A semi-automatic 2D/3D annotation framework for the geometric analysis of heritage artefacts

International audienceDocumentation and monitoring of heritage objects involve many actors on multidisciplinary aspects. The progress made over the years in the field of digital technologies has enabled many tools for analysis, management and dissemination of information gathered around an object. These tools must allow users to semantically describe the object while allowing them to grasp its morphological complexity and the heterogeneity of the available analysis supports. This article introduces an approach for the semantic annotation of heritage objects by using the bijective relationship that can be established between a 3D representation of an object and the set of oriented images towards it, while maintaining a continuum of information between all phases of observation and description, from acquisition to visualization of semantically enriched representations. The main idea is to offer a versatile environment to help extraction of relevant information from images using geometric descriptors and semi-automatic point cloud processing methods

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

scenery: Flexible Virtual Reality Visualization on the Java VM

Life science today involves computational analysis of a large amount and variety of data, such as volumetric data acquired by state-of-the-art microscopes, or mesh data from analysis of such data or simulations. Visualization is often the first step in making sense of data, and a crucial part of building and debugging analysis pipelines. It is therefore important that visualizations can be quickly prototyped, as well as developed or embedded into full applications. In order to better judge spatiotemporal relationships, immersive hardware, such as Virtual or Augmented Reality (VR/AR) headsets and associated controllers are becoming invaluable tools. In this work we introduce scenery, a flexible VR/AR visualization framework for the Java VM that can handle mesh and large volumetric data, containing multiple views, timepoints, and color channels. scenery is free and open-source software, works on all major platforms, and uses the Vulkan or OpenGL rendering APIs. We introduce scenery's main features and example applications, such as its use in VR for microscopy, in the biomedical image analysis software Fiji, or for visualizing agent-based simulations.Comment: Added IEEE DOI, version published at VIS 201

KinImmerse: Macromolecular VR for NMR ensembles

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In molecular applications, virtual reality (VR) and immersive virtual environments have generally been used and valued for the visual and interactive experience – to enhance intuition and communicate excitement – rather than as part of the actual research process. In contrast, this work develops a software infrastructure for research use and illustrates such use on a specific case.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The Syzygy open-source toolkit for VR software was used to write the KinImmerse program, which translates the molecular capabilities of the kinemage graphics format into software for display and manipulation in the DiVE (Duke immersive Virtual Environment) or other VR system. KinImmerse is supported by the flexible display construction and editing features in the KiNG kinemage viewer and it implements new forms of user interaction in the DiVE.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In addition to molecular visualizations and navigation, KinImmerse provides a set of research tools for manipulation, identification, co-centering of multiple models, free-form 3D annotation, and output of results. The molecular research test case analyzes the local neighborhood around an individual atom within an ensemble of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) models, enabling immersive visual comparison of the local conformation with the local NMR experimental data, including target curves for residual dipolar couplings (RDCs).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The promise of KinImmerse for production-level molecular research in the DiVE is shown by the locally co-centered RDC visualization developed there, which gave new insights now being pursued in wider data analysis.</p

Conceitos e métodos para apoio ao desenvolvimento e avaliação de colaboração remota utilizando realidade aumentada

Remote Collaboration using Augmented Reality (AR) shows great potential to establish a common ground in physically distributed scenarios where team-members need to achieve a shared goal. However, most research efforts in this field have been devoted to experiment with the enabling technology and propose methods to support its development. As the field evolves, evaluation and characterization of the collaborative process become an essential, but difficult endeavor, to better understand the contributions of AR. In this thesis, we conducted a critical analysis to identify the main limitations and opportunities of the field, while situating its maturity and proposing a roadmap of important research actions. Next, a human-centered design methodology was adopted, involving industrial partners to probe how AR could support their needs during remote maintenance. These outcomes were combined with literature methods into an AR-prototype and its evaluation was performed through a user study. From this, it became clear the necessity to perform a deep reflection in order to better understand the dimensions that influence and must/should be considered in Collaborative AR. Hence, a conceptual model and a humancentered taxonomy were proposed to foster systematization of perspectives. Based on the model proposed, an evaluation framework for contextualized data gathering and analysis was developed, allowing support the design and performance of distributed evaluations in a more informed and complete manner. To instantiate this vision, the CAPTURE toolkit was created, providing an additional perspective based on selected dimensions of collaboration and pre-defined measurements to obtain “in situ” data about them, which can be analyzed using an integrated visualization dashboard. The toolkit successfully supported evaluations of several team-members during tasks of remote maintenance mediated by AR. Thus, showing its versatility and potential in eliciting a comprehensive characterization of the added value of AR in real-life situations, establishing itself as a generalpurpose solution, potentially applicable to a wider range of collaborative scenarios.Colaboração Remota utilizando Realidade Aumentada (RA) apresenta um enorme potencial para estabelecer um entendimento comum em cenários onde membros de uma equipa fisicamente distribuídos precisam de atingir um objetivo comum. No entanto, a maioria dos esforços de investigação tem-se focado nos aspetos tecnológicos, em fazer experiências e propor métodos para apoiar seu desenvolvimento. À medida que a área evolui, a avaliação e caracterização do processo colaborativo tornam-se um esforço essencial, mas difícil, para compreender as contribuições da RA. Nesta dissertação, realizámos uma análise crítica para identificar as principais limitações e oportunidades da área, ao mesmo tempo em que situámos a sua maturidade e propomos um mapa com direções de investigação importantes. De seguida, foi adotada uma metodologia de Design Centrado no Humano, envolvendo parceiros industriais de forma a compreender como a RA poderia responder às suas necessidades em manutenção remota. Estes resultados foram combinados com métodos da literatura num protótipo de RA e a sua avaliação foi realizada com um caso de estudo. Ficou então clara a necessidade de realizar uma reflexão profunda para melhor compreender as dimensões que influenciam e devem ser consideradas na RA Colaborativa. Foram então propostos um modelo conceptual e uma taxonomia centrada no ser humano para promover a sistematização de perspetivas. Com base no modelo proposto, foi desenvolvido um framework de avaliação para recolha e análise de dados contextualizados, permitindo apoiar o desenho e a realização de avaliações distribuídas de forma mais informada e completa. Para instanciar esta visão, o CAPTURE toolkit foi criado, fornecendo uma perspetiva adicional com base em dimensões de colaboração e medidas predefinidas para obter dados in situ, que podem ser analisados utilizando o painel de visualização integrado. O toolkit permitiu avaliar com sucesso vários colaboradores durante a realização de tarefas de manutenção remota apoiada por RA, permitindo mostrar a sua versatilidade e potencial em obter uma caracterização abrangente do valor acrescentado da RA em situações da vida real. Sendo assim, estabelece-se como uma solução genérica, potencialmente aplicável a uma gama diversificada de cenários colaborativos.Programa Doutoral em Engenharia Informátic

Enhanced Concrete Bridge Assessment Using Artificial Intelligence and Mixed Reality

Conventional methods for visual assessment of civil infrastructures have certain limitations, such as subjectivity of the collected data, long inspection time, and high cost of labor. Although some new technologies (i.e. robotic techniques) that are currently in practice can collect objective, quantified data, the inspector\u27s own expertise is still critical in many instances since these technologies are not designed to work interactively with human inspector. This study aims to create a smart, human-centered method that offers significant contributions to infrastructure inspection, maintenance, management practice, and safety for the bridge owners. By developing a smart Mixed Reality (MR) framework, which can be integrated into a wearable holographic headset device, a bridge inspector, for example, can automatically analyze a certain defect such as a crack that he or she sees on an element, display its dimension information in real-time along with the condition state. Such systems can potentially decrease the time and cost of infrastructure inspections by accelerating essential tasks of the inspector such as defect measurement, condition assessment and data processing to management systems. The human centered artificial intelligence (AI) will help the inspector collect more quantified and objective data while incorporating inspector\u27s professional judgment. This study explains in detail the described system and related methodologies of implementing attention guided semi-supervised deep learning into mixed reality technology, which interacts with the human inspector during assessment. Thereby, the inspector and the AI will collaborate/communicate for improved visual inspection

Adaptive hypermedia for education and training

Adaptive hypermedia (AH) is an alternative to the traditional, one-size-fits-all approach in the development of hypermedia systems. AH systems build a model of the goals, preferences, and knowledge of each individual user; this model is used throughout the interaction with the user to adapt to the needs of that particular user (Brusilovsky, 1996b). For example, a student in an adaptive educational hypermedia system will be given a presentation that is adapted specifically to his or her knowledge of the subject (De Bra & Calvi, 1998; Hothi, Hall, & Sly, 2000) as well as a suggested set of the most relevant links to proceed further (Brusilovsky, Eklund, & Schwarz, 1998; Kavcic, 2004). An adaptive electronic encyclopedia will personalize the content of an article to augment the user's existing knowledge and interests (Bontcheva & Wilks, 2005; Milosavljevic, 1997). A museum guide will adapt the presentation about every visited object to the user's individual path through the museum (Oberlander et al., 1998; Stock et al., 2007). Adaptive hypermedia belongs to the class of user-adaptive systems (Schneider-Hufschmidt, Kühme, & Malinowski, 1993). A distinctive feature of an adaptive system is an explicit user model that represents user knowledge, goals, and interests, as well as other features that enable the system to adapt to different users with their own specific set of goals. An adaptive system collects data for the user model from various sources that can include implicitly observing user interaction and explicitly requesting direct input from the user. The user model is applied to provide an adaptation effect, that is, tailor interaction to different users in the same context. In different kinds of adaptive systems, adaptation effects could vary greatly. In AH systems, it is limited to three major adaptation technologies: adaptive content selection, adaptive navigation support, and adaptive presentation. The first of these three technologies comes from the fields of adaptive information retrieval (IR) and intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). When the user searches for information, the system adaptively selects and prioritizes the most relevant items (Brajnik, Guida, & Tasso, 1987; Brusilovsky, 1992b)

1st INCF Workshop on Sustainability of Neuroscience Databases

The goal of the workshop was to discuss issues related to the sustainability of neuroscience databases, identify problems and propose solutions, and formulate recommendations to the INCF. The report summarizes the discussions of invited participants from the neuroinformatics community as well as from other disciplines where sustainability issues have already been approached. The recommendations for the INCF involve rating, ranking, and supporting database sustainability

Designing for Mixed Reality Urban Exploration

This paper introduces a design framework for mixed reality urban exploration (MRUE), based on a concrete implementation in a historical city. The framework integrates different modalities, such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and haptics-audio interfaces, as well as advanced features such as personalized recommendations, social exploration, and itinerary management. It permits to address a number of concerns regarding information overload, safety, and quality of the experience, which are not sufficiently tackled in traditional non-integrated approaches. This study presents an integrated mobile platform built on top of this framework and reflects on the lessons learned.Peer reviewe

Designing for Mixed Reality Urban Exploration

This paper introduces a design framework for mixed reality urban exploration (MRUE), based on a concrete implementation in a historical city. The framework integrates different modalities, such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and haptics-audio interfaces, as well as advanced features such as personalized recommendations, social exploration, and itinerary management. It permits to address a number of concerns regarding information overload, safety, and quality of the experience, which are not sufficiently tackled in traditional non-integrated approaches. This study presents an integrated mobile platform built on top of this framework and reflects on the lessons learned