MirBot: A collaborative object recognition system for smartphones using convolutional neural networks

MirBot is a collaborative application for smartphones that allows users to perform object recognition. This app can be used to take a photograph of an object, select the region of interest and obtain the most likely class (dog, chair, etc.) by means of similarity search using features extracted from a convolutional neural network (CNN). The answers provided by the system can be validated by the user so as to improve the results for future queries. All the images are stored together with a series of metadata, thus enabling a multimodal incremental dataset labeled with synset identifiers from the WordNet ontology. This dataset grows continuously thanks to the users' feedback, and is publicly available for research. This work details the MirBot object recognition system, analyzes the statistics gathered after more than four years of usage, describes the image classification methodology, and performs an exhaustive evaluation using handcrafted features, convolutional neural codes and different transfer learning techniques. After comparing various models and transformation methods, the results show that the CNN features maintain the accuracy of MirBot constant over time, despite the increasing number of new classes. The app is freely available at the Apple and Google Play stores.Comment: Accepted in Neurocomputing, 201

David Alderson. 2016. Sex, Needs & Queer Culture. From Liberation to the Post-Gay. London: Zed Books. 316 pp.

In Sex, Needs & Queer Culture. From Liberation to the Post-Gay, David Alderson defends a humanist conviction whereby “the subject is not merely discursively produced, but a substantial entity in its own right” (18).1 In opposition to the queer perfomative principle, the book is based on the reality principle, mostly through its alignment with cultural materialism and socialist politics. Drawing on Alan Sinfield (1998), Alderson calls for an organic role for the critic, well beyond the straightjacketed limits of academic tradition. That the critic intervenes socially does not convert him into a protagonist, but into a part of a relational community..

Learning Eligibility in Cancer Clinical Trials using Deep Neural Networks

Interventional cancer clinical trials are generally too restrictive, and some patients are often excluded on the basis of comorbidity, past or concomitant treatments, or the fact that they are over a certain age. The efficacy and safety of new treatments for patients with these characteristics are, therefore, not defined. In this work, we built a model to automatically predict whether short clinical statements were considered inclusion or exclusion criteria. We used protocols from cancer clinical trials that were available in public registries from the last 18 years to train word-embeddings, and we constructed a~dataset of 6M short free-texts labeled as eligible or not eligible. A text classifier was trained using deep neural networks, with pre-trained word-embeddings as inputs, to predict whether or not short free-text statements describing clinical information were considered eligible. We additionally analyzed the semantic reasoning of the word-embedding representations obtained and were able to identify equivalent treatments for a type of tumor analogous with the drugs used to treat other tumors. We show that representation learning using {deep} neural networks can be successfully leveraged to extract the medical knowledge from clinical trial protocols for potentially assisting practitioners when prescribing treatments

Transgenerational and intergenerational family trauma in colm tóibín’s the blackwater lightship and “three friends”

This article analyses Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship (1999) and his short story "Three Friends" (2006), which are the testimony of the changes affecting current Ireland, especially those concerning the roles and engagement between females and gays. Drawing on Abraham and Torok's The Shell and the Kernel (1994), my main contention is that Tóibín's texts explore the trans-generational transmission of trauma and memory in an Irish context. Also Grabriele Schwab's Haunting legacies (2010), which explains the transference and haunting of trauma from both Holocaust victims and perpetrators to their descendants, will give a fuller understanding of The Blackwater Lightship and "Three Friends". I will demonstrate that different generations of Irish women, or Irish women and their (gay) sons hurt one another, being both victims and perpetrators. This paper also analyses the effectiveness of the language of trans/inter-generational memory and conflict, especially when paradoxically transmitted through strategic silences and meaningful gaps. Thus, Tóibín's texts look at the past and how it is codified and transmitted at a family level to eventually herald a message of renewal

Efficient methods for joint estimation of multiple fundamental frequencies in music signals

This study presents efficient techniques for multiple fundamental frequency estimation in music signals. The proposed methodology can infer harmonic patterns from a mixture considering interactions with other sources and evaluate them in a joint estimation scheme. For this purpose, a set of fundamental frequency candidates are first selected at each frame, and several hypothetical combinations of them are generated. Combinations are independently evaluated, and the most likely is selected taking into account the intensity and spectral smoothness of its inferred patterns. The method is extended considering adjacent frames in order to smooth the detection in time, and a pitch tracking stage is finally performed to increase the temporal coherence. The proposed algorithms were evaluated in MIREX contests yielding state of the art results with a very low computational burden.This study was supported by the project DRIMS (code TIN2009-14247-C02), the Consolider Ingenio 2010 research programme (project MIPRCV, CSD2007-00018), and the PASCAL2 Network of Excellence, IST-2007-216886

Utopía y distopía en el territorio homoerótico de The Swimming-pool Library, The Folding Star and The Spell de Alan Hollinghurst

This essay aims at exploring the use of pastoral Arcadia as a privileged territory for English homoerotic literature to unfold, putting special emphasis on Alan Hollinghurst’s first three novels so far. With this purpose, I think particularly worth noting Terry Gifford’s Pastoral (1999), where he points out the main characteristics of classic pastoral –a utopian genre deeply embedded in English landscape culture and writing–, as well as the dystopian anti-pastoral and post-pastoral. With this in mind, the essay delves into Hollinghurst’s novels to determine whether and, if so, how they make use, update or re-negotiate pastoral traditions to meet the needs of gay writing at the turn of the millennium. Este artículo pretende explorar el uso de la Arcadia pastoril como un terrero privilegiado para el desarrollo de la literatura homoerótica inglesa, haciendo especial énfasis en las tres novelas que Alan Hollinghurst ha publicado hasta la fecha. Con este fin, me parece relevante hacer referencia a Pastoral (1999), donde Terry Gifford explica las principales características de la literatura pastoril clásica –un género utópico firmemente arraigado en la literatura paisajística inglesa–, así como del anti-pastoralismo y el post-pastoralismo distópicos. Así, este ensayo ahonda en las novelas de Hollinghurst para determinar si, y si es así, cómo éstas utilizan, actualizan o renegocian las diferentes tradiciones pastoriles para satisfacer las necesidades de la literatura gay en el cambio de milenio

Be(com)ing Dispossessed: Relationality and Violence in Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospels

This paper delves into Naomi Alderman’s The Liars’ Gospels (2013) as a biographical novel that draws on the official Gospels to address current issues. Focusing on the sections on Miryam (the Jewish spelling for the Virgin) and Barabbas, dispossession turns out to be the central subject, related to relationality in the former case and to violence in the latter. Hence, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s concept of dispossession as a bifurcation of Emmanuel Lévinas’s ethics of alterity and Slavoj Žižek’s conception of violence constitute the theoretical framework of the analysis. With all this in mind, my main contention is that in Alderman’s novel acts of dispossession and violence are redirected towards ethical relationality and reconciliation between Jewishness and Christianity. Cet article examine The Liars Gospels (2013) de Naomi Alderman comme un roman biographique inspiré par les Évangiles officiels et qui, pourtant, aborde des questions d’actualité. En mettant l’accent sur les sections dédiées à Miryam (le nom hébraïque de la Vierge) et à Barabbas, la dépossession devient le sujet central, lié à la relationnalité pour la première et à la violence pour le second. Par conséquent, j’emploie le concept de dépossession proposé par Judith Butler et Athena Athanassiou comme étant au carrefour de l’éthique de l’altérité d’Emmanuel Lévinas et de la conception de la violence de Slavoj Žižek. En gardant cela à l’esprit, je soutiens que dans le roman d’Alderman les actes de dépossession et de violence sont redirigés vers une éthique relationnelle et la réconciliation de la judéité et du christianisme

PadChest: A large chest x-ray image dataset with multi-label annotated reports

We present a labeled large-scale, high resolution chest x-ray dataset for the automated exploration of medical images along with their associated reports. This dataset includes more than 160,000 images obtained from 67,000 patients that were interpreted and reported by radiologists at Hospital San Juan Hospital (Spain) from 2009 to 2017, covering six different position views and additional information on image acquisition and patient demography. The reports were labeled with 174 different radiographic findings, 19 differential diagnoses and 104 anatomic locations organized as a hierarchical taxonomy and mapped onto standard Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) terminology. Of these reports, 27% were manually annotated by trained physicians and the remaining set was labeled using a supervised method based on a recurrent neural network with attention mechanisms. The labels generated were then validated in an independent test set achieving a 0.93 Micro-F1 score. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the largest public chest x-ray database suitable for training supervised models concerning radiographs, and the first to contain radiographic reports in Spanish. The PadChest dataset can be downloaded from http://bimcv.cipf.es/bimcv-projects/padchest/

Traumatic identity and aura in David Lodge's Author, author

This paper delves into David Lodge’s Author, Author (2004) as an example of neo-Victorian celebrity biofiction, more concretely on Henry James. The genre belongs to the wave of Victorian revival in current literature which also affects cultural studies in general. My main contention is that Lodge’s novel responds to current cultural anxieties, particularly the crisis of identity and authorship and the end of Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura, by sublimating them into late- nineteenth-century traumata. The choice of James is, the article argues, not casual. He represents the redeeming figure of a lost auratic world; the human in crisis, traumatized because he does not fit in the new status quo