Learning to Detect and Track Visible and Occluded Body Joints in a Virtual World

Multi-People Tracking in an open-world setting requires a special effort in precise detection. Moreover, temporal continuity in the detection phase gains more importance when scene cluttering introduces the challenging problems of occluded targets. For the purpose, we propose a deep network architecture that jointly extracts people body parts and associates them across short temporal spans. Our model explicitly deals with occluded body parts, by hallucinating plausible solutions of not visible joints. We propose a new end-to-end architecture composed by four branches (visible heatmaps, occluded heatmaps, part affinity fields and temporal affinity fields) fed by a time linker feature extractor. To overcome the lack of surveillance data with tracking, body part and occlusion annotations we created the vastest Computer Graphics dataset for people tracking in urban scenarios by exploiting a photorealistic videogame. It is up to now the vastest dataset (about 500.000 frames, almost 10 million body poses) of human body parts for people tracking in urban scenarios. Our architecture trained on virtual data exhibits good generalization capabilities also on public real tracking benchmarks, when image resolution and sharpness are high enough, producing reliable tracklets useful for further batch data association or re-id modules

Critical literacy as a pedagogical goal in English language teaching

In this chapter, the authors provide an overview of the area of critical literacy as it pertains to second language pedagogy (curriculum and instruction). After considering the historical origins of critical literacy (from antiquity, and including in first language education), they consider how it began to penetrate the field of applied linguistics. They note the geographical and institutional spread of critical literacy practice as documented by published accounts. They then sketch the main features of L2 critical literacy practice. To do this, they acknowledge how practitioners have reported on their practices regarding classroom content and process. The authors also draw attention to the outcomes of these practices as well as challenges that practitioners have encountered in incorporating critical literacy into their second language classrooms

Performance of gypsum sheathed CFS panels under combined lateral and gravity loading

This paper investigates the performance of gypsum sheathed cold-formed steel (CFS) shear wall panels under combined action of lateral and gravity loading. The influence of gravity load on the lateral performance of the wall panels is experimentally evaluated through two scenarios of service and design levels. For this purpose, a total of eight full-scale one-side sheathed CFS panels, with two different field screw spacings as well as single and double section chord stud conditions, are considered for the experimental program. Based on the test results, a discussion on different failure modes, load-displacement relationships, maximum shear capacity, maximum displacement at failure, stiffness and energy absorption of the wall panels is presented. The test results are also employed to evaluate the response modification factor (R factor) of the wall panels using two different methods. The results indicate that the wall panels under gravity load at design level can provide higher shear strength, energy absorption and stiffness, but lower ductility compared to wall panels under service gravity load. In addition, the effect of increasing gravity load is more significant when double-section chord is employed for the specimens. The values of the response modification factor also indicate that the method of measuring R factor can relatively affect the results

Mentor teachers. Contributions to the development of preservice teachers’ identity

Preservice teachers’ identity development is a complex process requiring the coordination of varied internal and external factors. Internal motivations to teach, as strong as they are, might be colored by external factors influencing preservice teachers’ understanding and experiences of the teaching process. Although teacher education might have less control over the internal factors, they can significantly impact the experiences preservice teachers gain during practicum and positively shape their identity development. Mentor teachers as one of the main parties involved in teacher education exert considerable influence on preservice teachers’ understanding of who they are as a teacher and what they are capable of doing. This chapter looks at the relationship between mentor teachers and preservice teachers during practicum to unpack how mentoring and mentor teachers’ practices and mentoring approaches can motivate preservice teachers to continue as a teacher

Self-supervised learning of audio-visual objects from video

Our objective is to transform a video into a set of discrete audio-visual objects using self-supervised learning. To this end, we introduce a model that uses attention to localize and group sound sources, and optical flow to aggregate information over time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the audio-visual object embeddings that our model learns by using them for four downstream speech-oriented tasks: (a) multi-speaker sound source separation, (b) localizing and tracking speakers, (c) correcting misaligned audio-visual data, and (d) active speaker detection. Using our representation, these tasks can be solved entirely by training on unlabeled video, without the aid of object detectors. We also demonstrate the generality of our method by applying it to non-human speakers, including cartoons and puppets. Our model significantly outperforms other self-supervised approaches, and obtains performance competitive with methods that use supervised face detection

Leadership identity in a small island developing state: the Jamaican context

While the role of leadership in improving schools is attracting more worldwide attention, there is a need for more research investigating leaders’ experiences in different national contexts. Using focus group and semi-structured interview data, this paper explores the background, identities and experiences of a small group of Jamaican School Leaders who were involved in a leadership development programme. By drawing on the concepts of culture, socialisation and identity, the paper examines how the participants’ journeys of becoming and being school leaders are influenced by national level societal and cultural issues, experienced at a local level. The findings suggest that in becoming school leaders, the participants perceived that they had a strong sense of agency in attempting to change the social structures within the institutions they lead and in the surrounding local communities, which in turn, they hope, will have a lasting effect on the nation as a whole

Performance measures and a data set for multi-target, multi-camera tracking

To help accelerate progress in multi-target, multi-camera tracking systems, we present (i) a new pair of precision-recall measures of performance that treats errors of all types uniformly and emphasizes correct identification over sources of error; (ii) the largest fully-annotated and calibrated data set to date with more than 2 million frames of 1080 p, 60 fps video taken by 8 cameras observing more than 2, 700 identities over 85 min; and (iii) a reference software system as a comparison baseline. We show that (i) our measures properly account for bottom-line identity match performance in the multi-camera setting; (ii) our data set poses realistic challenges to current trackers; and (iii) the performance of our system is comparable to the state of the art