Negative Results in Computer Vision: A Perspective

A negative result is when the outcome of an experiment or a model is not what is expected or when a hypothesis does not hold. Despite being often overlooked in the scientific community, negative results are results and they carry value. While this topic has been extensively discussed in other fields such as social sciences and biosciences, less attention has been paid to it in the computer vision community. The unique characteristics of computer vision, particularly its experimental aspect, call for a special treatment of this matter. In this paper, I will address what makes negative results important, how they should be disseminated and incentivized, and what lessons can be learned from cognitive vision research in this regard. Further, I will discuss issues such as computer vision and human vision interaction, experimental design and statistical hypothesis testing, explanatory versus predictive modeling, performance evaluation, model comparison, as well as computer vision research culture

Annual report 2003 LBI organic fruit growing research: including plans for 2004

Our objectives in soil management research combine a number of issues: soil fertility, production, fruit quality, growth regulation, prevention of night frost damage, leaf decomposition (scab) and practical feasibility. This will result in different regimes of weed control, fertilisation, foliar feeding and watering for each plot. The evaluation criteria remain particularly difficult to assess. The proposed revised edition of the soil book (LF39) is combined with the final publication of the regulation project which appeared in de winter of 2003 as a hand-book “Biologische Appels en Peren – teeltmaatregelen voor kwaliteitsfruit-” (Organic apples and pears – cultivation measures for quality fruit) (LF75, ed. Joke Bloksma). Time after time our research shows that good crop regulation is the basis for a quality crop. This applies to all varieties, but Elstar requires special attention because of its susceptibility to biennialism. This last year lime sulphur was available for controlling scab. This enabled us to benefit from the side effects of blossom thinning. Trials are still being run internationally on new thinning agents for organic growing. To date however there is no prospect of a more efficacious agent than lime sulphur without the undesirable side effects. This begs the question of how much more energy should be spent on this research. We take the view that there are other areas to be developed which are essential to good crop regulation. There is scope for further development of an adapted pruning method which very specifically anticipates the prospects for the coming year. Pruning also seems to be important for the new variety Topaz, while we still need to ensure that we get sufficient fruit on the tree. Many trials in which we monitor flowering and bearing rates show time and again that Elstar trees with slightly excessive growth levels have much poorer flowering rates in the following year, even where there is no excessive vigour. Thus much attention still needs to be paid to growth regulation. LaMi is running a project in Utrecht province in which demonstration trials are being carried out to encourage the use of calcium hydroxide in conventional fruit growing. As advisor the LBI contributed its experience from the projects in previous years. Infection of a fruit by fungi or disease depends among other things on the resistance of the fruit. The resistance of a product to fungi, pests and diseases is a parameter for the quality of the product. The Louis Bolk Institute is attempting to develop a test for the evaluation of the natural resistance of the fruit, in which the apple can demonstrate how well or poorly a fruit rot fungus (Botrytis c.) can spread in the flesh of the fruit. The LBI has previous experience with self-disintegration tests. The problems here were the replicability and the unknown sources of infection. Fruit quality is an increasingly important aspect of fruit production. The supermarkets in particular continually raise the standards required for (external) product quality. Using organic growing methods it may not always be possible to meet the high standards for external quality. This means that the internal quality will become increasingly important. LBI is currently running 2 projects on apple quality: “Classy Apples in the Chain” (2001-2004) which involves monitoring and working with partners in the chain to reduce the quality gap between supply and demand and also reduce the distance between the start and end of the chain. The second project, “Parameters for Fruit Quality” (2001-2003) addresses more fundamental issues about suitable quality parameters for organic production. (See also 2002 report)

The evaluation of national accounting matrices with environmental accounts (NAMEA) as a methodology for carrying out a sustainability assessment of the Scottish food and drink sector

This report introduces environmental input-output (IO) accounts for Scotland as an example of a NAMEA framework. It provides an introduction to the use of basic IO multiplier methodology, which can be applied to examine pollution/waste generation and/or resource use under production and consumption accounting principles

Health Effects Associated With Electronic Cigarette Use: Automated Mining of Online Forums.

BACKGROUND:Our previous infodemiological study was performed by manually mining health-effect data associated with electronic cigarettes (ECs) from online forums. Manual mining is time consuming and limits the number of posts that can be retrieved. OBJECTIVE:Our goal in this study was to automatically extract and analyze a large number (>41,000) of online forum posts related to the health effects associated with EC use between 2008 and 2015. METHODS:Data were annotated with medical concepts from the Unified Medical Language System using a modified version of the MetaMap tool. Of over 1.4 million posts, 41,216 were used to analyze symptoms (undiagnosed conditions) and disorders (physician-diagnosed terminology) associated with EC use. For each post, sentiment (positive, negative, and neutral) was also assigned. RESULTS:Symptom and disorder data were categorized into 12 organ systems or anatomical regions. Most posts on symptoms and disorders contained negative sentiment, and affected systems were similar across all years. Health effects were reported most often in the neurological, mouth and throat, and respiratory systems. The most frequently reported symptoms and disorders were headache (n=939), coughing (n=852), malaise (n=468), asthma (n=916), dehydration (n=803), and pharyngitis (n=565). In addition, users often reported linked symptoms (eg, coughing and headache). CONCLUSIONS:Online forums are a valuable repository of data that can be used to identify positive and negative health effects associated with EC use. By automating extraction of online information, we obtained more data than in our prior study, identified new symptoms and disorders associated with EC use, determined which systems are most frequently adversely affected, identified specific symptoms and disorders most commonly reported, and tracked health effects over 7 years

Eliciting Expertise

Since the last edition of this book there have been rapid developments in the use and exploitation of formally elicited knowledge. Previously, (Shadbolt and Burton, 1995) the emphasis was on eliciting knowledge for the purpose of building expert or knowledge-based systems. These systems are computer programs intended to solve real-world problems, achieving the same level of accuracy as human experts. Knowledge engineering is the discipline that has evolved to support the whole process of specifying, developing and deploying knowledge-based systems (Schreiber et al., 2000) This chapter will discuss the problem of knowledge elicitation for knowledge intensive systems in general

Multimedia search without visual analysis: the value of linguistic and contextual information

This paper addresses the focus of this special issue by analyzing the potential contribution of linguistic content and other non-image aspects to the processing of audiovisual data. It summarizes the various ways in which linguistic content analysis contributes to enhancing the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and, as a consequence, to improving the effectiveness of conceptual media access tools. A number of techniques are presented, including the time-alignment of textual resources, audio and speech processing, content reduction and reasoning tools, and the exploitation of surface features

New approaches to using scientific data - statistics, data mining and related technologies in research and research training

This paper surveys technological changes that affect the collection, organization, analysis and presentation of data. It considers changes or improvements that ought to influence the research process and direct the use of technology. It explores implications for graduate research training. The insights of Evidence-Based Medicine are widely relevant across many different research areas. Its insights provide a helpful context within which to discuss the use of technological change to improve the research process. Systematic data-based overview has to date received inadequate attention, both in research and in research training. Sharing of research data once results are published would both assist systematic overview and allow further scrutiny where published analyses seem deficient. Deficiencies in data collection and published data analysis are surprisingly common. Technologies that offer new perspectives on data collection and analysis include data warehousing, data mining, new approaches to data visualization and a variety of computing technologies that are in the tradition of knowledge engineering and machine learning. There is a large overlap of interest with statistics. Statistics is itself changing dramatically as a result of the interplay between theoretical development and the power of new computational tools. I comment briefly on other developing mathematical science application areas - notably molecular biology. The internet offers new possibilities for cooperation across institutional boundaries, for exchange of information between researchers, and for dissemination of research results. Research training ought to equip students both to use their research skills in areas different from those in which they have been immediately trained, and to respond to the challenge of steadily more demanding standards. There should be an increased emphasis on training to work cooperatively

Economic Reform in Tanzania and Vietnam: A Comparative Commentary

The economic reforms in Tanzania and Vietnam represent the two typical cases of transition economies in Asia and Africa, particularrly the transformation of the two developing economies from the planned to the market mechanism. In this paper, the two authors, Brian - a British economist and Dinh - a Vietnamese economist, have, basing on a comparative approach, enquired into various economic and social aspects of the economic reforms in the two countries, including the demographic transition, the change in population growth, the investment in human capital, the growth of GDP, the structural sransformation, the linkage between gricultural growth, rural development, food production and poverty alleviation, the reform in the industrial sector and the state enterprises, the change of ownership , the role of the State, the capital formation, the role of the domestic savings, foreign aid, investment and trade, the gains and losses from globalisation, with an aim to find the answer to the question why in the two cases, Tanzania seemed to follow the donors’ guidance better than Vietnam, but achieved smaller successes?http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40092/3/wp706.pd

Exploring key economic sectors and groups of sectors in Scotland; 1998, 2004, 2007

Different methods and criteria exist for determining ‘key’ economic sectors. The Scottish Government identifies a number of ‘key’ sectors, although it is not clear which metrics it used to choose these. It is likely that these sectors are considered to be ‘key’ in delivering the Scottish Government’s policy priorities. This differs from a more formally defined economic approach to determining key sectors. However, even within the economics literature, there are different ways of thinking about which sectors are ‘key’. This short paper presents one approach to determining individual and groups of ‘key’ sectors. We will explain why these approaches are not necessarily equivalent, and what value is added in moving from considering sectors individually to analysing the impact of sectors in groups. We begin with a non-technical overview of the methods we employ, before discussing the database used in this analysis. We then present the results of applying this method for Scotland for three time periods: 1998, 2004, and 2007. We mainly focus on sectoral output, but we also include one set of results which look at key employment sectors. In the discussion of our results we concentrate on two things. First, we are interested in which sectors are identified as important in Scotland in each time period. Second, we investigate how those sectors have changed between 1998, 2004 and 2007