3,423 research outputs found
Can Curriculum Changes Improve the Deliverables the Business Studies Departments of Maine’s Community Colleges Provide its Stakeholders?
Recent seminars and meetings between state officials and business leaders have established that a perceived disconnect exists between the skill\u27s, knowledge, and abilities needed by their enterprises and the skill\u27s, knowledge, and abilities being taught by the state’s educational systems. The Maine Community College System\u27s vision states that the system answers to a number of stakeholders by providing a two year comprehensive, affordable, and accessible college education... dedicated to building a quality workforce for Maine” (Maine Community College, n.d.). While the MCCS is a relatively new institution, this suggests that the community college arena is the most logical starting place for investigating and identifying these disconnects. Through interviews with students and businesses, surveys for both groups of stakeholders were developed. The resulting survey data was used to ascertain any disconnects and suggest possible venues for determining if curriculum changes would address them. Suggestions for future directions are offered
The Full Two-Loop R-parity Violating Renormalization Group Equations for All Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model Couplings
We present the full two-loop -functions for the minimal supersymmetric
standard model couplings, extended to include R-parity violating couplings
through explicit R-parity violation
Fast Predictive Simple Geodesic Regression
Deformable image registration and regression are important tasks in medical
image analysis. However, they are computationally expensive, especially when
analyzing large-scale datasets that contain thousands of images. Hence, cluster
computing is typically used, making the approaches dependent on such
computational infrastructure. Even larger computational resources are required
as study sizes increase. This limits the use of deformable image registration
and regression for clinical applications and as component algorithms for other
image analysis approaches. We therefore propose using a fast predictive
approach to perform image registrations. In particular, we employ these fast
registration predictions to approximate a simplified geodesic regression model
to capture longitudinal brain changes. The resulting method is orders of
magnitude faster than the standard optimization-based regression model and
hence facilitates large-scale analysis on a single graphics processing unit
(GPU). We evaluate our results on 3D brain magnetic resonance images (MRI) from
the ADNI datasets.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figures, 13 table
An Improved Encoder-Decoder Framework for Food Energy Estimation
Dietary assessment is essential to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Automatic
image-based dietary assessment is a growing field of research due to the
increasing prevalence of image capturing devices (e.g. mobile phones). In this
work, we estimate food energy from a single monocular image, a difficult task
due to the limited hard-to-extract amount of energy information present in an
image. To do so, we employ an improved encoder-decoder framework for energy
estimation; the encoder transforms the image into a representation embedded
with food energy information in an easier-to-extract format, which the decoder
then extracts the energy information from. To implement our method, we compile
a high-quality food image dataset verified by registered dietitians containing
eating scene images, food-item segmentation masks, and ground truth calorie
values. Our method improves upon previous caloric estimation methods by over
10\% and 30 kCal in terms of MAPE and MAE respectively.Comment: Accepted for Madima'23 in ACM Multimedi
Constraints on Finite Soft Supersymmetry-Breaking Terms
Requiring the soft supersymmetry-breaking (SSB) parameters in finite
gauge-Yukawa unified models to be finite up to and including two-loop order, we
derive a two-loop sum rule for the soft scalar-masses. It is shown that this
sum rule coincides with that of a certain class of string models in which the
massive string states are organized into N=4 supermultiplets. We investigate
the SSB sector of two finite SU(5) models. Using the sum rule which allows the
non-universality of the SSB terms and requiring that the lightest superparticle
particleis neutral, we constrain the parameter space of the SSB sector in each
model.Comment: 34 page
QARV: Quantization-Aware ResNet VAE for Lossy Image Compression
This paper addresses the problem of lossy image compression, a fundamental
problem in image processing and information theory that is involved in many
real-world applications. We start by reviewing the framework of variational
autoencoders (VAEs), a powerful class of generative probabilistic models that
has a deep connection to lossy compression. Based on VAEs, we develop a novel
scheme for lossy image compression, which we name quantization-aware ResNet VAE
(QARV). Our method incorporates a hierarchical VAE architecture integrated with
test-time quantization and quantization-aware training, without which efficient
entropy coding would not be possible. In addition, we design the neural network
architecture of QARV specifically for fast decoding and propose an adaptive
normalization operation for variable-rate compression. Extensive experiments
are conducted, and results show that QARV achieves variable-rate compression,
high-speed decoding, and a better rate-distortion performance than existing
baseline methods. The code of our method is publicly accessible at
https://github.com/duanzhiihao/lossy-vaeComment: Technical repor
- …