16,048 research outputs found
Group Membership Prediction
The group membership prediction (GMP) problem involves predicting whether or
not a collection of instances share a certain semantic property. For instance,
in kinship verification given a collection of images, the goal is to predict
whether or not they share a {\it familial} relationship. In this context we
propose a novel probability model and introduce latent {\em view-specific} and
{\em view-shared} random variables to jointly account for the view-specific
appearance and cross-view similarities among data instances. Our model posits
that data from each view is independent conditioned on the shared variables.
This postulate leads to a parametric probability model that decomposes group
membership likelihood into a tensor product of data-independent parameters and
data-dependent factors. We propose learning the data-independent parameters in
a discriminative way with bilinear classifiers, and test our prediction
algorithm on challenging visual recognition tasks such as multi-camera person
re-identification and kinship verification. On most benchmark datasets, our
method can significantly outperform the current state-of-the-art.Comment: accepted for ICCV 201
Society seen through the prism of space: outline of a theory of society and space
Two questions challenge the student of space and society above all others: will new technologies
change the spatial basis of society ? And if so, will this have an impact on society itself ?
For the urbanist, these two questions crystallise into one: what will the future of cities have
to do with their past ? Too often these questions are dealt with as though they were only
matters of technology. But they are much more than that. They are deep and difficult questions
about the interdependence of technology, space and society that we do not yet have the
theoretical apparatus to answer. We know that previous �revolutions� in technology such as
agriculture, urbanism and industrialisation associated radical changes in space with no less
radical changes in social institutions. But we do not know how far these linkages were
contingent or necessary. We do not, in short, have a theory of society and space adequate to
account for where we are now, and therefore we have no reasonable theoretical base for
speculating about the future. In this paper, I suggest that a major reason for this theoretical
deficit is that most previous attempts to build a theory of society and space have looked at
society and tried to find space in its output. The result has been that the constructive role of
space in creating and and sustaining society has not been brought to the fore, or if it has, only
in a way which is too general to permit the detailed specification of mechanisms. In this
paper I try to reverse the normal order of things this by looking first at space and trying the
discern society through space: by looking at society through the prism of space. Through this
I try to define key mechanisms linking space to society and then use these to suggest how the
questions about the future of cities and societies might be better defined
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