119,609 research outputs found
The relationships between personality, approaches to learning, and academic success in first-year psychology distance education students
[Abstract]: The first aim of this study was to examine the relationships between the big five personality traits and approaches to learning in a sample of first-year psychology distance students. Approaches to learning are the intentions a student has when faced with a learning task. A deep approach reflects an intention to understand the material, a strategic approach reflects an intention to achieve the highest grades possible, and a surface approach reflects an intention to cope with the course requirements by memorising facts. Consistent with previous research of on-campus students, the Intellect trait predicted the deep learning approach; the Conscientiousness trait predicted the strategic learning approach; and the Emotional Stability trait negatively predicted the surface learning approach. The second aim of this study was to investigate whether approaches to learning predict academic success, as measured by grade point average. As expected, the surface learning approach negatively predicted achievement. However, contrary to expectations, neither the deep nor the strategic learning approach predicted academic success. This finding may partly be explained by these first-year distance students undergoing a transition to the expectations and requirements of their flexible learning environments. Further research is warranted to establish whether the deep and strategic learning approaches become more likely to predict academic success in the latter years of study, after distance students have adapted to the flexible delivery methods. To this end, a longitudinal study that tracks the academic performance of these students until they complete their degrees or leave the university is recommended
k-Same-Siamese-GAN: k-Same Algorithm with Generative Adversarial Network for Facial Image De-identification with Hyperparameter Tuning and Mixed Precision Training
For a data holder, such as a hospital or a government entity, who has a
privately held collection of personal data, in which the revealing and/or
processing of the personal identifiable data is restricted and prohibited by
law. Then, "how can we ensure the data holder does conceal the identity of each
individual in the imagery of personal data while still preserving certain
useful aspects of the data after de-identification?" becomes a challenge issue.
In this work, we propose an approach towards high-resolution facial image
de-identification, called k-Same-Siamese-GAN, which leverages the
k-Same-Anonymity mechanism, the Generative Adversarial Network, and the
hyperparameter tuning methods. Moreover, to speed up model training and reduce
memory consumption, the mixed precision training technique is also applied to
make kSS-GAN provide guarantees regarding privacy protection on close-form
identities and be trained much more efficiently as well. Finally, to validate
its applicability, the proposed work has been applied to actual datasets - RafD
and CelebA for performance testing. Besides protecting privacy of
high-resolution facial images, the proposed system is also justified for its
ability in automating parameter tuning and breaking through the limitation of
the number of adjustable parameters
NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding
Research on depth-based human activity analysis achieved outstanding
performance and demonstrated the effectiveness of 3D representation for action
recognition. The existing depth-based and RGB+D-based action recognition
benchmarks have a number of limitations, including the lack of large-scale
training samples, realistic number of distinct class categories, diversity in
camera views, varied environmental conditions, and variety of human subjects.
In this work, we introduce a large-scale dataset for RGB+D human action
recognition, which is collected from 106 distinct subjects and contains more
than 114 thousand video samples and 8 million frames. This dataset contains 120
different action classes including daily, mutual, and health-related
activities. We evaluate the performance of a series of existing 3D activity
analysis methods on this dataset, and show the advantage of applying deep
learning methods for 3D-based human action recognition. Furthermore, we
investigate a novel one-shot 3D activity recognition problem on our dataset,
and a simple yet effective Action-Part Semantic Relevance-aware (APSR)
framework is proposed for this task, which yields promising results for
recognition of the novel action classes. We believe the introduction of this
large-scale dataset will enable the community to apply, adapt, and develop
various data-hungry learning techniques for depth-based and RGB+D-based human
activity understanding. [The dataset is available at:
http://rose1.ntu.edu.sg/Datasets/actionRecognition.asp]Comment: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
(TPAMI
Local and Global Explanations of Agent Behavior: Integrating Strategy Summaries with Saliency Maps
With advances in reinforcement learning (RL), agents are now being developed
in high-stakes application domains such as healthcare and transportation.
Explaining the behavior of these agents is challenging, as the environments in
which they act have large state spaces, and their decision-making can be
affected by delayed rewards, making it difficult to analyze their behavior. To
address this problem, several approaches have been developed. Some approaches
attempt to convey the behavior of the agent, describing the
actions it takes in different states. Other approaches devised
explanations which provide information regarding the agent's decision-making in
a particular state. In this paper, we combine global and local explanation
methods, and evaluate their joint and separate contributions, providing (to the
best of our knowledge) the first user study of combined local and global
explanations for RL agents. Specifically, we augment strategy summaries that
extract important trajectories of states from simulations of the agent with
saliency maps which show what information the agent attends to. Our results
show that the choice of what states to include in the summary (global
information) strongly affects people's understanding of agents: participants
shown summaries that included important states significantly outperformed
participants who were presented with agent behavior in a randomly set of chosen
world-states. We find mixed results with respect to augmenting demonstrations
with saliency maps (local information), as the addition of saliency maps did
not significantly improve performance in most cases. However, we do find some
evidence that saliency maps can help users better understand what information
the agent relies on in its decision making, suggesting avenues for future work
that can further improve explanations of RL agents
The analysis of facial beauty: an emerging area of research in pattern analysis
Much research presented recently supports the idea that the human perception of attractiveness is data-driven and largely irrespective of the perceiver. This suggests using pattern analysis techniques for beauty analysis. Several scientific papers on this subject are appearing in image processing, computer vision and pattern analysis contexts, or use techniques of these areas. In this paper, we will survey the recent studies on automatic analysis of facial beauty, and discuss research lines and practical application
Extracting News Events from Microblogs
Twitter stream has become a large source of information for many people, but
the magnitude of tweets and the noisy nature of its content have made
harvesting the knowledge from Twitter a challenging task for researchers for a
long time. Aiming at overcoming some of the main challenges of extracting the
hidden information from tweet streams, this work proposes a new approach for
real-time detection of news events from the Twitter stream. We divide our
approach into three steps. The first step is to use a neural network or deep
learning to detect news-relevant tweets from the stream. The second step is to
apply a novel streaming data clustering algorithm to the detected news tweets
to form news events. The third and final step is to rank the detected events
based on the size of the event clusters and growth speed of the tweet
frequencies. We evaluate the proposed system on a large, publicly available
corpus of annotated news events from Twitter. As part of the evaluation, we
compare our approach with a related state-of-the-art solution. Overall, our
experiments and user-based evaluation show that our approach on detecting
current (real) news events delivers a state-of-the-art performance
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