25,151 research outputs found

    The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions

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    The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed, including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture. Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic, multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions, and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users, scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution

    Pathways to suicide among police in Rajasthan: perceptions and experiences of police personnel

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    Background: Evidence regarding the experience and perceptions of police personnel with suicide in South Asia is limited. This study explored the lived experiences and perceptions of suicide among police personnel in an Indian state. The focus was on explanations of and reasons for suicide. Methods: We conducted 20 qualitative interviews in 2021 with police of different ranks, guided by a topic guide. The reflexive thematic analysis approach was supported by the use of NVivo 12, a qualitative software package. Results: We explore three intersecting key themes around suicide in the police force, including: (1) the stressful police environment; (2) expectations of mental strength; and (3) police image and help-seeking. We discuss the tensions between these themes and how to address the challenges of supporting police personnel. Conclusions: To support and improve police personnel’s mental well-being training and support are needed but also broader changes at the organisational level. These need to take social and historical factors into account. An increased level of suicide and mental health literacy will not only benefit the police force but also the general public, and it would be very timely with recent changes in the Indian mental health and suicide policy context

    Concept Graph Neural Networks for Surgical Video Understanding

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    We constantly integrate our knowledge and understanding of the world to enhance our interpretation of what we see. This ability is crucial in application domains which entail reasoning about multiple entities and concepts, such as AI-augmented surgery. In this paper, we propose a novel way of integrating conceptual knowledge into temporal analysis tasks via temporal concept graph networks. In the proposed networks, a global knowledge graph is incorporated into the temporal analysis of surgical instances, learning the meaning of concepts and relations as they apply to the data. We demonstrate our results in surgical video data for tasks such as verification of critical view of safety, as well as estimation of Parkland grading scale. The results show that our method improves the recognition and detection of complex benchmarks as well as enables other analytic applications of interest

    Grasping nothing: a study of minimal ontologies and the sense of music

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    If music were to have a proper sense – one in which it is truly given – one might reasonably place this in sound and aurality. I contend, however, that no such sense exists; rather, the sense of music takes place, and it does so with the impossible. To this end, this thesis – which is a work of philosophy and music – advances an ontology of the impossible (i.e., it thinks the being of what, properly speaking, can have no being) and considers its implications for music, articulating how ontological aporias – of the event, of thinking the absolute, and of sovereignty’s dismemberment – imply senses of music that are anterior to sound. John Cage’s Silent Prayer, a nonwork he never composed, compels a rerethinking of silence on the basis of its contradictory status of existence; Florian Hecker et al.’s Speculative Solution offers a basis for thinking absolute music anew to the precise extent that it is a discourse of meaninglessness; and Manfred Werder’s [yearn] pieces exhibit exemplarily that music’s sense depends on the possibility of its counterfeiting. Inso-much as these accounts produce musical senses that take the place of sound, they are also understood to be performances of these pieces. Here, then, thought is music’s organon and its instrument

    Quantifying the retention of emotions across story retellings

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    Story retelling is a fundamental medium for the transmission of information between individuals and among social groups. Besides conveying factual information, stories also contain affective information. Though natural language processing techniques have advanced considerably in recent years, the extent to which machines can be trained to identify and track emotions across retellings is unknown. This study leverages the powerful RoBERTa model, based on a transformer architecture, to derive emotion-rich story embeddings from a unique dataset of 25,728 story retellings. The initial stories were centered around five emotional events (joy, sadness, embarrassment, risk, and disgust—though the stories did not contain these emotion words) and three intensities (high, medium, and low). Our results indicate (1) that RoBERTa can identify emotions in stories it was not trained on, (2) that the five emotions and their intensities are preserved when they are transmitted in the form of retellings, (3) that the emotions in stories are increasingly well-preserved as they experience additional retellings, and (4) that among the five emotions, risk and disgust are least well-preserved, compared with joy, sadness, and embarrassment. This work is a first step toward quantifying situation-driven emotions with machines

    Loop Closure Detection Based on Object-level Spatial Layout and Semantic Consistency

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    Visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems face challenges in detecting loop closure under the circumstance of large viewpoint changes. In this paper, we present an object-based loop closure detection method based on the spatial layout and semanic consistency of the 3D scene graph. Firstly, we propose an object-level data association approach based on the semantic information from semantic labels, intersection over union (IoU), object color, and object embedding. Subsequently, multi-view bundle adjustment with the associated objects is utilized to jointly optimize the poses of objects and cameras. We represent the refined objects as a 3D spatial graph with semantics and topology. Then, we propose a graph matching approach to select correspondence objects based on the structure layout and semantic property similarity of vertices' neighbors. Finally, we jointly optimize camera trajectories and object poses in an object-level pose graph optimization, which results in a globally consistent map. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed data association approach can construct more accurate 3D semantic maps, and our loop closure method is more robust than point-based and object-based methods in circumstances with large viewpoint changes

    Los compromisos de desempeño en la gestión educativa descentralizada en el Perú

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    La presente tesina tiene por tema los compromisos de desempeño en la gestión educativa descentralizada en el Perú. La temática en cuestión no es muy conocida por los diferentes actores del sector educativo, en especial por los órganos descentralizados, tales como las Direcciones Regionales de Educación (DRE) y las Unidades de Gestión Educativa Local (UGEL). Esta falta de conocimiento afecta los procesos de la gestión de estos órganos y por ende los resultados educativos esperados. La presente investigación plantea dos objetivos, el primero orientado a justificar la importancia de la gestión descentralizada en la administración educativa pública y el segundo a describir los beneficios de los compromisos de desempeño en la gestión descentralizada de la educación. El método aplicado en la investigación es de tipo documental, es decir, se inicia con la búsqueda y selección de documentos en base de datos confiables, para luego, analizar e interpretar la información, teniendo por producto final un documento debidamente organizado según las pautas y alcances de la redacción académica. Las conclusiones a las que llega la investigación son, en primer lugar, que los Compromisos de Desempeño que se aplican en la gestión educativa, se encuentran sustentados en un conjunto de normas y procedimientos dados a lo largo del tiempo y en el marco de una política pública, en segundo lugar, que estos compromisos permiten una mejor gestión por resultados para la oportuna y adecuada oferta de servicios educativos de calidad.The theme of this thesis is performance commitments in decentralized educational management in Peru. The issue in question is not well known by the different actors in the education sector, especially by decentralized bodies, such as the Regional Directorates of Education (DRE) and the Local Educational Management Units (UGEL). This lack of knowledge affects the management processes of these bodies and therefore the expected educational results. In this research, two objectives are proposed, the first aimed at justifying the importance of decentralized management in public educational administration and the second at describing the benefits of performance commitments in decentralized management of education. The method applied in the investigation is of a documentary type, that is, it begins with the search and selection of documents in a reliable database, and then analyzes and interprets the information, having as a final product a document duly organized according to the guidelines and scope of academic writing. The conclusions reached by this research are, first, that the Performance Commitments that are applied in educational management are supported by a set of rules and procedures given over time and within the framework of a public policy, secondly, that these commitments allow better resultsbased management for the timely and adequate supply of quality educational services. Keywords: decentralized management, decentralized educational management, performance commitments, education incentives

    Beyond (the cave of) pitch/loudness-equalization: A Commentary on Reymore (2021)

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    Traditional approaches in timbre research have often equalized sounds according to pitch, loudness, duration in order to study timbral differences across instruments. In a compact case study of the semantic qualities of the oboe and French horn, Reymore (2021) takes a different approach and considers timbral differences within musical instruments, which arise due to the covariation of timbre with the musical parameters of fundamental frequency (pitch) and playing effort (dynamic level). The study constitutes a timely contribution to a growing body of work on the covariation between timbre, pitch, and loudness. After providing a background and summary of important aspects of the target article, I elaborate on results from a recent complementary study that analyzed acoustical signal properties regarding that matter. Finally, I address three important issues in this context that appear to be worthy of future research

    Proverbs in the Footnote of the Meteor (d. 1069 AH) on the Interpretation of Al-Baydawi (d. 685 AH) - A Semantic Study

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    The study of proverbs, which is one of the arts of prose sayings, is an important study as it reveals the linguistic level at which the people of the language speak. Because the proverbs were spoken by the general public and their own, to express what they want, also because the proverb is the skill of Arabs in the pre-Islamic era and Islam, they depicted people's lives and their conditions. The Arabs summarized its word, saturated its meaning, and shortened its phrases, so its meaning became widespread. One of the most important motives that led me to my study was ``the semantic trend of proverbs in human qualities.'' It was in three sections, the first topic was the life of the meteor and its effects, the second topic was the positive qualities, and the third topic was negative attributes. As for the conclusion, it was the most important result that I reached in the research. Then the research was followed by a list of sources and references that were used in the study. And Praise be to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds. Keywords: At the foot of the Hassii Al Shahabh Study

    MACRO READING SKILLS INCORPORATED IN GAZA PREPARATORY STAGE ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS AND TEACHERS' PROBLEMS WITH INSTRUCTING THEM

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    The final goal of any reading activity is to extract the macro-level meaning (Sadeghi, 2021). The study aimed to examine macro-reading skills incorporated in Gaza preparatory stage English textbooks. The study also aimed at investigating the preparatory stage teachers' problems with instructing such skills. The researcher employed an evaluation checklist to examine macro-reading skills included in Palestinian preparatory stage English textbooks. Then, she conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 teachers teaching English to preparatory school students (seventh, eighth, and ninth graders) in Gaza so as to identify their problems with teaching macro-reading skills. Results indicated that the three English textbooks neglected many important macro skills of reading (e.g., identifying implied meaning in a passage, recognizing a sequence, making comparisons, and identifying the rhetorical form of the text). Additionally, the interview data revealed the participants' problems with teaching macro skills of reading (e.g., teachers' focus on micro skills at the expense of macro skills of reading and teachers' lack of knowledge about macro-reading skills).  Article visualizations
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