Refugee Camps: Initiation, Current Conditions, Development & Integration with the City

The issue of Palestinian refugees exists for nearly 70 years now, starting from the occupation of Palestine by Israeli forces and immigrants in the late 40s. Approximately 900,000 Palestinian refugees were forced to leave Palestine following the 1948 Arab– Israeli war. The majority of them fled to neighboring Arab countries; Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. Following the 1967 war; another wave of Palestinian refugees fled to Jordan, when Israel occupied the Gaza and West Bank along with other Arab territories. These waves of refugees who moved to Jordan transformed its demographic structure and reformed Jordan’s socio-economic, political, and cultural life. The Syrian conflict and civil war onwards of 2011 has seen thousands of Syrian and Palestinian refugees being forced to leave Syria and move to adjacent countries, creating accommodation issues for the hosts. The governments of the said host nations found it essential to formulate new policies to accommodate the refugee flux. One of the major historical issues of refugee camps is that they are considered by both the host governments and refugees themselves as a temporary solution until the conflict gets resolved. In some cases, however, what began as temporary arrangements have morphed into permanent residences; this is, especially true of the hapless Palestinian refugees. This research studies the structure and development of the refugee camps and looks at ways in which the camps can be better integrated with the surrounding cities and communities. It also provides a high-level study for two cases in Jordan, Al-Baqaa and Al-Zaatari refugee camps, with a particular focus on their edges and connections with the surrounding urban and social fabric. The areas of concern were explored in several ways starting from the literature review for the background and history, analyzing case studies, interviewing refugees and involved personnel ending with summarizing the outcomes. The research concludes by proposing urban design enhancements that can be implemented in the existing camps to create a better interface with the adjoining land and settlements. These are accompanied by a list of recommendations to modify the legislation and to create best practices for future refugee camps

Local depth patterns for fine-grained activity recognition in depth videos

© 2016 IEEE. Fine-grained activities are human activities involving small objects and small movements. Automatic recognition of such activities can prove useful for many applications, including detailed diarization of meetings and training sessions, assistive human-computer interaction and robotics interfaces. Existing approaches to fine-grained activity recognition typically leverage the combined use of multiple sensors including cameras, RFID tags, gyroscopes and accelerometers borne by the monitored people and target objects. Although effective, the downside of these solutions is that they require minute instrumentation of the environment that is intrusive and hard to scale. To this end, this paper investigates fine-grained activity recognition in a kitchen setting by solely using a depth camera. The primary contribution of this work is an aggregated depth descriptor that effectively captures the shape of the objects and the actors. Experimental results over the challenging '50 Salads' dataset of kitchen activities show an accuracy comparable to that of a state-of-the-art approach based on multiple sensors, thereby validating a less intrusive and more practical way of monitoring fine-grained activities

Prototype-based budget maintenance for tracking in depth videos

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York. The use of conventional video tracking based on color or gray-level videos often raises concerns about the privacy of the tracked targets. To alleviate this issue, this paper presents a novel tracker that operates solely from depth data. The proposed tracker is designed as an extension of the popular Struck algorithm which leverages the effective framework of structural SVM. The main contributions of our paper are: i) a dedicated depth feature based on local depth patterns, ii) a heuristic for handling view occlusions in depth frames, and iii) a technique for keeping the number of the support vectors within a given “budget” so as to limit computational costs. Experimental results over the challenging Princeton Tracking Benchmark (PTB) dataset report a remarkable accuracy compared to the original Struck tracker and other state-of-the-art trackers using depth and RGB data

A Computational Study of Toxicity of Nitrobenzenes Using QSPR and DFT-Based Molecular Surface Electrostatic Potential

In the present study, the density functional B3LYP/6-311G** level of theory was used to compute and map the molecular surface electrostatic potentials of a group of substituted nitrobenzenes to identify common features related to their subsequent toxicities. Several statistical properties including potentials’ extrema (Vmin, Vmax), molecular volume, surface area, polar surface area, along with different energies were computed. A little linear correlation was revealed between Vmin and surface area, and systems’ toxicities. Another computations employed quantitative structure–property relationships model in CODESSA package to correlate toxicities with calculated descriptors. Statistically, the most significant correlation is a five-parameter equation with correlation coefficient, R2 values of 0.962, and the cross-validated correlation coefficient, R2 CV= 0.950. The obtained models allowed us to reveal toxic activity of nitrobenzenes

Joint action recognition and summarization by sub-modular inference

© 2016 IEEE. Action recognition and video summarization are two important multimedia tasks that are useful for applications such as video indexing and retrieval, video surveillance, humancomputer interaction and home intelligence. While many approaches exist in the literature for these two tasks, to date they have always been addressed separately. Instead, in this paper we move from the assumption that these two tasks should be tackled as a joint objective: on the one hand, action recognition can drive the selection of meaningful and informative summaries; on the other, recognizing actions from a summary rather than the entire video can in principle reduce noise and prove more accurate. To this aim, we propose a novel approach for joint action recognition-summarization based on the performing latent structural SVM framework, together with an efficient algorithm for inferring the action and the summary based on the property of sub-modularity. Experimental results on a challenging benchmark, MSR Dai-lyActivity3D, show that the approach is capable of achieving remarkable action recognition accuracy while providing appealing video summaries

Variation of parameters in Becke‐3 hybrid exchange‐correlation functional

We have investigated the consequences of varying the three parameters in Becke's hybrid exchange‐correlation functional, which includes five contributions: Hartree–Fock exchange, local exchange, Becke's gradient exchange correction, local correlation, and some form of gradient correlation correction. Our primary focus was upon obtaining orbital energies with magnitudes that are reasonable approximations to the electronic ionization potentials; however, we also looked at the effects on molecular geometries and atomization enthalpies. A total of 12 parameter combinations was considered for each of three different gradient correlation corrections: the Lee–Yang–Parr, the Perdew‐86, and the Perdew–Wang 91. Five molecules were included in the study: HCN, N2, N2O, F2O, and H2O. For comparison, a Hartree–Fock calculation was also carried out for each of these. The 6‐31+G** basis set was used

A Density Functional Based Molecular Surface Electrostatic Potentials of Histamine H1-Agonists

A computational analysis of the electrostatic potentials of nine histamine H1 agonists of various structural modifications has been carried out at the density functional B3P86/6-31G** level of theory. It focuses upon the relationships between these potentials and the H1-agonistic activities of the molecules through identifying any common features. Analysis of several statistically based properties of the surface potentials has revealed that H1-Agonism is a linear function with of the potential’s maxima, max,

Stability and Antimicrobial Activity of Transition Metal (II) Complexes with SNO and ONO Functionalized Ligand: A Computational Study

In this work, the structural, surface potential, and antimicrobial aspects of a set of recently synthesized and published complexes of five transition metals (II) are investigated using the semiempirical PM6 and B3LYP/6-31G* methods. The complexes ML2 [M= Ni, Cu, and Zn] are mainly composed of 2-thiophenecarbaldehyde isonicotinoyl hydrazone containing a trifunctional SNO-donor system. Experimentally, the complexes were synthesized and characterized using their conductivity, IR, and partially using 1H NMR, and MS spectra, where they show similar properties to those in their analogous NNO functionalized ligand and ONO donor ligand. The attained wavefunction for each of the complexes was subsequently used to compute six molecular descriptors which were then investigated in light of their reported antimicrobial activities against Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Tautomerism of 5-methyl imidazolidine thio derivatives in the gas phase: a density functional study

Relative tautomerisation energies, enthalpies, entropies, Gibbs free energies, and dipole moments for 5-methyl-2,4-dioxo-imidazolidine and its thio analogous have been studied in the gas phase using hybrid density functional at the B3LYP level of theory using 6-31(d) and 6-31