Marketing applications: from Angry Birds to happy marketers

This marketing teaching case is focussed on the rapidly emergent industry associated with Apps for mobile devices. After setting the context in respect of the awe-inspiring numbers associated with these markets the case is made that innovative marketing is happening across all parts of the basic marketing framework – the 4Ps. The case presents many specific examples of marketing related decision making and outcomes, focussing on games-Apps such as Rovio’s best-selling Angry Birds game

Detection of non-classical space-time correlations with a novel type of single-photon camera

During the last decades, multi-pixel detectors have been developed capable of registering single photons. The newly developed Hybrid Photon Detector camera has a remarkable property that it has not only spatial but also temporal resolution. In this work, we use this device for the detection of non-classical light from spontaneous parametric down-conversion and use two-photon correlations for the absolute calibration of its quantum efficiency

Influence of Citrate and Phosphate on the Adsorption of Adenosine-5′-Monophosphate at the Hematite Water Interface

Nucleic acid derived organic phosphorus (Po) is an important source of plant available P when degraded to inorganic phosphate (P(V)i). It is known that when nucleic acids or components are adsorbed on mineral surfaces, the enzymatic degradation is hindered or delayed. Thus, understanding adsorption/desorption mechanisms of nucleic acids and their derivatives are key to assess the biogeochemical pathways of Po cycling. Here we report adsorption mechanisms of adenosine-5′-monophosphate (AMP) on hematite, a common iron oxide mineral, under various solution properties using macroscopic and in situ attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopic probes. The effects of citrate, mimicking organic acids from roots exudates, and the influence of P(V)i, representing inorganic fertilizer application, were also evaluated on the release of adsorbed AMP under various solution properties. The results suggested that AMP adsorbed with the hematite surface via the phosphate moiety, N7 atom and the π electron systems of the adenine moiety. The presence of citrate significantly decreased the AMP adsorption, which was also corroborated by the negative phosphate IR bands in the results of AMP and citrate competitive adsorption experiments monitored by in situ ATR-FTIR probe. Like citrate, P(V)i also reduced AMP adsorption on hematite. Our findings suggest a potential novel pathway of nucleic acid derived Po cycling in the soil environment

3D Human Pose Estimation via Intuitive Physics

Estimating 3D humans from images often produces implausible bodies that lean, float, or penetrate the floor. Such methods ignore the fact that bodies are typically supported by the scene. A physics engine can be used to enforce physical plausibility, but these are not differentiable, rely on unrealistic proxy bodies, and are difficult to integrate into existing optimization and learning frameworks. In contrast, we exploit novel intuitive-physics (IP) terms that can be inferred from a 3D SMPL body interacting with the scene. Inspired by biomechanics, we infer the pressure heatmap on the body, the Center of Pressure (CoP) from the heatmap, and the SMPL body's Center of Mass (CoM). With these, we develop IPMAN, to estimate a 3D body from a color image in a "stable" configuration by encouraging plausible floor contact and overlapping CoP and CoM. Our IP terms are intuitive, easy to implement, fast to compute, differentiable, and can be integrated into existing optimization and regression methods. We evaluate IPMAN on standard datasets and MoYo, a new dataset with synchronized multi-view images, ground-truth 3D bodies with complex poses, body-floor contact, CoM and pressure. IPMAN produces more plausible results than the state of the art, improving accuracy for static poses, while not hurting dynamic ones. Code and data are available for research at https://ipman.is.tue.mpg.de.Comment: Accepted in CVPR'23. Project page: https://ipman.is.tue.mpg.d

Évaluation d'une nouvelle expérience clinique immersive en réalité virtuelle pour améliorer le programme d'éducation médicale

Implication Statement Medical students often find the transition to clerkship challenging and stressful.  The use of virtual reality (VR) technologies such as screen-based learning, 360-video and immersive VR using head-mount-devices is becoming more utilized in medical education. Immersive technologies in particular have been shown to lead to greater enthusiasm and provide higher knowledge gain for students compared to screen-based VR. The University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine has developed a novel immersive patient experience using VR to enhance the clinical skills program and evaluate student perception regarding its formal integration into curricula. Students reported positive feedback on the experience, and interest in more immersive learning opportunities in future sessions. VR technology has the potential to enhance medical education and provide a safe immersive learning environment to build clinical acumen.Énoncé des implications de la recherche Les étudiants en médecine trouvent souvent la transition vers l'externat difficile et stressante.  L'utilisation des technologies de réalité virtuelle (RV), telles que l'apprentissage sur écran, la vidéo à 360° et la RV immersive à l'aide d'appareils montés sur la tête, est de plus en plus répandue dans l'éducation médicale. Il a été démontré que les technologies immersives, en particulier, suscitent un plus grand enthousiasme et permettent aux étudiants d'acquérir davantage de connaissances que la RV sur écran. La faculté de médecine de l'Université de la Colombie-Britannique a mis au point une nouvelle expérience immersive du patient en utilisant la RV pour améliorer le programme de compétences cliniques et évaluer la perception des étudiants concernant son intégration formelle dans les programmes d'études. Les étudiants ont fait part de leurs réactions positives à l'égard de l'expérience et de leur intérêt pour des possibilités d'apprentissage plus immersives dans les sessions futures. La technologie de la RV a le potentiel d'améliorer l'éducation médicale et de fournir un environnement d'apprentissage immersif sûr pour développer le sens clinique

GRIP: Generating Interaction Poses Using Latent Consistency and Spatial Cues

Hands are dexterous and highly versatile manipulators that are central to how humans interact with objects and their environment. Consequently, modeling realistic hand-object interactions, including the subtle motion of individual fingers, is critical for applications in computer graphics, computer vision, and mixed reality. Prior work on capturing and modeling humans interacting with objects in 3D focuses on the body and object motion, often ignoring hand pose. In contrast, we introduce GRIP, a learning-based method that takes, as input, the 3D motion of the body and the object, and synthesizes realistic motion for both hands before, during, and after object interaction. As a preliminary step before synthesizing the hand motion, we first use a network, ANet, to denoise the arm motion. Then, we leverage the spatio-temporal relationship between the body and the object to extract two types of novel temporal interaction cues, and use them in a two-stage inference pipeline to generate the hand motion. In the first stage, we introduce a new approach to enforce motion temporal consistency in the latent space (LTC), and generate consistent interaction motions. In the second stage, GRIP generates refined hand poses to avoid hand-object penetrations. Given sequences of noisy body and object motion, GRIP upgrades them to include hand-object interaction. Quantitative experiments and perceptual studies demonstrate that GRIP outperforms baseline methods and generalizes to unseen objects and motions from different motion-capture datasets.Comment: The project has been started during Omid Taheri's internship at Adobe and as a collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent System

Strong, Self-Healable, and Recyclable Visible-Light-Responsive Hydrogel Actuators

The most pressing challenges for light-driven hydrogel actuators include reliance on UV light, slow response, poor mechanical properties, and limited functionalities. Now, a supramolecular design strategy is used to address these issues. Key is the use of a benzylimine-functionalized anthracene group, which red-shifts the absorption into the visible region and also stabilizes the supramolecular network through π-π interactions. Acid-ether hydrogen bonds are incorporated for energy dissipation under mechanical deformation and maintaining hydrophilicity of the network. This double-crosslinked supramolecular hydrogel developed via a simple synthesis exhibits a unique combination of high strength, rapid self-healing, and fast visible-light-driven shape morphing both in the wet and dry state. As all of the interactions are dynamic, the design enables the structures to be recycled and reprogrammed into different 3D objects.Funding is gratefully acknowledged from the Australian Research Council(DP180103918),and the ANU Futures Scheme. Z.J.would like to acknowledge funding of ANU Early Career Researchers(ECR)Travel Grant(R.46850.4656)

Giant Enhancement of Magnetostrictive Response in Directionally-Solidified Fe83Ga17Erx Compounds

We report, for the first time, correlations between crystal structure, microstructure and magnetofunctional response in directionally solidified [110]-textured Fe83Ga17Erx (0 < x < 1.2) alloys. The morphology of the doped samples consists of columnar grains, mainly composed of a matrix phase and precipitates of a secondary phase deposited along the grain boundary region. An enhancement of more than ~275% from ~45 to 170 ppm is observed in the saturation magnetostriction value (λs) of Fe83Ga17Erx alloys with the introduction of small amounts of Er. Moreover, it was noted that the low field derivative of magnetostriction with respect to an applied magnetic field (i.e., dλs/dHapp for Happ up to 1000 Oe) increases by ~230% with Er doping (dλs/dHapp,FeGa= 0.045 ppm/Oe; dλs/dHapp,FeGaEr= 0.15 ppm/Oe). The enhanced magnetostrictive response of the Fe83Ga17Erx alloys is ascribed to an amalgamation of microstructural and electronic factors, namely: (i) improved grain orientation and local strain effects due to deposition of Er in the intergranular region; and (ii) strong local magnetocrystalline anisotropy, due to the highly anisotropic localized nature of the 4f electronic charge distribution of the Er atom. Overall, this work provides guidelines for further improving galfenol-based materials systems for diverse applications in the power and energy sector