The Life and Legacy of Chief Judge Lawrence H. Cooke: Truly an Exemplary Life. A Life Well Lived

It is an appropriate tribute to the late Chief Judge of New York, Lawrence H. Cooke, that this article be devoted to a man who many leaders of the bench, bar, and academia consider to be the greatest jurist to ever serve on New York State\u27s highest court. Chief Judge Cooke, better known as Larry, served with honor and distinction as an associate judge of the Court of Appeals, and later as Chief Judge

A Fully Convolutional Tri-branch Network (FCTN) for Domain Adaptation

A domain adaptation method for urban scene segmentation is proposed in this work. We develop a fully convolutional tri-branch network, where two branches assign pseudo labels to images in the unlabeled target domain while the third branch is trained with supervision based on images in the pseudo-labeled target domain. The re-labeling and re-training processes alternate. With this design, the tri-branch network learns target-specific discriminative representations progressively and, as a result, the cross-domain capability of the segmenter improves. We evaluate the proposed network on large-scale domain adaptation experiments using both synthetic (GTA) and real (Cityscapes) images. It is shown that our solution achieves the state-of-the-art performance and it outperforms previous methods by a significant margin.Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 201

A ParaBoost Stereoscopic Image Quality Assessment (PBSIQA) System

The problem of stereoscopic image quality assessment, which finds applications in 3D visual content delivery such as 3DTV, is investigated in this work. Specifically, we propose a new ParaBoost (parallel-boosting) stereoscopic image quality assessment (PBSIQA) system. The system consists of two stages. In the first stage, various distortions are classified into a few types, and individual quality scorers targeting at a specific distortion type are developed. These scorers offer complementary performance in face of a database consisting of heterogeneous distortion types. In the second stage, scores from multiple quality scorers are fused to achieve the best overall performance, where the fuser is designed based on the parallel boosting idea borrowed from machine learning. Extensive experimental results are conducted to compare the performance of the proposed PBSIQA system with those of existing stereo image quality assessment (SIQA) metrics. The developed quality metric can serve as an objective function to optimize the performance of a 3D content delivery system

The Constitutional Convention and Court Merger in New York State

In November 2017, voters in New York, for the first time in twenty years, will be asked to decide whether there “[s]hall be a convention to revise the constitution and amend the same?” If it is decided by the electorate to call a convention, “delegates will be elected in November 2018, and the convention will convene in April 2019.” One of the significant goals of a convention would be the achievement of court merger in the Empire State. The purpose of this perspective is to discuss the pros and cons of a constitutional convention with an emphasis on court merger