Wine communication in a global market: a study of metaphor through the genre of Australian wine reviews

This thesis is a report on wine communication focused on metaphoric language identified in the genre of wine reviews. Specifically, the research centred on Australian wine reviews written by Australian wine critics about Australian wines currently exported to the greater China region. In the genre of wine reviews, metaphoric expressions are frequently used to talk about wine (Caballero & Suárez-Toste, 2008). The thesis developed understanding of the influence of metaphoric language and its potential to constrain or motivate people’s sensory and affective responses to wine and highlighted the need to consider congruency of metaphoric language in terms of wine communication and education. The research was theoretically framed by the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and took a cognitive linguistic perspective to metaphor analysis (Croft & Cruse, 2004). Wine appreciation was argued to be a social event in contrast to an observational event. From this perspective, wine appreciation is concerned with influencing audience perceptions in contrast to a spontaneous commentary of an event. The thesis presents the findings of two qualitative studies that used a corpus approach to metaphor use and understanding in the genre of wine reviews. The investigation identified metaphoric expressions in Australian wine reviews and went on to explore their understanding and transfer by wine educators in Australia and China. Metaphor identification used the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (Steen et al., 2010) and the UCREL Semantic Annotation System (Archer et al., 2004) for semantic and conceptual analysis. Results indicated six underpinning metaphoric themes (i.e., AN OBJECT, A THREE DIMENSIONAL ARTEFACT, AN INSTITUTIONAL ARTEFACT, A TEXTILE, A LIVING ORGANISM, and A PERSON) of which spatial and temporal properties were often integrated. A comparison of wine educator responses to interpretation and transmission tasks showed that anthropomorphic metaphor (i.e., WINE IS A PERSON) tended to be conceptualized similarly by participants more often than other metaphoric themes. In conclusion, the cultural artefact of language used in the genre of wine reviews and the metaphoric potential of linguistic choices on sensory and affective perceptions indicates a need for the consideration of congruency when wine communication crosses cultural and linguistic borders

An affective computing and image retrieval approach to support diversified and emotion-aware reminiscence therapy sessions

A demência é uma das principais causas de dependência e incapacidade entre as pessoas idosas em todo o mundo. A terapia de reminiscência é uma terapia não farmacológica comummente utilizada nos cuidados com demência devido ao seu valor terapêutico para as pessoas com demência. Esta terapia é útil para criar uma comunicação envolvente entre pessoas com demência e o resto do mundo, utilizando as capacidades preservadas da memória a longo prazo, em vez de enfatizar as limitações existentes por forma a aliviar a experiência de fracasso e isolamento social. As soluções tecnológicas de assistência existentes melhoram a terapia de reminiscência ao proporcionar uma experiência mais envolvente para todos os participantes (pessoas com demência, familiares e clínicos), mas não estão livres de lacunas: a) os dados multimédia utilizados permanecem inalterados ao longo das sessões, e há uma falta de personalização para cada pessoa com demência; b) não têm em conta as emoções transmitidas pelos dados multimédia utilizados nem as reacções emocionais da pessoa com demência aos dados multimédia apresentados; c) a perspectiva dos cuidadores ainda não foi totalmente tida em consideração. Para superar estes desafios, seguimos uma abordagem de concepção centrada no utilizador através de inquéritos mundiais, entrevistas de seguimento, e grupos de discussão com cuidadores formais e informais para informar a concepção de soluções tecnológicas no âmbito dos cuidados de demência. Para cumprir com os requisitos identificados, propomos novos métodos que facilitam a inclusão de emoções no loop durante a terapia de reminiscência para personalizar e diversificar o conteúdo das sessões ao longo do tempo. As contribuições desta tese incluem: a) um conjunto de requisitos funcionais validados recolhidos com os cuidadores formais e informais, os resultados esperados com o cumprimento de cada requisito, e um modelo de arquitectura para o desenvolvimento de soluções tecnológicas de assistência para cuidados de demência; b) uma abordagem end-to-end para identificar automaticamente múltiplas informações emocionais transmitidas por imagens; c) uma abordagem para reduzir a quantidade de imagens que precisam ser anotadas pelas pessoas sem comprometer o desempenho dos modelos de reconhecimento; d) uma técnica de fusão tardia interpretável que combina dinamicamente múltiplos sistemas de recuperação de imagens com base em conteúdo para procurar eficazmente por imagens semelhantes para diversificar e personalizar o conjunto de imagens disponíveis para serem utilizadas nas sessões.Dementia is one of the major causes of dependency and disability among elderly subjects worldwide. Reminiscence therapy is an inexpensive non-pharmacological therapy commonly used within dementia care due to its therapeutic value for people with dementia. This therapy is useful to create engaging communication between people with dementia and the rest of the world by using the preserved abilities of long-term memory rather than emphasizing the existing impairments to alleviate the experience of failure and social isolation. Current assistive technological solutions improve reminiscence therapy by providing a more lively and engaging experience to all participants (people with dementia, family members, and clinicians), but they are not free of drawbacks: a) the multimedia data used remains unchanged throughout sessions, and there is a lack of customization for each person with dementia; b) they do not take into account the emotions conveyed by the multimedia data used nor the person with dementia’s emotional reactions to the multimedia presented; c) the caregivers’ perspective have not been fully taken into account yet. To overcome these challenges, we followed a usercentered design approach through worldwide surveys, follow-up interviews, and focus groups with formal and informal caregivers to inform the design of technological solutions within dementia care. To fulfil the requirements identified, we propose novel methods that facilitate the inclusion of emotions in the loop during reminiscence therapy to personalize and diversify the content of the sessions over time. Contributions from this thesis include: a) a set of validated functional requirements gathered from formal and informal caregivers, the expected outcomes with the fulfillment of each requirement, and an architecture’s template for the development of assistive technology solutions for dementia care; b) an end-to-end approach to automatically identify multiple emotional information conveyed by images; c) an approach to reduce the amount of images that need to be annotated by humans without compromising the recognition models’ performance; d) an interpretable late-fusion technique that dynamically combines multiple content-based image retrieval systems to effectively search for similar images to diversify and personalize the pool of images available to be used in sessions

EKSTRAKSI FITUR BERBASIS WAVELET PADA SISTEM TEMU KEMBALI CITRA TEKSTUR

Pada penelitian ini diimplementasikan suatu sistem temu kembali citra tekstur dengan ekstraksi fitur berbasis wavelet. Ekstraksi fitur terdiri dari 2 proses utama, yaitu dekomposisi wavelet terhadap data citra, dan perhitungan energi dan deviasi standar terhadap koefisien-koefisien wavelet hasil dekomposisi. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui performance sistem temu kembali citra tekstur dengan menggunakan beberapa vektor fitur yang diekstrak dari beberapa level dekomposisi wavelet yang berbeda. Untuk uji coba, dibuat database citra menggunakan citra tekstur Brodatz. Filter yang digunakan pada proses dekomposisi diturunkan dari fungsi wavelet Daubechies4, dan untuk perhitungan kemiripan antara citra contoh dan citra dalam database digunakan Canberra distance. Hasil ujicoba menunjukkan bahwa performance terbaik dari sistem temu kembali citra tekstur adalah recall sebesar 92,5%, yang didapat dengan menggunakan vektor fitur yang diekstrak dari hasil dekomposisi wavelet sampai dengan level 2. Kata kunci: Temu kembali citra tekstur,Ttransformasi wavelet, Canberra distanc

Proceedings of the 1st joint workshop on Smart Connected and Wearable Things 2016

These are the Proceedings of the 1st joint workshop on Smart Connected and Wearable Things (SCWT'2016, Co-located with IUI 2016). The SCWT workshop integrates the SmartObjects and IoWT workshops. It focusses on the advanced interactions with smart objects in the context of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), and on the increasing popularity of wearables as advanced means to facilitate such interactions

Extending Knowledge Graphs with Subjective Influence Networks for personalized fashion

International audienceThis chapter shows Stitch Fix's industry case as an applied fashion application in cognitive cities. Fashion goes hand in hand with the economic development of better methods in smart and cognitive cities, leisure activities and consumption. However, extracting knowledge and actionable insights from fashion data still presents challenges due to the intrinsic subjectivity needed to effectively model the domain. Fashion ontologies help address this, but most existing such ontologies are "clothing" ontologies, which consider only the physical attributes of garments or people and often model subjective judgements only as opaque categorizations of entities. We address this by proposing a supplementary ontological approach in the fashion domain based on subjective influence networks. We enumerate a set of use cases this approach is intended to address and discuss possible classes of prediction questions and machine learning experiments that could be executed to validate or refute the model. We also present a case study on business models and monetization strategies for digital fashion, a domain that is fast-changing and gaining the battle in the digital domain

Tailoring Interaction. Sensing Social Signals with Textiles.

Nonverbal behaviour is an important part of conversation and can reveal much about the nature of an interaction. It includes phenomena ranging from large-scale posture shifts to small scale nods. Capturing these often spontaneous phenomena requires unobtrusive sensing techniques that do not interfere with the interaction. We propose an underexploited sensing modality for sensing nonverbal behaviours: textiles. As a material in close contact with the body, they provide ubiquitous, large surfaces that make them a suitable soft interface. Although the literature on nonverbal communication focuses on upper body movements such as gestures, observations of multi-party, seated conversations suggest that sitting postures, leg and foot movements are also systematically related to patterns of social interaction. This thesis addressees the following questions: Can the textiles surrounding us measure social engagement? Can they tell who is speaking, and who, if anyone, is listening? Furthermore, how should wearable textile sensing systems be designed and what behavioural signals could textiles reveal? To address these questions, we have designed and manufactured bespoke chairs and trousers with integrated textile pressure sensors, that are introduced here. The designs are evaluated in three user studies that produce multi-modal datasets for the exploration of fine-grained interactional signals. Two approaches to using these bespoke textile sensors are explored. First, hand crafted sensor patches in chair covers serve to distinguish speakers and listeners. Second, a pressure sensitive matrix in custom-made smart trousers is developed to detect static sitting postures, dynamic bodily movement, as well as basic conversational states. Statistical analyses, machine learning approaches, and ethnographic methods show that by moni- toring patterns of pressure change alone it is possible to not only classify postures with high accuracy, but also to identify a wide range of behaviours reliably in individuals and groups. These findings es- tablish textiles as a novel, wearable sensing system for applications in social sciences, and contribute towards a better understanding of nonverbal communication, especially the significance of posture shifts when seated. If chairs know who is speaking, if our trousers can capture our social engagement, what role can smart textiles have in the future of human interaction? How can we build new ways to map social ecologies and tailor interactions

Computational Intelligence and Human- Computer Interaction: Modern Methods and Applications

The present book contains all of the articles that were accepted and published in the Special Issue of MDPI’s journal Mathematics titled "Computational Intelligence and Human–Computer Interaction: Modern Methods and Applications". This Special Issue covered a wide range of topics connected to the theory and application of different computational intelligence techniques to the domain of human–computer interaction, such as automatic speech recognition, speech processing and analysis, virtual reality, emotion-aware applications, digital storytelling, natural language processing, smart cars and devices, and online learning. We hope that this book will be interesting and useful for those working in various areas of artificial intelligence, human–computer interaction, and software engineering as well as for those who are interested in how these domains are connected in real-life situations

MC2: MPEG-7 content modelling communities

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel UniversityThe use of multimedia content on the web has grown significantly in recent years. Websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr cater for enormous amounts of multimedia content uploaded by users. This vast amount of multimedia content requires comprehensive content modelling otherwise retrieving relevant content will be challenging. Modelling multimedia content can be an extremely time consuming task that may seem impossible particularly when undertaken by individual users. However, the advent of Web 2.0 and associated communities, such as YouTube and Flickr, has shown that users appear to be more willing to collaborate in order to take on enormous tasks such as multimedia content modelling. Harnessing the power of communities to achieve comprehensive content modelling is the primary focus of this research. The aim of this thesis is to explore collaborative multimedia content modelling and in particular the effectiveness of existing multimedia content modelling tools, taking into account the key development challenges of existing collaborative content modelling research and the associated modelling tools. Four research objectives are pursued in order to achieve this; first, design a user experiment to study users’ tagging behaviour with existing multimedia tagging tools and identify any relationships between such user behaviour; second, design and develop a framework for MPEG-7 content modelling communities based on the results of the experiment; third, implement an online service as a proof of concept of the framework; fourth, validate the framework through the online service during a repeat of the initial user experiment. This research contributes first, a conceptual model of user behaviour visualised as a fuzzy cognitive map and, second, an MPEG-7 framework for multimedia content modelling communities (MC2) and its proof of concept as an online service. The fuzzy cognitive model embodies relationships between user tagging behaviour and context and provides an understanding of user priorities in the description of content features and the relationships that exist between them. The MC2 framework, developed based on the fuzzy cognitive model, is deep-rooted in user content modelling behaviour and content preferences. A proof of concept of the MC2 framework is implemented as an online service in which all metadata is modelled using MPEG-7. The online service is validated, first, empirically with the same group of users and through the same experiment that led to the development of the fuzzy cognitive model and, second, functionally against the folksonomy and MPEG-7 content modelling tools used in the initial experiment. The validation demonstrates that MC2 has the advantages without the shortcomings of existing multimedia tagging tools by harnessing the ease of use of folksonomy tools while producing comprehensive structured metadata.Supported by UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC