We never go out of Style: Motion Disentanglement by Subspace Decomposition of Latent Space

Real-world objects perform complex motions that involve multiple independent motion components. For example, while talking, a person continuously changes their expressions, head, and body pose. In this work, we propose a novel method to decompose motion in videos by using a pretrained image GAN model. We discover disentangled motion subspaces in the latent space of widely used style-based GAN models that are semantically meaningful and control a single explainable motion component. The proposed method uses only a few $(\approx10)$ ground truth video sequences to obtain such subspaces. We extensively evaluate the disentanglement properties of motion subspaces on face and car datasets, quantitatively and qualitatively. Further, we present results for multiple downstream tasks such as motion editing, and selective motion transfer, e.g. transferring only facial expressions without training for it.Comment: AI for content creation, CVPRW-202

Exploring Attribute Variations in Style-based GANs using Diffusion Models

Existing attribute editing methods treat semantic attributes as binary, resulting in a single edit per attribute. However, attributes such as eyeglasses, smiles, or hairstyles exhibit a vast range of diversity. In this work, we formulate the task of \textit{diverse attribute editing} by modeling the multidimensional nature of attribute edits. This enables users to generate multiple plausible edits per attribute. We capitalize on disentangled latent spaces of pretrained GANs and train a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) to learn the latent distribution for diverse edits. Specifically, we train DDPM over a dataset of edit latent directions obtained by embedding image pairs with a single attribute change. This leads to latent subspaces that enable diverse attribute editing. Applying diffusion in the highly compressed latent space allows us to model rich distributions of edits within limited computational resources. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments conducted across a range of datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for diverse attribute editing. We also showcase the results of our method applied for 3D editing of various face attributes.Comment: Neurips Workshop on Diffusion Models 202

Localism: a planning panacea?

© 2019 Liverpool University Press. This is the accepted manuscript version of an article which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2019.31It has been observed that there is a 'global trend' towards devolution of power from national governments to regional and local authorities, and planning is one of the activities often devolved. In England, the UK government has since 2011 gone further and, it claims, devolved planning powers to the community level. The introduction of a new form of statutory planning - neighbourhood planning - was heralded by the UK government as an embodiment of their commitment to 'localism', representing a shift from top-down to bottom-up control in the English planning system. This Policy and Practice explores some of the tensions inherent in localism as exemplified through the practical implementation of neighbourhood planning.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Health and lifestyle of Nepalese migrants in the UK

Background: The health status and lifestyle of migrants is often poorer than that of the general population of their host countries. The Nepalese represent a relatively small, but growing, immigrant community in the UK, about whom very little is known in term of public health. Therefore, our study examined the health and lifestyle of Nepalese migrants in the UK. Methods: A cross-sectional survey of Nepalese migrants in UK was conducted in early 2007 using a postal, self-administered questionnaire in England and Scotland (n = 312), and telephone interviews in Wales (n = 15). The total response rate was 68% (327 out of 480). Data were analyzed to establish whether there are associations between socio-economic and lifestyle factors. A multivariate binary logistic regression was applied to find out independent effect of personal factors on health status. Results: The majority of respondents was male (75%), aged between 30 and 45 (66%), married or had a civil partner (83%), had university education (47%) and an annual family income (69%) ranging from £5,035 to £33,300. More than one third (39%) of the respondents have lived in the UK for 1 to 5 years and approximately half (46%) were longer-term residents. Most (95%) were registered with a family doctor, but only 38% with a dentist. A low proportion (14%) of respondents smoked but more than half (61%) consumed alcohol. More than half (57%) did not do regular exercises and nearly one fourth (23%) of respondents rated their health as poor. Self reported 'good' health status of the respondents was independently associated with immigration status and doing regular exercise Conclusion: The self reported health status and lifestyle, health seeking behaviour of Nepalese people who are residing in UK appears to be good. However, the overall regular exercise and dentist registration was rather poor. Health promotion, especially aimed at Nepalese migrants could help encourage them to exercise regularly and assist them to register with a dentist

Vector Bin Packing with Multiple-Choice

We consider a variant of bin packing called multiple-choice vector bin packing. In this problem we are given a set of items, where each item can be selected in one of several $D$-dimensional incarnations. We are also given $T$ bin types, each with its own cost and $D$-dimensional size. Our goal is to pack the items in a set of bins of minimum overall cost. The problem is motivated by scheduling in networks with guaranteed quality of service (QoS), but due to its general formulation it has many other applications as well. We present an approximation algorithm that is guaranteed to produce a solution whose cost is about $\ln D$ times the optimum. For the running time to be polynomial we require $D=O(1)$ and $T=O(\log n)$. This extends previous results for vector bin packing, in which each item has a single incarnation and there is only one bin type. To obtain our result we also present a PTAS for the multiple-choice version of multidimensional knapsack, where we are given only one bin and the goal is to pack a maximum weight set of (incarnations of) items in that bin

Retail innovation and shopping practices: consumers' reaction to self-service retailing

Authors' draft also available on Surrey eprints repository at http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk. Final version available online at http://www.envplan.com/In this paper we address the related issues of retail innovation, changing shopping practices, and shopping geographies. We do so in relation to the spread of self-service grocery stores, and particularly the supermarket, in the postwar retail environment of Britain (1950 – 70), arguing that this juncture provides a propitious opportunity to study the relationship between changing practices of retailing and consumption. We highlight shoppers’ selective adoption of new self-service formats in relation to certain product categories and argue that this can be explained in part by reference to the socially embedded nature of women food shoppers’ behaviours and in particular the influence of contemporary notions of the ‘good housewife’. We support our argument by reference to a wide range of contemporary documentary material relating to postwar shopping including market research reports, the publications of local consumer groups, and selected retailer and government archive sources

The impact of privatisation on union membership and density: A Western Australian case study

Falling membership numbers and declining union density are issues of concern for many Australian unions. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that between 2005 and 2008, trade union membership declined from 22.4% to 18.9% of the workforce. Studies and statistics consistently show that union membership and density are lowest in Western Australia, despite trend reversals elsewhere. Using the Western Australian branches of two 'blue-collar' unions - the Australian Rail, Tram and Bus Industry Union, Western Australian Branch and the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union, covering a range of transport, metal working, printing and manufacturing trades - as examples, this article examines whether privatisation has contributed significantly to falling trade union density and membership in this state. These unions represented large public sector workforces. In order to test the hypothesis that privatisation has adversely affected union membership and density, the article examines three areas: changing policies in the Australian Labor Party, the breaking down of union culture and changes in trade training, and concludes that privatisation is a significant factor in the recent decline of these two unions