A relational post-processing approach for forms recognition

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is used to convert paper documents into electronic form. Unfortunately the technology is not perfect and the output can be erroneous. Conversion then is generally augmented by manual error detection and correction procedures which can be very costly; One approach to minimizing cost is to apply an OCR post processing system that will reduce the amount of manual correction required. The post processor takes advantage of knowledge associated with a particular project; In this thesis, we look into the feasibility of using integrity constraints to detect and correct errors in forms recognition. The general idea is to construct a database of form values that can be used to direct recognition and consequently, make automatic correction

Investigation of the relationship between firm-wise financial factors and firm performance in the hospitality industry

This study empirically investigates the relationship between firm-wise financial factors and firm performance in the hospitality industry from 2000 to 2004 using panel data regression. After a literature review of firm-wise financial factors and their impact on performance in the literature, unit-effect and time-effect linear models were proposed and examined in both the restaurant and hotel sectors with different firm performance measures used as the dependent variable (i.e., Proxy Q, Sharpe ratio, and Treynor ratio). While some variables, especially liquidity and solvency, were found to have significant impacts on firm performance measured by Proxy Q and Sharpe ratio in both the restaurant and hotel sectors, no financial variable was found to have a significant relationship with the Treynor ratio in either sector. Implications of this study\u27s findings for both the restaurant and hotel sectors are discussed at the end

Hospitality Management Educators vs. the Industry: a Competency Assessment

An often-asked question in the hospitality industry is whether graduates of hospitality education programs possess the competencies that the hospitality industry believes students should possess. The purpose of this study is to determine the discrepancies, if any, in the competencies being taught in the classroom for hospitality tourism students versus what lodging and food and beverage professionals believe are the most important competencies to be taught. Semi-structured, personal in-depth interviews were conducted with both educators of, and industry professionals working in, lodging management, and the food and beverage industry. The results of this study, incorporated into a competency domain model, indicate that there are small gaps between professionals and educators in both industries, as well as differences between the two industries. This discovery suggests that lines of communication are not open between educators and professionals. Faculty internships, industry forums, and interaction with graduating students are suggested means to opening communication

A Review of Restaurant Valuation Literature - The Pre 2005 Perspective

This research examines pre 2005 restaurant valuation literature in an effort to identify unexplored areas in this emerging field. Although much has been written regarding valuation in general, there has been very little appraisal literature focusing specifically on restaurants. Of the research that has been conducted, there has been some controversy about whether the appropriate value of a restaurant is a market value or a going concern value. We also explore the continuing usage of “rules of thumb” in restaurant valuation. Although these rules are often based in theory as well as practice, their breadth can severely limit their usefulness. Accordingly, we examine the prevalence of rule-of-thumb usage in the literature and hope that this may motivate academic researchers to find evidence of the relative accuracy of these informal tools

LightFormer: An End-to-End Model for Intersection Right-of-Way Recognition Using Traffic Light Signals and an Attention Mechanism

For smart vehicles driving through signalised intersections, it is crucial to determine whether the vehicle has right of way given the state of the traffic lights. To address this issue, camera based sensors can be used to determine whether the vehicle has permission to proceed straight, turn left or turn right. This paper proposes a novel end to end intersection right of way recognition model called LightFormer to generate right of way status for available driving directions in complex urban intersections. The model includes a spatial temporal inner structure with an attention mechanism, which incorporates features from past image to contribute to the classification of the current frame right of way status. In addition, a modified, multi weight arcface loss is introduced to enhance the model classification performance. Finally, the proposed LightFormer is trained and tested on two public traffic light datasets with manually augmented labels to demonstrate its effectiveness

From Covert Hiding to Visual Editing: Robust Generative Video Steganography

Traditional video steganography methods are based on modifying the covert space for embedding, whereas we propose an innovative approach that embeds secret message within semantic feature for steganography during the video editing process. Although existing traditional video steganography methods display a certain level of security and embedding capacity, they lack adequate robustness against common distortions in online social networks (OSNs). In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end robust generative video steganography network (RoGVS), which achieves visual editing by modifying semantic feature of videos to embed secret message. We employ face-swapping scenario to showcase the visual editing effects. We first design a secret message embedding module to adaptively hide secret message into the semantic feature of videos. Extensive experiments display that the proposed RoGVS method applied to facial video datasets demonstrate its superiority over existing video and image steganography techniques in terms of both robustness and capacity.Comment: Under Revie

Pressure-Induced Confined Metal from the Mott Insulator Sr\u3csub\u3e3\u3c/sub\u3eIr\u3csub\u3e2\u3c/sub\u3eO\u3csub\u3e7\u3c/sub\u3e

The spin-orbit Mott insulator Sr3Ir2O7 provides a fascinating playground to explore insulator-metal transition driven by intertwined charge, spin, and lattice degrees of freedom. Here, we report high-pressure electric resistance and resonant inelastic x-ray scattering measurements on single-crystal Sr3Ir2O7 up to 63–65 GPa at 300 K. The material becomes a confined metal at 59.5 GPa, showing metallicity in the ab plane but an insulating behavior along the c axis. Such an unusual phenomenon resembles the strange metal phase in cuprate superconductors. Since there is no sign of the collapse of spin-orbit or Coulomb interactions in x-ray measurements, this novel insulator-metal transition is potentially driven by a first-order structural change at nearby pressures. Our discovery points to a new approach for synthesizing functional materials

Hybrid weakness and continuous flowering caused by compound expression of FTLs in Chrysanthemum morifolium × Leucanthemum paludosum intergeneric hybridization

Hybridization is an important evolutionary mechanism ubiquitous to plants. Previous studies have shown that hybrid polyploidization of cultivated chrysanthemum, ‘Zhongshanzigui’, and Leucanthemum paludosum exhibit spring-flowering traits. This study explores the function of the LpFTLs gene via the phenotype of A. thaliana after heterologous transformation of the LpFTLs gene, and analyzes the mechanism ofthe continuous flowering phenotype and heterosis of hybrid offspring. The results suggest that the flowering phenotype of hybrid offspring in spring may be related to the expression of the LpFTLs gene. Ectopic expression of Leucanthemum paludosumLpFTLs in Arabidopsis thaliana resulted in earlier flowering, indicating that the LpFTLs gene also affects the flowering time in L. paludosum. Compound expression of FTLs in C. morifolium × L. paludosum intergeneric hybridization directly leads to serious heterosis in the hybrid offspring. Moreover, continuous flowering appears to be accompanied by hybrid weakness under the balance of vegetative and reproductive growth. Therefore, in future studies on chrysanthemum breeding, a suitable balance point must be established to ensure the target flowering time under normal growth

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Roadmap on energy harvesting materials

Ambient energy harvesting has great potential to contribute to sustainable development and address growing environmental challenges. Converting waste energy from energy-intensive processes and systems (e.g. combustion engines and furnaces) is crucial to reducing their environmental impact and achieving net-zero emissions. Compact energy harvesters will also be key to powering the exponentially growing smart devices ecosystem that is part of the Internet of Things, thus enabling futuristic applications that can improve our quality of life (e.g. smart homes, smart cities, smart manufacturing, and smart healthcare). To achieve these goals, innovative materials are needed to efficiently convert ambient energy into electricity through various physical mechanisms, such as the photovoltaic effect, thermoelectricity, piezoelectricity, triboelectricity, and radiofrequency wireless power transfer. By bringing together the perspectives of experts in various types of energy harvesting materials, this Roadmap provides extensive insights into recent advances and present challenges in the field. Additionally, the Roadmap analyses the key performance metrics of these technologies in relation to their ultimate energy conversion limits. Building on these insights, the Roadmap outlines promising directions for future research to fully harness the potential of energy harvesting materials for green energy anytime, anywhere