25,088 research outputs found
A Content-Analysis Approach for Exploring Usability Problems in a Collaborative Virtual Environment
As Virtual Reality (VR) products are becoming more widely available in the consumer market, improving the usability of these devices and environments is crucial. In this paper, we are going to introduce a framework for the usability evaluation of collaborative 3D virtual environments based on a large-scale usability study of a mixedmodality collaborative VR system. We first review previous literature about important usability issues related to collaborative 3D virtual environments, supplemented with our research in which we conducted 122 interviews after participants solved a collaborative virtual reality task. Then, building on the literature review and our results, we extend previous usability frameworks. We identified twelve different usability problems, and based on the causes of the problems, we grouped them into three main categories: VR environment-, device interaction-, and task-specific problems. The framework can be used to guide the usability evaluation of collaborative VR environments
Pervasive Displays Research: What's Next?
Reports on the 7th ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays that took place from June 6-8 in Munich, Germany
Some resonances between Eastern thought and Integral Biomathics in the framework of the WLIMES formalism for modelling living systems
Forty-two years ago, Capra published “The Tao of Physics” (Capra, 1975). In this book (page 17) he writes: “The exploration of the atomic and subatomic world in the twentieth century has …. necessitated a radical revision of many of our basic concepts” and that, unlike ‘classical’ physics, the sub-atomic and quantum “modern physics” shows resonances with Eastern thoughts and “leads us to a view of the world which is very similar to the views held by mystics of all ages and traditions.“ This article stresses an analogous situation in biology with respect to a new theoretical approach for studying living systems, Integral Biomathics (IB), which also exhibits some resonances with Eastern thought. Stepping on earlier research in cybernetics1 and theoretical biology,2 IB has been developed since 2011 by over 100 scientists from a number of disciplines who have been exploring a substantial set of theoretical frameworks. From that effort, the need for a robust core model utilizing advanced mathematics and computation adequate for understanding the behavior of organisms as dynamic wholes was identified. At this end, the authors of this article have proposed WLIMES (Ehresmann and Simeonov, 2012), a formal theory for modeling living systems integrating both the Memory Evolutive Systems (Ehresmann and Vanbremeersch, 2007) and the Wandering Logic Intelligence (Simeonov, 2002b). Its principles will be recalled here with respect to their
resonances to Eastern thought
SINet: A Scale-insensitive Convolutional Neural Network for Fast Vehicle Detection
Vision-based vehicle detection approaches achieve incredible success in
recent years with the development of deep convolutional neural network (CNN).
However, existing CNN based algorithms suffer from the problem that the
convolutional features are scale-sensitive in object detection task but it is
common that traffic images and videos contain vehicles with a large variance of
scales. In this paper, we delve into the source of scale sensitivity, and
reveal two key issues: 1) existing RoI pooling destroys the structure of small
scale objects, 2) the large intra-class distance for a large variance of scales
exceeds the representation capability of a single network. Based on these
findings, we present a scale-insensitive convolutional neural network (SINet)
for fast detecting vehicles with a large variance of scales. First, we present
a context-aware RoI pooling to maintain the contextual information and original
structure of small scale objects. Second, we present a multi-branch decision
network to minimize the intra-class distance of features. These lightweight
techniques bring zero extra time complexity but prominent detection accuracy
improvement. The proposed techniques can be equipped with any deep network
architectures and keep them trained end-to-end. Our SINet achieves
state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and speed (up to 37 FPS) on
the KITTI benchmark and a new highway dataset, which contains a large variance
of scales and extremely small objects.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
(T-ITS
GAN-based Virtual Re-Staining: A Promising Solution for Whole Slide Image Analysis
Histopathological cancer diagnosis is based on visual examination of stained
tissue slides. Hematoxylin and eosin (H\&E) is a standard stain routinely
employed worldwide. It is easy to acquire and cost effective, but cells and
tissue components show low-contrast with varying tones of dark blue and pink,
which makes difficult visual assessments, digital image analysis, and
quantifications. These limitations can be overcome by IHC staining of target
proteins of the tissue slide. IHC provides a selective, high-contrast imaging
of cells and tissue components, but their use is largely limited by a
significantly more complex laboratory processing and high cost. We proposed a
conditional CycleGAN (cCGAN) network to transform the H\&E stained images into
IHC stained images, facilitating virtual IHC staining on the same slide. This
data-driven method requires only a limited amount of labelled data but will
generate pixel level segmentation results. The proposed cCGAN model improves
the original network \cite{zhu_unpaired_2017} by adding category conditions and
introducing two structural loss functions, which realize a multi-subdomain
translation and improve the translation accuracy as well. % need to give
reasons here. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the
original method in unpaired image translation with multi-subdomains. We also
explore the potential of unpaired images to image translation method applied on
other histology images related tasks with different staining techniques
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