Although the importance of advocacy activities by civil society organizations (CSOs) in policy and decision-making procedures has been greatly emphasized in the literature of political science and social policy, we have relatively little understanding of the relevance and impact of the leading actors who structure the diverse networks and discourses through social media; further recognition is ...

This paper describes how the phase, obtained by Gabor filtering an image, can be used to aggregate related Gabor elements (simple features identified by peaks in the Gabor magnitude). This phase-based feature grouping simplifies the perennial problem of target/background segmentation because we need to only determine if the aggregate feature is target or background, rather than determine the st...

In this paper we present a technique for shape similarity estimation and apply it to content-based indexing and retrieval over large image databases. This technique is based on wavelet decomposition and uses polygonal approximation. It uses simple features (aspect ratio, angles, distances from the centroid, distance ratios and relative positions) extracted at high curvature points. The experime...

Online discussion forums are a valuable means for users to resolve specific information needs, both interactively for the participants and statically for users who search/browse over historical thread data. However, the complex structure of forum threads can make it difficult for users to extract relevant information. Automatically identifying whether the problem in a thread has been solved or ...

Superconductor–ferromagnet–superconductor (SFS) Josephson junctions are known to exhibit a transition between π and 0 states. In this letter, we find the π–0 phase diagram of an SFS junction depending on the transparency of an intermediate insulating layer (I). We show that, in general, the Josephson critical current is nonzero at the π–0 transition temperature. Contributions to the current fro...

In this paper we introduce a number of new features for quality estimation in machine translation that were developed for the WMT 2012 quality estimation shared task. We find that very simple features such as indicators of certain characters are able to outperform complex features that aim to model the connection between two languages.

Different language versions of Wikipedia contain articles referencing the same place. However, an article in one language does not necessarily mean it is available in another language as well and linked to. This paper examines geotagged articles describing places in Honduras in both the Spanish and the English language versions. It demonstrates that a method based on simple features can reliabl...

We present promising results for real-time vehicle visual detection, obtained with adaBoost using new original “keypoints presence features”. These weak-classifiers produce a boolean response based on presence or absence in the tested image of a “keypoint” (~ a SURF interest point) with a descriptor sufficiently similar (i.e. within a given distance) to a reference descriptor characterizing the...

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