We consider the classical problem of aggregating di¤erent individuals’probability assignments (opinions) over a -algebra of events. In practice, some events represent basic propositions, such as ‘it rains’or ‘CO2 emissions cause global warming’, while others represent combinations thereof, for instance disjunctions (unions) of basic events. It is plausible to treat the basic events as premises ...

From the early HMAX model to Spatial Pyramid Matching, spatial pooling has played an important role in visual recognition pipelines. By aggregating local statistics, it equips the recognition pipelines with a certain degree of robustness to translation and deformation yet preserving spatial information. Despite of its predominance in current recognition systems, we have seen little progress to ...

We develop a model of financial maintenance covenants under moral hazard, adverse selection, and accounting signals of varying quality. We explain how public signals from accounting statements can improve the outcome for lenders and borrowers by reducing inefficient risk-taking (in both the pooling and separating equilibrium), and by shielding good firms from the actions of bad (separating) one...

Pooling is a ubiquitous operation in image processing algorithms that allows for higher-level processes to collect relevant low-level features from a region of interest. Currently, max-pooling is one of the most commonly used operators in the computational literature. However, it can lack robustness to outliers due to the fact that it relies merely on the peak of a function. Pooling mechanisms ...

In object recognition, the Bag-of-Words model assumes: i) extraction of local descriptors from images, ii) embedding these descriptors by a coder to a given visual vocabulary space which results in so-called mid-level features, iii) extracting statistics from mid-level features with a pooling operator that aggregates occurrences of visual words in images into so-called signatures. As the last s...

Background: Milk is one of the most nutritious foods providing a variety of proteins, fats, minerals, and vitamins needed to maintain, grow, and develop the body. The aim of this study was to assess microbial and chemical adulterants of raw cow milk collected from dairy farms of Hlabisa villages, KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa. Methods: A total of 68 raw cow milk samples were obtained fr...