Robust Tracking of Multiple People Using Two Widely Separated Cameras

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Londo

Different blog use, different participation

Though it seems to be more popular for most people to discuss some issues with their friends on the micro blogs such as Twitter or community websites such as Facebook, there is still a doubt that these websites would play a role to facilitate civic engagement or promote the frequency for talking about public affairs. It is said that the success of Obama‟s case did intrigue politicians‟ attention for the effect of blog in Taiwan. That is why the study should be traced to the experiences of blog in America. There are some surveys which improved that the number of blogs have grown since 2001(Levy, 2002; Henning, 2003). In this case, Wallsten (2007) indicated that political blogs seems to have been grown faster than other types of blogs. In order to find the relationship between blog use and political participation, this study will focus on political blogs. Researchers pointed that the role of blog has become an open forum for users to address issues(Bruns, 2006; Cristol, 2002; Wall, 2006) and some researchers further claimed that blogs have been portrayed as political outlets (Kerbel and Bloom, 2005; Sweetser and Kaid, 2008; Trammell et al., 2006b) where allow users to express their self-perspective and access to different perspectives on an issue (Herring et al., 2004; Trammell and Keshelashvili, 2005; Papacharissi, 2004; Thompson, 2003). In brief, blog users also play a key role in the blog world. For this reason, the study will explore the connotation of blog users and further examine the relationship between blog use and political participation. But it seems to be less studies about types of blog users that could assess the effects of communication on blogs more precisely. To target more real supporters, this article will categorize the types of users into three kinds and measure the extent to their separate behavior which linked to political participation. --

Singular solutions for divergence-form elliptic equations involving regular variation theory: Existence and classification

We generalise and sharpen several recent results in the literature regarding the existence and complete classification of the isolated singularities for a broad class of nonlinear elliptic equations of the form \begin{equation} -{\rm div}\,(\mathcal A(|x|) \,|\nabla u|^{p-2} \nabla u)+b(x)\,h(u)=0\quad \text{in } B_1\setminus\{0\}, \end{equation} where $B_r$ denotes the open ball with radius $r>0$ centred at zero in $\mathbb{R}^N$ $(N\geq 2)$. We assume that $\mathcal{A} \in C^1(0,1]$, $b\in C(\bar{B_1}\setminus\{0\})$ and $h\in C[0,\infty)$ are positive functions associated with regularly varying functions of index $\vartheta$, $\sigma$ and $q$ at $0$, $0$ and $\infty$ respectively, satisfying $q>p-1>0$ and $\vartheta-\sigma<p<N+\vartheta$. We prove that the condition $b(x) \,h(\Phi)\not \in L^1(B_{1/2})$ is sharp for the removability of all singularities at zero for the positive solutions of our problem, where $\Phi$ denotes the "fundamental solution" of $-{\rm div}\,(\mathcal A(|x|)\, |\nabla u|^{p-2} \nabla u)=\delta_0$ (the Dirac mass at zero) in $B_1$, subject to $\Phi|_{\partial B_1}=0$. If $b(x) \,h(\Phi)\in L^1(B_{1/2})$, we show that any non-removable singularity at zero for a positive solution to our equation is either weak (i.e., $\lim_{|x|\to 0} u(x)/\Phi(|x|)\in (0,\infty)$) or strong ($\lim_{|x|\to 0} u(x)/\Phi(|x|)=\infty$). The main difficulty and novelty of this paper, for which we develop new techniques, come from the explicit asymptotic behaviour of the strong singularity solutions in the critical case, which had previously remained open even for $\mathcal{A}=1$. We also study the existence and uniqueness of the positive solution to our problem with a prescribed admissible behaviour at zero and a Dirichlet condition on $\partial B_1$

Re-examination on the role of the state in the development of Taiwan’s small and medium-sized enterprises, 1950- 2000: the state, market and social institution

Much research has been devoted to the story of Taiwan’s post-war economic development. The neo-classical economists argue that its government created a free market economy which led to rapid economic growth. The revisionists, Robert Wade and Alice Amsden, address the role of the state in formulating and leading the economic miracle. One of the characteristics of the Taiwanese economy was that the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) were found in great numbers (around 90%) in Taiwanese manufacturing industry. These SMEs were export-oriented and contributed greatly to the export growth in the 1970s and the 1980s. The success of the Taiwanese manufacturing SMEs was usually attributed to the market and the development policies which the state established and enforced. However, the existing literature ignores (1) the further development of the SMEs after the late 1980s; (2) the role which Taiwanese society played in the rise and the development of the SMEs. This ignorance over-estimates the role of the state in the development of the SMEs in the post-war era. The present dissertation reexamines the argument of the neo-classical economists and the revisionists by finding a historical pattern and tracing the further development of the SMEs after the late 1980s. To what extent did the market established by the state and the state development policy supported the rise and the development of the Taiwanese manufacturing SMEs from 1950 to 1980? What puts into question the influences of the state on the SMEs after the late 1980s? Why did the state have limited influences on the SMEs after the late 1980s? The dissertation finds that Wade and Amsden over-estimated the role of the state in the rise and development of the SMEs by explaining the limited influences of the state on the SMEs after the late 1980s. The research, by clarifying the relation of the state, market and social institutions from the historical pattern, demonstrates that the social institutions are adapted to the changing environment and continuously provided important financial sources to facilitate the SMEs’ business operations from 1950 to 2000

Efficient Two-Step Adversarial Defense for Deep Neural Networks

In recent years, deep neural networks have demonstrated outstanding performance in many machine learning tasks. However, researchers have discovered that these state-of-the-art models are vulnerable to adversarial examples: legitimate examples added by small perturbations which are unnoticeable to human eyes. Adversarial training, which augments the training data with adversarial examples during the training process, is a well known defense to improve the robustness of the model against adversarial attacks. However, this robustness is only effective to the same attack method used for adversarial training. Madry et al.(2017) suggest that effectiveness of iterative multi-step adversarial attacks and particularly that projected gradient descent (PGD) may be considered the universal first order adversary and applying the adversarial training with PGD implies resistance against many other first order attacks. However, the computational cost of the adversarial training with PGD and other multi-step adversarial examples is much higher than that of the adversarial training with other simpler attack techniques. In this paper, we show how strong adversarial examples can be generated only at a cost similar to that of two runs of the fast gradient sign method (FGSM), allowing defense against adversarial attacks with a robustness level comparable to that of the adversarial training with multi-step adversarial examples. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two-step defense approach against different attack methods and its improvements over existing defense strategies.Comment: 12 page

The Dualistic Model of European Agriculture - a Theoretical Framework for the Endogenous Development

The European model of agriculture refers to a multifunctional and virtuous model of agriculture that is progressively substituting the productivist model of agriculture, that, in the recent past, has been supported by agricultural community policies. However, the European model of agriculture comprises heterogeneous realities and economic actors characterised by different local conducts. Schematizing this model, we can distinguish two agriculture typologies: modernised agriculture and traditional agriculture. In this article, we will develop a theoretical framework which encompasses the different patterns of endogenous development in both agriculture typologies. Through this article, we aim to create the theoretical basis necessary to undertake the study of the dualistic model of European agriculture.endogenous rural development, european model of agriculture, traditional agriculture, modern agriculture, multifunctionality