The League of Nations and the Jews of Europe: 1919-1939

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Assessing use of passive acoustic detection to document behavior of two sympatric pomacentrid species

Videotape and audio recordings of a patch reef in Ant Atoll, Pohnpei, Micronesia were analyzed for the presence of bioacoustic activity produced by species of the teleost family Pomacentridae. The acoustic parameters of fish calls were measured and then identified as belonging to either Amphiprion melanopus or Stegastes nigricans. Visual and statistical methods of analysis were combined to compare the calls of the two species and to test for measurable differences in the acoustic parameters of their calls. Soundscape data showed similar patterns to previously observed tropical reef environments. Fish produced single or multi-pulsed calls in the frequency range of 0-1000 Hz that were often accompanied by observable behaviors such as a chases and displays of dominance. Results indicated that the species on this atoll produce similar calls that cannot be distinguished using acoustic data alone. Visual confirmation was necessary for definitive identification of sound producers and in many cases was not possible beyond the family level. Implications for passive acoustic monitoring are that acoustic data collection alone may be able to capture fish abundance but may not be sufficient to fully capture species richness in regions where populations of closely related fish have similar signals

Unsupervised Adversarial Depth Estimation using Cycled Generative Networks

While recent deep monocular depth estimation approaches based on supervised regression have achieved remarkable performance, costly ground truth annotations are required during training. To cope with this issue, in this paper we present a novel unsupervised deep learning approach for predicting depth maps and show that the depth estimation task can be effectively tackled within an adversarial learning framework. Specifically, we propose a deep generative network that learns to predict the correspondence field i.e. the disparity map between two image views in a calibrated stereo camera setting. The proposed architecture consists of two generative sub-networks jointly trained with adversarial learning for reconstructing the disparity map and organized in a cycle such as to provide mutual constraints and supervision to each other. Extensive experiments on the publicly available datasets KITTI and Cityscapes demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and competitive results with state of the art methods. The code and trained model are available on https://github.com/andrea-pilzer/unsup-stereo-depthGAN.Comment: To appear in 3DV 2018. Code is available on GitHu

Viraliency: Pooling Local Virality

In our overly-connected world, the automatic recognition of virality - the quality of an image or video to be rapidly and widely spread in social networks - is of crucial importance, and has recently awaken the interest of the computer vision community. Concurrently, recent progress in deep learning architectures showed that global pooling strategies allow the extraction of activation maps, which highlight the parts of the image most likely to contain instances of a certain class. We extend this concept by introducing a pooling layer that learns the size of the support area to be averaged: the learned top-N average (LENA) pooling. We hypothesize that the latent concepts (feature maps) describing virality may require such a rich pooling strategy. We assess the effectiveness of the LENA layer by appending it on top of a convolutional siamese architecture and evaluate its performance on the task of predicting and localizing virality. We report experiments on two publicly available datasets annotated for virality and show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.Comment: Accepted at IEEE CVPR 201

Vom Bibliotheksgesetz zum Kulturfördergesetz. Neue Wege der Kulturpolitik in Nordrhein-Westfalen? Eine Kurzbetrachtung.

Der Landtag Nordrhein-Westfalen hat im Sommer 2011 mit seiner Mehrheit der regierenden Koalition aus SPD und Bündnis90/Die Grünen den im Herbst 2010 von der Fraktion der CDU eingebrachten Entwurf eines Bibliotheksgesetzes zugunsten eines allgemeinen Kulturfördergesetzes zurückgestellt. Wenn dessen politische Implikationen es waren, nicht nur die Landeskulturpolitik auf eine eigengesetzliche Grundlage zu stellen, sondern zugleich in den Städten und Gemeinden einen Pflichtteil an Kulturleistungen zu begründen, was seine besondere Bedeutung in den zahlreichen Haushaltssicherungskommunen hätte entfalten können, dann ist diese Intention der Kulturpolitik nicht erfüllt worden. Unerfüllt geblieben ist zudem die eigengesetzliche Regelung für die Bibliotheken; der aktuelle Entwurf zu einem Kulturfördergesetz (KFG) aus dem Mai 2014 behandelt nur die Förderpolitik des Landes und bestimmte Instrumente zur Beförderung der kulturpolitischen Diskussion. In summer 2011, the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a majority of the governing coalition of SPD and Bündnis90/Die Grünen, returned the draft library law, which had been proposed by the oppositional CDU in the preceding fall 2010, in favor of a general law for culture promotion. If the political implications were to provide not only a distinct legal basis for the federal state’s cultural policy, but also to establish certain compulsory cultural services in the North Rhine-Westphalian cities and municipalities, which is especially important for the numerous municipalities with budget cuts, then this intention of cultural policy has not been met. There is also still no intrinsic legislation for libraries, as the current draft of a Culture Promotion Act from May 2014 deals only with the funding policy of the federal state and with certain instruments for the promotion of cultural matters and affairs within the political discussion

Reproducibility is Nothing without Correctness: The Importance of Testing Code in NLP

Despite its pivotal role in research experiments, code correctness is often presumed only on the basis of the perceived quality of the results. This comes with the risk of erroneous outcomes and potentially misleading findings. To address this issue, we posit that the current focus on result reproducibility should go hand in hand with the emphasis on coding best practices. We bolster our call to the NLP community by presenting a case study, in which we identify (and correct) three bugs in widely used open-source implementations of the state-of-the-art Conformer architecture. Through comparative experiments on automatic speech recognition and translation in various language settings, we demonstrate that the existence of bugs does not prevent the achievement of good and reproducible results and can lead to incorrect conclusions that potentially misguide future research. In response to this, this study is a call to action toward the adoption of coding best practices aimed at fostering correctness and improving the quality of the developed software

Erstmals mehr als eine Option? Der mühselige Weg zu einem Bibliotheksgesetz für Nordrhein-Westfalen

2017 hat das 1947 entstandene Bundesland Nordrhein-Westfalen seinen 70. Geburtstag gefeiert. Bereits ein Jahr nach seiner Gründung riefen Bibliothekare und Bibliothekarinnen aus allen Landesteilen den Verband der Bibliotheken des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen ins Leben und seitdem wird über ein Bibliotheksgesetz diskutiert. Die Debatte erlebte im zeitlichen Verlauf starke und schwache Phasen, aber sie begleitete das Bibliothekswesen des Landes, seinen Verband, die politischen Gremien und nicht zuletzt den Landtag von Nordrhein-Westfalen seit 1948 und brachte zahlreiche Entwürfe, Pläne und Vorhaben mit Gesetzes- oder gesetzesähnlichem Charakter hervor. Kurz vor Ende der 16. Legislaturperiode des Landtags von Nordrhein-Westfalen (2012-2017) brachte die Fraktion der CDU neuerlich den Entwurf eines „Landesbibliotheksgesetzes“ ein. Zeitgleich begann die Landesregierung aus SPD und Bündnis90/Die Grünen, die Instrumente des 2014 verabschiedeten Kulturfördergesetzes umzusetzen. Dazu gehörten der im Herbst 2016 im Landtag vorgestellte Entwurf des ersten, die Legislaturperioden übergreifenden Kulturförderplanes für die Jahre 2016 bis 2018 sowie der im Frühjahr dieses Jahres vorgelegte „Landeskulturbericht 2017“. Der Beitrag beginnt mit einem kurzen historischen Abriss und versucht dann abzuwägen, welche Fortschritte zur Sanktionierung der Bibliotheken durch das Kulturfördergesetz von 2014 gemacht worden sind, und welche Angelegenheiten einer potentiellen Bibliotheksgesetzgebung nach wie vor zu regeln sind. Es geht um die Frage, ob ein Bibliotheksgesetz mit Substanz neben dem Kulturfördergesetz seine Berechtigung hat. Die neue CDU/ FDP-Landesregierung hat für die im Juni 2017 beginnende neue Legislaturperiode ein Bibliotheksgesetz im Programm. Ist dies erstmals eine realistische Option für ein Bibliotheksgesetz?In 2017, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which was founded in 1947, celebrated its 70th birthday. Already one year after its foundation librarians from all parts of the country brought the Association of Libraries of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia into being and since then a library law has been discussed. The debate knew strong and weak phases, accompanying the state‘s libraries, their association, the political bodies, and, not least, the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia (Landtag) since 1948. Numerous drafts, plans and projects with a legal or legislative character were produced. Shortly before the end of the 16th legislative session of the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia (2012-2017), the CDU parliamentary party again introduced the draft of a Library Law („Landesbibliotheksgesetz“). At the same time, the state government made up of SPD and Bündnis90 / Die Grünen began to implement the instruments of the Cultural Promotion Act (“Kulturfördergesetz”) adopted in 2014. These included the draft of the first Cultural Promotion Plan (“Kulturförderplan”) for the years 2016 to 2018, which was presented to the Landtag in the fall of 2016, as well as a report on the cultural situation in North Rhine-Westphalia („Landeskulturbericht”) presented in the spring of this year. The paper begins with a brief historical outline and then seeks to weigh up the progress made in sanctioning libraries through the 2014 Cultural Promotion Act (“Kulturfördergesetz”) and discuss which matters of potential library legislation still need to be addressed. It focuses on the question of whether a library law with substance is needed in addition to the Culture Promotion Act. The new CDU / FDP state government has a library law in the program for the new legislative period starting in June 2017. Is this a realistic option for a substantial library law for the first time

Fixing Overconfidence in Dynamic Neural Networks

Dynamic neural networks are a recent technique that promises a remedy for the increasing size of modern deep learning models by dynamically adapting their computational cost to the difficulty of the inputs. In this way, the model can adjust to a limited computational budget. However, the poor quality of uncertainty estimates in deep learning models makes it difficult to distinguish between hard and easy samples. To address this challenge, we present a computationally efficient approach for post-hoc uncertainty quantification in dynamic neural networks. We show that adequately quantifying and accounting for both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty through a probabilistic treatment of the last layers improves the predictive performance and aids decision-making when determining the computational budget. In the experiments, we show improvements on CIFAR-100, ImageNet, and Caltech-256 in terms of accuracy, capturing uncertainty, and calibration error.Comment: In IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 202