Fashion Conversation Data on Instagram

The fashion industry is establishing its presence on a number of visual-centric social media like Instagram. This creates an interesting clash as fashion brands that have traditionally practiced highly creative and editorialized image marketing now have to engage with people on the platform that epitomizes impromptu, realtime conversation. What kinds of fashion images do brands and individuals share and what are the types of visual features that attract likes and comments? In this research, we take both quantitative and qualitative approaches to answer these questions. We analyze visual features of fashion posts first via manual tagging and then via training on convolutional neural networks. The classified images were examined across four types of fashion brands: mega couture, small couture, designers, and high street. We find that while product-only images make up the majority of fashion conversation in terms of volume, body snaps and face images that portray fashion items more naturally tend to receive a larger number of likes and comments by the audience. Our findings bring insights into building an automated tool for classifying or generating influential fashion information. We make our novel dataset of {24,752} labeled images on fashion conversations, containing visual and textual cues, available for the research community.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, This paper will be presented at ICWSM'1

Spartan Daily October 1, 2012

Volume 139, Issue 17https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1333/thumbnail.jp

Recent advances in exciton based quantum information processing in quantum dot nanostructures

Recent experimental developments in the field of semiconductor quantum dot spectroscopy will be discussed. First we report about single quantum dot exciton two-level systems and their coherent properties in terms of single qubit manipulations. In the second part we report on coherent quantum coupling in a prototype "two-qubit" system consisting of a vertically stacked pair of quantum dots. The interaction can be tuned in such quantum dot molecule devices using an applied voltage as external parameter.Comment: 37 pages, 15 figures, submitted to New Journal of Physics, focus issue on Solid State Quantum Information, added reference

A Color-Pair Based Approach for Accurate Color Harmony Estimation

Harmonious color combinations can stimulate positive user emotional responses. However, a widely open research question is: how can we establish a robust and accurate color harmony measure for the public and professional designers to identify the harmony level of a color theme or color set. Building upon the key discovery that color pairs play an important role in harmony estimation, in this paper we present a novel color-pair based estimation model to accurately measure the color harmony. It first takes a two-layer maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) based method to compute an initial prediction of color harmony by statistically modeling the pair-wise color preferences from existing datasets. Then, the initial scores are refined through a back-propagation neural network (BPNN) with a variety of color features extracted in different color spaces, so that an accurate harmony estimation can be obtained at the end. Our extensive experiments, including performance comparisons of harmony estimation applications, show the advantages of our method in comparison with the state of the art methods

Attachment to the Physical Age of Urban Residential Neighborhoods: A Comparative Case Study of Historic Charleston and I\u27On

Purpose: To counter the over-reliance of historic preservation research and practice on objective, expert values by understanding how people subjectively value and are attached to the age and design of traditionally-designed urban residential neighborhoods. Research question: How does the age of traditionally designed, urban residential environments affect the degree and character of place attachment for residents? Cases: 1) historic Charleston, south of Broad Street, 2) I\u27On new urbanist development in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. Unit of analysis: Residents of 1) historic Charleston and 2) I\u27On. Methodology (methods): Sequential mixed-method: phenomenology (interviews) followed by a survey methodology (on-line survey instrument); both employ photo elicitation techniques. Dependent variables: Measures of general attachment, dependence, identity, and rootedness. (Place attachment is dependent on an individual\u27s aesthetic attitudes about the environment.) Independent variables: Perceptions and valuation of place; behaviors elicited by environmental factors. Findings: Historic Charleston and I\u27On residents perceive their neighborhoods as being layered and having a sense of discovery and mystery. Age value is only associated with patina and spontaneous fantasy in historic Charleston; both of these variables correlate with increased levels of general attachment or dependence. Residents of both neighborhoods exhibit very high levels of general attachment, dependence, and identity. Rootedness is higher in Charleston. Place attachment is correlated with many more environmental variables in historic Charleston than it is in I\u27On. Limitations: A low response rate may indicate there is self-selection bias in the sample; the survey demographics, however, are mostly congruent with census data and lend support to the claim of generalizability of the results. Practical implications: The results of this study can be broadly applied to any discipline in which the holistic valuation of the built and natural environments is important. The mixed-methodological framework provides a way to explain quantitative findings through previously gathered qualitative meanings to increase overall validity and reliability. For historic preservation, it is important to protect masonry patina because of its association with place attachment. Both historic preservation and urban design can benefit from increasing the amount of \u27unseen effort\u27 in interventions made to the built environment. The assessment of what makes certain places significant should focus on sociocultural and phenomenological values as well as objective/expert values

Google Earth in the Middle School Geography Classroom: Its Impact on Spatial Literacy and Place Geography Understanding of Students

Success in today\u27s globalized, multi-dimensional, and connected world requires individuals to have a variety of skill sets – i.e. oracy, numeracy, literacy, as well as the ability to think spatially. Student\u27s spatial literacy, based on various national and international assessment results, indicates that even though there have been gains in U.S. scores over the past decade, overall performance, including those specific to spatial skills, are still below proficiency. Existing studies focused on the potential of virtual learning environment technology to reach students in a variety of academic areas, but a need still exists to study specifically the phenomenon of using Google Earth as a potentially more useful pedagogical tool to develop spatial literacy than the currently employed methods. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which graphicacy achievement scores of students who were immersed in a Google Earth environment were different from students who were provided with only two-dimensional instruction for developing spatial skills. Situated learning theory and the work of Piaget and Inhelder\u27s Child\u27s Conception of Space provided the theoretical grounding from which this study evolved. The National Research Council\u27s call to develop spatial literacy, as seen in Learning to Think Spatially , provided the impetus to begin research. The target population (N = 84) for this study consisted of eighth grade geography students at an upper Midwest Jr. High School during the 2009-2010 academic year. Students were assigned to the control or experimental group based on when they had geography class. Control group students ( n = 44) used two-dimensional PowerPoint images to complete activities, while experimental group students (n = 40) were immersed in the three-dimensional Google Earth world for activity completion. Research data was then compiled and statistically analyzed to answer five research questions developed for this study. One-way ANOVAs were run on data collected and no statistically significant difference was found between the control and experimental group. However, two of the five research questions yielded practically significant data that indicates students who used Google Earth outperformed their counterparts who used PowerPoint on pattern prediction and spatial relationship understanding

The Whole is Greater than the Sum of the Parts: Optimizing the Joint Science Return from LSST, Euclid and WFIRST

The focus of this report is on the opportunities enabled by the combination of LSST, Euclid and WFIRST, the optical surveys that will be an essential part of the next decade's astronomy. The sum of these surveys has the potential to be significantly greater than the contributions of the individual parts. As is detailed in this report, the combination of these surveys should give us multi-wavelength high-resolution images of galaxies and broadband data covering much of the stellar energy spectrum. These stellar and galactic data have the potential of yielding new insights into topics ranging from the formation history of the Milky Way to the mass of the neutrino. However, enabling the astronomy community to fully exploit this multi-instrument data set is a challenging technical task: for much of the science, we will need to combine the photometry across multiple wavelengths with varying spectral and spatial resolution. We identify some of the key science enabled by the combined surveys and the key technical challenges in achieving the synergies.Comment: Whitepaper developed at June 2014 U. Penn Workshop; 28 pages, 3 figure