Since most people now have a high-performing computing device with an attached camera in their pocket, in the form of a smartphone, robotics and computer vision researchers are thrilled about the possibility this creates. Such devices have previously been used in robotics to create 3D maps of environments and objects by feeding the camera data to a 3D reconstruction algorithm. The big downside with smartphones is that their cameras use a different sensor than what is usually used in robotics, namely a rolling shutter camera.These cameras are cheaper to produce but are not as well suited for general 3D reconstruction algorithms as the global shutter cameras typically used in robotics research. One recent, accurate and performance effective 3D reconstruction method which could be used on a mobile device, if tweaked, is LSD-SLAM. This thesis uses the LSD-SLAM method developed for global shutter cameras and incorporates additional methods developed allow the usage of rolling shutter data.The developed method is evaluated by calculating numbers of failed 3D reconstructions before a successful one is obtained when using rolling shutter data.The result is a method which improves this metric with about 70\% compared to the unedited LSD-SLAM method.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1995 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / The Data Acquisition and Distribution System (DADS) transparently collects data from a ship's combat system and transfers that data by satellite to a shore site. The system was developed by the Naval Surface Warfare Center Port Hueneme Division (NSWC PHD). DADS supports surface ship data collection, display, distribution, and debrief capabilities. NSWC PHD personnel used equipment assets developed in-house and purchased data communications hardware and software to develop DADS. A satellite terminal was placed outside Building 1380, and analog telephone lines were installed, linking the Data Communications and Control Laboratory (DCCL) with the Satellite Earth Station in Santa Paula, CA. A shipboard DADS transparently taps a ship's Combat System and collects selected data files. The data is compressed and archived. After shore site personnel select the data required for analysis, DADS encrypts it, and transmits the data via satellite to the shore site for reconstruction and analysis. DADS is unattended. The portable shipboard system equipment and software is controlled from a shore site via the International Maritime Satellite (INMARSAT). The DCC supports transmission speeds of up to 9.6 kilobits/second when connected to a communication system with this capability.

A juniper (Juniperus przewalskii Kom) tree-ring width chronology has been developed from the western-most forest of the Qilian Mountains. Our analyses demonstrate both temperature and precipitation have significant effects on tree growth and that both should be considered in climate reconstruction. Thus a regional drought history (A.D. 1855–2001) is reconstructed by calibrating with a linear interpolation through four Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) grid values nearest the sampling site. Our reconstruction extends the drought history of this area and also reveals that the most severe drought occurred in the 1920s. In the context of the drought history of western China, this extreme drought between 1925–1931 is consistent over a large surrounding region of Northwestern China. Multi-taper spectral analysis reveals the existence of significant 40- to 46-year, 29-year, and 2.1- to 3-year periods of variability. Overall, our study provides reliable information for the research of past drought variability in the Qilian Mountains, Northwestern China.

Astrocytes, the most abundant glial cell type in the brain, undergo a number of roles in brain physiology; among them, the energetic support of neurons is the best characterized. Contained within astrocytes is the brain’s obligate energy store, glycogen. Through glycogenolysis, glycogen, a storage form of glucose, is converted to pyruvate that is further reduced to lactate and transferred to neurons as an energy source via MCTs. Glycogen is a multi-branched polysaccharide synthesized from the glucose uptaken in astrocytes. It has been shown that glycogen accumulates with age and contributes to the physiological ageing process in the brain. In this study, we compared glycogen distribution between young adults and geriatric mice to understand the energy consumption of synaptic terminals during ageing using computational tools. We segmented and densely reconstructed neuropil and glycogen granules within six (three 4 month old old and three 24 month old) volumes of Layer 1 somatosensory cortex mice brains from FIB-SEM stacks, using a combination of semi-automated and manual tools, ilastik and TrakEM2. Finally, the 3D visualization software, Blender, was used to analyze the dataset using the DBSCAN and KDTree Nearest neighbor algorithms to study the distribution of glycogen granules compared to synapses, using a plugin that was developed for this purpose. The Nearest Neighbors and clustering results of 6 datasets show that glycogen clusters around excitatory synapses more than inhibitory synapses and that, in general, glycogen is found around axonal boutons more than dendritic spines. There was no significant accumulation of glycogen with ageing within our admittedly small dataset. However, there was a homogenization of glycogen distribution with age and that is consistent with published literature. We conclude that glycogen distribution in the brain is not a random process but follows a function distribution.

This study is an attempt to re-investigate the Republican party during the Reconstruction era in order to understand the degree and nature of the changes. The paper reviews the basis of the party at different points in its metamorphosis to demonstrate what happened to the organization.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal. / Pour respecter les droits d'auteur, la version électronique de cette thèse ou ce mémoire a été dépouillée, le cas échéant, de ses documents visuels et audio-visuels. La version intégrale de la thèse ou du mémoire a été déposée au Service de la gestion des documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

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Audio fingerprinting is a highly specific content-based audio retrieval technique. Given a short audio fragment as query, an audio fingerprinting system can identify the particular file that contains the fragment in a large library potentially consisting of millions of audio files. In this thesis, we investigate the possibility and feasibility of applying audio fingerprinting to do speech recognition in noisy environments based on speech reconstruction. To reconstruct noisy speech, the speech is divided into small segments of equal length at first. Then, audio fingerprinting is used to find the most similar segment in a large dataset consisting of clean speech files. If the similarity is above a threshold, the noisy segment is replaced with the clean segment. At last, all the segments, after conditional replacement, are concatenated to form the reconstructed speech, which is sent to a traditional speech recognition system. In the above procedure, a critical step is using audio fingerprinting to find the clean speech segment in a dataset. To test its performance, we build a landmark-based audio fingerprinting system. Experimental results show that this baseline system performs well in traditional applications, but its accuracy in this new application is not as good as we expected. Next, we propose three strategies to improve the system, resulting in better accuracy than the baseline system. Finally, we integrate the improved audio fingerprinting system into a traditional speech recognition system and evaluate the performance of the whole system. / Graduate

Emission Optical Projection Tomography (eO PT) is a relatively new imag- ing modality that bridges a gap between micro Magnetic Resonance Imag- ing and Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy. eO PT can be used to image the anatomy and gene expression of intact biological specimens at high resolution and thus provides an alternative to time consuming methods such as serial sectioning. Tomographic image reconstruction for eOPT is currently performed using the Filtered Back Projection algorithm which, while being fast, does not account for the physics of image formation and thus can result in reconstructions of reduced resolution and questionable quantitative consistency. This thesis describes work that was done on eOPT in three areas, including image formation, tomographic reconstruction, and memory savings, the latter of which were required to bring implementation of 3D iterative reconstruction algorithms within reach for the relatively high-resolution eO PT imaging modality. In the area of image formation, measurements were taken to reveal the effects of optical blurring, diffraction and charge-coupled device (CCD) camera noise. Accurate models of each of these phenomena were developed and compared against the measurements. The subject of image reconstruction was first addressed with a modi- fication to the FBP algorithm designed to correct for the quantitative inaccuracies suspected of being introduced by the FBP algorithm when reconstructing specimens consisting of very fine detail. This was done by incorporating the quantitative aspects of the model of image formation into the FBP algorithm. The full model of image formation was incorpo- rated into the iterative Maximum Likelihood Expectation Maximisation (MLEM) algorithm. The third strand of this thesis focuses on various memory saving meth- ods developed to enable the implementation and testing of a variation of MLEM known as the Ordered Subsets Expectation Maximisation (OSEM). , Without such memory saving methods, the implementation of an iterative 3D reconstruction algorithm such as MLEM or OSEM using a full model of image formation would have remained beyond the capacity of modern computers for the foreseeable future, requiring several Terabytes of RAM. Comparisons were made between the quality of and the time required to produce FBP and OSEM reconstructions of the same data sets given the availability of limited computing resources. The feasibility of adopting OSEM reconstructions as an alternative to FBP reconstructions was dis- cussed, based on the use of currently available cutting edge computing hardware.

Post-conflict army reconstruction is an important element of security sector reform (SSR), tracing its origins to at least 1980, before the SSR concept itself was formulated. Reconstruction of security forces is an important element in wider postconflict reconstruction, and for political reasons, an army has almost always deemed necessary. Since 1998, SSR itself has been increasingly conceptualized, with principles for SSR having been laid down by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) since 2004. Yet SSR faces a host of philosophical and practical problems, perhaps the greatest being the gap between theory and practice (Chanaa's 'conceptual-contextual divide'). To make SSR efforts more successful, the underlying principles need to be revised and amended. Post-conflict army reconstruction experience since 1980, and associated academic study, military doctrine, and work by international organizations (particularly the OECD) can provide a basis for such revision. This thesis aims to survey post-conflict army reconstruction activities since 1980, draw overall lessons from that review and field study in Liberia, and propose amendments to the SSR principles on that basis.