Discrepancies in Knee Joint Moments Using Common Anatomical Frames Defined by Different Palpable Landmarks

The aim was to investigate the effects of three anatomical frames using palpable anatomical landmarks of the knee on the net knee joint moments. The femoral epicondyles, femoral condyles, and tibial ridges were used to define the different anatomical frames and the segment end points of the distal femur and proximal tibia, which represent the origin of the tibial coordinate system. Gait data were then collected using the calibrated anatomical system technique (CAST), and the external net knee joint moments in the sagittal, coronal, and transverse planes were calculated based upon the three anatomical frames. Peak knee moments were found to be significantly different in the sagittal plane by approximately 25% (p ≤0.05), but no significant differences were seen in the coronal or transverse planes. Based on these findings it is important to consider the definition of anatomical frames and be aware that the use of numerous anatomical landmarks around the knee can have significant effects on knee joint moments

Unsupervised learning of object landmarks by factorized spatial embeddings

Learning automatically the structure of object categories remains an important open problem in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised approach that can discover and learn landmarks in object categories, thus characterizing their structure. Our approach is based on factorizing image deformations, as induced by a viewpoint change or an object deformation, by learning a deep neural network that detects landmarks consistently with such visual effects. Furthermore, we show that the learned landmarks establish meaningful correspondences between different object instances in a category without having to impose this requirement explicitly. We assess the method qualitatively on a variety of object types, natural and man-made. We also show that our unsupervised landmarks are highly predictive of manually-annotated landmarks in face benchmark datasets, and can be used to regress these with a high degree of accuracy.Comment: To be published in ICCV 201

The peace policy of Spain 1596-1600

The Peace Policy of Spain, 1596-16CU. is an examination of the motives of the government of Philip II and of Philip III in bringing to an end a long and exhausting war with three enemies - France, England and the United Provinces. It is based almost entirely upon original manuscript sources, most of which have not previously been studied in depth or for the period as a whole. The intellectual climate in which decisions were made, the political state of the Court, the efficiency of the handling of foreign affairs, the dramatis personae and their attitude towards Spain and her resources are first described by way of introduction. Relations with the Low Countries are then examined so as to provide the back-cloth to the rest of the foreign policy, and the war against the Dutch is shown as being Spain's true priority. The chapters on the negotiations that led up to the Treaty of Vervins (1598), on the Saluzzo crisis (1600) and on the cold war that culminated in the Biron conspiracy (l602) shew the working-out of a new policy towards France. Anglo-Spanish affairs occupy the chapters on the failure to find a naval or, in the English succession question, a diplomatic solution to the problem of England's hostility, and those on the preliminaries and course of the Treaty of London (1604.). New light is thrown on to the efficiency and range of Spain's governmental and diplomatic machinery, as on to her sense of imperial mission; some of the customary strictures upon the government's vapidity and indifference are strongly criticized; and Spain's great reluctance to face the economic and military fact that she had outgrown her strength emerges with clarity

A systematic review of kinematic models used in foot & ankle biomechanics

Over the past decade our understanding of foot function has increased significantly. Our understanding of foot and ankle biomechanics appears to be directly correlated to advances in models used to assess and quantify kinematic parameters in gait. These advances in models in turn lead to greater detail in the data. However, we must consider that the level of complexity is determined by the question or task being analysed. This systematic review aims to provide a critical appraisal of commonly used marker sets and foot models to assess foot and ankle kinematics in a wide variety of clinical and research purposes

Predicting critical power in elite cyclists: questioning validity of the 3-min All-out test

Purpose: New applications of the critical power concept, such as the modelling of intermittent work capabilities, are exciting prospects for elite cycling. However, accurate calculation of the required parameters is traditionally time invasive and somewhat impractical. An alternative single test protocol (3-min All-out) has recently been proposed, but validation in an elite population is lacking. The traditional approach for parameter establishment, but with fewer tests, could also prove an acceptable compromise. Methods: Six senior Australian endurance track cycling representatives completed six efforts to exhaustion on two separate days over a three week period. These included 1, 4, 6, 8 and 10 minute self-paced efforts, plus the 3-min All-out protocol. Traditional work versus time calculations of CP and W’ using the five self-paced efforts were compared to calculations from the 3-min All-out protocol. The impact of using just two or three self-paced efforts for traditional CP and W’ estimation were also explored using thresholds of agreement (8W, 2.0kJ respectively). Results: CP estimated from the 3-min All-out approach was significantly higher than from the traditional approach (402±33W, 351±27W, p<0.001), whilst W’ was lower (15.5±3.0kJ, 24.3±4.0kJ, p=0.02). Five different combinations of two or three self-paced efforts led to CP estimates within the threshold of agreement, with only one combination deemed accurate for W’. Conclusions: In elite cyclists the 3-min All-out approach is not suitable to estimate CP when compared to the traditional method. However, reducing the number of tests used in the traditional method lessens testing burden whilst maintaining appropriate parameter accuracy.Jason C Bartram, Dominic Thewlis, David T Martin, Kevin I Norto

Language as the Medium: Multimodal Video Classification through text only

Despite an exciting new wave of multimodal machine learning models, current approaches still struggle to interpret the complex contextual relationships between the different modalities present in videos. Going beyond existing methods that emphasize simple activities or objects, we propose a new model-agnostic approach for generating detailed textual descriptions that captures multimodal video information. Our method leverages the extensive knowledge learnt by large language models, such as GPT-3.5 or Llama2, to reason about textual descriptions of the visual and aural modalities, obtained from BLIP-2, Whisper and ImageBind. Without needing additional finetuning of video-text models or datasets, we demonstrate that available LLMs have the ability to use these multimodal textual descriptions as proxies for ``sight'' or ``hearing'' and perform zero-shot multimodal classification of videos in-context. Our evaluations on popular action recognition benchmarks, such as UCF-101 or Kinetics, show these context-rich descriptions can be successfully used in video understanding tasks. This method points towards a promising new research direction in multimodal classification, demonstrating how an interplay between textual, visual and auditory machine learning models can enable more holistic video understanding.Comment: Accepted at "What is Next in Multimodal Foundation Models?" (MMFM) workshop at ICCV 202