Off the Beaten Path: Let's Replace Term-Based Retrieval with k-NN Search

Retrieval pipelines commonly rely on a term-based search to obtain candidate records, which are subsequently re-ranked. Some candidates are missed by this approach, e.g., due to a vocabulary mismatch. We address this issue by replacing the term-based search with a generic k-NN retrieval algorithm, where a similarity function can take into account subtle term associations. While an exact brute-force k-NN search using this similarity function is slow, we demonstrate that an approximate algorithm can be nearly two orders of magnitude faster at the expense of only a small loss in accuracy. A retrieval pipeline using an approximate k-NN search can be more effective and efficient than the term-based pipeline. This opens up new possibilities for designing effective retrieval pipelines. Our software (including data-generating code) and derivative data based on the Stack Overflow collection is available online

Coarse-to-Fine Annotation Enrichment for Semantic Segmentation Learning

Rich high-quality annotated data is critical for semantic segmentation learning, yet acquiring dense and pixel-wise ground-truth is both labor- and time-consuming. Coarse annotations (e.g., scribbles, coarse polygons) offer an economical alternative, with which training phase could hardly generate satisfactory performance unfortunately. In order to generate high-quality annotated data with a low time cost for accurate segmentation, in this paper, we propose a novel annotation enrichment strategy, which expands existing coarse annotations of training data to a finer scale. Extensive experiments on the Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012 benchmarks have shown that the neural networks trained with the enriched annotations from our framework yield a significant improvement over that trained with the original coarse labels. It is highly competitive to the performance obtained by using human annotated dense annotations. The proposed method also outperforms among other state-of-the-art weakly-supervised segmentation methods.Comment: CIKM 2018 International Conference on Information and Knowledge Managemen

Social Policies in Kosovo: institutional reforms in the context of globalization and internatin aladministration

Social policy broadly focuses on pensions system, health insurance, education, family policies, disability and injury insurance, unemployment benefits, war victims’ benefits and other aid to the poor. The main features of Western Balkans’ welfare system during communism can be characterized by three pillars: full employment and quasi-obligatory employment: broad and universalistic social insurance: and a highly developed typically company-based, system of services and fringe benefits. This system was eliminated after the fall of communism, as it became impossible for the state to provide the necessary funds to cover new social costs associated with transformation. The welfare system reform in the form of introduction of choice and marketization was delayed and implemented unevenly due to protracted conflicts, internal and external determinants. The paper initially will comparatively examine the similarities and differences in social policy in Western Balkans taking into account different initial conditions, legacy, political systems and the influence of international actors. Secondly, it details the case of social policy in Kosovo explaining resulting institutional set-up and policies adopted in the context of international administration and globalisation

Is there a European Innovation Crisis!? The impact of product and labour market deregulation

Economists have often talked about the European Paradox:” - Europe having the necessary knowledge and research but failing to utilize these advantages and bring them to the markets. The perception, largely attributable to the media reporting, is that Europe lags behind the United States in innovation. While it is true that most of the e-commerce innovations were developed in the United States, Europe’s economies did well over the 1990s despite the lack of major breakthroughs in hightech sphere. Thus, it is hard to say that Europe is facing an innovation crisis, and I will argue that Europe has other advantages that make it competitive globally. While Europe might not have as much success in innovation as the United States, it nevertheless, has been successful in more developed and mature segments of the markets. Moreover, I will argue that country’s specialization depends on the setup of the institutions in the political economy. The countries utilize their comparative institutional advantage (CIA) to maintain competitive globally. Finally, I will argue against the idea of drastic deregulation of the product and labor markets in Europe. Doing so would be like shooting yourself in the foot since individual European countries would lose their comparative institutional advantage that allows them to stay competitive globally in the market for incremental innovation products

The impact of product and labour market deregulation

Economists have often talked about the European Paradox:” - Europe having the necessary knowledge and research but failing to utilize these advantages and bring them to the markets. The perception, largely attributable to the media reporting, is that Europe lags behind the United States in innovation. While it is true that most of the e-commerce innovations were developed in the United States, Europe’s economies did well over the 1990s despite the lack of major breakthroughs in high-tech sphere. Thus, it is hard to say that Europe is facing an innovation crisis, and I will argue that Europe has other advantages that make it competitive globally. While Europe might not have as much success in innovation as the United States, it nevertheless, has been successful in more developed and mature segments of the markets. Moreover, I will argue that country’s specialization depends on the setup of the institutions in the political economy. The countries utilize their comparative institutional advantage (CIA) to maintain competitive globally. Finally, I will argue against the idea of drastic deregulation of the product and labor markets in Europe. Doing so would be like shooting yourself in the foot since individual European countries would lose their comparative institutional advantage that allows them to stay competitive globally in the market for incremental innovation products

THE INFLUENCE OF TEACHING ENGLISH VOCABULARY USING VCD LEARNING TO THE KINDERGARTEN LEVEL IN SMART AND FUN COMMUNICATIVE ENGLISH COURSE SAMARINDA

The researcher used VCD Learning to help kindergarten level students Smart and Fun Communicative English Program Samarinda on learning English vocabulary. The contents were relevant to the vocabulary for students in kindergarten level of Smart and Fun Samarinda.This study was aimed finding whether there was significance difference between experimental and control groups and whether there was significant difference between post experimental and control groups. It is a kind of experimental research. This study’s design was two group-pretest-treatment-posttest design. The population of this study was 60 students. The researcher took 40 students from two classes as the sample of this study. Then, took other 20 students as try out test respondents. The test was tried out to 20 respondents consisted of 30 items. After being analyzed, its reliability coefficient was 0.462. The experimental group’s mean score on the post-test was 80.17 while on control group was 70.67. After analyzing the two mean scores by using the program of SPSS 16.0, it was found that the difference significance value between the two mean scores t - computed 4.068 was higher than t - table 2.093 with the level of significant 5%. The computation showed that the two groups’ mean scores of significantly differed. Thus, the alternative hypothesis (Ha) is accepted and the Null Hypothesis (Ho) is rejected. It could be concluded that there was significant difference of English vocabulary achievement among students of kindergarten level of Smart and Fun by using VCD Learning

PENGARUH PELAKSANAAN PRAKTIKUM TERHADAP KETERAMPILAN GENERIK SAINS SISWA SMA NEGERI 5 MAROS

Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian kuantitatif dengan metode eksperimen semu yang bertujuan untuk mengetahui Pengaruh Pelaksanaan Praktikum Terhadap Keterampilan Generik Sains Siswa SMA Negeri 5 Maros. Penelitian ini menggunakan dua kelas yaitu kelas eksperimen dan kelas kontrol, Instrument penelitian yang digunakan adalah tes essay sebanyak 5 nomor, lembar observasi keterampilan generik sains sebanyak 9 nomor yang telah divalidasi. Data penelitian ini dianalisis dengan menggunakan SPSS Versi 25 yang diajar dengan metode pembelajaran praktikum pada kelas eksperimen dengan nilai rata-rata 86.06 dan standar deviasi 6.131 sedangkan pada kelas kontrol yang diajar dengan menggunakan model pembelajaran konvensional yang nilai rata-rata 81.63 dan standar deviasi 8.092. Hasil analisis menggunakan SPSS Versi 25 uji t diperoleh nilai sig sebesar 0.012 < 0.025 maka dapat disimpulkan bahwa analisis hipotesis H0 ditolak dan H1 diterima ini berarti bahwa terdapat pengaruh pelaksanaan praktikum terhadap keterampilan generik sains siswa SMA Negeri 5 Maros pada materi sistem pernapasan manusi

Transactional Support for Visual Instance Search

International audienceThis article addresses the issue of dynamicity and durability for scalable indexing of very large and rapidly growing collections of local features for visual instance retrieval. By extending the NV-tree, a scalable disk-based high-dimensional index, we show how to implement the ACID properties of transactions which ensure both dynamicity and durability. We present a detailed performance evaluation of the transactional NV-tree, showing that the insertion throughput is excellent despite the effort to enforce the ACID properties

H∞ LIDAR odometry for spacecraft relative navigation

Current light detection and ranging (LIDAR) based odometry solutions that are used for spacecraft relative navigation suffer from quite a few deficiencies. These include an off-line training requirement and relying on the iterative closest point (ICP) that does not guarantee a globally optimum solution. To encounter this, the authors suggest a robust architecture that overcomes the problems of current proposals by combining the concepts of 3D local feature matching with an adaptive variant of the H∞ recursive filtering process. Trials on real laser scans of an EnviSat model demonstrate that the proposed architecture affords at least one order of magnitude better accuracy compared to ICP