99,424 research outputs found
Cultural representations of mental illness in contemporary Japan
This paper presents the results of a research project aimed at studying the cultural representations of mental illness and related interventions models in contemporary Japan, and providing the basis for a comparison between Japanese and Italian mental health cultures. The research methodology is based on interviews with scholars and professionals from multiple disciplinary areas and fields of practice, in order to analyze the interactions between medical, social sciences’ and humanities’ discourse on mental illness. The results highlight the significance of home custody within the modernization of the country, between Edo and Meiji periods; the cultural frameworks of contemporary psychiatry’s action; what anti-psychiatry and the ‘critical’ reflection on mental illness represented within the academic debate; the new demands and potentialities connected to the spread of psychology within the mental health sector; remarkably new experiences of social integration with the contribution of arts
Water and Nutrition: Harmonizing actions for the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition and the United Nations Water Action Decade
Progress for both SDG 2 and SDG 6 has been unsatisfactory, with several indicators worsening over time,
including an increase in the number of undernourished, overweight and obese people, as well as rapid increases
in the number of people at risk of severe water shortages. This lack of progress is exacerbated by climate
change and growing regional and global inequities in food and water security, including access to good quality
diets, leading to increased violation of the human rights to water and food.
Reversing these trends will require a much greater effort on the part of water, food security, and nutrition
communities, including stronger performances by the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition and the
United Nations International Decade for Action on Water for Sustainable Development. To date, increased
collaboration by these two landmark initiatives is lacking, as neither work program has systematically
explored linkages or possibilities for joint interventions.
Collaboration is especially imperative given the fundamental challenges that characterize the promotion of
one priority over another. Without coordination across the water, food security, and nutrition communities,
actions toward achieving SDG2 on zero hunger may contribute to further degradation of the world’s water
resources and as such, further derail achievement of the UN Decade of Action on Water and SDG 6 on water
and sanitation. Conversely, actions to enhance SDG 6 may well reduce progress on the UN Decade of Action
on Nutrition and SDG 2.
This paper reviews these challenges as part of a broader analysis of the complex web of pathways that link
water, food security and nutrition outcomes. Climate change and the growing demand for water resources are
also considered, given their central role in shaping future water and nutrition security. The main conclusions
are presented as three recommendations focused on potential avenues to deal with the complexity of the
water-nutrition nexus, and to optimize outcomes
Combining the conservation of biodiversity with the provision of ecosystem services in urban green infrastructure planning. Critical features arising from a case study in the metropolitan area of Rome
A large number of green infrastructure (GI) projects have recently been proposed, planned and implemented in European cities following the adoption of the GI strategy by the EU Commission in 2013. Although this policy tool is closely related to biodiversity conservation targets, some doubts have arisen as regards the ability of current urban GI to provide beneficial effects not only for human societies but also for the ecological systems that host them. The aim of this work is to review the features that should be considered critical when searching for solutions that simultaneously support biodiversity and guarantee the provision of ecosystem services (ES) in urban areas. Starting from a case study in the metropolitan area of Rome, we highlight the role of urban trees and forests as proxies for overall biodiversity and as main ecosystem service providers. We look beyond the individual functional features of plant species and vegetation communities to promote the biogeographic representativity, ecological coherence and landscape connectivity of new or restored GI elements
Im2Flow: Motion Hallucination from Static Images for Action Recognition
Existing methods to recognize actions in static images take the images at
their face value, learning the appearances---objects, scenes, and body
poses---that distinguish each action class. However, such models are deprived
of the rich dynamic structure and motions that also define human activity. We
propose an approach that hallucinates the unobserved future motion implied by a
single snapshot to help static-image action recognition. The key idea is to
learn a prior over short-term dynamics from thousands of unlabeled videos,
infer the anticipated optical flow on novel static images, and then train
discriminative models that exploit both streams of information. Our main
contributions are twofold. First, we devise an encoder-decoder convolutional
neural network and a novel optical flow encoding that can translate a static
image into an accurate flow map. Second, we show the power of hallucinated flow
for recognition, successfully transferring the learned motion into a standard
two-stream network for activity recognition. On seven datasets, we demonstrate
the power of the approach. It not only achieves state-of-the-art accuracy for
dense optical flow prediction, but also consistently enhances recognition of
actions and dynamic scenes.Comment: Published in CVPR 2018, project page:
http://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/im2flow
Energy-based Self-attentive Learning of Abstractive Communities for Spoken Language Understanding
Abstractive community detection is an important spoken language understanding
task, whose goal is to group utterances in a conversation according to whether
they can be jointly summarized by a common abstractive sentence. This paper
provides a novel approach to this task. We first introduce a neural contextual
utterance encoder featuring three types of self-attention mechanisms. We then
train it using the siamese and triplet energy-based meta-architectures.
Experiments on the AMI corpus show that our system outperforms multiple
energy-based and non-energy based baselines from the state-of-the-art. Code and
data are publicly available.Comment: Update baseline
Social Scene Understanding: End-to-End Multi-Person Action Localization and Collective Activity Recognition
We present a unified framework for understanding human social behaviors in
raw image sequences. Our model jointly detects multiple individuals, infers
their social actions, and estimates the collective actions with a single
feed-forward pass through a neural network. We propose a single architecture
that does not rely on external detection algorithms but rather is trained
end-to-end to generate dense proposal maps that are refined via a novel
inference scheme. The temporal consistency is handled via a person-level
matching Recurrent Neural Network. The complete model takes as input a sequence
of frames and outputs detections along with the estimates of individual actions
and collective activities. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our
algorithm on multiple publicly available benchmarks
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