Beyond Masks: On the Generalization of Masked Face Recognition Models to Occluded Face Recognition

Over the years, the evolution of face recognition (FR) algorithms has been steep and accelerated by a myriad of factors. Motivated by the unexpected elements found in real-world scenarios, researchers have investigated and developed a number of methods for occluded face recognition (OFR). However, due to the SarS-Cov2 pandemic, masked face recognition (MFR) research branched from OFR and became a hot and urgent research challenge. Due to time and data constraints, these models followed different and novel approaches to handle lower face occlusions, i.e., face masks. Hence, this study aims to evaluate the different approaches followed for both MFR and OFR, find linked details about the two conceptually similar research directions and understand future directions for both topics. For this analysis, several occluded and face recognition algorithms from the literature are studied. First, they are evaluated in the task that they were trained on, but also on the other. These methods were picked accordingly to the novelty of their approach, proven state-of-the-art results, and publicly available source code. We present quantitative results on 4 occluded and 5 masked FR datasets, and a qualitative analysis of several MFR and OFR models on the Occ-LFW dataset. The analysis presented, sustain the interoperable deployability of MFR methods on OFR datasets, when the occlusions are of a reasonable size. Thus, solutions proposed for MFR can be effectively deployed for general OFR. © 2022 IEEE.

A Peculiar Case of an Acute Increase in Sodium From 152 mmol/L to 192 mmol/L

We present a case in which a long-term hospital patient had a serum sodium level that increased from 152mmol/L to 192 mmol/L in a time frame less than 12 hours. Inspite of aggressive treatment, he succumbed to his illness. Guidlines for hypernatremia treatment need to be updated 75 yo male with PMH of malnutrition, CKD Stage 4, chronic hypoxia and hypertension was brought to the ED for hypertensive emergency. He had a complicated hospital course which included COVID contraction and diarrhea. Nephrology was consulted for chronic hypernatremia with a sodium of 152, BUN of 100 and creatinine of 4.50 along with acute encephalopathy. Hemodialysis was recommended. Repeat labs later that evening showed a sodium of 192. He was started on HD with the highest sodium bath available to the institution at 148 mmol/L. Pt’s sodium 18 hours after HD & IV fluids was 172 mmol/L . He later developed hypotension requiring vasopressors. Due to family wishes;patient was transitioned to comfort care with the last noted sodium of 168mmol/L. The brain adapts to hypernatremia. There were several factors in this patient that would have prevented adequate adaptation, namely hypoxia, malnutrition and hypotension. Hence a decision was made to rapidly lower serum sodium. There are many reports where chronic hypernatremia has been rapidly corrected by dialysis without development of cerebral edema. In our case, there was a dilemma whether to treat this as acute or chronic hypernatremia. The guideline for correction of chronic hyponatremia is based on pediatric patients. Many however, do not agree with this recommendation as there are reports where the sodium has been rapidly lowered without complications. Further studies are needed in adults to ascertain the correct correction rate. (Table Presented) (Figure Presented)

Exploring the Dynamic Capabilities of Businesses to Cope with COVID-19 Challenges

The pandemic caused by COVID-19 triggered a severe disruption in businesses worldwide, with pressing changes aimed business survival and striving. In this context, the pace of the digital transformation of business was tremendously accelerated, launching managers and employees into a new world of digital challenges. In this work, we explore the dynamic capabilities of businesses to cope with the COVID-19 contingencies, focusing on survival and success measures, dynamic digital capabilities and emerging management skills. We interviewed 24 business managers using semi-structured interviews and mixed-methods research to reveal how these businesses have coped during the second wave of COVID-19 in the country. Our results show that little to no governmental and financial support was received, and overall negative impact on the business potential to succeed at several levels, with little exceptions. Most businesses reveal having dynamic digital capabilities in place and ability to take advantage of their digital presence to foster business survival and growth. These capabilities are, however, heavily built on what we believe to be core emerging business management skills, as they are associated with several areas of expertise in the domain of digital communication. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Surviving the COVID-19-Accelerated Digital Transformation: The Case of Portuguese SME and the Role of YBS Project

COVID-19 brought a lot of disruption into the business world. To cope with the challenges, companies tried to adopt new work formats, embracing the digital transformation as a possible solution to survive. Together with this change, owners and workers had to adapt and in several circumstances, learning new competencies and developing new capabilities. As this is a recent alteration, it is not complete yet, the effects of the pandemic crisis in businesses and people. Additionally, there are some initiatives to help entrepreneurs to start their own business or deal / improve their actual one. As such, this study intends to contribute to characterize the situation in Portugal and understand the role of one of these initiatives—the YBS—your business success—project. A small number of interviews were carried out with some companies in order to understand how they have faced the COVID-19 challenge. Results show that people responded to the challenge, and for some of them, these are even better than before. As this is just an exploratory study, more research about these changes and the process of innovation is needed as future work. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Emergency Remote Learning One Year Later - What Changed?

During the first confinement caused by COVID-19 pandemic education shifted to what was coined as Emergency Remote Learning/Instruction/Teaching, trying to balance the need to continue the provision of educational content and the enormous challenges of coping with multiple issues that an unforeseen, unplanned, and urgent situation brought worldwide. At that period, we developed research to understand how HE students were living this situation for what we built a close-ended questionnaire comprising six dimensions of issues that may impact ERL: educational and organizational issues, technological and working conditions, social, family-related, psychological, and financial issues. Previous results, collected right after the first month of ERL revealed that the most severe problems reside in the pedagogical and psychological domains. The present research followed the evolution of the situation and confronts research results obtained during the first confinement with the conditions and students’ perception that we collected during the second confinement and its multidomain repercussions. The current results show that while the improvements reside mainly in contextual aspects, such as the family dynamics, working conditions, and financial safety, the worsening is primarily felt in the input and process element issues which concern the remote learning environment and social interactions with teachers and peers. However, the set of persistent issues reveals a scenario of perpetuation of the problems/concerns detected in the first confinement, such as sleeping disorders, exhaustion, lack of engaging classes, and lack of motivation. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

FocusFace: Multi-task Contrastive Learning for Masked Face Recognition

SARS-CoV-2 has presented direct and indirect challenges to the scientific community. One of the most prominent indirect challenges advents from the mandatory use of face masks in a large number of countries. Face recognition methods struggle to perform identity verification with similar accuracy on masked and unmasked individuals. It has been shown that the performance of these methods drops considerably in the presence of face masks, especially if the reference image is unmasked. We propose FocusFace, a multi-task architecture that uses contrastive learning to be able to accurately perform masked face recognition. The proposed architecture is designed to be trained from scratch or to work on top of state-of-the-art face recognition methods without sacrificing the capabilities of a existing models in conventional face recognition tasks. We also explore different approaches to design the contrastive learning module. Results are presented in terms of masked-masked (MM) and unmasked-masked (U-M) face verification performance. For both settings, the results are on par with published methods, but for M-M specifically, the proposed method was able to outperform all the solutions that it was compared to. We further show that when using our method on top of already existing methods the training computational costs decrease significantly while retaining similar performances. The implementation and the trained models are available at GitHub.

My Eyes Are Up Here: Promoting Focus on Uncovered Regions in Masked Face Recognition

The recent Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that wearing masks in public is now mandatory in several countries, created challenges in the use of face recognition systems (FRS). In this work, we address the challenge of masked face recognition (MFR) and focus on evaluating the verification performance in FRS when verifying masked vs unmasked faces compared to verifying only unmasked faces. We propose a methodology that combines the traditional triplet loss and the mean squared error (MSE) intending to improve the robustness of an MFR system in the masked-unmasked comparison mode. The results obtained by our proposed method show improvements in a detailed step-wise ablation study. The conducted study showed significant performance gains induced by our proposed training paradigm and modified triplet loss on two evaluation databases. © 2021 Gesellschaft fur Informatik (GI). All rights reserved.

My Eyes Are up Here: Promoting Focus on Uncovered Regions in Masked Face Recognition

The recent Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that wearing masks in public is now mandatory in several countries, created challenges in the use of face recognition systems (FRS). In this work, we address the challenge of masked face recognition (MFR) and focus on evaluating the verification performance in FRS when verifying masked vs unmasked faces compared to verifying only unmasked faces. We propose a methodology that combines the traditional triplet loss and the mean squared error (MSE) intending to improve the robustness of an MFR system in the masked-unmasked comparison mode. The results obtained by our proposed method show improvements in a detailed step-wise ablation study. The conducted study showed significant performance gains induced by our proposed training paradigm and modified triplet loss on two evaluation databases. © 2021 IEEE.

Are we ready for remote work? preliminary results from portugal

Due to the pandemic crisis caused by COVID-19, people started performing their professional tasks remotely. This transition from the off-line and face-to-face work to online and remote work did not happen without pain, anxiety and some frustration as there was a need for accelerated learning and the frontiers between private and professional life were blurred. In this paper, we report on the preliminary findings of a survey-based research aimed at evaluating the main impacts and challenges faced by professionals in this transition process, in Portugal. Results show that respondents believe they work more, they feel more motivated, have better control over time, easily create methods and pace of work, and have more focus on tasks. Savings on fuel are offset by increased expenses in electricity, water, and food. Increased work-life balance but not increased leisure time are recognised. The most negative impact is social/professional seclusion, despite recognising fewer professional conflicts. © Atas da Conferencia da Associacao Portuguesa de Sistemas de Informacao 2020.

Context, Input and Process as Critical Elements for Successful Emergency Remote Learning

In Spring 2020, the world moved from traditional classes to what was coined as ERL (Emergency Remote Teaching/Learning/Instruction), posing real challenges to all actors involved, requiring an immediate, unprecedented, and unplanned devising of mitigation strategies. The impacts of this transition cannot, however, be studied only at the educational level, as it consists of a broader social shift with multidomain repercussions. In this paper, we use the CIPP model (Context, Input, Process and Product evaluations) to further investigate interrelations among the context, input and process elements of ERL during the first wave of COVID-19, as the second wave presses towards reconfining. A correlation analysis of 46 variables, based students’ responses (N = 360) to a closed-ended questionnaire shows the crucial importance of motivation and engagement in online classes, as learning enablers or constrainers. These also shape the students’ perception of the role that online classes play in helping them to stay more positive during ERL. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Perspectives of Companies and Employees from the Great Place To Work (GPTW) Ranking on Remote Work in Portugal: A Methodological Proposal

Traditionally, there have been many reasons and factors contributing to the disbelieve in remote work as a large-scale efficient work format. But with the social distancing imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work (RW) emerged as an adequate solution to continue labor at a large scale, even in the situations where remote work was unforeseeable and, in many cases, happened under inappropriate conditions. Despite some advantages, which are mainly identified by employees, there are other issues, pointed out by organizations, such as required technology infrastructure, HR training, etc. In any case, opting for remote work present some gains and losses for both employers and employees. With the end of the mandatory confinement, organizations reorganized the work format and, in some cases, it consisted in restoring the previous one. At this point, many questions arise being important to evaluate the perspectives of both sides – workers and companies – as well as their perceptions retrieved from the RW during the Spring confinement period, to understand how was the transition period and preview the future in terms of RW becoming part of the work model or even the way the pandemic situation is influencing future changes in businesses models. To achieve that goal, an exploratory survey-based research, and interviews will be carried out. The sample consists of the top 100 private companies of the Great Place To Work (GPTW) Portuguese ranking. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Emergency Remote Learning During COVID-19: Socio-educational Impacts on Portuguese Students

The pandemic caused by COVID-19 is not just a global crisis, it is ‘the first’ global crisis, and as the mandatory confinement shifted all education to Emergency Remote Instruction/Teaching/Learning, Higher Education Institutions were faced with the heavy task of balancing the immediate massive technological-pedagogical request by teachers and providing students with the socio-educational support that they need. This paper analyses the socio-educational impacts of the current confinement period on student’s lives and how they are responding to implemented ERL solutions, specifically in a stage of abundant pressing changes in which critical challenges are mostly felt. A close-ended questionnaire was built, comprising six dimensions of issues that may impact ERL: educational and organizational issues, technological and working conditions, social issues, family-related issues, psychological issues, and financial issues. Results were collected right after the first month of ERL and reveal that the most severe problems reside on the pedagogical and psychological domains. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Emergency Remote Work in Portugal: Evaluation, Effects, and Recommendations

The recent pandemic caused by COVID-19 has forced unprecedented professional and social changes that affect the way people work, learn and live. Even in an era in which the digitalization of the workplace had been already widely announced, employers and employees had not expected such an urgent digital immersion of jobs with broad impacts on the professional, personal, financial and social dimensions of the workforce. In this paper, the main consequences, challenges, and effects of remote work in Portugal are reported, together with a set of recommendations for employers and workers, which were captured in survey-based research. Results show that professionals are not unanimous towards the benefits of remote work, and while some would like to resume in-person work, a substantial amount of professional, personal and financial benefits are associated to the possibility of working from home. Additionally, and according to pressing changes, professionals put forward several recommendations for employers and peers regarding workload and time management, employee assistance and self-regulated work. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.