Sexualities and the ECHR: Introducing the Universal Sexual Legal Subject

Shifting from an essentialist to a constructionist perspective on sexual identities, I move from a consideration of the homosexual legal subject, as presently treated under the European Convention on Human Rights, to the elaboration of a universal sexual legal subject. The universal sexual legal subject enjoys two basic rights: the right to choose sexual activity and sexual identity and the right to establish relationships and families in accordance with this choice. The possibility of including these two rights within the Convention presupposes their insertion into a set of sexually neutral standards which grant the universal sexual legal subject equality of choices. By examining the case law of the European Court and Commission of Human Rights on decriminalization of same-sex sexual activity, and family and relationship issues, I question the sexual particularity of the construction of the homosexual legal subject. This analysis of the case law provides the legal material and principles around which the insertion of the two sexual rights into the Convention is discussed. Both sexual rights are located within the right to respect for private and family life (Article 8). Equality of choices can only be guaranteed if the right to marry and found a family (Article 12) is erased and marriage is ‘privatised’ into Article 8 on an equal footing with other sexual and relational choices

Activity recognition from videos with parallel hypergraph matching on GPUs

In this paper, we propose a method for activity recognition from videos based on sparse local features and hypergraph matching. We benefit from special properties of the temporal domain in the data to derive a sequential and fast graph matching algorithm for GPUs. Traditionally, graphs and hypergraphs are frequently used to recognize complex and often non-rigid patterns in computer vision, either through graph matching or point-set matching with graphs. Most formulations resort to the minimization of a difficult discrete energy function mixing geometric or structural terms with data attached terms involving appearance features. Traditional methods solve this minimization problem approximately, for instance with spectral techniques. In this work, instead of solving the problem approximatively, the exact solution for the optimal assignment is calculated in parallel on GPUs. The graphical structure is simplified and regularized, which allows to derive an efficient recursive minimization algorithm. The algorithm distributes subproblems over the calculation units of a GPU, which solves them in parallel, allowing the system to run faster than real-time on medium-end GPUs