Search results for " Computer"
showing 10 items of 6910 documents
Simplification Of Painting Images For Tactile Perception By Visually Impaired Persons
2018
The access to artworks by visually impaired people requires a simplified tactile representation of paintings. This paper presents the difficulties of direct transcription of artworks and the test results of simplification of the paintings done by Australian Aborigines which don't have purely visual elements such as shadows or perspective. The implemented methodology is bottom-up: it starts with tactile representation of basic elements relevant to the understanding of the whole painting, then their association into more complex concepts. The context of associations is explained through audio-description. The results of the tests with visually impaired persons are analyzed and explained.
An Efficient Cooperative Smearing Technique for Degraded Historical Documents Images Segmentation
2020
Segmentation is one of the critical steps in historical document image analysis systems that determines the quality of the search, understanding, recognition and interpretation processes. It allows isolating the objects to be considered and separating the regions of interest (paragraphs, lines, words and characters) from other entities (figures, graphs, tables, etc.). This stage follows the thresholding, which aims to improve the quality of the document and to extract its background from its foreground, also for detecting and correcting the skew that leads to redress the document. Here, a hybrid method is proposed in order to locate words and characters in both handwritten and printed docu…
What is an indirect speech act?
2019
Abstract The notion of an indirect speech act is at the very heart of cognitive pragmatics, yet, after nearly 50 years of orthodox (Searlean) speech act theory, it remains largely unclear how this notion can be explicated in a proper way. In recent years, two debates about indirect speech acts have stood out. First, a debate about the Searlean idea that indirect speech acts constitute a simultaneous realization of a secondary and a primary act. Second, a debate about the reasons for the use of indirect speech acts, in particular about whether this reason is to be seen in strategic advantages and/or observation of politeness demands. In these debates, the original pragmatic conception of sen…
Recycling a genre for news automation: The production of Valtteri the Election Bot
2020
Abstract The amount of available digital data is increasing at a tremendous rate. These data, however, are of limited use unless converted into a user-friendly form. We took on this task and built a natural language generation (NLG) driven system that generates journalistic news stories about elections without human intervention. In this paper, after presenting an overview of state-of-the-art technologies in NLG, we explain systematically how we identified and then recontextualized the determinant aspects of the genre of an online news story in the algorithm of our NLG software. In the discussion, we introduce the key results of a user test we carried out and some improvements that these re…
Eventual Consistency Formalized
2019
Distribution of computation is well-known, and there are several frameworks, including some formal frameworks, that capture distributed computation. As yet, however, models of distributed computation are based on the idea that data is conceptually centralized. That is, they assume that data, even if it is distributed, is consistent. This assumption is not valid for many of the database systems in use today, where consistency is compromised to ensure availability and partition tolerance. Starting with an informal definition of eventual consistency, this paper explores several measures of inconsistency that quantify how far from consistency a system is. These measures capture key aspects of e…
Containers in Software Development: A Systematic Mapping Study
2019
Over the past decade, continuous software development has become a common place in the field of software engineering. Containers like Docker are a lightweight solution that developers can use to deploy and manage applications. Containers are used to build both component-based architectures and microservice architectures. Still, practitioners often view containers only as way to lower resource requirements compared to virtual machines. In this paper, we conducted a systematic mapping study to find information on what is known of how containers are used in software development. 56 primary studies were selected into this paper and they were categorized and mapped to identify the gaps in the cu…
An Internet-based treatment for flying phobia (NO-FEAR Airlines): study protocol for a randomized controlled trial
2016
Background: Flying phobia (FP) is a common and disabling mental disorder. Although in vivo exposure is the treatment of choice, it is linked to a number of limitations in its implementation. Particularly important, is the limited access to the feared stimulus (i.e., plane). Moreover, the economic cost of in vivo exposure should be specially considered as well as the difficulty of applying the exposure technique in an appropriate way; controlling important variables such as the duration of the exposure or the number of sessions. ICTs could help to reduce these limitations. Computer-assisted treatments have remarkable advantages in treating FP. Furthermore, they can be delivered through the I…
What represents a face? A computational approach for the integration of physiological and psychological data.
1997
Empirical studies of face recognition suggest that faces might be stored in memory by means of a few canonical representations. The nature of these canonical representations is, however, unclear. Although psychological data show a three-quarter-view advantage, physiological studies suggest profile and frontal views are stored in memory. A computational approach to reconcile these findings is proposed. The pattern of results obtained when different views, or combinations of views, are used as the internal representation of a two-stage identification network consisting of an autoassociative memory followed by a radial-basis-function network are compared. Results show that (i) a frontal and a…
Some personal views on the current state and the future of locational analysis
1998
In this paper a group of participants of the 12th European Summer Institute which took place in Tenerife, Spain in June 1995 present their views on the state of the art and the future trends in Locational Analysis. The issues discussed include modeling aspects in discrete Location Theory, the influence of the distance function, the relation between discrete, network and continuous location, heuristic techniques, the state of technology and undesirable facility location. Some general questions are stated regarding the applicability of location models, promising research directions and the way technology affects the development of solution techniques.
Novel Distance Estimation Methods Using 'Stochastic Learning on the Line' Strategies
2018
In this paper, we consider the problem of Distance Estimation (DE) when the inputs are the $x$ and $y$ coordinates (or equivalently, the latitudinal and longitudinal positions) of the points under consideration. The aim of the problem is to yield an accurate value for the real (road) distance between the points specified by the latter coordinates. 1 This problem has, typically, been tackled by utilizing parametric functions called the “Distance Estimation Functions” (DEFs). The parameters are learned from the training data (i.e., the true road distances) between a subset of the points under consideration. We propose to use Learning Automata (LA)-based strategies to solve the problem. In par…