Text to 3D Scene Generation with Rich Lexical Grounding

The ability to map descriptions of scenes to 3D geometric representations has many applications in areas such as art, education, and robotics. However, prior work on the text to 3D scene generation task has used manually specified object categories and language that identifies them. We introduce a dataset of 3D scenes annotated with natural language descriptions and learn from this data how to ground textual descriptions to physical objects. Our method successfully grounds a variety of lexical terms to concrete referents, and we show quantitatively that our method improves 3D scene generation over previous work using purely rule-based methods. We evaluate the fidelity and plausibility of 3D scenes generated with our grounding approach through human judgments. To ease evaluation on this task, we also introduce an automated metric that strongly correlates with human judgments.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables. To appear in ACL-IJCNLP 201

Class and cuisine in contemporary Britain : the social space, the space of food and their homology

Thirty-five years ago Pierre Bourdieu asserted that food preferences, as much as any other element of culture, are distributed within a space of difference more or less homologous with the social space of class positions. Plumbing data on annual spends on all manner of food items, he detected two key oppositions – a taste for the light versus a taste for the heavy on the one hand and a taste for rich foods versus a taste for healthy and exotic foods on the other – and located their generative principles in differences of volume of capital and composition of capital respectively. Deploying a correspondence analysis of similar data using the 2010 Living Costs and Food Survey, supplemented by data from the 2008 British Social Attitudes survey and the 2003 Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion Survey, we seek to examine whether comparable differences in expenditure and preferences are observable in contemporary Britain and, consequently, to illuminate the current structure of the food space and its homology with class. Ultimately, we conclude that Bourdieu’s general model is essentially transposable from 1960s France to the UK at the dawn of the 21st century, though we put additional emphasis on the ethical dimension of food consumption, and reflect on the prevalent instances of symbolic violence it underpins

Medieval Futurity: Essays for the Future of a Queer Medieval Studies

This collection of essays asks contributors to take the capaciousness of the word queer to heart in order to think about what medieval queers would have looked like and how they may have existed on the margins and borders of dominant, normative sexuality and desire. The contributors work with recent trends in queer medieval studies, blending together modern concepts of sexuality and desire with the queer configurations of eroticism, desire, and materiality as they might have existed for medieval audiences.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_nqm/1000/thumbnail.jp

Parameter estimation on compact binary coalescences with abruptly terminating gravitational waveforms

Gravitational-wave astronomy seeks to extract information about astrophysical systems from the gravitational-wave signals they emit. For coalescing compact-binary sources this requires accurate model templates for the inspiral and, potentially, the subsequent merger and ringdown. Models with frequency-domain waveforms that terminate abruptly in the sensitive band of the detector are often used for parameter-estimation studies. We show that the abrupt waveform termination contains significant information that affects parameter-estimation accuracy. If the sharp cutoff is not physically motivated, this extra information can lead to misleadingly good accuracy claims. We also show that using waveforms with a cutoff as templates to recover complete signals can lead to biases in parameter estimates. We evaluate when the information content in the cutoff is likely to be important in both cases. We also point out that the standard Fisher matrix formalism, frequently employed for approximately predicting parameter-estimation accuracy, cannot properly incorporate an abrupt cutoff that is present in both signals and templates; this observation explains some previously unexpected results found in the literature. These effects emphasize the importance of using complete waveforms with accurate merger and ringdown phases for parameter estimation.Comment: Very minor changes to match published versio

Fault tolerant actuation for dorado class, AUVS.

This paper describes a new control surface actuating design for the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) Dorado class AUVs. The intent was to increase reliability as part of obtaining the goal to greatly increase access to the Arctic Ocean. The new actuating mechanism is part of creating a robust and economical solution towards increased reliability and fault tolerance. Specifically, as part of developing the ALTEX Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) for Arctic research with basin scale endurance, the concept for under ice missions was redundancy in critical areas. As the development of the DORADO systems progressed from the original ALTEX concepts, added drivers came from the operations group looking for more useable volume in the aft section. The DORADO vehicle is guided using an articulated tail steering section. The tail is comprised of a ducted propeller acting as control surfaces and propulsion, in contrast with the more traditional fin control surfaces used by most vehicles. This approach was taken to be more robust to impacts as experience using Odyssey IB vehicles showed the control surfaces damaged during launch and recovery were the number one failure by far. As predicted by analysis the design also improved propulsion efficiency. Also worth noting is that this entire tail system stays inside the 21” diameter of the main vehicle body. The new system being developed is unique in that it keeps all of the key propulsion and actuators but eliminates the current gimbaled tail through the use of what we refer to as a false center. While several new components are being developed, the objective is to leverage the existing technology to the degree possible and allow for an inexpensive as well as direct swap into existing systems. The new steering mechanism uses a Three Actuator False Center Control solution. The design was first modeled and tested for feasibility. After passing the preliminaries, the decision was made to build a full-scale sea going unit. We now have that system built and in bench testing, ready to swap in for at sea testing in the very near future. We’ve already demonstrated that the new design offers a superior use of space yielding more useable volume for other equipment. The model demonstrated the added redundancy that we will duplicate at sea. We believe the design is very robust and has a broad range of uses in long duration unattended operations where fault situations must be dealt with by the autonomous system. In this paper we will discuss our progress to date, our current test efforts, and the near term future uses of this new control section for DORADO science vehicles.Peer Reviewe