The Normative Foundations of Emancipatory Theory: Evolutionary Versus Pragmatic Perspectives

This is the published version. Copyright 1989 University of Chicago Press.From the start, emancipatory theory has been plagued by contradictory and incompletely elaborated normative underpinnings that weaken its sociological and ethical credibility. Jurgen Habermas, the leading contemporary critical theorist, has attempted to address this problem in an extensive reconstruction of the theories of Marx and Weber that appropriates elements of American pragmatist thought. Yet he resorts to an evolutionary normative argument that undermines the sociological powers of the two classical theories and contradicts the pragmatists' historical approach to values. This essay explains the significance of Habermasian theory for the emancipatory tradition, analyzes certain problems of the theory, and argues that an expanded dialogue with American pragmatism would strengthen both its sociological and its normative dimensions. Though the explicit focus is on the emancipatory tradition, the essay raises broader critical questions about pseudohistorical, normative justification in general sociological theory

Representations for Cognitive Vision : a Review of Appearance-Based, Spatio-Temporal, and Graph-Based Approaches

The emerging discipline of cognitive vision requires a proper representation of visual information including spatial and temporal relationships, scenes, events, semantics and context. This review article summarizes existing representational schemes in computer vision which might be useful for cognitive vision, a and discusses promising future research directions. The various approaches are categorized according to appearance-based, spatio-temporal, and graph-based representations for cognitive vision. While the representation of objects has been covered extensively in computer vision research, both from a reconstruction as well as from a recognition point of view, cognitive vision will also require new ideas how to represent scenes. We introduce new concepts for scene representations and discuss how these might be efficiently implemented in future cognitive vision systems

Post-Ebola Case Management of Orphaned Young Adults in Rural Sierra Leone

The 2014-2016 Ebola pandemic in Sierra Leone significantly increased the orphan population and the need for social support programs, especially for student-orphans in higher education. Poorly prepared disaster response managers have little knowledge about how college student-orphans experience social services. The purpose of this transcendental phenomenological study was to explore how post-Ebola student-orphans enrolled in an agricultural university in rural Sierra Leone experienced post disaster specialized case management to enhance student performance. Criterion sampling techniques including specific inclusion and exclusion criteria guided the recruitment, that included 10 research participants taking part in the semi structured interviews. Ecological system theory and postpositivist ontology informed this transcendental phenomenological research. The modified van Kaam transcendental phenomenological data analysis enabled the development of themes from lived experiences of post-Ebola case management for student-orphans. The findings of the research showed that student-orphans experienced specialized case management with three characterizations: (a) sadness, (b) happiness, and (c) anger which included information helpful for crisis and disaster case management administration and staff across similar circumstances. The social change implication for the study results include information useful for human service administrators and staff in designing and employing post disaster programs for college student-orphans

2D and 3D computer vision analysis of gaze, gender and age

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has been an active research area for over four decades. Research studies and commercial designs in this area have been largely facilitated by the visual modality which brings diversified functionality and improved usability to HCI interfaces by employing various computer vision techniques. This thesis explores a number of facial cues, such as gender, age and gaze, by performing 2D and 3D based computer vision analysis. The ultimate aim is to create a natural HCI strategy that can fulfil user expectations, augment user satisfaction and enrich user experience by understanding user characteristics and behaviours. To this end, salient features have been extracted and analysed from 2D and 3D face representations; 3D reconstruction algorithms and their compatible real-world imaging systems have been investigated; case study HCI systems have been designed to demonstrate the reliability, robustness, and applicability of the proposed method.More specifically, an unsupervised approach has been proposed to localise eye centres in images and videos accurately and efficiently. This is achieved by utilisation of two types of geometric features and eye models, complemented by an iris radius constraint and a selective oriented gradient filter specifically tailored to this modular scheme. This approach resolves challenges such as interfering facial edges, undesirable illumination conditions, head poses, and the presence of facial accessories and makeup. Tested on 3 publicly available databases (the BioID database, the GI4E database and the extended Yale Face Database b), and a self-collected database, this method outperforms all the methods in comparison and thus proves to be highly accurate and robust. Based on this approach, a gaze gesture recognition algorithm has been designed to increase the interactivity of HCI systems by encoding eye saccades into a communication channel similar to the role of hand gestures. As well as analysing eye/gaze data that represent user behaviours and reveal user intentions, this thesis also investigates the automatic recognition of user demographics such as gender and age. The Fisher Vector encoding algorithm is employed to construct visual vocabularies as salient features for gender and age classification. Algorithm evaluations on three publicly available databases (the FERET database, the LFW database and the FRCVv2 database) demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method in both laboratory and unconstrained environments. In order to achieve enhanced robustness, a two-source photometric stereo method has been introduced to recover surface normals such that more invariant 3D facia features become available that can further boost classification accuracy and robustness. A 2D+3D imaging system has been designed for construction of a self-collected dataset including 2D and 3D facial data. Experiments show that utilisation of 3D facial features can increase gender classification rate by up to 6% (based on the self-collected dataset), and can increase age classification rate by up to 12% (based on the Photoface database). Finally, two case study HCI systems, a gaze gesture based map browser and a directed advertising billboard, have been designed by adopting all the proposed algorithms as well as the fully compatible imaging system. Benefits from the proposed algorithms naturally ensure that the case study systems can possess high robustness to head pose variation and illumination variation; and can achieve excellent real-time performance. Overall, the proposed HCI strategy enabled by reliably recognised facial cues can serve to spawn a wide array of innovative systems and to bring HCI to a more natural and intelligent state

Ordinal depth from SFM and its application in robust scene recognition

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Purposive three-dimensional reconstruction by means of a controlled environment

Retrieving 3D data using imaging devices is a relevant task for many applications in medical imaging, surveillance, industrial quality control, and others. As soon as we gain procedural control over parameters of the imaging device, we encounter the necessity of well-defined reconstruction goals and we need methods to achieve them. Hence, we enter next-best-view planning. In this work, we present a formalization of the abstract view planning problem and deal with different planning aspects, whereat we focus on using an intensity camera without active illumination. As one aspect of view planning, employing a controlled environment also provides the planning and reconstruction methods with additional information. We incorporate the additional knowledge of camera parameters into the Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi method used for feature tracking. The resulting Guided KLT tracking method benefits from a constrained optimization space and yields improved accuracy while regarding the uncertainty of the additional input. Serving other planning tasks dealing with known objects, we propose a method for coarse registration of 3D surface triangulations. By the means of exact surface moments of surface triangulations we establish invariant surface descriptors based on moment invariants. These descriptors allow to tackle tasks of surface registration, classification, retrieval, and clustering, which are also relevant to view planning. In the main part of this work, we present a modular, online approach to view planning for 3D reconstruction. Based on the outcome of the Guided KLT tracking, we design a planning module for accuracy optimization with respect to an extended E-criterion. Further planning modules endow non-discrete surface estimation and visibility analysis. The modular nature of the proposed planning system allows to address a wide range of specific instances of view planning. The theoretical findings in this work are underlined by experiments evaluating the relevant terms

Product Design

Product design is a comprehensive process related to the creation of new products, and the ability to design and develop efficient products are key to success in today’s dynamic global market. Written by experts in the field, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the product design process and its applications in various fields, particularly engineering. Over seven chapters, the authors explore such topics as development of new product design methodologies, implementation of effective methods for integrated products, development of more visualized environments for task-based conceptual design methods, and development of engineering design tools based on 3D photogrammetry, among others

Rural community development: a study of the relevant sociological theories

On account of this incomplete grasp of the concept in different regions and at different levels, and also on account of the lack of its systematic treatment in the theoretical spheres, there is an ever-growing need for examining the contemporary thought and experience and for gaining an integrated understanding of the subject, from time to time. The focus of the present study is on one aspect of this situation, namely, the apparent paucity of a foundation of sociological theory to the concept of community development. The purpose of this thesis may therefore be stated as the study of the theoretical background of the concept of rural community development.” The main aim is not so much to examine the concept of community development itself, as it is to examine some of the sociological theories that could be brought together to construct a basis, as it were, which would support a generalized concept of community development. It is assumed here that the central concept of community development has its foundation in the theories of sociology.This study seeks to bring together these relevant theories so as to show their conceptual relationship with community development

Development of Disaster Resilient Coastal Communities to Enhance Economic Development and Social Welfare: Book of Abstracts

Coast at risk – the importance of risk knowledge Coastal communities all over the world are under severe pressure resulting from planned and unplanned development, population growth and human induced vulnerability, coastal hazards with increasing frequency and magnitude and impacts of global climate change. These unprecedented changes have increased the level of risk of such coastal communities from a wide range of coastal hazards arising from natural phenomena and human induced activities. In this respect the assessment and management of risk for coastal hazards plays a vital role for safety of human lives, conservation of ecosystems and protection of the built environment. It leads to the development of disaster resilient communities to enhance economic development and social welfare. Risk assessment is one of the fundamental first steps towards planning, improving and implementing effective disaster risk reduction policies and programmes. One has to know and identify risks if they are to be effectively reduced and contained. There is a need to develop simplified approaches to risk assessment to convince a wider stakeholder base that investing in risk assessments pay. Such approaches bring together so many members of civil society leading the efforts to make disaster risk reduction everyone’s business

Moral and Spiritual Values in Education: A Challenge to Every American

This book deals with the multiple problem of education in the public schools as it relates to moral and spiritual values. The author cuts a wide swath through the tangled underbrush of church and state, religion and education, sacred and secular, spiritual and materialistic, “body and soul,” and lets in a lot of light. To these problems the author brings a lifetime of courageous reflection and experience. To them he also brings, as case studies, the actual experiences of actual children and teachers in actual classrooms in Kentucky, where an experimental program of education in moral and spiritual values has been in process for the past several years. William Clayton Bower is professor emeritus of The University of Chicago. An ordained minister of the Disciples of Christ Church, he held pastorates in Indiana, New York, and California until 1912, when he joined the faculty of Transylvania College, Lexington. In 1925, after he had become dean both of Transylvania College and College of the Bible, he went to The University of Chicago as professor of religious education.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_social_and_philosophical_foundations_of_education/1001/thumbnail.jp