The World after the Crisis

World economy crisis will outlast. It has not reached the bottom and no efficient policy solution could be seen yet. It is a crisis of global and virtual economy. It is more than a stage of the Kondratiev cycle, it is a structural crisis that tends to turn into a systemic one. But what will the world look like after it? Important changes will come out, changes that the world has not imagined till recently: market fundamentalism will decrease and state capitalism will become the dominant system; financial background will change, financial sector will be reduced and regulated, both nationally and internationally; despite the decrease of global demand, energy, food and commodities cost will rise; a greater but still insufficient attention will be given to the environmental issues; protectionism of all forms will increase; poverty will become endemic in many parts of the world, globalization will persist, as Earth is no longer flat; a technological tsunami is being born in front of us; we will be witnessing the emergence of the feminine principle. Change will become common everywhere, but first of all, we need to embody the change we want for the world.

Context-based Object Viewpoint Estimation: A 2D Relational Approach

The task of object viewpoint estimation has been a challenge since the early days of computer vision. To estimate the viewpoint (or pose) of an object, people have mostly looked at object intrinsic features, such as shape or appearance. Surprisingly, informative features provided by other, extrinsic elements in the scene, have so far mostly been ignored. At the same time, contextual cues have been proven to be of great benefit for related tasks such as object detection or action recognition. In this paper, we explore how information from other objects in the scene can be exploited for viewpoint estimation. In particular, we look at object configurations by following a relational neighbor-based approach for reasoning about object relations. We show that, starting from noisy object detections and viewpoint estimates, exploiting the estimated viewpoint and location of other objects in the scene can lead to improved object viewpoint predictions. Experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that object configurations can indeed be used as a complementary cue to appearance-based viewpoint estimation. Our analysis reveals that the proposed context-based method can improve object viewpoint estimation by reducing specific types of viewpoint estimation errors commonly made by methods that only consider local information. Moreover, considering contextual information produces superior performance in scenes where a high number of object instances occur. Finally, our results suggest that, following a cautious relational neighbor formulation brings improvements over its aggressive counterpart for the task of object viewpoint estimation.Comment: Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU

Viewpoint consistency in Z and LOTOS: A case study

Specification by viewpoints is advocated as a suitable method of specifying complex systems. Each viewpoint describes the envisaged system from a particular perspective, using concepts and specification languages best suited for that perspective. Inherent in any viewpoint approach is the need to check or manage the consistency of viewpoints and to show that the different viewpoints do not impose contradictory requirements. In previous work we have described a range of techniques for consistency checking, refinement, and translation between viewpoint specifications, in particular for the languages LOTOS and Z. These two languages are advocated in a particular viewpoint model, viz. that of the Open Distributed Processing (ODP) reference model. In this paper we present a case study which demonstrates how all these techniques can be combined in order to show consistency between a viewpoint specified in LOTOS and one specified in Z. Keywords: Viewpoints; Consistency; Z; LOTOS; ODP

Specification of multiparty audio and video interaction based on the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing

The Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) is an emerging ISO/ITU-T standard. It provides a framework of abstractions based on viewpoints, and it defines five viewpoint languages to model open distributed systems. This paper uses the viewpoint languages to specify multiparty audio/video exchange in distributed systems. To the designers of distributed systems, it shows how the concepts and rules of RM-ODP can be applied.\ud \ud The ODP ¿binding object¿ is an important concept to model continuous data flows in distributed systems. We take this concept as a basis for multiparty audio and video flow exchanges, and we provide five ODP viewpoint specifications, each emphasising a particular concern. To ensure overall correctness, special attention is paid to the mapping between the ODP viewpoint specifications

Usage simulation methods for education

The paper deals with usage of computer simulation methods for education at Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Signaling in Transport, Jan Perner Transport Faculty, University of Pardubice. Current situation of railway technics is very complicated and sophisticated both from viewpoint of railway infrastructure and from viewpoint of transport means. The particular parts of system are necessary to be analyzed from viewpoint of their behaviour and from viewpoint of influence to surrounding parts of the whole system. Therefore students as future railway experts must be trained for ability of problem identification and suitable design of problem solution. This readiness of experts for real operation of these devices is one of the main goals of lecturers from the mentioned department