Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Online Handwriting Text Classification

Self-supervised learning offers an efficient way of extracting rich representations from various types of unlabeled data while avoiding the cost of annotating large-scale datasets. This is achievable by designing a pretext task to form pseudo labels with respect to the modality and domain of the data. Given the evolving applications of online handwritten texts, in this study, we propose the novel Part of Stroke Masking (POSM) as a pretext task for pretraining models to extract informative representations from the online handwriting of individuals in English and Chinese languages, along with two suggested pipelines for fine-tuning the pretrained models. To evaluate the quality of the extracted representations, we use both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation methods. The pretrained models are fine-tuned to achieve state-of-the-art results in tasks such as writer identification, gender classification, and handedness classification, also highlighting the superiority of utilizing the pretrained models over the models trained from scratch

The Evolution of Agriculture, Food and Drink in the Ancient Niger River Basin: Archaeobotanical studies from Mali and Benin

This doctoral thesis examines the evolution of the agricultural and food economies that supported the communities that gave rise to complex societies in West Africa, as well as the agricultural systems that sustained the succeeding polities around the Niger River Valley. One of the major goals of my thesis was to reconstruct the evolution of food and beer systems, including both production and consumption. The aim of my thesis goes beyond simply documenting the arrival of new practices or new crop taxa. It also addresses the consumption practices that these crops gave rise to, and how they became embedded in the social, economic, political and environmental history of past African societies. The time period covered by this research (from 2000 BC. Until Today) witnesses climatic fluctuations, with continual oscillations between dry and humid phases. Many social changes also occurred during this period. One of the most important modifications in the African landscape, during the first and second millennium AD, is the growth of the West African states and empires, such as those of Ghana and Mali, as well as various Songhay polities. The extension and maturation of these political entities likely impacted on local agricultural systems, urbanization, and trade networks. The history and peopling of West Africa, and particularly in the Niger River area, is connected to issues of food consumption and social organisation. Indeed, we also have to study the ethno-historic framework of the area. This research includes an analysis of archaeobotanical material recovered from sites located in North Benin and Mali. The 13 sites from Benin were excavated for the ‘Crossroad of empires’ ERC project during three field seasons (2012-14). As for the samples from Malian sites, 4 were recovered by Kevin MacDonald during excavations in the 1990s, Sadia in Dogon country was excavated by the APA Swiss project in 2010-11 and Togu 2A excavated by Daouda Keita (Université des sciences Socials et Géstion, Bamako, Mali) for the Markadugu Project led by Nikolas Gestrich from the Frobenius Institute (Frankfurt, Germany)

AutoGraff: towards a computational understanding of graffiti writing and related art forms.

The aim of this thesis is to develop a system that generates letters and pictures with a style that is immediately recognizable as graffiti art or calligraphy. The proposed system can be used similarly to, and in tight integration with, conventional computer-aided geometric design tools and can be used to generate synthetic graffiti content for urban environments in games and in movies, and to guide robotic or fabrication systems that can materialise the output of the system with physical drawing media. The thesis is divided into two main parts. The first part describes a set of stroke primitives, building blocks that can be combined to generate different designs that resemble graffiti or calligraphy. These primitives mimic the process typically used to design graffiti letters and exploit well known principles of motor control to model the way in which an artist moves when incrementally tracing stylised letter forms. The second part demonstrates how these stroke primitives can be automatically recovered from input geometry defined in vector form, such as the digitised traces of writing made by a user, or the glyph outlines in a font. This procedure converts the input geometry into a seed that can be transformed into a variety of calligraphic and graffiti stylisations, which depend on parametric variations of the strokes

Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology

kwartalni

Making Presentation Math Computable

This Open-Access-book addresses the issue of translating mathematical expressions from LaTeX to the syntax of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS). Over the past decades, especially in the domain of Sciences, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), LaTeX has become the de-facto standard to typeset mathematical formulae in publications. Since scientists are generally required to publish their work, LaTeX has become an integral part of today's publishing workflow. On the other hand, modern research increasingly relies on CAS to simplify, manipulate, compute, and visualize mathematics. However, existing LaTeX import functions in CAS are limited to simple arithmetic expressions and are, therefore, insufficient for most use cases. Consequently, the workflow of experimenting and publishing in the Sciences often includes time-consuming and error-prone manual conversions between presentational LaTeX and computational CAS formats. To address the lack of a reliable and comprehensive translation tool between LaTeX and CAS, this thesis makes the following three contributions. First, it provides an approach to semantically enhance LaTeX expressions with sufficient semantic information for translations into CAS syntaxes. Second, it demonstrates the first context-aware LaTeX to CAS translation framework LaCASt. Third, the thesis provides a novel approach to evaluate the performance for LaTeX to CAS translations on large-scaled datasets with an automatic verification of equations in digital mathematical libraries. This is an open access book

Making Presentation Math Computable

This Open-Access-book addresses the issue of translating mathematical expressions from LaTeX to the syntax of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS). Over the past decades, especially in the domain of Sciences, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), LaTeX has become the de-facto standard to typeset mathematical formulae in publications. Since scientists are generally required to publish their work, LaTeX has become an integral part of today's publishing workflow. On the other hand, modern research increasingly relies on CAS to simplify, manipulate, compute, and visualize mathematics. However, existing LaTeX import functions in CAS are limited to simple arithmetic expressions and are, therefore, insufficient for most use cases. Consequently, the workflow of experimenting and publishing in the Sciences often includes time-consuming and error-prone manual conversions between presentational LaTeX and computational CAS formats. To address the lack of a reliable and comprehensive translation tool between LaTeX and CAS, this thesis makes the following three contributions. First, it provides an approach to semantically enhance LaTeX expressions with sufficient semantic information for translations into CAS syntaxes. Second, it demonstrates the first context-aware LaTeX to CAS translation framework LaCASt. Third, the thesis provides a novel approach to evaluate the performance for LaTeX to CAS translations on large-scaled datasets with an automatic verification of equations in digital mathematical libraries. This is an open access book

Wellesley Bulletin [2006-2007]

https://repository.wellesley.edu/catalogs/1104/thumbnail.jp

Wellesley College Courses [2009-2010]

https://repository.wellesley.edu/catalogs/1107/thumbnail.jp

Wellesley College Courses [2007-2008]

https://repository.wellesley.edu/catalogs/1105/thumbnail.jp