15,985 research outputs found
Estimating snow cover from publicly available images
In this paper we study the problem of estimating snow cover in mountainous
regions, that is, the spatial extent of the earth surface covered by snow. We
argue that publicly available visual content, in the form of user generated
photographs and image feeds from outdoor webcams, can both be leveraged as
additional measurement sources, complementing existing ground, satellite and
airborne sensor data. To this end, we describe two content acquisition and
processing pipelines that are tailored to such sources, addressing the specific
challenges posed by each of them, e.g., identifying the mountain peaks,
filtering out images taken in bad weather conditions, handling varying
illumination conditions. The final outcome is summarized in a snow cover index,
which indicates for a specific mountain and day of the year, the fraction of
visible area covered by snow, possibly at different elevations. We created a
manually labelled dataset to assess the accuracy of the image snow covered area
estimation, achieving 90.0% precision at 91.1% recall. In addition, we show
that seasonal trends related to air temperature are captured by the snow cover
index.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedi
Spartan Daily September 25, 2018
Volume 151, Issue 15https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2018/1057/thumbnail.jp
Listening to Garhwali Popular Music in and out of Place
Listening to popular music is a central means by which people construct their place in the world, both literally and figuratively. For Garhwalis living inside and outside of the Himalayas, listening to vernacular popular music has been one way in which they imagine themselves to be part of a specific place and a larger cultural region. Displacement is a major theme of these songs, and practices of listening underline the mobile and trans-local aspects of life for many Garhwalis. In order to assess the impact of popular music consumption on notions of place, and vice versa, this article provides ethnographic vignettes of musical consumption in Garhwali villages and small towns, Garhwali pilgrimage sites, and migrant contexts outside of Garhwal. I suggest that much of the emotional salience and enduring popularity of Garhwali gīt derive from the emotional and physical displacement of married women and male migrants
Online Popularity and Topical Interests through the Lens of Instagram
Online socio-technical systems can be studied as proxy of the real world to
investigate human behavior and social interactions at scale. Here we focus on
Instagram, a media-sharing online platform whose popularity has been rising up
to gathering hundred millions users. Instagram exhibits a mixture of features
including social structure, social tagging and media sharing. The network of
social interactions among users models various dynamics including
follower/followee relations and users' communication by means of
posts/comments. Users can upload and tag media such as photos and pictures, and
they can "like" and comment each piece of information on the platform. In this
work we investigate three major aspects on our Instagram dataset: (i) the
structural characteristics of its network of heterogeneous interactions, to
unveil the emergence of self organization and topically-induced community
structure; (ii) the dynamics of content production and consumption, to
understand how global trends and popular users emerge; (iii) the behavior of
users labeling media with tags, to determine how they devote their attention
and to explore the variety of their topical interests. Our analysis provides
clues to understand human behavior dynamics on socio-technical systems,
specifically users and content popularity, the mechanisms of users'
interactions in online environments and how collective trends emerge from
individuals' topical interests.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figures, Proceedings of ACM Hypertext 201
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