Perceived quality of multimedia educational content: A cognitive style approach

This is the post-print version of the Article. The oficial published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright, 2006 SpringerCognitive styles influence the way how humans process information, with previous research demonstrating that they have significant effects on student learning in multimedia environments. On the other hand, the perceptual quality of the human multimedia experience is notoriously difficult to measure. In this paper, we report the results of an empirical study, which investigated the relationship between user cognitive styles and perceptual multimedia quality, in which users had the possibility to specify their desired Quality of Service settings — in terms of frame rates and color depth. Results show that whilst color choice is impacted by a participant's cognitive style, such Quality of Service parameters do not significantly affect perceived multimedia quality, and that users do not necessarily choose optimum presentation settings to enhance their perceived enjoyment and assimilation of multimedia informational content

Emotion Recognition from Acted and Spontaneous Speech

Dizertační práce se zabývá rozpoznáním emočního stavu mluvčích z řečového signálu. Práce je rozdělena do dvou hlavních častí, první část popisuju navržené metody pro rozpoznání emočního stavu z hraných databází. V rámci této části jsou představeny výsledky rozpoznání použitím dvou různých databází s různými jazyky. Hlavními přínosy této části je detailní analýza rozsáhlé škály různých příznaků získaných z řečového signálu, návrh nových klasifikačních architektur jako je například „emoční párování“ a návrh nové metody pro mapování diskrétních emočních stavů do dvou dimenzionálního prostoru. Druhá část se zabývá rozpoznáním emočních stavů z databáze spontánní řeči, která byla získána ze záznamů hovorů z reálných call center. Poznatky z analýzy a návrhu metod rozpoznání z hrané řeči byly využity pro návrh nového systému pro rozpoznání sedmi spontánních emočních stavů. Jádrem navrženého přístupu je komplexní klasifikační architektura založena na fúzi různých systémů. Práce se dále zabývá vlivem emočního stavu mluvčího na úspěšnosti rozpoznání pohlaví a návrhem systému pro automatickou detekci úspěšných hovorů v call centrech na základě analýzy parametrů dialogu mezi účastníky telefonních hovorů.Doctoral thesis deals with emotion recognition from speech signals. The thesis is divided into two main parts; the first part describes proposed approaches for emotion recognition using two different multilingual databases of acted emotional speech. The main contributions of this part are detailed analysis of a big set of acoustic features, new classification schemes for vocal emotion recognition such as “emotion coupling” and new method for mapping discrete emotions into two-dimensional space. The second part of this thesis is devoted to emotion recognition using multilingual databases of spontaneous emotional speech, which is based on telephone records obtained from real call centers. The knowledge gained from experiments with emotion recognition from acted speech was exploited to design a new approach for classifying seven emotional states. The core of the proposed approach is a complex classification architecture based on the fusion of different systems. The thesis also examines the influence of speaker’s emotional state on gender recognition performance and proposes system for automatic identification of successful phone calls in call center by means of dialogue features.

Design Spaces in Visual Analytics Based on Goals: Analytical Behaviour, Exploratory Investigation, Information Design & Perceptual Tasks

This paper considers a number of perspectives on design spaces in visual analytics and proposes a new set of four design spaces, based on user goals. Three of the user goals are derived from the literature and are categorised under the terms exploratory investigation, perceptual tasks, and information design. The fourth goal is categorised as analytical behaviour; a recently defined term referring to the study of decision-making facilitated by visual analytics. This paper contributes to the literature on decision-making in visual analytics with a survey of real-world applications within the analytical behaviour design space and by providing a new perspective on design spaces. Central to our analysis is the introduction of decision concepts and theories from economics into a visual analytics context. Given the recent interest in decision-making we wanted to understand the emerging topic of analytical behaviour as a design space and found it necessary to look at more than just decision-making to make a valuable contribution. The result is an initial framework suitable for use in the analysis or design of analytical behaviour applications

M-commerce perceptual quality of service

Copyright @ 2003 CAiS

Partial Perception and Approximate Understanding

What is discussed in the present paper is the assumption concerning a human narrowed sense of perception of external world and, resulting from this, a basically approximate nature of concepts that are to portray it. Apart from the perceptual vagueness, other types of vagueness are also discussed, involving both the nature of things, indeterminacy of linguistic expressions and psycho-sociological conditioning of discourse actions in one language and in translational contexts. The second part of the paper discusses the concept of conceptual and linguistic resemblance (similarity, equivalence) and discourse approximating strategies and proposes a Resemblance Matrix, presenting ways used to narrow the approximation gap between the interacting parties in monolingual and translational discourses

The impact of cognitive styles on perceptual distributed multimedia quality

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.Multimedia technology has been widely used in web-based instruction, but previous studies have indicated that individual differences, especially cognitive styles, have significant effects on users’ preferences with respect to presentation of multimedia content. However, such research has thus far neglected to examine the effect of cognitive styles on users’ subjective perceptions of multimedia quality. This study aims to examine the relationships among users’ cognitive styles, the multimedia Quality of Service (QoS) delivered by the underlying network, and Quality of Perception (QoP), which encompasses user levels of enjoyment and understanding of the informational content provided by multimedia material. Accordingly, 132 users took part in an experiment in which they were shown multimedia video clips presented with different values of two QoS parameters (frame rate and colour depth). Results show that, whilst the two QoS parameters do not impact user QoP, multimedia content and dynamism levels significantly influence the user understanding and enjoyment component of QoP