Hasil untuk "Diplomatics. Archives. Seals"

Yeonsung Kim, Junggeun Do, Seunguk Do et al.

3D human pose estimation (HPE) is characterized by intricate local and global dependencies among joints. Conventional supervised losses are limited in capturing these correlations because they treat each joint independently. Previous studies have attempted to promote structural consistency through manually designed priors or rule-based constraints; however, these approaches typically require manual specification and are often non-differentiable, limiting their use as end-to-end training objectives. We propose SEAL-pose, a data-driven framework in which a learnable loss-net trains a pose-net by evaluating structural plausibility. Rather than relying on hand-crafted priors, our joint-graph-based design enables the loss-net to learn complex structural dependencies directly from data. Extensive experiments on three 3D HPE benchmarks with eight backbones show that SEAL-pose reduces per-joint errors and improves pose plausibility compared with the corresponding backbones across all settings. Beyond improving each backbone, SEAL-pose also outperforms models with explicit structural constraints, despite not enforcing any such constraints. Finally, we analyze the relationship between the loss-net and structural consistency, and evaluate SEAL-pose in cross-dataset and in-the-wild settings.

Sergios-Anestis Kefalidis, Konstantinos Plas, Manolis Koubarakis

TerraQ is a spatiotemporal question-answering engine for satellite image archives. It is a natural language processing system that is built to process requests for satellite images satisfying certain criteria. The requests can refer to image metadata and entities from a specialized knowledge base (e.g., the Emilia-Romagna region). With it, users can make requests like "Give me a hundred images of rivers near ports in France, with less than 20% snow coverage and more than 10% cloud coverage", thus making Earth Observation data more easily accessible, in-line with the current landscape of digital assistants.

Jonas Gebele, Timm Mutzel, Burak Oez et al.

Sealed-bid auctions ensure fair competition and efficient allocation but are often deployed on centralized infrastructure, enabling opaque manipulation. Public blockchains eliminate central control, yet their inherent transparency conflicts with the confidentiality required for sealed bidding. Prior attempts struggle to reconcile privacy, verifiability, and scalability without relying on trusted intermediaries, multi-round protocols, or expensive cryptography. We present a sealed-bid auction protocol that executes sensitive bidding logic on a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)-backed confidential compute blockchain while retaining settlement and enforcement on a public chain. Bidders commit funds to enclave-generated escrow addresses, ensuring confidentiality and binding commitments. After the deadline, any party can trigger resolution: the confidential blockchain determines the winner through verifiable off-chain computation and issues signed settlement transactions for execution on the public chain. Our design provides security, privacy, and scalability without trusted third parties or protocol modifications. We implement it on SUAVE with Ethereum settlement, evaluate its scalability and trust assumptions, and demonstrate deployment with minimal integration on existing infrastructure

Peter Sullivan, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed

In this study, we leverage a unique UNESCO collection of mid-20th century radio recordings to probe the robustness of modern off-the-shelf language identification (LID) and speaker recognition (SR) methods, especially with respect to the impact of multilingual speakers and cross-age recordings. Our findings suggest that LID systems, such as Whisper, are increasingly adept at handling second-language and accented speech. However, speaker embeddings remain a fragile component of speech processing pipelines that is prone to biases related to the channel, age, and language. Issues which will need to be overcome should archives aim to employ SR methods for speaker indexing.

Renan Nascimento Reis

Este artigo propôs-se a acompanhar as atividades de vigilância promovida pelo regime militar através do SNI, no âmbito da UFPA. Tomamos como objeto de pesquisa a produção de dados a respeito da comunidade acadêmica durante o ano de 1968, e como o movimento estudantil se comportou diante desse cenário. Para isso, lançamos mão de documentos de acesso restrito no contexto de sua produção, cujo sigilo foi “quebrado” há poucos anos, além de fontes orais, fotografias e notícias divulgadas em jornais. Palavras-chave: ditadura; vigilância; movimento estudantil; repressão.

Rodrigo Vieira Pinnow, Patricia Kayser Vargas Mangan

Este artigo apresenta os resultados parciais de uma pesquisa relativa aos centros binacionais norte-americanos no Brasil. As fontes sobre a fundação de 33 centros , a criação de uma coligação, as semelhanças nos processos de criação e expansão, e o papel dos atores norte-americanos e brasileiros estão preservadas nos acervos espalhados por diferentes unidades federativas. Tais instituições, como espaços públicos e de memória, preservam acervos que podem ajudar na compreensão das relações entre o Brasil e os Estados Unidos. Palavras-chaves: memória social; centros binacionais; difusão cultural.

Isabella Belmiro Araujo, Márcio Ferreira Nery Corrêa , Tatyana Marques de Macedo Cardoso et al.

O presente artigo tem como objetivo apresentar a criação do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas em História da Geografia e Geografia Histórica no Colégio Pedro II (Nepehgeo/CPII) e sua relação com a Biblioteca Histórica e a Sala Raja Gabaglia, ambas situadas no campus Centro. Para isso, iremos apresentar os objetivos do Núcleo, assim como expor parte dos acervos que contam com obras do século XVIII ao século XX. Palavras-chave: história da geografia; Colégio Pedro II; Biblioteca Histórica; Sala Raja Gabaglia.

Laura Mendes Selva, Erinaldo Dias Valério

O objetivo deste artigo é investigar como os estandartes atuam como suporte documental colaborando com a preservação da cultura e memória do frevo. Para alcançar tal objetivo, a pesquisa fez uso de ferramentas metodológicas tendo como base o Método Quadripolar de Paul De Bruyne, Jacques Herman e Marc Schoutheete (1977), agregado a isso a revisão bibliográfica, o estudo de caso e a descrição, para que seja possível construir uma investigação com base teórica sólida junto ao recorte social escolhido. Com isso, as contribuições teóricas dos autores Paul Otlet, Suzanne Briet, Niels Lund, Bern Frohmann e Michael Buckland foram utilizadas para compreender o conceito de documento e suas aplicações, considerando também os objetos materiais tridimensionais enquanto suporte documental. Em suma, obteve-se enquanto resultado que o estandarte carrega consigo informações relevantes para identificar e representar grupos sociais, por causa das relações objetivas e subjetivas que são estabelecidas entre eles. Tendo em mente que esta não é a primeira nem a última análise acerca dos estandartes carnavalescos, enfatiza-se que este é um instrumento de difusão do conhecimento e de estímulo à reflexão sobre os objetos materiais que carregam consigo vestígios da história, cultural e memória social.

Lan Wang, Yujia Chen, Du Tran et al.

Long video understanding presents challenges due to the inherent high computational complexity and redundant temporal information. An effective representation for long videos must efficiently process such redundancy while preserving essential contents for downstream tasks. This paper introduces SEmantic Attention Learning (SEAL), a novel unified representation for long videos. To reduce computational complexity, long videos are decomposed into three distinct types of semantic entities: scenes, objects, and actions, allowing models to operate on a compact set of entities rather than a large number of frames or pixels. To further address redundancy, we propose an attention learning module that balances token relevance with diversity, formulated as a subset selection optimization problem. Our representation is versatile and applicable across various long video understanding tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SEAL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in video question answering and temporal grounding tasks across diverse benchmarks, including LVBench, MovieChat-1K, and Ego4D.

William Yang, Karthikeya Kona, Yashveer Jain et al.

Current mobile manipulators and high-fidelity simulators lack the ability to seamlessly operate and simulate across integrated environments spanning sea, air, and land. To address this gap, we introduce Aerial-Aquatic Manipulators (AAMs) in SEa, Air, and Land Simulator (SEALS), a comprehensive and photorealistic simulator designed for AAMs to operate and learn in these diverse environments. The development of AAM-SEALS tackles several significant challenges, including the creation of integrated controllers for flying, swimming, and manipulation, and the high-fidelity simulation of aerial dynamics and hydrodynamics leveraging particle-based hydrodynamics. Our evaluation demonstrates smooth operation and photorealistic transitions across air, water, and their interfaces. We quantitatively validate the fidelity of particle-based hydrodynamics by comparing position-tracking errors across real-world and simulated systems. AAM-SEALS benefits a broad range of robotics communities, including robot learning, aerial robotics, underwater robotics, mobile manipulation, and robotic simulators. We will open-source our code and data to foster the advancement of research in these fields. The overview video is available at https://youtu.be/MbqIIrYvR78. Visit our project website at https://aam-seals.umd.edu for more details.

Juan-Pablo Rivera, Gabriel Mukobi, Anka Reuel et al.

Governments are increasingly considering integrating autonomous AI agents in high-stakes military and foreign-policy decision-making, especially with the emergence of advanced generative AI models like GPT-4. Our work aims to scrutinize the behavior of multiple AI agents in simulated wargames, specifically focusing on their predilection to take escalatory actions that may exacerbate multilateral conflicts. Drawing on political science and international relations literature about escalation dynamics, we design a novel wargame simulation and scoring framework to assess the escalation risks of actions taken by these agents in different scenarios. Contrary to prior studies, our research provides both qualitative and quantitative insights and focuses on large language models (LLMs). We find that all five studied off-the-shelf LLMs show forms of escalation and difficult-to-predict escalation patterns. We observe that models tend to develop arms-race dynamics, leading to greater conflict, and in rare cases, even to the deployment of nuclear weapons. Qualitatively, we also collect the models' reported reasonings for chosen actions and observe worrying justifications based on deterrence and first-strike tactics. Given the high stakes of military and foreign-policy contexts, we recommend further examination and cautious consideration before deploying autonomous language model agents for strategic military or diplomatic decision-making.

Jorge Guilherme Francisconi

Durante o período autoritário desenvolvimentista (1964-1984), as regiões metropolitanas foram componentes fundamentais das políticas interfederativas territoriais. Durante o período democrático, a Constituição Federal de 1988 entrega a gestão urbana ao município, a gestão metropolitana ao critério e interesse de cada estado e a questão metropolitana perde importância. O texto destaca os potenciais da norma constitucional no combate às disparidades sociais e urbanas em metrópoles brasileiras de nossos dias. Palavras-chave: regiões metropolitanas; desenvolvimento urbano; planejamento metropolitano; Brasil urbano.

Yuntao Wang, Zhou Su, Tom H. Luan et al.

Due to the limited battery and computing resource, offloading unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)' computation tasks to ground infrastructure, e.g., vehicles, is a fundamental framework. Under such an open and untrusted environment, vehicles are reluctant to share their computing resource unless provisioning strong incentives, privacy protection, and fairness guarantee. Precisely, without strategy-proofness guarantee, the strategic vehicles can overclaim participation costs so as to conduct market manipulation. Without the fairness provision, vehicles can deliberately abort the assigned tasks without any punishments, and UAVs can refuse to pay by the end, causing an exchange dilemma. Lastly, the strategy-proofness and fairness provision typically require transparent payment/task results exchange under public audit, which may disclose sensitive information of vehicles and make the privacy preservation a foremost issue. To achieve the three design goals, we propose SEAL, an integrated framework to address strategy-proof, fair, and privacy-preserving UAV computation offloading. SEAL deploys a strategy-proof reverse combinatorial auction mechanism to optimize UAVs' task offloading under practical constraints while ensuring economic-robustness and polynomial-time efficiency. Based on smart contracts and hashchain micropayment, SEAL implements a fair on-chain exchange protocol to realize the atomic completion of batch payments and computing results in multi-round auctions. In addition, a privacy-preserving off-chain auction protocol is devised with the assistance of the trusted processor to efficiently protect vehicles' bid privacy. Using rigorous theoretical analysis and extensive simulations, we validate that SEAL can effectively prevent vehicles from manipulating, ensure privacy protection and fairness, improve the offloading efficiency.

Kota Chin, Keita Emura, Kazumasa Omote et al.

In an open-bid auction, a bidder can know the budgets of other bidders. Thus, a sealed-bid auction that hides bidding prices is desirable. However, in previous sealed-bid auction protocols, it has been difficult to provide a ``fund binding'' property, which would guarantee that a bidder has funds more than or equal to the bidding price and that the funds are forcibly withdrawn when the bidder wins. Thus, such protocols are vulnerable to false bidding. As a solution, many protocols employ a simple deposit method in which each bidder sends a deposit to a smart contract, which is greater than or equal to the bidding price, before the bidding phase. However, this deposit reveals the maximum bidding price, and it is preferable to hide this information. In this paper, we propose a sealed-bid auction protocol that provides a fund binding property. Our protocol not only hides the bidding price and a maximum bidding price, but also provides fund binding, simultaneously. For hiding the maximum bidding price, we pay attention to the fact that usual Ethereum transactions and transactions for sending funds to a one-time address have the same transaction structure, and it seems that they are indistinguishable. We discuss how much bidding transactions are hidden. We also employ DECO (Zhang et al,. CCS 2020) that proves the validity of the data to a verifier in which the data are taken from a source without showing the data itself. Finally, we give our implementation which shows transaction fees required and compare it to a sealed-bid auction protocol employing the simple deposit method.

Ngoc dung Tran

Abstract Drawing on primary materials from the English East India Company (EIC) archives in the British Library (London, UK), this article investigates the early diplomatic encounters between England and Vietnam (Tonkin and Cochinchina) in the seventeenth century. Previous studies have mostly focused on the English trade in Vietnam in that period and their diplomatic missions from the late eighteenth century to 1858 but partly neglected their diplomacy in their first connections with Vietnam (1614–1705). This article thus investigates how the EIC adapted its gift-giving diplomacy to the diverse and shifting political landscape of the Tonkin and Cochinchina kingdoms. While the Trịnh Lords in Tonkin severely limited diplomatic and trade exchanges with EIC agents and other European traders, the Nguyễn Lords in Cochinchina welcomed relations with EIC representatives as it served their ambition to facilitate trade and establish military alliances with other powerful actors in the region.

Igor Vukadinović

Kingdom of Albania’s fascist regime considered education as one of the pillars of its policy in Kosovo and Metohija during World War II. With the aim of spreading and strengthening Albanian national identity and culture, several hundreds of educators were sent from the “Old Albania” to Kosovo and Metohija. The Italian occupation authorities were not supportive of the educational policy pursued by the officials in Tirana, which often resulted in disagreement between the two sides. After liberating the province in 1944, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia decided to keep the teachers and educators who misused their positions to serve the Greater Albania cause, as there was no available staff to replace them. The paper is based primarily on the unpublished sources from the Central State Archives of Albania in Tirana, the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Belgrade, the Archives of Serbia, and the Archives of Yugoslavia.

Carles Sánchez Márquez, Joan Soler Jiménez

The wall paintings adorning the south transept apse of Santa Maria at Terrassa are among the most notable surviving items pertaining to the iconography of St. Thomas Becket. Recently found documents in which diplomatic archives reveal English connections are essential for understanding the quick reception of the Becket cult in the Crown of Aragon. The presence of an Anglo-Norman canon—Arveus or Harveus (Harvey)—and his position of scribe during the second half of the twelfth century when Reginald, probably also of English origin, was prior there—seem to be the likely source of inspiration for this project. These English connections, which are essential for understanding the quick reception of the Becket cult in the Crown of Aragon, stemmed from the endeavours undertaken some years earlier south of the Pyrenees by the abbot of Saint-Ruf at Avignon, Nicholas Breakspear, who subsequently became Pope Adrian IV.

P.-E. Thévenin

Abstract This article examines the role played by the Soviet Union during the negotiations of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The author argues that since its transformation into a maritime power in the 1960s, the USSR defended a liberal conception of the law of the sea, similar to that promoted by the West with which it cooperated in order to resist attempts by developing states to increase coastal state sovereignty on the high seas and centralize exploitation of the deep seabed’s resources. To demonstrate its thesis and reassess the findings of the existing literature, this article draws upon the travaux préparatoires of the Law of the Sea Convention, as well as newly available fonds from the French Diplomatic archives.

Marco Cuzzi

In the months between the Italian armistice (September 1943) and the end of the war (May 1945), Italy became the destination of a large group of Yugoslav exiles who, in various ways, opposed Tito and the Socialist and Federal Republic in the process of being formed. These exiles, divided by nationality and political affiliation (ranging from exponents of the resistance linked to the government in exile in London to the most radical collaborators with the Nazis), were united by their staunch anti-communism. Carefully observed by both the Italian secret services and the Allied military government, with the approach of the Cold War this Yugoslav ?refractory community? was increasingly used as a centre of propaganda and in part also of information by the West. After the Tito-Stalin split, this function was reduced, and the community waited for new developments that would only appear forty years later with the dissolution of the disdained Federal and Socialist Republic. This essay is an integral part of research based on the archives of the Italian Military Intelligence Service (SIM) kept at the Historical Office of the Italian Army General Staff in Rome, in the fonds of the Confidential Affairs of the General Directorate of Public Security of the Italian Ministry of the Interior and in the ?Affari Politici - Jugoslavia? collections of the Historical-Diplomatic Archive of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The research is still in progress and aims to create a map of the Yugoslav anti-communist community in Italy from the end of the Second World War until the dissolution of the Federal Republic between 1989 and 1992.

Abidin Temizer

In this study, the reaction of the Ottoman Empire to the declaration of independence of Bulgaria, the first ambassador of the Ottoman Empire in Bulgaria, Mustafa Asım Bey and his activities are discussed. The study examines the diplomatic activities of the Ottoman Empire against Bulgaria in the period between the autonomy process of Bulgaria and the independence process, the process of recognition of Bulgaria’s independence, the diplomatic relations established with Bulgaria, the biography of Mustafa Asım Bey, the first Ambassador of the Ottoman Empire to Sofia, and his approach to the problems between the two countries. In the article, documents from the Ottoman Archive of Directorate of State Archives (BOA), documents from the Bulgarian State Archives, periodicals and literature were used.