Probabilistic Graphical Model for Computer Vision

When refugees flee war and persecution, protection and assistance are usually provided by United Nations organisations and their NGO implementing partners. In camps and cities, the dominant humanitarian model remains premised upon a provider-beneficiary relationship. In parallel to this model, however, is a largely neglected story: refugees themselves frequently mobilise to create organisations or networks as alternative providers of social protection. Based on fieldwork in refugee camps and cities in Uganda and Kenya, this book examines how refugee-led organisations emerge, the forms they take, and their interactions with international institutions. Developing an original theoretical framework based on the concept of 'the global governed', the book shows how power and hierarchy mediate the seemingly benign notion of protection. Drawing upon ideas from anthropology and international relations, it offers an alternative vision for more participatory global governance, of relevance to oth

With its intuitive yet rigorous approach to machine learning, this text provides students with the fundamental knowledge and practical tools needed to conduct research and build data-driven products. The authors prioritize geometric intuition and algorithmic thinking, and include detail on all the essential mathematical prerequisites, to offer a fresh and accessible way to learn. Practical applications are emphasized, with examples from disciplines including computer vision, natural language processing, economics, neuroscience, recommender systems, physics, and biology. Over 300 color illustrations are included and have been meticulously designed to enable an intuitive grasp of technical concepts, and over 100 in-depth coding exercises (in Python) provide a real understanding of crucial machine learning algorithms. A suite of online resources including sample code, data sets, interactive lecture slides, and a solutions manual are provided online, making this an ideal text both for grad

This book is an advanced introduction to semantics that presents this crucial component of human language through the lens of the 'Meaning-Text' theory - an approach that treats linguistic knowledge as a huge inventory of correspondences between thought and speech. Formally, semantics is viewed as an organized set of rules that connect a representation of meaning (Semantic Representation) to a representation of the sentence (Deep-Syntactic Representation). The approach is particularly interesting for computer assisted language learning, natural language processing and computational lexicography, as our linguistic rules easily lend themselves to formalization and computer applications. The model combines abstract theoretical constructions with numerous linguistic descriptions, as well as multiple practice exercises that provide a solid hands-on approach to learning how to describe natural language semantics.

This book is an advanced introduction to semantics that presents this crucial component of human language through the lens of the 'Meaning-Text' theory - an approach that treats linguistic knowledge as a huge inventory of correspondences between thought and speech. Formally, semantics is viewed as an organized set of rules that connect a representation of meaning (Semantic Representation) to a representation of the sentence (Deep-Syntactic Representation). The approach is particularly interesting for computer assisted language learning, natural language processing and computational lexicography, as our linguistic rules easily lend themselves to formalization and computer applications. The model combines abstract theoretical constructions with numerous linguistic descriptions, as well as multiple practice exercises that provide a solid hands-on approach to learning how to describe natural language semantics.

Our world and the people within it are increasingly interpreted and classified by automated systems. At the same time, automated classifications influence what happens in the physical world. These entanglements change what it means to interact with governance, and shift what elements of our identity are knowable and meaningful. In this cyber-physical world, or 'world state', what is the role for law? Specifically, how should law address the claim that computational systems know us better than we know ourselves? Monitoring Laws traces the history of government profiling from the invention of photography through to emerging applications of computer vision for personality and behavioral analysis. It asks what dimensions of profiling have provoked legal intervention in the past, and what is different about contemporary profiling that requires updating our legal tools. This work should be read by anyone interested in how computation is changing society and governance, and what it is about p

In this comprehensive textbook about robot grasping, readers will discover an integrated look at the major concepts and technical results in robot grasp mechanics. A large body of prior research, including key theories, graphical techniques, and insights on robot hand designs, is organized into a systematic review, using common notation and a common analytical framework. With introductory and advanced chapters that support senior undergraduate and graduate level robotics courses, this book provides a full introduction to robot grasping principles that are needed to model and analyze multi-finger robot grasps, and serves as a valuable reference for robotics students, researchers, and practicing robot engineers. Each chapter contains many worked-out examples, exercises with full solutions, and figures that highlight new concepts and help the reader master the use of the theories and equations presented.

Network flow theory has been used across a number of disciplines, including theoretical computer science, operations research, and discrete math, to model not only problems in the transportation of goods and information, but also a wide range of applications from image segmentation problems in computer vision to deciding when a baseball team has been eliminated from contention. This graduate text and reference presents a succinct, unified view of a wide variety of efficient combinatorial algorithms for network flow problems, including many results not found in other books. It covers maximum flows, minimum-cost flows, generalized flows, multicommodity flows, and global minimum cuts and also presents recent work on computing electrical flows along with recent applications of these flows to classical problems in network flow theory.

Is the human mind uniquely nonphysical or even spiritual, such that divine intentions can meet physical realities? As scholars in science and religion have spent decades attempting to identify a 'causal joint' between God and the natural world, human consciousness has been often privileged as just such a locus of divine-human interaction. However, this intuitively dualistic move is both out of step with contemporary science and theologically insufficient. By discarding the God-nature model implied by contemporary noninterventionist divine action theories, one is freed up to explore theological and metaphysical alternatives for understanding divine action in the mind. Sarah Lane Ritchie suggests that a theologically robust theistic naturalism offers a more compelling vision of divine action in the mind. By affirming that to be fully natural is to be involved with God's active presence, one may affirm divine action not only in the human mind, but throughout the natural world.

Python is today's fastest growing programming language. This engaging and refreshingly different guide breaks down the skills into clear step-by-step chunks and explains the theory using brief easy-to-understand language. Rather than bamboozling readers with pages of mind-numbing technical jargon, this book includes 150 practical challenges, putting the power in the reader's hands. Through creating programs to solve these challenges the reader will quickly progress from mastering the basics to confidently using subroutines, a graphical user interface, and linking to external text, csv and SQL files. This book is perfect for anyone who wants to learn how to program with Python. In particular, students starting out in computer science and teachers who want to improve their confidence in Python will find here a set of ready-made challenges for classroom use.

Quantum theory is the soul of theoretical physics. It is not just a theory of specific physical systems, but rather a new framework with universal applicability. This book shows how we can reconstruct the theory from six information-theoretical principles, by rebuilding the quantum rules from the bottom up. Step by step, the reader will learn how to master the counterintuitive aspects of the quantum world, and how to efficiently reconstruct quantum information protocols from first principles. Using intuitive graphical notation to represent equations, and with shorter and more efficient derivations, the theory can be understood and assimilated with exceptional ease. Offering a radically new perspective on the field, the book contains an efficient course of quantum theory and quantum information for undergraduates. It is aimed at researchers, professionals, and students in physics, computer science and philosophy, as well as the curious outsider seeking a deeper understanding of the theo

In this volume, Mark Douglas offers a new vision of the history of Christian pacifism within the context of a warming world. He narrates this story in a way that recognizes the complexities of the tradition and aligns it with a coherent theological vision, one that shapes the tradition to encompass the new causes and types of wars fought during the Anthropocene. Along the way, Douglas draws from research in historical climatology to recover the overlooked role that climate changes have always played in shaping not only the Christian pacifist tradition but also the movement of traditions through western history. Scholars across a range of disciplines - peace studies, Christian theology and history, environmentalism, and environmental conflict studies - will benefit from this model of critical and charitable engagement with the complex history of Christian pacifism, the resources of which will be important for addressing wars in a warming world.

Recent years have witnessed an explosion in the volume and variety of data collected in all scientific disciplines and industrial settings. Such massive data sets present a number of challenges to researchers in statistics and machine learning. This book provides a self-contained introduction to the area of high-dimensional statistics, aimed at the first-year graduate level. It includes chapters that are focused on core methodology and theory - including tail bounds, concentration inequalities, uniform laws and empirical process, and random matrices - as well as chapters devoted to in-depth exploration of particular model classes - including sparse linear models, matrix models with rank constraints, graphical models, and various types of non-parametric models. With hundreds of worked examples and exercises, this text is intended both for courses and for self-study by graduate students and researchers in statistics, machine learning, and related fields who must understand, apply, and ad

If you’re a developer familiar with AI, machine learning, and computer vision, this practical book provides you with a foundational understanding of augmented and virtual reality functions. AR a

Gain insights into image-processing methodologies and algorithms, using machine learning and neural networks in Python. This book begins with the environment setup, understanding basic image-processing terminology, and exploring Python concepts that will be useful for implementing the algorithms discussed in the book. You will then cover all the core image processing algorithms in detail before moving onto the biggest computer vision library: OpenCV. You’ll see the OpenCV algorithms and how to use them for image processing. The next section looks at advanced machine learning and deep learning methods for image processing and classification. You’ll work with concepts such as pulse coupled neural networks, AdaBoost, XG boost, and convolutional neural networks for image-specific applications. Later you’ll explore how models are made in real time and then deployed using various DevOps tools. All the concepts in Practical Machine Learning and Image Processing are explained using r

What is the future of curatorship? Is there a vision for an ideal model, a curatopia, whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia? Or is there a plurality of approaches, amounting to a curatorial hete

An account of modernization and technological innovation in nineteenth-century Brazil that provides a distinctly Brazilian perspective. Existing scholarship on the period describes the beginnings of Brazilian modernization as a European or North American import dependent on foreign capital, transfers of technology, and philosophical inspiration. Promoters of modernization were considered few in number, derivative in their thinking, or thwarted by an entrenched slaveholding elite hostile to industrialization. Teresa Cribelli presents a more nuanced picture. Nineteenth-century Brazilians selected among the transnational flow of ideas and technologies with care and attention to the specific conditions of their tropical nation. Studying underutilized sources, Cribelli illuminates a distinctly Brazilian vision of modernization that challenges the view that Brazil, a nation dependent on slave labor for much of the nineteenth century, was merely reactive in the face of the modernization model

This volume provides a practical introduction to the method of maximum likelihood as used in social science research. Ward and Ahlquist focus on applied computation in R and use real social science data from actual, published research. Unique among books at this level, it develops simulation-based tools for model evaluation and selection alongside statistical inference. The book covers standard models for categorical data as well as counts, duration data, and strategies for dealing with data missingness. By working through examples, math, and code, the authors build an understanding about the contexts in which maximum likelihood methods are useful and develop skills in translating mathematical statements into executable computer code. Readers will not only be taught to use likelihood-based tools and generate meaningful interpretations, but they will also acquire a solid foundation for continued study of more advanced statistical techniques.

In Borges' Classics, Laura Jansen reads the oeuvre of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges as a radically globalized model for reimagining our relationship with the classical past. This major study reveals how Borges constructs a new 'physics of reading' the classics, which privileges a paradoxical vision of the canon as universal yet centreless, and eschews fixed ideas about the cultural history of the West. Borges' unique approach transforms classical antiquity into a simultaneously familiar and remote world, whose legacy is both urgent and unstable. In the process, Borges repositions the classical tradition at the intersection of the traditional Western canon and modernist literature of the peripheral West. Jansen's study traces Borges' encounters with the classics through appeal to themes central to Borges' thought, such as history and fiction, memory and forgetfulness, the data of the senses, and the vectors that connect cultures and countries.

The computer has increasingly become the principal model for the mind, which means our most basic experience of "reality" is as mediated through a screen, or stored in a cloud. As a result, we are los

In Calvin's Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church, Matthew J. Tuininga explores a little appreciated dimension of John Calvin's political thought, his two kingdoms theology, as a model for constructive Christian participation in liberal society. Widely misunderstood as a proto-political culture warrior, due in part to his often misinterpreted role in controversies over predestination and the heretic Servetus, Calvin articulated a thoughtful approach to public life rooted in his understanding of the gospel and its teaching concerning the kingdom of God. He staked his ministry in Geneva on his commitment to keeping the church distinct from the state, abandoning simplistic approaches that placed one above the other, while rejecting the temptations of sectarianism or separatism. This revealing analysis of Calvin's vision offers timely guidance for Christians seeking a mode of faithful, respectful public engagement in democratic, pluralistic communities today.

Investment arbitration has emerged from modest beginnings and matured into an established presence in international law. However, in recent years it has drifted from the reciprocal vision of its founders. This volume serves as a comprehensive guide for those who wish to reform international investment law from within, seeking a return to the mutuality of access that is in arbitration's essence. A detailed toolset is provided for enhancing the access of host States and their nationals to formal resolution mechanisms in foreign investment disputes. It concludes by offering model texts to achieve greater reciprocity and access to justice in the settlement of disputes arising from international investment initiatives. The book will appeal to all those interested in the future of international investment law, including an international audience of scholars, government officials, private sector actors, and private citizens alike, and including diverse constituencies, communities, and collect

Written by some major contributors to the development of this class of graphical models, Chain Event Graphs introduces a viable and straightforward new tool for statistical inference, model se

This book offers a vision of economics in which there is no place for universal laws of nature, and even for laws of a more probabilistic character. The author avoids interpreting the practice of econ

This third edition covers fundamental concepts in creating and manipulating 2D and 3D graphical objects, including topics from classic graphics algorithms to color and shading models. It maintains the

For courses in Image Processing and Computer Vision. Introduce your students to image processing with the industry's most prized text For 40 years, Image Processing has been the foundational text for

Science is fundamentally about learning from data, and doing so in the presence of uncertainty. This volume is an introduction to the major concepts of probability and statistics, and the computational tools for analysing and interpreting data. It describes the Bayesian approach, and explains how this can be used to fit and compare models in a range of problems. Topics covered include regression, parameter estimation, model assessment, and Monte Carlo methods, as well as widely used classical methods such as regularization and hypothesis testing. The emphasis throughout is on the principles, the unifying probabilistic approach, and showing how the methods can be implemented in practice. R code (with explanations) is included and is available online, so readers can reproduce the plots and results for themselves. Aimed primarily at undergraduate and graduate students, these techniques can be applied to a wide range of data analysis problems beyond the scope of this work.

Science is fundamentally about learning from data, and doing so in the presence of uncertainty. This volume is an introduction to the major concepts of probability and statistics, and the computational tools for analysing and interpreting data. It describes the Bayesian approach, and explains how this can be used to fit and compare models in a range of problems. Topics covered include regression, parameter estimation, model assessment, and Monte Carlo methods, as well as widely used classical methods such as regularization and hypothesis testing. The emphasis throughout is on the principles, the unifying probabilistic approach, and showing how the methods can be implemented in practice. R code (with explanations) is included and is available online, so readers can reproduce the plots and results for themselves. Aimed primarily at undergraduate and graduate students, these techniques can be applied to a wide range of data analysis problems beyond the scope of this work.

Contributors from business and information and computer science explore commerce on the social networks. Among their topics are mobile news apps in India: relocating news in the mobile platform, model

TensorFlow is currently the leading open-source software for deep learning, used by a rapidly growing number of practitioners working on computer vision, Natural Language Processing (NLP), speech reco

Quantum theory is the soul of theoretical physics. It is not just a theory of specific physical systems, but rather a new framework with universal applicability. This book shows how we can reconstruct the theory from six information-theoretical principles, by rebuilding the quantum rules from the bottom up. Step by step, the reader will learn how to master the counterintuitive aspects of the quantum world, and how to efficiently reconstruct quantum information protocols from first principles. Using intuitive graphical notation to represent equations, and with shorter and more efficient derivations, the theory can be understood and assimilated with exceptional ease. Offering a radically new perspective on the field, the book contains an efficient course of quantum theory and quantum information for undergraduates. It is aimed at researchers, professionals, and students in physics, computer science and philosophy, as well as the curious outsider seeking a deeper understanding of the theo

In Calvin's Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church, Matthew J. Tuininga explores a little appreciated dimension of John Calvin's political thought, his two kingdoms theology, as a model for constructive Christian participation in liberal society. Widely misunderstood as a proto-political culture warrior, due in part to his often misinterpreted role in controversies over predestination and the heretic Servetus, Calvin articulated a thoughtful approach to public life rooted in his understanding of the gospel and its teaching concerning the kingdom of God. He staked his ministry in Geneva on his commitment to keeping the church distinct from the state, abandoning simplistic approaches that placed one above the other, while rejecting the temptations of sectarianism or separatism. This revealing analysis of Calvin's vision offers timely guidance for Christians seeking a mode of faithful, respectful public engagement in democratic, pluralistic communities today.

Since their inception, the Perspectives in Logic and Lecture Notes in Logic series have published seminal works by leading logicians. Many of the original books in the series have been unavailable for years, but they are now in print once again. This volume, the eleventh publication in the Lecture Notes in Logic series, collects the proceedings of the Annual European Summer Meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic, held in 1995. It includes papers in the core areas of set theory, model theory, proof theory and recursion theory, as well as the more recent topics of finite model theory and non-monotonic logic. It also includes a tutorial on interactive proofs, zero-knowledge and computationally sound proofs that reported on recent developments in theoretical computer science, and three plenary lectures dedicated to the foundational and technical evolution of set theory over the past 100 years.

Since their inception, the Perspectives in Logic and Lecture Notes in Logic series have published seminal works by leading logicians. Many of the original books in the series have been unavailable for years, but they are now in print once again. This volume, the second publication in the Lecture Notes in Logic series, is the proceedings of the Association for Symbolic Logic meeting held in Helsinki, Finland, in July 1990. It contains eighteen papers by leading researchers, covering all fields of mathematical logic from the philosophy of mathematics, through model theory, proof theory, recursion theory, and set theory, to the connections of logic to computer science. The articles published here are still widely cited and continue to provide ideas for ongoing research projects.

Design optimization is a standard concept in engineering design, and in other disciplines which utilize mathematical decision-making methods. This textbook focuses on the close relationship between a design problem's mathematical model and the solution-driven methods which optimize it. Along with extensive material on modeling problems, this book also features useful techniques for checking whether a model is suitable for computational treatment. Throughout, key concepts are discussed in the context of why and when a particular algorithm may be successful, and a large number of examples demonstrate the theory or method right after it is presented. This book also contains step-by-step instructions for executing a design optimization project - from building the problem statement to interpreting the computer results. All chapters contain exercises from which instructors can easily build quizzes, and a chapter on 'principles and practice' offers the reader tips and guidance based on the au

Specifically intended for lab-based biomedical researchers, this practical guide shows how to design experiments that are reproducible, with low bias, high precision, and widely applicable results. With specific examples from research using both cell cultures and model organisms, it explores key ideas in experimental design, assesses common designs, and shows how to plan a successful experiment. It demonstrates how to control biological and technical factors that can introduce bias or add noise, and covers rarely discussed topics such as graphical data exploration, choosing outcome variables, data quality control checks, and data pre-processing. It also shows how to use R for analysis, and is designed for those with no prior experience. An accompanying website (https://stanlazic.github.io/EDLB.html) includes all R code, data sets, and the labstats R package. This is an ideal guide for anyone conducting lab-based biological research, from students to principle investigators working in e

Specifically intended for lab-based biomedical researchers, this practical guide shows how to design experiments that are reproducible, with low bias, high precision, and widely applicable results. With specific examples from research using both cell cultures and model organisms, it explores key ideas in experimental design, assesses common designs, and shows how to plan a successful experiment. It demonstrates how to control biological and technical factors that can introduce bias or add noise, and covers rarely discussed topics such as graphical data exploration, choosing outcome variables, data quality control checks, and data pre-processing. It also shows how to use R for analysis, and is designed for those with no prior experience. An accompanying website (https://stanlazic.github.io/EDLB.html) includes all R code, data sets, and the labstats R package. This is an ideal guide for anyone conducting lab-based biological research, from students to principle investigators working in e

This book offers a unified perspective on the study of complex systems for scholars of various disciplines, including mathematics, physics, computer science, biology, economics and social science. The contributions, written by leading scientists, cover a broad set of topics, including new approaches to data science, the connection between scaling limits and conformal field theories, and new ideas on the Legendre duality approach in statistical mechanics of disordered systems. The volume moreover explores results on extreme values of correlated random variables and their connection with the Riemann zeta functions, the relation between diffusion phenomena and complex systems, and the Brownian web, which appears as the universal scaling limit of several probabilistic models. Written for researchers from a broad range of scientific fields, this text examines a selection of recent developments in complex systems from a rigorous perspective.

This book covers aspects of human re-identification problems related to computer vision and machine learning. Working from a practical perspective, it introduces novel algorithms and designs for human

An account of modernization and technological innovation in nineteenth-century Brazil that provides a distinctly Brazilian perspective. Existing scholarship on the period describes the beginnings of Brazilian modernization as a European or North American import dependent on foreign capital, transfers of technology, and philosophical inspiration. Promoters of modernization were considered few in number, derivative in their thinking, or thwarted by an entrenched slaveholding elite hostile to industrialization. Teresa Cribelli presents a more nuanced picture. Nineteenth-century Brazilians selected among the transnational flow of ideas and technologies with care and attention to the specific conditions of their tropical nation. Studying underutilized sources, Cribelli illuminates a distinctly Brazilian vision of modernization that challenges the view that Brazil, a nation dependent on slave labor for much of the nineteenth century, was merely reactive in the face of the modernization model

This textbook, derived from courses given by three leading researchers, provides advanced undergraduates and graduates with up-to-date coverage of space physics, from the Sun to the interstellar medium. Clear explanations of the underlying physical processes are presented alongside major new discoveries and knowledge gained from space missions, ground-based observations, theory, and modelling to inspire students. Building from the basics to more complex ideas, the book contains enough material for a two-semester course but the authors also provide suggestions for how the material can be tailored to fit a single semester. End-of-chapter problems reinforce concepts and include computer-based exercises specially developed for this textbook package. Free access to the software is available via the book's website and enables students to model the behavior of magnetospheric and solar plasma. An extensive glossary recaps new terms and carefully selected further reading sections encourage stud