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Pirate Bay founder held in new hacking probe
piratebaypirate bayfilesharingfile sharingcambodiahackingskatteverketlogica
Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, who faces a year-long prison sentence for promoting copyright infringement, was detained on new computer hacking suspicions when he landed in Sweden on Tuesday morning.
According to a statement issued on Tuesday by the Swedish Prosecution Authority (Åklagarmyndigheten), Warg is suspected of having hacked into the Swedish Tax Agency (Skatteverket) as well as Swedish IT firm Logica, which supplies services to the agency.
"During a preliminary investigation concerning computer hacking at the company Logica and the Swedish Tax Agency during the spring, suspicions were directed at one person, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg," the Prosecution Authority wrote.
The agency added, however, that Warg's August 30th arrest in Cambodia and subsequent deportation from the country on Monday were due to an arrest warrant issued for him in relation to his conviction in the Pirate Bay trial.
Shortly after Warg's arrest, reports emerged that he was wanted in an investigation into a hacker attack against Logica and the tax agency.
According to a September 6th report in the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper, the attacks gave the hackers access to a sizeable amount of protected personal information.
The attack is believed to have started in 2010 and continued until April of this year.
Warg, and his fellow co-founders Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde, as well as financier Carl Lundström, were all convicted in 2009 of facilitating copyright infringement and ordered to pay 46 million kronor ($6.9 million) in damages to the music and movie industry.
While Neij, Sunde, and Lundström all had their 12-month sentences reduced to between four and 10 months on appeal in late 2010, Warg did not attend his appeal hearing and his one-year sentence was upheld.
Prosecutors now have until Friday to issue a remand order for Warg related to the new computer hacking suspicions.
The Local/dl
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The vision that the session has implemented within this congregation is the vision of a church that in reality strives to care for every member – a church that allows no one to slip between the floorboards by our neglect of that person.
This vision is the closest thing we have discovered in terms of obeying as a church Christ's command for us to love one another – and therefore for us to honour and glorify our God.
* to develop the practice of loving care that encompasses "every member" of the church so that all people within the church are cared for.
* to care for new people entering into the fellowship of the church and to incorporate them into the church family.


When we talk about BlackBerry, a question always rises among all of us, which is not so tough to guess. It is if this brand is still alive? SO, yes this brand is still.
BlackBerry is a Canadian company, who started to introduce phones in 1999. By presenting two-way pagers, it got more recognition. Talking about that time, it was a really laudable research and a new step into the innovative world of technology.
At that time, BlackBerry was considered as one of the most prominent smartphone company in the world. And, the one thing we've always appreciated and considered is the remarkable quality of their phones.
Security, which is a major issue nowadays, was also an issue in the olden days. But, back then and even now, BlackBerry provides secure cellular communication for its customers.
Around September 2013, about 85 billion people started BlackBerry fan-following. It was such a loved brand.
Display:5-inch IPS LCD, 1920x1080px resolution, 16:9 aspect ratio 403 ppi, Dragon Trail Glass with anti-scratch Nano-diamond coating.
Rear camera: 12MP camera, PDAF, f/2.0 aperture, dual-tone LED flash, HDR, 4K recording with 30fps, 1080p with 30fps, video stabilization (EIS), multi-frame low light boost.
Front camera: 8MP fixed focus, f/2.2 aperture, 1.12 um pixels, 1080p with 30fps.
Chipsets: 14nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 CPU – octa-core 2.0GHz Cortex-A53, Adreno 506 GPU.
Single or Dual SIM configurations; LTE-A Category 9 450/50 Mbps, USB-C (v2.0); Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac (2.4 or 5 GHz); GPS; NFC; USB-OTG; Bluetooth 4.2.
3.5mm headphone jack; ear buds with tips incorporated.
Firstly, BlackBerry Motion does not have a keyboard. Yes, it is a touch-screen phone and is very evenhanded. Although, the design is quite outmoded. But, a famous person said – we can't judge a book by its cover. So, we think these lines are really suitable here because, design apart, its functions, features, and battery life is remarkable. Talking about the battery life, the BB Motion is much better than the MOTO X4, HTC U11 Life, and Honor 9.
We liked the enhanced hardware in BB Motion, as it was very much identical to KEY one. But, it's got quite a good look actually. The last of the two BB touch phones were exceptionally good, but, BB Motion is not just a clone of phones, it is much more than that. And, we guarantee better results with this new flagship.
However, we'd say that this one has a very handsome look. Okay, okay we know we loved the outlook. So, BlackBerry is offering you a blend of aluminum glass and a nice soft appearance, which will really capture your eyes.
In order to give Motion, an extra ordinary good look BlackBerry designers have rounded the phone's top edge while giving the bottom a flat look. The phone has metal, glass as well as the mix of plastic for its outlook. To appreciate its beauty you have to look closely.
Motion is running the Android 7.1.2 with a twist of BB protection and worthy quality. This is not something that all the other phone brands offer you. The processor is 2GHz Octa core Cortex A53. With a chipset of Qualcomm MSM8953 Snapdragon 625 which is enough to make the processor work faster-and-faster. Coming to the GPU, Motion is with Adreno 506, which is again an awesome add-on.
The capacity of the battery is 4000MAh. Our Motion worked two full days without being recharged. And, yes we checked our emails, did searching and browsing, YouTube videos and even games and it worked for complete two days. Actually two-and-a-half to be exact.
Not bad at all, this is quite good. Everyone needs a phone with long battery life for all the processing, and this phone is highly recommended for powerful battery life.
It has a 12 MP rear camera with an f/2.0 aperture, talented of recording 4K audiovisual. The front camera is an 8MP sensor, adapter 1080p video recording. The 12 MP camera is capable of capturing quite good pictures, especially when in the bright light. Motion has a camera which can capture very solid colors.
Unfortunately, its camera cannot focus properly. But, the overall camera is good. The KEY one had similar problems, and we were hoping BlackBerry would get around to fix them. Alas, they're still here.
As anticipated, your emails and other kinds of stuff are transferred into a unified inbox called, the Hub. Thus, making it easy to have a fast-look at all of your incoming messages. Though, with all these features, it is slightly tricky and can make all your email notifications mask by just a click.
However, BB Motion is quite user-friendly, and you also get smart-security. BB MOTION is offering you a new feature, which is a locker. It is to protect all your sensitive files. Transferring the data to the locker is easy too. You just have to swipe the files in the locker and to see them again you have to be an authorized user. Password, fingerprint and pattern, all are there.
It isn't an ultra-high resolution; nor an OLED panel. However, in this price range, BB Motion is quite good. It has a 5.5-inch 1080p IPS LCD screen, making it as tall as an iPhone 8 Plus. The colors are bright enough, but most people appear to prefer this style over a more relaxed one. Here, we can particularly judge by the reception of the Google Pixel 2 XL. People complained about the Pixel 2's more muted display, but that's not the case with BB.
When you can get quite decent mid-range Android mobiles, such as the Nokia 8, or Sony Xperia XZ, the BlackBerry Motion doesn't carry a good deal of exclusive features. But the genuinely impressive battery life is its key to stay. Prices vary from market to market, and availability. However, you wouldn't be sad if you bought this phone. So, tell us if you are a loyal BB follower, and have you bought the new BB Motion?
New Samsung Galaxy Note8 Gets November Patch!
Apple – iOS 11.0.1 Updates Released!


We took our Colombia coffee and aged it in a freshly dumped KOVAL Bourbon Barrel. As soon as we opened the barrel to roast the colombian coffee the intoxicating smell of sweet bourbon filled our roast room. As soon as you open the bag you will be hit with the sweet smells of KOVAL Bourbon. This is a full bodied coffee with strong notes of sweet bourbon, mellow smoke, and roasted peanuts. This is a fantastic coffee to enjoy during the holiday season.
Established in 2008, KOVAL produces organic whiskey, liqueurs and specialty spirits in Chicago's first distillery since the mid-1800s. Their signature style - using only the "heart" cut of the distillate - makes for a brighter, cleaner take on whiskey. Embracing the grain-to-bottle mentality, each step of the spirit-making process is thoughtfully monitored: beginning with contracting local farmers to grow the grain, to on-site milling and mashing, to finally distilling, bottling, and packaging. KOVAL has grown to be one of America's leading small batch, independent spirit manufacturers.


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Q: HTML stop button won't stop with $id I made a stop button and a renew button.
Renew button works fine, but the stopBtn won't work, it just reloads the page. I've spent few hours trying other ways of methods and it just refreshes the page. If someone could shed some light on where I went wrong would be great.
if (isset($_POST['stopBtn'])) {
    $attackID = intval($_POST['id']);

    $SQLSelect = $odb->prepare("SELECT * FROM `logs` WHERE `id` = :id AND `stopped` = '0' LIMIT 1");
    $SQLSelect->execute([':id' => $attackID]);
    while ($show = $SQLSelect->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)) {
        $host = $show['ip'];
        $port = $show['port'];
        $time = $show['time'];
        $username1 = $_SESSION['username'];
        $methodcheck = $show['method'];

        $odb->query("UPDATE `logs` SET `stopped` = '1' WHERE `id` = '".$attackID."'");
    }
}

As you can see below my button code is in check.
<form method="POST">
    <input type="hidden" name="stopCheck" value="<?php echo htmlspecialchars($logs['id']); ?>">
    <input <?php if (time() > $expires or htmlspecialchars($logs['stopped']) == 1) {
        echo 'type="submit" name="attackBtn" class="btn btn-outline-primary btn-sm" value="Renew Attack"';
    } else {
        echo 'type="submit" name="stopBtn" class="btn btn-outline-danger btn-sm" value="Stop Attack"';
    } ?>>
</form>

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


AUDIO SYSTEM 8 DIAGONAL COLOR TOUCH SCREEN NAVIGATION WITH GMC INFOTAINMENT SYSTEM AM/ FM/ SIRIUSXM HD RADIO with USB ports auxiliary jack Bluetooth streaming audio for music most phones Pandora Internet radio , phone ( STD), voice- activated technology for radio REAR AXLE 3. Jan 26 · Similar help support threads Thread: Forum: CSR Bluetooth driver stopped working after last Win7 update Has anyone a solution to this? 1, my Bluetooth device doesn' t work.
Suppliers of Bluetooth protocol stack software. It was originally conceived as a wireless alternative to RS- 232 data cables. Bluetooth is a wireless technology standard for exchanging data over short distances using short- wavelength UHF radio waves in the ISM band from 2.
Programming reference for Windows Driver Kit ( WDK) Windows Driver Kit ( WDK) 10 is integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio and Debugging Tools for Windows. If your computer has a built- in Bluetooth adapter we recommend using it instead of purchasing our adapter especially in Windows 10. I bought this USB Bluetooth dongle today as people here said it doesn' t come with a driver CD it' s really hard to find them online ( especially for x64). Unfortunately protocol stack software abounds in acronyms! A Bluetooth Driver is a software program that allows your operating system to communicate with a Bluetooth device and vice- versa. This driver has worked fine since late august and after the latest security update on Win7 it has stopped working correctly.
Feb 07, · After upgrading to Windows 8. Headphones ( head- phones in the early days of telephony , radio) are a pair of small loudspeaker drivers worn on around the head over a user' s ears.
How can I get it working again? Bluetooth Profile Driver Installation.
Generic bluetooth radio driver. 485 GHz from fixed mobile devices building personal area networks ( PANs). Generic bluetooth radio driver.
Bluetooth Protocol Stack. With it update windows, you can clean windows registry, remove cache files, defrag disk, fix errors download dlls. Bluetooth Device Drivers are operating system for the same Bluetooth Device, Windows 8 , device other words, you are likely to require a different Driver for Windows 10 Windows 7 to the Driver you would need for Windows XP. They are electroacoustic transducers, which convert an electrical signal to a corresponding sound.
SmartPCFixer™ is a fully featured and easy- to- use system optimization suite. If you know of others please e- mail us details. In order to use Bluetooth technology, a device must be compatible with the subset of Bluetooth profiles necessary to use the desired services.
Bluetooth is managed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group ( SIG), which has. Aug 10 · Hey just wanted to join the other people here in saying - THANKS! Also be sure to uninstall any bluetooth software from " Programs Features" in the Control Panel.
Headphones let a single user listen to an audio source privately in contrast to a loudspeaker which emits sound into the open air for anyone. Remove its driver as explained below in the FAQ section. 23 RATIO Front Disc/ Rear Drum Brakes, Integrated Turn Signal Mirrors, Bluetooth Connection, Power Steering, Tires - Front Performance, Temporary Spare Tire, Aluminum Wheels, AM/ FM Stereo, Rear Defrost, LICENSE PLATE KIT FRONT, Variable Speed Intermittent Wipers, MP3 Player, Daytime Running Lights, Tires - Rear Performance, ABS, Intermittent Wipers, Power Mirror( s), Brake Assist, Auxiliary Audio Input, DENALI PREFERRED ont Wheel Drive HD Radio.


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Home | Articles | Book Reviews | Star Gazing | Astro*Weather | Everyday Astrology
Article Title: Delineation of Conjunctions and Stellia
Date Published: 7/1/1997
- by Stephanie Clement
Astrology is, in essence, a science based on the structure of time. In a universe of motion, timing is everything for its poor players. The mystery of our respective characters is illuminated by the drama of our entrances, whether it is announced with a portentous fanfare like Alexander or veiled in the penumbra of its apparent humility.
The influence of a life is resonant with the chords sounded at its beginning. Within sound is proportion, within proportion number, and within number archetype. The wheel of an astrological chart is weighted by the forces it turns against and where they meet is the pronouncement of our names, each of which carries with it the momentum of a secret progression.
A strikingly unusual birth chart bespeaks the arrival of an unusual person, if for no other reason than it is theirs to preserve the rhythm of a rare event, a significant coincidence of the elements within a cycle. Cezanne, a difficult man, once attempted to justify his intractable behavior by saying, "It is difficult to be SOMEONE." With the conciseness occasionally blessing the inarticulate, here are words we all may affirm before asking, "Specifically, why?" White light diverges from a prism into the colors of the rainbow and only a second prism can reunite the colors. Some charts approximate this re-convergence and while their subjects may find the experience as disorienting as the diverging majority, their perspective doubtlessly has the potential to help clarify the conundrums of individuality for legions of "someones".
The chart herein considered has seven planets within thirty degrees and all in one house. A stellium is defined as a cluster of planets in close angular proximity. This is a somewhat arbitrary definition, since it assigns no particular number to a cluster or no particular degree to the angles, but this chart fits the definition for sure.
I received email from the owner of this chart in November of 1996. Yojana is an Indian astrology student. He writes, "The problem with my horoscope is most of the planets are in the Fifth House. There are three pairs [of conjunctions] so I can't judge the power of the individual planets." He goes on to say that if a general reading would be too nebulous, he would like to "know about my spouse and married life", which is the area I will address.
While space does not permit an in depth analysis of Yojana's chart, I will refer to it in considering the most common problem of applied astrology for beginner and expert alike. That is, how do we distinguish the various planetary influences within ourselves as they are happening to us in our daily lives? While most of us may feel a periodic urge to bring our lives together, with three conjunctions and seven planets all in the same house, Yojana is more likely to wish he could pry his affairs apart. Environment, career, partnership, home, communication, self worth, finance, persona and creativity are all packed into the fifth House sardine can. Without some understanding, every step might cause him to feel hobbled together with an unruly crowd like the lead man on a chain gang. The astrologer has to find a way to describe a life that is both concentrated in one direction and diverse in the various energies that are brought into focus.
Yojana's Pluto-Venus conjunction will serve as an example. Pluto, the ruler of the Seventh House, is in the Fifth House stellium. In regard to the marriage partner, then, he needs first to experience the energy of Pluto separate from all the other Fifth House energies. What then, is the energy of Pluto and how is it experienced? Or perhaps more generally, how can any planet's archetypal energy be anthropomorphized so as to be as easily recognized as a dour dinner guest or pessimistic business partner? After all, part of acting on our intelligences is knowing their source.
Yojana stated his problem clearly when he said he can't judge the individual power of the planets. This is a problem with conjunctions in general, and stellia in particular. One method of making each influence distinct is to study astrology until you are able identify certain objects in your environment that exemplify the individual planets. For each person this will be somewhat different. With Pluto is conjunct Venus, he has the added problem of experiencing Pluto separate from Venus. A second option is to imagine a story or scene in which representatives of the two planetary energies are interacting, and then identify with the actors individually. Astrology is not the only science in which the denial of archetypal images keeps people from relating to the energies directly. If the energy can be perceived within one's self, then the relationships between or among the energies can be experienced. So here are some metaphors in which Pluto and Venus reveal themselves together, but as separate energies.
These energies can be like people. So you see a guy standing next to you and he has his hat pulled down over his eyes. Sometimes he seems really wicked, like he is going to kidnap you and drag you into a dark alley. Other times he seems like a big sister who stands beside you when you need her. Pluto and Venus can have many such faces.
Scientists and artist see moving entities, not final formulae or works of art. Suppose you are working on your algebra and what you see is playing cards marching around like band performances at football games. Some of the cards are clubs and some are hearts. They shuffle themselves together, and then they march around and suddenly all the black ones are in one row and the red ones are in another. Then you realize you know the answer to the algebra problem: Pluto + Venus = . Or you are in art class and you get the same image. But what you paint is interlaced forms that repeat themselves in graphically interesting ways, without looking like the clubs and hearts at all.
The archetypes of every science seem to the outsider both arcane and inaccessible. The chemical symbols are not for the chemist synonymous with the elements, nor does the physicist imagine the atom to be numbers. The prerequisite of advancement via discovery by anyone in any discipline is the rediscovery of its governing archetypes. The planetary archetypes are the qualities of the universal self which allow for the comprehension of the individual experience within divine unity. Planetary archetypes can be like the people, or like the tasks mentioned here. They mix together and then can be perceived separately. They come together through conjunctions or other aspects, bringing their individual energies into a blending.
The Venus Pluto combination can lead to compulsive behavior, especially in one's love life, if it is not understood and managed consciously. I would encourage Yojana to consider the esoteric meanings of Venus and Pluto to find understanding of this combination. Venus deals with concrete knowledge and Pluto deals with power and will. The combination of these forces can be used for good or ill, depending on one's consciousness. Yojana's task is to understand concrete knowledge as being somewhat separate from or different from power and will. In other words, Knowledge is not Power and Will is not Knowledge. Just because you know some facts, that doesn't, in itself, make you powerful. And just because you feel the strong direction of your will, that doesn't make your opinion a concrete fact. On a more mundane level, this combination has the power of creativity pushing to express itself. Once we see that creativity reaches beyond the sexual expression, we find that it pervades our lives in every way. Yojana has a magnetic persona that will attract people to him so he has the potential to be very successful in his career. The trick is to experience the balance and harmony of Venus as distinct from the force and will of Pluto.
Esoterically Pluto is power and will and Venus is concrete knowledge. Therefore the task of the conjunction is to distinguish what is known from the direction of one's will. Caesar and John Kennedy were both warned that their lives would be in danger if they didn't change their plans. They both had the information, but chose to exercise their wills anyway. We know results were not good.
To look at Yojana's question about his marriage, suppose a person with this Venus - Pluto conjunction comes to believe that he controls (Pluto) the beauty and magnetism (Venus) he perceives in his wife. He may become intensely possessive and jealous of her, not wanting to share her with others because he feels the loss of control too keenly. Concrete knowledge for him concerns her attractiveness and magnetism. His will is involved in that he tries to force his will onto her - he tries to keep her from sharing her qualities with others. While this is an extreme statement of the problem, it is certainly not unheard of. He could just as well choose to encourage her to share her qualities with as many people as possible, and this choice could be based in concrete knowledge of her faithfulness to him.
Therefore, knowledge (Venus) provides numerous options and will (Pluto) provides the force of focus. These are neither positive or negative in themselves. How is such a decision made? It is made from a balanced position within the conjunction itself. There is a synthesis of two energies. Something similar happens with other aspects, but the desire behind them is different. The desire of the conjunction is to glue the two energies together so that neither is lost. Even though there may be a fear that one of the energies may be lost if the conjunction is dissolved, it is important to experience the two energies as themselves, in order to get the true value of the two energies working together. Fear of loss is the problem. Examination of the energies is essential.
Venus rules things like apricots, song birds, bouquets, cameos, candy, copper, coral, deer, doves, emeralds, ferns, roses, songs, spices, sugar, vines, wine, yams, social sphere, and love. Pluto rules reptiles, ants, death, decay, executions, inner planes, lava, plagues, procreation, transformation, underworld, and waste. Of the three planetary pairs in this chart, this may be the most difficult to sort out, as Venus is the energy of love that we find in relationships, while Pluto is the procreative urge that drives us emotionally sometimes. Ideal relationships have some of each. Venus rules vines and wine, while Pluto rules the dissipation that occurs with over use. Venus is the active social principal while Pluto deals with the action on the inner plane.
I find that separating the energies of a conjunction in this objective way is helpful because I then can apply what I know of the planets more clearly when working with other people's charts. If I could not separate them, I would not be much help to people who do not share the conjunctions I have. I also find it is helpful to allow the two energies to merge again, as that is how I personally am able to work with them. This process extends itself from the conjunction to include the remaining planets in the stellium.
Copyright: Stephanie Clement
Other articles by Stephanie Clement:
Aries and the Masculine in Astrology 11/14/2002
Aspects and Mental Alchemy 11/14/2002
Conjunctions to the Midheaven 11/14/2002
Decanates 11/14/2002
Manilius' System of Dodecatemories (DWADS) 11/14/2002
Planet-Centered Astrology: Mars and His Moons, Phobos and Deimos 11/14/2002
Star of the Month: Christopher Reeve 6/1/1996
Sublimation and Air 6/1/1997
Venus: An Alchemical View 5/1/1997
Win or Lose?: Two George Foreman Fights Seen Astrologically 8/1/1997
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Synthlover
Bzangy Groink
Jyoti Mishra's website
Komeda – What Makes It Go?
December 3, 1998 February 21, 2005 Jyoti
(North Of No South Records / Pinnacle NONSCD65)
Author: Jyoti Mishra <jyoti@dial.pipex.com
Forum: uk.music.alternative
Now, this is more like it. I'd never heard of them before but within the first two songs I was hooked on this album. The first track, 'Binario' starts with some Isan-y woodpecker coughs and then this crazy semi-slap bassline kicks in. Rhodri, this is definitely one track you can throw angular post-punk dancing shapes to. Stylistically, I suppose they sound most like a cross between very early Stereolab and the Cardigans. But I hate the Cardigans, which is weird cos I love this band. The songs are pretty much trad pop song forms but there's a kind of Stereolabby fucking-around going on at the edges.
Second track, 'It's Alright Baby' is simply a classic instant pop singalong. It sets your head nodding and you know the chorus the second time around. If you like any Michael Nesmith/Monkees, Beatles or Beach Boys, I can't see you not loving this song. I'm listening to it now and it's soooooo pop. Clipped rhythm guitar, modal piano countermelodies, woo-woos, – lovely. It reminds me of 'The Girl That I Knew Somewhere', 'I Saw Her Standing There' and a very obscure Sedgewicks song.
Another beauty is 'Our Hospitality' which starts off with some sample-and-hold flurbling before the bass does a lovely corny slide in. The vocal is very Stereolabby, being a kissing cousin of that classic French smoocher 'A Man And A Woman.' It's only 2.42 long and just when you think it's gonna be da-bah-da-bah-dum all the way through there's a crazy chromatic descent and some mad new lyrics. And all the tracks on this album are equally startling in different ways, combining 'traditional' instruments with electronic boogie-ing in a way that seems organic and meaningful. Rather than just bunging an old break under everything…
As you may know, apart from a few notables like Spearmint and Gorky's, I've not liked any trad guitar-pop bands this year. Komeda are now definitely in that list as well and I'll have to re-do my Top Ten. When it comes down to it, I do love a good singalong… This album is a great pop album for all the same reasons that Even As We Speak's 'Feral Pop Frenzy' was: vigour, experimentation and, most of all choruses.
The Notwist – Shrink
The Notwist – Shrink (Duophonic Super 45s DS45-CD23)
From a totally different angle, I guess this lot are doing the same as Komeda. The electronic sounds they use are far more torn and crunchy, revelling in obvious aliasing and hooting. But they mix these well with 'conventional' instruments. Track 2, 'Chemicals' reminds me most of a song off 'Bleach' performed by an alternate-reality Joy Division who have swapped Hooky for a singing modem. 'Moron' starts off quite jaaaazzzzz but get's weirder when the beat kicks in. Imagine Lalo Schifrin played over a 'Speak & Spell' era Depeche Mode drum pattern. Sort of 'Dirty Harry' meets 'Shout'. Warning: there is a saxophone solo on this track. But I still like it.
It's about as close as I get to goatee territory. Overall, the tone of the album is quite bleak and when guitar appears, it's nearly always playing sombre powerchords around a Devoesque progression (which is where the Nirvana comes in, I guess). If you're an old goth, you'll probably like this album. Or if you've got more than two 4AD records in your collection. Or if you just enjoy fairly glum music.
Where groups like isan or BoC (I hope you don't mind the comparison, toe) at their best remind you of being a kid, that intense sunshine and soaring pointless joy, this stuff most reminds you of being pissed and lonely with vomit on your shoes. For me, then, a great album. Honestly. But not the best one to listen to if you've just been dumped. Makes Mark Eitzel sound like Charlie Drake. So, two out of three ain't bad.
(And sorry if this review sounds more poncey than usual but I've finished a linguistics essay on register, dialect and sociolect and it's not worn off yet…)
Whale vs. Moloko
September 20, 1998 February 21, 2005 Jyoti
Again, after recommendations from Ant and other ukmaers, I bought the Whale album 'All Disco Dance Must End In Broken Bones' (Hut CDHUT52) the same day I bought Moloko's 'I Am Not A Doctor' (Echo ECHCX21).
Both albums are, in their own ways, bloody bonkers. This is their greatest similarity and the rather thin excuse I'm using for this head-to-head.
Whale's album most reminds me of a pop band locked in a studio with a techno Phil Spector when he's on acid and got his gun out. Whereas Moloko seem to be an experimental band who occasionally veer into pop territory as if by accident. Who can forget 'Killer Bunnies' (off their last album) once they've heard it, a track as bizzarrely scary as Denim's 'New Potatoes.'
Off the Whale album, my favourite so far is the last track, '2 Cord Song' which has this grinding, inevitably VU-ish quality to it that's fractured by Nico-ish vocals and some semi-yodelling. I think this is one of the poppiest tracks but I'm usually wrong. It does go a bit ska at the end, but then so do most songs.
The first track 'Crying At Airports' has a bit of a Portisheady feel but with a dubby bassline that reminds me of Renegade Soundwave's 'Cocaine Sex.'
'Deliver The Juice' also seems very radio and dancefloor-friendly to me. It most sounds like the Waitresses with Arthur Baker producing them and Wagner occasionally opening the door to his rehearsal room. I reckon if you love the Beasties (hiya Chaos Paul!), you'll probably love this track. If you're gonna listen to this album in a shop, check out this track cos it's got most of the width of the album in there.
Now Moloko…
I don't know (again) how to encapsulate this strange brew in one pithy sentence. Like Whale, Moloko have teensy bits of Portishead/MA/Roni Size drifting about but they also have their own thang. Like 'The Flipside' which is all over the bloody road, d'n'b to hip hop to swing to Tom Waits to trad jazz to rock.
The album as a whole isn't. A whole, that is. It's more like that old story about the blind men groping the elephant, each thinking it a rat, cat, bat, twat etc. I've only listened to the album two times thorugh solidly and it's sometimes quite jarring. It's weirder than Whale and less immediately poppy but there's often a dark underbelly of pop there. But if it is pop, it's goth pop: wry, dry and mostly impenetrable.
But amongst the huge weirdness, there are quite a few tracks which grip you despite yourself. 'Dr Zee' rolls along, with the boinks and the flurbles and 'Sorry' is a bastard cousin of 'D.I.V.O.R.C.E' with what sounds like a small monkey playing a tiny tin drumkit.
Overall, I think they're both bold, adventurous albums. They haven't done the obvious things most schmindy bands shamlessly get away with. All a guitar band has to do is bung a Moog on one track and they're instantly acclaimed as head masons of the sonic cathedral of sound.
In a pinch, I'd prefer Whale over Moloko but then I've never been hugely into experimental music, Zappa, Beefheart or modern jazz. Whale rock, Moloko tronk. Take your pick.
love and kisses,
Spearmint vs. Belle & Sebastian
I bought Belle & Sebastian's 'The Boy With The Arab Strap' the other day and didn't like it enormously. I know that's tantamount to treason round these parts and I'll get lynched at dawn but I have to be honest.
It starts well with 'It Could Have Been A Brilliant Career.' This is a wonderful, light, airy strawberry trifle of a pop song. It's ace just for the rising twiddly bassline in the chorus. The album goes downhill from here. I was listening to it with a mate of mine and when I asked him if he'd buy it he said, "Well, I've already got 'Sinister' so what's the point?" That's pretty accurate. I really, really wanted to love this album but I've listened to the bugger three times now and very little stays in my head. It's all alright…but apart from 'Career' there's nothing that grabs me like 'The State' or 'Stars of T&F.' Okay, I'm done – you can start throwing the rocks.
An album I preferred to B&S was Spearmint's 'Songs For the Colour Yellow.' This pissed all over B&S and it's not even a "proper" album, ostensibly being a collection of early stuff and b-sides. I only caught onto Spearmint when they did 'Sweeping The Nation' and I was quite surprised by how punky the earlier tracks are. But unlike B&S, what you also get from these 14 tracks is a sense of progression, of experimentation and a band looking beyond their limits. I like overarching ambition. So, whereas 'Goldmine' is a punky stomper of a track in an almost Godfathers way, the second track is Henry Mancini piano pumping crossed with Bernard Herrman.
I guess if I had to pigeonhole them, Spearmint would be a Postcard band (or perhaps at a stretch, El) whereas B&S are definitely Sarah. Which is ironic since Matt Shinkansen doesn't really like them that much. What gives Spearmint the edge over B&S is the structure of their songs. If you're doing guitar pop, choruses, bridges, and verses matter. Even when Spearmint are being wacky, as on 'Colour Yellow' it's still very singalong. This is a very poppy, singalong album. 'Scared Of Everything' sort of reminds me of Mega City Four at their best – honest and driving. Honestly, every song is good. This is meant to be a b-sides comp and all these tracks are better than all the current schmindy greats a-sides put together.
There's a versatility Spearmint have that B&S lack. They'll do anything to get a song across, us any instrument in any style. Do a soft song one minute and a nosiy, Devo-ish wail the next ('Best Friends'). In their inclusiveness, energy and bravery, Spearmint are the truly great pop band that B&S may someday turn into.
Spearmint 1 – B&S 0
Boards Of Canada – Music Has The Right To Children
(Warp/Skam Warpcd55 / skald1)
Well, after many endorsements from Mark and toe, I ordered this from Soundclash and….
It's amazing. I can honestly say that this record is the closest I've heard in terms of aesthetic to Kraftwerk. Unlike Komputer, BoC don't pastiche K, but they share the same melodic sensibility and sonic freshness. Each track has a narrative, an underlying structure that's closer to "classical" music than pop. The sounds are often atonal and deliberately dissonant. But they're so dissonant that they make normal music sound…. boring. It's a bit like when I first got into Sonic Youth after having heard Teenage Riot, I couldn't listen to any 'normal' guitar bands cos their chords sounded so dull.
My favourite track is number 10 which I think is called 'Roygbiv.' It is awesome. It starts off with a fat, offbeat synthbass. The clicky, dolphiny beat kicks in and then the most sublime chords I've heard since Satie or Debussy. This track is beautiful. It's only very short but it takes hold of you insanely efficiently. I went out to a nightclub last night, listened to a whole night of stuff and yet the only tune in my head in the taxi home was 'Roygbiv.'
Another great one is 'Aquarius.' It's got one of those wobbly, dubby basslines that just make you smile when you hear them. And it fits so funkily, it's a classic head-nodder. I'm sure this album's gonna be heavily sampled by hiphoppers, if it hasn't been already. The rhythms are at once compelling and hypnotic but yet loose and… different.
Really, every track hooks me. There's not a dud on here, similar to the Fila Brazillia album. At the same time, as a musician, this is the kind of album that depresses the hell out of me. It's so far ahead of what I'm doing, so much better than 99% of what I'm doing. I mean, when I listen to Embrace or Mansun, I can believe I'm a creative genius. But when I listen to this album, I feel like a tone-deaf moron. Who can't produce. I've obviously got to try harder.
I know I get over-enthusiastic when I post stuff but, like Jimmy Possession, that's partly cos I just don't review music I think is shite. But with BoC, I want everyone to buy the CD. Even if you hate electronic music, give it a listen. Yeah, it's sort-of ambient, but not really at all. There's too much going there for it to be aural wallpaper.
If you like Kraftwerk, Can, TD, Satie, Grieg, Debussy or Sonic Youth, you're gonna want to marry this album. I myself took the CD to bed with me last night. Otherwise, you're probably only gonna love it.
Warp, Harthouse, Sprawl
September 6, 1998 February 21, 2005 Jyoti
(sorry for the repost – pipex is being arse)
I've finally got round to following some of the recommendations in the bzangy groinky thread and have bought:
We Are Reasonable People – Warp
…which is another Warp compilation. It's brill, and I think I even prefer it to the old Artificial Intelligence comps. Beautiful tracks by Boards of Canada, Autechre, Mira Calix and other Warpsters. So far my favourite is the Plone track 'Plaything' for its sheer fartiness and similarity to the theme music from Moody & Peg. Buy this album just for its amazing variety of flatulent diarrhea(sp?) noises.
Harthouse Retrospective – Harthouse
I saw this and had to snap it up. Of course, it's more four-on-the-floor than any of the Warp stuff and probably to a lot of ears less experimental. But twenty quid for four CDs of some of the finest thumping, creaking and weebling ever recorded just can't be wrong. Great tracks by Speedy J, Metal Master, Arpeggiators and, of course, Hardfloor. The Laurent Garnier remix of the Resistance D. track also captures that floaty, zonked feeling perfectly (mind you, I say this as a teetotal, kinda-straight-edge guy so I could be wrong).
Chinese Whispers – Sprawl Imprint
I reckon the insert sums up the concept of this album succinctly, "Stereolab remixing T-Power remixing Subtropic remixing Si Begg remixing Bedouin Ascent remixing Slang remixing Freeform remixing Mike Paradinas remixing Ultramarine remixing The Sons Of Silence remixing Stereolab."
(phew)
Of course, this results in one hell of a mixed album. I liked pretty much all of it, especially the nastily aliasing Paradinas samples in his intro. Very Commodore Pet. Again, I'm running out of real words to describe most of these tracks. Apart from the Bedouin Ascent one being fairly traditionally clattery in a cutlery-dropping-on-marble-floor way. Buy it if you like all the Warpy kind of stuff more than the more 'traditional' techno/electronic/house/deep bolivian skunk stuff. It's definitely more Boyd Rice than Carl Cox.
I better go now cos I've more records to babble on about…
Cappadonna, Sunz of Man, Big Punisher
(Now that I've moved to Norwich, I have access to all the hip hop I've been wanting to buy for ages…)
Finally got that Jurassic 5 album and it's good. The obvious first comparison is to De La's '3ft High' period but there's other things in there as well. Some of the early Del (TFH) stuff and even 3rd Bass. My favourite so far is 'Concrete Schoolyard' which is just a great pop song. It should be number one if times weren't so strange and the oxymoronic spectacle of a corporate punk band didn't hold that crown. Gits. J5 also win Marvel No-Prizes for not having the ghost of Wu-Tang hovering over them like too much stuff around now.
Cappadonna – The Pillage
I s'pose that's unfair since Cap's actually produced by Rza and the Wus. But still… Even though his flow's brilliant on track's like 'Pillage' , the sonics drag me down a bit. I mean, I still love the sound but it's still that sound. Innit. Buy it for the rapping – it's worth it.
Sunz Of Man – The Last Shall Be The First
What's that smelll?? I smell….WU! But I like this album more than Cap's mainly cos of the scope of the lyrics. A track like 'Illusions' has that kind of world-weary cynicism that can't be faked – it has to be learned the hard way. It reminds me a lot of Nas. Yep, there's the usual sword clashes and Wu-trademark Les Dawson piano riffs but I still rate this CD. Like the first Gravediggaz LP, they create this claustrophobic world of Illuminati, superheroes/villains and NOI splinter sects.
Big Punisher – Capital Punishment
Now poor old Punisher got a terrible review from that staunch guardian of white, middle-class morality, the NME. Apparently, he's a nasty sexist who doesn't even sound like Tzant so how can he be hip hop?? It was nearly as good a hatchet job as when Momus got 0/10 from Barbara Ellen for much the same reasons. Though he's a lot skinnier… I like this album. It most reminds me of Chubb Rock, he's got that kind of teacherly pissed-offness but coupled with a nastier vocabulary and artillery delivery. The album does suffer a bit from guest-aritus, with Noreaga, Fat Joe, Mobb Deep, Wu (arghhh not again), Busta Rhymes and the inevitable Wyclef. Even so, BP's got his own style sonically as well as lyrically. Weirdly, it reminds me of old Katch 22.
Has anyone seen the vid for 'I'm Not A Player?' I mean, I'm a very fat bloke (wheezing when I get up etc.) and Ant Chapman's what I'd call tubby. But BP's like our combined weight welded into a short bloke. Seeing him dancing round in his pyjamas was one the most surreal things on MTV this year…
Fila Brazillia – Power Clown
Oooh, this ties with the Warp comp for being my fave today. Apparently FB got bored with doing house so they decided to go insane with a couple of guitars and a load of samplers and then release the bugger. Which is exactly what I want more bands to be doing. This is where today's happening guitar beat combos usually fail so boringly. Look at bloody Kenickie – now they've come back as Steps. Next week they'll probably lob some baggy skate trousers on and declare they've always had a hip hop element to their music.
FB astound me track after track. The closest mainstream CD this sounds like (and it doesn't) is perhaps Air, at a loooong stretch. Really, to describe it more accurately, you have to imagine disturbed members of Swell Maps or Modern English locked up in a room with Lalo Schifrin and William Shatner. Really. Honestly. It's like This Mortal Coil discovering the funk in a very small purple box that their goth kitten had shat on. FB's use of guitar is at once familiar and totally disconcerting. This is Brechtian pop music (just as I wibbled on once that The Day Today was Brechtian comedy for much the same reasons).
Now if FB heard me saying all that, they'd probably call me a fat cunt and poke me in the eyes. But I don't care:I like this album that much. For entirely different reasons, it excites me as much as the first time I heard Penthouse & Pavement, Criminal Minded or Tigermilk. I've listened to it twice since I bought it today and I'm now gonna ration myself so I don't prematurely wear it out.
August 6, 1998 February 21, 2005 Jyoti
Author: Jyoti Mishra
I got a copy of the Big Idea's new single from Mr. Wayne Artex himself this morning. It cheered me up loads because it's poppy, bizzarre and not even vaguely trying to be hip-bleedin'-house or schmindie.
Overall, it's very synthpop, which is, of course, cool by me. The songs are:
1. Bored Housewife
A tale of marital infidelity. This sounds like Separations-period Pulp crossed with Squeeze and Vince Clarke. Chorus is : "She's a housewife and I love her but I've gotta be gone by three cos her mother's coming round for tea." Excellent. Not one mention of teenage angst or Bolivian freedom fighters. Imagine the June Brides with synths.
2. Stick Or Twist
Umm…This has got a verse riff that's jerky in a Devo (good) way but the song itself sounds like an electro version of 'Johnny Remember Me' (gooder). Honestly. The best coda in a long time – they've just nicked the 'Intel Inside' riff. They'll get their arses sued if this becomes a hit. Believe me, I know.
3. It's So Obvious
This one's my favourite. It's very simple, very poppy. Lovely harmonies. Magnificent cheesy drum sounds. Here, the singer strays into almost Robert Wyatt territory. And I like songs with bits that go "woahh-ohhh-ohh" in them. Which is why Jimmy The Hoover were great.
4. Eye Contact
This one is the track that makes me think they're one bun short of a trolley. Nice floaty intro, boingy piano riff and a lead sound like Madonna's 'Holiday.' It's 4.47 long and you think, oooohh what a nice instrumental. Then the vocals come in. Just one verse. After four minutes and twenty-three seconds. Now that's some intro. If, like me, you're a fan of the theme from Howard's Way, you'll like this. Yes, I am being serious.
More Stuff About The Band
I first saw The Big Idea when they supported David Devant at the Derby gig I arranged earlier this year. I'd asked Mikey if he'd bring his favourite unsigned band as a support. They played a good gig and I was struck, then as now, by how they don't sound current. You know, every other new band you hear wants to be bloody Oasis or arsing Radiohead. They didn't. They had their influences, sure, but they also had their own style that wasn't merely an ironic checklist of previous genre guides. I want more bands like this and less fakeass depressive clones.
Anyway, the single's out on Lucky Pierre Recordings and it's cat no. is Pier 002. Buy it. It's brill.
The Orchids & Mcarthy
July 27, 1998 February 21, 2005 Jyoti
Forum: uk.music.alternative more headers author posting history
I was tidying up and put on the Orchids' 'Epicurean' CD comp. I haven't listened to it for ages. What a great band they were. I only wish some of the "indie" chancers knocking about nowadays could write tunes as good as 'Something For The Longing' or 'Long Drawn Sunday Night.'
Matt Shinkansen told me how they'd given up after slogging on for so many years. Poor buggers. What a waste. Why is it only good artists know when to stop? Felt, the Orchids… and yet I bet bloody Embrace and Radiohead will keep going like the bastard Stones. Arsenuts.
And yes, I've wittered on about Mcarthy before on this ng. For me, Mcarthy were like the Redskins but clever. With better tunes. I listened to 'Write To Your MP Today' and it was as fresh, nasty and pertinent as when they released it. I'm afraid I've never got the same hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck-twitching thrill from Stereolab. It's the depth of emotion in Mcarthy's lyrics that hooks me. The only other music I get that from is contemporary hip hop.
All the new schmindy stuff I hear is asinine navel-gazing, the paucity of meaning matched only by the mendacity of its production. Music made by scrotal scabs for easy consumption by pubic lice.
Ah well….musn't grumble, eh? It's only music, after all.
Vid Shits
flicking through profiles on OKC is now just an esoteric form of self-harm
I Miss My Dad
Top Albums Of The Decade Or Something
Clubbing (21)
DJing (181)
Doodles (25)
Films Of The Year (1)
Flying Ant Day (4)
Gig (50)
Infected (6)
Musical Moments (5)
Rambling (230)
Straight Edge (22)
Why Is Your Band Called White Town? (6)


Laravel is powerful PHP framework, it could be pretty easy to build a site using it. Here we're going to see how to install it.
How we can configure a virtual host for any site on Ubuntu, you just need to follow these steps sequentially.


text:
UGA to Host 2019 Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders
Thursday, February 28, 2019 - 11:16am
Alan Flurry
The University of Georgia has been selected as an Institute Partner for the 2019 Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders. Beginning in mid-June, UGA will host 25 of Africa's bright, emerging Civic Engagement leaders for a six-week Leadership Institute, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
The Mandela Washington Fellowship empowers young African leaders through academic coursework, leadership training, mentoring, networking, professional opportunities, and local community engagement. Since 2014, the U.S. Department of State has supported nearly 3,700 young leaders from 49 countries across Sub-Saharan Africa to develop their leadership skills and foster connections and collaborations with U.S. professionals.
The Fellowship hosted by UGA will be part of a group of 700 Mandela Washington Fellows hosted at 27 educational institutions across the United States. At the conclusion of their Leadership Institutes, these exceptional young leaders will convene in Washington, D.C., for the sixth annual Mandela Washington Fellowship Summit, where they will take part in networking and panel discussions with each other and with U.S. leaders from the public, private, and non-profit sectors. Following the Summit, 70 competitively-selected Fellows will participate in four weeks of professional development at U.S. non-governmental organizations, private companies, and government agencies.
The Civic Engagement Institute at UGA will include 25 experienced professionals between the ages of 25 and 35, who will travel to UGA this summer to participate in a six-week leadership program centered on civic engagement. Fellows will be provided with a deep understanding of pivotal issues impacting U.S. civic engagement through academic sessions, group discussions, living case studies, and site visits.
"UGA has developed considerable expertise in both civic engagement and international development practice," said Brian Watkins, Director of International Initiatives at the UGA Office of Global Engagement and Administrative Director for the institute. "The Civic Engagement Institute at UGA represents a tremendous opportunity to capitalize on this expertise and to expose UGA students and faculty to the diverse experiences of leaders from across Africa."
During the Institute at UGA, Fellows will hear from influential community leaders and grass roots activists as they travel to various cities across the South. In Atlanta, they will visit local civic organizations to learn about organizational development, and advocacy skills will be reinforced with a visit to Montgomery, Alabama, the birthplace of the U.S. civil rights movement. In New Orleans, the Fellows will explore the complex intersection of civil society and government through the lens of post-Katrina reconstruction efforts.
"Helping these carefully selected and highly qualified young African leaders identify their personal leadership styles and strengths and refining their leadership skills is key to them becoming more effective vehicles for civic engagement in their home communities," said Matt Bishop, Director of the J.W. Fanning Institute for Leadership Development, a UGA Public Service and Outreach unit. Rich McCline, Academic Director for the Civic Engagement Institute at UGA added:"The Fanning Institute is committed to building stronger communities by developing engaged leaders, and we are proud to partner with the Office of Global Engagement and the African Studies Institute to do that with this important opportunity." Dr. Brandy Walker and other Fanning faculty will join Dr. McCline in helping to implement the academic components of the Institute at UGA.
Through The Civic Engagement Institute at UGA, connections between the United States and Africa will be strengthened as Fellows establish long-lasting partnerships with local American communities. Fellows will also leave a lasting impression on the host community through community service and cultural exchange. Upon returning to their home countries, they will continue to build upon the skills learned from the program through support from US embassies, U.S. mentors, and affiliated partners.
"The Institute at UGA offers both UGA and Athens communities an opportunity to invest in young African civic leaders, the catalysts for meaningful changes across the continent," said Akinloye Ojo, Director of the UGA African Studies Institute and Co-Academic Director for The Institute at UGA. "Due to the high level of civic engagement in Athens, Georgia, it is an ideal venue for our African Fellows to learn and to comparatively appraise their own civic leadership experiences."
For additional information about the Institute at UGA, please contact Brian Watkins at the Office of Global Engagement.
The Mandela Washington Fellowship is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs with funding provided by the U.S. Government and administered by IREX. For more information about the Mandela Washington Fellowship, visit yali.state.gov/mwf and join the conversation at #YALI2019.
Chronicles Tagging:
Mandela Washington Fellowship
African Studies Institute
Star Department


People ask me why I would meet some celebrity multiple times. Once you meet them, what else is there to do?
I have met many celebrities multiple times, because I like them. If the celeb was a jerk, I might try once more, but that would be about it. When the celebs are nice and I like them, I am more likely to revisit them at future conventions.
Such is the case with Hacksaw Jim Duggan. We have met him several times and it is always fun. Hacksaw, like a lot of celebs, recognizes us and seems to give us a litle extra when we see him.
Sometimes these multiple visits allow the celeb to become comfortable with you. You build a bit of a relationship. I am not saying I am "friends" with the celebs. I know the lines. Still, I think I am pretty friendly with many of them.
With trust comes perks. Duggan gave us an interview last year because he likes us. That interview can be found at On the Beat with Hacksaw Jim Duggan.
I did write that Hacksaw likes us. You might not get that at first glance at the picture below. Hacksaw looks to be squeezing the life out of me. Wow, he has some big hands.
Hacksaw actually wanted to have a choking chain of him choking me and Matt choking him. I don't think Matt could get his hands around Hacksaw's thick neck. I can only imagine how big he was when he played college football. He is a big, thick dude (and probably without the use of enhancers).
Hacksaw gave us that little extra at C2E2 this year as usual. This is why I keep going to see him. I don't know where he will pop up next, but if it is near me, you know I will be there.
Hacksaw Jim Duggan, Matt Parker and me in Chicago, IL-April 2014.


See all the colors next to each other!
By now, you've probably seen several images of "supposed" iPhone 7s. After all, its release is just weeks away. And they all look promising — from French tech site Nowhereelse reporting they come in three different sizes, to Italian tech blog MaCityNet suggesting they might make a grand entrance in the same pastel colors we're used to. But this one from Weibo and resurfaced thanks to 9to5Mac seems to take the cake, according to Mashable.
The leaked photo purports to show together the three color options for the iPhone 7 Plus, as well as the iPhone 7 in rose gold.
The camera bump seems to be prominent, as Mashable points out, and the iPhone 7 in the photo looks similar to the one shown in a recent leaked video.
As for what's on the inside, you might be able to enter a new era of all the storage clocking in at 256GB, which totally obliterates your 16GB base storage, reports Forbes. But as with all rumors and leaked photos and videos, we can't verify their authenticity 100% — so you'll have to wait until September to see what Apple really has in store.


text:
\subsection{Problem Definition and Notation}
We assume an environment consisting $\bm{N}$ agents with their own observations $\bm{X}=\{\bm{x}_n\}_{n=1,...,\bm{N}}$.
Among those agents, some of them are degraded $\tilde{\bm{X}} = \{\tilde{\bm{x}}_l\}_{l=1,..,\bm{L}}$, and the set of degraded agents is a subset of all agents $\tilde{\bm{X}}\subset\bm{X}$.
Each agent outputs the prediction of perception task $\tilde{\bm{Y}}=\{\bm{\tilde{y}}_n\}_{n=1,...,\bm{N}}$ with the proposed communication mechanism.
Note that each agent is a \textbf{\textit{requester}} and \textbf{\textit{supporter}} simultaneously.
However, which agents are degraded is \textbf{unknown} in our problem setting.

\subsection{Communication Groups Construction}

As demonstrated in Figure ~\ref{fig:com_diff}, previous works on learning to communicate applied fully-connected communication for information exchange across agents. This framework results in a large amount of bandwidth usage and is difficult to scale up when the number of agents increases.

To reduce the network complexity and bandwidth usage, inspired by communication network protocol~\cite{kurose2005computer}, we propose a two-step group construction procedure: we first apply the handshake communication~\cite{liu2020who2com} to determine the weights of connections, and we further prune the less important connections with an activation function.

To start constructing a communication group, we apply a three-stage handshake communication mechanism~\cite{liu2020who2com}, which consists of three stages: request, match, and select. Agent $i$ first compresses its local observations $\bm{x}_i$ into a compact query vector $\bm{\mu}_i$ and a key vector $\bm{\kappa}_i$:
\begin{equation}\label{eq:key_query_generator}
     \bm{\mu}_i = G_q(\bm{x}_i; \theta_q)\in\mathbb{R}^Q, \quad \bm{\kappa}_i = G_k(\bm{x}_i;\theta_k)\in\mathbb{R}^K,
\end{equation}
where $G_q$ is a query generator parameterized by $\theta_q$ and $G_k$ is a key generator parameterized by $\theta_k$. We further broadcast the query to all of other agents, and note that this only causes limited amount of bandwidth transmission as all queries are compact compared to the high-resolution images. To decide who to communicate with, we compute a matching score $\bm{m}_{i,j}$ between an agent $i$ (as a requester) and an agent $j$ (as a supporter),
\begin{equation}\label{eq:matching}
    \bm{m}_{i,j} = \Phi(\bm{\mu}_i, \bm{\kappa}_j), \quad \forall i\neq j,
\end{equation}
where $\Phi(\cdot,\cdot)$ is a learned similarity function which measures the correlation between two vectors. The matching score $\bm{m}_{i,j}$ implies correlation between agent $i$ and $j$, and intuitively this value also represents the amount of information the supporting agent $j$ can provide for the requesting agent $i$.

However, the above method does not learn ``when" to communicate, and it results in wasted bandwidth when an agent has sufficient information and the communication is not necessary. An ideal communication mechanism is to switch on transmission when the agent requires information from other agents to improve its perception ability, while it should also switch off the transmission when it has sufficient information for its own perception task. Toward this end, inspired by self-attention mechanism~\cite{cheng2016long}, we use the correlation between the key and query from the same agent to determine if the agent potentially requires more information and thus learn when to communicate,
\begin{equation}\label{eq:matching}
    \bm{m}_{i,i} = \Phi(\bm{\mu}_i, \bm{\kappa}_i).
\end{equation}
Note that $\hat{\bm{m}}_{i,i}\approx1$ represents that the agent has sufficient information and does not need communication for perception tasks.

In order to minimize bandwidth usage during transmission, we further propose an asymmetric message method, which compresses the query into an extremely low-dimensional vector (which is transmitted) while keeping a larger size for the key vector (which is not transmitted). Once extremely compact queries are passed to receiver agents, we use a scaled general attention~\cite{luong2015effective,vaswani2017attention} to compute the correlation between agent $i$ and agent $j$:
\begin{equation}\label{eq:matching_detail}
   \Phi(\bm{\mu}_i, \bm{\kappa}_j)= \frac{\bm{\mu}_i^T \bm{W}_g \bm{\kappa}_j}{\sqrt{K}},
\end{equation}
where $W_g \in \mathbb{R}^{Q \times K}$ is a learnable parameter to match the size of query and key, and $Q$ and $K$ are dimension of query and key respectively.

Based on the above self-attention and cross-attention mechanism across all queries and keys, we thus derive the matching matrix $\bm{M}$:
\begin{equation}\label{eq:matching}
\bm{M} =
 \bm{\sigma}(\begin{pmatrix}
  \bm{m}_{1,1} & \bm{m}_{1,2} & \cdots & \bm{m}_{1,N} \\
  \bm{m}_{2,1} & \bm{m}_{2,2} & \cdots & \bm{m}_{2,N} \\
  \vdots  & \vdots  & \ddots & \vdots  \\
  \bm{m}_{N,1} & \bm{m}_{N,2} & \cdots & \bm{m}_{N,N}
 \end{pmatrix})\in\mathbb{R}^{\bm{N}\times \bm{N}},
\end{equation}
where $\bm{\sigma}(\cdot)$ is a row-wise softmax function.

To construct the communication groups, we prune the less connections with an activation function:
\begin{equation}\label{eq:matching}
\bar{\bm{M}} = \bm{\Gamma}(
   \bm{M} ;\delta),
\end{equation}
where $\bm{\Gamma}(\cdot;\delta)$ is an element-wise function, which zeros out the elements smaller than $\delta$. (We set $\delta=\frac{1}{N}$ in our experiment.)

The derived matrix $\bar{\bm{M}}$ can be regarded as the adjacency matrix of a directed graph, where the entries of the matrix indicate when to communicate and non-entries represent who to communicate with as demonstrated in Figure~\ref{fig:graph_mat}.
Each row of the matrix represents how a receiver agent collects information from different supporting agents, and each column of the matrix is how one supporter sends its own information to different requesting agents.
\input{figure/graph_mat.tex}

As shown in Figure~\ref{fig:overview_model}, once a requesting agent collects the information from its linked supporting agents, the requesting agent $i$ integrates its local observation and the compressed visual feature maps from supporters based on the matching scores:
\begin{align}\label{eq:softmax}
        \bm{\hat{y}}_i=D([{\bm{f}}_i; \bm{f}_{i}^{inf}];\theta_d), \quad
        \bm{f}_{i}^{int} = \sum_{\substack{j=1 \\  \bm{\bar{m}}_{i,j}\neq 0 }}^{\bm{N}}\bm{\bar{m}}_{i,j}\bm{f}_j,
\end{align}
where $\bm{D}$ is an perception task decoder parameterized by $\theta_d$, $\bm{\bar{m}}_{i,j}$ is the element located in
$i$-th row and $j$-th of the matrix $\bm{\bar{M}}$, $\bm{f}_i=\bm{E}(x_i;\theta_e)$ is an feature map of agent $i$ encoded by an image encoder $\bm{E}$, $[\cdot;\cdot]$ is concatenation operation along channel dimension. It is worth noting that our perception task decoder is not limited for specific vision tasks, and we demonstrate our communication framework can be generalized to different visual tasks in our experiments.

\subsection{Learning of Communication}
Our learning strategy follows the centralized training and decentralized inference procedure~\cite{lowe2017multi}.
Precisely, all agents are able to access all local observations of agents in the training stage, while each agent can only observe its own local observation in the inference stage. Our goal is to learn a bandwidth-efficient communication mechanism, so that in the inference stage, our proposed model is able to perform multi-agent collaborative perceptions in a bandwidth-limited and distributed manner.

We follow the aforementioned handshake communication to compute the matching matrix $M$, and we weight the agents' feature maps based on the matching matrix $M$ and further integrate them as:
\begin{align}\label{eq:training_softmax}
        \bm{f}_{i}^{all} = \sum_{j=1}^{\bm{N}}\bm{\tilde{m}}_{i,j}\bm{f}_j,
\end{align}
where $\bm{\tilde{m}}$ the element located in
$i$-th row and $j$-th of the matrix $\bm{M}$.
Note that in the above equation $\bm{m}_{i,j}\bm{f}_j$ represents who to communicate with, and $\bm{m}_{i,i}\bm{f}_i$ indicates when to communicate.
Then, a client agent $i$ combines its own feature map $f_i$ and the integrated feature $\bm{f}_{i}^{all}$ to compute the prediction for downstream visual tasks,
\begin{align}\label{eq:training_softmax}
        \bm{\tilde{y}}_i=D([{\bm{f}}_i; \bm{f}_{i}^{all}];\theta_d), \quad
\end{align}

In order to train our model, we use the label for downstream tasks (\textit{e.g.,} segmentation masks) as supervision, we compute the loss as:
\begin{align}\label{eq:loss}
\mathcal{L} = \mathcal{H}(\bm{y}_j, \bm{\tilde{y}}_j),
\end{align}
where $\mathcal{H}(\cdot,\cdot)$ can be the objective function for any downstream visual tasks (\textit{e.g.} pixel-wise cross-entropy for segmentation tasks or cross-entropy for recognition tasks). We later update the weights of our model $\Theta=(\theta_k,\theta_q, \theta_e, \theta_d)$ using the above loss in an end-to-end manner.

\subsection{Experimental Cases and Datasets}
\input{table/dataset.tex}
\subsubsection{Collaborative Semantic Segmentation}

Our first task is collaborative 2D semantic segmentation of a 3D scene. Given observations (an RGB image, aligned dense depth map, and pose) from several mobile agents, the objective of this task is to produce an accurate 2D semantic segmentation mask for each agent.

Since current semantic segmentation datasets~\cite{geiger2013vision,cordts2016cityscapes,RobotCarDatasetIJRR,hecker2018end} only provide RGB images and labels captured from the perspective of single agent, we thus use AirSim simulator~\cite{airsim2017fsr} to collect our AirSim-MAP (Multi-Agent Perception) dataset.
For this dataset, we fly a swarm of five to six drones with different yaw rates through a series of waypoints in the AirSim ``CityEnviron'' environment.
We record pose, depth maps, and RGB images for each agent. Note that we also provide semantic segmentation masks for \textbf{all} drones.

We consider three experimental cases within this task.  We refer to the agent attempting segmentation as the \textbf{requesting} agent, and all other agents as the \textbf{supporting} agents.  Details for each case are listed as follows:

\noindent
\textbf{Single-Request Multiple-Support (SRMS)}
This first case examines the effectiveness of communication for a single requesting agent under the assumption that if an agent is degraded, then its original, non-degraded information will be present in one of the supporting agents.  We include a total of five agents, of which only one is selected for possible degradation.  We add noise to a random selection of $50\%$ of this agent's frames, and we randomly replace one of the remaining agents with the \textit{non-degraded} frame of the original agent.  Note that only the segmentation mask of the original agent is used as supervision.

\noindent
\textbf{Multiple-Request Multiple-Support (MRMS)}
The second case considers a more challenging problem, where multiple agents can suffer degradation.  Instead of requiring a single segmentation output, this case requires segmentation outputs for all agents, degraded and non-degraded.  We follow the setup of the previous case, and we ensure that each of the several degraded requesting agents has a corresponding non-degraded image among its supporting agents.

\noindent
\textbf{Multiple-Request Multiple-Partial-Support (MRMPS)}
The third case removes the assumption that there exists a clean version of the degraded view among the supporting agents.  Instead, the degraded agent must select the most informative view(s) from the other agents, and these views might have a variable degree of relevance.  Specifically, as the drone group moves through the environment, the images from each drone periodically and partially overlap with those of other drones.  Intuitively, the segmentation output of the requesting drone is only aided from the supporting drones that have overlapping views.

\input{table/MIMO_case1.tex}

\subsubsection{Multi-Agent 3D Shape Classification}
In addition to the semantic segmentation task, we also consider a multi-agent 3D shape classification task.
For this experimental case, we construct a multi-agent variant of the \textbf{ModelNet 40} dataset~\cite{wu20153d}.
The original dataset contains 40 common object categories from ModelNet with 100 unique CAD models per category and 12 different views of each model.
However, our variant adds a communication group structure to the original dataset.  Specifically, we sample three sets of class-based image triplets.
Each triplet corresponds to a randomly selected 3D object model and each triplet contains three randomly selected 2D views of its corresponding object model.
To make this problem setting more challenging, we further degrade one image from each triplet.
The objective of this task is to predict the corresponding object class for each agent by leveraging the information from all agents.
Figure~\ref{fig:vis_graph} shows an example of the dataset in one trial with 9 agents.
This modified task is essentially a distributed version of the multi-view classification task~\cite{wu20153d}.

\subsection{Baselines and Evaluation Metrics}
Here we consider several fully-connected (FC) and distributed communication (DistCom) models as our baselines. FC models fuse all of the agents' observations (either weighted or unweighted) whereas DistCom models only fuse a subset of those observations.

\begin{itemize}[topsep=0pt,itemsep=-1ex,partopsep=1ex,parsep=1ex,labelindent=0.0em,labelsep=0.2cm,leftmargin=*]

\item \textit{CatAll} \textbf{(FC)} is a naive FC model baseline which concatenates the encoded image features of all agents prior to subsequent network stages.

\item \textit{Auxiliary-View Attention (AuxAttend;\textbf{FC})} uses an attention mechanism to weight auxiliary views from the supporting agents.

\item  \textit{RandCom} \textbf{(DistCom)} is a naive distributed baseline which randomly selects one of other agents as a supporting agent.

\item \textit{Who2com}~\cite{liu2020who2com} \textbf{(DistCom)} excludes self-attention mechanism such that it always communicates with one of the supporting agents.

\item \textit{OccDeg and AllNorm} are baselines that employ no communication, i.e. each agent (view) independently computes the output for itself. For \textit{OccDeg} the data is degraded similarly as before, while in \textit{AllNorm} we use clean images for all views. These two serve as an upper and lower reference for comparison.
\end{itemize}

We also consider communication modules of \textit{CommNet}~\cite{sukhbaatar2016learning}, \textit{VAIN}~\cite{hoshen2017vain}, and \textit{TarMac}~\cite{das2019tarmac} as our baseline methods for all multiple-outputs tasks.
For a fair comparison, we use ResNet18~\cite{he2016deep} as the feature backbone for our and all mentioned  baseline models. For the 3D recognition task, we also add MVCNN~\cite{wu20153d} as a baseline.

We evaluate the performance of all the models with mean IoU on the segmentation task and prediction accuracy on the 3D shape recognition task. In addition, we report Bandwidth of all FC and DistCom models in Megabyte per frame (MBpf). To obtain MBpf, We add the size of the feature vectors which need to be transmitted to the requesters and size of keys broadcast to all supporters and multiply by the number of bytes required for storage.

\subsection{Quantitative results}

\noindent
\textbf{Single-Request Multiple-Support (SRMS)}
The goal of this case is to examine if our model is able to learn when to communicate and learn who to communicate with for a single requesting agent.
Figure~\ref{fig:when2com_exp} shows the performance of our proposed model and several baseline models.
Although most fully-connected methods can improve the prediction mIoU compared with \textit{NoCom}, they need to propagate all information in a fully-connected manner and thus require high bandwidth consumption.
In contrast, our model reports higher prediction accuracy yet smaller bandwidth usage (Who2com~\cite{liu2020who2com}: $2$ MBpf; ours: $0.98$ MBpf).
Another observation is that our model is able to further improve compared with \textit{Who2com}~\cite{liu2020who2com}.
This demonstrates the benefit of learning when to communicate, which reduces the waste of bandwidth and prevent detrimental message when the requesting agent has sufficient information and communication is not required.

\noindent
\textbf{Multiple-Request Multiple-Support (MRMS)}
In this case, we further address a more challenging problem, where multiple agents suffer degradation.
Each agent should (1) identify when it needs to communicate, (2) decide who to communicate with when it needs to, and (3) avoid the selection of noisy views from the supporting agents.
We list the experiment results in the Table~\ref{tab:mimo_case1}\zk{Should move tables so that this is Table 1}.
It can be seen that, when the requesting agents cannot prevent the selection of noisy supporting agents, both \textit{CatAll} and \textit{RandCom} perform even worse than \textit{NoCom}.
This verifies our intuition that the information from the supporting agents is not always beneficial for the requesting agents, and selection of incorrect information may even hinder the prediction of the requesters.

With the use of attention mechanisms for weighting the feature maps from the supporting agents, both \textit{AuxAttend} and \textit{Who2com}~\cite{liu2020who2com} are able to prevent incorrect views from deteriorating performance and thus improve with respect to \textit{NoCom}, \textit{CatAll}, and \textit{RandCom}.
However, without learning when to communicate, those models are forced to always request information from at least one supporting agent resulting in both poorer performance and unnecessary bandwidth usage.

In addition to the above baseline methods, we also consider CommNet~\cite{sukhbaatar2016learning} and TarMac~\cite{das2019tarmac}.
Even though CommNet integrates the information from other agents by using an average pooling mechanism, it does not improve the prediction of either degraded or non-degraded requesting agents because it indiscriminately incorporates all views.

On the other hand, TarMac~\cite{das2019tarmac} is able to provide better results compared with the baseline models.
However, TarMac uses one-way communication and results in large bandwidth usage which presents difficulty in the real scenario.
On the contrary, our model is not only able to outperform it on both degraded and non-degraded samples, but also consumes less bandwidth by using our asymmetric query mechanism and pruning redundant connections within the network with the activation function.

\noindent
\textbf{Multiple-Request Multiple-Partial-Support (MRMPS)}
In this case, there is less chance to have completely overlapped observations between any two agents.
This presents an inherent difficulty in the perception task because only incomplete information is available for the prediction.
As shown in the right part of Table~\ref{tab:mimo_case1}, the performance improvement margin of all FC and DistCom models is smaller with respect to \textit{NoCom}, in comparison to more significant improvement observed in the previous scenario.

Nonetheless, we observe that all methods exhibit a similar trend as the previous scenario. Our model is still able to maintain a similar prediction accuracy as fully-connected models, while we only use one-fourth bandwidth for communication across agents. This demonstrates the superior bandwidth-efficiency of our model.

\noindent
\textbf{Multi-agent 3D shape Recognition}
In order to demonstrate the generalization of our model, here we apply our model to the task of multi-agent 3D shape classification.
Table~\ref{tab:3d_shape} provides the quantitative evaluation on this task using our proposed model and other baselines, including \textit{VAIN}~\cite{hoshen2017vain}, \textit{CommNet}~\cite{sukhbaatar2016learning}, and \textit{TarMac}~\cite{das2019tarmac}. Our model is able to perform competitively compared with \textit{TarMac}~\cite{das2019tarmac} with only approximately one-eighth bandwidth usage. We also provide qualitative results in Figure~\ref{fig:vis_graph} to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, which allows agents to communicate with the correct and informative agents.

\subsection{Analyses}

To investigate the source of our model's improvement over the baselines, we computed two selection accuracy metrics on the SRMS dataset, \textit{WhenToCom} and \textit{Grouping}. \textit{WhenToCom} accuracy measures how often communication between a requester and a supporter(s) is established and when it is needed; and \textit{Grouping} measures how often the correct group is created when there is indeed communication. We also comment on the trade-off between bandwidth and performance of communication by conducting a controlled experiment on the size of query and key on the 3D recognition dataset.

\noindent
\textbf{Effect of handshake communication}
As demonstrated in Figure~\ref{fig:hcom_effect}, we conduct an ablation study on the proposed handshake communication. In the \textit{Ours (w/o H-Com)} model, we remove the handshake communication module, so that each agent only uses its local observations to compute both (1) the communication score and (2) its communication group.

We additionally provide the result of \textit{RandCom}.  We observed that our model with the proposed handshake communication offers a significant improvement over both \textit{RandCom} and our model without handshake communication. This finding demonstrates the necessity of communication for deciding when to communicate and who to communicate with. That is, an agent without communication cannot decide what information it needs and which supporter has the relevant information to help better perform on perception tasks.

Figure~\ref{fig:vis_graph} visualizes three examples from the 3D shape recognition task. Each agent clearly knows when communication is needed based on information provided by the supporters and its own observation. For example, in the first three box examples, the degraded agent on the left knows to select an informative view from the other agents; the non-degraded agent in the middle decides to select a more informative view even though it possesses sufficient information; and the third agent decides that communication is not needed because it has the most informative view among all. It is worth mentioning that all 9 views are provided to every agent and the agent needs to identify informative views and detrimental views based on the matching scores.
\noindent
\textbf{Query and key size}
We further analyze the effect of query and key size on \textit{Grouping} accuracy and classification accuracy on the 3D shape classification task.
We vary the query size from $1$ to $128$ with a fixed key size of $16$ as shown in Figure~\ref{fig:abl_msg}. We observe that both selection and classification accuracy improve as the message size increases. Our model can perform favorably with a message size of $4$. The same trend is also observed for key sizes. Most noticeably, we find that there exists asymmetry in query-key size. While the selection accuracy saturates at 16-dimensional query, selection accuracy consistently improves with increasing key size until 1024-dimensional key. Our model exploits this asymmetry to save bandwidth in communication while maintaining high performance.

\section{Conclusion}
In this paper, we proposed a general bandwidth-efficient communication framework for collaborative perception. Our framework learns both how to construct communication groups and when to communicate. This framework can be generalized to several down-stream tasks including (but not limited to) multi-agent semantic segmentation and multi-agent 3D shape recognition. We demonstrated superior performance with lower bandwidth requirements across all compared methods.

\section{Experiment}
We evaluate the performance of our proposed framework on two distinct perception tasks: collaborative semantic segmentation and multi-view 3D shape recognition.

\input{4.1_setting.tex}
\input{figure/when2com_exp.tex}

\input{4.2_baseline.tex}
\input{table/3dshape_rec.tex}
\input{figure/vis_graph.tex}

\input{4.3_quan_result.tex}
\input{figure/msg_size.tex}

\input{4.4_analyses.tex}
\input{figure/effect_hcom.tex}

\section{Introduction}

Remarkable progress has been achieved for single-agent perception and recognition, where one or more sensor modalities are used to perform object detection~\cite{redmon2016you,Redmon_2017_CVPR,Lin_2017_ICCV} and segmentation~\cite{chen2018encoder,He_2017_ICCV,kirillov2019panoptic}, depth estimation~\cite{godard2017unsupervised,Zhou_2017_CVPR,godard2019digging}, and various other scene understanding tasks.
However, in many applications, such as robotics, there may be multiple agents distributed in the environment, each of which has local sensors.
Such multi-agent systems are advantageous in many cases, for example, to increase coverage across the environment or to improve robustness to failures.
\input{figure/overview.tex}

Thus, we tackle the problem of \textit{multi-agent collaborative perception}, an under-studied topic in the literature, where multiple agents are able to exchange information to improve overall accuracy towards perception tasks (\textit{e.g.}, semantic segmentation or object recognition).
One major challenge for multi-agent collaborative perception is the transmission bandwidth, as high bandwidth results in network congestion and latency in the agent network.
We therefore investigate the scenario where information across all agents (and hence sensors) is not available in a centralized manner, and agents can only communicate through bandwidth-limited channels.
We also consider several challenging scenarios where some sensor data may be uninformative or degraded.

Prior works on learning to communicate~\cite{sukhbaatar2016learning,foerster2016learning} mainly address decision-making tasks (rather than for improving perception) under simple perceptual environments.
In addition, these methods also do not consider bandwidth limitations: They learn to communicate across a fully-connected graph (i.e. all agents communicate with each other through broadcasts).
Such methods cannot scale as the number of agents increases.
Similarly, since all information is broadcast there is no decision of \textit{when} to communicate conditioned on the need.
An agent does not need to consume bandwidth when the local observation is sufficient for the prediction.
When messages sent by other agents are degraded or irrelevant, communication thus could be detrimental to the perception task.

In this paper, we propose a learning-based communication model for collaborative perception.
We specifically view the problem as learning to construct the communication group (i.e. each agent decides what to transmit and which agent(s) to communicate with) and to decide when to communicate without explicit supervision for such decisions during training.
In contrast to broadcast-based methods (e.g. TarMac~\cite{das2019tarmac}) and inspired by the general attention mechanisms, our method decouples the stages of communication and this allows for \textit{asymmetric message and key sizes}, reducing the amount of transmitted data.

Our method can be generalized to several downstream vision tasks, including multi-agent collaborative semantic segmentation (dense prediction) and multi-agent 3D shape recognition (global prediction).
Our model is able to be trained in an end-to-end manner with only supervision from downstream tasks (e.g. ground-truth masks for segmentation and class labels for image recognition) and without the need for explicit ground-truth communication labels.

We demonstrate across different tasks that our method can perform favorably against previous works on learning to communicate while using less bandwidth.
We provide extensive analyses, including trade-offs between message and query sizes, the correlation between ground-truth key and predicted message, and visualization of the learned communication groups.

Our contributions are listed as follows:
\begin{itemize}[topsep=0pt,itemsep=-1ex,partopsep=1ex,parsep=1ex,labelindent=0.0em,labelsep=0.2cm,leftmargin=*]
\item We address the under-explored area of collaborative perception, which is at the intersection of perception, multi-agent systems, and communication.
\item We propose a unified framework that learns both how to construct communication groups and when to communicate. It does not require ground truth communication labels during training, and it can dynamically reduce bandwidth during inference.
\item Our model can be generalized to several down-stream tasks, and we show through rigorous experimentation that it can perform better when compared with previous works investigating learned communication.
\item  We provide a collaborative multi-agent semantic segmentation dataset, AirSim-MAP, where each agent has its own depth, pose, RBG images, and semantic segmentation masks. This dataset allows researchers to further investigate solutions to multi-agent perception.
\end{itemize}
\section{Acknowledgement}
\label{sec:acknowledgement}
This work was supported by ONR grant N00014-18-1-2829.

{\small
\bibliographystyle{ieee_fullname}

\section{Method}

The goal of our proposed model is to address the multi-agent collaborative perception problem, where an agent is able to improve its perception by receiving information from other agents. In this paper, we are specifically interested in \textit{learning to construct communication groups} and \textit{learning when to communicate} in a bandwidth-limited way.

\input{3.1_problem.tex}
\input{3.2_model.tex}
\input{3.3_learning.tex}

\section{Related works}
\input{figure/com_diff.tex}
\textbf{Learning to communicate.}
Communication is an essential component for effective collaboration, especially for multi-agent decision-making and perception tasks.
Early works~\cite{tan1993multi,melo2011querypomdp} facilitated information flow and collaboration through pre-defined communication protocols. Similarly, auction-based methods~\cite{li2010auction,qureshi2008smart} for camera grouping use several assumptions (e.g., static cameras) and heuristic rules to decide the agents' communication.
However, such rigid protocols do not evolve with dynamic environments and do not easily generalize to complex environments.
Thus, in recent years, several multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) works have explored learn-able interactions between agents.
For example, assuming full cooperation across agents, each agent in CommNet~\cite{sukhbaatar2016learning} broadcasts its hidden state to a shared communication channel so that other agents can decide their actions based on this integrated information.
A similar scheme was proposed by Foerster~\textit{et al.}~\cite{foerster2016learning}, where agents instead communicate via learned, discrete signals.
To further leverage the interactions between agents, Battaglia~\textit{et al.}~\cite{battaglia2016interaction} and Hoshen~\cite{hoshen2017vain} integrate kernel functions into CommNet.
Additionally, several works have addressed communication through recurrent neural networks (RNN).
For example, DIAL~\cite{foerster2016dial} uses an RNN to derive the individual Q-value of each agent based on its observation and the messages from other agents.
BiCNet~\cite{peng2017multiagent} connects all agents with a Bi-directional LSTM to integrate agent-specific information, and ATOC~\cite{jiang2018learning} additionally applies an attention unit to determine what to broadcast to the shared channel.
Although substantial progress has been made by several MARL works, most experimental tasks are built on simplistic 2D-grid environments where each agent observes low-dimensional 2D images.
As mentioned in Jain~\textit{et al.}~\cite{jain2019two}, studying agents' interactions in simplistic environments does not permit study of the interplay between perception and communication.

\input{figure/com_module.tex}
Recent works have proposed to construct communication groups based on pre-defined rules~\cite{jiang2018learning,jiang2018graph} or a unified communication network~\cite{singh2018learning,sukhbaatar2016learning,hoshen2017vain,peng2017multiagent,singh2018learning,das2019tarmac}.
With these techniques, bandwidth usage during communication increases as the number of agents scales up. While Who2com~\cite{liu2020who2com} uses a handshake communication to reduce the bandwidth usage, this model assumes all agents \textit{always} need to communicate with one of the other agents.
This results in the waste of bandwidth consumption and cannot prevent the issue of detrimental messages.
In contrast, our proposed framework alleviates these problems by learning to decide when to communicate and to create communication groups.

\textbf{Attention mechanisms.}
Attention mechanisms have been widely used in recent learning-based models.
In a nutshell, the attention mechanism can be viewed as a soft fusion scheme to weight different values based on a similarity between query and keys.
A few noticeable and widely used attention mechanisms are \textit{additive}~\cite{bahdanau2014neural}, \textit{scale dot-product}~\cite{vaswani2017attention}, and \textit{general}~\cite{luong2015effective}.
One key finding of our work is that the \textit{general} mechanism allows for asymmetric queries and keys, which makes it especially suitable for tasks with bandwidth considerations: An agent's transmitted query message can be smaller than its retained key, and hence its overall bandwidth consumption can be reduced.

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