A voice for the voiceless: lessons from a Hmong community's approach to music and self-expression

Since the turn of the century, the world has witnessed a rise in violence promulgated on American soil. From terrorism to bullying, citizens across the United States are left wondering, "What’s next or what can I do about it?" I imagine that I am not alone in feeling powerlessness, out of control, and sometimes apathetic about the constant newsfeed heralding bad news both at home and abroad. With this kind ofuncertainty, it is no surprise that our students might feel just as overwhelmed and confused as we teachers. What, then, can music educators do to be a voice for and with students and how will their songs be a voice for those who will not or cannot sing songs of their own? This essay is an account of how I connect what I learned in a Hmong community of rappers and poets to music education, what critical pedagogy might mean for music educators, and how teachers can employ "voice for the voiceless" strategies with their ensemble or general music students

Boosting Image Database Retrieval

We present an approach for image database retrieval using a very large number of highly-selective features and simple on-line learning. Our approach is predicated on the assumption that each image is generated by a sparse set of visual "causes" and that images which are visually similar share causes. We propose a mechanism for generating a large number of complex features which capture some aspects of this causal structure. Boosting is used to learn simple and efficient classifiers in this complex feature space. Finally we will describe a practical implementation of our retrieval system on a database of 3000 images

TRANSFORMING EDUCATION IN CENTRAL VIETNAM BY INTEGRATED CURRICULUM APPROACH: FROM INITIATIVES TO SUSTAINABILITY

Global changes pose an urgent demand to education that produces citizens with relevant competences to deal with a complex world. By creating connection among different disciplines and connection between lessons and real life, integrated curriculum has been pondered to be an appropriate approach to transform education. In Vietnam, though integrated education concept had been introduced since early 2000s and promoted by the government recently, it remains a new concept to many school teachers. 76% of interviewed teachers claimed that integrated curriculum was indispensable trend of education but only 26% of them practiced IC. Based on the study results, several solutions were proposed to motivate integrated education in Vietnam and those can also be applied in other developing countries  Article visualizations

Statistical dependence estimation for object interaction and matching

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-103).This dissertation shows how statistical dependence estimation underlies two key problems in visual surveillance and wide-area tracking. The first problem is to detect and describe interactions between moving objects. The goal is to measure the influence objects exert on one another. The second problem is to match objects between non-overlapping cameras. There, the goal is to pair the departures in one camera with the arrivals in a different camera so that the resulting distribution of relationships best models the data. Both problems have become important for scaling up surveillance systems to larger areas and expanding the monitoring to more interesting behaviors. We show how statistical dependence estimation generalizes previous work and may have applications in other areas. The two problems represent different applications of our thesis that statistical dependence estimation underlies the learning of the structure of probabilistic models. First, we analyze the relationship between Bayesian, information-theoretic, and classical statistical methods for statistical dependence estimation. Then, we apply these ideas to formulate object interaction in terms of dependency structure model selection.(cont.) We describe experiments on simulated and real interaction data to validate our approach. Second, we formulate the matching problem in terms of maximizing statistical dependence. This allows us to generalize previous work on matching, and we show improved results on simulated and real data for non-overlapping cameras. We also prove an intractability result on exact maximally dependent matching.by Kinh Tieu.Ph.D

Learning Object-Independent Modes of Variation with Feature Flow Fields

We present a unifying framework in which "object-independent" modes of variation are learned from continuous-time data such as video sequences. These modes of variation can be used as "generators" to produce a manifold of images of a new object from a single example of that object. We develop the framework in the context of a well-known example: analyzing the modes of spatial deformations of a scene under camera movement. Our method learns a close approximation to the standard affine deformations that are expected from the geometry of the situation, and does so in a completely unsupervised (i.e. ignorant of the geometry of the situation) fashion. We stress that it is learning a "parameterization", not just the parameter values, of the data. We then demonstrate how we have used the same framework to derive a novel data-driven model of joint color change in images due to common lighting variations. The model is superior to previous models of color change in describing non-linear color changes due to lighting

A FORMALIZED TRANSFORMATION PROCESS FOR GENERATING DESIGN MODELS FROM BUSINESS RULES

Business rules play a critical role in building and maintaining effective and flexible information systems. In light of that critical role, the publication of the Semantic Business Vocabulary and Business Rules standard (SBVR), has been regarded a highly significant advance. Following that release, a number of research efforts have been made to convert SBVR to design models, most of which are structural models represented in UML. However, so far the proposed methodologies tend to be of an exploratory nature in the sense that they are not built on a rigorous foundation. Our aim is to identify a core subset of the SBVR features and show how those core SBVR features can be translated into an equivalent UML structural model. To do that on a sound foundation, we first provide formal models of the core SBVR and the target UML class diagram. We then transform the core SBVR model to the UML class model, completed with proofs of correctness, and describe how the mapping rules can be applied in a transformation process. Finally, to show the usefulness of our formal approach, we discuss how it is used as a crucial component in a larger project, which embraces a number of practical objectives

Assessing and Mapping Rice Provisioning Ecosystem Services

Reisproduktion und damit verbundene Ökosystemleistungen sind abhängig von ökologischen und sozio-ökonomischen Faktoren. Auf wissenschaftlicher sowie auf politischer Ebene bestehen immer noch Wissenslücken zum Thema Entwicklung nachhaltiger Strategien für die Landwirtschaft und zur Verbesserung der Nahrungsmittelsicherheit. Landnutzer verstehen oftmals nicht die Probleme bezüglich Angebot und Nachfrage von Reisprodukten und Ökonomen können nicht alle landwirtschaftlichen Aspekte nachvollziehen. Diese Lücken haben zu einer Steigerung ökologischer Risiken (z.B. Dürre, Erosion und Verschmutzung) und zu Hungersnöten in Entwicklungsländern beigetragen. Darum ist es zwingend notwendig, einen integrativen Ansatz zu erarbeiten, welcher die Vorteile und das Wissen der verschiedenen Stakeholder, wie z.B. Landwirte, Politiker, Zwischenhändler und Konsumenten, integriert und eine ausbalancierte Bewertung ermöglicht.Rice production and related ecosystem services provision are strongly dependent on environmental characteristics and socio-economic factors. There are still various knowledge gaps among decision makers for the development of sustainable agriculture strategies and to improve food security. Farmers can often not clearly understand issues related to rice supply chains, while economists can often not clearly understand farming issues. These gaps have led to the increase of environmental risks (e.g. droughts, erosion and pollution), as well as famine threats in developing countries. Therefore, it is necessary to find out an integrated approach to balance the benefits and knowledge between stakeholders such as farmers, politicians, intermediate traders and consumers