Working definitions in literature and tourism: a research guide

Working definitions in literature and tourism: A research guide is a volume that assembles a large set of working definitions aimed at all researchers in the field of literature and tourism. The entries are written by around 50 scholars and experts from all over the world, covering a wide range of concepts that go through the areas of literature and tourism and also, among others, culture, geography, anthropology, and methodologies.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

An Outlook into the Future of Egocentric Vision

What will the future be? We wonder! In this survey, we explore the gap between current research in egocentric vision and the ever-anticipated future, where wearable computing, with outward facing cameras and digital overlays, is expected to be integrated in our every day lives. To understand this gap, the article starts by envisaging the future through character-based stories, showcasing through examples the limitations of current technology. We then provide a mapping between this future and previously defined research tasks. For each task, we survey its seminal works, current state-of-the-art methodologies and available datasets, then reflect on shortcomings that limit its applicability to future research. Note that this survey focuses on software models for egocentric vision, independent of any specific hardware. The paper concludes with recommendations for areas of immediate explorations so as to unlock our path to the future always-on, personalised and life-enhancing egocentric vision.Comment: We invite comments, suggestions and corrections here: https://openreview.net/forum?id=V3974SUk1

A theoretical framework for conserving cultural values ofheritage buildings in Malaysia from the perspective offacilities management

This thesis aims to develop a Theoretical Framework for Conserving Cultural Values of Heritage Buildings in Malaysia from the perspective of Facilities Management. It proposes the establishment of Cultural Values of Heritage Buildings (CVHB) and Facilities Management (FM) in sustaining the physical condition, authenticity, and integrity of heritage buildings in Malaysia. The linkages between CVHB and FM will help to produce guidelines for conserving CVHB from the FM perspective (CVHB-FM) at the initial phase of conservation in Malaysia. The thesis adapted the Critical Realist approach in understanding the world by distinguishing the reality from factual and empirical, and recognising the social structures in the phenomenon. The research process “onion” was adapted to achieve the goal of the thesis. A Case-Study was conducted based on Malacca’s World Heritage City. A single holistic embedded approach was employed from the three levels of conservation practitioners who were strategic, tactical, and operational. The Matrix Thematic mapped the main elements of the study (CVHB, FM, conservation practitioners, and conservation documents) in a robust manner. Expert Interviews and Document Reviews were the main tools used in gathering the data. The raw qualitative data was then analysed via Content Analysis and Template Analysis. This thesis identifies the CVHB as being social, economic, political, historic, aesthetical, scientific, age, and ecological. These were associated and epistemologically constructed with FM perspectives of people, place, process, and technology. The embedded levels of respondents from the conservation practitioners have explained and elaborated on the connotation between the characteristics of CVHB and FM in developing the theoretical framework of the research. The thesis also provided insights into how the perspective of FM was associated with CVHB criteria in conserving a heritage building in Malaysia

3D Information Technologies in Cultural Heritage Preservation and Popularisation

This Special Issue of the journal Applied Sciences presents recent advances and developments in the use of digital 3D technologies to protect and preserve cultural heritage. While most of the articles focus on aspects of 3D scanning, modeling, and presenting in VR of cultural heritage objects from buildings to small artifacts and clothing, part of the issue is devoted to 3D sound utilization in the cultural heritage field

ECLAP 2012 Conference on Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment

It has been a long history of Information Technology innovations within the Cultural Heritage areas. The Performing arts has also been enforced with a number of new innovations which unveil a range of synergies and possibilities. Most of the technologies and innovations produced for digital libraries, media entertainment and education can be exploited in the field of performing arts, with adaptation and repurposing. Performing arts offer many interesting challenges and opportunities for research and innovations and exploitation of cutting edge research results from interdisciplinary areas. For these reasons, the ECLAP 2012 can be regarded as a continuation of past conferences such as AXMEDIS and WEDELMUSIC (both pressed by IEEE and FUP). ECLAP is an European Commission project to create a social network and media access service for performing arts institutions in Europe, to create the e-library of performing arts, exploiting innovative solutions coming from the ICT

History in the secondary school curriculum: Some considerations for drawing up a syllabus

It is obviously no longer acceptable to a large sector of educationalists to regard history as a necessary evil whose survival, although a constant source of complaint, is nevertheless conceded. It is both desirable and necessary, therefore, to provide reasons which will satisfy not only these critics but others less antagonistic to the subject, of the justification of the place of history in the secondary school curriculum. This study therefore, set itself the following objects: first, it aimed to put the case for the study of history in secondary schools. To do this it was necessary to summarise some of the conclusions regarding the nature of history. What is it that we are defending and how is it viewed by those who attack it? This done, it proposed to see what provisions are laid down by current curriculum theory regarding the criteria for the inclusion of subject matter in the secondary school curriculum; Moreover, it was recognised that by submitting history to the supposedly neutral arbitration of curriculum theory, certain limitations or prescriptions might be laid upon it if a favourable judgement were returned. In the event, justification was found in curriculum theory for the inclusion of history in the secondary school curriculum, and it did prove to be the case that, as a condition of that justification, a certain redirection of the focus of history courses was perhaps indicated. The second concern of this study, therefore, was to examine some of the other features which have bearing on the organisation of history curricula, and in particular those, the negligence of which had given rise to some of the current disillusionment with history as a secondary school subject. The areas of concern chosen were the syllabus itself, the influence of examinations, the capacity of the pupil to profit from a study of history, and the ability of the teacher to communicate such study profitably. These were the factors, it was felt, which imposed the greatest restraints upon the teaching of history, and no conclusions drawn from curriculum theory would be remotely viable unless they took these restraints into account. From the prescriptions offered in the first part of this study, with due regard to the limitations imposed upon them by the issues raised in the second part of this study, the third part proposed to offer some considerations for drawing up a history curriculum. These considerations, in the main, arose from a detailed expression of a set of objectives for history teaching. It was felt that it was a lack of this clarity that was responsible for much of the current dissatisfaction with the teaching of history. These objectives were linked to the learning experiences and content which were most urgently prescribed by the principles examined in part one : finally, procedures were suggested for evaluating with what success these objectives have been achieved. These objectives, learning experiences, content, and evaluation are intended, in sum, to form the basis for a secondary school history curriculum

The role of context in image annotation and recommendation

With the rise of smart phones, lifelogging devices (e.g. Google Glass) and popularity of image sharing websites (e.g. Flickr), users are capturing and sharing every aspect of their life online producing a wealth of visual content. Of these uploaded images, the majority are poorly annotated or exist in complete semantic isolation making the process of building retrieval systems difficult as one must firstly understand the meaning of an image in order to retrieve it. To alleviate this problem, many image sharing websites offer manual annotation tools which allow the user to “tag” their photos, however, these techniques are laborious and as a result have been poorly adopted; Sigurbjörnsson and van Zwol (2008) showed that 64% of images uploaded to Flickr are annotated with < 4 tags. Due to this, an entire body of research has focused on the automatic annotation of images (Hanbury, 2008; Smeulders et al., 2000; Zhang et al., 2012a) where one attempts to bridge the semantic gap between an image’s appearance and meaning e.g. the objects present. Despite two decades of research the semantic gap still largely exists and as a result automatic annotation models often offer unsatisfactory performance for industrial implementation. Further, these techniques can only annotate what they see, thus ignoring the “bigger picture” surrounding an image (e.g. its location, the event, the people present etc). Much work has therefore focused on building photo tag recommendation (PTR) methods which aid the user in the annotation process by suggesting tags related to those already present. These works have mainly focused on computing relationships between tags based on historical images e.g. that NY and timessquare co-exist in many images and are therefore highly correlated. However, tags are inherently noisy, sparse and ill-defined often resulting in poor PTR accuracy e.g. does NY refer to New York or New Year? This thesis proposes the exploitation of an image’s context which, unlike textual evidences, is always present, in order to alleviate this ambiguity in the tag recommendation process. Specifically we exploit the “what, who, where, when and how” of the image capture process in order to complement textual evidences in various photo tag recommendation and retrieval scenarios. In part II, we combine text, content-based (e.g. # of faces present) and contextual (e.g. day-of-the-week taken) signals for tag recommendation purposes, achieving up to a 75% improvement to precision@5 in comparison to a text-only TF-IDF baseline. We then consider external knowledge sources (i.e. Wikipedia & Twitter) as an alternative to (slower moving) Flickr in order to build recommendation models on, showing that similar accuracy could be achieved on these faster moving, yet entirely textual, datasets. In part II, we also highlight the merits of diversifying tag recommendation lists before discussing at length various problems with existing automatic image annotation and photo tag recommendation evaluation collections. In part III, we propose three new image retrieval scenarios, namely “visual event summarisation”, “image popularity prediction” and “lifelog summarisation”. In the first scenario, we attempt to produce a rank of relevant and diverse images for various news events by (i) removing irrelevant images such memes and visual duplicates (ii) before semantically clustering images based on the tweets in which they were originally posted. Using this approach, we were able to achieve over 50% precision for images in the top 5 ranks. In the second retrieval scenario, we show that by combining contextual and content-based features from images, we are able to predict if it will become “popular” (or not) with 74% accuracy, using an SVM classifier. Finally, in chapter 9 we employ blur detection and perceptual-hash clustering in order to remove noisy images from lifelogs, before combining visual and geo-temporal signals in order to capture a user’s “key moments” within their day. We believe that the results of this thesis show an important step towards building effective image retrieval models when there lacks sufficient textual content (i.e. a cold start)