Taste, Freshness and Nutrients Information to Retailers regarding Control of Quality and Safety in Organic Production Chains

This leaflet provides a practical overview for retailers of what is done to secure the quality and taste of seven types of organically produced foods, where improvements are possible, and what the retailers can do to support improvements and ensure the best possible food quality. Other leaflets for retailers cover authenticity and fraud or safety and contamination, and separate leaflets aim at consumers or at production of specific commodities

Taste, Freshness and Nutrients Information to Consumers regarding Control of Quality and Safety in Organic Production Chains

This leaflet provides a practical overview for consumers of what is done to secure the quality and taste of 7 types of organically produced foods, where improvements are possible and what the consumer can do to support improvements and to preserve the food quality after purchase. Other leaflets for consumers cover authenticity and fraud or safety and contamination, and separate leaflets aim at retailers or at production of specific commodities

Self-taught Object Localization with Deep Networks

This paper introduces self-taught object localization, a novel approach that leverages deep convolutional networks trained for whole-image recognition to localize objects in images without additional human supervision, i.e., without using any ground-truth bounding boxes for training. The key idea is to analyze the change in the recognition scores when artificially masking out different regions of the image. The masking out of a region that includes the object typically causes a significant drop in recognition score. This idea is embedded into an agglomerative clustering technique that generates self-taught localization hypotheses. Our object localization scheme outperforms existing proposal methods in both precision and recall for small number of subwindow proposals (e.g., on ILSVRC-2012 it produces a relative gain of 23.4% over the state-of-the-art for top-1 hypothesis). Furthermore, our experiments show that the annotations automatically-generated by our method can be used to train object detectors yielding recognition results remarkably close to those obtained by training on manually-annotated bounding boxes.Comment: WACV 201

Processing of Wheat to Bread Control of Quality and Safety in Organic Production Chains

This leaflet provides a practical overview for millers, bakers and others involved in production of flour and bread, on what can be done at these steps to improve the quality and safety of organically produced bread, in addition to certification and general food safety requirements. A separate leaflet covers the wheat production and grain storage steps, and other leaflets cover other commodities or aim at consumers and retailers

Emmanuel Levinas e l'orizzonte ultimo dello spazio intersoggettivo

Il pensiero di Emmanuel Levinas dischiude le coordinate di uno spazio relazionale in cui identità e alterità trovano il proprio «luogo». Il presente contributo tratteggia il particolare intreccio fra esperienza letteraria ed esperienza dell’alterità nell’orizzonte ultimo della trascendenza. Ogni relazione è caratterizzata da una particolare asimmetria che rivela le identità dei soggetti coinvolti ed allo stesso tempo rimanda al di là di essi, attraverso una eccedenza di senso che si rivela nella sproporzione dell’incontro. L’esperienza letteraria si caratterizza per il suo «fare segno» verso questo orizzonte ultimo, rimandando a una presenza che interpella attraverso la traccia dell’assenza. Attraverso una analisi della metafora della «curvatura dello spazio intersoggettivo» e il suo ritornare sullo sfondo delle riflessioni più recenti di Levinas si cercherà di descrivere la funzione testimoniale del linguaggio e la ritmica dialogica della persona umana. The thought of Emmanuel Levinas reveals the coordinates of a relational space where identity and otherness find their own «place». This paper outlines the remarkable connection between the literary experience and the experience of otherness in the ultimate horizon of transcendence. Every relationship is characterized by a particular asymmetry, which reveals the identities of the involved subject. At the same time, it is even able to go beyond them, thanks to an excess of sense that lies in the disproportion of the meeting. The literary experience moves itself towards this ultimate horizon, questioning and referring to a presence by the track of the absence. Through an analysis of the ‘metaphor of the curvature of intersubjective space’ and its return to the background of the most recent reflections of Levinas we are attempts to describe the testimonal function of language and the rhythmic dialogue of the human person

Drawing beyond Language and Images : Steps to Olfactory Representations

The paper investigates questions of multisensory representation and design. It focuses especially on olfactory representation and ‘smell maps’, based on the surfacing scientific literature and applications of the sense of smell in urban representation, in perfumery and in what lies between these categories, such as ‘smell art’. The main purpose is that of proposing new perspectives and possibilities to the science of Drawing, and conversely to expand the traditional knowledge of architectural representation. To do so, the paper first offers a short epistemological and theoretical framework, and then compares the state of the art of different representational regimes (visual, aural, and olfactory) and examines their analogies and differences, in order to begin exploring notions – like that of ‘projection’ – and practices that could be transferred or translated between visual, aural and olfactory information. Recent scientific papers, articles, and books – coming from different disciplinary fields which usually rely solely on visual information provided by survey and drawing, e.g., Archaeology – seem to prefigure a transition to an ‘olfactory turn’, just like the first decades of the new millennium led to an enormous and growing interest towards sound, commonly referred to as ‘sonic turn’. Besides, as the modern and contemporary world and culture still focus mostly on the visual and on language, developing tools to measure and parametrize other kinds of information can lead to discover aspects of cultural heritage which are still hidden

Methods for efficient object categorization, detection, scene recognition, and image search

In the past few years there has been a tremendous growth in the usage of digital images. Users can now access millions of photos, a fact that poses the need of having methods that can efficiently and effectively search the visual information of interest. In this thesis, we propose methods to learn image representations to compactly represent a large collection of images, enabling accurate image recognition with linear classification models which offer the advantage of being efficient to both train and test. The entries of our descriptors are the output of a set of basis classifiers evaluated on the image, which capture the presence or absence of a set of high-level visual concepts. We propose two different techniques to automatically discover the visual concepts and learn the basis classifiers from a given labeled dataset of pictures, producing descriptors that highly-discriminate the original categories of the dataset. We empirically show that these descriptors are able to encode new unseen pictures, and produce state-of-the-art results in conjunct with cheap linear classifiers. We describe several strategies to aggregate the outputs of basis classifiers evaluated on multiple subwindows of the image in order to handle cases when the photo contains multiple objects and large amounts of clutter. We extend this framework for the task of object detection, where the goal is to spatially localize an object within an image. We use the output of a collection of detectors trained in an offline stage as features for new detection problems, showing competitive results with the current state of the art. Since generating rich manual annotations for an image dataset is a crucial limit of modern methods in object localization and detection, in this thesis we also propose a method to automatically generate training data for an object detector in a weakly-supervised fashion, yielding considerable savings in human annotation efforts. We show that our automatically-generated regions can be used to train object detectors with recognition results remarkably close to those obtained by training on manually annotated bounding boxes

Interfaces: between Drawing and Design

This article explores the role of drawing in relation to design, not so much as a specific creative act, capable of informing and repre- senting design ideas, or as a ‘manifestation of the idea’ per se, but rather as a dense and sedimented knowledge that is increasingly relevant for interaction design – and extensively in any design project. Looking at examples such as video game interfaces and other everyday use artifacts, as well as theoretical reference models for the interaction design community (from Donald Norman’s to Paul Dourish’s, from Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s to Branden Hookway’s, etc.), it is possible to bring out and discuss the centrality of the role of drawing in rethinking strategies of the interaction project, while considering the interface as a specific ‘place’ where not only the mediation between user and designed content takes place, but also that between drawing and design is activated. If windows, mirrors, and lenses can be considered as mediation devices of the visible, interfaces of digital devices can synthesize, make coexist and multiply their functioning and consequences, for example when they are meant to relate collections of data with their possible representations. Furthermore, recent discoveries in other fields, such as chemistry and biology, lead us to rethink together both drawing and design, starting from new epistemological models which extensively rely on the notion of interface