Staging Oriental Delegations at the Habsburg Imperial Court in Prague (1600-1610)

Serial Defaults , Serial Profits : Returns to Sovereign Lending in Habsburg Spain , 1566 - 1600 *

Philip II of Spain accumulated debts equivalent to 60% of GDP. He also defaulted four times on his short-term loans, thus becoming the first serial defaulter in history. Contrary to a common view in the literature, we show that lending to the king was profitable even under worst-case scenario assumptions. Lenders maintained long-term relationships with the crown. Losses sustained during default...

Discovering relationships from imperial court documents of Qing China

The Qing Imperial Court documents are a major source of primary research material for studying the Qing era China since they provide the most direct and first-hand details of how national affairs were handled. However, the way Qing archived these documents has made it cumbersome to collect documents covering the same event and rebuild their original contexts. In this paper, we describe some inf...

Priscianus of Lydia at the Sasanian Court: Solutionum ad Chosroem

Priscianus of Lydia’s Solutionum ad Chosroem is a series of answers to questions asked at a philosophical debate held at the Sasanian court c. 530 CE. Priscianus of Lydia was one of seven non-Christian philosophers from the Byzantine Empire who journeyed to the Sasanian Empire to take part in the debate. Long overlooked in the history of philosophy, Priscianus of Lydia’s text represents a branc...

List of delegations

1 Imperial College at TRECVID

We describe our experiments for the shot boundary detection, high-level feature extraction and search. In the shot boundary detection task, we employ our proven method based on the calculation of distances between colour histograms of frames over a range of timescales. For the search task, we tested a different system. This year, content based search is complemented with a new relevance feedbac...