priority ruminant diseases (anthrax, brucellosis, Crimean Congo haemorrhagic fever (CCHF), foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), lumpy skin disease (LSD), and peste des petits ruminants (PPR)) that are present or threaten to emerge in the region. Standardized questionnaires were completed by a network of focal points and supplemented with external sources. We examined country and ruminant-specific data such as demographics, economic importance, and value chains in each country. For disease-specific data, we analysed the sanitary status, management strategies, and temporal trends of the selected diseases.Results and discussionThe shift from a centrally planned to a market economy, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, restructured the ruminant sector. This sector played a critical role in rural livelihoods within the BSB. Yet, it faced significant challenges such as the low sustainability of pastoralism, technological limitations, and unregistered farms. Additionally, ruminant health was hindered by informal animal trade as a result of economic factors, insufficient support for the development of formal trade, and socio-cultural drivers. In the Caucasus and Türkiye, where diseases were present, improvements to ruminant health were driven by access to trading opportunities. Conversely, European countries, mostly disease-free, prioritized preventing disease incursion to avoid a high economic burden. While international initiatives for disease management are underway in the BSB, there is still a need for more effective local resource allocation and international partnerships to strengthen veterinary health capacity, protect animal health and improve ruminant production

A Roadmap for High Assurance Cryptography

International audienceAlthough an active area of research for years, formal verification has still not yet reached widespread deployment. We outline the steps needed to move from low-assurance cryptography, as given by libraries such as OpenSSL, to high assurance cryptography in deployment. In detail, we outline the need for a suite of high-assurance cryptographic software with per-microarchitecture optimizations that maintain competitive speeds with existing hand-optimized assembly and the bundling of these cryptographic primitives in a new API that prevents common developer mistakes. A new unified API with both formally verified primi-tives and an easy-to-use interface is needed to replace OpenSSL in future security-critical applications

Rupture et comportement mécanique couplé des matériaux : application au bois et aux composites Présentée par

La fissuration et le comportement couplé des matériaux et des structures sont abordés dans ce mémoire. Tout d’abord, la synthèse de mes activités d’enseignant-chercheur est présentée dans le premier chapitre. Les recherches effectuées ont donné lieu à 28 articles dans des revues internationales à comité de lecture. Le deuxième chapitre présente les travaux sur les comportements viscoélastique, mécanosorptif et hydromécanique du bois (Sapin blanc du Massif Central). L’existence du comportement hygroverrou du bois est justifiée par des essais expérimentaux, des calculs analytiques et numériques. Les approches développées sont ensuite généralisées à des cas 3D. Enfin, la méthode de la grille est utilisée pour l’étude du comportement hydromécanique du bois de printemps et d’été. Le troisième chapitre présente les travaux sur la fissuration des matériaux intelligents et composites, des matériaux et structures treillis en bois ainsi que la fissuration des rondelles de bois suite à la dessiccation. La rupture aux interfaces des bi- matériaux piézoélectriques est étudiée en calculant les facteurs d’intensité de contrainte et électrique. Egalement, l’éprouvette Mixed Mode Crack Growth (MMCG) est optimisée et adaptée à la méthode de grille en mode I. Aussi, la rupture et le comportement semi-rigide des poutres treillis sont étudiés par la méthode de la grille. La fissuration des rondelles bois lors du séchage est également analysée en comparant les données expérimentales et numériques. Dans ce cadre, l’effet de la viscoélasticité sur l’initiation de la fissure est démontré. Le dernier chapitre présente les travaux en cours liés en partie au projet ANR JCJC CLIMBOIS qui s’intéresse à la fissuration du bois en environnements variables couplée à la fiabilité. La validité des approches est assurée par l’indépendance du domaine d’intégration autour de la pointe de fissure statique et en propagation. Les résultats montrent la capacité du modèle à séparer les modes mixtes de rupture en environnements variables. Parallèlement, la fiabilité et les méthodes statistiques sont appliquées afin d’étudier la probabilité de ruine et connaître les paramètres les plus discriminants dans le processus de fissuration

The NGO-ization of social movements in neoliberal times: contemporary feminisms in Romania and Belgium

As women gained access to influence politics through formal official channels, social justice concerns of feminist activists started to be pursued through institutionalized forms of political intervention. Scholars have argued for a shift in feminist activism from participation in political movements to lobby and advocacy within formal organizations. The institutionalization and professionalization of the feminist movement were widely associated with feminist and women NGOs collaborating with governmental gender equality bodies to advance movement goals and achieve policy success. While some insisted on the benefits of infusing feminist ideas and practices within the state, others considered that NGO-ization made the feminist movement susceptible of co-optation, contributing to its demobilization and depoliticization. The financial dependency on public or private subsidies studded the NGO-ization hypothesis and urged scholars to analyse the effects of funding on feminist organizations and their capacity for mobilization. Despite the general diagnosis of a demobilized movement comprising an overabundance of depoliticized NGOs, contemporary feminist movement reveals as a space in which formal official organizations and informal groups co-exist, which use both disruptive and disciplined strategies, in different political locations, with various material resources, from friends and comrades\u2019 contributions, to state funds or private grants. However, the NGO form seems to dominate feminist movement organizations that turned into stable and legitimate partners of the state or international institutions, being more visible in the public space, while the informal groups are more fluid and less conspicuous. The major shortcoming within the literature that analyses these transformation is the fact that NGO-ization, institutionalization, professionalization and bureaucratization are used interchangeably and the relation between them is ambiguous. Similarly, scholars however do not always seem to agree if there is a causal relation or a co-occurrence regarding the outcomes of these processes \u2013 co-optation, demobilization and depoliticization. By comparing NGOized feminist organizations and Street feminist groups in Belgium and Romania, in this research I aim to provide an answer to the question of what is NGO-izationand to trace the development of the NGO-ization process and its entanglements with neoliberal modes of governance and techniques. Drawing both on social movements and NGO-ization literature, by analysing the NGO-ization process, I aim to disentangle the links between institutionalization, professionalization, bureaucratization and financial dependence and bring some clarifications concerning the outcomes associated with them such as demobilization, depoliticization and co-optation

Transparent and Service-Agnostic Monitoring of Encrypted Web Traffic

International audienceNowadays, most of Web services are accessed through HTTPS. While preserving user privacy is important, it is also mandatory to monitor and detect specific users' actions, for instance, according to a security policy. This paper presents a solution to monitor HTTP/2 traffic over TLS. It highly differs from HTTP/1.1 over TLS traffic what makes existing monitoring techniques obsolete. Our solution, H2Classifier, aims at detecting if a user performs an action that has been previously defined over a monitored Web service, but without using any decryption. It is thus only based on passive traffic analysis and relies on random forest classifier. A challenge is to extract representative values of the loaded content associated to a Web page, which is actually customized based on the user action. Extensive evaluations with five top used Web services demonstrate the viability of our technique with an accuracy between 94% and 99%

Design Choices for Crowdsourcing Implicit Discourse Relations: Revealing the Biases Introduced by Task Design

Disagreement in natural language annotation has mostly been studied from a perspective of biases introduced by the annotators and the annotation frameworks. Here, we propose to analyze another source of bias—task design bias, which has a particularly strong impact on crowdsourced linguistic annotations where natural language is used to elicit the interpretation of lay annotators. For this purpose we look at implicit discourse relation annotation, a task that has repeatedly been shown to be difficult due to the relations’ ambiguity. We compare the annotations of 1,200 discourse relations obtained using two distinct annotation tasks and quantify the biases of both methods across four different domains. Both methods are natural language annotation tasks designed for crowdsourcing. We show that the task design can push annotators towards certain relations and that some discourse relation senses can be better elicited with one or the other annotation approach. We also conclude that this type of bias should be taken into account when training and testing models