Current Instantiation Research Articles

DART: An automated end-to-end object detection pipeline with data Diversification, open-vocabulary bounding box Annotation, pseudo-label Review, and model Training

Accurate real-time object detection is vital across numerous industrial applications, from safety monitoring to quality control. Traditional approaches, however, are hindered by arduous manual annotation and data collection, struggling to adapt to ever-changing environments and novel target objects. To address these limitations, this paper presents DART, an innovative automated end-to-end pipeline that revolutionizes object detection workflows from data collection to model evaluation. It eliminates the need for laborious human labeling and extensive data collection while achieving outstanding accuracy across diverse scenarios. DART encompasses four key stages: (1) Data Diversification using subject-driven image generation (DreamBooth with SDXL), (2) Annotation via open-vocabulary object detection (Grounding DINO) to generate bounding box and class labels, (3) Review of generated images and pseudo-labels by large multimodal models (InternVL-1.5 and GPT-4o) to guarantee credibility, and (4) Training of real-time object detectors (YOLOv8 and YOLOv10) using the verified data. We apply DART to a self-collected dataset of construction machines named Liebherr Product, which contains over 15K high-quality images across 23 categories. The current instantiation of DART significantly increases average precision (AP) from 0.064 to 0.832. Its modular design ensures easy exchangeability and extensibility, allowing for future algorithm upgrades, seamless integration of new object categories, and adaptability to customized environments without manual labeling and additional data collection. The code and dataset are released at https://github.com/chen-xin-94/DART.

Beyond the psychedelic hype: Exploring the persistence of the neoliberal paradigm

AbstractBackground and AimsAdvocates of psychedelic medicine have positioned psychedelics as a novel therapeutic intervention that will solve the mental health crisis by liberating individuals from their entrenched habits and limiting beliefs. Despite claims for novelty, the psychedelics industry is engaging in the same profit-oriented approaches that contributed to poor clinical outcomes with SSRIs and other earlier pharmaceuticals, which threatens to undermine their purported clinical benefits.MethodsWe present evidence that the liberatory rhetoric of psychedelic medicalization promotes neoliberal, individualised treatments for distress, which distracts from collective efforts to address root causes of suffering through systemic change. Drawing examples from the psychedelics industry, we illustrate how the discourse of psychedelic medicalisation subjects socially-determined distress to psychotropic intervention through the mechanisms of depoliticisation, productivisation, pathologisation, commodification, and de-collectivisation.ResultsRather than disrupting or subverting the psychopharmaceutical status quo, the psychedelic industry's current instantiation aligns with and upholds key facets of neoliberal ideology by adhering to the same facilitative mechanisms that scholars identified in the antidepressant industry. We identify these common mechanisms in examples unique to the psychedelics industry, including the search for psychedelic analogues and political lobbying to reschedule psychedelics.ConclusionWe demonstrate how a neoliberal mental health paradigm that individualises and interiorizes mental distress cannot meaningfully resolve suffering with ubiquitous origins in the current sociopolitical environment, which is characterised by inequality, precarity, exploitation, and ecological collapse. As a result, psychedelics must decouple from neoliberal incentives, and demonstrate efficacy, if they are to facilitate durable improvements in well-being and prosocial outcomes.

Orienting Care: Boris Groys, Philosophy of Care

In Philosophy of Care, Boris Groys undertakes a reading of key philosophical texts in terms of the relationship between self-care and care, as a way of trying to reinvigorate the question of health beyond its current instantiation in biopolitical life and algorithmic life. He passes through Socrates, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kojève, Bataille, Heidegger and others, culminating in Bogdanov’s distinction between egressive and degressive organization and his cosmist-immortalist dreams. The philosophy outlined by Groys is questioned here through the prism of the work of Bernard Stiegler, in particular via the distinction between labour and work, a re-reading of Hegel on the master-slave dialectic, an interpretation of the meaning of defunctionalization, and an account of the necessity of reorienting ourselves in thought so as to make possible a new economy of care, which depends on the possibility of fostering new processes of sublimation.

The real ethical problem with metaverses

Many philosophers hold that the human risks associated with the development and use of metaverses arise primarily from their status–they are unreal in ways that make the experiences within them meaningless and thereby less prudentially valuable. This purported unreality is not merely a result of the virtual or intangible nature of metaverses. Rather, it arises from the idea that, regardless of the experiences, interactions, and affordances of metaverses, what we do in these spaces is somehow different and impoverished compared to what we do in the physical world. Those who think this believe that our behavior and interactions within metaverses are inferior to our behaviors and interactions in the physical world in a way that confers less value on the lives of those engaging regularly within metaverses. Some commentators worry that repeated exposure to these impoverished virtual experiences will somehow dehumanize us or make us worse at offline interactions, and certainly reduce the amount of time we have for more meaningful real-world pursuits. If true, this would be a serious concern for metaverse-evangelists and users. However, in this article we will argue that it is not so— in fact, metaverses are morally relevantly similar to the physical world, and capable of providing most of the experiences and interactions we find in the physical world – whether positive or negative. However, metaverses are not without risks. We claim that the real ethical problem with metaverses arises, in their current instantiation, from the risks involved in their development as commercial enterprises, locking users into particular infrastructures and placing power over the continuation or termination of the metaverse in the hands of a corporate entity that has goals and motivations independent of those of the users of the metaverse.

State-Conditioned Adversarial Subgoal Generation

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) proposes to solve difficult tasks by performing decision-making and control at successively higher levels of temporal abstraction. However, off-policy HRL often suffers from the problem of a non-stationary high-level policy since the low-level policy is constantly changing. In this paper, we propose a novel HRL approach for mitigating the non-stationarity by adversarially enforcing the high-level policy to generate subgoals compatible with the current instantiation of the low-level policy. In practice, the adversarial learning is implemented by training a simple state conditioned discriminator network concurrently with the high-level policy which determines the compatibility level of subgoals. Comparison to state-of-the-art algorithms shows that our approach improves both learning efficiency and performance in challenging continuous control tasks.

Metamodernism and counterpublics: politics, aesthetics, and porosity in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet

ABSTRACT Influential critics including Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen have characterised the metamodern turn as politically reenergizing aesthetic practices with a mixture of hope and irony after a period of postmodern cynicism. While such studies have examined political movements or individual writers, few have examined how the metamodern shift affects the habitus of British artists and intellectuals who are the current instantiation of what Alan Sinfield calls the ‘dissident middle class’. Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet wrestles with that very question as she populates her four novels with characters whose conversations about art and politics revise tropes of metropolitan cynicism common in postmodern British literature and scholarship. Smith’s colliding representations of historical and fictional artists reflect a ‘porous’ aesthetic approach to the novel that combines fiction, ekphrasis, and contemporary politics and reimagines Britain’s ‘dissident middle’ counterpublic. Smith’s metamodern vision of a counterpublic sphere affirms the civic role of artists and intellectuals yet ironically tempers the novels’ utopic moments with acknowledgments of other characters’ barriers to participation in the counterpublic. The Seasonals present a distinct theoretical approach to the relationship between art and politics by blurring boundaries between a fictional counterpublic and the author and her readers’ public sphere.

Flattening the Curve of Flexible Space Robotics

Infrastructure monitoring, inspection, repair, and replacement in space is crucial for continued usage and safety, yet it is expensive, time-consuming, and technically very challenging. New robotics technologies and artificial intelligence algorithms are potentially novel approaches that may alleviate such demanding operations using existing or novel sensing technologies. Space structures must necessarily be very light weight due to the high costs of placing robots in space. Several methods are proposed and compared to control highly flexible space robotics, where a key challenge is the presence of flexible resonant modes at frequencies so low as to reside inside typical feedback controller bandwidths. Such conditions imply the very action of sending control signals to the ultra-light weight robotics will cause structural resonance. Implementations of incrementally increasing order are offered, achieving an over ninety percent performance improvement in trajectory tracking errors, while improvement using unshaped methods merely achieve a twenty-four percent improvement in direct comparison (where the only modification is the proposed control methodology). Based on superior performance, single-sinusoidal trajectory shaping is recommended, with a corollary benefit of preparing future research into applying deterministic artificial intelligence whose current instantiation relies on single-sinusoidal, autonomous trajectory generation.

Open Science, Closed Doors? Countering Marginalization through an Agenda for Ethical, Inclusive Research in Communication

Abstract The open science (OS) movement has advocated for increased transparency in certain aspects of research. Communication is taking its first steps toward OS as some journals have adopted OS guidelines codified by another discipline. We find this pursuit troubling as OS prioritizes openness while insufficiently addressing essential ethical principles: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. Some recommended open science practices increase the potential for harm for marginalized participants, communities, and researchers. We elaborate how OS can serve a marginalizing force within academia and the research community, as it overlooks the needs of marginalized scholars and excludes some forms of scholarship. We challenge the current instantiation of OS and propose a divergent agenda for the future of Communication research centered on ethical, inclusive research practices.

Aha! Taking on the myth that simulation‐derived surprise enhances learning

This paper aims to discuss the recurring education-related issue of the high-fidelity simulation myth. In the current instantiation, educators erroneously believe that trainees benefit from authentic uncertainty and surprise in simulation-based training. We explore the origins of this myth within the experiential learning and social constructivism theories and propose an evidence-based solution of transparent and guided instruction in simulation. Constructivist theories highlight meaning making as the benefit of inquiry and discovery learning strategies. Inappropriate translation of this epistemology into an element of curriculum design creates unfortunate unintended consequences. We propose that the translation of constructivist theories of learning within simulation-based education has resulted in a pervasive myth, which decrees that scenarios must introduce realistic tension or surprises to encourage exploration and insightful problem solving. We argue that this myth is masquerading as experiential learning. In this narrative review, we interpret our experiences and observations of simulation-based education through our expertise in education science and curriculum design. We offer anecdotal evidence along with a review of selected literature to establish the presence of this previously undetected myth.

Usability assessment of a wearable speech-processing platform

The ultimate value of the NIDCD open-source initiative lies in use of the resulting platforms in research studies that advance knowledge and practice in hearing health-care. This study is concerned with usability of the current instantiation of the UCSD wearable speech-processing platform in possible field studies of advanced processing and/or listener-adjustment protocols. Usability is assessed, here, in the context of hearing-aid self-adjustment. Starting with an NAL-NL2 prescription for a relatively mild generic hearing loss, volunteers self-adjust gain and spectral tilt to preference in the clinic. They use the embedded version of the Boothroyd and Mackersie “Goldilocks” protocol while listening to recorded narrative at a conversational level. They are then accompanied by the researcher to local environments, with varying background noise and reverberation, and are given the opportunity to readjust. Listener reactions are subsequently obtained via a structured interview covering opinions on the physical attributes, acoustic attributes, and ease of adjustment. These are supplemented by coupler and real-ear measures of self-selected responses together with measures of phoneme recognition as a function of listening level. Individual differences are extreme but most participants respond positively to acoustics and usability and a proportion indicate a willingness to wear the platform in field studies.

Trajectories for Research: Fathoming the Promise of the NARCIS Classification

NARCIS—National Academic Research and Collaborations Information System-- is the national research portal for the Netherlands’ data and research archiving, which is governed by its own NARCIS Classification. The current instantiation of the classification dates from 2015. The classification is currently made up of two classes—D for the sciences broadly, and E for interdisciplinary areas. The NARCIS Classification is designed specifically and with care for the contents of the NARCIS data portal. The classification mostly represents the sciences. A few anomalous situations are visible in the ontology of the classification: the humanities occupy one division within the sciences, placed between the life sciences and law; and, the treatment of interdisciplinarity, for which a separate class E is set aside for interdisciplinary sciences. A dump of the NARCIS database was used to analyze the population of the NARCIS classification. The life sciences occupy 34% of the NARCIS database. A framework for research networking systems reveals the NARCIS database and its classification most objectives, with the only lapse being the output of entities and attributes to ontologies. The NARCIS Classification is also an occupational classification. The NARCIS classification supports a vital research portal that, in turn, supports a nationally-coordinated research effort designed to provide better inter-institutional communication of scholarly productivity, thus is in itself an information institution, in which domain-dependence is part of its cultural imperative. The NARCIS Classification incorporates an example of top-down politics in which funded disciplines are included and best represented. A perhaps unintended consequence is the encapsulation of forced views. Trajectories for further discussion with regard to continued development of the NARCIS Classification include identity, interoperability, interdisciplinarity, and synthesis.

Kinematics in the Information Age

Modern kinematics derives directly from developments in the 1700s, and in their current instantiation, have been adopted as standard realizations…or templates that seem unquestionable. For example, so-called aerospace sequences of rotations are ubiquitously accepted as the norm for aerospace applications, owing from a recent heritage in the space age of the late twentieth century. With the waning of the space-age as a driver for technology development, the information age has risen with the advent of digital computers, and this begs for re-evaluation of assumptions made in the former era. The new context of the digital computer defines the use of the term “information age” in the manuscript title and further highlights the novelty and originality of the research. The effects of selecting different Direction Cosine Matrices (DCM)-to-Euler Angle rotations on accuracy, step size, and computational time in modern digital computers will be simulated and analyzed. The experimental setup will include all twelve DCM rotations and also includes critical analysis of necessary computational step size. The results show that the rotations are classified into symmetric and non-symmetric rotations and that no one DCM rotation outperforms the others in all metrics used, yielding the potential for trade space analysis to select the best DCM for a specific instance. Novel illustrations include the fact that one of the ubiquitous sequences (the “313 sequence”) has degraded relative accuracy measured by mean and standard deviations of errors, but may be calculated faster than the other ubiquitous sequence (the “321 sequence”), while a lesser known “231 sequence” has comparable accuracy and calculation-time. Evaluation of the 231 sequence also illustrates the originality of the research. These novelties are applied to spacecraft attitude control in this manuscript, but equally apply to robotics, aircraft, and surface and subsurface vehicles.

Lost and Found: Personal Reflections on Educational Earnestness and the Power of Love

In this essay, Polly Graham addresses a current instantiation of what might be called self-loss within education in the United States. Graham observes that, in her experience, many students and educators, whether decidedly or without reflection, conform to superficial schooling practices that circumscribe the possibility of receiving affirmations for the sense of self we implicitly know to be authentic. Through narrative, she puts forward the possibility of “educational love” as a counter to the fundamental insecurity associated with habits of acting in conformance with superficial, alienated, school-determined identity criteria. The question of “repetition” in a Kierkegaardian sense invites the reader to resist the logic of standardization — which assumes and valorizes comparability and reliability from an outsider perspective — in favor of a consideration of generalizability as embedded within the intimacy of a particular relation. As such, educational love is resonance rather than dictation.

Implementation and design of physical radar waveform diversity

Echo-locating mammals have been exploiting waveform diversity (WD) for about 50 million years [1], and the notion of radar waveform design has been around for several decades (see [2] and references therein). However, the current instantiation of WD was first popularized in 2002 in the hopes of addressing the growing competition for radar spectrum [3]. Since that time, there has been a tremendous amount of work on myriad aspects of WD (e.g. [4]), with a particular emphasis on leveraging higher dimensionality (e.g., multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)). Much of this work has focused on the complex mathematical modeling and subsequent optimization of radar “waveforms” (noting that the term tends to be used rather loosely). Here we summarize recent work that seeks to connect the parameterized mathematical abstraction of radar codes, which provide the benefit of being readily optimizable, with the physical attributes and limitations of real radar systems and phenomenology. This physical perspective permits realization of the promised performance enhancements of WD on actual hardware, as well as providing the means with which to address radar spectrum issues for real systems.

Attrition patterns amongst participant groups in Massive Open Online Courses

In their current instantiation, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) represent a form of educational delivery with little barrier to entry. In part due to the ease of enrolling, low completion rates have been a notable characteristic of MOOCs with as few as 5 - 10% of enrolled students gaining a certificate of completion. Beyond these observations, little is known about the patterns of attrition, nor how they may vary amongst different groups of MOOC participants. Activity data was analysed from log records collected from 42 MOOCs run by Stanford University between 2011 and 2013 on Coursera. A novel analysis was applied to the data which showed that attrition varies little between those that audited the course and those that actively participated in assessments. The results indicate that attrition is not influenced by levels of participation in a MOOC and attrition is further not greatly influenced by attributes of the course.

Should uncontrollable worry be removed from the definition of GAD? A test of incremental validity.

In its current instantiation in DSM-IV, a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) requires the presence of excessive and uncontrollable worry. It has been proposed that the uncontrollability criterion be removed from future editions of the DSM, primarily on the basis of empirical and conceptual overlap between excessiveness and uncontrollability and a relative lack of research on uncontrollability. However, no research has directly investigated the incremental validity of the uncontrollability criterion-that is, the extent to which uncontrollability predicts important clinical information over and above excessiveness. This question was examined in a community sample of 126 adults diagnosed with GAD. After controlling for excessiveness, uncontrollability explained a significant proportion of additional variance in a variety of relevant clinical measures, including GAD severity, clinician-rated anxiety, number and severity of comorbid disorders, and use of psychotropic medication and psychotherapy. The results remained statistically significant even when other features of GAD were controlled. By contrast, excessiveness did not significantly predict any clinical measure over and above uncontrollability. These findings suggest that uncontrollability contributes to the validity of the GAD diagnosis and should be retained as a core feature of pathological worry.

Does human factors/ergonomics contribute to the quality of life?

Our study explores the moral bases of human factors/ergonomics (HF/E). Since their inception, these co-evolving facets of the human enterprise have espoused a dedication to the quality of life. We examine whether this principle has been adhered to or transgressed during the history of, the current instantiation of and the future of HF/E. Such deliberations depend upon whether human beings are viewed as the means of production in a capitalist system or as the fundamental ends of that society. This is a political decision that those in HF/E have to partake in as individuals and as professional groups. Such a decision cannot be neglected since: ‘The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict’. Now is a time of great moral conflict and it is upon the outcome of such decisions that the value of HF/E must and will be judged.

Reply to Krueger: Good point, wrong paper

In his letter, Krueger (1) raises an important issue regarding questions of prediction of behavior from tests of underlying mental states. We think it is important to make the distinction here between using the implicit association test (IAT) for diagnostic purposes (e.g., to classify individuals as ‘racist’) and using the IAT for research purposes (i.e., to investigate a potential contributing factor to trust behavior in our study) (2). We emphatically agree with Krueger (1) that, in its current instantiation, the IAT should not be used for diagnostic purposes. Indeed, the concern of Krueger (1) is exactly the one that we would raise ourselves if …

IC-P1-021: A novel web-based system for automated computer classification in Alzheimer's dementia

Background: Automated computer classification (ACC) techniques based on routine MRI provide aid to diagnostic information in an objective and reproducible fashion without being resource-intensive. To ensure simple yet reliable access, we propose a web-based ACC prototype tailored to the task of differentiating probable AD from normal aging. Methods: Input The system is based on anonymized T1weighted MR scans. Image quality control (QC) is performed manually on an 11-point scale. Processing The comparative ACC methodology exploits the differences in covariant patterns of Jacobian determinants and scaled grey-level intensity between subjects within a limited volume of interest centered on the medial temporal lobe. The classification result is obtained by comparing the resulting projection coordinates on relevant axes against a linear discriminant function. The nonlinear deformation field is also used to extract volumetric measures of specific temporal structures. Training data In the current instantiation the normative reference space for data projection was created using intensity and determinant features from 150 young controls. The linear discriminant function was obtained via forward stepwise linear discriminant analysis of a training set composed of 150 subjects: 75 patients with a diagnosis of probable AD and 75 age-matched controls without neurological or neuropsychological deficit. The AD subjects were individuals with mild to moderate probable AD recruited among outpatients seen at the IRCC Fatebenefratelli (Brescia, Italy). Longitudinal clinical assessment of all patients supported the diagnostic used as ground truth for the evaluation of the classification function. The final function is composed of 12 intensity and determinant features. Results: Reporting The report consists in three parts: a) QC information; b) quantitative information (e.g. Z-score of amygdalae and hippocampi with respect to retrospective data on age-matched CTRL); and c) summary classification information in support of clinical diagnosis. Conclusions: This web-based prototype interface is ready for routine clinical use for physicians working at the training site. Multi-site models will be made available in the next generation. The proposed technique is completely automated, requires no external expertise, and is completely objective. Acknowledgments: ICBM project, G. B. Frisoni (Brescia, Italy) for the data.

An educational articulatory synthesizer, EASY

An articulatory synthesizer has been written for general educational and research use. It has been named Educational Articulatory Synthesizer, EASY, and written in the MATLAB programming language. In its current instantiation, the synthesizer performs calculations in the frequency domain and includes the effects of wall-vibration, viscous and thermal boundary layer loss, and radiation loss. Sources anywhere from the glottis to the mouth can be specified. Further, the code allows for side branches other than the nasal tract so that sounds such as laterals can be specified. A low-frequency aerodynamic module has also been included. Midsagittal shape is controlled by a hierarchy of flesh points. Points high in the hierarchy specify the overall shape by determining reference positions for points lower in the hierarchy, which, in turn, determine the shape locally. [Work supported by grant NIDCD-001247 to CReSS LLC.]