Detecting Hands in Egocentric Videos: Towards Action Recognition

Recently, there has been a growing interest in analyzing human daily activities from data collected by wearable cameras. Since the hands are involved in a vast set of daily tasks, detecting hands in egocentric images is an important step towards the recognition of a variety of egocentric actions. However, besides extreme illumination changes in egocentric images, hand detection is not a trivial task because of the intrinsic large variability of hand appearance. We propose a hand detector that exploits skin modeling for fast hand proposal generation and Convolutional Neural Networks for hand recognition. We tested our method on UNIGE-HANDS dataset and we showed that the proposed approach achieves competitive hand detection results

Computational methods for stellerator configurations

This project consists of two parallel objectives. On the one hand, computational techniques for three dimensional magnetic confinement configurations were developed or refined and on the other hand, this new techniques were applied to the solution of practical fusion energy problems or the techniques themselves were transferred to other fusion researcher for practical use in the field

Suicide - a global overview and focus on the South African situation

As a medical doctor you learn how to deal with death and you feel that your duty is to encourage people to fight against illness for their lives but, when you face suicide, you feel defenseless because it is the person him or herself who chooses to die. Another reason for choosing this topic is that I’m advocating the development and implementation of a Suicide Prevention Program in South Africa and this could be a good forum to talk about this important issue

Cálculo de los valores máximos de campo magnético utilizando el método de los elementos finitos

El método de los elementos finitos (FEM) es ampliamente utilizado en varias áreas del conocimiento las cuales incluyen aplicaciones de la ingeniería mecánica en áreas como transferencia de calor, mecánica de sólidos, estudios de elasticidad, dinámica de fluidos y análisis del comportamiento de materiales cuando son sometidos a esfuerzos. Las aplicaciones en ingeniería eléctrica van desde el análisis de campo eléctrico y magnético en un punto hasta el modelamiento de las líneas de flujo en una máquina eléctrica o línea de transmisión

Cálculo de los valores máximos de campo magnético utilizando el método de los elementos finitos

El método de los elementos finitos (FEM) es ampliamente utilizado en varias áreas del conocimiento las cuales incluyen aplicaciones de la ingeniería mecánica en áreas como transferencia de calor, mecánica de sólidos, estudios de elasticidad, dinámica de fluidos y análisis del comportamiento de materiales cuando son sometidos a esfuerzos. Las aplicaciones en ingeniería eléctrica van desde el análisis de campo eléctrico y magnético en un punto hasta el modelamiento de las líneas de flujo en una máquina eléctrica o línea de transmisión

The Future of Parenting Programs: II Implementation

This article examines the role that implementation science can play in evidence-based parenting programs. Although parenting programs can support parents in their caregiving roles, adapting and taking an evidence-based approach from one place to another without attending to implementation factors may contribute to poor impact in a new setting. Implementation science enables researchers to move beyond monitoring and evaluation of outcomes of a parenting program to understanding the process of putting the program into practice. Factors such as whether the program meets the needs of families and communities, how to secure buy-in from key stakeholders, what training and supervision are needed for the workforce, and ways that parenting programs can be integrated in existing infrastructure are all critical to successful implementation. Quality improvement can be built into the implementation process through feedback loops that inform rapid changes and testing cycles over time as a program is implemented. If researchers lead initial implementation of parenting programs, they must determine how the program can continue to work when using community workers and local systems rather than researchers. Open access components are especially important for the implementation of parenting programs in low- and middle-income countries to avoid prohibitive costs of proprietary programs and to benefit from flexibility in adapting components to meet the needs of particular local populations. Parenting programs benefit when policy makers, program leaders, and researchers attend not only to the what but also to the how of implementation.Objective.Design.Results.Conclusions

Sub-specialties in psychiatry: Towards parity in mental health training and services

Neuropsychiatric disorders account for 5 of the 10 most disabling medical disorders worldwide,1 and for a particularly large component of the burden of disease in South Africa.2 Unfortunately, as elsewhere, training and services in psychiatry have lagged behind those of other major disciplines, and much additional work is needed to achieve parity. We focus in particular on the status of psychiatric sub-specialties in South Africa, considering the pros and cons of their recognition in a developing country