World System Energetics

The Snooks/Panov curve is discussed, concerning the economic history of human societies as energy transduction systems; a first formulization is proposed. World system energetics falls into the scientific context of the mathematics of planet earth & sustainability, futurizing the energy wave patterns of the global village

Cameras and Inertial/Magnetic Sensor Units Alignment Calibration

Due to the external acceleration interference/ magnetic disturbance, the inertial/magnetic measurements are usually fused with visual data for drift-free orientation estimation, which plays an important role in a wide variety of applications, ranging from virtual reality, robot, and computer vision to biomotion analysis and navigation. However, in order to perform data fusion, alignment calibration must be performed in advance to determine the difference between the sensor coordinate system and the camera coordinate system. Since orientation estimation performance of the inertial/magnetic sensor unit is immune to the selection of the inertial/magnetic sensor frame original point, we therefore ignore the translational difference by assuming the sensor and camera coordinate systems sharing the same original point and focus on the rotational alignment difference only in this paper. By exploiting the intrinsic restrictions among the coordinate transformations, the rotational alignment calibration problem is formulated by a simplified hand–eye equation AX = XB (A, X, and B are all rotation matrices). A two-step iterative algorithm is then proposed to solve such simplified handeye calibration task. Detailed laboratory validation has been performed and the good experimental results have illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed alignment calibration method

Rational approximations, multidimensional continued fractions and lattice reduction

We first survey the current state of the art concerning the dynamical properties of multidimensional continued fraction algorithms defined dynamically as piecewise fractional maps and compare them with algorithms based on lattice reduction. We discuss their convergence properties and the quality of the rational approximation, and stress the interest for these algorithms to be obtained by iterating dynamical systems. We then focus on an algorithm based on the classical Jacobi--Perron algorithm involving the nearest integer part. We describe its Markov properties and we suggest a possible procedure for proving the existence of a finite ergodic invariant measure absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue measure.Comment: 30 pages, 4 figure

World System Energetics

The Snooks/Panov curve is discussed, concerning the economic history of human societies as energy transduction systems. A first formalization and mathematization of world system energetics proposed

In Portfolio: Market attachments, money and capital in private wealth management

Unequivocally tied to the protection and accumulation of private fortunes over time, the wealth management industry has mostly been portrayed in media and academic accounts in terms of exotic practices taking place in unreachable, offshore worlds. This thesis seeks to explore this sector of finance as a market that targets and serves the super-rich and as a key site where capital is reproduced, but by attending to the more ordinary practices, procedures and experiences typically obscured in those accounts. More precisely, this is a market that seeks to capture and retain private wealth in the form of a portfolio of financial market products. Doing so, as a tradition of research on marketization has shown, involves multiple processes whereby suppliers and their products/services adapt and co-evolve with clients and their worlds. Through a range of qualitative and ethnographic methods and materials collected across different wealth management contexts (i.e. Lisbon, London, Geneva and Zurich), the aim is to account for those adaptations and attachments as pragmatic, situated lived experience that demands forms of cognitive and calculative engagement but always exceed it in significant ways. Namely, this is a market for financial products and services that clients become attached to by seeing them as adequate ways of holding and growing money. In this sense, this thesis is also about money – and how modes of qualifying products/services for holding and growing money reveal something constitutive of what money is that unsettles dominant theories. A market that is all about the money reveals – performs - money not as a means for lubricating exchange, but as the embodiment of a nexus between value and future. Thus, accounting for the ways in which private wealth becomes attached in the financial portfolio, and animated by the ‘spirit’ of money, is ultimately a story about capital - how it is provoked, accomplished and demonstrated in and through the financial portfolio but also a variety of other services, and how its mark is inscribed in lifeworlds attached thereby

Integrated Photonic Tensor Processing Unit for a Matrix Multiply: a Review

The explosion of artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms, connected to the exponential growth of the exchanged data, is driving a search for novel application-specific hardware accelerators. Among the many, the photonics field appears to be in the perfect spotlight for this global data explosion, thanks to its almost infinite bandwidth capacity associated with limited energy consumption. In this review, we will overview the major advantages that photonics has over electronics for hardware accelerators, followed by a comparison between the major architectures implemented on Photonics Integrated Circuits (PIC) for both the linear and nonlinear parts of Neural Networks. By the end, we will highlight the main driving forces for the next generation of photonic accelerators, as well as the main limits that must be overcome

Ethics, Religion, and Spiritual Health

What does human enhancement technology (HET) and artificial intelligence (AI) have to do with religion? This book explores, specifically, the intersection of HET and AI with spiritual health, Christianity, and ethics. The exploration strengthens an emergent, robust body of publications about human enhancement ethics. What does it mean to make us “better” must also address the potential spiritual implications. Concern for spiritual health promises to make the study of religion and human enhancement ethics increasingly pressing in the public sphere. Some of the most significant possible and probable spiritual impacts of HET and AI are probed. Topics include warfare, robots, chatbots, moral bioenhancement, spiritual psychotherapy, superintelligence, ecology, fasting, and psychedelics. Two sections comprise this book: one addresses spirituality in relation to HETs and AI, and one addresses Christianity in relation to HETs and AI

Overview of the ImageCLEF 2014 Scalable Concept Image Annotation Task

[EN] The ImageCLEF 2014 Scalable Concept Image Annotation task was the third edition of a challenge aimed at developing more scalable image annotation systems. Unlike traditional image annotation challenges, which rely on a set of manually annotated images as training data, the participants were only allowed to use data and/or resources that as new concepts to detect are introduced do not require significant human effort (such as hand labeling). The participants were provided with web data consisting of 500,000 images, which included textual features obtained from the web pages on which the images appeared, as well as various visual features extracted from the images themselves. To optimize their systems, the participants were provided with a development set of 1,940 samples and its corresponding hand labeled ground truth for 107 concepts. The performance of the submissions was measured using a test set of 7,291 samples which was hand labeled for 207 concepts among which 100 were new concepts unseen during development. In total 11 teams participated in the task submitting overall 58 system runs. Thanks to the larger amount of unseen concepts in the results the generalization of the systems has been more clearly observed and thus demonstrating the potential for scalability.The authors are very grateful with the CLEF initiative for supporting Image CLEF.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under the tranScriptorium project (#600707) and from the Spanish MEC under the STraDA project (TIN2012-37475-C02-01).Villegas Santamaría, M.; Paredes Palacios, R. (2014). Overview of the ImageCLEF 2014 Scalable Concept Image Annotation Task. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. 1180:308-328. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/61152S308328118