VisDA 2022 Challenge: Domain Adaptation for Industrial Waste Sorting

Label-efficient and reliable semantic segmentation is essential for many real-life applications, especially for industrial settings with high visual diversity, such as waste sorting. In industrial waste sorting, one of the biggest challenges is the extreme diversity of the input stream depending on factors like the location of the sorting facility, the equipment available in the facility, and the time of year, all of which significantly impact the composition and visual appearance of the waste stream. These changes in the data are called ``visual domains'', and label-efficient adaptation of models to such domains is needed for successful semantic segmentation of industrial waste. To test the abilities of computer vision models on this task, we present the VisDA 2022 Challenge on Domain Adaptation for Industrial Waste Sorting. Our challenge incorporates a fully-annotated waste sorting dataset, ZeroWaste, collected from two real material recovery facilities in different locations and seasons, as well as a novel procedurally generated synthetic waste sorting dataset, SynthWaste. In this competition, we aim to answer two questions: 1) can we leverage domain adaptation techniques to minimize the domain gap? and 2) can synthetic data augmentation improve performance on this task and help adapt to changing data distributions? The results of the competition show that industrial waste detection poses a real domain adaptation problem, that domain generalization techniques such as augmentations, ensembling, etc., improve the overall performance on the unlabeled target domain examples, and that leveraging synthetic data effectively remains an open problem. See https://ai.bu.edu/visda-2022/Comment: Proceedings of Machine Learning Researc

IDPs of East Beirut versus the Lebanese State

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Taif agreement that formally ended the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–1990. Three decades later, some communities remain internally displaced because of the actions of the State

Integrating Systems Thinking and Storytelling

This paper explores the role of design in conflict resolution when doing so means balancing burdened pasts with present uncertainties. To prove its relevance in today’s complex problem spaces, design cannot remain stagnant; it must evolve alongside the pace of development. Designing within complexity is unprecedented. Yet, design can define structures that guide an understanding of this complexity. The methodology and case study described in this paper explore how systems thinking, storytelling and grounded theory can contribute to this understanding. The methodology aims to combine subjective perspectives with systemic analyses to create a collective narrative that reveals the multitude of individual understandings of conflicts. Ultimately, this methodology does not attempt to resolve conflict; instead, it  aims to provide an in-depth diagnosis of a wicked problem and question the role of design therein.This paper explores the role of design in conflict resolution when doing so means balancing burdened pasts with present uncertainties. To prove its relevance in today’s complex problem spaces, design cannot remain stagnant; it must evolve alongside the pace of development. Designing within complexity is unprecedented. Yet, design can define structures that guide an understanding of this complexity. The methodology and case study described in this paper explore how systems thinking, storytelling and grounded theory can contribute to this understanding. The methodology aims to combine subjective perspectives with systemic analyses to create a collective narrative that reveals the multitude of individual understandings of conflicts. Ultimately, this methodology does not attempt to resolve conflict; instead, it  aims to provide an in-depth diagnosis of a wicked problem and question the role of design therein