Analytic Case Study Using Unsupervised Event Detection in Multivariate Time Series Data

Analysis of cyber-physical systems (CPS) has emerged as a critical domain for providing US Air Force and Space Force leadership decision advantage in air, space, and cyberspace. Legacy methods have been outpaced by evolving battlespaces and global peer-level challengers. Automation provides one way to decrease the time that analysis currently takes. This thesis presents an event detection automation system (EDAS) which utilizes deep learning models, distance metrics, and static thresholding to detect events. The EDAS automation is evaluated with case study of CPS domain experts in two parts. Part 1 uses the current methods for CPS analysis with a qualitative pre-survey and tasks participants, in their natural setting to annotate events. Part 2 asks participants to perform annotation with the assistance of EDAS’s pre-annotations. Results from Part 1 and Part 2 exhibit low inter-coder agreement for both human-derived and automation-assisted event annotations. Qualitative analysis of survey results showed low trust and confidence in the event detection automation. One correlation or interpretation to the low confidence is that the low inter-coder agreement means that the humans do not share the same idea of what an annotation product should be

Proceedings of the 7th Sound and Music Computing Conference

Proceedings of the SMC2010 - 7th Sound and Music Computing Conference, July 21st - July 24th 2010

Musical Acts and Musical Agents: theory, implementation and practice

Centre for Intelligent Systems and their ApplicationsMusical Agents are an emerging technology, designed to provide a range of new musical opportunities to human musicians and composers. Current systems in this area lack certain features which are necessary for a high quality musician; in particular, they lack the ability to structure their output in terms of a communicative dialogue, and reason about the responses of their partners. In order to address these issues, this thesis develops Musical Act Theory (MAT). This is a novel theory, which models musical interactions between agents, allowing a dialogue oriented analysis of music, and an exploration of intention and communication in the context of musical performance. The work here can be separated into four main contributions: a specification for a Musical Middleware system, which can be implemented computationally, and allows distributed agents to collaborate on music in real-time; a computational model of musical interaction, which allows musical agents to analyse the playing of others as part of a communicative process, and formalises the workings of the Musical Middleware system; MAMA, a musical agent system which embodies this theory, and which can function in a variety of Musical Middleware applications; a pilot experiment which explores the use of MAMA and the utility of MAT under controlled conditions. It is found that the Musical Middleware architecture is computationally implementable, and allows for a system which can respond to both direct musical communi- cation and extramusical inputs, including the use of a custom-built tangible interface. MAT is found to capture certain aspects of music which are of interest — an intuitive notion of performative actions in music, and an existing model of musical interaction. Finally, the fact that a number of different levels — theory, architecture and implementation — are tied together gives a coherent model which can be applied to many computational musical situations

Evaluating distributional models of compositional semantics

Distributional models (DMs) are a family of unsupervised algorithms that represent the meaning of words as vectors. They have been shown to capture interesting aspects of semantics. Recent work has sought to compose word vectors in order to model phrases and sentences. The most commonly used measure of a compositional DM’s performance to date has been the degree to which it agrees with human-provided phrase similarity scores. The contributions of this thesis are three-fold. First, I argue that existing intrinsic evaluations are unreliable as they make use of small and subjective gold-standard data sets and assume a notion of similarity that is independent of a particular application. Therefore, they do not necessarily measure how well a model performs in practice. I study four commonly used intrinsic datasets and demonstrate that all of them exhibit undesirable properties. Second, I propose a novel framework within which to compare word- or phrase-level DMs in terms of their ability to support document classification. My approach couples a classifier to a DM and provides a setting where classification performance is sensitive to the quality of the DM. Third, I present an empirical evaluation of several methods for building word representations and composing them within my framework. I find that the determining factor in building word representations is data quality rather than quantity; in some cases only a small amount of unlabelled data is required to reach peak performance. Neural algorithms for building single-word representations perform better than counting-based ones regardless of what composition is used, but simple composition algorithms can outperform more sophisticated competitors. Finally, I introduce a new algorithm for improving the quality of distributional thesauri using information from repeated runs of the same non deterministic algorithm

Semantics-enriched workflow creation and management system with an application to document image analysis and recognition

Scientific workflow systems are an established means to model and execute experiments or processing pipelines. Nevertheless, designing workflows can be a daunting task for users due to the complexities of the systems and the sheer number of available processing nodes, each having different compatibility/applicability characteristics. This Thesis explores how concepts of the Semantic Web can be used to augment workflow systems in order to assist researchers as well as non-expert users in creating valid and effective workflows. A prototype workflow creation/management system has been developed, including components for ontology modelling, workflow composition, and workflow repositories. Semantics are incorporated as a lightweight layer, permeating all aspects of the system and workflows, including retrieval, composition, and validation. Document image analysis and recognition is used as a representative application domain to evaluate the validity of the system. A new semantic model is proposed, covering a wide range of aspects of the target domain and adjacent fields. Real-world use cases demonstrate the assistive features and the automated workflow creation. On that basis, the prototype workflow creation/management system is compared to other state-of-the-art workflow systems and it is shown how those could benefit from the semantic model. The Thesis concludes with a discussion on how a complete infrastructure based on semantics-enriched datasets, workflow systems, and sharing platforms could represent the next step in automation within document image analysis and other domains

Understanding the best practices of senior level-leaders among the European Union civil institutions

Senior-level EU civil leadership is fundamental to providing current and future generations of European leaders with the training, mentorship and work environment they need to succeed in sustaining the EU system. To be successful in the EU service, aspiring leaders must clearly set and revise a common vision, lead by example, incorporate diversified communication, and work to establish a sense of belonging and work culture to their staff. The purpose of this study was to determine what EU civil institutions can do to prepare their current staff and future generations of students to enter a career in public leadership and ascend to reach senior-level positions. This purpose was achieved by identifying strategies and best practices that current senior-level leaders at EU civil institutions have employed while transitioning into their current or past roles. Data were collected from 15 senior-level leaders among the EU civil institutions and public agencies. This was done in the form of a 11-question, semi-structured interview format, which focused on their past experiences, lessons learned and future orientation towards EU civil service careers. The key findings of the study yielded 49 themes that answered 4 research questions. In particular, building a work culture and guiding multicultural staff was the primary challenge associated with senior-level EU leadership. Additionally, study participants indicated that they face resistance to change on a constant basis, and that effective communication is highly valued. As a result of the study findings, senior-level EU leaders have collectively mentioned that having a mentor, taking part in internships, and learning additional languages will be especially helpful for emerging generations of civil leaders. Specifically, for those currently studying, the framework indicated from the participants would allow them to take action and act with passion towards their goals. For mid-level leadership looking to transition upward, these suggestions provide insight into the big picture view of EU bureaucracy and public service