Abstract

Bidirectional path tracing (BDPT) can render highly realistic scenes with complicated lighting scenarios. The Light Vertex Cache (LVC) based BDPT method by Davidovic et al. [Davidovic et al. 2014 ˇ ] provided good performance on scenes with simple materials in a progressive rendering scenario. In this paper, we propose a new bidirectional path tracing formulation based on the LVC approach that handles scenes with complex, layered materials efficiently on the GPU. We achieve coherent material evaluation while conserving GPU memory requirements using sorting. We propose a modified method for selecting light vertices using the contribution importance which improves the image quality for a given amount of work. Progressive rendering can empower artists in the production pipeline to iterate and preview their work quickly. We hope the work presented here will enable the use of GPUs in the production pipeline with complex materials and complicated lighting scenarios.

Abstract

Freehand sketches often contain sparse visual detail. In spite of the sparsity, they are easily and consistently recognized by humans across cultures, languages and age groups. Therefore, analyzing such sparse sketches can aid our understanding of the neuro-cognitive processes involved in visual representation and recognition. In the recent past, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have emerged as a powerful framework for feature representation and recognition for a variety of image domains. However, the domain of sketch images has not been explored. This paper introduces a freehand sketch recognition framework based on" deep" features extracted from CNNs. We use two popular CNNs for our experiments--Imagenet CNN and a modified version of LeNet CNN. We evaluate our recognition framework on a publicly available benchmark database containing thousands of freehand sketches depicting everyday objects. Our results are an improvement over the existing state-of-the-art accuracies by 3%-11%. The effectiveness and relative compactness of our deep features also make them an ideal candidate for related problems such as sketch-based image retrieval. In addition, we provide a preliminary glimpse of how such features can help identify crucial attributes (eg object-parts) of the sketched objects.

Abstract

Freehand line sketches are an interesting and unique form of visual representation. Typically, such sketches are studied and utilized as an end product of the sketching process. However, we have found it instructive to study the sketches as sequentially accumulated composition of drawing strokes added over time. Studying sketches in this manner has enabled us to create novel sparse yet discriminative sketch-based representations for object categories which we term category-epitomes. Our procedure for obtaining these epitomes concurrently provides a natural measure for quantifying the sparseness underlying the original sketch, which we term epitome-score. We construct and analyze category-epitomes and epitome-scores for freehand sketches belonging to various object categories. Our analysis provides a novel viewpoint for studying the semantic nature of object categories.

Abstract

Preserving the cultural heritage of the performing arts raises difficult and sensitive issues, as each performance is unique by nature and the juxtaposition between the performers and the audience cannot be easily recorded. In this paper, we report on an experimental research project to preserve another aspect of the performing arts—the history of their rehearsals. We have specifically designed non-intrusive video recording and on-site documentation techniques to make this process transparent to the creative crew, and have developed a complete workflow to publish the recorded video data and their corresponding meta-data online as Open Data using state-of-the-art audio and video processing to maximize non-linear navigation and hypervideo linking. The resulting open archive is made publicly available to researchers and amateurs alike and offers a unique account of the inner workings of the worlds of theater and opera.

Abstract

Commoditizing idle computing resources by sharing them in a marketplace has gained increased attention in recent years as a potential disruption to the modern cloud-based service delivery. Recent initiatives have focused on scavenging for idle resources and provide suitable incentives accordingly. A recent work on resources marketplace has proposed a Marketplace for Compute Infrastructure that not only allows resource owners to get incentives by sharing resources to the marketplace but also ensures Service Level Agreements (SLAs), such as performance guarantees, for the computing jobs to be run by the shared resources.

Abstract

The disclosed embodiments illustrate methods and systems for selecting a set of resumes for a job description (JD). The method includes extracting at least a portion in each of a plurality of resumes based on a scoping criterion received from a user. The method further includes extracting one or more first features from said portion in each of said plurality of resumes. The method further includes selecting said set of resumes from said plurality of resumes based on a comparison between said one or more first features and said scoping criterion. Thereafter, the method includes displaying, by a display device, one or more second features of said selected set of resumes on a graphical user interface to said user. The method is performed by one or more microprocessors.

Abstract

Disclosed are methods and systems for transmitting a first electronic message to an employee. The method further includes generating a first data structure based on one or more first parameters of one or more electronic messages, one or more demographic attributes associated with the employee and one or more second parameters representative of one or more feedbacks provided by the employee on each of the one or more electronic messages other than the first electronic message. The method further includes determining a priority of the first electronic message, wherein the determination of the priority comprises predicting the one or more second parameters associated with the employee for the first electronic message based on the one or more second data structures. The method further includes transmitting the first electronic message to the employee based on the determined priority of the first electronic message.

Abstract

As modern organizations become more agile and support more complex business processes, acquiring the right set of talent is becoming crucial for their operations. One of the key talent acquisition problems is staffing a team that has requirement for multiple job descriptions, from a pool of external candidates. This team hiring problem may arise for (i) a new organization, (ii) a new group in an existing organization, or (iii) an existing group that faces high attrition level. This paper presents a Talent Acquisition Decision Support System (TADSS) that provides decision support for team hiring. The system first builds a weighted graph based model for the three types of Human Resource (HR) entities in the problem setup (jobs, employees and candidates), and the inter-relationship among them. Next, an algorithm based on spectral embedding of the HR Graph is used to select teams. The system then provides an interactive team selection and comparison interface based on the HR Graph. Simulation-based evaluations show the effectiveness of the proposed system in team formation.

Abstract

Even though, a lot of research has already been done on Machine Translation, translating complex sentences has been a stumbling block in the process. To improve the performance of machine translation on complex sentences, simplifying the sentences becomes imperative. In this paper, we present a rule based approach to address this problem by simplifying complex sentences in Hindi into multiple simple sentences. The sentence is split using clause boundaries and dependency parsing which identifies different arguments of verbs, thus changing the grammatical structure in a way that the semantic information of the original sentence stay preserved.

Abstract

We propose a framework for automatically generating multiple clips suitable for video editing by simulating pan-tilt-zoom camera movements within the frame of a single static camera. Assuming important actors and objects can be localized using computer vision techniques, our method requires only minimal user input to define the subject matter of each sub-clip. The composition of each sub-clip is automatically computed in a novel L1-norm optimization framework. Our approach encodes several common cinematographic practices into a single convex cost function minimization problem, resulting in aesthetically pleasing sub-clips which can easily be edited together using off-the-shelf multi-clip video editing software. We demonstrate our approach on five video sequences of a live theatre performance by generating multiple synchronized subclips for each sequence.