Training a Convolutional Neural Network for Appearance-Invariant Place Recognition

Place recognition is one of the most challenging problems in computer vision, and has become a key part in mobile robotics and autonomous driving applications for performing loop closure in visual SLAM systems. Moreover, the difficulty of recognizing a revisited location increases with appearance changes caused, for instance, by weather or illumination variations, which hinders the long-term application of such algorithms in real environments. In this paper we present a convolutional neural network (CNN), trained for the first time with the purpose of recognizing revisited locations under severe appearance changes, which maps images to a low dimensional space where Euclidean distances represent place dissimilarity. In order for the network to learn the desired invariances, we train it with triplets of images selected from datasets which present a challenging variability in visual appearance. The triplets are selected in such way that two samples are from the same location and the third one is taken from a different place. We validate our system through extensive experimentation, where we demonstrate better performance than state-of-art algorithms in a number of popular datasets

The Public and Public Education

This Cousins Research Group report includes two articles by Kettering Foundation president David Mathews that were published previously. "The Public for Public Schools Is Slipping" was first published in Education Week in 1995. The second piece, "Putting the Public Back into Public Education: An Old-Fashioned Remedy for a Troubled Relationship," appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of the National Civic Review. Both pieces look at the growing disconnect between the schools and the public they serve. They suggest that the usual institutional responses to repair the troubled relationship (e.g., standardized tests or better public relations) have failed to remedy the problem. The key to bridging the divide between the schools and the public may actually be found on the citizens' side. Mathews observes, "Citizens themselves and their organizations have to be actors who bring educational resources in the community to complement what the schools do.

Arab EFL Learners' Acquisition of Modals

This paper investigates Arab EFL learners' acquisition of modal verbs. The study used a questionnaire, which comprises two versions, testing students' mastery of modals at the levels of both recognition and production. The questionnaire was distributed to 50 English major university students who had studied English for 12-14 years and who had scored 500 or more on the TOEFL. The findings of the study show that the overall performance of the subjects in the study was quite low. The study established a hierarchy of difficulty and identified the major causes of difficulty in the use of modals

A geo-temporal information extraction service for processing descriptive metadata in digital libraries

In the context of digital map libraries, resources are usually described according to metadata records that define the relevant subject, location, time-span, format and keywords. On what concerns locations and time-spans, metadata records are often incomplete or they provide information in a way that is not machine-understandable (e.g. textual descriptions). This paper presents techniques for extracting geotemporal information from text, using relatively simple text mining methods that leverage on a Web gazetteer service. The idea is to go from human-made geotemporal referencing (i.e. using place and period names in textual expressions) into geo-spatial coordinates and time-spans. A prototype system, implementing the proposed methods, is described in detail. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approaches

The sound of higher education: sensuous epistemologies and the mess of knowing

The soundscape of higher education is changing. The changes reflect an age of managerialism and an age of uncertainty. These changes call on us to give up on some of the ways we have understood knowledge in the past and prompt us to find news ways of recognizing and understanding the complexities facing higher education research. This paper explores the possibilities opened up by perceptions of higher education gained through the senses, especially through the auditory sense. Taking the case of modern languages it t some of the contours of the soundscape of higher education – its grief and its diversity