I live and work between Hanoi and Milan. My works are multimedia, with a focus on identity, self-inscription and memory. My current research and practice are aimed to investigate failures in the relationship between human and machine, specifically in the process of learning. I have participated in various exhibitions, workshops, screenings and art projects in Vietnam, Italy, Portugal and France. In 2013, I debuted as a photographer in the group show Autopsy of days, held in Goethe Institut Hanoi. In the very same year, I was chosen by NhàSàn Collective to be in the De-constructing memories art project, in which I received sponsorship from the Cultural Development and Exchange Fund of the Denmark Embassy to make my photography exhibition. In 2015, my video Disorder is beautiful was selected to be screened at Asian Cultural Complex in Gwangju, South Korea. In 2018, my workThe Fall was performed at Museo 900' in Milan, as part of Furla Series. Apart from personal projects, I have also contributed to community development. In 2016, I curated In_ur_scr!, the first online exhibition in Vietnam. In 2014, I founded The Black Hole – a community art project, in which I illustrated and published anonymous secrets from Internet users. I am currently pursuing a MFA in New Media Art at Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera – Italy, with the Italian Government Scholarship for foreigners.
"My Artificial Muse" is a performance in IV acts exploring how Artificial Intelligence can collaborate with humans in the creative and artistic processes.The human artist Albert Barqué-Duran performs a live-painting show, reproducing an artwork 100% designed by an Artificial Neural Network conceived by Mario Klingemann. Also, the artifi-cial intelligent machine performs a visual show on how it generates new paintings and showcases the computational creativity processes behind it. A generative experimental music set, produced by Marc Marzenit, is played through a series of embodied sensors that follow the movements of the artist during the performance. (Playtime: 60 minutes aprox.). Each performance is unique.


World War Z key brings the newest third-person co-op zombie fighting experience by Saber Interactive! Enter the world infested and loaded with zombies, they are everywhere, and they come in a swarm! Whatever living they see, they rush mindlessly to tear it in pieces! Humanity is at its soon-to-be downfall and the remaining few are not planning to hide until their eventual demise!
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text:
February 3, 2020 In the service of others
February 18, 2020 Making medicine and peacekeeping her mission
February 20, 2020 Improving the health and wellbeing of people with a disability
Posted on May 5, 2020 September 9, 2020 by Lynda Allen
Currently on the frontline of his country's response to COVID-19, Dr Kwan Leung Chia (MD '16) is a member of the Home Quarantine Taskforce at the Centre for Health Protection in Hong Kong's Department of Health, where he is a Specialist Trainee in Public Health Medicine.
'The Home Quarantine Taskforce ensures that people under home quarantine orders are medically well, compliant with the requirements, and able to access round-the-clock medical attention via a telemedicine service which informs clinical decision-making,' says Kwan.
'Apart from rostered clinical service, I have also assisted to refine the operational system of the Home Quarantine Taskforce to make it more efficient, including the referral and collaboration system with public hospitals, immigration, port health, police, social welfare departments, the quarantine centre and camps.'
Kwan is also an Adjunct Associate Lecturer at Flinders University and an Honorary Clinical Tutor at the University of Hong Kong.
He came to Flinders in 2013 under the Flinders Graduate-entry Medical Program, after graduating with a Bachelor of Chinese Medicine from The University of Hong Kong.
'A friend was studying medicine at Flinders when I began researching universities to apply to, and he highly recommended it, often reiterating the program's strength in early clinical exposure so that graduates would be more competent, confident and genuinely ready for the workplace.'
Kwan has many fond memories of his time at Flinders.
'My rural placement experience in third year enhanced my understanding of health inequity and inequalities, thus stimulating my interests in public health medicine. In my fourth year I was elected as a member of the University Council, which offered me great insights of how Flinders is led, managed, and contributed by a team of dedicated volunteer experts from different professions.
Kwan says his greatest inspiration comes from his wife, Tung Ping Chan.
'We had a long-distance relationship for five years before she quit her job in Hong Kong to move to Adelaide to accompany me during my studies. Now, she is the full-time mother of our Flinders Medical Centre-born baby boy. It's very cool that he was born in the same place where I assisted in delivering a baby when I was a student.'
In 2019 he established an innovative public health initiative and a registered charity called Chinese Medicine South Australia Incorporated to promote integrative medicine which he hopes to develop in the future. Kwan's dual practitioner status as a Registered Chinese Medicine Practitioner and Registered Medical Practitioner provide an interesting combination rarely seen in the professions.
'The long-term goal is to reduce health inequalities by improving the health of rural and remote South Australians through self-management to reduce the need for health services, which are often sacred in rural areas.
'I hope that my international frontline public health experience will be beneficial to Australia's health system – I intend to bring the specialist knowledge, skills and experience back to Australia after I have obtained my medical specialist qualification in Hong Kong.'
Flinders graduates have global reach and international impact, read more
College of Medicine and Public Health Medicine Stories
A shift to finance proves economic
A powerful vision for law

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Intellect Incursion
The game will begin shortly before the end of the world, well at least the end of things as everyone knew them. Mind Flayers quickly become a problem, invading and unleashing eldritch horrors on those who survive the first few minutes. The players will be exploring the Sword Coast, trying to survive, learn more about the history behind the incursion, and maybe even drive their new masters back to wherever they came from.
Carsen Bill Potter
Neurodivergent
Brings Every D&D Sourcebook and the basic rulebooks for every system I can run to the table
Players should have a basic understanding of the rules of 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons, or make it known to me before the game that they don't. Most communication will be done through Discord, and the game will be played through Roll20, so players should have access to, and accounts for those programs.
I have access to all of the published DnD rulebooks and UA articles up to, but not including Rime of the Frostmaiden. I will provide battlemaps, a map of the Sword Coast, and any other handouts, rules, etc. the players will need.
Most of the gameplay will be traveling around a post-apocalyptic version of the Sword Coast in Faerun, searching for clues as to what caused the invasion, and trying to stay alive, sane, and human (or humanoid).
Characters will start at second level, and will be made after joining the game, but before the first session. 4d6 drop the lowest for abilities, and all WotC created materials, including Unearthed Arcana, will be allowed as character options.


text:
Peace activist and hip-hop singer will address Kennesaw State community
Emmanuel Jal to headline Stand Up for Peace event March 31 as students attempt to break Guinness…
Georgia (Mar 20, 2012) —
Emmanuel Jal to headline Stand Up for Peace event March 31 as students attempt to break Guinness world record for largest human peace sign
Click here for more information about Jal's speaking engagment at KSU.
KENNESAW, Ga. March 20, 2012– Sudanese peace activist and international hip-hop star Emmanuel Jal will address the Kennesaw State University community on Saturday, March 31, on the Campus Green as thousands of students attempt to break the record for the world's largest human peace sign.
Jal, a child soldier from Sudan who became known as one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, will also be speaking to KSU students in a master class workshop on performance studies for social activism on Tuesday, March 27.
Jal has emerged into a global recording artist acclaimed for his unique style of global hip-hop music and his message of peace and reconciliation. In 2008, a full-length documentary on his life, "Warchild," won 12 film-festival awards. For his commitment to peace building, Jal received the 2011 Common Ground Award previously awarded to Bishop Desmond Tutu and Mohammad Ali. Jal has addressed the United Nations and U.S. Congress.His 2009 TED Global talk was a YouTube sensation.
Jal, who lives in the U.K., comes to Atlanta at the invitation of nonprofit Mothering Across Continents and Kennesaw State. One of Mothering Across Continents' flagship efforts is Raising South Sudan, a project that helps former Lost Boys of Sudan fund education, school building and clean water in the Republic of South Sudan. The Lost Boys refers to 3,800 young men invited in 2001 to leave refugee camps and come to the U.S. to begin new lives.
KSU graduate Nathaniel Nyok, a former Lost Boy of Sudan and participant in the Raising South Sudan project, will join Jal in delivering the message that youth locally can be a positive force for global change.
Kennesaw State University is the third-largest university in Georgia, offering 80 graduate and undergraduate degrees, including doctorates in education, business and nursing, and a new Ph.D. in international conflict management. A member of the 35-unit University System of Georgia, Kennesaw State is a comprehensive, residential institution with a growing population of 24,100 students from more than 130 countries.


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text:
\section{Limitations and Future Work}
\label{sec:discussion}
Although our results are up to two times better than the one of G\"unel et al., there are multiple technical constraints.
Besides requiring free-flight motion, which restricts the application scenarios, the assumption of a static camera is the strongest limitation. However, we believe that existing video stabilization \cite{Liu14b}, video panorama \cite{Agarwala05}, and SfM  techniques \cite{Schonberger16} could be applied to resolve this constraint by registering moving videos to a static frame.
In fact, our strategy could be integrated into SfM methods and provide the scale information missing in monocular reconstruction.

Detecting free-flight, is a challenge that we only touched in this study. Currently the flight and ground contact phases can only be distinguished within a hand-selected snippet that must contain flight phases. While sufficient for many tasks such as forensics and analyzing legacy videos, developing fully-automatic techniques, perhaps by analyzing foot-ground contact visually, poses an important future research direction for domains that require automation.

It is important to reinforce that our method recovers metric height, the absolute extend of an object in the direction of gravity, but no other extends. Computing scales in arbitrary directions, such as object width, would require knowledge of the 3D gravity direction and camera calibration to disentangle the effects of foreshortening and pixel~extend.

\section{Conclusion}

We have explored a new approach for estimating the height of a person jumping and running. It is applicable to monocular videos of persons and objects alike, whenever free-fall with negligible air friction is present.
We hope that this approach will enable new applications, as its limitations are complementary to those of existing monocular height estimation approaches. The precision is high, attaining up to 3.9 cm MAE on our new \persons{} dataset. In the future, we expect that advances in person keypoint detection will further improve the proposed gravity-based height estimation strategy.

\paragraph{Acknowledgement.} We thank artist \href{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAtbsh2U8Uw}{\emph{Michael Dick}} for his outstanding parkour performances. This work was supported in part by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

\section{Experimental Evaluation}
\label{sec:eval}

We first study the attainable accuracy of the gravity-based height estimation at hand of rigid objects, where automatic detection is easy and reliable.
Subsequently, we analyze the feasibility of estimating a person's height during jumps and runs of varying complexity and compare it to ground truth measurements and to the appearance-based solution proposed in \cite{Gunel18}.
We introduce new tests sets for both setups:
\begin{itemize}
	\item \ball{}. We drop a tennisball at several distances to the camera, spaced 50cm apart, as sketched in Figure~\ref{fig:tennis}. Two bounces of the ball are recorded at 120 Hz, the second one is about 50\% lower due to the absorbed energy at inception with the ground. The introduced ball detection algorithm is used to calculate the ball diameter in pixels. The ground truth diameter is 7.3 cm.
	\item \persons{}. We recorded {12} subjects, at 30 Hz, located at {four} and {seven} meter distance to the camera. Examples are shown in Figure~\ref{fig:dataset people}. {Seven} motions are tested: low, high, jumping jack, and funny on-spot jumps, as well as lateral running, exaggerated running, and jumping with swinging arms. Funny jumps are undirected and participants chose asymmetric, articulated poses, see Figure~\ref{fig:funny} for examples. The dataset is available at \url{https://cvlab.epfl.ch/articulated-free-fall-dataset}.
	%
\end{itemize}

\begin{figure}[t]
	\begin{center}
		\includegraphics[width=0.8\linewidth]{images/CameraTennis_far.pdf}
		\caption{\textbf{Illustration of the tennisball experiment.} The ball is dropped in front of the camera so that it is still in the field of view.}
		\label{fig:tennis}
	\end{center}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[t]
	\begin{center}
		\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{images/peopleDataset.pdf}
		\caption{\textbf{Examples from our new \persons{} dataset}, that is captured at 4 and 7 m distance s and features lateral running, jumping and on-spot jumping.}
		\label{fig:dataset people}
	\end{center}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[t]
	\centering
	\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{images/funny.pdf}
	\caption{\textbf{Example of funny and jumping jack poses.} The wooden reference object is used to estimate relative errors of $q$.}
	\label{fig:funny}
\end{figure}

On top of this, we test human height estimation on community videos downloaded from YouTube. We chose a parcour clip with movements of varying complexity in different outdoor scenes. Qualitative results of these, including limitations, are shown in the supplemental video.

For quantitative evaluation of estimated height $\hat{h}$ and conversion factor $\hat{q}$ we compute absolute and signed errors to report:
\begin{itemize}
	\item \textbf{accuracy} across trials as the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) between predicted and estimated quantities.
	\item \textbf{bias} across trials as the Mean signed Error (ME).
\end{itemize}
Both measures are computed for absolute and relative errors since relative errors are easier to grasp for the small values of $q$. For consistency analysis, we report the Standard Deviation (SD) for absolute and signed errors using the $\pm$ notation.

The ground truth ratio $q$ is computed from a reference object of known height and its height in the images.

\subsection{Estimating a Rigid Object's Height}

\begin{figure}[t]
	\begin{center}
		\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{images/ErrorPlotCombined1and2bounceCM_edited.pdf}
		\caption{\textbf{Absolute size estimation error} as a function of the distance to the camera. The error is small overall, below one centimeter for distances up to 4m and follows a linear trend with respect to the distance. The varied bounce heights do not influence the accuracy significantly.}
		\label{fig:tradeoffDistance}
	\end{center}
\end{figure}

This experiment analyzes height estimation accuracy on a tennis ball being thrown from varying heights and distances to the camera.
Figure~\ref{fig:tradeoffDistance} plots the absolute error with respect to the distance to the camera. Overall, the error is small and below one centimeter for distances up to four meters. Acceleration estimation with curve fitting, \curve{}, slightly outperforms the simpler distance-based strategy, \dist{}.
This marginal difference can be explained with the high accuracy of the ball detection, larger differences can be seen in the subsequent evaluation on persons.

To analyze the overall behavior we show the linear fit of errors from \curve{} as black lines in Figure~\ref{fig:tradeoffDistance}. The error increases with respect to the distance from the camera. This is expected, as the projected object size and motion decrease in scale proportionally to the distance while the image estimation error stays constant due to the pixel discretization.
We analyzed two different bounce heights. Although the lower bounce is roughly 50\% smaller, we found no significant influence on the scale estimation accuracy. This can be seen on the linear fits in Figure~\ref{fig:tradeoffDistance}.

\subsection{Estimating a Person's Height}
\input{tex/tab1.tex}
\input{tex/tab2.tex}

Qualitative results and exemplar videos from the new \persons{} dataset are shown in the supplemental video. Here we analyze the accuracy quantitatively. All videos are processed with the described COM computation and automatic flight-phase detection using per-frame AlphaPose estimates.

\paragraph{Accuracy analysis.}
The introduced error metrics are evaluated in Table~\ref{tab:errorPerSubject}. The predictions from all four on-spot jumps are accumulated taking the median, independently for each of the 12 subjects.
The overall height estimation accuracy of 3.9 cm (MAE) is quite good given the large distance of 4 to 7 meters.
Notably is also the low bias of $0.8$ cm.
Accuracies vary across subjects, but without apparent correlation to subject gender and height. For instance, S4 and S9 have the same height (159 and 163 cm) and gender but largely different errors. Moreover, the largest errors are distributed across all heights, e.g., S7 (188 cm) and S9 (163 cm) have both an error above 4.5 cm.
As for the tennis ball experiment, results are slightly more accurate and have lower standard deviation for jumps closer to the camera.

Table~\ref{tab:errorPerJump} sheds light on the performance in terms of jump complexity. Low jumps have the highest error, presumably due to their short duration and resulting low numbers of samples. High and simple jumps are most accurate, followed by the symmetric jumping jack. In general, occasional AlphaPose failures occur during all jump types, resulting in relatively high MAE and SD. However, taking the median prediction across all jumps, including the difficult funny poses, increases prediction accuracy and SD significantly, as analyzed before.

Lateral jumping and running motions are more difficult to capture due to the occluded body side. Therefore, AlphaPose exhibits many false joint detections, leading to temporal jitter in the derived COM trajectories. Table~\ref{tab:errorRunning} reports the accuracy and bias across all subjects and independently for slow run, fast run, and jumping. While Jumping is still acceptable with a MAE of 6.6 cm, the reconstructions of runs are noisy.
Part of the error comes from the fact that flight phases during running are very short and thereby provide little data points. The difference between complex and simple jumps can be seen on the example trajectory in Figure \ref{fig:trajectoryComparison}.
This problem could be mitigated by recording with frame rates larger than the 30 Hz used here.
Another reason could be the athletic articulation leading to errors in the COM computation.
We discuss alternative counter measures in the subsequent limitation and future work section.

\begin{figure}[t]
	\begin{center}
		\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{images/TrajectoriesCombined.pdf}
		\caption{\textbf{COM trajectory comparison,} for 3 on-spot jumps (left) and 6 running steps (right). Running has shorter flight phases and contains temporal jitter around the peaks.}
		\label{fig:trajectoryComparison}
	\end{center}
\end{figure}

\input{tex/tab3.tex}

\parag{Quantitative comparison.}
We compare our approach to the only existing method for estimating height from monocular and uncalibrated footage \cite{Gunel18}. Since that method regresses height with a neural network from single images, we apply it to all video frames and compute error values on the median prediction across all frames, to be comparable. \cite{Gunel18} shows large errors for tall and short persons, high MAE of $6.5$ cm, and strong bias of 3.7 cm, see bottom of Table~\ref{tab:errorPerSubject}\cite{Gunel18}. This can be explained with a tendency to the mean person height due to the uncertainty of visual cues. The naive \population{}, predicting the population mean height of 168.9 m, is largely outperformed.

\parag{Ablation study.} We now turn to analyzing independent model components and alternatives.
The negligible bias of $0.5$ cm (in Table~\ref{tab:errorPerSubject}) towards overestimating height shows that the simple linear translation from ankle-nose to total height works well. This is further evidenced by the similar relative errors of $q$, which depends only on the accuracy of $a^\text{px}$, compared to that of $h$, that includes both steps.

To validate the importance of outlier rejection, we disable the confidence-based outlier removal.
Without any rejection, strong outliers in the pose estimation distort the curve fitting, shown for one jump in Figure~\ref{fig:useRandsac}.
Using RANSAC on top helps to reduce some errors, but worsens others. In total it increases the MAE of $h$ to 7.4 cm.

Finally, we repeat the comparison of the curve fitting, \curve{}, to the simpler \dist{} approach. Unlike for the ball experiment, \dist{} performs significantly worse, see the bottom part of Table~\ref{tab:errorPerSubject}. This is because \curve{} can tolerate moderate AlphaPose errors by fitting to the entire jump, while \dist{} is sensitive to the peak and end frame pair.

The distance dependent error due to the assumed scaled-orthographic projection model is analyzed in the supplemental document using a simulation. The document further contains an analysis on the resilience to camera rotation.

\section{Introduction}

Estimating metric scale from a monocular image or video recordings is a fundamental problem in computer vision \cite{Criminisi00,Hartley00} and important for determining distances in forensics, autonomous driving, person re-identification, and structure-from-motion (SfM).
In general, object size and distance cancel in perspective projection---which makes the problem ill-posed.
However, solutions exist if cameras and ground floor are manually calibrated \cite{Guan09,Zhou16d,Li11d}, special cameras for depth-of-field sweeping are available \cite{Georgiev13}, or reference objects of known scale are present \cite{Vester12,Hartley00,Vester12,Ljungberg08}. Some solutions studied relationships that are particular for persons, such as height, appearance, facial features, body proportions \cite{Benabdelkader08,Gunel18}. However, only uncertain and biased predictions could be obtained.

This paper aims at a new approach to estimating a person's height using motion cues in videos.
The main idea is to use the omnipresent gravity on earth as a reference 'object'. Newton's second equation of motion dictates that the trajectory of an object is a parabola, a function of time, its initial speed and position, with the curvature determined by the acceleration induced by constant external forces \cite{Newton1729}.
To this end, we restrict ourselves to cases where gravitation is the only source of external acceleration and the camera is static, so that acceleration in the image can be uniquely attributed to gravity.
By relating acceleration in the image and to gravity on earth, we can then translate measurements in pixels to metric height in meters, as sketched in Figure~\ref{fig:teaser}.

\begin{figure}[t]
	\centering
	\vspace{-0.7cm}
	\includegraphics[height=5cm]{images/teaser.pdf}
	\caption{\textbf{Idea.} We exploit gravity as a reference \emph{object} for mapping image height measurements in pixel [px] to metric height [m].}
	\label{fig:teaser}
\end{figure}

Although this strategy restricts the application to scenarios entailing free-fall motions, it applies to any video of a person jumping or running, where air friction and other sources of acceleration are negligible.
Because this limitation is orthogonal to those of existing solutions, our method opens up new application fields, such as metric monocular SfM, automatic person re-identification in videos with unknown camera geometry, and metric human pose estimation from a single camera, as demonstrated in Figure~\ref{fig:metricPose}.

\begin{figure}[t]
	\centering
	\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{images/pose_rescaling.pdf}
	\caption{\textbf{Application to metric 3D pose estimation. Left:}
		%
		Input and output of LCRNet, a 3D human pose estimation method~\cite{Rogez18}, which does not recover the correct scales (marked in red).
		\textbf{Right:} Using our height estimate from directed on-spot jumping recovers the scale and relative depth of the hip locations (marked in green).}
	\label{fig:metricPose}
\end{figure}

Our method is inspired by approaches that estimate the 3D trajectory of rigid objects in free fall \cite{kim98,Ohno00,Ribnick09,Kumar11,Skold15}.
All these methods assume a calibrated camera, known gravity direction, rigid objects and focus on object position instead of scale estimation.
In contrast, we show that our strategy for height estimation is applicable without knowing or constraining the initial object speed or position, that it can be generalized to account for the internal forces present in articulated person motion, and does not require knowledge of any camera parameters nor ground plane position.

We validate our findings on a new test set containing 12 persons performing seven different jumping and running motions at two distances. Our obtained mean absolute error (MAE) of 3.9 cm, is nearly half of the 6.5 cm MAE by \cite{Gunel18}, which demonstrates the success our our method and the importance of geometric and physical constraints. %
Our code and dataset is available at \url{https://cvlab.epfl.ch/articulated-free-fall-dataset}.

\section{Theory}
\label{sec:theory}

Gravitation is omnipresent and roughly constant on the earth's surface, with an acceleration of $g \approx 9.81 {m}/{s^2}$ towards the center of the planet and the variation across the surface below four percent.
\footnote{Extremes are, e.g., $9.78 {m}/{s^2}$ in Singapore and $9.83 {m}/{s^2}$ in Oslo.}

A rigid object in free-fall, where gravitation is the only acceleration, is explained by Newton's equation of motion:
\begin{equation}
\mathbf{p}(t) = \frac{1}{2} \mathbf{g} t^2 + \mathbf{v}_0 t + \mathbf{p}_0,
\label{eq:motion}
\end{equation}
where $\mathbf{p}_0$ and $\mathbf{v}_0$ are 3D-vectors capturing the initial position and velocity, respectively, $t$ the elapsed time, and $\mathbf{g} = \mathbf{n} g$ the acceleration in direction $\mathbf{n}$ (vertically, depending on the chosen coordinate system).

The underlying idea is to measure motion in video and relate the quantities estimated in pixel units to metric meters through Eq.~\ref{eq:motion}. Figure~\ref{fig:teaser} sketches this relation graphically.
For example, in the special case of $\mathbf{v}_0=0$, Newton's equation dictates that an object moves $4.9 m$ after one second of free fall. Hence, estimating a motion of $|\mathbf{p}^\text{px}|$ pixels (px) over a video of length $t=1\us$ yields $1 \upx = \frac{1}{|\mathbf{p}^\text{px}|} 4.9 \um$, uniquely determining the px to meter ratio, which in turn allows to translate height measurements of the moving object in the image to metric units in 3D world coordinates. Next, we derive this relation formally with respect to the camera position and orientation. We first derive them for the case of rigid objects and then for articulated motion.

\subsection{Computing a Rigid Object's Height}

In this section we derive a linear relation, the factor $q$, that maps the distances measured in the image, e.g., height $h^\text{px}$ measured from upper to lower object extend, to corresponding height in meters,
$h = h^\text{px} q$.
 Notably, this factor can be computed for unknown distance $d$, focal length $f$, and gravity direction, by relating the gravitational constant $g$ to the measured image acceleration $\mathbf{a}^\text{px}$.

Formally, the observed 2D motion $(\mathbf{p}^\text{px}_1,\dots,\mathbf{p}^\text{px}_T)$ on the image plane across a video of $T$ frames are samples of the projected 3D motion $\mathbf{p}^\text{px}(t) = \Pi\left( \mathbf{p}(t)\right)$. In this work, we will approximate the projection process with scaled orthographic projection, $\Pi$. In terms of camera coordinates, with optical axis pointing towards the third coordinate, the projected free-fall motion (Eq.~\ref{eq:motion}) is then explained by
\begin{align}
\mathbf{p}^\text{px}(t) &= \frac{f}{d} \begin{bmatrix}
1 & 0 & 0\\
0 & 1 & 0
\end{bmatrix}\mathbf{p}(t) \nonumber\\
&= \frac{f}{d} \begin{bmatrix}
1 & 0 & 0\\
0 & 1 & 0
\end{bmatrix} \left(\frac{t^2}{2} \mathbf{g} + \mathbf{v}_0 {t} + \mathbf{p}_0 \right),
\label{eq:projected motion}
\end{align}
here $d$ is the object distance to the camera. This projection formula implies that the image motion is also a parabola,
\begin{equation}
{\mathbf{p}}^\text{px}(t) = \frac{1}{2} \mathbf{a}^\text{px} t^2 + \mathbf{v}^\text{px}_0 t + \mathbf{p}^\text{px}_0 \;.
\label{eq:image motion}
\end{equation}
The estimation of $\mathbf{a}^\text{px}, \mathbf{v}^\text{px}_0$ and $\mathbf{p}^\text{px}_0$ from the input video is explained in Section~\ref{sec:acceleration}.
By relating the quadratic terms in Eq.~\ref{eq:projected motion} and Eq.~\ref{eq:image motion} %
, we obtain the following relation between the measured 2D and predicted 3D acceleration,
\begin{align}
\frac{1}{2} \mathbf{a}^\text{px} t^2
=& \frac{f}{d} \begin{bmatrix}
1 & 0 & 0\\
0 & 1 & 0
\end{bmatrix} \frac{t^2}{2} \mathbf{g}
\nonumber \\
\Leftrightarrow \quad\quad
\mathbf{a}^\text{px}
=& \frac{f}{d} \begin{bmatrix}
1 & 0 & 0\\
0 & 1 & 0
\end{bmatrix} \mathbf{n} g.
\label{eq:projection}
\end{align}
This relation is sketched in Fig.~\ref{fig:teaser}. Although $\mathbf{n}, f$, and $d$ are unknown, they are constants. For an object at $d$, their combined effect is determined by the acceleration quotient,
\begin{align}
\mathbf{q} = \frac{d}{f \mathbf{n}^\text{px}} = \frac{g}{\mathbf{a}^\text{px}}
\quad\text{ with }\quad
\mathbf{n}^\text{px} = \begin{bmatrix}
1 & 0 & 0\\
0 & 1 & 0
\end{bmatrix} \mathbf{n},
\label{eq:translation}
\end{align}
where $g$ is known, $\mathbf{a}^\text{px}$ is the observed acceleration in Eq.~\ref{eq:image motion}. Note that, vector-scalar operations are here element-wise.

We now turn to the height estimation using $\mathbf{q}$. We define height as the distance between two 3D points $\mathbf{p}_u$ and $\mathbf{p}_b$ that are in a line with the direction of gravity $\mathbf{n}$, see Figure~\ref{fig:height projection}. The sought function is derived by applying $\Pi$ on $\mathbf{p}_u$ and $\mathbf{p}_b$, using the linearity of $\Pi$, and substituting $\mathbf{q}$ from Eq.~\ref{eq:translation},
\begin{align}
\mathbf{h}^\text{px} &= \Pi(\mathbf{p}_u)-\Pi(\mathbf{p}_b)  \nonumber\\
&= \frac{f}{d} \begin{bmatrix}
1 & 0 & 0\\
0 & 1 & 0
\end{bmatrix} \left(\mathbf{p}_u- \mathbf{p}_b \right) \nonumber\\
&= \frac{f}{d} \begin{bmatrix}
1 & 0 & 0\\
0 & 1 & 0
\end{bmatrix} \mathbf{n} h
= \frac{h}{\mathbf{q}}
\;, \label{eq:height projection}
\end{align}
where, $\mathbf{h}^\text{px}$ is the difference between the projected reference points used for height estimation---in our experiments it is the head-to-heel vector measured in the image.
This relation provides two solutions for $h$, respectively for the vertical and horizontal components of $\mathbf{q}$ and $\mathbf{a}^\text{px}$. This system of equations could be solved in the least-squares sense.

However, in practice, videos are predominantly captured upright and the vertical direction will dominante. We therefore use the vertical solution directly. In the following, we denote the vertical components of $\mathbf{q}, \mathbf{a}^\text{px}$ and $\mathbf{h}^\text{px}$ respectively with scalars $q,a^\text{px}$ and $h^\text{px}$.
The translation rule between $h^\text{px}$ in $\upx$ and metric height is~then
\begin{align}
h = h^\text{px} q
\;.\label{eq:height translation}
\end{align}

Note that the gravity direction and camera projection matrix are subsumed in $q$. Hence, equations hold for any affine camera model and no ground plane nor camera calibration is needed. Also the simplified Eq.\ref{eq:height translation} applies to unknown camera orientation, so long vertical acceleration is non-zero. %

\begin{figure}[t]
	\centering
	\includegraphics[width=0.7\columnwidth]{images/HeightRelation.pdf}
	\caption{\textbf{Projection of height.} The projected height, $h^\text{px}$ is the distance between two projected points $\Pi(\mathbf{p}_u)$ and $\Pi(\mathbf{p}_b)$ that are aligned with the direction of gravity $\mathbf{n}$ in 3D and span height $h$.}
	\label{fig:height projection}
\end{figure}

Only if $n$ and $f$ are known, i.e., when the direction of gravity, camera intrinsic, and extrinsic parameters are calibrated, it is true that $q$ can be further decomposed to compute the object's distance $d$ and extend in all directions, which was the focus of previous studies \cite{kim98,Ohno00,Ribnick09,Kumar11,Skold15}.

\subsection{Computing a Person's Height }

A jumping or otherwise moving person is likely to articulate the arms and other body parts actively. Instead of trying to model the complex interactions between body parts, we model the human body as a closed system and switch to Center of Mass (COM) computations. Conveniently, by the law of conservation of momentum, the center of mass of a closed system will move at a constant speed even if internal parts move in other ways, and it also follows
Newton's equation of motion (Eq.~\ref{eq:motion}) when accelerated by $\mathbf{g}$. Moreover, the (scaled orthographic) projection of the 3D-COM is the 2D-COM of the individually projected body parts, so that Eq.~\ref{eq:projection} holds as well.

To sum up, to estimate the height of a person we propose to compute the COM trajectory in 2D, solve Eq.~\ref{eq:translation} for $q$, and apply $q$ in Eq.~\ref{eq:height translation} to translate the height $h^\text{px}$ from head to heel measured in pixel units to absolute height $h$ in m.

In the following, we will explain how the needed quantities, such as COM trajectory can be inferred automatically from videos without requiring camera calibration.

\section{Algorithms}
\label{sec:method}

The algorithm splits into four consecutive steps: computing object position and COM per frame, detecting free fall events, estimating image acceleration, and measuring height in the image for total height computation.

\subsection{Measuring the COM}
\label{sec:COM}

For algorithmic validation, we analyze the ideal projectile trajectory of a rigid and uniformly colored ball. In this toy example, the image position measurements can easily be automated. We segment the ball from the background through color thresholding and determine the object center, $\mathbf{p}^\text{px}(t)$, by fitting a circle to the segmentation contour.

For articulated human motion, we detect the person's body parts with AlphaPose \cite{Fang17b}, a neural network that has been trained to predict person keypoints in the input image.
Given a set of $T$ RGB images $I \in \mathbb{R}^{3\times W \times H}$ representing the $T$ frames of the original video,
AlphaPose outputs $J=17$ person 2D joint positions $(\mathbf{p}^{\text{px},j}_t)_{j=1}^J$ for each frame $t$. Examples are shown in Fig.~\ref{fig:AlphaPose}. If multiple persons are detected, we select the largest one, the one in the foreground.

\begin{figure}[t]
	\centering
	\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{images/AlphaPose.pdf}
	\caption{\textbf{Bodypart keypoint detections} using AlphaPose on frontal and lateral motion, displayed as colored skeleton overlay.}
	\label{fig:AlphaPose}
\end{figure}

To compute the needed COM position, $\mathbf{p}^\text{px}_t = \sum_{j=0}^{J} r_j \mathbf{p}^{\text{px},j}_t$, of the $J$ parts at positions $\mathbf{p}^{\text{px},j}_t$, one needs to know the ratio $r_j$ between the weight of body part $j$ in relation to the total weight.
For persons, the absolute weight varies significantly and it appears to be at least as hard to estimate weight as to recover the sought height.
However, the relative weight of bodyparts varies little across individuals. We took the mean mass distribution estimated in a large-scale study in \cite{Clauser71}, which has been widely used for COM computation in the past.

\subsection{Detecting Free-Fall}
\label{sec:free-fall}

\begin{figure}[t]
	\centering
	\includegraphics[width=8cm]{images/ExampleTrajectory.png}
	\caption{\textbf{COM trajectory for on-spot jumping}, with the polynomial fit,detected start, maximum, and end points marked.}
	\label{fig:trajectory}
\end{figure}

We assume that gravity is the only external force applied on the person (neglecting air friction). However, this is only true during jumps and other free-fall phases. Thus, we derive a simple yet effective algorithm for distinguishing flight and ground contact phases. First, we localize maxima in the trajectory, the highest points $M = \{m | p^\text{px}_m > p^\text{px}_t \text{ for } t \in [m-10,\dots,m+10]\}$ in the trajectory of vertical pixel locations $p^\text{px}_t$. Second, we compute the position of contact, $p^\text{px}_\text{floor}$ as the median across the first 100 frames, expecting that the motion starts in a standing pose. We then select the frame interval $ S_m = [\mathbf{p}^\text{px}_s,\dots,\mathbf{p}^\text{px}_e]$ such that all $\mathbf{p}^\text{px}_t \in S_m$ are at least 15 \% above the ground in relation to the jump peak~$p^\text{px}_m$. This procedure ensures the points belonging to the jump initiation are excluded, those where the body is accelerated and in contact with the ground. A selection example is visualized in Figure~\ref{fig:trajectory}.

For lateral motion the ground contact point varies dependent on the position in the image, lense distortion, and camera orientation. For these, we switch to an alternative approach and determine the distance between a maxima and the two neighboring minimum values and select only those points that are in the upper half.

\subsection{Estimating Acceleration}
\label{sec:acceleration}

A key challenge is the estimation of $\mathbf{a}^\text{px}$ from the COM trajectory. Without loss of generality, we assume that the camera roll is small and, hence, acceleration is predominantly vertical. This can be ensured by rotating the image in the direction of maximal acceleration.
Moreover, we read the camera frame rate from the video meta data, to measure acceleration in pixel per seconds instead of number of frames. We propose two ways of estimating the image acceleration:

\parag{\dist{}.} At the highest point of a jump the velocity is zero. Hence, the linear term in Eq.~\ref{eq:motion} must be zero. Therefore, motion in the video after this turning point till inception with the ground can be uniquely attributed to gravitational acceleration. Taking the highest point $p_m$ and the last point before ground contact, $p^\text{px}_e$, we can easily solve $p^\text{px}_e - p^\text{px}_m = \frac{1}{2} a^\text{px} (e-m)^2$ for $a^\text{px}$ since $\mathbf{v}_0^\text{px}$ is zero and $p^\text{px}_0$ constant. Here $(e-m)$ is the time difference in seconds. However, these point estimates are prone to error and the highest point might happen to be in-between two samples.%

\parag{\curve{}.} Under the free-fall assumption, the COM trajectory must follow a second order polynomial, with the quadratic term representing the acceleration and the linear term the velocity in pixels. Therefore, we fit a polynomial of degree two on the curve in the least squares sense.
Since the COM trajectory is estimated through AlphaPose, wrong and inaccurate detections occur. We test two measures to counteract. First, we utilize the confidence output of AlphaPose and exclude points where the score drops below 2.
Second, we apply random sample consensus (RANSAC) \cite{Fischler81} on top.

The fitting process and the effect of outliers rejection is exemplified in Figure~\ref{fig:useRandsac}.
The acceleration $\mathbf{a}^\text{px}$ is then simply two-times the quadratic coefficient of the curve fit. Note that the image acceleration needs to be measured in pixels per seconds squared using the video frame rate information.

\begin{figure}[t!]
	\centering
	\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{images/Randsac.png}
	\caption{\textbf{Outlier removal example.} The red diamond marks the outlier and the red curve is the one that excludes it during fitting, leading to significantly improved fits.}
	\label{fig:useRandsac}
\end{figure}

\subsection{Converting Length Estimates to Human Height}
\label{sec:translation}

To estimate the total height of a person, we need to know the pixel location of the top of the head to the heel in a standing pose. Unfortunately, no such off-the-shelf detectors exist. The most utmost locations that AlphaPose returns are the nose and ankle points. As a stop-gap solution, we propose to infer a correction factor to go from nose-to-ankle to total height.
We compute the mean ratio, $c=1.17\pm 0.03$, between the person's pixel height and ankle-nose distance, determined by AlphaPose, over 29 images taken from the web. The low standard deviation suggests that this linear approximation is accurate.

In practice, we measure the pixel height at the first frames of the video, assuming an upright stance. The final height is subsequently recovered by translating that image height measurements to meters with Eq.~\ref{eq:height translation} and multiplying the result with $c$.

\section{Related Work}
\label{sec:related}

Multiple approaches for estimating the size of a person or object have been proposed in the literature. We list the most important ones, focusing on the existing conditions used to make monocular height estimation well-posed.

\paragraph{Height from camera geometry.}
Without external scale information, object size and distance is ambiguous according to the
basic pinhole camera model. In practice, lenses have a limited depth of field,
which shape-from-defocus techniques exploit~\cite{Mather96,Shi15b}.
While it can be used to guess depth orderings in a single image, a
focal sweep across multiple images or a specialized camera~\cite{Georgiev13} is
required for metric scale reconstruction.
These constraints preclude applications to monocular height estimation from single images and videos recorded with consumer cameras.

\paragraph{Scale from scene and camera geometry.}
One method for estimating height from images it to place several reference objects nearby the target object \cite{Vester12,Ljungberg08}. Placing multiple references is cumbersome and has been overcome
by relating a single reference to other points in the scene through vanishing points of the ground plane~\cite{Criminisi00,Hartley00,Vester12}.
An alternative is to manually calibrate the camera height and orientation in
relation to the ground plane~\cite{Guan09,Zhou16d,Li11d}.
Thereby, the height of standing people can be inferred by locating the head and foot position in a single image, triangulating the 3D foot position on the known ground plane, and scaling the head-foot distance to this 3D position.
These methods do not require to alter the scene but they are not applicable to legacy videos and require an expert to calibrate.

\paragraph{Height from statistics.}

Dey et al.~\cite{Dey14} propose a unique solution that exploits statistics across a group of people by measuring relative heights in group pictures and connecting these in large image collections.
Absolute height is then estimated from the resulting network of relative heights by enforcing consistency with the average human. %
Medical studies determined a correlation of human height and ratios of limb proportions~\cite{Adjeroh10} and the ratio of head to shoulders \cite{Shiang99,Kato98}, but these are difficult to estimate from images.
Recent methods have attempted to capture such statistical relations directly from anthropometric
measurements~\cite{Benabdelkader08,Gordon89} and collection of images \cite{Gunel18,Dantcheva18} though black-box regression using linear regression and deep learning, respectively.
We show that these statistical methods suffer from errors and bias towards the average human height, as monocular scale estimation is ill-posed without geometric constraints.

\paragraph{Physics-based trajectory modeling.}
Physical constraints are widely used for refining and estimating trajectories of rigid objects.
Kim et al.~\cite{kim98} recover the 3D positions of a soccer ball in relation to the known height of a player or goalpost by exploiting that the ball trajectory follows a parabola in free flight.
Ohno et al.~\cite{Ohno00} model gravity and air drag explicitly to recover metric 3D football trajectories from a calibrated camera. This strategy has also been shown to generalize to other projectiles \cite{Ribnick09}.
Kumar et al. \cite{Kumar11} analyze tennis and use physics to fill-in frames for which no multi–view triangulation of the ball is available.
All of these methods assume a calibrated camera, rigid object, focus on object position, and, thereby, do not address our aim of recovering a person's height from uncalibrated video.

\section{Appendix}
\input{tex/supplemental.tex}

{\small
\bibliographystyle{ieee_fullname}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
Polio awareness videos to be shown on flights to Pakistan
Press Trust of India | Dubai Last Updated at July 3, 2014 13:23 IST
UAE asks Indian school in Abu Dhabi to shut down
Pakistan to host New Zealand in UAE
Abu Dhabi airport technical failure halts flights
Abu Dhabi to host World Future Energy Summit next month
Wasim Akram joins KKR in UAE
Etihad Airways will launch a campaign to raise awareness of the potential risk of the polio virus in Pakistan through a short inflight video to be shown on its all flights to the country.
The Abu Dhabi-based airline said the inflight programme, "Leap of Faith", will raise awareness of this crippling and potentially fatal disease among thousands of Pakistani workers returning home or visiting their families.
Pakistan is one of the few countries where the disease remains endemic.
The vaccination campaign, which aims to reach over 3.5 million children in Pakistan, was launched by the United Arab Emirates Pakistan Assistance Programme.
"By showing this engaging story on board our flights, Etihad Airways is supporting the efforts of the UAE in helping to eradicate polio in Pakistan," said	James Hogan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Etihad Airways.
Asif Durrani, Pakistan Ambassador to the UAE, said, "With approximately 1.25 million expatriate Pakistanis in the UAE, this is a perfect opportunity to educate our people during their journey home and ultimately help in the overall eradication of this terrible disease in our country."
The inflight programme produced by Image Nation Abu Dhabi, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Media, will be aired on all Etihad Airways' flights to Pakistan in July and August.
The airline currently operates 37 flights per week between Abu Dhabi and the Pakistani cities of Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar and Karachi.
First Published: Thu, July 03 2014. 13:23 IST


the thermal performance of our products.
and hand finishing each frame prior to despatch.
Are all Windows and Doors the same?
In a hightly competitive industry such as the replacement window market manufacturing companies should have made a considerable investment in plant and machinery, firstly to ensure that the resultant economies of scale are passed on to the end customer in the form of competitive pricing. Secondly and probably more importantly is that this investment can be seen in the end product. For example all frame joints being fusion welded (rather than screwed together) or frame members being reinforced according to the system suppliers specification.
Not all companies have been able to make the investment in plant, machinery, and logistics. So the resultant frames may not be the same from one company as from another. Fortunately when you order windows or doors from Artisan Windows you can be assured we only deal with manufacturers that can produce frames to the highest standards.
We supply PVC-U windows and door in the Veka, Spectus, Eurocell, and Duraflex systems which means us getting a very close match to your requirements and budget.


We are just a day away from the Grand yearly farewell and to new beginnings. Such special goodbyes deserve a great party in a super awesome outfit. But wait! 31st December happens to be a weekday and unfortunately it is not national holiday. So what do we do? Bunk the New Years Eve party? Or crash into one in our office clothes? Fortunately for all the working ladies, New Years bashes are late night affairs and hence dropping by after work is no big deal. All you need is a quick, hassle-free look you can put up quickly after work.
When in a rush, bank on a Statement Necklace for an instant fashion upgrade. In case you are rushing to a party directly from work, and have no time whatsoever to change, you may consider putting on a statement jewelry over your office formals.
Not only do they look absolutely chic, they also serve multiple purposes, one being covering your legs in the cold December night.
If you are in a major time crunch, all you need, to transform your look itls an embellished clutch.
Last but not the least, remember to wear that stunning smile and have fun. Nothing looks more gorgeous!
Wishing you all a great end to 2014 and a great start.
Wishing you and yours a happy n healthy New Year!
Wishing you a lovely new year dear!


text:
Juniper Pursues Hardware/Software Disaggregation
Tuesday, November 03, 2015 Juniper, Switches
Juniper Networks is advancing its commitment to open networking through disaggregation of Junos software. This will enable deployment of third-party network services or applications directly on Juniper hardware platforms as well as have the option to program directly to Juniper systems using the supported Open Compute Project (OCP) defined software model.
At its inaugural NXTWORK 2015 Summit in Santa Clara, California, the company is also unveiling its QFX5200 series of access switches. These will be the first platform to run the disaggregated Junos as well as the emerging 25 and 50 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) standard. The switches are based on Broadcom's Tomahawk silicon.
Juniper said the significance of the announcement is that customers gain flexibility in purchasing hardware separately from software with a pay-for-what-you-need software-licensing model.
"Our customers are consistently challenged to accelerate the pace of network infrastructure deployments to match the speed of business requirements. As a result, the purpose of the network has fundamentally changed; it's all about choice to enable people to connect with speed, agility and reliability. Our new software infrastructure for Junos and the QFX5200 series, along with our technology integration in leading converged stacks, illustrate how Juniper's data center solutions deliver the automation, programmability and openness required to solve our customers' most pressing network challenges and eradicate lock-in," stated Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president and general manager, Juniper Development and Innovation, Juniper Networks.
Disaggregated Junos Software
Develop and install third-party applications directly on supported Juniper switching systems with the disaggregated Junos software as well as run the disaggregated Junos software on Open Network Install Environment (ONIE) compliant third-party switches.
Using an open platform approach, Juniper provides open access to Linux so customers can freely orchestrate third-party applications using Openstack, Apache, Netconf or other tools. This new level of network services modularity enables easy integration with customer applications, SDN controllers and orchestration tools.
Support for MPLS, BGP, EVPN-VXLAN and a robust L2/L3 feature set.
A new pricing model for the QFX5200 will allow customers to purchase Junos and the QFX5200 hardware platform together or separately.
QFX5200 Switches
Next-generation QFX5200 access switches with multi-speed capability from 10G to 100GbE enable customers to migrate to higher port speeds and support 25G/50GbE without costly upgrades. With 25GbE, customers get 2.5 times the performance over existing cabling infrastructure.
QFX5200 switches support the disaggregated version of Junos, combining high-performance switching with the flexibility, power and functionality of a quad-core server CPU.
Managed through Junos Space Network Director, customers can control the entire enterprise network through a single pane of glass. Additionally, with support of VMware vRealize
http://www.juniper.net
Juniper Expands its NFV Toolkit with Cloud CPE
Tuesday, November 03, 2015 #NFV, #SDN, Juniper, vCPE
Juniper Networks announced an expansion of its Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) portfolio with the launch of Cloud CPE, a fully automated, end-to-end network functions virtualization solution.
The solution builds on Juniper's Contrail Networking to scale across all models – whether on-premises or in the cloud. Juniper said its goal is to make service delivery from an end user's perspective as easy as downloading a new app from iTunes.
Juniper's Cloud CPE uses the Contrail Service Orchestration platform to deliver and manage virtualized network services, such as virtual security. Contrail is designed to operate in multi-vendor network environments and can orchestrate the entire service lifecycle – from service design to activation – to radically improve the user experience and enable new service revenue.
Juniper's NFX250 is the first in a series of network services platforms that can operate as secure, on-premises devices running multiple virtual network functions, from Juniper and third-parties, simultaneously. The NFX250, is capable of running myriad virtual functions on a single software-driven device, thereby significantly reducing cost. The 1RU NFX250 unit, which will be available during the first half of 2016, runs both Juniper and third-party virtual network functions.
"As more and more of our service provider customers look to realize real business value from SDN and NFV, the need to have flexible solutions that effectively scale is critical. With the innovations we're announcing today, service providers will be able to harness the power of scale-out services to improve their service delivery economics. For us at Juniper, it's all about infusing automation into our customers' networks to reduce time to market and speed time to revenue," stated Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president and general manager, Juniper Development and Innovation.
Telefonica Picks Gigamon for Network Visibility
Tuesday, November 03, 2015 Analytics, Gigamon, Telefonica, Testing
Telefonica Argentina has selected Gigamon's visibility solutions to help optimize its subscriber service offerings. The solution is being used to gain insight into the way subscribers consume content, enabling Telefonica to adjust service offerings accordingly.
Specifically, Telefonica Argentina is utilizing a number of Gigamon solutions and technologies including several GigaSMART applications for traffic intelligence: Adaptive Packet Filtering, Application Session Filtering and Header Stripping as well as Gigamon's patented Flow Mapping.
Gigamon said that by combining its Aggregation Solution, GigaVUE-TA1, and the GigaVUE-HD8 Fabric Node with the GigaSMART applications implemented as part of a Visibility Fabric architecture, Telefonica Argentina gained visibility into more than 32 x 10Gbps IP/MPLS links. The GigaSMART feature set significantly reduced the traffic that needed to be processed by the tools, resulting in a 10:1 cost savings ratio for Telefonica. With Gigamon's solution in place, Telefonica Argentina can streamline the introduction of new technologies such as VoLTE, IMS and CDN to its network and reduce operational and performance impact.
Telefonica Argentina is also working with Gigamon to increase its network performance and optimization capabilities.
"Gigamon's solutions are well suited for our customer experience management needs. Gigamon has also helped us gain greater visibility across our entire network and identify and address issues as soon as they arise. In fact, during the deployment process, Gigamon helped us to troubleshoot a DNS Cache Server Farm performance issue, resolve it remotely avoiding a possible service outage. It really helped us to streamline the performance of the DNS system," said Alberto Bernal, Telecom Network Planning Engineer, Telefonica Argentina.
https://www.gigamon.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/telefonica-selects-gigamon-gain-network-visibility-and-optimize
Quantenna Enables 10G Wave 3 Wi-Fi Access Points
Tuesday, November 03, 2015 802.11ac, Gateway, Quantenna, Silicon
Quantenna Communications announced the availability of the first 10G Wave 3 Wi-Fi product family for home wireless access points and residential gateways with unprecedented Wi-Fi performance, reliability and capacity for high-density environments.
Quantenna's True 8x8 QSR10G Wi-Fi platform with multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) technology is the first to implement 10G Wave 3 to support speeds up to 10Gbps. This milestone speed benchmark for Wi-Fi is attained by combining the industry's first True 8x8 MIMO configuration for 5GHz networks with a 4x4 MIMO configuration on 2.4GHz networks for a combined 12-stream configuration.
"In Wi-Fi access points more antennas are always better, but 10G Wave 3 is not just about 8x8 MU-MIMO and faster speeds. It's about making better use of network and airtime efficiency to support the growing number of connected devices, services and applications," said Dr. Sam Heidari, Quantenna CEO. "After pioneering the Wi-Fi industry with 4x4 MIMO, we've gained a deep understanding of real-world channel behavior in crowded environments. These insights have led to the creation of 10G Wave 3 and the world's first 8x8 MIMO, which are poised to revolutionize the Wi-Fi experience."
Key Wave 3 Features and Benefits
Integrated AP chipset for dual-band (5GHz and 2.4GHz), dual concurrent operation and management
160MHz channel support for 5GHz networks. When combined with 8x8 MIMO configuration, this offers 4x the capacity of 80MHz 4x4 MIMO networks
Unique adaptive MIMO configuration
Up to 1024 QAM modulation for 2.4GHz and 5GHz transmissions
Supports rich set of interfaces to external hosts such as PCIe Gen3/Gen2, RXAUI, RGMII, and others
Sckipio Lands Intel Investment for G.fast Silicon
Tuesday, November 03, 2015 Funding, G.fast, Israel, Sckipio, Silicon, Start-ups
Sckipio Technologies, a pioneering developer of G.fast modem technology, announced an equity investment from Intel Capital. The investment adds to Sckipio's third round of funding. Previously, Sckipio raised $27 million from venture capital firms Amiti Ventures, Aviv Ventures, Genesis Partners, Gemini Israel Ventures and Pitango Venture Capital.
Sckipio noted a number of achievements over the past year, including the first 16-port Distribution Point Unit, the first to run UHDTV content across G.fast, the first to demonstrate SDN running over G.fast (in partnership with AT&T), and the first to deliver over 1Gbps at 300 meters.
"Sckipio and Intel have been working closely together since the beginning of the G.fast market and jointly announced the first G.fast residential gateway reference design in the fall of 2014," noted Dan Artusi, Intel vice president and general manager of its Connected Home Division. "This strategic investment is another milestone for the Intel Connected Home Division and Sckipio to deliver fiber-like speeds to the people on existing copper infrastructure."
"Sckipio continued to deliver many industry firsts," said David Baum, co-founder and CEO of Sckipio Technologies. "With the investment from Intel Capital, Sckipio will increase technology investments to accelerate our innovations in the broadband access market."
http://www.sckipio.com/intel-capital-invests-in-sckipio/
A Major Update is Released for Open Source Wireshark Packet Analyzer
Tuesday, November 03, 2015 Riverbed, Testing, Wireshark
Riverbed Technology announced a major release of Wireshark, a free and open-source packet analyzer used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development. Riverbed is the primary sponsor of Wireshark, which is free and distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
Wireshark 2.0 offers an updated UI and now uses a new application framework to deliver a significantly better user experience on all platforms, particularly Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. The new release offers many new features, including configurable conversation types, VoIP player improvements, a new wireless toolbar, SSL dissector improvements, more languages, etc.
http://www.wireshark.org
http://www.riverbed.com
IEEE Approves 802.22b-2015 Wireless Broadband - "Wi-FAR"
Tuesday, November 03, 2015 IEEE, Standards
IEEE announced the approval of 802.22b-2015, a new standard designed to support point-to-multipoint wireless broadband operation in the VHF and UHF TV bands in the frequency range between 54 MHz and 862 MHz.
802.22b point-to-multipoint wireless broadband, which is sometimes referred to as "Wi-FAR", is targeted at traditionally underserved rural areas, where most empty TV channels can be found and where Internet access services are often scarce. It takes advantage of favorable propagation characteristics in the VHF and low UHF TV bands, to provide broadband wireless access under both line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) conditions over large areas (10 to 30 kilometers). This occurs while operating on a strict non-interference basis in "TV white space" (TVWS)—spectrum that is assigned to, but unused by, incumbent licensed services.
"IEEE 802.22b-2015 is designed to double the throughput of devices based on the original IEEE 802.22 standard. The new amendment is intended also to serve more users per base station and enable relay capability for machine-to-machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) use cases," said Chang-woo Pyo, chair of the task force that created IEEE 802.22b.
http://standards.ieee.org/develop/project/802.22.1.html
East Japan Railway Deploys SDN with NEC
Tuesday, November 03, 2015 #SDN, Japan, NEC
East Japan Railway Company (JR East) has deployed a "Common Station Network" based on SDN across all 36 of its stations in the Yamanote Line area. The software-defined network makes it possible to carry out integrated network management across all stations, enabling JR East to establish and provide new services easier.
NEC installed the SDN-based Common Station Network in March 2014. The project included:
Installation of NEC UNIVERGE PF Series switches, which are among the first such products in the world to be compatible with OpenFlow.
Across all stations, including Tokyo Station, a total of 20 SDN controllers and 174 SDN switches have been installed.
NEC has created a large-scale, high-capacity network with a high degree of availability by connecting all stations on the Yamanote Line and stations in the same area on the Chuo Line in a ring configuration, using an IP network consisting of fiber optic cables.
In addition to enabling visualization and integrated management of the entire network, the Common Station Network uses software to enable JR East to configure networks or make multiple changes to settings centrally, rather than doing so every time a new service is launched or station improvement works are carried out, as previously.
http://www.nec.com/en/press/201510/global_20151027_01.html
IBM Acquires Gravitant to Hybrid Cloud Brokerage Tool
Tuesday, November 03, 2015 #cloud, IBM, Mergers and Acquisitions
IBM has acquired Gravitant, a privately held company that develops cloud-based software to enable organizations to easily plan, buy and manage, or "broker," software and computing services from multiple suppliers across hybrid clouds. Financial terms were not disclosed.
IBM said the Gravitant software will help customers to purchase compute and software services from different suppliers.
"The reality of enterprise IT is that it is many clouds with many characteristics, whether they be economic, capacity or security," said Martin Jetter, Senior Vice President, Global Technology Services, IBM. "Gravitant provides an innovative approach to add choice and simplicity to how enterprises can now manage their environments. It will be a key component as we broaden our hybrid cloud services."
IBM plans to integrate the Gravitant capabilities into the IBM Global Technology Services unit. In addition, IBM Cloud plans to integrate the capabilities into Software-as-a-Service offerings, extending the company's growing hybrid cloud solutions and capabilities.
Gravitant is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and has development operations in Pune and Bangalore, India. The company was founded in 2004.
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47987.wss
Ixia Posts Revenue of $126 Million, Strong U.S. Sales
Tuesday, November 03, 2015 Financials, Ixia, Test
Ixia reported Q3 revenue of $125.9 million, compared with $114.0 million reported for the 2014 third quarter and $131.6 million reported for the 2015 second quarter. Net income (GAAP) was $4.0 million, or $0.05 per diluted share, compared with a net loss of $7.3 million, or $0.09 per diluted share, for the 2014 third quarter.
"We delivered another solid quarter of year-over-year revenue and earnings growth. Our revenue growth was driven by strong market momentum across our product portfolio, particularly in the U.S. where revenue grew 25% year-over-year to reach a new record. In addition to growing our year-over-year bottom line results, we generated approximately $22 million in cash from operations as we continue to strive for operational excellence and financial discipline," said Bethany Mayer, Ixia's president and chief executive officer.
http://www.ixiacom.com
Affirmed Networks Intros Virtualized Wi-Fi Gateway
Tuesday, November 03, 2015 #NFV, Affirmed Networks, Wi-Fi
Affirmed Networks introduced an Evolved Packet Data Gateway (ePDG) and Trusted Wi-Fi Access Gateway (TWAG) solution that enables fixed and mobile operators to offer virtualized Wi-Fi access.
The carrier-grade virtualized Wi-Fi solution delivers the scalability and encryption required to increase the number of IPSEC-encrypted sessions on demand without the need of specialized encryption hardware. The company said it is able to achieve this by leveraging its expertise in virtualizing network elements with a solution on the IPSEC encryption front. Its virtualized Wi-Fi gateway takes advantages of hardware and software advances from Intel, including Intel AES New Instructions (Intel AES-NI) and Intel Multi-Buffer Crypto for IPsec Library. These advances enable the delivery of a high-performance, fully-virtualized IPsec-enabled ePDG on standard high-volume servers. In particular, new capabilities associated with the performance gains provide accelerated data encryption and greater levels of security.
"Network security is a critical issue for service providers," said Renu Navale, director, Intel Network Builders. "Robust and scalable encryption capabilities in Intel platforms will help accelerate the development of high-performance virtualized security appliances. Our work with Affirmed Networks is an excellent example of how we collaborate with Intel Network Builders members to deliver optimized solutions for comms networks."
"Our work with Intel Technologies allows us to ensure that our technical innovation remains at the 'world-class' level that our customers deserve," said Angela Whiteford, Affirmed Networks' Vice President of Marketing and Product Management. "Mobile operators are investing heavily to gain new customers and to remain profitable and must keep churn to a minimum. By providing operators with virtualized Wi-Fi capabilities, not only can they begin to offer revenue-driving services, they also significantly improve network coverage, and the overall customer experience as a result. Wi-Fi also provides a valuable 'offload' option that operators are utilizing to improve overall network utilization."
http://www.affirmednetworks.com
Nokia to Test Artemis pCell Wireless with Operators
Monday, November 02, 2015 Artemis, Nokia, Small Cells, TD-LTE
Nokia Networks has agreed to test Artemis Networks' pCell wireless technology in 2016 with wireless operators, initially in large indoor venues and other high density areas.
The companies will jointly offer pCell Proof-of-Concept deployments to selected Nokia Networks customers. The companies may extend the collaboration to consider further advanced features that could be enabled by pCells, such as precise 3D location positioning.
Nokia said pCell has the potential to enhance the capacity of conventional 4G TD-LTE networks in certain use cases, while remaining compatible with unmodified devices.
The pCell concept uses radios to transmit signals that deliberately interfere with each other, combining to synthesize tiny pCells, each just one cm in size. Every mobile device has its own pCell, a "personal cell," each getting the full spectrum capacity.
"In addition to creating transformative internal innovations, we continuously look for and evaluate external innovations to bring the most advanced solutions to the operators. We are keen to see the potential for pCell in enhancing 4G LTE downlink and uplink capacity given the rapidly growing network demands such as concurrent HD video streaming," stated Hossein Moiin, Executive Vice President and CTO at Nokia Networks.
Steve Perlman, Founder & CEO of Artemis Networks, said: "We are delighted to collaborate with Nokia, the world's leading 4G LTE network vendor, to offer pCell Proof-of-Concept deployments to selected customers. pCell technology has the potential to significantly increase the downlink and uplink capacity of spectrum, while remaining compatible with existing 4G LTE devices."
http://networks.nokia.com/news-events/press-room/press-releases/nokia-networks-artemis-to-trial-pcell-technology
http://www.artemis.com/pcell
Steve Perlman, Artemis Founder & CEO, has previously served as an Apple Principal Scientist and Microsoft Division President. He holds over 140 U.S. patents and is credited with the invention of Apple Quicktime.
ClearSky Data Raises $27 Million for Enterprise Storage Service
Monday, November 02, 2015 #cloud, Clearsky, Funding, New England, Start-ups, Storage
ClearSky Data, a start-up based in Boston, announced $27 million in a Series B funding for its a global storage network
ClearSky's global storage network manages the entire data lifecycle, combining the performance and availability of local enterprise storage with the scalability and economics of the cloud. ClearSky's fully managed service automatically caches data across a network of geographically distributed layers, making data available to enterprise users where and when it's needed. The service combines primary storage, backup and disaster recovery with on-demand scaling and agility. It automatically caches data – moving cold data to the cloud, keeping warm data in metro-based PoPs within 120 miles of customers, and storing a small portion of hot data on-premises.
The funding round was led by Polaris Partners, with a strategic investment from Akamai Technologies. Previous investors General Catalyst and Highland Capital Partners also participated in the funding. This brings total investment in the company to $39 million.
"Managing primary storage is a huge and poorly served challenge in the enterprise infrastructure market. Legacy systems have failed to address customer needs and no one has figured out how to leverage the economics and agility of the cloud – until now. ClearSky has addressed this challenge head-on, creating a breakthrough software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering for primary storage," said Dave Barrett, managing partner of Polaris Partners. "We've entered the next generation of the enterprise and ClearSky has a great opportunity to build the next major infrastructure company."
Andy Champagne, vice president and chief technology officer, Akamai Labs at Akamai Technologies said, "ClearSky's global storage network is the way for enterprises to move their data to the cloud—with the security, performance and availability they need to succeed. At Akamai, we know firsthand how to build a global network that meets the stringent requirements of enterprise customers, and we look forward to working with the ClearSky team to help customers worldwide as they adopt this new approach to enterprise storage."
http://www.clearskydata.com/
Rackspace Launches Carina Container Cluster Service
Monday, November 02, 2015 #cloud, #containers, OpenStack, Rackspace
Rackspace introduced a native container cluster service called Carina.
Carina focuses on portability and ease-of-use for deploying a cluster of containerized applications. It leverages bare-metal performance, Docker Engine, native container tooling and Docker Swarm for orchestration.
Rackspace said one of the advantages of Carina is that it uses the native Docker API and tooling. Containers sit on top of the server, which helps eliminate hypervisor overhead, allowing faster application performance. The idea is to get customers to a "zero infrastructure" container environment, where Rackspace manages the infrastructure and Docker environment for customers.
"At Rackspace, our mission is to give customers industry-leading service and expertise on the world's leading technologies. Carina extends this mission as part of our strategy to support OpenStack's position as a leading choice for enterprise clouds," said Scott Crenshaw, SVP, strategy and product at Rackspace. "Carina design makes containers fast, simple and accessible to developers using native container interfaces, while leveraging the infrastructure capabilities of OpenStack."
"The Carina beta from Rackspace makes it fast and simple to start a Docker Swarm cluster. They have put the Docker experience front and center without any abstraction," said Nick Stinemates, VP business development of Docker, Inc. "You can get started in under a minute and pull images into a cluster straight from Docker Hub, or leverage existing Docker tools and plugins that natively "just work." This is exciting as it builds on and partners with our existing community and ecosystem. The focus on container developer experience is paramount and they're showing a commitment to it."
http://blog.rackspace.com/newsarticles/carina-by-rackspace-simplifies-containers-with-easy-to-use-instant-on-native-container-environment/
World Radiocommunication Conference Seeks Consensus on Spectrum Allocations
Monday, November 02, 2015 ITU, Regulatory, Satellite, Spectrum
The ITU's World Radiocommunication Conference 2015 (WRC-15 kicked off in Geneva and is scheduled to run through the end of November.
The WRC is held every three to four years to review, and, if necessary, revise the Radio Regulations, the international treaty governing the use of the radio-frequency spectrum and the geostationary-satellite and non-geostationary-satellite orbits.
WRC-15 will address a number of key issues, in particular:
Mobile broadband communications: Provision of additional frequencies to meet the rapidly growing demand for mobile broadband communications.
Emergency communications and disaster relief: Allocation of frequencies for advanced public protection and disaster relief.
Monitoring the environment and climate change: New allocations for earth-exploration satellite services with higher resolution radar imagery for improved global environmental monitoring.
Unmanned aircraft and wireless avionics systems: Spectrum for the aeronautical sector, related to the use of unmanned aircraft systems, and wireless avionics intra-communications to allow for the heavy and expensive wiring used in aircraft to be replaced by wireless systems.
Global flight tracking for civil aviation: WRC-15 will consider allocating spectrum for global flight tracking for improved safety.
Enhanced maritime communications systems: Maritime communications, facilitating the use of on-board digital transmissions and automatic identification system on vessels for improved navigation safety.
Road Safety: Allocation of frequencies for short range, high-resolution radars for collision avoidance systems in vehicles for increased road safety.
Operation of satellite systems: Allocation of spectrum for broadband satellite systems; providing for earth stations on-board moving platforms, such as ships and aircraft; and improving coordination procedures to make more efficient use of spectrum and satellite orbits.
Universal Time: examining the feasibility of achieving a continuous reference time-scale, by modifying Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-R/conferences/wrc/2015/Pages/default.aspx
Hibernia Extends Ethernet to Equinix Cloud Exchange
Monday, November 02, 2015 Cloud Exchange, Equinix, Hibernia
Hibernia Networks is extending its Ethernet connectivity to and within the Equinix Cloud Exchange in Asia, Europe and North America.
The Hibernia Networks' EtherReach Cloud Exchange service, which the companies describe as one of the largest network connectivity deployments for Equinix's Cloud Exchange to date, initially includes 12 major cities located across six countries. The second phase, slated for completion in the first quarter of 2016, will expand the reach to 18 cities in eleven countries.
"EtherReach Cloud Exchange provides enterprises, system integrators and wholesale customers with a secure, dedicated global network connectivity solution to the robust selection of cloud service providers available on the Equinix Cloud Exchange," states Al DiGabriele, senior vice president of product and marketing at Hibernia Networks. "Combining a more consistent and lower latency network experience with access to cost-effective cloud services allows customers to simplify operations, improve efficiencies and accelerate time to market."
"With locations in 33 markets worldwide, Equinix's data centers are a major hub for cloud services, and Equinix Cloud Exchange is available in 21 of those markets, and growing," states Jim Poole, vice president of service provider marketing at Equinix. "Being able to tap into Hibernia Networks' high capacity, low latency network infrastructure provides customers with a cost-effective, secure and reliable dedicated connection as an alternative to the public Internet."
http://www.equinix.com/industries/cloud-providers
http://www.hibernianetworks.com/hnservices/wholesale-services/
New Hibernia Express Cable Timed at Record 58.95ms Latency for NY-London
Thursday, September 24, 2015 Hibernia, Submarine Cable, Undersea No comments
The new Hibernia Express transatlantic cable is delivering an actual tested latency of better than 58.95ms (milliseconds) from New York to London, which is faster by more than half a millisecond off the original projected speed.
Hibernia Networks said its new undersea cable has undergone rigorous testing over the past two weeks. Testing parameters included power stability, spectral efficiency and latency. The results confirmed the latency on Hibernia Express from LD4 in Slough, England to NY4 in Secaucus, New Jersey to be under 58.95ms.
http://www.hibernianetworks.com/hibernia_express
Hibernia Express utilizes a 6-fiber-pair submarine cable, with a portion of the fibers optimized for lowest latency and a portion optimized for 100X100 Gpbs design capacity. The total cross-sectional design capacity of the cable will be over 53 Tbps. Hibernia Express will initially launch with 100 Gbps transmission capacity using TE SubCom's C100 SLTE platform. Hibernia Express follows the most direct route between the UK and North America, promising to reduce latency by at least 5 milliseconds over existing cables.
Mellanox Open Ethernet Gains Acceptance by Open Compute Project
Monday, November 02, 2015 Data Center, Ethernet, Mellanox, OCP, Silicon
The Open Compute Project (OCP) has accepted Mellanox Technologies' 10GbE and 40GbE switch systems. This includes:
the MSX1710OCP spine switch system, with 36 QSFP+ interfaces
the MSX1410OCP leaf / top-of-rack (ToR) switch system, with 48 SFP+ interfaces and 12 QSFP+ interfaces
Both switch systems are based on the company's SwitchX-2 silicon, which is designed for non-blocking 2.56 Tbps full wire speed forwarding with cut-through latency and deterministic zero packet loss performance. Mellanox is a co-author of the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI), which enables applications and Ethernet protocol stacks to operate seamlessly over any Open Ethernet compatible switch hardware platform. Mellanox was the first to integrate the SAI layer and to offer its free download as an open-source.
"It is exciting to see organizations such as Mellanox take an active role in shaping the future of open networking through not only its open collaboration and participation in the OCP Networking Project, but through its willingness to open the specs and designs around in its SwitchX-2 product line," said Amber Graner, operations director for the Open Compute Project Foundation. "The Mellanox switch contributions are another great example of how OCP through member participation is accelerating the future of open hardware in the networking ecosystem."
http://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Networking/SpecsAndDesigns#Accepted_Hardware
http://www.mellanox.com/
T-Mobile Launches 4G LTE CellSpot
Monday, November 02, 2015 Small Cells, T-Mobile
T-Mobile is introducing a residential small cell for providing LTE coverage inside a home.
The T-Mobile 4G LTE CellSpot delivers a 4G LTE signal for customers with or without an indoor cellular signal on compatible 3G, 4G and LTE handsets for up to 16 callers at one time anywhere a customer has broadband Internet and T-Mobile wireless spectrum. The customer must provide the location address and acknowledge 9-1-1 limitations. The device is free for customers on T-Mobile's Simple Choice plan.
"Where the T-Mobile Wi-Fi CellSpot's like a T-Mobile tower, this new 4G LTE CellSpot is a T-Mobile mini-tower—and it's a huge feat of engineering," said John Legere, president and CEO of T-Mobile. "The big difference between us and the carriers is that they'll do absolutely everything they can to bleed you dry. We'll do absolutely everything we can and use every proven technology available to give you the best coverage possible."
https://newsroom.t-mobile.com/media-kits/4g-lte-cellspot.htm


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State of Energy: Indian Point impact looms
To kick off 2019, Poughkeepsie Journal reporters are assessing the state of critical issues on their beats. In this story, reporter Thomas C. Zambito looks at the state of energy in the Hudson Valley.
State of Energy: Indian Point impact looms To kick off 2019, Poughkeepsie Journal reporters are assessing the state of critical issues on their beats. In this story, reporter Thomas C. Zambito looks at the state of energy in the Hudson Valley. Check out this story on poughkeepsiejournal.com: https://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/news/2019/01/23/state-energy-indian-point-impact-looms/2644049002/
Thomas C. Zambito, Poughkeepsie Journal Published 6:00 a.m. ET Jan. 23, 2019
Indian Point will refuel one of its two working nuclear reactors in the spring, the last one for the Buchanan power plant on the shores of the Hudson River before it shuts down in 2021. The multi-million-dollar process of removing Unit 3's fuel rods, replacing them with new ones and dropping the old into a pool of water until they've cooled enough to be entombed in cement and steel casks for eternity involves the work of hundreds of temporary workers who will descend on the Hudson Valley for several weeks.
Work to replace the fuel rods at Indian Point 3 as well as the replacement, refurbishment and testing of equipment is underway as part of routine maintenance of the nuclear reactor in Buchanan on Mar. 20, 2017. (Photo: Ricky Flores/The Journal News)
Unit 3 started generating power in 1976. Its sister reactor, Unit 2, started two years earlier, and will be shut down in 2020.
The pending closure of the twin reactors not only means the Hudson Valley will be free of a source of nuclear power for the first time in more than four decades.
The Indian Point Energy Center nuclear power plant in Buchanan (Photo: Peter Carr/The Journal News)
It means other power sources will need to fill a sizable gap in the state's energy grid. Indian Point's owner, Louisiana-based Entergy, says the plant produces about 25 percent of the electricity used in Westchester County and New York City and at full power lights up 2 million homes.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo envisions that energy gap being filled by harnessing renewable sources of energy from the wind and the sun, while making homes and businesses more energy efficient.
"As the federal government continues to ignore the real and imminent dangers of climate change, New York is aggressively pursuing clean energy alternatives to protect our environment and conserve resources," Cuomo said last month.
Cuomo wants the state to rely on renewables for 50 percent of its energy needs by 2030. And in 2018, he took steps to jump-start that process, including creating financial incentives for companies to build wind farms off Long Island's Atlantic coast.
But will it be enough? Or will natural gas plants opposed by environmentalists be called on to bridge the gap as they have in other states when nuclear power plants have shut down amid market pressure created by the cheap price of gas.
Those issues and more will be at the forefront of the state's energy discussions in 2019.
Will Entergy sell Indian Point to a decommissioning firm like it did its Vermont Yankee Plant in 2018? In October, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission signed off on Entergy's deal to sell Vermont Yankee to a New York dismantling firm, the first such deal of its kind in the nation.
Spent fuel containment casks at the Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan, Aug. 11, 2015. (Photo: Mark Vergari/The Journal News)
If Entergy does the same with Indian Point, it could speed up the decommissioning of its two reactors and perhaps open up a portion of the plant's 240 acres to new development sooner than expected. It's likely Entergy won't publicly reveal a decision until Indian Point is closed.
Entergy has been clear about its intent to exit its merchant nuclear power business.
"We have agreements in place to sell our Pilgrim and Palisades plants (which will shut down in 2019 and 2022, respectively), and the company expects to ultimately pursue a similar commercial arrangement for Indian Point after the units are shut down," Entergy spokesman Jerry Nappi said.
Indian Point's neighbors in Buchanan and the Town of Cortlandt are anxiously awaiting word on Indian Point's future. The village and town stand to lose a significant amount in annual property tax revenue – $2.6 million for Buchanan and $800,000 for Cortlandt – they've relied on for decades.
And the Hendrick Hudson School District would lose about a third of its $75 million budget.
Linda Puglisi, supervisor of the Town of Cortlandt, left, Theresa Knickerbocker, mayor of the Village of Buchanan, and Joseph Hochreiter, superintendent of the Hendrick Hudson School District, talk outside the entrance to the Indian Point nuclear power plant Jan. 17, 2017. Officials of the town, village and school district are now challenged with finding ways to make up the revenue that will be lost when Indian Point closes in 2021. (Photo: Seth Harrison/The Journal News)
Officials are hoping Cuomo makes good on a promise made in April to add $24 million in his 2019 budget to aid communities hurt by power plant closings. The money won't become available until the plant closes in 2021. "That money needs to be appropriated every year as a nest egg so that when we need it, it's there," said Joseph Hochreiter, the superintendent of the Hendrick Hudson schools.
In its analysis of a post-Indian Point world, the New York Independent System Operator concluded three natural gas plants under construction could help pick up the slack once the plant closes.
But a challenge led by environmental groups like Riverkeeper continue to dog one of those new plants – the CPV Valley Energy Center in Orange County. CPV started generating electricity in August but to continue operation it will need to obtain a federal air permit and go through another round of hearings before the state Department of Environmental Conservation. A court has allowed the plant to continue operations while it pursues the approvals. At capacity, CPV in Wawayanda generates enough electricity to power 600,000 homes.
"This facility will enhance the reliability of the (Hudson Valley) electric system, reduce annual electricity costs to New York consumers by a forecasted $700 million while reducing carbon emissions by an estimated 500,000 tons a year," CPV Chief Executive Officer Gary Lambert said in October.
The plant was at the center of a federal corruption trial involving former Cuomo aide Joseph Percoco.
In Dover, the Cricket Valley Energy Center project is under construction.
The $1.584 billion, 1,100-megawatt, natural-gas-fired plant is being built on the former industrial site off Route 22 in the Town of Dover. It is estimated to provide electricity for one million homes and — at peak construction — will hire 1,100 workers, according to Cricket Valley's website.
However, local groups have opposed the project, with some arguing the plant is not necessary and that sustainable power sources, such as solar and wind, should be the focus of new projects.
Rising costs for energy mean higher electric bills. State ratepayers are already paying an extra $2 per month to bankroll a multi-million-dollar bailout of three upstate nuclear power plants for the next 10 years. And, by 2020, ratepayers could see a 76-cents-per-month increase on their monthly bills to help jump-start the state's offshore wind output.
Sandra Galef – The Democratic assemblywoman will continue pushing Cuomo to lend a hand to towns like Buchanan and Cortlandt that face the loss of revenue from power plants. As of April, there was $56 million in the state's Electric Generation Facility Cessation Mitigation Program. Galef said if the governor doesn't include the money in his budget, she will push fellow legislators to make it happen. "We want to be sure it keeps building," Galef said.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo won support for a 2015 law that allowed New York to recoup state money from homeowners who were not eligible for the STAR exemption on their house. (Photo: David McKay Wilson/The Journal News)
Andrew Cuomo – The governor helped negotiate the 2017 agreement that led to Indian Point's decision to close, following years of protest by anti-nuclear groups. He'll need to deliver on his goal of having the state rely more on renewables to make up the energy lost once Indian Point shuts down while making sure neighboring towns can weather life without the power plant's tax payments.
Jan. 24 – The Town of Cortlandt holds a task force meeting on the Indian Point closure.
March/April – The last refueling and maintenance for Indian Point's Unit 3 reactor before its scheduled shutdown in 2021.
76: The amount, in cents, electric bills will increase every month come 2020 to subsidize the expansion of the state's offshore wind industry.
$2: Amount the average state ratepayer kicks in every month to finance a multi-million-dollar bailout of three upstate nuclear power plants.
600,000: Number of homes that get power from the CPV Valley Energy Center in Wawayanda.
$60 million: Amount of revenue the Hendrick Hudson School District projects it would lose in the four years after Indian Point shuts down in 2021.
13 percent: Average that taxes would have to rise to cover revenue lost by the Hendrick Hudson School District over the four years after the shutdown.
SALE: Vermont Yankee dismantling deal a glimpse at Indian Point post-nuclear future?
ACRES: Indian Point task force study urges Entergy to turn over property
WIND: Fishing community fights Cuomo's offshore wind plan
Read or Share this story: https://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/news/2019/01/23/state-energy-indian-point-impact-looms/2644049002/
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