Visions and Challenges in Managing and Preserving Data to Measure Quality of Life

Health-related data analysis plays an important role in self-knowledge, disease prevention, diagnosis, and quality of life assessment. With the advent of data-driven solutions, a myriad of apps and Internet of Things (IoT) devices (wearables, home-medical sensors, etc) facilitates data collection and provide cloud storage with a central administration. More recently, blockchain and other distributed ledgers became available as alternative storage options based on decentralised organisation systems. We bring attention to the human data bleeding problem and argue that neither centralised nor decentralised system organisations are a magic bullet for data-driven innovation if individual, community and societal values are ignored. The motivation for this position paper is to elaborate on strategies to protect privacy as well as to encourage data sharing and support open data without requiring a complex access protocol for researchers. Our main contribution is to outline the design of a self-regulated Open Health Archive (OHA) system with focus on quality of life (QoL) data.Comment: DSS 2018: Data-Driven Self-Regulating System

DFD based scene segmentation for H.263 video sequences

Content based indexing and retrieval of video is becoming increasingly important in many applications. Identifying scene changes and special effects in a video scene is an essential pre-requisite for indexing. In this paper, a sudden scene change detection algorithm for H.263 video sequences is proposed. This method uses the number of intra-coded macroblocks and Displaced Frame Difference (DFD) signal of the video signal. Experimental results show that the performance of this algorithm is independent of the encoder threshold. Furthermore, this algorithm is capable of detecting abrupt scene changes accurately even the video sequence contains special effects

Scene adaptive video encoding for MPEG and H263+ video

This paper presents a new scene adaptive video encoding scheme for MPEG and H263+ video encoders. The proposed scheme determines the picture types adaptively based on statistical features of each video frame. Results show that the proposed scheme demonstrates a significant improvement in performance compared to existing scheme

Fade-in and fade-out detection in video sequences using histograms

There is an increased need to extract key information automatically from video for the purposes of indexing, fast retrieval, and scene analysis. To support this vision, reliable scene change detection algorithms must be developed. Several algorithms have been proposed for both sudden and gradual scene change detection in uncompressed and compressed video. In this paper we present an algorithm for fade-in and fade-out scene change detection in both uncompressed and compressed video sequences using histograms. We use the properties of the fading operation and extract these features in the luminance histogram. Results show that the proposed algorithm can be used in both uncompressed and compressed video to detect fade regions with a high reliability and less computation

Shoot and plantlet regeneration from meristems of Dioscorea rotundata Poir and Dioscorea alata L.

In vitro culture media capable of regenerating moderate to high shoots and/or plantlets from meristems of two yam species - Dioscorea rotundata and Dioscorea alata within comparable duration of 10 weeks as commonly obtained in other monocots and root and tuber crops were investigated. The study comprised 125 phytohormone combinations investigated in three factorial experiments each consisting of an auxin (NAA) and a cytokinin (BAP or kinetin), or two cytokinins only. The frequency of direct plantlet regeneration, though significantly (P < 0.05) higher for D. alata than for D. rotundata, was low and ranged from 0 to 10% at 3 weeks after culture (WAC) and 0 to 35% at 8 WAC. At 8 WAC, shoot regeneration of 42-75% was obtained in D. rotundata in MS medium supplemented with 0.1 M NAA + 0.20 M BAP, and shoot + plantlet regeneration of 60-82% obtained in media containing 0.05 M + 0.20 M BAP or 0.46 M BAP + 0.50 M kinetin in D. alata. Both shoot induction and plantlet regeneration were species-dependent. Induced shoots were successfully rooted in MS medium within 3 to 4 weeks, bringing time taken for plantlet regeneration to 11 to 12 weeks. Regenerants were morphologically similar to the mother plants. Results of the present study will facilitate regeneration of plantlets via meristem in D. rotundata and D. alata

Video special effects editing in MPEG-2 compressed video

With the increase of digital technology in video production, several types of complex video special effects editing have begun to appear in video clips. In this paper we consider fade-out and fade-in special effects editing in MPEG-2 compressed video without full frame decompression and motion estimation. We estimated the DCT coefficients and use these coefficients together with the existing motion vectors to produce these special effects editing in compressed domain. Results show that both objective and subjective quality of the edited video in compressed domain closely follows the quality of the edited video in uncompressed video at the same bit rat

A joint motion & disparity motion estimation technique for 3D integral video compression using evolutionary strategy

3D imaging techniques have the potential to establish a future mass-market in the fields of entertainment and communications. Integral imaging, which can capture true 3D color images with only one camera, has been seen as the right technology to offer stress-free viewing to audiences of more than one person. Just like any digital video, 3D video sequences must also be compressed in order to make it suitable for consumer domain applications. However, ordinary compression techniques found in state-of-the-art video coding standards such as H.264, MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 are not capable of producing enough compression while preserving the 3D clues. Fortunately, a huge amount of redundancies can be found in an integral video sequence in terms of motion and disparity. This paper discusses a novel approach to use both motion and disparity information to compress 3D integral video sequences. We propose to decompose the integral video sequence down to viewpoint video sequences and jointly exploit motion and disparity redundancies to maximize the compression. We further propose an optimization technique based on evolutionary strategies to minimize the computational complexity of the joint motion disparity estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that Joint Motion and Disparity Estimation can achieve over 1 dB objective quality gain over normal motion estimation. Once combined with Evolutionary strategy, this can achieve up to 94% computational cost saving

Review of Multiliteracy Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media, and Multimodal Rhetoric, Edited by David M. Sheridan and James A. Inman

While writing center directors will certainly want to read Multiliteracy Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media, and Multimodal Rhetoric, a new collection edited by David M. Sheridan and James Inman, this book is equally important for writing program administrators, WAC (writing the curriculum) directors, and other academic professionals charged with composition pedagogy.University Writing Cente