“It was a cute little white, squash-shaped cartoon character created by Al Capp in his comic strip “Li’l Abner,” in 1948, see figure 1. Shmoos bred like rabbits and could produce any object at the drop of a hat. Since they loved to please humans, they would willingly pump out milk, eggs, filet mignon, caviar, or anything else if requested. At first glance Shmoos seemed to herald the arrival of ...

Value at risk (VaR) is the standard measure of market risk used by financial institutions. Interpreting the VaR as the quantile of future portfolio values conditional on current information, the conditional autoregressive value at risk (CAViaR) model specifies the evolution of the quantile over time using an autoregressive process and estimates the parameters with regression quantiles. Utilizin...

Computer Assisted Visual Interactive Recognition (CAVIAR) draws on sequential pattern recognition, image database, expert systems, pen computing, and digital camera technology. It is designed to recognize wild flowers and other families of similar objects more accurately than machine vision and faster than most laypersons. The novelty of the approach is that human perceptual ability is exploite...

This work develops a pedestrian detection system using a feature space based on level lines, called Movement Feature Space (MFS). Besides detecting the movement in the scene, this feature space defines the descriptors used by the classifiers to identify pedestrians. Locations hypotheses of pedestrian are performed by a cascade of boosted classifiers. The validation of these regions of interest ...

The paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) is a primitive fish that is found in several large rivers of the Mississippi River drainage. The status of paddlefish populations in these large rivers is debatable due to several factors including habitat loss, contaminants and commercial fishing (Sparrowe 1986; Gundersen and Pearson 1992). The roe of female paddlefish is used to make domestic caviar and comm...

This paper studies the performance of nonparametric quantile regression as a tool to predict Value at Risk (VaR). The approach is flexible as it requires no assumptions on the form of return distributions. A monotonized double kernel local linear estimator is applied to estimate moderate (1%) conditional quantiles of index return distributions. For extreme (0.1%) quantiles, where particularly f...

Amyand’s hernia is a rare condition where the appendix is found within the sac of an inguinal hernia. The occurrence of an appendicular neoplasm within such hernia is even rarer. We highlight the case of a 70-year-old male who presented with an appendicular neoplasm masquerading as a strangulated inguinal hernia. The rarity and heterogenic clinico-pathological presentation of an appendiceal neo...

The Histogram Probabilistic Multi-Hypothesis Tracker (H-PMHT) algorithm is a parametric track-before-detect method. It locates targets in imagery by fitting a mixture of probability densities. In recent work, an unknown target shape was accommodated through the use of a Wishart prior on the measurement probability density, this version of the algorithm is referred to as H-PMHT-RM. This paper ap...

The objective of this paper is to present a set of techniques for video analysis aiming a visual surveillance system for monitoring scenarios, detecting and tracking moving objects. The proposed method integrates motion, spatial position and color information to track object blobs which are segmented using Eigenbackground subtraction. To deal with occlusions and splits, detected blobs are organ...