3,400 research outputs found
Formal Methods of Argumentation as Models of Engineering Design Decisions and Processes
Complex engineering projects comprise many individual design decisions. As these decisions are made over the course of months, even years, and across different teams of engineers, it is common for them to be based on different, possibly conflicting assumptions. The longer these inconsistencies go undetected, the costlier they are to resolve. Therefore it is important to spot them as early as possible. There is currently no software aimed explicitly at detecting inconsistencies in interrelated design decisions. This thesis is a step towards the development of such tools. We use formal methods of argumentation, a branch of artificial intelligence, as the foundation of a logical model of design decisions capable of handling inconsistency. It has three parts. First, argumentation is used to model the pros and cons of individual decisions and to reason about the possible worlds in which these arguments are justified. In the second part we study sequences of interrelated decisions. We identify cases where the arguments in one decision invalidate the justification for another decision, and develop a measure of the impact that choosing a specific option has on the consistency of the overall design. The final part of the thesis is concerned with non-deductive arguments, which are used in design debates, for example to draw analogies between past and current problems. Our model integrates deductive and non-deductive arguments side-by-side. This work is supported by our collaboration with the engineering department of Queen’s University Belfast and an industrial partner. The thesis contains two case studies of realistic problems and parts of it were implemented as software prototypes. We also give theoretical results demonstrating the internal consistency of our model
Long-term Tracking in the Wild: A Benchmark
We introduce the OxUvA dataset and benchmark for evaluating single-object
tracking algorithms. Benchmarks have enabled great strides in the field of
object tracking by defining standardized evaluations on large sets of diverse
videos. However, these works have focused exclusively on sequences that are
just tens of seconds in length and in which the target is always visible.
Consequently, most researchers have designed methods tailored to this
"short-term" scenario, which is poorly representative of practitioners' needs.
Aiming to address this disparity, we compile a long-term, large-scale tracking
dataset of sequences with average length greater than two minutes and with
frequent target object disappearance. The OxUvA dataset is much larger than the
object tracking datasets of recent years: it comprises 366 sequences spanning
14 hours of video. We assess the performance of several algorithms, considering
both the ability to locate the target and to determine whether it is present or
absent. Our goal is to offer the community a large and diverse benchmark to
enable the design and evaluation of tracking methods ready to be used "in the
wild". The project website is http://oxuva.netComment: To appear at ECCV 201
Long-Term Visual Object Tracking Benchmark
We propose a new long video dataset (called Track Long and Prosper - TLP) and
benchmark for single object tracking. The dataset consists of 50 HD videos from
real world scenarios, encompassing a duration of over 400 minutes (676K
frames), making it more than 20 folds larger in average duration per sequence
and more than 8 folds larger in terms of total covered duration, as compared to
existing generic datasets for visual tracking. The proposed dataset paves a way
to suitably assess long term tracking performance and train better deep
learning architectures (avoiding/reducing augmentation, which may not reflect
real world behaviour). We benchmark the dataset on 17 state of the art trackers
and rank them according to tracking accuracy and run time speeds. We further
present thorough qualitative and quantitative evaluation highlighting the
importance of long term aspect of tracking. Our most interesting observations
are (a) existing short sequence benchmarks fail to bring out the inherent
differences in tracking algorithms which widen up while tracking on long
sequences and (b) the accuracy of trackers abruptly drops on challenging long
sequences, suggesting the potential need of research efforts in the direction
of long-term tracking.Comment: ACCV 2018 (Oral
Aspects of asphaltene aggregation obtained from coarse-grained molecular modeling
We have performed a molecular-simulation-based
study to explore
some of the underlying mechanisms of asphaltene aggregation. The daunting
complexity of the crude oil + asphaltene system precludes any type
of meaningful molecular simulation unless some assumptions are made
with respect to the key physical and chemical properties that must
be explicitly described. In the present work, we focus on molecular
simulations of a coarse-grained model of asphaltene molecules in pure
solvents, which are based on the assumption that the general size
asymmetry and asphaltene morphology play a key role in the aggregation
process. We use simple single isotropic Lennard-Jones sites to represent
paraffinic and aromatic C<sub>6</sub> segments, which are used as
building blocks for the description of continental asphaltene models
and solvent moieties. The energy and size parameters for the intermolecular
models (ε and σ) for solute and solvent molecules are
chosen to reproduce the experimental density of the liquid phase for
different mixtures. An explicit pure solvent is considered, and the
relationship between the aggregation mechanism and the solvent nature
is investigated through direct simulation of the aggregation process.
The results reproduce accurately expected trends observed for more-complex
models as well as experiments, for example, strong aggregation of
asphaltene molecules in <i>n-</i>heptane and high solubility
in toluene. Different asphaltene models based on different geometries
reveal that even at this level of simplification the topology of the
molecules (number and position of aliphatic branches) does affect
the way molecules aggregate
Learning Rotation Adaptive Correlation Filters in Robust Visual Object Tracking
Visual object tracking is one of the major challenges in the field of
computer vision. Correlation Filter (CF) trackers are one of the most widely
used categories in tracking. Though numerous tracking algorithms based on CFs
are available today, most of them fail to efficiently detect the object in an
unconstrained environment with dynamically changing object appearance. In order
to tackle such challenges, the existing strategies often rely on a particular
set of algorithms. Here, we propose a robust framework that offers the
provision to incorporate illumination and rotation invariance in the standard
Discriminative Correlation Filter (DCF) formulation. We also supervise the
detection stage of DCF trackers by eliminating false positives in the
convolution response map. Further, we demonstrate the impact of displacement
consistency on CF trackers. The generality and efficiency of the proposed
framework is illustrated by integrating our contributions into two
state-of-the-art CF trackers: SRDCF and ECO. As per the comprehensive
experiments on the VOT2016 dataset, our top trackers show substantial
improvement of 14.7% and 6.41% in robustness, 11.4% and 1.71% in Average
Expected Overlap (AEO) over the baseline SRDCF and ECO, respectively.Comment: Published in ACCV 201
Siamese network based features fusion for adaptive visual tracking
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018. Visual object tracking is a popular but challenging problem in computer vision. The main challenge is the lack of priori knowledge of the tracking target, which may be only supervised of a bounding box given in the first frame. Besides, the tracking suffers from many influences as scale variations, deformations, partial occlusions and motion blur, etc. To solve such a challenging problem, a suitable tracking framework is demanded to adopt different tracking scenes. This paper presents a novel approach for robust visual object tracking by multiple features fusion in the Siamese Network. Hand-crafted appearance features and CNN features are combined to mutually compensate for their shortages and enhance the advantages. The proposed network is processed as follows. Firstly, different features are extracted from the tracking frames. Secondly, the extracted features are employed via Correlation Filter respectively to learn corresponding templates, which are used to generate response maps respectively. And finally, the multiple response maps are fused to get a better response map, which can help to locate the target location more accurately. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on three benchmarks: Temple-Color, OTB50 and UAV123. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on these benchmarks
Hard Occlusions in Visual Object Tracking
Visual object tracking is among the hardest problems in computer vision, as
trackers have to deal with many challenging circumstances such as illumination
changes, fast motion, occlusion, among others. A tracker is assessed to be good
or not based on its performance on the recent tracking datasets, e.g., VOT2019,
and LaSOT. We argue that while the recent datasets contain large sets of
annotated videos that to some extent provide a large bandwidth for training
data, the hard scenarios such as occlusion and in-plane rotation are still
underrepresented. For trackers to be brought closer to the real-world scenarios
and deployed in safety-critical devices, even the rarest hard scenarios must be
properly addressed. In this paper, we particularly focus on hard occlusion
cases and benchmark the performance of recent state-of-the-art trackers (SOTA)
on them. We created a small-scale dataset containing different categories
within hard occlusions, on which the selected trackers are evaluated. Results
show that hard occlusions remain a very challenging problem for SOTA trackers.
Furthermore, it is observed that tracker performance varies wildly between
different categories of hard occlusions, where a top-performing tracker on one
category performs significantly worse on a different category. The varying
nature of tracker performance based on specific categories suggests that the
common tracker rankings using averaged single performance scores are not
adequate to gauge tracker performance in real-world scenarios.Comment: Accepted at ECCV 2020 Workshop RLQ-TO
Opportunities for topical antimicrobial therapy: permeation of canine skin by fusidic acid
BACKGROUND: Staphylococcal infection of the canine epidermis and hair follicle is amongst the commonest reasons for antimicrobial prescribing in small animal veterinary practice. Topical therapy with fusidic acid (FA) is an attractive alternative to systemic therapy based on low minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs, commonly <0.03 mg/l) documented in canine pathogenic staphylococci, including strains of MRSA and MRSP (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and S. pseudintermedius). However, permeation of canine skin by FA has not been evaluated in detail. This study aimed to define the degree and extent of FA permeation in canine skin in vitro from two sites with different hair follicle density following application of a licensed ophthalmic formulation that shares the same vehicle as an FA-betamethasone combination product approved for dermal application in dogs. Topical FA application was modelled using skin held in Franz-type diffusion cells. Concentrations of FA in surface swabs, receptor fluid, and transverse skin sections of defined anatomical depth were determined using high-performance liquid chromatography and ultraviolet (HPLC-UV) analysis. RESULTS: The majority of FA was recovered by surface swabs after 24 h, as expected (mean ± SEM: 76.0 ± 17.0%). FA was detected within 424/470 (90%) groups of serial sections of transversely cryotomed skin containing follicular infundibula, but never in 48/48 (100%) groups of sections containing only deeper follicular structures, nor in receptor fluid, suggesting that FA does not permeate beyond the infundibulum. The FA concentration (mean ± SEM) in the most superficial 240 μm of skin was 2000 ± 815 μg/g. CONCLUSIONS: Topically applied FA can greatly exceed MICs for canine pathogenic staphylococci at the most common sites of infection. Topical FA therapy should now be evaluated using available formulations in vivo as an alternative to systemic therapy for canine superficial bacterial folliculitis.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio
The scalar gluonium correlator: large-beta_0 and beyond
The investigation of the scalar gluonium correlator is interesting because it
carries the quantum numbers of the vacuum and the relevant hadronic current is
related to the anomalous trace of the QCD energy-momentum tensor in the chiral
limit. After reviewing the purely perturbative corrections known up to
next-next-to-leading order, the behaviour of the correlator is studied to all
orders by means of the large-beta_0 approximation. Similar to the QCD Adler
function, the large-order behaviour is governed by the leading ultraviolet
renormalon pole. The structure of infrared renormalon poles, being related to
the operator product expansion are also discussed, as well as a low-energy
theorem for the correlator that provides a relation to the renormalisation
group invariant gluon condensate, and the vacuum matrix element of the trace of
the QCD energy-momentum tensor.Comment: 14 pages, references added, discussion of IR renormalon pole at u=3
extended, similar version to appear in JHE
The condition-dependent transcriptional landscape of Burkholderia pseudomallei
This is the final version of the article. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.Burkholderia pseudomallei (Bp), the causative agent of the often-deadly infectious disease melioidosis, contains one of the largest prokaryotic genomes sequenced to date, at 7.2 Mb with two large circular chromosomes (1 and 2). To comprehensively delineate the Bp transcriptome, we integrated whole-genome tiling array expression data of Bp exposed to >80 diverse physical, chemical, and biological conditions. Our results provide direct experimental support for the strand-specific expression of 5,467 Sanger protein-coding genes, 1,041 operons, and 766 non-coding RNAs. A large proportion of these transcripts displayed condition-dependent expression, consistent with them playing functional roles. The two Bp chromosomes exhibited dramatically different transcriptional landscapes--Chr 1 genes were highly and constitutively expressed, while Chr 2 genes exhibited mosaic expression where distinct subsets were expressed in a strongly condition-dependent manner. We identified dozens of cis-regulatory motifs associated with specific condition-dependent expression programs, and used the condition compendium to elucidate key biological processes associated with two complex pathogen phenotypes--quorum sensing and in vivo infection. Our results demonstrate the utility of a Bp condition-compendium as a community resource for biological discovery. Moreover, the observation that significant portions of the Bp virulence machinery can be activated by specific in vitro cues provides insights into Bp's capacity as an "accidental pathogen", where genetic pathways used by the bacterium to survive in environmental niches may have also facilitated its ability to colonize human hosts.This work was funded by a core grant provided by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research to the Genome Institute of Singapore, and funding from the Defence Medical and Environmental Research Institute, Singapore. This work was supported in part through NIAID contract HHSN266200400035C to BWS. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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