Laser Scanner Technology

Laser scanning technology plays an important role in the science and engineering arena. The aim of the scanning is usually to create a digital version of the object surface. Multiple scanning is sometimes performed via multiple cameras to obtain all slides of the scene under study. Usually, optical tests are used to elucidate the power of laser scanning technology in the modern industry and in the research laboratories. This book describes the recent contributions reported by laser scanning technology in different areas around the world. The main topics of laser scanning described in this volume include full body scanning, traffic management, 3D survey process, bridge monitoring, tracking of scanning, human sensing, three-dimensional modelling, glacier monitoring and digitizing heritage monuments

Combining shape and color. A bottom-up approach to evaluate object similarities

The objective of the present work is to develop a bottom-up approach to estimate the similarity between two unknown objects. Given a set of digital images, we want to identify the main objects and to determine whether they are similar or not. In the last decades many object recognition and classification strategies, driven by higher-level activities, have been successfully developed. The peculiarity of this work, instead, is the attempt to work without any training phase nor a priori knowledge about the objects or their context. Indeed, if we suppose to be in an unstructured and completely unknown environment, usually we have to deal with novel objects never seen before; under these hypothesis, it would be very useful to define some kind of similarity among the instances under analysis (even if we do not know which category they belong to). To obtain this result, we start observing that human beings use a lot of information and analyze very different aspects to achieve object recognition: shape, position, color and so on. Hence we try to reproduce part of this process, combining different methodologies (each working on a specific characteristic) to obtain a more meaningful idea of similarity. Mainly inspired by the human conception of representation, we identify two main characteristics and we called them the implicit and explicit models. The term "explicit" is used to account for the main traits of what, in the human representation, connotes a principal source of information regarding a category, a sort of a visual synecdoche (corresponding to the shape); the term "implicit", on the other hand, accounts for the object rendered by shadows and lights, colors and volumetric impression, a sort of a visual metonymy (corresponding to the chromatic characteristics). During the work, we had to face several problems and we tried to define specific solutions. In particular, our contributions are about: - defining a bottom-up approach for image segmentation (which does not rely on any a priori knowledge); - combining different features to evaluate objects similarity (particularly focusiing on shape and color); - defining a generic distance (similarity) measure between objects (without any attempt to identify the possible category they belong to); - analyzing the consequences of using the number of modes as an estimation of the number of mixture’s components (in the Expectation-Maximization algorithm)

LIPIcs, Volume 274, ESA 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 274, ESA 2023, Complete Volum

LIPIcs, Volume 258, SoCG 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 258, SoCG 2023, Complete Volum

Modular and Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning of Language Models

Transfer learning has recently become the dominant paradigm of natural language processing. Models pre-trained on unlabeled data can be fine-tuned for downstream tasks based on only a handful of examples. A long-term goal is to develop models that acquire new information at scale without incurring negative transfer and that generalize systematically to new settings. Modular deep learning has emerged as a promising solution to these challenges, by updating parameter-efficient units of computation locally and asynchronously. These units are often implemented as modules that are interlaid between layers, interpolated with pre-trained parameters, or concatenated to the inputs. Conditioned on tasks or examples, information is routed to multiple modules through a fixed or learned function, followed by an aggregation of their outputs. This property enables compositional generalization, by disentangling knowledge and recombining it in new ways. In this thesis, we provide a unified view of modularity in natural language processing, spanning across four dimensions; specifically, we disentangle modularity into computation functions, routing functions, aggregation functions, and the training setting. Along those axes, we propose multiple contributions: a research framework which encompasses all dimensions; a novel attention-based aggregation function which combines the knowledge stored within different modules; routing mechanisms for out of distribution generalization in cross-lingual transfer scenarios; a dataset and modular training strategies for multimodal and multilingual transfer learning; a modular pre-training strategy to tackle catastrophic interference of heterogeneous data

Studies related to the process of program development

The submitted work consists of a collection of publications arising from research carried out at Rhodes University (1970-1980) and at Heriot-Watt University (1980-1992). The theme of this research is the process of program development, i.e. the process of creating a computer program to solve some particular problem. The papers presented cover a number of different topics which relate to this process, viz. (a) Programming methodology programming. (b) Properties of programming languages. aspects of structured. (c) Formal specification of programming languages. (d) Compiler techniques. (e) Declarative programming languages. (f) Program development aids. (g) Automatic program generation. (h) Databases. (i) Algorithms and applications