Sensors Best Paper Award 2015

Since 2011, an annual award system was instituted to recognize outstanding Sensors papers that are related to sensing technologies and applications and meet the aims, scope and high standards of this journal [1–4]. This year, the winners were chosen by the Section Editor-in-Chiefs of Sensors from among all the papers published in 2011 to track citations. Reviews and full research articles were considered separately. We gladly announce that the following eight papers were awarded the Sensors Best Paper Award in 2015

Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution

Recent research on super-resolution has progressed with the development of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN). In particular, residual learning techniques exhibit improved performance. In this paper, we develop an enhanced deep super-resolution network (EDSR) with performance exceeding those of current state-of-the-art SR methods. The significant performance improvement of our model is due to optimization by removing unnecessary modules in conventional residual networks. The performance is further improved by expanding the model size while we stabilize the training procedure. We also propose a new multi-scale deep super-resolution system (MDSR) and training method, which can reconstruct high-resolution images of different upscaling factors in a single model. The proposed methods show superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets and prove its excellence by winning the NTIRE2017 Super-Resolution Challenge.Comment: To appear in CVPR 2017 workshop. Best paper award of the NTIRE2017 workshop, and the winners of the NTIRE2017 Challenge on Single Image Super-Resolutio

Newbery Award-Winning Books and Gifted Readers

This paper explores whether or not Newbery award-winning books, recognized for contributions to children’s literature in general, are likely to challenge and engage gifted readers. Children who demonstrate exceptional abilities in reading comprehension and perform beyond others their age need literature that will challenge their comprehension and enhance their advanced vocabulary. The Newbery books generally are written for upper elementary students and above, so the language of the texts themselves should align with the ability of a gifted reader. By examining the research related to what books are best for gifted readers, as well as the characteristics of books selected as Newbery-award winners, it would be more apparent whether the characteristics of Newbery books align with the needs of gifted readers. This exploration can help classroom teachers better serve gifted readers by understanding the needs of these students, as well as the literature that serves as an appropriate match, encouraging children to become life-long readers

From Q&A to Slumdog Millionaire: it’s written

In this paper, we seek to analyse the film adaptation of Vikas Swarup’ novel, Q&A, published in 2005. Slumdog Millionaire was directed by British filmmaker Danny Boyle and released in 2008. Thus, three years after its publication, Vikas Swarup’s novel was turned into a blockbuster earning successive awards including the 2009 Best Picture Award from the Hollywood Academy. Its success was not the result of a mega “business strategy”; it was largely due to Danny Boyle’s direction and Simon Beaufoy’s thoughtful screenplay; they were two of the winners among a talented cast of actors and filmmakers. A movie about India, adapted by former colonisers from a book written by an Indian novelist, whose depiction of modern India is far from sympathetic, was a delicate undertaking demanding as much cinematic know-how as diplomatic skills

Approval-Based Shortlisting

Shortlisting is the task of reducing a long list of alternatives to a (smaller) set of best or most suitable alternatives from which a final winner will be chosen. Shortlisting is often used in the nomination process of awards or in recommender systems to display featured objects. In this paper, we analyze shortlisting methods that are based on approval data, a common type of preferences. Furthermore, we assume that the size of the shortlist, i.e., the number of best or most suitable alternatives, is not fixed but determined by the shortlisting method. We axiomatically analyze established and new shortlisting methods and complement this analysis with an experimental evaluation based on biased voters and noisy quality estimates. Our results lead to recommendations which shortlisting methods to use, depending on the desired properties

"i have a feeling trump will win..................": Forecasting Winners and Losers from User Predictions on Twitter

Social media users often make explicit predictions about upcoming events. Such statements vary in the degree of certainty the author expresses toward the outcome:"Leonardo DiCaprio will win Best Actor" vs. "Leonardo DiCaprio may win" or "No way Leonardo wins!". Can popular beliefs on social media predict who will win? To answer this question, we build a corpus of tweets annotated for veridicality on which we train a log-linear classifier that detects positive veridicality with high precision. We then forecast uncertain outcomes using the wisdom of crowds, by aggregating users' explicit predictions. Our method for forecasting winners is fully automated, relying only on a set of contenders as input. It requires no training data of past outcomes and outperforms sentiment and tweet volume baselines on a broad range of contest prediction tasks. We further demonstrate how our approach can be used to measure the reliability of individual accounts' predictions and retrospectively identify surprise outcomes.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 2017 (long paper

Information and communication on the designation and management of Natura2000 sites. Main Report 4: A Proposal for a Natura2000 partner award scheme

Following the selection of Special Protection Areas (SPA) and Sites of Community Importance (SCI) according to the Birds and the Habitats Directives, most European Member States are now in process of formally designating SPAs and SCIs as Special Areas of Conservation (SAC) or Natura2000 sites. These protected areas collectively form the European Union’s Natura2000 network. Member States are also selecting and implementing adequate management approaches and instruments to maintain and restore the favourable conservation status of protected species and habitat types and to prevent damage to the integrity of the sites. Both actions follow Articles 6.1 and 6.2 of the Habitats Directive. To help the Member States, the European Commission wishes to improve the knowledge and exchange of information and good practice both on the designation process of SPAs and SACs and on the establishment of conservation measures and instruments for these areas. Furthermore, the Commission wants to stress the importance of the sites and their management by involving a wider group of stakeholders in the development of so-called integrated management, in accordance with Article 2 of the Habitats Directive. The project ‘PREPARATORY ACTIONS- Lot 2: Information and communication on the designation and management of sites’ (tender ENV.B.2/SER/2007/0076) is intended to help the Commission to achieve these objectives. This is a proposal to the European Commission (EC) for a new European award scheme recognising ‘Natura2000 Partner’ and ‘Natura2000 Partner of the Year’. Our brief was to “elaborate a proposal for a system for rewarding persons, organizations or institutions that have a particular merit in the management of and the communication on Natura2000 sites.” The brief further stipulated the need for an award that would select ‘Natura2000 Partners’ on an annual basis. From these, a selection would be made, enabling the EC to confer the title of ‘Natura2000 Partner of the Year’. Our proposal allows for Member States (MSs) to award this latter title, with an additional title of ‘European Natura2000 Partner of the Year’ being made annually by the EC

Archway Commencement Issue, v. 19, no. 18, July 11, 1958

Archway v. 19, no. 18, July 11, 1958 - Commencement issue

Spartan Daily, June 17, 1937

Volume 25, Issue 156https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/2640/thumbnail.jp