CLIPPO: Image-and-Language Understanding from Pixels Only

Multimodal models are becoming increasingly effective, in part due to unified components, such as the Transformer architecture. However, multimodal models still often consist of many task- and modality-specific pieces and training procedures. For example, CLIP (Radford et al., 2021) trains independent text and image towers via a contrastive loss. We explore an additional unification: the use of a pure pixel-based model to perform image, text, and multimodal tasks. Our model is trained with contrastive loss alone, so we call it CLIP-Pixels Only (CLIPPO). CLIPPO uses a single encoder that processes both regular images and text rendered as images. CLIPPO performs image-based tasks such as retrieval and zero-shot image classification almost as well as CLIP-style models, with half the number of parameters and no text-specific tower or embedding. When trained jointly via image-text contrastive learning and next-sentence contrastive learning, CLIPPO can perform well on natural language understanding tasks, without any word-level loss (language modelling or masked language modelling), outperforming pixel-based prior work. Surprisingly, CLIPPO can obtain good accuracy in visual question answering, simply by rendering the question and image together. Finally, we exploit the fact that CLIPPO does not require a tokenizer to show that it can achieve strong performance on multilingual multimodal retrieval without modifications.Comment: CVPR 2023. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/google-research/big_vision/blob/main/big_vision/configs/proj/clippo/README.m

A BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE ON MOBILE APPLICATION STORES

Mobile devices, namely smart phones and tablets, have recently experienced remarkable proliferation. Beside private users, companies realize the potential of increasing the mobile productivity of their workforce. In this paper, we take a business-to-business perspective on mobile app stores by evaluating the potential of particular app stores for business-related apps. For this purpose, we first review the existing landscape of mobile app stores, and then assess their suitability for business-tobusiness purposes. For some mobile platforms there already exist alternatives to the official app store. We also judge if they could serve as model for B2B purposes. Overall, we highlight three distinct cases from this analysis: the “Google case”, the “Apple case” and the “Web case”. For all of them we show how the distribution of B2B could fit in. We then take a look at the specific aspects that should be considered for designing app stores for B2B needs. We suggest concepts for realizing these aspects. Some of the aspects, however, remain open. We discuss them and propose considerable potential for further work

If donor-conceived children have a constitutional right to know their genetic origins, what protection is there for donors in terms of their constitutional right to privacy?

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.Increasingly, couples and individuals are turning to donor-conception as a means to conceive children. In South Africa, gamete donation is regulated by the National Health Act 61 of 2003, together with the Regulations relating to the Artificial Fertilization of Persons, 2012 and the Children’s Act 38 of 2005 together with its regulations. In terms of these, the disclosure of the identity of a gamete donor is prohibited unless the law or the courts deem it permissible. This leaves a donor-conceived child without means of ascertaining his or her biological parent who is the donor. The lack of a right of a donor-conceived child to know his or her biological parents is seemingly inconsistent when compared with adopted and naturally conceived children. The position may be tenuous in our law therefore, as it may go against the spirit and objectives of the Bill of Rights, where both the Right to Equality is guaranteed, as well as the Right of Access to Information. The position is further complicated by advancements in medical technology since the advent of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, as this makes it possible to track down biological relatives using online genealogical databases. This may make the position of donor-anonymity increasingly unfeasible as increasing numbers of people use direct-to-consumer genetic testing, and the online genealogical databases increase in size. This dissertation will discuss the law as it stands pertaining to whether the position of donor-anonymity is in fact legal under the Bill of Rights. It will then discuss the challenges posed to donor-anonymity by direct-to-consumer genetic testing, and then draw conclusions and recommend that principle of donor-anonymity be abolished, by allowing donor-conceived children access to the identity of their gamete donors, while introducing other measures to protect the donors interests by introducing a framework as to how much interaction a donor-conceived individual is permitted with a donor. These may include laws pertaining to nuisance, trespass or anti-stalking

Field testing of an onsite sanitation system on apartment building blackwater using biological treatment and electrochemical disinfection

The Closed Loop Advanced Sanitation System (CLASS) was designed to treat, disinfect, and recycle toilet blackwater from existing flush toilets in a multi-story apartment building. Two systems were tested at two unique sites in Coimbatore, India for a combined 7500+ treatment hours resulting in more than 180 000 L of treated water. The CLASS prototypes used a combination of biological pretreatment and electrochemical oxidation processes to produce treated water that nearly met the stringent requirements outlined in the standard ISO 30500. The nutrient and organic loading from the toilet blackwater was predominantly reduced by over 85–95% and 80–87%, respectively, through biological processes that were achieved using either a sequencing batch reactor (SBR, site A) or an anaerobic–aerobic biodigester (EcoSan, site B). Complete disinfection of E. coli with nil CFU per ml was achieved using electrochemical processes that also served to remove the remaining organic and nutrient loading to over 90–96%. The treated water was reused for flushing by the residents of the apartment building for 89 days

A new framework for high-resolution pedestrian data processing using rule-based algorithms and real-time alarm systems

Pedestrian flows and densities have increased in recent years within transport-related public facilities such as train stations, as well as in private buildings such as shopping centers, event halls or convention centers. Increasing flows and high densities often raise comfort, safety, operational and delay issues; and therefore, require pedestrian flow optimization, intervention or even revised regulation. Recent technological advances enhanced pedestrian sensing; however, they disregard adaptive data capture, processing, and strategic communication within reasonable time, or real-time, such as tactic occupancy or density alarms trigger rules. Content of this research is twofold. First, new data capturing and processing advances of recent technological developments are combined in an integral software and hardware-based framework. Second, applied methods highlight projects and experiences on both pedestrian research and on existing and operating pedestrian facilities. Based on the described, two-sided approach, proposed framework is able to fulfil high safety and comfort standards of facilities such as train stations, retail facilities or event halls. In this research, past semi-automatic video analysis processing of pedestrian behavioral studies is replaced with combined sensor and data processing system within proposed framework. In train stations of major operators, real-time pedestrian observation increases safety levels on station platforms. Tactic algorithms and alarm trigger schemes enable on-time surveillance, e.g. at overcrowded floor levels in shopping centers for escalator or door closure. Sensor data is used to train models for underpass pedestrian flow regarding path choice and fundamental diagram. In retail, queue length, trajectory analysis and floor occupancy are determined for economic, comfort as well as safety evaluation. Using trajectory classification, movement and dwell time is analyzed for staff and visitors separately (see Figure 1)

Delaying spontaneous combustion of reactive coals through inhibition

A moist coal adiabatic oven test has been used to quantify the effect of applying an anti-oxidant agent to reactive coals from Australia and the US. For the dosage rate applied, the anti-oxidant significantly reduces the coal self-heating rate and extends the time taken to reach thermal runaway by a factor of three for sub-bituminous coal and by a factor of two for the same application to high volatile C bituminous coal. The laboratory result obtained for sub-bituminous coal from Powder River Basin is in direct agreement with the practical site experience of applying the anti-oxidant product as a spontaneous combustion management control. Consequently, it is now possible to benchmark the application of the anti-oxidant to any reactive coal prior to mining as part of developing a leading practice spontaneous combustion management plan

Vitamin D Receptor Variants and Uncontrolled Asthma

BACKGROUND: Asthma is a common childhood respiratory disease, affecting around 20% of Irish children. In other populations, vitamin D receptor (VDR) polymorphisms have been associated with asthma risk. We aimed to investigate the association between 2 VDR polymorphisms and uncontrolled paediatric asthma. METHODS: 44 asthmatic children and 57 healthy volunteers were studied. The VDR TaqI gene variant in exon 9 (T/C) (rs731236) and ApaI (rs7975232) in intron 8 (C/T) were determined, using TaqMan®Assays. The lung function, serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25OHD) levels and other biomarkers of allergy, immunity, airway and systemic inflammation were assessed. RESULTS: The distribution of T and C alleles and genotype frequencies differed significantly between asthmatics and controls for both polymorphisms (