There have been lots of new drone applications in recent years. Drones are also often used in the field of national security forces. The aim of this work is to design and implement a tool intended for crowd behavior analysis in drone videodata. This tool ensures identification of suspicious behavior of persons and facilitates its localization. The main benefits include the design of a suitable video stabilization algorithm to stabilize small jitters, as well as trace back of the lost scene. Furthermore, two anomaly detectors were proposed, differing in the method of feature vector extraction and background modeling. Compared to the state of the art approaches, they achieved comparable results, but at the same time they brought the possibility of online data processing.

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Habituellement décrite dans les états maniaques chez des patients présentant un trouble bipolaire, la tachypsychie est définie comme une accélération de la pensée qui peut également être observée dans les états dépressifs mixtes. Pour évaluer les mécanismes psychopathologiques impliqués dans ce phénomène peu étudié, nous avons élaboré un auto-questionnaire, le Racing and Crowded Thoughts Questionnaire (RCTQ), et nous avons évalué ses propriétés psychométriques chez les sujets sains et chez les patients avec trouble bipolaire. Les mécanismes cognitifs ont été investigués par le biais d’approches temporelles et langagières. Nos résultats suggèrent que la tachypsychie est un phénomène composite présent même chez les sujets sains en cas d’instabilité mineure de l’humeur. Sur le plan cognitif, la tachypsychie a été associée à la présence d’anomalies lexico-sémantiques et exécutives relevées à des tâches de fluence verbale ainsi qu’à une accélération du passage du temps. / Racing thoughts have been traditionally described in manic states in patients with bipolar disorder. Recently, attention has been raised to this symptom in depressive episodes. In this thesis, we aimed at investigating the phenomenology of racing thoughts, a phenomenon that has been understudied so far, via a self-report questionnaire that we have developed – the Racing and Crowded Thoughts Questionnaire (RCTQ) -, in patients with bipolar disorder and in healthy individuals. From a cognitive standpoint, we assessed the cognitive underpinnings of racing thoughts via temporal and verbal fluency tasks. Our results suggest that racing thoughts are a multi-faceted phenomenon, that can be observed even in healthy individuals with mild affective instability. Importantly, our results show that racing thoughts are associated with lexico-semantic and executive abnormalities as well as with a feeling of faster than usual passage of time.

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Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection which is a major cause of death worldwide. TB is a curable disease, however the bacterium can become resistant to the first line treatment against the disease. This leads to a disease called drug resistant TB that is difficult and expensive to treat. It is well-known that TB disease thrives in communities in overcrowded environments with poor ventilation, weak nutrition, inadequate or inaccessible medical care, etc, such as in some prisons or some refugee camps. In particular, the World Health Organization discovered that a number of prisoners come from socio-economic disadvantaged population where the burden of TB disease may be already high and access to medical care may be limited. In this dissertation we propose compartmental models of systems of differential equations to describe the population dynamics of TB disease under conditions of crowding. Such models can be used to make quantitative projections of TB prevalence and to measure the effect of interventions. Indeed we apply these models to specific regions and for specific purposes. The models are more widely applicable, however in this dissertation we calibrate and apply the models to prison populations.

Imagine a world where someone’s personal information is constantly compromised, where federal government entities AKA Big Brother always knows what anyone is Googling, who an individual is texting, and their emoticons on Twitter. Government entities have been doing this for years; they never cared if they were breaking the law or their moral compass of human dignity. Every day the Federal government blatantly siphons data with programs from the original ECHELON to the new series like PRISM and Xkeyscore so they can keep their tabs on issues that are none of their business; namely, the personal lives of millions. Our allies are taking note; some are learning our bad habits, from Government Communications Headquarters’ (GCHQ) mass shadowing sharing plan to America’s Russian inspiration, SORM. Some countries are following the United States’ poster child pose of a Brave New World like order of global events. Others like Germany are showing their resolve in their disdain for the rise of tyranny. Soon, these new found surveillance troubles will test the resolve of the American Constitution and its nation’s strong love and tradition of liberty. Courts are currently at work to resolve how current concepts of liberty and privacy apply to the current conditions facing the privacy of society. It remains to be determined how liberty will be affected as well; liberty for the United States of America, for the European Union, the Russian Federation and for the people of the World in regards to the extent of privacy in today’s blurred privacy expectations.