130 research outputs found

    New Issues in Object Interoperability

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    Complexity, transparency and time pressure: practical insights into science communication in times of crisis

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    A global crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic that started in early 2020 poses significant challenges for how research is conducted and communicated. We present four case studies from the perspective of an interdisciplinary research institution that switched to “corona-mode” during the first two months of the crisis, focussing all its capacities on COVID-19-related issues, communicating to the public directly and via media, as well as actively advising the national government. The case studies highlight the challenges posed by the increased time pressure, high demand for transparency, and communication of complexity and uncertainty. The article gives insights into how these challenges were addressed in our research institution and how science communication in general can be managed during a crisis

    Exploiting Sparse Representations for Robust Analysis of Noisy Complex Video Scenes

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    Abstract. Recent works have shown that, even with simple low level visual cues, complex behaviors can be extracted automatically from crowded scenes, e.g. those depicting public spaces recorded from video surveillance cameras. However, low level features as optical flow or fore-ground pixels are inherently noisy. In this paper we propose a novel unsupervised learning approach for the analysis of complex scenes which is specifically tailored to cope directly with features ’ noise and uncer-tainty. We formalize the task of extracting activity patterns as a matrix factorization problem, considering as reconstruction function the robust Earth Mover’s Distance. A constraint of sparsity on the computed basis matrix is imposed, filtering out noise and leading to the identification of the most relevant elementary activities in a typical high level behavior. We further derive an alternate optimization approach to solve the pro-posed problem efficiently and we show that it is reduced to a sequence of linear programs. Finally, we propose to use short trajectory snippets to account for object motion information, in alternative to the noisy optical flow vectors used in previous works. Experimental results demonstrate that our method yields similar or superior performance to state-of-the arts approaches.

    Systematic population-wide ecological analysis of regional variability in disease prevalence

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    The prevalence of diseases often varies substantially from region to region. Besides basic demographic properties, the factors that drive the variability of each prevalence are to a large extent unknown. Here we show how regional prevalence variations in 115 different diseases relate to demographic, socio-economic, environmental factors and migratory background, as well as access to different types of health services such as primary, specialized and hospital healthcare. We have collected regional data for these risk factors at different levels of resolution; from large regions of care (Versorgungsregion) down to a 250 by 250 m square grid. Using multivariate regression analysis, we quantify the explanatory power of each independent variable in relation to the regional variation of the disease prevalence. We find that for certain diseases, such as acute heart conditions, diseases of the inner ear, mental and behavioral disorders due to substance abuse, up to 80% of the variance can be explained with these risk factors. For other diagnostic blocks, such as blood related diseases, injuries and poisoning however, the explanatory power is close to zero. We find that the time needed to travel from the inhabited center to the relevant hospital ward often contributes significantly to the disease risk, in particular for diabetes mellitus. Our results show that variations in disease burden across different regions can for many diseases be related to variations in demographic and socio-economic factors. Furthermore, our results highlight the relative importance of access to health care facilities in the treatment of chronic diseases like diabetes
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