Yes / Online shopping is increasingly becoming people's first choice when shopping, as it is very convenient to choose products based on their reviews. Even for moderately popular products, there are thousands of reviews constantly being posted on e-commerce sites. Such a large volume of data constantly being generated can be considered as a big data challenge for both online businesses and consumers. That makes it difficult for buyers to go through all the reviews to make purchase decisions. In this research, we have developed models based on machine learning that can predict the helpfulness of the consumer reviews using several textual features such as polarity, subjectivity, entropy, and reading ease. The model will automatically assign helpfulness values to an initial review as soon as it is posted on the website so that the review gets a fair chance of being viewed by other buyers. The results of this study will help buyers to write better reviews and thereby assist other buyers in making their purchase decisions, as well as help businesses to improve their websites.

No / The orientation-sensitive performance of the Schlumberger array, when used to survey narrow, linear features, has long been recognized in geophysical prospecting for geology. However, in spite of frequent use of the array for archaeological survey, particularly in eastern Europe and the Far East, this directional effect is not apparent in the survey of walls and ditches. In order to examine the array's performance some experiments were carried out in a shallow electrolytic tank using insulating and conducting cylinders. Broadside and longitudinal traverses with systematic expansion of the current electrode spacing facilitated the production of pseudosections. The results confirmed the high selectivity of the Schlumberger response to the orientation of the feature. Broadside traverse of the conductor and longitudinal traverse of the insulator produced very large changes: much smaller signals were recorded for the alternative orientations. A subsequent experiment, however, on a simulated ditch in bedrock revealed no signal. The directional effect for a linear insulator was confirmed in field studies of a simple stone-walled structure. Implications for survey of low-contrast linear archaeological features are discussed.

Yes / Faces are highly complex stimuli that contain a host of information. Such complexity poses the following questions: (a) do observers exhibit preferences for specific information? (b) how does sensitivity to individual face parts compare? These questions were addressed by quantifying sensitivity to different face features. Discrimination thresholds were determined for synthetic faces under the following conditions: (i) ‘full face’: all face features visible; (ii) ‘isolated feature’: single feature presented in isolation; (iii) ‘embedded feature’: all features visible, but only one feature modified. Mean threshold elevations for isolated features, relative to full-faces, were 0.84x, 1.08, 2.12, 3.34, 4.07 and 4.47 for head-shape, hairline, nose, mouth, eyes and eyebrows respectively. Hence, when two full faces can be discriminated at threshold, the difference between the eyes is about four times less than what is required when discriminating between isolated eyes. In all cases, sensitivity was higher when features were presented in isolation than when they were embedded within a face context (threshold elevations of 0.94x, 1.74, 2.67, 2.90, 5.94 and 9.94). This reveals a specific pattern of sensitivity to face information. Observers are between two and four times more sensitive to external than internal features. The pattern for internal features (higher sensitivity for the nose, compared to mouth, eyes and eyebrows) is consistent with lower sensitivity for those parts affected by facial dynamics (e.g. facial expressions). That isolated features are easier to discriminate than embedded features supports a holistic face processing mechanism which impedes extraction of information about individual features from full faces.

Past research indicates that created non-tidal wetlands in the mid-Atlantic region are considerably lower in soil organic matter than native forested hydric soils. However, optimal loading rates for created wetland soil reconstruction have not been rigorously established. Our objective was to determine appropriate organic amendment loading rates for a Coastal Plain mitigation wetland based on 1) soil properties reflective of hydric soil development, 2) the formation of redoximorphic features, and 3) the growth and vigor of hydrophytic vegetation. The study contained wet (CCW-Wet) and dry (CCW-Dry) experiments, each receiving 6 compost treatments (0 Mg/ha untilled and 0, 56, 112, 224, and 336 Mg/ha tilled). Over the 1.5-year monitoring period, redox potential decreased and redoximorphic feature formation increased with compost loadings up to 112 Mg/ha. Surface bulk density decreased with loadings up to 224 Mg/ha, while no treatment differences were noted in sub-surface bulk density. In the CCW-Dry experiment, soil moisture peaked in the 224 Mg/ha treatment, while soil moisture in CCW-Wet increased consistently across all loadings. Total biomass in CCW-Wet and Betula nigra L. growth in both experiments increased with loading rate. Total biomass in CCW-Dry and Quercus palustris Muench. growth in both experiments peaked at 112 Mg/ha, although differences were not significant. Collectively, these findings indicate that 112 Mg/ha of high quality organic amendment was optimal for inducing hydric soil conditions and positive hydrophytic vegetation response. Incorporating compost at rates exceeding 112 Mg/ha is challenging and leads to higher surface elevations and redox levels in the initial growing season. / Master of Science

Identification of an individual from discriminating features of the friction ridge surface is one of the oldest and most commonly used biometric techniques. Methods for identification span from tedious, although highly accurate, manual examination to much faster Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS). While automatic fingerprint recognition has grown in popularity due to the speed and accuracy of matching minutia features of good quality plain-to-rolled prints, the performance is less than impressive when matching partial fingerprints. For some applications, including forensic analysis where partial prints come in the form of latent prints, it is not always possible to obtain high-quality image samples. Latent prints, which are lifted from a surface, are typically of low quality and low fingerprint surface area. As a result, the overlapping region in which to find corresponding features in the genuine matching ten-print is reduced; this in turn reduces the identification performance. Image quality also can vary substantially during image capture in applications with a high throughput of subjects having limited training, such as in border control. The rushed image capture leads to an overall acceptable sample being obtained where local image region quality may be low. We propose an improvement to the reliability of features detected in exemplar prints in order to reduce the likelihood of an unreliable overlapping region corresponding with a genuine partial print. A novel approach is proposed for detecting minutiae in low quality image regions. The approach has demonstrated an increase in match performance for a set of fingerprints from a well-known database. While the method is effective at improving match performance for all of the fingerprint images in the database, a more significant improvement is observed for a subset of low quality images. In addition, a novel method for fingerprint analysis using a sequence of fingerprint images is proposed. The approach uses the sequence of images to extract and track minutiae for temporal analysis during a single impression, reducing the variation in image quality during image capture. Instead of choosing a single acceptable image from the sequence based on a global measure, we examine the change in quality on a local level and stitch blocks from multiple images based on the optimal local quality measures. / Ph. D.

Dans un travail réalisé au Centre de Robotique et à l'Institut VEDECOM, nous nous sommes intéressés aux systèmes robustes de localisation visuelle en milieu urbain pour la voiture autonome. Obtenir une pose exacte à partir d'une mono-caméra est difficile et insuffisant en terme de précision pour la voiture autonome actuelle. Nous nous sommes concentrés sur l'utilisation de Systèmes d'Information Géographiques (SIG) pour concevoir une approche fiable, précise et absolue de localisation en milieu urbain.Le développement de SIG publics nous a apporté un nouvel horizon pour résoudre le problème de la localisation, mais ses informations, telles que les cartes topologiques, sémantiques, métriques, les Street Views, les cartes de profondeur, les cartes cadastrales 3D et les cartes en haute définition, doivent être bien analysées et organisées pour extraire les informations pertinentes pour une voiture autonome. Notre première tâche consistait à concevoir une base de données hors ligne accessible par un robot à partir d'un SIG public dense, à savoir Google Maps, qui a l'avantage d'avoir une couverture mondiale. Nous générons une représentation topométrique compacte de l'environnement urbain en extrayant quatre données utiles du SIG, y compris : les topologies, les géo-coordonnées, les Street Views panoramiques et les cartes de profondeur associées. Dans le même temps, un ensemble de données en ligne a été acquis par une mono-caméra équipée sur les véhicules de VEDECOM. Afin de rendre les Street View sphériques compatibles avec l'imagerie en ligne, une transformation basée sur l'interpolation d'image est introduite pour obtenir des images rectilignes à partir de Street Views.Nous proposons deux méthodes de localisation : l'une est une approche de vision par ordinateur basée sur l'extraction de caractéristiques, l'autre est une méthode d'apprentissage basée sur les réseaux de neurones convolutionnels (convnet). En vision par ordinateur, l'extraction de caractéristiques est un moyen populaire de résoudre le positionnement à partir d'images. Nous tirons parti de Google Maps et utilisons ses données topo-métriques hors ligne pour construire un positionnement grossier à fin, à savoir un processus de reconnaissance de lieu topologique puis une estimation métrique de pose par optimisation de graphe. La méthode a été testée en environnement urbain et démontre à la fois une précision sous-métrique et une robustesse aux changements de point de vue, à l'illumination et à l'occlusion. Aussi, les résultats montrent que les emplacements éloignés de Street Views produisent une erreur significative dans la phase d'estimation métrique. Ainsi, nous proposons de synthétiser des Street Views artificielles pour compenser la densité des Street View originales et améliorer la précision.Cette méthode souffre malheureusement d'un temps de calcul important. Étant donné que le SIG nous offre une base de données géolocalisée à l'échelle mondiale, cela nous motive à régresser des localisations globales directement à partir d'un convnet de bout en bout. La base de données hors ligne précédemment construite est encore insuffisante pour l'apprentissage d'un convnet. Pour compenser cela nous densifions la base d'origine d'un facteur mille et utilisons la méthode d'apprentissage par transfert pour faire converger notre régresseur convnet et avoir une bonne performance. Le régresseur permet également d'obtenir une localisation globale à partir d'une seule image et en temps réel.Les résultats obtenus par ces deux approches nous fournissent des informations sur la comparaison et la relation entre les méthodes basées sur des caractéristiques et celles basées sur le convnet. Après avoir analysé et comparé les performances de localisation des deux méthodes, nous avons également abordé des perspectives pour améliorer la robustesse et la précision de la localisation face au problème de localisation urbaine assistée par SIG. / In a work made at Centre de Robotique and Institut VEDECOM, we studied robust visual urban localization systems for self-driving cars. Obtaining an exact pose from a monocular camera is difficult and cannot be applied to the current autonomous cars. We mainly focused on fully leveraging Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to achieve a low-cost, robust, accurate and global urban localization.The development of public GIS's has brought us a new horizon to address the localization problem but their tremendous amount of information, such as topological, semantic, metric maps, Street Views, depth maps, 3D cadastral maps and High Definition maps, has to be well analyzed and organized to extract relevant information for self-driving cars. Our first task was to design a robotic accessible offline database from a dense public GIS, namely Google Maps, which has the advantage to propose a worldwide coverage. We make a compact topometric representation for the dynamic urban environment by extracting four useful data from the GIS, including topologies, geo-coordinates, panoramic Street Views, and associated depth maps. At the same time, an online dataset was acquired with a low-cost camera equipped on VEDECOM vehicles. In order to make spheric Street Views compatible with the online imagery, an image warping and interpolation based transformation is introduced to render rectilinear images from Street Views.We proposed two localization methods: one is a handcrafted-features-based computer vision approach, the other is a convolutional neural network (convnet) based learning technique. In computer vision, extracting handcrafted features is a popular way to solve the image based positioning. We take advantages of the abundant sources from Google Maps and benefit from the topometric offline data structure to build a coarse-to-fine positioning, namely a topological place recognition process and then a metric pose estimation by a graph optimization. The method is tested on an urban environment and demonstrates both sub-meter accuracy and robustness to viewpoint changes, illumination and occlusion. Moreover, we demonstrate that sparse Street View locations produce a significant error in the metric pose estimation phase. Thus our former framework is refined by synthesizing more artificial Street Views to compensate the sparsity of original Street Views and improve the precision.The handcrafted feature based framework requires the image retrieval and graph optimization. It is hard to achieve in a real-time application. Since the GIS offers us a global scale geotagged database, it motivates us to regress global localizations from convnet features in an end-to-end manner. The previously constructed offline database is still insufficient for a convnet training. We hereby augment the originally constructed database by a thousand factor and take advantage of the transfer learning method to make our convnet regressor converge and have a good performance. In our test, the regressor can also give a global localization of an input camera image in real time.The results obtained by the two approaches provide us insights on the comparison and connection between handcrafted feature-based and convnet based methods. After analyzing and comparing the localization performances of both methods, we also talked about some perspectives to improve the localization robustness and precision towards the GIS-aided urban localization problem.

<p>Syftet med studien är att är att studera skillnader i mottaglighet för emotionell smitta, anknytningsstilar och personlighets drag så som temperament och karaktär är hos personer diagnosticerade med Asperger jämfört med personer som inte har någon diagnos. Ett annat syfte är att studera samband mellan emotionell smitta, anknytningsstilar samt personlighetsdrag såsom temperament och karaktär. Åttioåtta försökspersoner deltog i enkät studien varav femton personer hade en Asperger diagnos och resterande sjuttiotre inte hade någon diagnos, i enkäten fick de svara på 293 påståenden som involverade emotioner, anknytning och personliga temperaments och karaktärsdrag. Samband och skillnader mellan grupperna undersöktes sedan. Resultatet visar att det existerar skillnader mellan grupperna. Studenterna är mer mottagliga för emotionerna arg än gruppen med Asperger diagnos. Individerna med en Asperger diagnos skattade sig högre i anknytningsstilen distans, sakorientering och relationsfixering än studenterna, studentgruppen tenderar att uppge personliga egenskaper som novelty seeking, reward dependent och cooperativeness i högre grad än gruppen med en Asperger diagnos. Existerande samband mellan emotioner, anknytning och personlighet visade sig. Studentgruppen visade högt samband mellan anknytningsstilen bifallsbehov och personlighetsegenskapen harm avoidance. Och Aspergergruppen visade högt sambandet mellan anknytningsstilen tillit och personlighetsegenskapen novelty seeking.</p> / <p>The aim of the present study is to study how the differences in susceptible for emotional contagion, attachment styles and personality features such as temperament and character within individuals diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and those individual who aren´t diagnosed. Eighty eight participated in the survey, fifteen of those had an Asperger diagnose. The survey contained 293 items involving emotions, attachment and temperament and character personality features. The result shows that differences exist between the groups in emotional contagion, attachment and personality. The students are more susceptible to angry emotions than the individuals with an Asperger diagnose. The individuals with an Asperger diagnose showed higher scores in the attachment styles distance, relation fixation and thing alignment than the students. The student group tends to state personal properties as novelty seeking, reward dependent och cooperativeness in a higher degree than individuals with an Asperger diagnose. The result also showed that there is an existing connection between emotions, attachment and personality. The group of students showed a high connection between the attachment style applause needs and the personality characteristic harm avoidance. In the Asperger group a high connection was showed between the attachment style thrust and the personality characteristic novelty seeking.</p>

This doctoral thesis examines the office environment’s influence on employees’ perception oftheir workplaces, their organizations and their job satisfaction, as well as their health and wellbeing.It is based on an empirical study of 491 office employees from twenty-six companies anddivisions in large companies. Seven office types, defined by their architectural and functionalfeatures, are represented in the study group: cell-office, shared-room office, small open planoffice, medium-sized open plan office, large open plan office, flex-office and combi-office. Theresearch has its basis in architecture, although an interdisciplinary approach using organizationaland management theory, environmental psychology, and social and stress medicine has beenemployed. Qualitative (Articles I &amp; V) and quantitative methods(Articles II &amp; IV) were used.The thesis also contains an explorative, review article. Thus it comprises all in all five articles.Article I is an analysis of the importance of architectural quality for employees´ perceptionand experience of the office using Lynch’s method (1960) developed to measure inhabitants’perception of architectural quality in cities. The study shows that in the office the experienceto a high degree is independent of both the scale of the office and office type; instead it isdetermined by the quality of the plan layout combined with the quality of other design features.It also shows Lynch’s method to be useful in foreseeing where the elements that reinforce‘imageability’ will most likely appear in an office environment.Article II investigates employees’ environmental satisfaction focusing on:1) ambient factors; 2) noise and privacy; and 3) design-related factors. The results, based onregression models with age, gender, job rank and line of business as additional covariates,show office type as a factor with a statistically significant impact on satisfaction with the officeenvironment. Employees in cell-offices are prominently most satisfied, followed by those inflex-offices, cell-offices rate low only on social aspects of design-related factors. A major findingis the internal differences between office types where employees share workspace and facilitieswith lowest satisfaction in medium-sized and large open plan offices.Article III is a review article that analyzes the employees’ office experiences in two ways:1) by framing the physical work environment’s influence on employees into the model oforganizational theorist Davis (1994); and 2) by categorizing the office experience into twogroups based on the nature of the experience and problems related to them. The results of theemperical study presented in Article II are the basis for the discussion in this article.Article IV examines employees’ health, well-being and job satisfaction. A multivariateanalysis applied to the study sample and equivalent to that of Article II shows significantly higherrisks for ill health and poor well-being in medium-sized and small open plan offices, comparedespecially with cell-office. In medium-sized open plan and combi-offices the employees evincethe lowest job satisfaction. The best chance for good health status and job satisfaction is in cellofficesand flex-offices.Article V examines the office architecture´s importance for employees’ perception of theirown workplaces and organizations based on the two key components of architecture—theaesthetical and functional dimensions. The results show that overall the employees had positiveexperiences of their office environments. These mainly concerned the aesthetical dimension,whereas the negative comments dealt with the functional dimension. The aesthetical dimensionappears not only to set the agenda for employees’ perception of the workplace and organizationas a whole, but also for the perception of the functional dimensions. The functional dimensionswere only in focus when the workstation and its proximate area were discussed. / <p>QC 20100908</p>

Syftet med studien är att är att studera skillnader i mottaglighet för emotionell smitta, anknytningsstilar och personlighets drag så som temperament och karaktär är hos personer diagnosticerade med Asperger jämfört med personer som inte har någon diagnos. Ett annat syfte är att studera samband mellan emotionell smitta, anknytningsstilar samt personlighetsdrag såsom temperament och karaktär. Åttioåtta försökspersoner deltog i enkät studien varav femton personer hade en Asperger diagnos och resterande sjuttiotre inte hade någon diagnos, i enkäten fick de svara på 293 påståenden som involverade emotioner, anknytning och personliga temperaments och karaktärsdrag. Samband och skillnader mellan grupperna undersöktes sedan. Resultatet visar att det existerar skillnader mellan grupperna. Studenterna är mer mottagliga för emotionerna arg än gruppen med Asperger diagnos. Individerna med en Asperger diagnos skattade sig högre i anknytningsstilen distans, sakorientering och relationsfixering än studenterna, studentgruppen tenderar att uppge personliga egenskaper som novelty seeking, reward dependent och cooperativeness i högre grad än gruppen med en Asperger diagnos. Existerande samband mellan emotioner, anknytning och personlighet visade sig. Studentgruppen visade högt samband mellan anknytningsstilen bifallsbehov och personlighetsegenskapen harm avoidance. Och Aspergergruppen visade högt sambandet mellan anknytningsstilen tillit och personlighetsegenskapen novelty seeking. / The aim of the present study is to study how the differences in susceptible for emotional contagion, attachment styles and personality features such as temperament and character within individuals diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and those individual who aren´t diagnosed. Eighty eight participated in the survey, fifteen of those had an Asperger diagnose. The survey contained 293 items involving emotions, attachment and temperament and character personality features. The result shows that differences exist between the groups in emotional contagion, attachment and personality. The students are more susceptible to angry emotions than the individuals with an Asperger diagnose. The individuals with an Asperger diagnose showed higher scores in the attachment styles distance, relation fixation and thing alignment than the students. The student group tends to state personal properties as novelty seeking, reward dependent och cooperativeness in a higher degree than individuals with an Asperger diagnose. The result also showed that there is an existing connection between emotions, attachment and personality. The group of students showed a high connection between the attachment style applause needs and the personality characteristic harm avoidance. In the Asperger group a high connection was showed between the attachment style thrust and the personality characteristic novelty seeking.

Magistro darbe analizuojami Kalninės pušies Pinus mugo Turra Kuršių nerijoje morfologiniai ir genetiniai požymiai, galintys identifikuoti jų porūšius. Tyrimo objektas – Kalninė pušis Pinus mugo Turra, auganti Kuršių nerijos teritorijoje. Šio tyrimo tikslas – įvertinti Pinus mugo porūšių morfologinius požymius Kuršių nerijoje bei nustatyti, šioje teritorijoje labiausiai išplitusio Pinus mugo porūšio nothssp. rotundata Link įvairių morfotipų taksonominę priklausomybę pagal raktinius morfologinius ir genetinius požymius. Tyrimo metodai – morfologinių ir genetinių požymių analizė. Tyrimo rezultatai. Raktiniai morfologiniai požymiai rodo, kad Kuršių nerijoje auga pagrindiniai trys P. mugo Turra porūšiai: mugo (įskaitant pseudopumilio), nothssp. rotundata Link ir ssp. uncinata Ram. Labiausiai išplitęs ir morfologiškai įvairus yra nothssp. rotundata Link porūšis. Iš raktinių kankorėžių morfologinių požymių informatyviaisiais identifikuojant porūšius buvo kankorėžio apofizio gylis ir simetriškumas. DNR tyrimas atskleidė, kad P. mugo porūšiai pagal savo per tėvinę liniją paveldimą chloroplasto DNR, iš esmės nesiskiria vienas nuo kito. Kiek ženkliau išsiskiria tik P. mugo ssp. mugo (krūmas) nuo P. mugo ssp. uncinata Ram (medžio), kas patvirtina P. mugo porūšių laisvo tarpusavio kryžminimosi hipotezę, taip pat tai, kad taksonomiškai tai yra vienos rūšies porūšiai, o ne skirtingos rūšys. Visi tirti P. mugo porūšiai laisvai kryžminasi tarp savęs, dalijasi bendru chloroplasto DNR genomu... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Mountain pine Pinus mugo Turra subspieces morphological and genetic variety in Kursiu nerija, that can identify subspieces was investigated in the work of master thesis. Object of the work – Pinus mugo Turra growing in Kuršių nerija territory. Method of the work – morphological and genetic features analysis. The results of the work. Key morphological features showed that three Pinus mugo Turra main subspieces growing in Kursiu nerija: mugo (including pseudopumilio), nothssp. rotundata Link and ssp. uncinata. The most widespread and morphologically variable is nothssp. rotundata Link. The informative key morphological features to identify subspieces were cone apophyses depth and symmetry. DNA analysis revealed that P. mugo varieties according to their own through the parental line inherited chloroplast DNA are not significantly different from each other. More different by DNA analysis are Pinus mugo ssp. mugo (shrub) and Pinus mugo ssp. uncinata Ram (tree) which confirming hypothesis of Pinus mugo subspieces free interbreeding. Also it is confirming hypothesys that taxonomically it is one type of subspieces, but not diferrent species. All of the explored Pinus mugo subspieces are free interbreeding between each other, sharing a common chloroplast DNA genome and in evolution the origin is from one parental spiece which spread to different eco-climatic niches and evolved to subspieces reflected by morphotypes. It is likely that this morphotypical variety should be... [to full text]