Sustainability in Business: Adapting to New Trends

Environmental sustainability is a concept that businesses should incorporate in order to maximize production, increase competitiveness in their respective markets, and enhance their longevity. To address and incorporate environmental and sustainability concerns into business practice, a concept call the triple bottom line was developed by John Elkington. As Timothy Slaper and Tanya Hall explain for the Indiana Business Review (2011), Elkington contrived the idea of the triple bottom line to include three primary factors: economic, environmental, and social, commonly referred to as the “three P’s” as profit, planet, and people (p. 4). Businesses that emphasize these three factors equally instead of financial gain and superiority, they argue, attain better success both in the short and long term

Recuperação multimodal e interativa de informação orientada por diversidade

Orientador: Ricardo da Silva TorresTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Os métodos de Recuperação da Informação, especialmente considerando-se dados multimídia, evoluíram para a integração de múltiplas fontes de evidência na análise de relevância de itens em uma tarefa de busca. Neste contexto, para atenuar a distância semântica entre as propriedades de baixo nível extraídas do conteúdo dos objetos digitais e os conceitos semânticos de alto nível (objetos, categorias, etc.) e tornar estes sistemas adaptativos às diferentes necessidades dos usuários, modelos interativos que consideram o usuário mais próximo do processo de recuperação têm sido propostos, permitindo a sua interação com o sistema, principalmente por meio da realimentação de relevância implícita ou explícita. Analogamente, a promoção de diversidade surgiu como uma alternativa para lidar com consultas ambíguas ou incompletas. Adicionalmente, muitos trabalhos têm tratado a ideia de minimização do esforço requerido do usuário em fornecer julgamentos de relevância, à medida que mantém níveis aceitáveis de eficácia. Esta tese aborda, propõe e analisa experimentalmente métodos de recuperação da informação interativos e multimodais orientados por diversidade. Este trabalho aborda de forma abrangente a literatura acerca da recuperação interativa da informação e discute sobre os avanços recentes, os grandes desafios de pesquisa e oportunidades promissoras de trabalho. Nós propusemos e avaliamos dois métodos de aprimoramento do balanço entre relevância e diversidade, os quais integram múltiplas informações de imagens, tais como: propriedades visuais, metadados textuais, informação geográfica e descritores de credibilidade dos usuários. Por sua vez, como integração de técnicas de recuperação interativa e de promoção de diversidade, visando maximizar a cobertura de múltiplas interpretações/aspectos de busca e acelerar a transferência de informação entre o usuário e o sistema, nós propusemos e avaliamos um método multimodal de aprendizado para ranqueamento utilizando realimentação de relevância sobre resultados diversificados. Nossa análise experimental mostra que o uso conjunto de múltiplas fontes de informação teve impacto positivo nos algoritmos de balanceamento entre relevância e diversidade. Estes resultados sugerem que a integração de filtragem e re-ranqueamento multimodais é eficaz para o aumento da relevância dos resultados e também como mecanismo de potencialização dos métodos de diversificação. Além disso, com uma análise experimental minuciosa, nós investigamos várias questões de pesquisa relacionadas à possibilidade de aumento da diversidade dos resultados e a manutenção ou até mesmo melhoria da sua relevância em sessões interativas. Adicionalmente, nós analisamos como o esforço em diversificar afeta os resultados gerais de uma sessão de busca e como diferentes abordagens de diversificação se comportam para diferentes modalidades de dados. Analisando a eficácia geral e também em cada iteração de realimentação de relevância, nós mostramos que introduzir diversidade nos resultados pode prejudicar resultados iniciais, enquanto que aumenta significativamente a eficácia geral em uma sessão de busca, considerando-se não apenas a relevância e diversidade geral, mas também o quão cedo o usuário é exposto ao mesmo montante de itens relevantes e nível de diversidadeAbstract: Information retrieval methods, especially considering multimedia data, have evolved towards the integration of multiple sources of evidence in the analysis of the relevance of items considering a given user search task. In this context, for attenuating the semantic gap between low-level features extracted from the content of the digital objects and high-level semantic concepts (objects, categories, etc.) and making the systems adaptive to different user needs, interactive models have brought the user closer to the retrieval loop allowing user-system interaction mainly through implicit or explicit relevance feedback. Analogously, diversity promotion has emerged as an alternative for tackling ambiguous or underspecified queries. Additionally, several works have addressed the issue of minimizing the required user effort on providing relevance assessments while keeping an acceptable overall effectiveness. This thesis discusses, proposes, and experimentally analyzes multimodal and interactive diversity-oriented information retrieval methods. This work, comprehensively covers the interactive information retrieval literature and also discusses about recent advances, the great research challenges, and promising research opportunities. We have proposed and evaluated two relevance-diversity trade-off enhancement work-flows, which integrate multiple information from images, such as: visual features, textual metadata, geographic information, and user credibility descriptors. In turn, as an integration of interactive retrieval and diversity promotion techniques, for maximizing the coverage of multiple query interpretations/aspects and speeding up the information transfer between the user and the system, we have proposed and evaluated a multimodal learning-to-rank method trained with relevance feedback over diversified results. Our experimental analysis shows that the joint usage of multiple information sources positively impacted the relevance-diversity balancing algorithms. Our results also suggest that the integration of multimodal-relevance-based filtering and reranking was effective on improving result relevance and also boosted diversity promotion methods. Beyond it, with a thorough experimental analysis we have investigated several research questions related to the possibility of improving result diversity and keeping or even improving relevance in interactive search sessions. Moreover, we analyze how much the diversification effort affects overall search session results and how different diversification approaches behave for the different data modalities. By analyzing the overall and per feedback iteration effectiveness, we show that introducing diversity may harm initial results whereas it significantly enhances the overall session effectiveness not only considering the relevance and diversity, but also how early the user is exposed to the same amount of relevant items and diversityDoutoradoCiência da ComputaçãoDoutor em Ciência da ComputaçãoP-4388/2010140977/2012-0CAPESCNP

Study and Investigations of archaeobotanical remains from Tutankhamun tomb

Abstract: An immense ―natural‖ treasure was recently recovered from the storerooms of the Archaeological Museum of Cairo. Once moved to the new seat and museum, the Grand Egyptian Museum, it was time to start studying this precious ―rubbish‖ recovered one century ago, at the end of the archaeological excavation of the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun by Howard Carter‘s team. The study focuses on carpological remains swiped from the surfaces of the tomb and deposited in a wooden box in 1933. The carpological remains retrieved from the box are still in excellent condition, and allowed identification at a species level. Identified remains contained fruits and seeds belonging to 24 species belonging to 14 different plant families. New Species found in all the tombs of the Eighteenth Dynasty include faba bean (Vicia faba L.) and onion (Allium cepa L.). Egyptian luffa / sponge gourd (Luffa aegyptiaca Mill.) is a total novelty. In this work I started analyzing the plant remains, using only a qualitative approach. The restrictions caused by the pandemic prevented, in fact, a continuous laboratory work and the complete identification of the so far extracted macroremains

Charms and Charming

In the book are presented studies of 18 renowned researchers focussing on the verbal aspects of everyday magic, placing in the centre the richest and most poetic manifestation of verbal magic – the charm or incantatio. Incantations are in Europe well spread folklore genre, which contain very old magical elemrnts. The book covers wide spectrum of regions, from United Kingdom to Russia and Iran, and includes also Slovenia. The researchers have devoted their attention to phenomenological and theoretical studies of incantatio, and have discussed various topics, from the origin of charms and ancient European magical practices, to the receptions and diffusions of different types of charms

Waste Management in Ovita. An Underserved Relocated Settlement in Dehiwala - Mt. Lavinia Municipal Council

Based on a representative survey and in-depth interviews with residents and other stakeholders, this book by Fernando and De Silva provides detailed insights into one such underserved settlement, referred to by the pseudonym of Ovita, located in the Colombo metropolitan area. The detailed study provides glimpses of more general political and social processes in Ovita (and other informal settlements in Sri Lanka) that are marked by patron-client relationships. Using the case of Ovita, Fernando and De Silva also describe waste management beyond the municipal system showing a case of social and environmental inequality and injustice in an underserved settlement while, pointing to problematic issues related to waste labor and human dignity. Given the detailed analysis and the novel insights into an underserved as well as understudied neighborhood, we trust that the present book will be useful for government uthorities, civil society and grassroots actors, and private parties to improve solid waste management in informal settlements in Sri Lanka and to improve the working conditions of both formal and informal waste workers

Enhancing Inter-Document Similarity Using Sub Max

Document similarity, a core theme in Information Retrieval (IR), is a machine learning (ML) task associated with natural language processing (NLP). It is a measure of the distance between two documents given a set of rules. For the purpose of this thesis, two documents are similar if they are semantically alike, and describe similar concepts. While document similarity can be applied to multiple tasks, we focus our work on the accuracy of models in detecting referenced papers as similar documents using their sub max similarity. Multiple approaches have been used to determine the similarity of documents in regards to literature reviews. Some of such approaches use the number of similar citations, the similarity between the body of text, and the figures present in those documents. This researcher hypothesized that documents with sections of high similarity(sub max) but a global low similarity are prone to being overlooked by existing models as the global score of the documents are used to measure similarity. In this study, we aim to detect, measure, and show the similarity of documents based on the maximum similarity of their subsections. The sub max of any two given documents is the subsections of those documents with the highest similarity. By comparing subsections of the documents in our corpus and using the sub max, we were able to improve the performance of some models by over 100%

Materialising Contagion: An Archaeology of Sydney's North Head Quarantine Station

North Head Quarantine Station was established in the 1830s as a means to protect the population of Sydney, Australia, from the threat of communicable diseases such as plague, smallpox, cholera and typhus. The practice of maritime quarantine in Sydney throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries coincided with radical changes in the way that disease transmission was understood, as earlier ideas such as noxious ‘miasmas’ bound to localities were supplanted by modern germ theory. The Quarantine Station bore witness to these transitions, and as such is an ideal case study through which to explore the archaeological signature of evolving understandings of – and responses to – disease. Within the archaeological literature, disease is primarily accessed and configured through human remains. The present research builds on this scholarship by considering the ways in which objects and places, as well as people, have been materially transformed via their historical associations with infection. This project examines how disease has been materialised at quarantine sites, and remains interpretable through the archaeological assemblage. Drawing on relational concepts including DeLanda’s (2006) assemblage theory, my research adopts a multiscalar approach, beginning with an examination of the landscape of North Head and the ways in which disease has been located and controlled within it. The discussion then moves to the level of the collection, drawing out the taphonomic processes that have brought objects into and out of association with the institution. Finally, individual objects are interrogated in order to evaluate the direct relationships between object and disease – as objects that reveal or erase disease, or objects that are themselves diseased. These scales are then drawn together to consider what constitutes an archaeology of quarantine, and the role of disease within this institutional assemblage

A picture is worth a thousand words : content-based image retrieval techniques

In my dissertation I investigate techniques for improving the state of the art in content-based image retrieval. To place my work into context, I highlight the current trends and challenges in my field by analyzing over 200 recent articles. Next, I propose a novel paradigm called __artificial imagination__, which gives the retrieval system the power to imagine and think along with the user in terms of what she is looking for. I then introduce a new user interface for visualizing and exploring image collections, empowering the user to navigate large collections based on her own needs and preferences, while simultaneously providing her with an accurate sense of what the database has to offer. In the later chapters I present work dealing with millions of images and focus in particular on high-performance techniques that minimize memory and computational use for both near-duplicate image detection and web search. Finally, I show early work on a scene completion-based image retrieval engine, which synthesizes realistic imagery that matches what the user has in mind.LEI Universiteit LeidenNWOImagin

Special Libraries, Spring 1985

Volume 76, Issue 2https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1985/1001/thumbnail.jp