The Seventh EU Enlargement and Beyond: Pre-Accession Policy vis-à-vis the Western Balkans Revisited

The accession of Croatia to the European Union is yet another milestone in the history of EU enlargements. After seven enlargement rounds the membership has increased from the original six founding countries to twenty-eight Member States. Many claim, quite rightly, that the enlargement policy is the most successful of the EU’s foreign policy tools. Even those who bring this bold argument into doubt have to agree that, when contrasted with other external policies, and the European Neighbourhood Policy in particular, the overall balance sheet of the enlargement policy is positive. The accession of Croatia is symbolic in a number of ways. As argued in this article, it closes one big chapter in the history of EU enlargements but, at the same time, opens another. Croatia is – most likely – the last country to join the EU this decade. After a sometimes painful pre-accession process, it has proved to be a ‘success story’ of the stabilisation and asso-ciation process. As the European Commission claims, it is living proof that the raison d’être and mechanics of the policy employed vis-à-vis the Western Balkans have their merits. However, a quick look into the future proves that the next enlargements will be far more complicated affairs. The current list of candidates and potential candidates is a mix of a heavyweight (Turkey) and the Western Balkan countries, all struggling to meet the fundamental prerequisites for a democracy based on the rule of law. Failure to comply with the Copenhagen criteria, together with a dwindling appetite for further enlargement among some Member States, create a rather dangerous mix. This article argues that following recent enhancements to the pre-accession policy, further improvements are necessary to make future expansions of the European Union possible. If only from the geopolitical perspective, this is in the joint interest of the European Union, its Member States and the countries of the Western Balkans

The Enjoyment and Acquisition of Resources in Outer Space

In their interactions in the larger arena, states and their surrogates may be observed to employ many different types of resources as bases of power and to make claims of many varying degrees in comprehensiveness of authority and in scope and duration of control over such resources. The more important resources so employed and subjected to claim include, apart from manpower, not only the land masses, in all their protean forms, but also the oceans, air space, outer space, polar areas, rivers and so on. Some of these resources, such as the oceans, air space over the oceans, and international rivers, which experience has demonstrated to admit of a high degree of shared use by reasonable mutual accommodation, have been generally regarded as not being subject to exclusive appropriation by particular states, and the only claims which states have reciprocally honored in traditional international law have been those asserting shared access and requiring reasonable accommodation among users. Other resources, such as the land masses and closely proximate waters and air space, have commonly been regarded as admitting only in modest degree of shared use and competence, and states have reciprocally honored each other\u27s claims to a most comprehensive and continuing, exclusive competence over such resources; indeed the very conception of the contemporary state embodies, as is well known, this high degree of exclusivity in the competence of a territorially organized group. The policies followed by the general community in this allocation of resources between inclusive and exclusive authoritative control have, building upon the experience that inclusive use and competence most often achieve the greatest production and widest distribution of goods and services for the benefit of all, established a very strong presumption in favor of the inclusive control of sharable resources, with exclusive control being protected only when it can be shown to contribute most to common interest

Multilinear Wavelets: A Statistical Shape Space for Human Faces

We present a statistical model for $3$D human faces in varying expression, which decomposes the surface of the face using a wavelet transform, and learns many localized, decorrelated multilinear models on the resulting coefficients. Using this model we are able to reconstruct faces from noisy and occluded $3$D face scans, and facial motion sequences. Accurate reconstruction of face shape is important for applications such as tele-presence and gaming. The localized and multi-scale nature of our model allows for recovery of fine-scale detail while retaining robustness to severe noise and occlusion, and is computationally efficient and scalable. We validate these properties experimentally on challenging data in the form of static scans and motion sequences. We show that in comparison to a global multilinear model, our model better preserves fine detail and is computationally faster, while in comparison to a localized PCA model, our model better handles variation in expression, is faster, and allows us to fix identity parameters for a given subject.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures; accepted to ECCV 201

Rate of increase in serum lactate level risk-stratifies infants after surgery for congenital heart disease

ObjectiveIncreased blood lactate levels reflect tissue oxygen debt and might be indicative of low cardiac output. We hypothesized that the rate of increase in serum lactate would be an ideal marker to discriminate between infants at high and low risk of a poor outcome after surgical repair of congenital heart disease using cardiopulmonary bypass.MethodsIn the present prospective, observational study in a pediatric cardiac intensive care unit, infants (aged <12 months) undergoing cardiac surgery had serial whole blood lactate levels measured with every arterial blood gas drawn for the first 24 postoperative hours. The composite poor outcome included death, the need for extracorporeal support, and dialysis.ResultsThe lactate levels were measured in 231 infants; 19 infants (8.2%) had a poor outcome. A lactate increase rate of 0.6 mmol/L/h had very good discriminatory ability (area under the curve [AUC], 0.89) with a sensitivity of 90%, specificity of 84%, positive predictive value (PPV) of 34%, and negative predictive value (NPV) of 99%. Similar results were obtained for subgroups stratified by 1- or 2-ventricle heart disease and risk adjustment for congenital heart surgery (RACHS-1) score. In neonates (age <30 days) with single-ventricle physiology (n = 43, poor outcome = 8), a lactate increase of 0.6 mmol/L/h had near perfect discriminatory ability (AUC 0.99) with a sensitivity of 100%, specificity of 51%, PPV of 32%, and NPV of 100%. In 2-ventricle neonates (n = 43, poor outcome = 5), a lactate increase of 0.6 mmol/L/h also had near perfect discriminatory ability (AUC, 0.99), with a sensitivity of 100%, specificity of 90%, PPV of 56%, and NPV of 100%.ConclusionsThe postoperative lactate increase rate allows discrimination between infants at high and low risk of morbidity and mortality after congenital heart disease surgery, and the lactate level can be followed serially for the treatment response

Fully Automatic Expression-Invariant Face Correspondence

We consider the problem of computing accurate point-to-point correspondences among a set of human face scans with varying expressions. Our fully automatic approach does not require any manually placed markers on the scan. Instead, the approach learns the locations of a set of landmarks present in a database and uses this knowledge to automatically predict the locations of these landmarks on a newly available scan. The predicted landmarks are then used to compute point-to-point correspondences between a template model and the newly available scan. To accurately fit the expression of the template to the expression of the scan, we use as template a blendshape model. Our algorithm was tested on a database of human faces of different ethnic groups with strongly varying expressions. Experimental results show that the obtained point-to-point correspondence is both highly accurate and consistent for most of the tested 3D face models

Video face replacement

We present a method for replacing facial performances in video. Our approach accounts for differences in identity, visual appearance, speech, and timing between source and target videos. Unlike prior work, it does not require substantial manual operation or complex acquisition hardware, only single-camera video. We use a 3D multilinear model to track the facial performance in both videos. Using the corresponding 3D geometry, we warp the source to the target face and retime the source to match the target performance. We then compute an optimal seam through the video volume that maintains temporal consistency in the final composite. We showcase the use of our method on a variety of examples and present the result of a user study that suggests our results are difficult to distinguish from real video footage.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant PHY-0835713)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant DMS-0739255