Learning from Millions of 3D Scans for Large-scale 3D Face Recognition

Deep networks trained on millions of facial images are believed to be closely approaching human-level performance in face recognition. However, open world face recognition still remains a challenge. Although, 3D face recognition has an inherent edge over its 2D counterpart, it has not benefited from the recent developments in deep learning due to the unavailability of large training as well as large test datasets. Recognition accuracies have already saturated on existing 3D face datasets due to their small gallery sizes. Unlike 2D photographs, 3D facial scans cannot be sourced from the web causing a bottleneck in the development of deep 3D face recognition networks and datasets. In this backdrop, we propose a method for generating a large corpus of labeled 3D face identities and their multiple instances for training and a protocol for merging the most challenging existing 3D datasets for testing. We also propose the first deep CNN model designed specifically for 3D face recognition and trained on 3.1 Million 3D facial scans of 100K identities. Our test dataset comprises 1,853 identities with a single 3D scan in the gallery and another 31K scans as probes, which is several orders of magnitude larger than existing ones. Without fine tuning on this dataset, our network already outperforms state of the art face recognition by over 10%. We fine tune our network on the gallery set to perform end-to-end large scale 3D face recognition which further improves accuracy. Finally, we show the efficacy of our method for the open world face recognition problem.Comment: 11 page

An overview of musculoskeletal ultrasound – A thirteen years experience in Pakistan

SummaryObjective(1) To provide an overview on 13 years experience on patients with musculoskeletal disorders in Pakistan. (2) To assess accuracy of ultrasound in musculoskeletal disorders. (3) To determine percentage of different regional pathologies referred for musculoskeletal ultrasound.Material and methodsWe scanned 25,437 patients coming from all over Pakistan including 18,715 males and 6722 females from 1 month to 85 years of age.We used two ultrasound equipments with a multi-frequency (6–14MHz) linear probe to perform studies in patients with possible musculoskeletal system problems.ResultsAll patients with different joint or specific problems of musculoskeletal system were scanned, the total number of patients of any specific disorder was calculated and the accuracy of ultrasound was compared with MRI in a given percentage of patients.DiscussionIn all musculoskeletal disorders ultrasound was found to be accurate in about 84.8%. It was 83.5% accurate in the cases which went for MRI, its accuracy with other lab tests was 81.2% and that with surgery was 93.3%.ConclusionMusculoskeletal ultrasound is a very useful tool in almost all disorders of musculoskeletal system and shall be a necessary tool of a physicians, specially a family physician, orthopedic surgeon, physiotherapist and rheumatologist

Imagining Self: Judith Wright’s Womanhood in Her Poem’s Woman To Child and Request to A Year

While teaching at the University of Kashmir, Department of English, I encountered Australia’s one of the most phenomenal poets, Judith Wright and her captivating poetry. This paper is a detailed and a critical study of her poems Woman to Child and Request to a Year. The paper aims at acquainting readers with the vision of her mother country, Australia, her idealised portrayal of womanhood and self-actualisation. This paper also focuses on the clarity of language she uses, the depth and transparency of her imagery and symbols she utilises to bring home the theme of her poems. Judith Wright’s poetry has a unique characteristic and a typical style when it comes to the utilisation of her two crucial and relevant subjects concerning her mother country: ‘Australian Aspect’ wherein she frequently relates to the old traditional style of Australia’s history and the harsh landscape as a peculiar Australian trait and the feministic side of her thought process gets reflected from her ‘Woman’s View’ which becomes her favoured theme in most of her poems, where her creativity relates the historical and contemporary realities a woman perceives in a certain way different from that of the male counterpart

Generalised anxiety and depression during COVID-19 pandemic among post-metric science students at Baramulla

Background: COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected the studies of students because of strict lockdown and closure of schools. As such students might have developed a lot of stress. Primary objective of this study was to find out the prevalence of generalized anxiety and depression during the COVID-19 pandemic among post-metric science students at Baramulla preparing for professional exams after senior secondary. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted by distributing a pre-designed questionnaire among post-metric science students at Baramulla, Kashmir. Two tuition centres were randomly selected out of all the centres. All the students who returned filled questionnaires were included. Binary logistic regression was employed to find the association of anxiety and depression with independent variables. Results: Of the 173 participants, 91 were male (52.6%), the mean age was 16.9±1.4 years. For 81% of students, the pandemic had negatively affected their studies. About 16% (28) students had severe anxiety whereas 33% (57) had moderate anxiety and 14 students (8%) had severe depression whereas 23 (13%) had moderately severe depression. Those who did not perform routine exercise daily had higher odds of depression (AOR=2.86) and anxiety (AOR=2.3). Conclusions: Anxiety and depression levels among young students as high as found in this study cannot be ignored. A habit of routine exercise that may have been hampered during the current pandemic must be inculcated among youngsters for healthier mental health

The Impact of Agricultural Imports and Exports on Agricultural Productivity

This paper analyze the impact of agricultural exports and imports on agricultural productivity secondly to it also analyzes the effect of exports on imports or moreover it analyzes the causal relationship agriculture exports, agricultural imports and agricultural productivity. Variable which we had taken to fulfill our objective are AY (Agricultural productivity), AMP (Agricultural imports), AXP (Agricultural exports) whereas AY is dependent variable and AMP, AXP are independent variable data which we had taken is from 1980 to 2010.  So for this we have done certain methodology in which we had done pair wise granger causality and so by analyzing results we have seen the causality between these variable. By the results we had concluded that agricultural exports and agricultural productivity has a bi-directional causality and imports and exports have unidirectional causality whereas agricultural imports in terms of finished products and agricultural productivity have no causality because when the income of the peoples increases so this leads to increase in the imports this do not affect the agricultural productivit

Inaugural Address

Sardar Aseff Ahmad Ali, Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, Dr Rashid Amjad, President, Pakistan Society of Development Economists, Honourable Ministers, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen! It is indeed a privilege and honour to address this distinguished gathering of economists. I am very happy that this meeting is being attended by internationally acclaimed economists and academics from both within and outside the country. I am especially heartened to see that students of economics from all over Pakistan have been especially invited to attend this meeting. Over the years the Annual Conference of the Pakistan Society of Development Economists has become one of the leading events on the calendar of meetings where experts from various disciplines discuss cutting edge issues that confront developing economies in general and Pakistan’s economy in particular. The Pakistan Institute of Development Economics is to be congratulated for holding such conferences on an annual and regular basis. The President of the Society has mentioned that I have actively encouraged the participation of economic experts, academics and researchers in the policy planning process. I firmly believe that this interaction will lead to framing of economic policies that respond to our economic needs and lead to more sustainable and equitable economic growth. I will continue to involve our body of economists in formulating policies and thank you for your offer to work closely with our government. The theme of this year’s Meeting “Economic Sustainability in a Globalised World” is very timely and touches the very heart of the economic challenge we face at the global and national level. The world has witnessed a global financial meltdown which started in the USA but spread to other parts of the world, both developed and developing. This financial crisis has now hit the real economy, causing a massive decline in global manufacturing output and global trade which is the worst since the Great Depression in 1929. World output is projected to shrink in 2009 and world trade expected to decline markedly this year

Dense 3D Face Correspondence

We present an algorithm that automatically establishes dense correspondences between a large number of 3D faces. Starting from automatically detected sparse correspondences on the outer boundary of 3D faces, the algorithm triangulates existing correspondences and expands them iteratively by matching points of distinctive surface curvature along the triangle edges. After exhausting keypoint matches, further correspondences are established by generating evenly distributed points within triangles by evolving level set geodesic curves from the centroids of large triangles. A deformable model (K3DM) is constructed from the dense corresponded faces and an algorithm is proposed for morphing the K3DM to fit unseen faces. This algorithm iterates between rigid alignment of an unseen face followed by regularized morphing of the deformable model. We have extensively evaluated the proposed algorithms on synthetic data and real 3D faces from the FRGCv2, Bosphorus, BU3DFE and UND Ear databases using quantitative and qualitative benchmarks. Our algorithm achieved dense correspondences with a mean localisation error of 1.28mm on synthetic faces and detected $14$ anthropometric landmarks on unseen real faces from the FRGCv2 database with 3mm precision. Furthermore, our deformable model fitting algorithm achieved 98.5% face recognition accuracy on the FRGCv2 and 98.6% on Bosphorus database. Our dense model is also able to generalize to unseen datasets.Comment: 24 Pages, 12 Figures, 6 Tables and 3 Algorithm

Understanding the behaviour and influence of automated social agents

Soft-bound submitted: Fri 23 Feb 2018 Corrections submitted: Mon 30 Jul 2018 Corrections approved: Tue 7 Aug 2018 Apollo submitted: Wed 22 Aug 2018 Hard-bound submitted: Fri 24 Aug 2018Online social networks (OSNs) have seen a remarkable rise in the presence of automated social agents, or social bots. Social bots are the new computing viral, that are surreptitious and clever. What facilitates the creation of social agents is the massive human user-base and business-supportive operating model of social networks. These automated agents are injected by agencies, brands, individuals, and corporations to serve their work and purpose; utilising them for news and emergency communication, marketing, social activism, political campaigning, and even spam and spreading malicious content. Their influence was recently substantiated by coordinated social hacking and computational political propaganda. The thesis of my dissertation argues that automated agents exercise a profound impact on OSNs that transforms into an array of influence on our society and systems. However, latent or veiled, these agents can be successfully detected through measurement, feature extraction and finely tuned supervised learning models. The various types of automated agents can be further unravelled through unsupervised machine learning and natural language processing, to formally inform the populace of their existence and impact.Sep'14-Aug'17, Marie Curie ITN METRICS, Early-Stage Researcher Sep'17, UMobile, Research Associate Oct'17-Mar'18, EPSRC Global Challenges Research Fund, Research Associat

Development of Energy Harvesting System Using Rotation Mechanism of a Revolving Door

Conventional Energy sources are depleting with time. There is a dire need to find new sources of energy. The new methods of energy should be able to replace dwindling sources of energy. Energy Harvesting is one such method where ambient energy from environment is converted into useful energy. Unfortunately, there is not enough work done on energy harvesters. The purpose of this project is to show that the abundant ambient energy in the surroundings can be utilized to generate electricity. In this project, the energy used to open a revolving door is being converted into Electrical Energy. Accordingly, a Revolving Door prototype was designed, fabricated and tested. The test results are used to calculate the amount of energy being harvested on one push of the door. This prototype can be further optimized in order to generate more Electrical Energy