Beyond the Duvalier Legacy: What New Arab Spring Governments Can Learn from Haiti and the Benefits of Stolen Asset Recovery

This article analyzes a ground-breaking development in the global fight against corruption: international asset recovery. By highlighting developments in the Duvalier case, the authors argue that stolen asset recovery is quickly emerging as one of the more high profile aspects of holding corrupt political leaders accountable and developing the rule of law

Protecting Cultural Heritage as a Means for International Peace, Security and Stability

Cultural aggression has become a strategy to obtain an advantage during war. In a deliberate and methodical pattern extremists have not only damaged and destroyed historical sites in Iraq and Syria, but they have also looted antiquities to raise money for their terrorist activities. In addition to degrading the victims\u27 identities, such acts decrease the wealth of knowledge of the world as a whole. By examining various treaties and case law on cultural property, this Article highlights the importance of holding these perpetrators accountable. Furthermore, the protection of cultural property in war zones should be an element in the whole strategy for bringing peace, stability, and security to the region. To this end, this Article suggests the creation of a public-private initiative to fight the trafficking of stolen antiquities from conflict zones

Automatic 3D facial model and texture reconstruction from range scans

This paper presents a fully automatic approach to fitting a generic facial model to detailed range scans of human faces to reconstruct 3D facial models and textures with no manual intervention (such as specifying landmarks). A Scaling Iterative Closest Points (SICP) algorithm is introduced to compute the optimal rigid registrations between the generic model and the range scans with different sizes. And then a new template-fitting method, formulated in an optmization framework of minimizing the physically based elastic energy derived from thin shells, faithfully reconstructs the surfaces and the textures from the range scans and yields dense point correspondences across the reconstructed facial models. Finally, we demonstrate a facial expression transfer method to clone facial expressions from the generic model onto the reconstructed facial models by using the deformation transfer technique

Beyond the Duvalier Legacy: What New Arab Spring Governments Can Learn from Haiti and the Benefits of Stolen Asset Recovery

This article analyzes a ground-breaking development in the global fight against corruption: international asset recovery. By highlighting developments in the Duvalier case, the authors argue that stolen asset recovery is quickly emerging as one of the more high profile aspects of holding corrupt political leaders accountable and developing the rule of law