Recognizing the artistic style of fine art paintings with deep learning for an augmented reality application

The rapid digitalization of artwork collections in libraries, museums, galleries, and art centers has resulted in a growing interest in developing autonomous systems capable of understanding art concepts and categorizing fine art paintings as it became difficult to manually manipulate the content of these collections. However, the task of automatic categorization comes with significant challenges due to the subjective interpretation and perception of art elements and the reliance on accurate annotations provided by art experts. As in recent years, deep learning approaches and computer vision techniques have shown remarkable performance in automating painting classification; this research aims to develop efficient deep learning systems that can automatically classify the artistic style of fine-art paintings. In this thesis, we investigate the effectiveness of seven pre-trained EfficientNet models for identifying the style of a painting and propose custom models based on pre-trained EfficientNet architectures. In addition, we analyzed the impact of deep retraining the last eight layers on the performance of the custom models. The experimental results on the standard fine art painting classification dataset, Painting-91 indicate that deep retraining of the last eight layers of the custom models yields the best performance, achieving a 5% improvement compared to the base models. This demonstrates the effectiveness of leveraging pre-trained EfficientNet models for automatic artistic style identification in paintings. Moreover, the study presents a framework that compares the performance of six pre-trained convolutional neural networks (Xception, ResNet50, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2, DenseNet121, and EfficientNet B3) for identifying artistic styles in paintings. Notably, Xception architecture is employed for this purpose for the first time. Furthermore, the impact of different optimizers (SGD, RMSprop, and Adam) and two learning rates (1e-2 and 1e-4) on model performance is studied using transfer learning. The experiments on two different art classification datasets, Pandora18k and Painting-91 revealed that InceptionResNetV2 achieves the highest accuracy for style classification on both datasets when trained with the Adam optimizer and a learning rate of 1e-4. Integrating deep learning algorithms and transfer learning techniques into fine art painting analysis and classification offers promising avenues for automating style identification tasks. The proposed models and findings contribute to the development of automatic methods that enable the art community to efficiently analyze and categorize the vast number of digital paintings available on the internet

Accelerometer assessed moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and successful ageing: results from the Whitehall II study.

Physical activity is key for successful ageing, but questions remain regarding the optimal physical activity pattern. We examined the cross-sectional association between physical activity and successful ageing using data on 3,749 participants (age range = 60-83years) of the Whitehall II study. The participants underwent a clinical assessment, completed a 20-item physical activity questionnaire, and wore a wrist-mounted accelerometer for 9 days. Successful ageing was defined as good cognitive, motor, and respiratory functioning, along with absence of disability, mental health problems, and major chronic diseases. Time spent in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) episodes assessed by accelerometer was classified as "short" (1-9.59 minutes) and "long" (≥10 minutes) bouts. Linear multivariate regression showed that successful agers (N = 789) reported 3.79 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.39-6.19) minutes more daily MVPA than other participants. Accelerometer data showed this difference to be 3.40 (95% CI:2.44-4.35) minutes for MVPA undertaken in short bouts, 4.16 (95% CI:3.11-5.20) minutes for long bouts, and 7.55 (95% CI:5.86-9.24) minutes for all MVPA bouts lasting 1 minute or more. Multivariate logistic regressions showed that participants undertaking ≥150 minutes of MVPA per week were more likely to be successful agers with both self-reported (Odd Ratio (OR) = 1.29,95% (CI):1.09-1.53) and accelerometer data (length bout ≥1 minute:OR = 1.92, 95%CI:1.60-2.30). Successful agers practice more MVPA, having both more short and long bouts, than non-successful agers

Protective effect of Atriplex halimus extract against benzene-induced haematotoxicity in rats

Benzen (BZ) is a ubiquitous environmental pollutant with a toxic effect mainly aimed at the hematopoietic­ and immune systems. Atriplex halimus L. (Amaranthaceae) is a Mediterranean halophytic shrub traditionally used in North Africa as medicinal plant for several therapeutic uses. The present study aimed to estimate the preventive and curative effects of Atriplex halimus L. (Ah) aqueous extract against BZ-induced hematotoxici­ty in rats. Analysis of the extract by the method of LC-MS revealed the presence of 7 vitamins, among which vitamin C content was the highest. Adult rats were divided into five groups as follow: Group 1 received water (control); Group 2 received orally Ah aqueous extract (200 mg/kg) 3 days/week for 15 weeks; Group 3 received BZ (100 mg/kg b.w) daily in drinking water for 15 weeks; Group 4 received concomitantly BZ (100 mg/kg) and preventive treatment with Ah (200 mg/kg) for 15 weeks (AhP+BZ); Group 5 first received BZ (100 mg/kg) for 11 weeks and then curative treatment with Ah extract (300 mg/kg) daily for 30 days (BZ+AhC). It was shown that sub-chronic exposure to benzene induced leukopenia, lymphocytopenia, granulocytopenia and massive degeneration of the bone marrow tissue. The level of GSH and activity of GST and CAT were significantly lowered and the level of MDA was increased in the blood and bone marrow in rats of BZ-intoxicated group compared to the control rats. Administration of Ah extract recovered the bone marrow structure, dramatically decreased MDA content and increased GSH and CAT activity and GST level in the blood and bone marrow as compared with the indices in BZ-treated group. These observations demonstrate that curative and, to a lesser extent, preventive treatment with Atriplex halimus extract have therapeutic potential against hematotoxicity induced by benzene

Descriptive study of sedentary behaviours in 35,444 French working adults: cross-sectional findings from the ACTI-Cités study

International audienceBackground : Given the unfavourable health outcomes associated with sedentary behaviours, there is a need to better understand the context in which these behaviours take place to better address this public health concern. We explored self-reported sedentary behaviours by type of day (work/non-work), occupation, and perceptions towards physical activity, in a large sample of adults.Methods : We assessed sedentary behaviours cross-sectionally in 35,444 working adults (mean ± SD age: 44.5 ± 13.0 y) from the French NutriNet-Santé web-based cohort. Participants self-reported sedentary behaviours, assessed as domain-specific sitting time (work, transport, leisure) and time spent in sedentary entertainment (TV/DVD, computer and other screen-based activities, non-screen-based activities) on workdays and non-workdays, along with occupation type (ranging from mainly sitting to heavy manual work) and perceptions towards physical activity. Associations of each type of sedentary behaviour with occupation type and perceptions towards physical activity were analysed by day type in multiple linear regression analyses.Results : On workdays, adults spent a mean (SD) of 4.17 (3.07) h/day in work sitting, 1.10 (1.69) h/day in transport sitting, 2.19 (1.62) h/day in leisure-time sitting, 1.53 (1.24) h/day viewing TV/DVDs, 2.19 (2.62) h/day on other screen time, and 0.97 (1.49) on non-screen time. On non-workdays, this was 0.85 (1.53) h/day in transport sitting, 3.19 (2.05) h/day in leisure-time sitting, 2.24 (1.76) h/day viewing TV/DVDs, 1.85 (1.74) h/day on other screen time, and 1.30 (1.35) on non-screen time. Time spent in sedentary behaviours differed by occupation type, with more sedentary behaviour outside of work (both sitting and entertainment time), in those with sedentary occupations, especially on workdays. Negative perceptions towards physical activity were associated with more sedentary behaviour outside of work (both sitting and entertainment time), irrespective of day type.Conclusions : A substantial amount of waking hours was spent in different types of sedentary behaviours on workdays and non-workdays. Being sedentary at work was associated with more sedentary behaviour outside of work. Negative perceptions towards physical activity may influence the amount of time spent in sedentary behaviours. These data should help to better identify target groups in public health interventions to reduce sedentary behaviours in working adults

A new corpus for the evaluation of arabic intrinsic plagiarism detection

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40802-1_6The present paper introduces the first corpus for the evaluation of Arabic intrinsic plagiarism detection. The corpus consists of 1024 artificial suspicious documents in which 2833 plagiarism cases have been inserted automatically from source documentsThis work is the result of the collaboration in the framework of the bilateral research project AECID-PCI AP/043848/11 (Application of Natural Language Processing to the Need of the University) between the Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain and Constantine 2 University in AlgeriaBensalem, I.; Rosso, P.; Chikhi, S. (2013). A new corpus for the evaluation of arabic intrinsic plagiarism detection. En Information Access Evaluation. Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Visualization. Springer Verlag (Germany). 53-58. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40802-1_6S5358Springer Policy on Publishing Integrity. Guidelines for Journal EditorsPotthast, M., Stein, B., Eiselt, A., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Rosso, P.: Overview of the 1st International Competition on Plagiarism Detection. In: Stein, B., Rosso, P., Stamatatos, E., Koppel, M., Agirre, E. (eds.) SEPLN 2009 Workshop on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship, and Social Software Misuse (PAN 2009), pp. 1–9 (2009)Potthast, M., Stein, B., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Rosso, P.: An Evaluation Framework for Plagiarism Detection. In: Huang, C.-R., Jurafsky, D. (eds.) Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2010), pp. 997–1005. ACL (2010)Potthast, M., Barrón-cedeño, A., Eiselt, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Overview of the 2nd International Competition on Plagiarism Detection. In: Braschler, M., Harman, D. (eds.) Notebook Papers of CLEF 2010 LABs and Workshops (2010)Potthast, M., Eiselt, A., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Stein, B., Rosso, P.: Overview of the 3rd International Competition on Plagiarism Detection. In: Petras, V., Forner, P., Clough, P. (eds.) Notebook Papers of CLEF 2011 LABs and Workshops (2011)Potthast, M., Gollub, T., Hagen, M., Graßegger, J., Kiesel, J., Michel, M., Oberländer, A., Tippmann, M., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Gupta, P., Rosso, P., Stein, B.: Overview of the 4th International Competition on Plagiarism Detection. In: Forner, P., Karlgren, J., Womser-Hacker, C. (eds.) CLEF 2012 Evaluation Labs and Workshop –Working Notes Papers (2012)Juola, P.: An Overview of the Traditional Authorship Attribution Subtask Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2012. In: Forner, P., Karlgren, J., and Womser-Hacker, C. (eds.) CLEF 2012 Evaluation Labs and Workshop –Working Notes Papers (2012)Yakout, M.M.: Examples of Plagiarism in Scientific and Cultural Communities (in Arabic), http://www.yaqout.net/ba7s_4.htmlAbbasi, A., Chen, H.: Applying Authorship Analysis to Arabic Web Content. In: Kantor, P., Muresan, G., Roberts, F., Zeng, D.D., Wang, F.-Y., Chen, H., Merkle, R.C. (eds.) ISI 2005. LNCS, vol. 3495, pp. 183–197. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)Shaker, K., Corne, D.: Authorship Attribution in Arabic using a hybrid of evolutionary search and linear discriminant analysis. In: 2010 UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence (UKCI), pp. 1–6. IEEE (2010)Ouamour, S., Sayoud, H.: Authorship attribution of ancient texts written by ten arabic travelers using a SMO-SVM classifier. In: 2012 International Conference on Communications and Information Technology (ICCIT), pp. 44–47. IEEE (2012)Bensalem, I., Rosso, P., Chikhi, S.: Intrinsic Plagiarism Detection in Arabic Text: Preliminary Experiments. In: Berlanga, R., Rosso, P. (eds.) 2nd Spanish Conference on Information Retrieval (CERI 2012), Valencia (2012)Jadalla, A., Elnagar, A.: A Plagiarism Detection System for Arabic Text-Based Documents. In: Chau, M., Wang, G.A., Yue, W.T., Chen, H. (eds.) PAISI 2012. LNCS, vol. 7299, pp. 145–153. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)Alzahrani, S., Salim, N.: Statement-Based Fuzzy-Set Information Retrieval versus Fingerprints Matching for Plagiarism Detection in Arabic Documents. In: 5th Postgraduate Annual Research Seminar (PARS 2009), Johor Bahru, Malaysia, pp. 267–268 (2009)Menai, M.E.B.: Detection of Plagiarism in Arabic Documents. International Journal of Information Technology and Computer Science 10, 80–89 (2012)Jaoua, M., Jaoua, F.K., Hadrich Belguith, L., Ben Hamadou, A.: Automatic Detection of Plagiarism in Arabic Documents Based on Lexical Chains. Arab Computer Society Journal 4, 1–11 (2011) (in Arabic)Potthast, M., Hagen, M., Völske, M., Stein, B.: Crowdsourcing Interaction Logs to Understand Text Reuse from the Web. In: 51st Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL 2013). ACM (to appear, 2013)Stein, B., Lipka, N., Prettenhofer, P.: Intrinsic plagiarism analysis. Language Resources and Evaluation 45, 63–82 (2010)Bensalem, I., Rosso, P., Chikhi, S.: Building Arabic Corpora from Wikisource. In: 10th ACS/IEEE International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA 2013). IEEE (2013

Home and Work Physical Activity Environments: Associations with Cardiorespiratory Fitness and Physical Activity Level in French Women

The influence of the physical activity environment in the home and at work on cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) and objectively-measured physical activity has not been extensively studied. We recruited 147 women with a (mean ± SD) age of 54 ± 7 years and without evidence of chronic disease. The physical activity environment was assessed by self-report (Assessing Levels of PHysical Activity or ALPHA questionnaire), CRF using a submaximal step test, usual physical activity using combined heart rate and accelerometry, as well as by a validated questionnaire (Recent Physical Activity Questionnaire). Summary scores of the home environment and the work environment derived from the ALPHA questionnaire were positively correlated with CRF after adjustment for age ($r$ = 0.18, $p$ = 0.03 and $r$ = 0.28, $p$ < 0.01, respectively). Women owning a bicycle or having a garden (which may prompt physical activity) had higher CRF; those with a bicycle at home also had a higher physical activity energy expenditure. Similarly, women who had access to fitness equipment at work had higher CRF. In conclusion, these results provide new insights into potential environmental influences on physical capacity and physical activity that could inform the design of physical activity promotion strategies.European Union (Integrated Project LSHM-CT-2006-037197 in the Framework Programme 6 of the European Community), Medical Research Council (Grant ID: MC_UU_12015/3

Supporting ethical, independent learning behavior among university students in the Arabian Gulf

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014. Students in the Arabian Gulf region and the world over confront plagiarism temptations wittingly or unwittingly due to the multitude of free and easily available electronic sources of information. Rather than develop independent learning skills and academic integrity, students are often taken advantage of by essay mills that sell readymade essays. Instructors at times compound the problem by repeatedly recycling course assignments and tasks. Furthermore, there have been reports of the use of social networking sites for outsourcing and contract cheating in student assignments. This paper discusses how educators in an institution of higher learning in the UAE assist students to develop good academic skills. Data collection is with the use of an online survey questionnaire. Concurring with Wheeler and Anderson (2010) who call for appropriate and comprehensive institutional policies and guidelines for dealing with plagiarism, practical examples of the processes and procedures used at these institutions are provided

Uncovering source code reuse in large-scale academic environments

The advent of the Internet has caused an increase in content reuse, including source code. The purpose of this research is to uncover potential cases of source code reuse in large-scale environments. A good example is academia, where massive courses are taught to students who must demonstrate that they have acquired the knowledge. The need of detecting content reuse in quasi real-time encourages the development of automatic systems such as the one described in this paper for source code reuse detection. Our approach is based on the comparison of programs at character level. It is able to find potential cases of reuse across a huge number of assignments. It achieved better results than JPlag, the most used online system to find similarities among multiple sets of source codes. The most common obfuscation operations we found were changes in identifier names, comments and indentation. 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 23:383–390, 2015; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI 10.1002/cae.21608Flores Sáez, E.; Barrón Cedeño, LA.; Moreno Boronat, LA.; Rosso, P. (2015). Uncovering source code reuse in large-scale academic environments. Computer Applications in Engineering Education. 23(3):383-390. doi:10.1002/cae.21608S38339023