Romani people | EPFL Graph Search

The Romani, also spelled Romany or Rromani (ˈroʊməni or ˈrɒməni ), colloquially known as the Roma (: Rom), are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group who traditionally lived a nomadic, itinerant lifestyle. Linguistic and genetic evidence suggests that the Romani originated in the Indian subcontinent; in particular, the region of present-day Rajasthan. Their subsequent westward migration, possibly in waves, is now believed by historians to have occurred around 1000 CE. Their original name is from the Sanskrit word डोम (doma) and means a member of a Dalit caste of travelling musicians and dancers. The Roma population moved west into the Persian Ghaznavid Empire and later into the Byzantine Empire. The Roma arrived in Europe around the 13th to 14th century. Although they are dispersed, their most concentrated populations are located in Europe, especially central, eastern, and southern Europe (notably southern France), as well as western Asia (mainly in Turkey and Iran). In the English language

Action levers for wellbeing with low energy demand

Sascha Nick

Why focus on action levers? • Wellbeing with low energy demand is clearly defined in low energy scenarios like LED or DLS, but it is far from obvious how to get there, including even collectively deciding on what is a good transition. • Progressively changing mindsets: No sufficiently ambitious transition will be spontaneously acceptable to most people, especially in rich countries. Engaging people in the process of designing the transition is key. Citizens’ assemblies have an excellent track record of doing this, and the Academic Citizens’ Assembly could scale to potentially millions of participants. • Who benefits from negative emissions (NE)? If left within today’s power structures (incumbents and markets), there is a real risk NE could slow decarbonization and transfer billions to fossil companies. A public fund could create an objective CO2 price, and based on the realistic potential of NE with biodiversity and societal co-benefits, determine the required rate of reductions in emissions and energy use. We examine and model how this could be done for Switzerland, and for global aviation.

2022

Gait disturbances as specific predictive markers of the first fall onset in elderly people: a two-year prospective observational study

Jean-Baptiste Mignardot

Falls are common in the elderly, and potentially result in injury and disability. Thus, preventing falls as soon as possible in older adults is a public health priority, yet there is no specific marker that is predictive of the first fall onset. We hypothesized that gait features should be the most relevant variables for predicting the first fall. Clinical baseline characteristics (e.g., gender, cognitive function) were assessed in 259 home-dwelling people aged 66 to 75 that had never fallen. Likewise, global kinetic behavior of gait was recorded from 22 variables in 1036 walking tests with an accelerometric gait analysis system. Afterward, monthly telephone monitoring reported the date of the first fall over 24 months. A principal components analysis was used to assess the relationship between gait variables and fall status in four groups: non-fallers, fallers from 0 to 6 months, fallers from 6 to 12 months and fallers from 12 to 24 months. The association of significant principal components (PC) with an increased risk of first fall was then evaluated using the area under the Receiver Operator Characteristic Curve (ROC). No effect of clinical confounding variables was shown as a function of groups. An eigenvalue decomposition of the correlation matrix identified a large statistical PC1 (termed "Global kinetics of gait pattern"), which accounted for 36.7% of total variance. Principal component loadings also revealed a PC2 (12.6% of total variance), related to the "Global gait regularity" Subsequent ANOVAs showed that only PC1 discriminated the fall status during the first 6 months, while PC2 discriminated the first fall onset between 6 and 12 months. After one year, any PC was associated with falls. These results were bolstered by the ROC analyses, showing good predictive models of the first fall during the first six months or from 6 to 12 months. Overall, these findings suggest that the performance of a standardized walking test at least once a year is essential for fall prevention.

Frontiers Research Foundation2014

Estimating People Flows to Better Count Them in Crowded Scenes

Pascal Fua, Weizhe Liu, Mathieu Salzmann

Modern methods for counting people in crowded scenes rely on deep networks to estimate people densities in individual images. As such, only very few take advantage of temporal consistency in video sequences, and those that do only impose weak smoothness constraints across consecutive frames. In this paper, we advocate estimating people flows across image locations between consecutive images and inferring the people densities from these flows instead of directly regressing. This enables us to impose much stronger constraints encoding the conservation of the number of people. As a result, it significantly boosts performance without requiring a more complex architecture. Furthermore, it also enables us to exploit the cor- relation between people flow and optical flow to further improve the results. We will demonstrate that we consistently outperform state-of-the-art methods on five benchmark datasets.

2020

Gait disturbances as specific predictive markers of the first fall onset in elderly people: a two-year prospective observational study

Jean-Baptiste Mignardot

Frontiers Research Foundation2014