CIAGAN: Conditional Identity Anonymization Generative Adversarial Networks

The unprecedented increase in the usage of computer vision technology in society goes hand in hand with an increased concern in data privacy. In many real-world scenarios like people tracking or action recognition, it is important to be able to process the data while taking careful consideration in protecting people's identity. We propose and develop CIAGAN, a model for image and video anonymization based on conditional generative adversarial networks. Our model is able to remove the identifying characteristics of faces and bodies while producing high-quality images and videos that can be used for any computer vision task, such as detection or tracking. Unlike previous methods, we have full control over the de-identification (anonymization) procedure, ensuring both anonymization as well as diversity. We compare our method to several baselines and achieve state-of-the-art results.Comment: CVPR 202

Challenges for China’s Sustainable Growth

For more than a quarter of a century, China has experienced a significant economic growth. Yet, this rapid growth has brought on many economic, social and environmental challenges, which might negatively influence the future development of the country. The objective of this paper is to analyse the Chinese economic evolution in order to determine if its growth model is sustainable over time. The research methods consisted in an investigation of the specialized literature, which helped us formulate four research hypotheses, and in a statistical analysis of secondary data, which allowed us develop four models, in order to test the hypotheses. The conclusions show that, to sustain the growth rate, China needs to increase its human capital stock, to keep the pace of attracting the foreign investments, to reduce the size of the government, to diminish the public consumption and to invest in the renewable energy, for increasing the energy efficiency.JEL Codes - Q01; I25; F21; Q5

Introduction: globalization, African workers and the terms of inclusion

This introductory article explores the transformative potential of global connections for African workers. It challenges recent claims that African workers have become functionally irrelevant to the global economy by examining the shift of global demand for African workers from formal to increasingly informalised labour arrangements, mediated by social enterprises, labour brokers and graduate entrepreneurs. Focusing on global employment connections initiated from above and from below, we consider why global labour linkages have tended to increase rather than reduce problems of vulnerable and unstable working conditions within African countries, and consider the economic and political conditions needed for African workers to capture the gains of inclusion in the global economy

Introduction: globalization, African workers and the terms of inclusion

This introductory article explores the transformative potential of global connections for African workers. It challenges recent claims that African workers have become functionally irrelevant to the global economy by examining the shift of global demand for African workers from formal to increasingly informalised labour arrangements, mediated by social enterprises, labour brokers and graduate entrepreneurs. Focusing on global employment connections initiated from above and from below, we consider why global labour linkages have tended to increase rather than reduce problems of vulnerable and unstable working conditions within African countries, and consider the economic and political conditions needed for African workers to capture the gains of inclusion in the global economy

Inflation – Unemployment Dilemma. A Cross-Country Analysis

According to Phillips’ study, there is an inverse link between inflation and unemployment. The major consequence of these imbalances lies in authorities’ ability to correct one of them, usually the unemployment, by influencing the components of the aggregate demand. Phillips' opinion is later countered by Friedman’s principle of currency neutrality. Together with Phelps, Friedman argues that, in the long run, the Phillips curve is vertical and any attempt to lower the unemployment below the natural rate leads to a simultaneous rise in unemployment and inflation. This paper aims to analyze the impact of the economic policy measures on the evolution of inflation and unemployment in the G7 countries, starting from the monetary criticism regarding the inefficiency of monetary impulses. In order to achieve this purpose, the developed econometric analysis tries to identify the existence and the direction of the nexus between variables, both in the short and long term, by using causality and cointegration methods, such as Granger, Granger-Wald and Johansen tests. Our findings support Phillips model on the short run, indicating that there is an inverse link between the inflation rate and the unemployment rate in the G7 states, during the analyzed period. However, on the long run, our results indicate that inflation and unemployment can coexist, fact that allows us to agree with the monetarist theories

La chimie face aux enjeux de la communication

L’image publique négative de la chimie, science et industrie, est une préoccupation importante pour nombre de chimistes. La proclamation de l’année 2011 comme « Année de la Chimie » par l’ONU en est une preuve. En réponse à cette préoccupation, deux modèles d’interaction avec le public peuvent être identifiés parmi les chimistes. Une première approche, structurée autour de l’idée d’« acceptabilité », vise à l’éducation du grand public et à la démonstration des bénéfices de la chimie dans la vie quotidienne. Une deuxième approche, qui peut être appelée « dialogique », considère que les relations entre chimie et société vont au-delà d’une question d’image, et constituent surtout une question de fond. Comme pour d’autres sciences, il s’agit d’un changement nécessaire dans les pratiques des chercheurs et des industriels. Cet article analyse ces deux courants de pensée de façon comparative, selon trois aspects structurants : le concept de communication, l’image du public et les terrains de la communication

Deep Appearance Maps

We propose a deep representation of appearance, i. e., the relation of color, surface orientation, viewer position, material and illumination. Previous approaches have useddeep learning to extract classic appearance representationsrelating to reflectance model parameters (e. g., Phong) orillumination (e. g., HDR environment maps). We suggest todirectly represent appearance itself as a network we call aDeep Appearance Map (DAM). This is a 4D generalizationover 2D reflectance maps, which held the view direction fixed. First, we show how a DAM can be learned from images or video frames and later be used to synthesize appearance, given new surface orientations and viewer positions. Second, we demonstrate how another network can be used to map from an image or video frames to a DAM network to reproduce this appearance, without using a lengthy optimization such as stochastic gradient descent (learning-to-learn). Finally, we show the example of an appearance estimation-and-segmentation task, mapping from an image showingmultiple materials to multiple deep appearance maps