text:
Brussels, Belgium,
Toyota Motor Europe (TME) sold 874,000 vehicles in 2015 with record 209,000 hybrid sales
Despite low gas prices, best-ever sales of hybrid models across the Toyota and Lexus brands, up by 17% year-on-year
Lexus all-time European sales record of 64,000 units, a 20% year-on-year increase
Strong performance of Toyota built-in-Europe models, reaching 71% of sales, an increase of 6% points versus last year
Toyota Motor Europe (TME) reported its annual sales for calendar year 2015 today, and despite the lowest petrol prices in 5 years, its sales of hybrid vehicles have continued their 5-year increase to reach 209,000 units, up 17% year-on-year. Sales of Toyota and Lexus-branded hybrid vehicles now represent 24% of the group's sales on the continent, up from 20% a year ago. In Western Europe only, sales of hybrid represent a third of total sales.
"Our excellent hybrid sales performance demonstrates that European consumers look beyond gas price fluctuations and are attracted by the benefits of driving a hybrid, and not just that they save on fuel and emissions," said Johan van Zyl, President and CEO of TME. "Those include very low cost of ownership, the pleasure of quiet driving and the benefit of an electric drivetrain with no range anxiety," said van Zyl.
Within those hybrid sales, the Yaris hybrid recorded sales of 72,000 in 2015, up 23% versus last year, proving that hybrid technology is accessible even on a B-segment vehicle. More than one in three Yaris sold in Europe is a hybrid.
The new Auris hybrid also did extremely well with an increase of 12% year-on-year at 78,500 sales. More than half of all Auris sold by Toyota are hybrid.
For the Lexus premium brand, hybrid sales increased by 24% to reach 41,000 units. Lexus Hybrid Drive vehicles make up 64% of total Lexus sales across the continent, and reach 96% of sales in Western Europe alone.
"With sales of both the new generation Prius and the new RAV4 hybrid about to start, the irreversible drive towards ever more hybrid sales in Europe will continue in 2016," said van Zyl. "We aim to reach more than 400,000 sales by 2020," he added.
2015 overall sales results
Overall sales of Toyota and Lexus vehicles reached 874,000 units in 2015 (-1.5%)
TME's sales results reflect two trends last year:
sustained growth in Western Europe (+7%) and Central Europe (+18%).
a decline in sales in Eastern Europe (Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and the Caucasus region) in line with the very strong market decline (-36%)
The group's overall market share stood at 4.6%.
"Our overall sales results in 2015 were in line with our expectations," said van Zyl. "We knew from the start that with the Ruble depreciation, 2015 would not be an easy year, but we were able to maintain our share in Eastern Europe whilst increasing our sales in the rest of Europe by 9.5%. We are particularly proud of the extremely strong performance of our hybrid models and the all-time record for our premium brand Lexus in Europe."
Strong performance of Toyota European produced models
Sales of European produced Toyota vehicles increased by 27,000 units (+5%) and now represent 71% of the total sales (+6% points versus last year).
The new AYGO reached 89,000 sales, a 26% increase year-on-year, continuing to perform strongly in its second year post launch. The newly redesigned Yaris increased sales by 11% to 201,000 units. The new Auris and Avensis, both updated in 2015, have been well received, with 142,000 sales for Auris (stable in a declining segment) and 35,000 sales for Avensis (+17%), with both models' new interior and exterior designs, and powertrain enhancements earning high praise.
2016 will see the arrival on the market of new or redesigned models: the new Prius; the RAV4 hybrid; the new Hilux, and the new PROACE.
Lexus has best year on record in Europe
Lexus has achieved its best-ever sales in Europe in 2015. Sales increased by 20% year-on-year to reach nearly 64,000 units.
"Sales grew strongly in Western Europe and increased even in Eastern Europe despite the market decline," said van Zyl. "We expect the strong performance achieved in 2015 to continue through 2016 towards another sales record and on track towards our 2020 target of 100,000 sales," he added.
Lexus sales increased in Western Europe by 31%, in Central Europe by 50% and by 1% in Eastern Europe, despite the challenging environment. The market share in those respective regions increased to 1.2% (+0.2% points increase) in Western Europe, 3.6% (+0.8% points) in Central Europe and a record 12.2% (+3% points increase) in Eastern Europe versus last year.
In a line-up now comprising 9 different models covering the main premium segments, the NX became Lexus' best seller with 28,000 sales, 61% of which were hybrid. The new RX, launching now, will bring a significant increase in sales in 2016.
"However good they are, sales figures are just sales figures," said van Zyl. "What's most important to us in Europe is to grow our brands and our business in a solid and sustainable way, with profit. And we're doing exactly that by providing ever better Toyota and Lexus cars with ever better service to our customers."
Table 1 – TME (1) total sales in 2015
TOTAL TOYOTA/LEXUS 873,844
TOYOTA 810,085
AYGO 88,583
Yaris (incl. Yaris Hybrid) 201,271
Yaris Hybrid 72,252
Auris TTL (incl. Auris Hybrid) 142,369
Auris Hybrid 78,515
Corolla 69,194
Verso 34,826
Avensis 35,487
iQ 84
Urban Cruiser 24
Verso-S 6,085
Prius Family 16,862
Prius 7,853
Prius+ 8,077
Prius Plug-in Hybrid 932
Mirai 23
Camry 34,207
GT86 1,704
RAV4 (incl. RAV4 Hybrid) 85,988
RAV4 Hybrid 206
Venza 278
Highlander 4,528
Land Cruiser 42,907
Hilux 35,939
Proace 7,423
Hiace 314
Other models 1,989
LEXUS 63,759
CT 200h 10,235
IS (incl. IS hybrid) 8,523
IS hybrid 7,745
ES (incl. ES hybrid) 2,072
ES hybrid 44
GS (incl. GS hybrid) 2,004
GS hybrid 1,523
LS (incl. LS hybrid) 295
LS hybrid 147
NX (incl. NX hybrid) 28,417
NX hybrid 17,278
RX (incl. RX hybrid) 6,883
RX hybrid 3,568
RC (incl. RC hybrid) 648
RC hybrid 89
Table 2 – TME (1) total sales in Q4 2015
Yaris (incl. Yaris Hybrid) 48,705
Auris TTL (incl. Auris Hybrid) 37,832
Verso 8,132
Avensis 9,600
iQ 5
Urban Cruiser 1
Verso-S 464
Prius Family 3,890
Camry 7,913
GT86 360
Venza 13
Highlander 926
Hiace 86
CT 200h 2,646
ES (incl. ES hybrid) 908
ES hybrid 2
GS (incl. GS hybrid) 334
GS hybrid 248
LS (incl. LS hybrid) 48
LS hybrid 23
NX (incl. NX hybrid) 7,073
NX hybrid 4,682
RX hybrid 535
(1) Toyota Motor Europe is responsible for all Western, Central and Eastern European countries including Turkey and Russia as well as Israel and a number of Central Asian markets (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan).
Models listed in italics are produced locally at Toyota's European manufacturing facilities.
lexus-nx-200t-f-sport-02-dpl-2015.jpg
2015-new-auris-teaser.jpg
yaris-bitone-04-sept2015.jpg
2015 Yaris Bitone


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text:
Marquette athletic director Cottingham resigns
Steve Cottingham
Buzz Williams
By ASSOCIATED PRESS - Associated Press - Thursday, June 30, 2011
MILWAUKEE (AP) - Marquette athletic director Steve Cottingham resigned Thursday, parting ways with a program facing scrutiny for recent legal issues.
Cottingham was named the school's interim athletic director in January 2007 and took the role on a permanent basis a year later. He oversaw a tumultuous transition after men's basketball coach Tom Crean left for Indiana, and successor Buzz Williams has kept up the program's winning ways on the court.
But Marquette recently has been criticized for the way it handled sexual assault allegations against unidentified athletes.
"Although recent events involving a few student-athletes have certainly been a disappointment to me, I leave Marquette with positive feelings and confidence in its future," Cottingham wrote in a letter to Marquette President Robert Wild.
Prosecutors decided in May not to charge the athletes involved in the alleged assaults. District Attorney John Chisholm said at the time that investigations into two separate alleged assaults were impeded because Marquette's public safety department didn't tell authorities.
Instead, it advised students of options available, including reporting the allegations to the police department.
Marquette's Dean of Students, Dr. Stephanie Quade, said at the time that the school was "not proud" of the incidents or the way they were handled. She said the school had changed protocol to notify police immediately.
"We have had meetings with Marquette University and its public safety department in order to ensure such a lapse between the reporting of a crime and its investigation never occurs again," Milwaukee Police Chief Edward A. Flynn said in a statement at the time. "Marquette University has pledged to do better. We will hold them to their word."
Neither the school or law enforcement has identified the athletes.
Cottingham oversaw expansion of the school's athletic programs, including the addition of men's and women's lacrosse beginning in 2012, and a drive to boost Marquette's athletic scholarship fund.
He recently gave Williams a contract extension, fending off interest from rival schools after the Golden Eagles' surprise run to the round of 16 in the NCAA tournament.
Deputy athletic director Mike Broeker will be the acting athletic director pending a permanent replacement.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
\section{Introduction}

Environment perception pipeline is required to isolate objects of interest from background ones. While multi-object detection produces a bounding box around the objects of interest, a tight contour is required especially with occluding objects. This is obtained through semantic segmentation which is incapable of distinguishing occluding object instances, and is computationally expensive due to pixel-wise operations. On the contrary, instance segmentation can produce a tight object mask, with differentiation between objects instances, without classifying the whole scene pixels.

The standard method in literature for instance segmentation is to build a two-stage pipeline \cite{he2017mask}. First, objects are detected and highlighted using bounding boxes. Then, a semantic segmentation model processes the areas of the detected boxes to produce objects masks. This approach suffers from various drawbacks: (1) Computational complexity: due to costly upsampling (2) Slow processing: since the two-stages have to run sequentially (3) Does not fit for tasks that involve oriented boxes, such as remote sensing applications \cite{tang2017arbitrary}, or Bird-eye-View LiDAR \cite{ali2018yolo3d}.

In this paper, We propose Insta-YOLO, a novel one-shot end-to-end model, inspired by YOLO one-shot object detector \cite{redmon2018yolov3}. Our model predicts instance masks represented by contour points in Cartesian space. Our method does not perform costly pixel-wise prediction or up-sampling. Hence, the algorithm is efficient in terms of number of parameters and fast in terms of FPS. Moreover, it provides generic solution for oriented objects as well. In summary, the contribution of this work includes:

\begin{itemize}
    \item Construction of a novel CNN architecture for instance segmentation. Our model  runs in real-time at double speed of the state-of-the-art algorithms with competitive accuracy.
    \item Implementation of a novel loss function that improves localization of the instances.

    \item Demonstration of how our algorithms generalizes to tasks with oriented objects.
\end{itemize}

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. First, we discuss the related work, followed by the model architecture details. Then we present the details of model training and experimental setup and discuss the results. Finally, we conclude with the main findings.

\section{Related Work}
\label{sec-related-work}

In this section we review the recent models for object detection, instance segmentation, and polygon regression techniques.

\subsection{Object Detection}
\label{sec-object-detection}

The goal of object detectors is to predict the location of any object of interest with a recognized label. Object detectors can generally be split into two main categories, two-stage, and one-stage detectors. The two-stage detectors consist of a region proposal network in the first stage. The features are extracted from each candidate box for bounding-box regression and recognition tasks in the second stage. Two-stage object detectors usually achieve higher localization and recognition accuracy, but they are not feasible for real-time applications. On the other hand, one-stage detectors localize the bounding boxes and determine their labels in an end-to-end way. Hence, they need less inference time and can be used for real-time applications.

YOLO \cite{redmon2016you}, SSD \cite{liu2016ssd} and RetinaNet  \cite{lin2017focal} are the most common one-stage object detectors. YOLO divides the image into S x S grid cells, which are responsible for detecting N objects whose centers fall within. Each grid cell predicts N boxes, every box is represented using x,y,w,h for the localization and C class probabilities. The backbone has 24 convolutional layers, followed by two fully connected layers that are responsible for object localization and recognition. Experimental results show that YOLO was not good enough to localize the objects precisely. It achieved mAP of 63.4\% with 45 FPS on PASCAL VOC dataset. Based on that, the authors proposed YOLOv2 \cite{redmon2017yolo9000} and YOLOv3 \cite{redmon2018yolov3} with a series of improvement in design choices, including different backbones, more bounding boxes, and different scales to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy. On a Pascal Titan X it processes images at 30 FPS and has a mAP of 57.9.
Faster R-CNN  \cite{ren2015faster} is the most known two-stage object detector. It was proposed to improve the region-based CNN in R-CNN \cite{girshick2014rich} and Fast R-CNN \cite{girshick2015fast}. Instead of using selective search to generate region proposals, which need running time equivalent to the detection network, it uses a fully convolutional region proposal network to predict the candidate boxes efficiently. Faster R-CNN achieved mAP of 73.2\% with 7 FPS on PASCAL VOC dataset.

\subsection{Instance Segmentation}
\label{sec-insta-seg}

Instance segmentation requires predicting the instances of the objects and their binary segmentation mask. It performs object detection and semantic segmentation simultaneously. Existing methods in the literature are often divided into two groups, two-stage, and one-stage instance segmentation.

Two-stage instance segmentation methods usually deal with the problem as a detection task followed by segmentation, they detect the bounding boxes of the objects in the first stage, and a binary segmentation is performed for each bounding box in the second stage. Mask R-CNN \cite{he2017mask}, which is an extension for the Faster R-CNN, adds an additional branch that computes the mask to segment the objects and replaces RoI-Pooling with RoI-Align to improve the accuracy. Hence, the Mask R-CNN loss function combines the losses of the three branches; bounding box, recognized class, and the segmented mask. Mask Scoring R-CNN \cite{huang2019mask} adds a mask-IoU branch to learn the quality of the predicted masks in order to improve the performance of the instance segmentation by producing more precise mask predictions. The mAP is improved from 37.1\% to 38.3\% compared to the Mask R-CNN on the COCO dataset. PANet  \cite{liu2018path} is built upon the Mask R-CNN and FPN networks. It enhanced the extracted features in the lower layers by adding a bottom-up pathway augmentation to the FPN network in addition to proposing adaptive feature pooling to link the features grids and all feature levels. PANet achieved mAP of 40.0\% on the COCO dataset, which is higher than the Mask R-CNN using the same backbone by 2.9\% mAP. Although the two-stage methods can achieve state-of-the-art performance, they are usually quite slow and can not be used for real-time applications. Using one TITAN GPU, Mask R-CNN runs at 8.6 fps, and PANet runs at 4.7 fps. Real-time instance segmentation usually requires running above 30 fps.

One-stage methods usually perform detection and segmentation directly. InstanceFCN \cite{dai2016instance} uses FCN to produce several instance-sensitive score maps that have information for the relative location, then object instances proposals are generated by using an assembling module. YOLACT \cite{bolya2019yolact}, which is one of the first attempts for real-time instance segmentation, consists of feature backbone followed by two parallel branches. The first branch generates multiple prototype masks, whereas the second branch computes mask coefficients for each object instance. After that, the prototypes and their corresponding mask coefficients are combined linearly, followed by cropping and threshold operations to generate the final object instances. YOLACT achieved mAP of 29.8\% on the COCO dataset at 33.5 fps using Titan Xp GPU. YOLACT++  \cite{bolya2019yolact++} is an extension for YOLACT with several performance improvements while keeping it real-time. Authors utilized the same idea of the Mask Scoring R-CNN and added a fast mask re-scoring branch to assign scores to the predicted masks according to the IoU of the mask with ground-truth. Also, the 3x3 convolutions in specific layers are replaced with 3x3 deformable convolutions in the backbone network. Finally, they optimized the prediction head by using multi-scale anchors with different aspect ratios for each FPN level.
YOLACT++ achieved 34.1\% mAP (more than YOLACT by 4.3\%) on the COCO dataset at 33.5 fps using Titan Xp GPU. However, the deformable convolution makes the network slower, as well as the upsampling blocks in YOLACT networks.

TensorMask \cite{chen2019tensormask} explored the dense sliding-window instance segmentation paradigm by utilizing structured 4D tensors over the spatial domain. Also, tensor bipyramid and aligned representation are used to recover the spatial information in order to achieve better performance. However, these operations make the network slower than two-stage methods such as Mask R-CNN. CenterMask \cite{lee2020centermask} decomposed the instance segmentation task into two parallel branches: Local Shape prediction branch, which is responsible for separating the instances, and Global Saliency branch to segment the image into a pixel-to-pixel manner. The branches are built upon a point representation layer containing the local shape information at the instance centers. The point representation is utilized from CenterNet \cite{zhou2019objects} for object detection with a DLA-34 as a backbone. Finally, the outputs of both branches are grouped together to form the final instance masks. CenterMask achieved mAP of 33.1\% on the COCO dataset at 25.2 fps using Titan Xp GPU. Although the one-stage methods run at a higher frame rate, the network speed is still an issue for real-time applications. The bottlenecks in the one-stage methods in the upsampling process in some methods, such as YOLACT.

\subsection{Bounding Polygon for Instance Segmentation}
\label{sec-poly-tech}

Recently, a new paradigm has been proposed to perform instance segmentation as predicting the polygon of each object instance through the center of the object. ExtremeNet \cite{zhou2019bottom} predicts an octagon mask for each instance that consists of 8 extreme points using a keypoint estimation network, achieving mAP of 34.6\% on COCO dataset. ExtremeNet 's backbone is Hourglass-104 \cite{newell2016stacked}, which is extremely heavy and requires a lot of time.
ESE-Seg \cite{xu2019explicit} estimated the shape of the detected objects by using an explicit shape encoding and decoding framework. It is based on Inner-center Radius (IR) and fits it using Chebyshev polynomial fitting, and YOLOv3 is the object detector. ESE-Seg archives mAP of 21.6\% on the COCO dataset.
PolarMask \cite{xie2020polarmask} was published concurrently with ESE-Seg but conducted independently. PolarMask proposed an additional polar IoU loss. Also, it does not require box detection, but it is necessary for ESE-Seg. PolarMask outperforms ESE-Seg by mAP of 7.5\% on the COCO dataset.

FourierNet \cite{benbarka2020fouriernet} uses polygon representation to represent each mask. It is a fully convolutional method with no anchor boxes, a shape vector is predicted and then converted into contour points using Fourier transform. The predicted boundaries are smoother than PolarMask. FourierNet achieves 24.3\% mAP on the COCO dataset at 26.6 FPS using 2080Ti GPU, which is not suitable for real-time applications. PolyTransform \cite{liang2020polytransform} combined the power of the current segmentation approaches and polygon-based methods to produce geometry-preserving masks. Instance masks are generated using segmentation network, and then the masks are converted to a set of polygons using deforming network to fit the object boundaries better. It achieved mAP of 44.6\% on the Cityscapes dataset when the model was trained on the COCO dataset. Our method Insta-YOLO follows this paradigm without any upsampling technique, unlike others. The polygon of each instance regresses using N point, where N is a hyperparameter representing the number of points for each instance, and we achieve comparable mAP at much higher FPS than other methods.

\section{Methodology}
\label{sec-methodology}
In this section, our proposed model is detailed. Data generation is demonstrated, followed by the network architecture and our loss functions.

\subsection{Data Generation}
\label{sec-data-generation}

To be able to train a conventional object detection algorithm, ground truth needs to be represented by the center of the box, width, and height which are only sufficient for box regression and not a polygon. On the other hand, segmentation ground truth is usually provided as dense pixel-wise annotation. Although Insta-YOLO predicts a dense mask output, it takes only object contours as inputs without dense annotation. Therefore, a conversion tool is implemented to adapt the segmentation masks to polygon representation with an arbitrary number of coordinate points as a pre-processing step. For this task, the algorithm in \cite{teh1989detection} is adopted to detect the dominant points on a curved shape without the need for hand-crafted parameters.

To be able to train Insta-YOLO, a fixed number of vertices is needed to represent the object mask. To achieve that, two ways are presented. The first one is simpler but less accurate. It relies on sampling the desired number of vertices with a fixed step which is calculated according to

\begin{equation}\label{fixed_step}
   Step =\frac{\text{\# of dominant points}}{\text{\# of desired vertices}}
\end{equation}

The second method is more complex but efficient enough to guarantee the most accurate representation for the object mask.
Using \cite{douglas1973algorithms}, we shrink the number of points needed to represent the object mask. It is based on the Hausdorff distance between the curves to get the most representative simplified curve. The simplified curve consists of a subset of the points that defined the original curve. We use a parametric version from the algorithm which needs to define an $\epsilon$ that is an indication for how accurate the new simplified curve should be, a wise selection of $\epsilon$ is required to get the correct output. To avoid setting it manually, we use binary search technique to search for the best $\epsilon$ by changing the $\gamma$ as shown in Equ. \ref{eq_eq2}, which determines the highest accuracy with the desired number of points iteratively.

\begin{equation}\label{eq_eq2}
   \epsilon = \gamma_{B\cdot S} \ast \text{Arc - Length}
\end{equation}

This technique enables us to represent the object mask with an adaptive step instead of a fixed-step. The adaptive step could be considered an object-aware step adapted to the object curvature to fit it as much as possible with the desired number of vertices. Fig.\ref{fig-fixed_adaptive_step} demonstrates the importance of our proposed adaptive step polygon. Curves lines are represented with more dense points than straight lines. Using fixed-step representation, the vehicle's front curved side is represented by 3 points only, i.e; points 1,2,3 in red, while the bottom of the car is represented by 4 points, i.e; points 6,7,8,9 although it is a straight line which can be represented only by two points. On the other hand, adaptive-step represents the vehicle's front side as 4 points providing the maximum accuracy for the curve, and represents the bottom as two points only, i.e; points 10,11. This mechanism helps the network learn attention on curved lines maximizing the accuracy while minimizing redundant points for easier curves which maximizes efficiency.

To obtain the optimal number of points which best represents objects of the dataset, an automatic method is adopted for such computation. We set an initial value for the number of points and compute IoU with the segmentation mask. We increase the number of points iteratively until we observe no significant change in IoU.

\begin{figure}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{Figures/points.png}
  \caption{\textbf{Top:} Fixed representation for contour points. \textbf{Middle:} Variable step representation. Points 2,3 show the benefit of variable step compared to fixed steps. \textbf{Bottom:} Another valid representation demonstrating that there is no unique set of contour points for each instance}
  \label{fig-points}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Network Architecture}
\label{sec-Network-Architecture}

\begin{figure*}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[width=1\textwidth]{Figures/network_arch.png}
  \caption{Insta-YOLO architecture which is inspired by YOLO, the right part illustrate our adaptation in the output layer.}
  \label{fig-network-arch}
\end{figure*}

Our backbone builds upon the popular YoloV3 \cite{redmon2018yolov3} algorithm as shown in Fig. \ref{fig-network-arch}. The output layer is adapted to follow equation \ref{eq-instayolo-outlayer} where the four coordinates were replaced by the number vertices which represent the object masks and the one is the mask confidence.

\begin{equation}
\label{eq-instayolo-outlayer}
output_layer=n_{anchros}[n_{vertices}1+n_{classes}]
\end{equation}

\subsection{Losses Representations}
\label{losses-Representations}

Our proposed method four loss functions as shown in Equ. \ref{eq_total-loss} that will be discussed in details in the following section.

\begin{equation}
\label{eq_total-loss}
\begin{split}
\text{Insta-YOLO loss} = \text{Classification loss} +\text{Confidence loss}\\ +\text{Localization loss}
\end{split}
\end{equation}

Two of which are inherited from YoloV3 \cite{redmon2016you} which are classification and confidence loss. We adapt the algorithm to our problem by adding two novel loss functions which are regression loss and IoU loss. We study the impact of our added loss functions and provide results in Tables \ref{Table:airbus-results},\ref{Table:carvana-results}, \ref{Table:cityscape-results}.

\subsubsection{Classification and Confidence loss}

If an object is detected, the classification loss at each cell is the squared error of the class conditional probabilities for each class
\begin{equation}\label{eq_eq4}
\text{Classification loss}=\sum_{i=0}^{S^2} \mathds{1}_i^{obj}\sum_{\text{c}\in \text{classes}} (p_i (c)- p_i^{'} (c))^2
\end{equation}
where \\
$\mathds{1}_i^{obj}=1$ if an object appears in cell $i$, otherwise 0.\\
$p_i^{'} (c)$ denotes the conditional class probability for class $c$ in cell $i$.

The confidence loss is measuring the abjectness of the box as follows

\begin{equation}
\label{eq_eq5}
\begin{split}
\text{Confidence loss}=\sum_{i=0}^{S^2}\sum_{j=0}^{B} \mathds{1}_{ij}^{obj}(C_i - C_i^{'})^2 \\
+ \lambda_{noobj}
\sum_{i=0}^{S^2}\sum_{j=0}^{B} \mathds{1}_{ij}^{noobj}(C_i - C_i^{'})^2
\end{split}
\end{equation}

where \\
$C_i^{'}$ is the box confidence score of the box $j$ in cell $i$.\\
$\mathds{1}_{ij}^{obj}=1$ if the $j$ th boundary box in cell $i$ is responsible for detecting the object, otherwise 0.\\
$\mathds{1}_{ij}^{noobj}$ is the complement of $\mathds{1}_{ij}^{obj}$.\\
$\lambda_{noobj}$ weights down the loss when detecting background.

\subsubsection{Localization Loss}

We modified the localization part, which is considered one of our contributions. The original YOLO \cite{redmon2018yolov3} applies mean square error as a regression loss for the center, width, and height of the box. In our case, we don't predict these measurements as we have polygons instead of boxes, as described in \ref{sec-Network-Architecture}. Accordingly, different localization losses are examined to fit our new problem.

\textbf{Regression Loss}

As opposed to conventional mean-square error function, using the Log Cosh loss which is approximately equal to $(x ^ 2) / 2$ for small $x$ and to $abs(x) - log(2)$ for large $x$. This means that it works mostly like the mean squared error, but will not be aggressively affected by outliers. We maintain the same advantages of Huber loss \cite {huber1973robust}, while keeping our function differentiable.

\textbf{IoU Loss}

Figure \ref{fig-points} demonstrates that there is no unique representation for the object mask using a fixed number of vertices. Both right and left sides of the figure show almost identical mask for the vehicle. However there is slight difference between the points representing the mask as highlighted by the red points. Both masks are valid and both set of points are also valid. On the other hand, regression loss forces the network to predict the the contour points exactly as the annotation. This means that if the points were slightly shifted on the same contour, they will be penalized although it is a valid solution. This behavior makes the regression loss not enough for our problem as it will mislead the network and negatively affect the learned features. Therefore, two IoU losses have been added to our localization loss to be more suitable to this problem.

First, we follow the loss provided by \cite{xie2020polarmask} where the the vertices are converted from Cartesian to polar. The approach relies on approximating the area that is produced by the predicted polygon and the ground truth polygon to spherical shape, which enables us to convert the exact equation \begin{equation}\label{eq_eq6}
\text{IoU}= \frac{\int_{0}^{2\pi}\frac{1}{2}\text{min}(d,d^\ast)^2 d\theta}{\int_{0}^{2\pi}\frac{1}{2}\text{max}(d,d^\ast)^2 d\theta}
\end{equation}

to a discretized and approximated version of it
\begin{equation}\label{eq_eq7}
\text{Polar IoU Loss}=\log \frac{\sum_{i=1}^{n}d_{max}}{\sum_{i=1}^{n}d_{min}}
\end{equation}

Second, we introduce a new loss function as described in Equ.\ref{eq_area} to get the area of polygon and adapt it to represent Cartesian IOU loss as follows:
\begin{enumerate}
\item Convert Cartesian vertices to polar representation by calculating the distance and theta for every vertex relative to the polygon center according to Equ.\ref{eq_distance} and Equ. \ref{eq-theta-equ}
\item Sort the Cartesian vertices clockwise or anticlockwise, in the ground truth and predicted polygon, in the same manner, w.r.t $\theta$.
\item Get the minimum and maximum vertices between the sorted vertices of GT and predicted ones w.r.t the calculated distance. The minimum values model the intersection between GT and predicted polygon and the maximum vertices represent the union.
\item The final IOU loss will be as in Equ.\ref{eq-car-iou-loss}
\end{enumerate}

\begin{strip}

\begin{equation}\label{eq_area}
\text{Area}=\left|\frac{(x_1 y_2 - y_1 x_2)+(x_2 y_3 - y_2 x_3)\cdots+(x_n y_1 - y_n x_1)}{2}\right|
\end{equation}

\begin{equation}\label{eq_distance}
\text{D}=\sqrt{(x_n-x_c)^2+(y_n-y_c)^2}
\end{equation}

\begin{equation}\label{eq-theta-equ}
\theta = \begin{cases} \mbox 180+tan^{-1}\left(\dfrac{y_n-y_c}{x_n-x_c}\right), & \mbox{if } x_n-x_c < 0 \hspace{0.25cm}\&\hspace{0.25cm} y_n-y_c > 0 \\
                      \mbox 180-tan^{-1}\left(\dfrac{y_n-y_c}{x_n-x_c}\right), & \mbox{if } x_n-x_c < 0 \hspace{0.25cm}\&\hspace{0.25cm} y_n-y_c < 0  \\
                      \mbox tan^{-1}\left(\dfrac{y_n-y_c}{x_n-x_c}\right), & \mbox{otherwise}
                      \end{cases}
\end{equation}

\begin{equation}
\label{eq-car-iou-loss}
\text{Cartesian IoU Loss}=\log \left( \frac{(x_1^{max} y_2^{max} - y_1^{max} x_2^{max})+(x_2^{max} y_3^{max} - y_2^{max} x_3^{max})\cdots+(x_n^{max} y_1^{max} - y_n^{max} x_1^{max})}{(x_1^{min} y_2^{min} - y_1^{min} x_2^{min})+(x_2^{min} y_3^{min} - y_2^{min} x_3^{min})\cdots+(x_n^{min} y_1^{min} - y_n^{min} x_1^{min})}\right)
\end{equation}
\end{strip}

where\\
$x_n$ is the $x$ coordinates of vertex $n$ and $x_c$ is the $x$ coordinates of the center\\
$y_n$ is $y$ coordinate of the nth vertex and $y_c$ is the $y$ coordinates of the center\\
$N$ is the number of vertices.

We argue that our method is more accurate than \cite{xie2020polarmask}, which approximates an arbitrary polygon to a spherical shape to get its area, but our method doesn't make this aggressive approximation.
For fast convergence and to achieve the highest accuracy, we formulate the localization loss as a weighted combination of the regression loss and the IoU loss, as shown in Equ. \ref{eq_localizationloss}, at the beginning of the training the weight $\lambda$ is one and start decreasing while training to help the model focusing on outputting vertices near to the GT which is considered as warm-up epochs, after that start to inject the IoU loss gradually to make the model more sensitive and aware to the curvature information.
\begin{equation}\label{eq_localizationloss}
   \text{Localization loss} = \lambda \ast \text{Regression - Loss} + (1 - \lambda) \ast \text{IOU - Loss}
\end{equation}

IoU losses are known for their inaccurate predictions for self-intersecting polygons where one side crosses over another. To avoid this problem, we use the loss after several epochs where the model has learned already not to predict self-intersecting polygons.

\begin{table}[!ht]
\caption{Instance Segmentation Results on Cityscapes}
\centering
\label{Table:cityscape-results}
\begin{tabular}{cccc}
\hline
Experiment          & $AP_{50}$       & $AP_{75}$      & Frame rate  \\ \hline
Insta-YOLO with \\ regression loss    & 74.17\%     & 22\%    & \textbf{56 FPS}   \\ \hline

Insta-YOLO with \\ Polar IoU Loss   & 84\%  & 43\%    & \textbf{56 FPS}   \\ \hline

Insta-YOLO with \\ Cartesian IoU Loss   & 89\%  & 56\%    & \textbf{56 FPS}   \\ \hline

Polar-Mask   & 91.8\%  & 81.4\%    & 28 FPS    \\ \hline

YOLACT \\ \cite{bolya2019yolact}   & \textbf{93\%}  & \textbf{83\%}       & 32 FPS  \\ \hline

\end{tabular}
\end{table}

\section{Experimental Setup}
In this section, we provide details about the datasets we use. This is followed by description of the network setup to train our models.

\subsection{Datasets}
We evaluate our algorithm on three well-known datasets with different applications. Carvana \cite{carvana} and Cityscapes \cite{Cordts2016Cityscapes} focus on the application of vehicles detection and autonomous driving scenes. Each of both datasets consists of 5k images. Airbus Ship dataset \cite{airbus} focuses on aerial images of ships. We filter 13k images out of the whole dataset showing reasonably-sized ships. For all datasets, we split 80\% of the data for training and 20\% for validation.

\subsection{Training Setup}
In our experiments, YoloV3 \cite{redmon2018yolov3} model was used with pre-trained ResNet-50 encoder. Decoder has been adapted to predict multiple contour points. The models are trained end-to-end for 80 epochs with schedule weighted factor $\lambda$ according to \ref{eq:schedule_lamda}. This helps the model to focus on regression loss in beginning of training to avoid self-intersecting polygons. Later, IoU loss is used gradually to improve segmentation accuracy. Adam optimizer is used with learning rate of $1e^{-4}$.

\begin{equation}\label{eq:schedule_lamda}
\lambda =\text{max}(0.7822 + \frac{0.3429}{epoch}, 0.2)
\end{equation}

\begin{table}[!ht]
\caption{Instance Segmentation Results on CARVANA}
\centering
\label{Table:carvana-results}
\begin{tabular}{cccc}
\hline
Experiment                        & $AP_{50}$ & $AP_{75}$ & Frame rate  \\ \hline
Insta-YOLO \\With regression loss   & 86\%  & 68\%    & \textbf{56 FPS}   \\ \hline

Insta-YOLO \\With Polar IoU Loss   & 92.73\%  & 82\%  & \textbf{56 FPS}  \\ \hline

Insta-YOLO \\With Cartesian IoU Loss   & \textbf{99\%}  & 84\%   & \textbf{56 FPS}  \\ \hline

YOLACT \\\cite{bolya2019yolact}   & \textbf{99\%}  & 98\%       & 32 FPS  \\ \hline

MaskRCNN   & \textbf{99\%}  & \textbf{98.5\%}       & 7 FPS  \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

\begin{figure}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[width=0.48\textwidth]{Figures/iou_vs_regression.png}
  \caption{\textbf{Top:} Result on dataset using regression only. \textbf{Bottom:} Result using combined localization loss.}
  \label{fig-reg-vs-seg}
\end{figure}

\section{Experimental Results}
\label{sec-experiment}

In this section, we demonstrate qualitative and quantitative results of our approach for instance segmentation. This is followed by details about our experiments to predict oriented bounding boxes which is required for various applications.

\subsection{Instance Segmentation}

Tables \ref{Table:carvana-results} and \ref{Table:cityscape-results} illustrate the impact of our approach on Carvana \cite{carvana} and Cityscapes datasets \cite{Cordts2016Cityscapes}. With polar IoU from \cite{xie2020polarmask} loss we obtain improvement of 6\% and 10\% respectively in accuracy in both datasets relative to the baseline. Additional 7\% and 5\% improvement has been obtained using our proposed loss. Our model provides slightly less accuracy than Yolact, however it runs at 2.4 times the speed. For fair comparison with Yolact, the encoder of Yolact has been changed to DarkNet-53 which helps avoid misleading results. Figure\ref{fig-reg-vs-seg} visualizes the benefit of our proposed loss function which maximizes the accuracy of prediction.

Fig.\ref{fig-reg-vs-seg} demonstrates the benefit of using our combined localization loss compared to regression only on Carvana dataset \cite{carvana}. Higher accuracy has been obtained using the combined loss. Fig.\ref{fig-cityscapes} shows our instance segmentation results on Cityscapes dataset. It is worth noting that our results are reported on "vehicles" class only.

\begin{figure}
  \centering
  \includegraphics[width=0.415\textwidth]{Figures/cityscapes_vertical.png}
  \caption{Visualization for Insta-YOLO output on Cityscapes dataset.}
  \label{fig-cityscapes}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Oriented Bounding Boxes}

Various applications such as \cite{tang2017arbitrary} and \cite{ali2018yolo3d} require prediction of oriented bounding boxes. Such method requires an additional regression operation to be performed to predict the angle of the box. Conventional oriented boxes methods suffer from angle encoding problem. For practical implementation constraints, box angle is predicted in the range of 0-180 degrees. This means that a slight change of a box oriented with 2 degrees can cause the prediction jump from 2 to 178 which might mislead the network and cause aggressive jumps in prediction.

Insta-YOLO does not have this limitation. Since the four box points are independent of each other, the resulting polygon will be oriented without additional parameter to learn and free of the angle encoding problem. Table \ref{Table:airbus-results} shows that our algorithm supersedes \cite{ali2018yolo3d} in accuracy by 5\% and runs at 2.7 times the speed, while it provides competitive results compared to Yolact
at 1.57 times the speed.

\begin{table}[!ht]
\caption{Oriented Bounding Boxes Results on AirBus Ships}
\centering
\label{Table:airbus-results}
\begin{tabular}{cccc}
\hline
Experiment       & $AP_{50}$        & $AP_{75}$         & Frame rate  \\ \hline
Insta-YOLO   & \textbf{78.16\%}  & 45\%    & \textbf{56 FPS}   \\ \hline

Orinted YOLO, \\ YOLO3D \\ \cite{ali2018yolo3d}   & 73.4\%      & 21.98\%       & \textbf{56 FPS}  \\ \hline

YOLACT \\ \cite{bolya2019yolact}      & 74\%       & \textbf{48\%}       & 32 FPS  \\ \hline

\end{tabular}
\end{table}

\section{Conclusion}
\label{sec-conclusion}

In this paper, we proposed a novel algorithm for instance segmentation. The algorithm runs in real-time at 35 fps which is 2.5 times the speed of state-of-the-art algorithms with competitive results in terms of accuracy. A new loss function has been proposed to adapt YoloV3 algorithm to our problem. Ablation study has been performed demonstrating the benefit of our proposed loss. Our algorithm is evaluated on three well-known datasets, namely, Cityscapes \cite{Cordts2016Cityscapes}, Carvana \cite{carvana} and Airbus-Ship datasets \cite{airbus}. Both qualitative and quantitative results on the three datasets demonstrate the benefit of our algorithm in terms of accuracy, speed and efficiency. The proposed algorithm is highly generic where it can replace conventional boxes at higher accuracy as well oriented boxes for various applications as illustrated in our results compared to state-of-the-art methods.

\medskip
{\small
\bibliographystyle{icml2020}
\newpage

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
Chapter: 6 Small Group Meetings
« Previous: 5 Session III: Implications for Engineering Education
Suggested Citation:"6 Small Group Meetings." National Academy of Engineering. 2010. Engineering, Social Justice, and Sustainable Community Development: Summary of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12887.
Small Group Meetings
The workshop was designed to allow time for small group discussions. Four small group meetings were held after Session III on the first day and on the morning of the second day. The first two groups were asked the same question: in regard to ethics, sustainability, and social justice in the engineering profession, how do we get "there"? Group 1 approached the subject from the engineers' perspective, and Group 2 approached it from social perspectives. Group 3 was asked to discuss new approaches in engineering ethics research and education. These groups were asked to use workshop presentations and discussions as a basis for their deliberations. Group 4 discussed how the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and professional engineering societies might encourage efforts by engineers to promote social justice and sustainable community development. Participants attended one of the four groups. Afterward, rapporteurs for each group described highlights of their discussions in a full plenary session.
The rapporteurs' reports follow; for the names of group leaders, see the agenda and the list of participants in Appendixes A and B. The opinions in the following descriptions were expressed in one or more of the discussions, but they are not consensus opinions nor are they the opinions of the sponsors.
All groups agreed that the words "ethics," "sustainability," and "social justice" are difficult to define, and much time was spent talking about what they mean in an engineering context and how they should be interpreted. Indeed, the issue of defining the terms of the workshop took center stage, and each group attempted to come up with its own definitions. Plenary discussions following the summaries by the rapporteurs revealed sharp differences in opinion about the concept of social
justice and its implications, including its implications for engineering. Despite these differences, one group put forth the following "declaration for engineering:"
Engineers and engineering societies have a heritage of concern for ethics and ethical issues. Yet in fulfilling its professional responsibilities, engineering has for too long neglected questions about social justice and sustainable community development. As in other professions, engineers are obligated to serve the public interest. To honor this commitment to public service, engineers should pay greater attention to social justice and sustainable community development. In this way, engineering can take a leadership role in developing a vision of a profession that provides integrated solutions.
GROUP 1, ENGINEERS' PERSPECTIVES
Karen Smilowitz, Northwestern University, rapporteur of Group 1, first noted that the difficulty of defining terms, even among like-minded people with common concerns, is indicative of their complexity. Group 1 ultimately decided that, for their purposes, getting to social justice requires "achieving equality in human rights" and "equity in human opportunity." The group then moved on to a discussion of how to reach that goal. They identified the following essential participants in that effort: academia (at both the undergraduate and graduate levels), professional organizations, industry, government (local, state, and federal), and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
Group 1 discussed how engineers, engineering societies, and employers could identify pathways, solutions, and opportunities to promote just and sustainable applications in engineering and societal systems. If engineers are engaged early in the development of an engineering solution to a problem, they can do more than provide sound engineering advice; they can question whether social justice and sustainability goals are also being met by that particular project. They can also propose sustainable solutions, not just with a 12-month horizon, but with a 10- or 20-year horizon to encompass the long-term social impacts of their work.
"[Y]ou don't just go into a community and say, 'Here's the solution, see you later,' but make sure that these are sustainable solutions; this is one of the keys to sustainability."
Karen Smilowitz, Northwestern University
Engineers should work with social scientists, group members said, to ensure that they are really "listening" to the populations they intend to serve. They have an opportunity and perhaps a responsibility to engage "customers," expand choices, and empower these customers, as was done in the project in Kenya described in the panel on "early career" engineers. This particular project was undertaken with the cultural conditions and needs of the end users taken into account. Engineers should also continually educate the populations affected by the engineering solutions they provide. Performance and economic goals should not be the only ones taken into account in determining the success of a project—environmental, ecosystem, and social equity goals should all be considered. Project designs should also include a commitment to outcomes assessment and data gathering to determine the effects on the population.
The group concluded that academia is not currently structured to reward interdisciplinary work—which is crucial to developing curricula and programs on ethics and social justice. The group suggested that the tenure process and academic funding structures be altered to take into account the importance of interdisciplinary efforts.
Another way to publicize and legitimize these efforts to traditional practitioners of engineering is to encourage leading technical journals to feature humanitarian work. Disseminating and publicizing the social justice and sustainability aspects of engineering projects may also tap into the enthusiasm of many students for making a difference and show that there is a place for them to call "home" once they graduate. If the market potential of "sustainable development" can be demonstrated, this would tap into students' entrepreneurial spirit. Universities must take the lead in broadening the student knowledge base, giving them multidisciplinary exposures, adjusting teaching techniques, and focusing more on the humanitarian aspects of engineering solutions to problems. Schools can also promote opportunities for students to work in the real world with NGOs, the United Nations, and similar organizations through summer- and semester-long cooperative learning programs. The group also noted that engineering societies should lead the way by adopting a coherent message and providing continuing education opportunities.
GROUP 2, SOCIAL PERSPECTIVES
Michael Loui, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, presented the summary for Group 2, which discussed how engineering projects (e.g., interstate highways that devastate minority communities in urban areas, flood levees in New Orleans) can have unintended social consequences. These negative consequences might be a function of engineers operating far from decision makers and with "blinders" on in large organizations such as the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and others in the private sector, that have been shown to ignore the social and, often, the environmental consequences of their work. When faced with these problems, individual engineers need and deserve assistance; professional societies should assume responsibility for questioning the structure and functioning of these large organizations.
Several members of Group 2 argued that engineers should feel compelled to think about long-term consequences and sustainability. Even if this is not an assigned part of their jobs, they should feel an individual professional responsibility that is an integral aspect of who they are as engineers. It is true that engineers often work under constraints set by others, but they should also think about their tasks in a sociotechnical context and focus on the ends as well as the means to achieving their goal.
Along the same lines, the group urged that, although engineers cannot take full responsibility for setting social goals, they and their societies should strive to increase awareness of these issues among engineers and to develop a process of engagement with clients, employers, and the public to discuss the implementation of their work in a responsible way.
"[O]ften engineering work is divorced from the social context."
Michael Loui, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The ethos of the engineering profession should encourage engineers to contribute to social justice and sustainability. This ethos should be so intertwined with the profession that it becomes common for employers to support efforts by their employees to undertake projects in pursuit of these goals. Codes for the profession should recognize this obligation.
Engineers and engineering societies should engage in an intense dialogue with scholars in the humanities and social sciences on how
engineering can serve the cause of social justice. In turn, members of those disciplines should engage with engineers to determine how they can help them work toward these goals. Engineers should also engage in a public conversation on social justice issues and ensure that representatives of typically disadvantaged groups are involved.
GROUP 3, ETHICS EDUCATION
Bruce Seely, Michigan Technological University, spoke for the third breakout group, which was asked to identify successful programs that address social justice and sustainability issues. The group began by praising many of the programs with which the workshop participants were affiliated. They then identified other programs around the country that focus on social justice, sustainability, and related topics. The more important question, the group suggested, is whether these programs have moved beyond individual initiatives to gain institutional support and whether they can be reasonably exported and duplicated.
The question of "who should teach what" must be addressed when an institution is considering whether, and how to incorporate social justice and humanitarian concerns into the curriculum. Many engineering instructors are not well prepared to teach ethics in a substantive, professional way, which raises an important question—should there be new required courses, with the involvement of humanities and social science faculty, or, perhaps, ethics material be integrated into courses throughout the curriculum?
To define "ethics" in this context, the group decided they needed more information. For instance, what is the appropriate level for classroom discourse? Discussions could include meta-ethics (looking for conceptual clarification); normative ethics (which, like practical, professional, and applied ethics, focuses on ethical implications of particular problems); paramedic ethics (encouraging professionals to use rules of thumb and standards of practice to address ethical issues); and even pop ethics (online blogs by professionals and members of the public who express their opinions on a wide variety of ethical issues in science and engineering).
Understanding the distinctions among these approaches is crucial to teaching ethics, they said. Teaching in context is an important aspect of all successful engineering instruction, but teaching ethical engineering "in context" will require adjusting materials and discussions to engineering students (e.g., students working in a lab) who may not recognize,
or may even flatly deny, that there are ethical considerations in their work.
The group then turned to a discussion of the purpose of introducing ethics in engineering education in the first place. Since many people understand the term "ethical," as in "ethical engineer," to mean a person who follows general moral precepts, some engineers may be uncomfortable with ethical precepts as a professional goal. Several group members noted that introducing and improving ethical reasoning, particularly in professional contexts, might be more easily accepted.
The concept of social justice, which addresses issues in social and economic contexts, often includes "ethics" but is more political. Ultimately, some argued, the common characteristic of sustainability and social justice is "values," which, perhaps, should be introduced to students as a design parameter. Engineers should listen, rather than impose; end the expert-user divide; and take into account local and indigenous knowledge in making engineering decisions.
Successful programs in ethics bring critical thinking into the process in a variety of ways, such as asking new and different kinds of questions. Therefore, it is important to introduce a variety of perspectives on how to address problems, from feminism to race and ethnic studies to postcolonial studies, and so on.
Group 3 also took up some broad issues related to bringing ethics into engineering education, such as reexamining structures in the curriculum that lead students to feel "they must cheat to survive." The group considered whether the "first" engineering degree should be a six-year master's degree, that perhaps the four-year curriculum is too crowded and too short for the complete development of engineering students. They drew a distinction between training and education. Engineering programs should ask themselves whether they are producing "technicians" or "professional engineers."
Finally, the group discussed how new media could be used in sophisticated ways to transmit the codified information in engineering curricula. This would leave more time for the discussion of issues of societal and ethical importance. Given that there are few models to follow, the best advice now, the group suggested, is to "do whatever you can make work."
In considering the role of the Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society (CEES), the group noted that it would be helpful to know how deeply engaged the NAE membership is in these issues. How many would be willing to participate in disseminating and supporting the
ideas generated by CEES? Perhaps CEES could focus on developing a portfolio of cases to assist engineering faculty, who often have very limited preparation for teaching ethics. In addition, CEES could lead an effort at the graduate level to ensure that potential new faculty members are familiar with ethical materials and issues before they become instructors. CEES could also provide assistance in engaging social science and humanities faculty.
Many in the group felt that there might be an emerging professional identity for instructors who teach engineering ethics, which raises a number of questions CEES might investigate. Is this a new branch of engineering? If so, what should it be called and what would its curriculum include? How would a major in this area affect a career? In an educational environment that values publications, research, and grants, how could the risks of someone getting "stuck" with no clear path to tenure be mitigated?
The answers to these questions will not be the same for all schools. Even at large research universities, where NSF efforts in grant making have made some inroads in introducing ethics, there is still little tolerance for a career path based on ethics. Smaller schools, however, might be more open to introducing new perspectives to their faculty. The approach would vary, depending on the audience, as will the response.
GROUP 4, PROFESSIONAL SOCIETIES
Joe Herkert, Arizona State University, Polytechnic Campus, was the rapporteur for Group 4, which focused on what NAE and other professional societies can do. The group suggested that NAE attempt to define the meaning of "social justice" in the context of engineering and then provide a voice for the profession with an appropriate message. The American Association for Engineering Societies (AAES) and a number of other societies have established forums on sustainability, and it would be useful to expand on those efforts, with NAE presenting the idea to their boards (based on the assumption that leadership must be engaged before members are likely to become involved). NAE can, perhaps, use the annual Convocation of Academic Engineering and Technical Societies to promote this idea.
To encourage changes in professional practices, societies must maintain a highly visible, continuing dialogue on these issues. Members of Group 4 suggested that professional societies carefully develop overt and covert messages on engineering, social justice, and sustainable com-
munity development and related issues, such as diversity in engineering. They could sponsor workshops in the corporate world, thus providing venues for sharing best practices and discussing issues of engineering and business ethics, and they could host meetings of business executives to discuss the need for more diversity in engineering and engineering leadership. In addition, professional societies should recognize exemplars with prominent conference sessions, awards, and prizes.
The group discussed how CEES could work with other engineering organizations, such as AAES and the World Federation of Engineering Organizations, to promote international cooperation on sustainability and social justice, as well as a focus on ethical leadership and organizational ethics that go beyond legal requirements.
NAE and other professional organizations could promote career opportunities provided by Engineers Without Borders and Engineers for a Sustainable World. Engineering students, including women and underrepresented minorities, are interested in the kinds of projects undertaken by these organizations, as well as in combining entrepreneurship with social justice and humanitarian goals.
Many in the group argued that professional codes of ethics should be reexamined and modified to encourage sustainability and social justice as professional goals. Codes of ethics might also be improved by explicitly recognizing multiple-value perspectives and expanding the self-policing efforts of engineering professions. Finally, the group noted that ABET could elevate the importance of ethics and sustainability, citing the American Socieety of Civil Engineers "Red Book" as an example. They also argued that more emphasis should be put on reviewing program performance in ethics areas as rigorously as in technical areas and suggested that ABET might revise its general criterion 3f: "Understand professional and ethical issues" to include the phrase "including sustainability and social justice." Sustainability and social justice could become standard parts of continuing education to raise their visibility in the community of professional engineers.
Next: 7 Roundtable Discussion: The Intersection of Humanitarian Action, Social Justice, and Sustainable Community Development »


Tulku Lobsang Rinpoche held the international Gang Gyok Day with hundreds of participants in Dharamsala - India. The run started at the upper TCV (Tibetan Children Village) and ended at the Tsuglagkhang (the temple of His Holiness the Dalai Lama).
The run was held for health and happiness around the world.


text:
Croatia, the War, and the Future
Ina Vukic - Croatia: people, politics, history, economy, transition from communism to democracy
You are here: Home / Uncategorized / Dishing Out Crumbs To Croatian Diaspora In New Croatian Citizenship Amendment Act
Dishing Out Crumbs To Croatian Diaspora In New Croatian Citizenship Amendment Act
November 3, 2019 by inavukic 18 Comments
Sample Croatian Citizenship Certificate
The Croatian Parliament has on October 18, 2019, passed the Croatian Citizenship Amendment Act (Zakon o izmjenama i dopunama zakona o hrvatskom državljanstvu) and the amendments will come into effect as of, and including, 1st January 2020. So what are the changes/amendments to the Croatian Citizenship Act or law that are of particular interest to people of Croatian origins living outside of Croatia?
AMENDMENT 1:
Automatic Right to Croatian citizenship based on ancestry/descent has not been extended to 2nd, 3rd, etc. generations of people of Croatian national ancestry – it is still limited to person born abroad to at least one parent who at the time of the child's birth was/is a citizen of the Republic of Croatia. Hence, if you like, this automatic right to citizenship has fundamentally remained the same as it was during communist Yugoslavia times; the only detail that is changed in this amendment is that the age limit within which a child born abroad to Croatian citizens must be registered with the Croatian authorities (e.g. Consular/Diplomatic Mission) is now 21 years of age (instead of 18) but, also, extended beyond the age of 21 IF within the next TWO YEARS he/she submits an application for entry into the register of Croatian citizens, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs determines that there is no obstacle for this.
There is no special consideration being given in this to Croatian nationals (e.g. like Israel's long-standing "Right of Return Act" for people of Jewish extraction). The only special consideration is given to existing Croatian citizenship of a parent at time of child's birth. While Israel (and several other countries) in its laws that extend the automatic right to citizenship in its legislative development evidently considered the history of the Jewish diaspora, the Croatian law completely disregarded the history of the Croatian diaspora or emigration. Particularly the fact that through several generations Croats in diaspora refused to maintain their Yugoslav citizenship/passport (which at the time of declaring Croatia's secession from Yugoslavia translated into Croatian citizenship) as a matter of political and other principle – they fled from Austro-Hungarian Empire, they fled from Kingdom of Yugoslavia then they fled from communist Yugoslavia and, therefore, their automatic right to citizenship got lost in time. Any new Croatian citizenship law had an obligation to consider these unfortunate circumstances and especially so when one looks at the fact that all generations of Croatian emigrants in the diaspora played a key role in achieving Croatia's independence – thus demonstrating everlasting sense of loyalty and belonging to Croatia, their country of origins.
While the Croatian government boasts of its newest changes to the citizenship Act the same, in fact, do not provide any truly special provisions for automatic right to citizenship on basis of Croatian nationality ancestry (extending the age of a child to 21 for registering for citizenship does not truly represent a special consideration) and yet, a day doesn't go by that someone from the same government is not urging people of Croatian national ancestry to return and live in Croatia!
One reads, sees and hears these days in Croatian media government officers and HDZ politicians that the HDZ government has with this citizenship amendment Act delivered on its promise to make the acquisition of Croatian citizenship easier for the Croatian diaspora! To me and to many, what this amendment brings is a handful of crumbs that barely touch upon the national goal of boosting Croatia's population with returnees.
It needs to be said here that one of the main reasons the government embarked upon amending the citizenship Act is entailed in the Government Program of the Republic of Croatia 2016-2020, and its context for demographic reconstruction, which recognises the fact that one of the strategic goals of the Government of the Republic of Croatia is to stop emigration, affirmation of Croatian emigration and facilitating the acquisition of Croatian citizenship for members of the Croatian people abroad and Croatian emigration, and proposes to liberalise the conditions for acquiring Croatian citizenship for members of the Croatian people abroad and Croatian emigration. (Page 17 Government Program of Republic of Croatia 2016-2020)
But as with other laws this Act the government passed also is a tragic mismatch with the government's rhetoric and its expressed goals – to strongly attract Croatians living abroad to come and live in Croatia!
What this Act has done is somewhat made it easier to acquire Croatian citizenship via naturalisation for all aliens as well as for people of Croatian national descent. No special treatment or consideration of Croatian national ancestry. That is a shame and a great loss to Croatia, indeed.
Acquisition of Croatian citizenship via naturalisation process belongs to all people of Croatian ancestry whose parent/s at the time of his/her birth abroad were not citizens of Croatia and to all other nationals and aliens. The amendment includes: that Regulations for citizenship via naturalisation will be finalised within six months of the new Act coming into effect; this includes Regulations on the manner of verifying knowledge of the Croatian language and Latin script, Croatian culture and social order in the procedures for acquiring Croatian citizenship (Official Gazette, No. 118/12) with the provisions of this Act within six months from the day this Law enters into force i.e. from 1st January 2020).
AENDMENT 3:
Insertion of new Article 24b to the Act. It stipulates the solemn oath to be given by citizenship recipient: "I swear by my honour that as a Croatian citizen I will abide by the Constitution and the law and respect the legal order, culture and customs in the Republic of Croatia."
A new Article 30a is added to the Act to regulate the issue of the citizenship status of the missing and dead Croatian Homeland War veterans who did not have Croatian citizenship at the time of their disappearance or death, and also prescribes the possibility of subsequent entry into the register of citizenship of the Republic of Croatia and persons born in the period January 8, 1977, to October 8, 1991, whose parents were both Croatian nationals at the time of their birth and who had been granted another citizenship, provided that they submit, within two years of the entry into force of this Act application for the establishment of Croatian citizenship.
Hence the range or catchment area of persons considered to be expatriates, emigrés, is widened in the new amendments Act. Croatian emigrés under this Act are not only the persons who emigrated from the territory of present-day Croatia, but also from other territories in which Croats lived, and in which, at the time of the emigration, the territory of today's Republic of Croatia was located and those belonging to this group must within two years of the Act coming into effect submit an application for citizenship.
In conclusion: while the Croatian government boasts of changes to the citizenship Act as contributing highly to its calls and promises for demographic policy and strengthening of the 'Croatian component' both in the country and abroad, this Croatian Citizenship Amendment Act will not be a very productive demographic measure much due to the fact that it has not expanded the population abroad that has automatic right to citizenship on the basis of Croatian nationality, ethnic, descent, ancestry. Naturalisation and making this easier by cutting out language, culture and social order tests is not likely to see any significant surge of citizenship applications. This particularly so if we consider the fact that actively seeking citizenship of another country by naturalisation, by people that already have citizenship of other country/countries may pose both stumbling blocks and statutory limitations for some individuals. It is utterly disappointing that automatic right to citizenship was not by this Amendment Act extended to second or third generations of Croats born outside Croatia given that receiving a citizenship as a matter of automatic right rather than applying for one through naturalisation are entirely different matters in any country's eyes and laws. I say this particularly having in mind the history of Croatian emigration and the fact that the 20th century saw multitudes flee from foreign control such as Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kingdom of Yugoslavia and communist Yugoslavia. When it comes to victimhood and persecution and oppression as ingredients of history of a nation of people and their automatic rights to citizenship upon return several countries, including Israel, got that formula right towards boosting population and improving demographic picture of a country. Croatia ignored that formula totally. I have no doubts that that's because today's Croatia is still largely governed and controlled by the communist Yugoslavia heritage that still resists and fights against the assertion of its predominantly Croatian nationality profile. Ina Vukic
Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Croatia, Croatian Citizenship Act, Croatian Citizenship Amendment Act, Croatian diaspora, New changes to Croatian citizenship Act, right to citizenship by descent
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Dear Ina.. I do not profess to understand all the implications of this, but reading I feel there are still divisions which are not being met in equality..
I feel your passion and your frustrations as you see so much of the prejudices still in place..
Sending love and Blessings my friend… ❤
inavukic says:
Yes Sue there are divisions and lack of will to get rid of many former communist processes or ways of doing things in public admin. But there is still hope where the will to pursue full democracy exists. Hugs ❤
Eric Ragot says:
The way I read it, it is more straightforward for me to apply with a Croatian mother now. Before I would have argued Article 10. The new law also seems to exempt the other language requirements, so it does allow me with just one Croatian parent to get citizenship.
Splithead says:
Hi INA,
We were told at the embassy the time frame to obtain citizenship is any where form 6 months to 3 years, so take your pick.
It is a clear indication we are not valued and are a inconvenience.
The message to young and old is, we are seeing and experiencing totalitarian rule were referendums are stolen, the law is not equally applied or not at all, media is controlled by the state, number one on the list of corrupt states in Europe, and above all democracy is denied.
Meanwhile the citizens are apathetic and don't go out to vote in numbers.
We need to stop using those rose coloured glasses. The sooner we all come to terms with these facts the better.
As everyday passes without a parliamentary election more damage is being done. GDP 10 yr average -0.2%. Yes they are going backwards.
Indeed Splithead, much to be done and urgently too! While many benefit from status quo, starting from securing a cushy job because "your" dad or aunt etc are politically linked etc, most suffer. It is difficult to understand why people are not on the streets protesting – fear of reprisals? but yes the longer this situation continues the harder it will get to institution needed changes.
carinaragno says:
Reblogged this on Piazza della Carina.
Ina, New concerning development, the government is buying out APIS, the firm that was to check the votes for Parliamentary reforms, supposedly. Allowing HDZ to throw referendum votes in the bin without allowing scrutiny. If confirmed, Its seems HDZ/SDP will be counting the votes for future elections. This will impact whats left of this pseudo democracy and it really will be like "Guatemala".
Wow! That is shocking news if true! Indeed – independence in vote counting going down the chute. The only remedy: independent scrutineers for every candidate/party at every polling booth…? And APIS is already reputed to be corrupt against the public, so there you go. Just awful!
Hi Ina
Regarding the new Croatian Citizenship Laws:
Can Croatian citizenship be given from Great Grandparents who left during the Austria Hungarian Empire? It seems no?
If yes, Is there a language test?
The Croatian lineage is there Great Grandparents Grandparent/s Parent… so I see no reason why not, one needs to demonstrate ancestry … the test will be abolished when the amendments to the law kick in in January 2020, i.e. as soon as regulations are done around that…Cheers Anna
NOW WE ARE MORE AWARE OF THIS!
Segvich, Carl says:
Dear Ina,
I agree, if not all, then with most of your comments.
Regarding " I have no doubts that that's because today's Croatia is still largely governed and controlled by the communist Yugoslavia heritage that still resists and fights against the assertion of its predominantly Croatian nationality profile. " , I think this profile includes our Catholicism (Christianity). Do you agree?
For just one example, I think it is utterly absurd that at Trg Jelacic, there is a menorah but no nativity scene. THIS IS DERANGED!
Carl Segvich
Yes I agree Carl. Definitely majority Christian and nativity scene should also be placed in the heart of the capital on Ban Jelacic Square not just in front of the Cathedral
segvich says:
…..and, even at the Cathedral, the outside large manger has no statues; it has just a bunch of hay and furniture. The live re-enactment was entertaining but even that became to liberal at the end with the Protestant-type dancing. After the 22nd or 23rd of Dec., I never saw anything but a bare stable —- no Jesus.
I always say that "nothing shocks me anymore" but this and NOTHING at Trg Jelacic (but a menorah!!) is inexplicable!
P.S. I just received Domovnice and moved to Croatia 22 days ago. Can we start a campaign to place a nativity in Trg for Dec 2020….and make it the PRIMARY FOCUS OF ADVENT?
What a great idea Carl re nativity on Trg. Wishing you much joy and success with your move to Croatia. Happy New Year!
Thanks Ina, and please give me some advice as to how I can contribute to this Nativity 2020 campaign please. We would need a leader(s). Since I am new, I think I can not lead this mission, but I can help. (You can direct message or call me anytime.)
Hvala i blessings for our new year of our Lord.
I will look into how best that could be done. Cheers Carl
Role of Croatian Diaspora – Ina Vukic on Laudato TV July 2019 – Click Image to link to Youtube video
Croatia and Blessed Alojzije Stepinac (video in English)
Pope John Paul II declares Alojzije Stepinac Blessed
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Welcome to my blog. Here I will bring to you a variety of topics covering the documented truth about that terrible war that Croatia had to endure during the period between 1991 and 1995 and about Croatian political history that shaped a wonderful nation of people.
Croatian people wanted independence for centuries, just as they had it until the twelfth century but fate was not on their side – others wanted their beautiful land. In late 1980′s the will to break free from Yugoslavia which suffocated freedom and self determination through harsh communist party rule finally bore the desired fruit.
In June 1991 Croatia declared its independence; soon after the aggressive war against Croatia broke out. The struggle of the Croatian people for self-determination was a just one. But I fear genuine justice has not been served as there have been, and there still exist, international covert and overt moves to equate victims with aggressors continue in attempts to change history. Truth often becomes obscured and lost and that is why I have chosen to write this blog, to concentrate on actual events and issues about Croatia – wishing it a bright and freedom-loving future.
It certainly was not easy to come out of the war that was fought on two fronts:
1. On the military front the world's public has seen the indiscriminate bombardment of Croatian cities, towns and villages from land, sea and air; the destruction of civilian targets including homes, schools, hospitals, churches, factories and cultural monuments; the blockading and destruction of roads, bridges and ports; the blockading of power, water, food and medical supplies. What hasn't been shown on our television sets is the forced clearing and evacuation of towns and villages, followed by looting, torture, rape and murder carried out by the Serbian forces, who were initially backed by the federal Yugoslav army that was largely constituted by Serb nationals; the transportation of multiple hundreds of innocent Croatian civilians from Croatia into concentration camps Serbia (Begejci, Stajicevo, Sremska Mitrovica... from October 1991, and later (1992) transferred into Serb-held camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Omarska, Keratern, Manjaca, Trnopolje).
2. The second front was the war of political propaganda centred on: misinformation about the rights of minorities in Croatia; portrayal of the Croatian people as Ustasha or Fascists; the representation of the Croatian defence forces as illegal paramilitary units; the representation of the Croatian and Slovenian republics as unreasonable secessionists who are unwilling to negotiate; a regurgitation of distorted facts about World War II.
Indeed Croatia had an absolute right to defend itself and this is often forgotten if not often denied it.
Ina Vukic
Ina has been a tireless volunteer on humanitarian aid and fundraising for victims of war in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially war orphans. From1991 to beginning of 1994 she contributed in lobbying for international recognition of Croatian independence and Croatia's rights in defending its territory and people from military aggression by Serbian forces. For this dedicated voluntary work Ina was awarded two Medals of Honour by the first president of the Republic of Croatia in 1995 (Commemorative Medal of the Homeland War and Order of the Croatian Trefoil).Ina has also written hundreds articles for newspapers in Australia and Croatia on the plight of Croatian people for freedom and self-determination, developing democracy in former communist countries. She holds two graduate and one post-graduate university degrees, specialising in behaviour, clinical and political psychology and management.
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Blessed Alojzije (Aloysius) Stepinac Feast Day February 10
Blessed Aloysius Stepinac quote:
"When they take everything from you, you'll be left with two hands; put them together in prayer and then you'll be the strongest." Blessed Aloysius Stepinac (1898 – 1960)
First President of Croatia Dr Franjo Tudjman quote:
"They could not, nor will they ever be able to kill our passion and our need to live in human dignity, in peace with ourselves and with the free nations of Europe. We have carved out that right at our first democratic elections. For this right and for our sacred land we are even ready to die" – Dr Franjo Tudjman (1922-1999) ( Addressing the Croatian nation at the moment of the start of Serbian aggression against Croatia, 16 October 1991)
LINKS TO BOOKS
Ao only true men can: Nikola Zrinski's Last Stand at Sziget by Zeljko Zidaric
Alojzije Stepinac: Pillar of Human Rights by Esther Gitman
BLANKA MATKOVIC ON COMMUNIST CRIMES – AMAZON, BOOK DEPOSITORY, BOOKTOPIA, BARNES AND NOBLE. BOOKS A MILLION …
LIVING CELLS – JULIENNE EDEN BUSIC – ON AMAZON
On Amazon & Createspace
pdf Public document
The Gospel of John, Ch.8,V.32
"and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."
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The fourth session is concerned with the inner leg muscles and the pelvic floor, starting a phase of work which focuses on the bodies core.
The core extends far beyond just a six pack and refers to the interior space which holds the organs, as well as the surrounding muscles and fascia. The core is used in almost every movement of the human body and acts as a stabiliser during dynamic and isometric motions.
In this session the aim is to release and organise the tissue structure which forms the boundary of the lower core. The pelvic floor muscles are the main focus in this area.
A healthy pelvic floor has many benefits such as giving control over the bladder and bowel in order to control the release of urine, faeces and flatulence. Alongside this the pelvic floor muscles contribute to healthy sexual function in both men and women and are key in supporting pregnancy and childbirth.
However the most important benefit of well functioning and positioned pelvic floor muscles, is the stability and support this gives the pelvis and lumbar spine. The position of the pelvis can greatly impact posture, for example if it is too far forward this can create too much lordosis which can lead to lower back pain.


The sale of the final residential unit at The Magdalen in Earlsfield, London has now been completed. The development consits of a total of 38 residential units (including 10 shared ownership) and associated underground car parking and communal roof garden, along with an 8500 sq ft retail unit let to Sainsburys. Construction of the building commenced in 2008, with completion taking place in a number of phases through 2009 and 2010.


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Maquoketa Valley Senior High School
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Maquoketa Valley Comm School District. Get school information, student-teacher ratio, demographics & more on Maquoketa Valley Senior High School.
Maquoketa Valley Senior High School Information
DELHI, IA 52223
MAQUOKETA VALLEY COMM SCHOOL DISTRICT
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Which type of school is better?
This high school has a total enrollment of 253 students with approximately 25 full-time teachers. It has a student to teacher ratio of about 10 students per teacher. The average student-teacher ratio for Delaware County is 13 to 1.
Enrollment by Grade Level
» 9th Grade Students 62
» 10th Grade Students 67
Total students 253
Total Full-time teachers 24.6
Student / Teacher Ratio 10:1
Students eligible for free lunch 44 (17%)
Students eligible for reduced lunch 19 (8%)
Other schools near Maquoketa Valley Senior High School
Nearby Elementary Schools - See all Elementary Schools in Delaware County, IA
0.2 mi - Delhi Elementary School - 112 3Rd St, Delhi, IA 52223
4.7 mi - Earlville Elementary School - 213 Stow St, Earlville, IA 52041
7.0 mi - Johnston Elementary School - 131 Culver Rd, Hopkinton, IA 52237
7.8 mi - Lambert Elementary School - 1001 Doctor St, Manchester, IA 52057
Nearby Middle Schools - See all Middle Schools in Delaware County, IA
0.2 mi - Maquoketa Valley Middle School - 112 3Rd St, Delhi, IA 52223
7.9 mi - West Delaware Middle School - 1101 Doctor St, Manchester, IA 52057
15.0 mi - Monticello Middle School - 217 South Maple, Monticello, IA 52310
16.6 mi - Drexler Middle School - 405 3Rd Ave Ne, Farley, IA 52046
Nearby High Schools - See all High Schools in Delaware County, IA
7.8 mi - West Delaware High School - 701 New St, Manchester, IA 52057
15.6 mi - Edgewood-Colesburg High School - 403 West Union, Edgewood, IA 52042
15.8 mi - Monticello High School - 850 East Oak St, Monticello, IA 52310
18.0 mi - Cascade Junior-Senior High School - 505 Johnson St Nw, Cascade, IA 52033
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