Information Services in the CGIAR

Paper by the TAC Standing Committee for External Reviews, drawing on the consultant paper by John Woolston, and several inputs from the CGIAR Secretariat concerning the role of information in the CGIAR. It argues for the centers to play a role in the development and use of a more coherent global information system for research in agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. The NARS should in the long term be able to participate in such a system as full fledged actors. The paper urges the CGIAR to take the lead in organizing a conference on global information needs and opportunities.Agenda document, TAC 56

Agriculture's Role in Greenhouse Gas Mitigation

Examines technical, economic, and policy trends. Explores efforts to encourage farmers to adopt new agricultural practices that reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Reviews biofuel options, and related policy implications

Responsible Fatherhood Investments, 1994-2009: Influence, Impact, and Leverage

Reviews the Annie E. Casey Foundation's investments in and contributions to the field of responsible fatherhood in improving outcomes for vulnerable children, including convening, funding ideologically diverse grantees, and providing technical assistance

A proposal for regularly updated review/survey articles: "Perpetual Reviews"

We advocate the publication of review/survey articles that will be updated regularly, both in traditional journals and novel venues. We call these "perpetual reviews." This idea naturally builds on the dissemination and archival capabilities present in the modern internet, and indeed perpetual reviews exist already in some forms. Perpetual review articles allow authors to maintain over time the relevance of non-research scholarship that requires a significant investment of effort. Further, such reviews published in a purely electronic format without space constraints can also permit more pedagogical scholarship and clearer treatment of technical issues that remain obscure in a brief treatment.Comment: This is a draft white paper and we seek comments from the communit

Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey

Object detection, as of one the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision, has received great attention in recent years. Its development in the past two decades can be regarded as an epitome of computer vision history. If we think of today's object detection as a technical aesthetics under the power of deep learning, then turning back the clock 20 years we would witness the wisdom of cold weapon era. This paper extensively reviews 400+ papers of object detection in the light of its technical evolution, spanning over a quarter-century's time (from the 1990s to 2019). A number of topics have been covered in this paper, including the milestone detectors in history, detection datasets, metrics, fundamental building blocks of the detection system, speed up techniques, and the recent state of the art detection methods. This paper also reviews some important detection applications, such as pedestrian detection, face detection, text detection, etc, and makes an in-deep analysis of their challenges as well as technical improvements in recent years.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE TPAMI for possible publicatio

A note on the temporal sure preference principle and the updating of lower previsions.

This paper reviews the temporal sure preference principle as a basis for inference over time. We reformulate the principle in terms of desirability, and explore its implications for lower previsions. We report some initial results. We also discuss some of the technical difficulties encountered