Virtually real : problems of authenticity in religion on the internet

Bibliography: leaves 205-213.This study explores the vexed problem of authenticity in religion. In making that exploration, the study uses for its data the multitude of diverse and disparate religious formations found in the relatively disordered and anarchic spaces created with Internet technologies, formations that I have tentatively called virtual religions. The theoretical framework applied here is developed from the unique and original critical theory of Walter Benjamin. This study is therefore located at a number of important intersections: between religion and popular culture, between religion and politics, between religion and philosophy, and between religion and art. The argument is comprised of three major parts, corresponding to Chapters Two, Three and Four respectively. The first part approaches authenticity from the perspective of empiricism, with its scientific methods of verification and falsification. The keyword here is forensics because it implies both the scientific paradigm and police detection. This second implication is an important addition to the first because it draws attention to power in the vexed problem of religious authenticity

TextFormer: A Query-based End-to-End Text Spotter with Mixed Supervision

End-to-end text spotting is a vital computer vision task that aims to integrate scene text detection and recognition into a unified framework. Typical methods heavily rely on Region-of-Interest (RoI) operations to extract local features and complex post-processing steps to produce final predictions. To address these limitations, we propose TextFormer, a query-based end-to-end text spotter with Transformer architecture. Specifically, using query embedding per text instance, TextFormer builds upon an image encoder and a text decoder to learn a joint semantic understanding for multi-task modeling. It allows for mutual training and optimization of classification, segmentation, and recognition branches, resulting in deeper feature sharing without sacrificing flexibility or simplicity. Additionally, we design an Adaptive Global aGgregation (AGG) module to transfer global features into sequential features for reading arbitrarily-shaped texts, which overcomes the sub-optimization problem of RoI operations. Furthermore, potential corpus information is utilized from weak annotations to full labels through mixed supervision, further improving text detection and end-to-end text spotting results. Extensive experiments on various bilingual (i.e., English and Chinese) benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method. Especially on TDA-ReCTS dataset, TextFormer surpasses the state-of-the-art method in terms of 1-NED by 13.2%.Comment: MIR 2023, 15 page

Speciesism | Ageism | Racism

Speciesism | Ageism | Racism (SAR) is a generative cinematic artwork stemming from the millennia-old practice of mask making and laying claim to the fundamental richness of diversity. SAR generates sequences of masks from photos of people and animals without bias, imbued meaning or particular intent, leaving all interpretations and assumptions to the audience. SAR is aesthetically rooted in traditional folklore and the worldwide popular art of mask-making, in the concepts of “loop” and metric montage. Conceptually, SAR thrives in the intersectionality of postcolonial theory, feminist and anti-discrimination studies, as well as animal rights movements, policies and practices. By stripping away the ability to consistently identify species, age, race, gender or sexual orientation, the artwork allows for a disruptive aesthetic appreciation, which confronts the ideology and politics of group superiority. SAR delivers a participatory, hypnotic, rhythmic and generative audio-visual experience, charged with an anti-discriminatory message countering speciesism, ageism and racism. Speciesism | Ageism | Racism can be enjoyed in its on-line pre-calculated version at https://pedroveiga.com/sar-speciesism-ageism-racism/info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Artificial intelligence in endoscopy: the challenges and future directions

Artificial intelligence based approaches, in particular deep learning, have achieved state-of-the-art performance in medical fields with increasing number of software systems being approved by both Europe and United States. This paper reviews their applications to early detection of oesophageal cancers with a focus on their advantages and pitfalls. The paper concludes with future recommendations towards the development of a real-time, clinical implementable, interpretable and robust diagnosis support systems

Image manipulation: Photoshop as a data-measurement tool

Researchers believe that image manipulation threatens photography\u27s perceived objectivity of capturing moments in history. Current research exists that is aimed at determining whether images have been subjected to methods of manipulation. While this research is thorough in its approaches to detection, it lacks methods that would facilitate the measurement of those manipulations; This study uses Photoshop to measure the qualitative changes in images. The aesthetic dimensions set forth by Gillian Rose (2007) such as content, color, spatial organization, and light can be isolated, manipulated, and ultimately measured; This research is aimed at facilitating additional questions regarding what constitutes image manipulation, the extent of image manipulation using the methods described herein, and how image manipulation may affect the viewer. It also hopes to show that widely accepted practices of image modification need to be revisited as technologies continue to update at an unprecedented rate

Introduction: Ways of Machine Seeing

How do machines, and, in particular, computational technologies, change the way we see the world? This special issue brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines to explore the entanglement of machines and their ways of seeing from new critical perspectives. This 'editorial' is for a special issue of AI & Society, which includes contributions from: María Jesús Schultz Abarca, Peter Bell, Tobias Blanke, Benjamin Bratton, Claudio Celis Bueno, Kate Crawford, Iain Emsley, Abelardo Gil-Fournier, Daniel Chávez Heras, Vladan Joler, Nicolas Malevé, Lev Manovich, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Perle Møhl, Bruno Moreschi, Fabian Offert, Trevor Paglan, Jussi Parikka, Luciana Parisi, Matteo Pasquinelli, Gabriel Pereira, Carloalberto Treccani, Rebecca Uliasz, and Manuel van der Veen