Game, Set, and Conflict: Evaluating Conflict and Game Frames in Indian Election News Coverage

News frames refer to how journalists organize and present information to convey a particular message or perspective to their readers. When covering elections, these frames shape how the public perceives electoral issues and events. This study examines how news frames, especially conflict and game frames, were employed by news organizations in India to cover the 2014 and 2019 general elections. We analyzed how the frames varied temporally, by region, and by the party being featured in the articles. Key findings include (i) conflict and games frames are employed more often in highly electorally consequential states (higher legislative seats) than in other states (ii) articles featuring challenger parties are more likely to have conflict and game frame articles than those featuring incumbent parties (iii) the national parties (BJP, Bharatiya Janata Party) and (INC, Indian National Congress) disproportionately feature in articles having conflict frames. Overall, our analysis highlights the evolving nature of election campaigns and how conflict and game frames play a major part in them.Comment: ICWS

Transition metal saccharide chemistry and biology: syntheses, characterization, solution stability and putative bio-relevant studies of iron-saccharide complexes

A number of Fe(III) complexes of saccharides and their derivatives, and those of ascorbic acid were synthesized, and characterized by a variety of analytical, spectral (FT-IR, UV-Vis, EPR, Mossbauer and EXAFS), magnetic and electrochemical techniques. Results obtained from various methods have shown good correlations. Data obtained from EPR, magnetic susceptibility and EXAFS techniques could be fitted well with the mono-, di- and trinuclear nature of the complexes. The solution stability of these complexes has been established using UV-Vis absorption and cyclic voltammetric techniques as a function of pH of the solution. Mixed valent, Fe(II,III) ascorbate complexes have also been synthesized and characterized. Reductive release of Fe(II) from the complexes using sodium dithionite has been addressed. In vitro absorption of Fe(III)-glucose complex has been studied using everted sacs of rat intestines and the results have been compared with that of simple ferric chloride. Fe(III)-saccharide complexes have shown regular protein synthesis even in hemin-deficient rabbit reticulocyte lysate indicating that these complexes play a role that is equivalent to that played by hemin in order to restore the normal synthesis of protein. These complexes have exhibited enhanced DNA cleavage properties in the presence of hydrogen peroxide with pUC-18 DNA plasmid

Building an Aerial-Ground Robotics System for Precision Farming: An Adaptable Solution

[No abstract available

An efficient locally reactive controller for safe navigation in visual teach and repeat missions

To achieve successful field autonomy, mobile robots need to freely adapt to changes in their environment. Visual navigation systems such as Visual Teach and Repeat (VT&R) often assume the space around the reference trajectory is free, but if the environment is obstructed path tracking can fail or the robot could collide with a previously unseen obstacle. In this work, we present a locally reactive controller for a VT&R system that allows a robot to navigate safely despite physical changes to the environment. Our controller uses a local elevation map to compute vector representations and outputs twist commands for navigation at 10 Hz. They are combined in a Riemannian Motion Policies (RMP) controller that requires <2ms to run on a CPU. We integrated our controller with a VT&R system onboard an ANYmal C robot and tested it in indoor cluttered spaces and a large-scale underground mine. We demonstrate that our locally reactive controller keeps the robot safe when physical occlusions or loss of visual tracking occur such as when walking close to walls, crossing doorways, or traversing narrow corridors

Towards real-time forest inventory using handheld LiDAR

While mobile LiDAR sensors are increasingly used to scan in ecology and forestry applications, reconstruction and characterization are typically carried out offline. Motivated by this, we present an online LiDAR system which is capable of running on a handheld device. Our system is capable of creating 3D point cloud reconstructions of large forest areas, segment and track individual trees, and create an inventory for the detected trees. Segments relating to each tree are accumulated over time, and tree models are completed as more scans are captured from different perspectives. The LiDAR scans are processed in an online fashion, and feedback can be provided to the operator via a screen mounted on the device. This allows the operator to ensure the desired area is mapped satisfactorily without any gaps or missing sections. We employ a pose-graph based SLAM system with loop closures to correct for drift errors allowing us to map large areas accurately. Our mapping system also provides multi-session capability where data captured during different runs can be automatically merged in a post-processing step. In this work, we estimate the Diameter at Breast Height (DBH) of individual trees as an example parameter for the forest inventory. The DBH is estimated online by fitting a cylinder to each tree trunk through a least-squares optimization within a RANSAC loop. We demonstrate our mapping approach operating in two different forests (both ecological and commercial) with the total travel distance spanning several kilometres. Further, we also provide experimental results comparing our DBH estimation to ground-truth measurements recorded manually in an ecological forest (Wytham Woods, Oxford). We demonstrate that our DBH estimates are within ∼7 cm accuracy for 90% of individual trees detected in the dataset

Towards real-time forest inventory using handheld LiDAR

While mobile LiDAR sensors are increasingly used to scan in ecology and forestry applications, reconstruction and characterization are typically carried out offline. Motivated by this, we present an online LiDAR system which is capable of running on a handheld device. Our system is capable of creating 3D point cloud reconstructions of large forest areas, segment and track individual trees, and create an inventory for the detected trees. Segments relating to each tree are accumulated over time, and tree models are completed as more scans are captured from different perspectives. The LiDAR scans are processed in an online fashion, and feedback can be provided to the operator via a screen mounted on the device. This allows the operator to ensure the desired area is mapped satisfactorily without any gaps or missing sections. We employ a pose-graph based SLAM system with loop closures to correct for drift errors allowing us to map large areas accurately. Our mapping system also provides multi-session capability where data captured during different runs can be automatically merged in a post-processing step. In this work, we estimate the Diameter at Breast Height (DBH) of individual trees as an example parameter for the forest inventory. The DBH is estimated online by fitting a cylinder to each tree trunk through a least-squares optimization within a RANSAC loop. We demonstrate our mapping approach operating in two different forests (both ecological and commercial) with the total travel distance spanning several kilometres. Further, we also provide experimental results comparing our DBH estimation to ground-truth measurements recorded manually in an ecological forest (Wytham Woods, Oxford). We demonstrate that our DBH estimates are within ∼7 cm accuracy for 90% of individual trees detected in the dataset

BriMon : a sensor network system for Railway bridge monitoring

Railway systems are critical in many regions, and can consist of several tens of thousands of bridges, being used over several decades. It is critical to have a system to monitor the health of these bridges and report when and where maintenance operations are needed. This paper presents BriMon, a wireless sensor network based system for such monitoring. The design of BriMon is driven by two important factors: application requirements, and detailed measurement studies of several pieces of the architecture. In comparison with prior bridge monitoring systems and sensor network prototypes, our contributions are three-fold. First, we have designed a novel event detection mechanism that triggers data collection in response to an oncoming train. Next, BriMon employs a simple yet effective multi-channel data transfer mechanism to transfer the collected data onto a sink located on the moving train. Third, the BriMon architecture is designed with careful consideration of the interaction between the multiple requisite functionalities such as time synchronization, event detection, routing, and data transfer. Based on a prototype implementation, this paper also presents several measurement studies to show that our design choices are indeed quite effective

RoboCupSimData : software and data for machine learning from RoboCup Simulation League

The main goal of this work is to facilitate machine learning research for multi-robot systems as they occur in RoboCup, an international scientific robot competition. We describe our software (a simulator patch and scripts) and a larger research dataset from games of some of the top teams from 2016 and 2017 in Soccer Simulation League (2D), where teams of 11 agents compete against each other, recorded by this software. We used 10 different teams to play each other, resulting in 45 unique pairings. For each pairing, we ran 25 matches, leading to 1125 matches or more than 180 h of game play. The generated CSV files are 17 GB of data (zipped), or 229 GB (unzipped). The dataset is unique in the sense that it contains local, incomplete and noisy percepts (as sent to each player), in addition to the ground truth logfile that the simulator creates (global, complete, noise-free information of all objects on the field). These data are made available as CSV files, as well as in the original soccer simulator formats