Artistic image assessment has become a prominent research area in computer vision. In recent years, the field has witnessed a proliferation of datasets and methods designed to evaluate the aesthetic quality of paintings. However, most existing approaches focus solely on static final images, overlooking the dynamic and multi-stage nature of the artistic painting process. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework for human-aligned assessment of painting processes. Specifically, we introduce the Painting Process Assessment Dataset (PPAD)-the first large-scale dataset comprising real and synthetic painting process images, annotated by domain experts across eight detailed attributes. Furthermore, we present PPJudge (Painting Process Judge), a Transformer-based model enhanced with temporally-aware positional encoding and a heterogeneous mixture-of-experts architecture, enabling effective assessment of the painting process. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines in accuracy, robustness, and alignment with human judgment, offering new insights into computational creativity and art education.

Google services continuously generate vast amounts of application data. This data provides valuable insights to business users. We need to store and serve these planet-scale data sets under the extremely demanding requirements of scalability, sub-second query response times, availability, and strong consistency; all this while ingesting a massive stream of updates from applications used around the globe. We have developed and deployed in production an analytical data management system, Napa, to meet these requirements. Napa is the backend for numerous clients in Google. These clients have a strong expectation of variance-free, robust query performance. At its core, Napa's principal technologies for robust query performance include the aggressive use of materialized views, which are maintained consistently as new data is ingested across multiple data centers. Our clients also demand flexibility in being able to adjust their query performance, data freshness, and costs to suit their unique needs. Robust query processing and flexible configuration of client databases are the hallmark of Napa design. Most of the related work in this area takes advantage of full flexibility to design the whole system without the need to support a diverse set of preexisting use cases. In comparison, a particular challenge we faced is that Napa needs to deal with hard constraints from existing applications and infrastructure, so we could not do a "green field" system, but rather had to satisfy existing constraints. These constraints led us to make particular design decisions and also devise new techniques to meet the challenges. In this paper, we share our experiences in designing, implementing, deploying, and running Napa in production with some of Google's most demanding applications.

The fractional green vegetation cover (Fc) is an important climate model parameter. Remote sensing technique has become one of the most effective means to acquire vegetation dynamics information. The CCD cameras onboard HJ-1 satellites (Environment and Disaster monitoring and forecasting Satellite constellation) are advanced in revisit frequency and image coverage compared with Landsat TM. This study aims to assess the capability of HJ-1 CCD images in monitoring of Fc in terms of comparing with the widely used TM images. The quality of HJ-1 CCD is compared with the same temporal TM image in two aspects: the image statistical analysis and the image application analysis. After the comparison between the HJ-1 CCD image and TM image of the same area. The results show a high level of uniform between HJ-1 and TM images. Therefore, the conclusion may be drawn that the HJ-1 CCD image is feasible and suitable for Fc monitoring.