THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

The aim of this extended essay is to analyze the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien by dwelling on the characters and contrasting their physical baggage with their emotional burdens. The researcher asks the question, “how are the personal possessions used to illustrate the emotional, mental and physical features of the characters forced to fight in a war they were against?” and investigates the effects of war on the personalities and behavior of the characters. The three aspects in question will be further investigated amongst the characters and related to the book with necessary quotations and remarks. The researcher tries to adopt a perspective as neutral and objective as possible in her analyses and interpretations. There is a brief historical context, in order to reflect the dimensions of warfare, and the author’s involvement in the context is explained. The researcher aims to present the decisive background information, the effect war has on young and inexperienced soldiers as well as civilians, and explain the burdens they carry, both concrete and abstract

A shallow 3D convolutional neural network for violence detection in videos

With the recent worldwide statistical rise in the amount of public violence, automated violence detection in surveillance cameras has become a matter of high importance. This work introduces an end-to-end, trainable 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3D CNN) for detecting violence in video footage. The proposed network is inherently capable of processing both spatial and temporal information, thereby obviating the need for additional models that would introduce higher computational requirements and complexity. This work has two main contributions: 1) developing a lightweight 3D CNN suitable for inference on edge devices as mobile systems, and 2) a comprehensive explanation of all components comprising a CNN model, thereby enhances model interpretability. Experiments were conducted to assess the performance of the proposed model using a consolidated dataset combining four benchmark datasets. The results of the experiments support the asserted contributions, which are discussed in detail