Concurrence-Aware Long Short-Term Sub-Memories for Person-Person Action Recognition

Recently, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) has become a popular choice to model individual dynamics for single-person action recognition due to its ability of modeling the temporal information in various ranges of dynamic contexts. However, existing RNN models only focus on capturing the temporal dynamics of the person-person interactions by naively combining the activity dynamics of individuals or modeling them as a whole. This neglects the inter-related dynamics of how person-person interactions change over time. To this end, we propose a novel Concurrence-Aware Long Short-Term Sub-Memories (Co-LSTSM) to model the long-term inter-related dynamics between two interacting people on the bounding boxes covering people. Specifically, for each frame, two sub-memory units store individual motion information, while a concurrent LSTM unit selectively integrates and stores inter-related motion information between interacting people from these two sub-memory units via a new co-memory cell. Experimental results on the BIT and UT datasets show the superiority of Co-LSTSM compared with the state-of-the-art methods

Analyzing Human-Human Interactions: A Survey

Many videos depict people, and it is their interactions that inform us of their activities, relation to one another and the cultural and social setting. With advances in human action recognition, researchers have begun to address the automated recognition of these human-human interactions from video. The main challenges stem from dealing with the considerable variation in recording setting, the appearance of the people depicted and the coordinated performance of their interaction. This survey provides a summary of these challenges and datasets to address these, followed by an in-depth discussion of relevant vision-based recognition and detection methods. We focus on recent, promising work based on deep learning and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Finally, we outline directions to overcome the limitations of the current state-of-the-art to analyze and, eventually, understand social human actions

Kiryas Joel and Two Mistakes about Equality

In 1948, Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum founded the congregation Yetev Lev D\u27Satmar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Over the next twenty-five years, the Satmar Hasidic sect grew, and members started thinking about leaving the urban, heterogeneous setting for a place where they could live in relative isolation. In 1974, Satmar families began leaving Brooklyn for upstate New York. They purchased property in the Town of Monroe, and later, after a zoning dispute with the Town, incorporated as the Village of Kiryas Joel. As of 1990, approximately 10,000 Satmar Jews lived in or around the Village. The Satmars dress in conformance with a semiformal code; they speak Yiddish; they resolve most of their disputes in Satmar courts; their marriages are prearranged. Further, the Satmars educate almost all of their children in private, religious schools, with boys and girls educated separately. Public funds for educating handicapped children may not be used in those private, religious schools, so to qualify for such funds, the Satmars of Kiryas Joel experimented with sending their handicapped children to the heterogeneous county schools. But the Satmar children had a hard time dealing with immersion in the non-Satmar world. \u27 Parents of most of these children withdrew them from the Monroe-Woodbury secular schools, citing \u27the panic, fear and trauma [the children] suffered in different. The Satmars then lobbied the New York legislature for a special school district. The Satmars did not argue that religious doctrine required separation; rather, they contended that separate schooling would alleviate the emotional trauma of their handicapped children. In 1989, the New York legislature responded by constituting the Village of Kiryas Joel as a separate school district, granting all the powers and duties of a union free school district. \u27 Governor Cuomo indicated that the action was a good faith effort to solve th[e] unique problem faced by the Satmars. But in Board of Education of Kiyas Joel Village School District, Grumet [Kiryas Joel], the United States Supreme Court held the law unconstitutional. There is reason to believe, however, that the Court, by failing to pay proper attention to the partial exit problem, made two mistakes about equality, both of which stem from a similar brand of constitutional myopia-emphasizing the virtues of the unum while seeing only the destructive aspects of the e pluribus. The Court\u27s first mistake about equality was to condemn the New York law for promoting segregation over integration; the Justices referred to the Establishment Clause, but seemed animated by broader Equal Protection Clause values. There are two aspects to the Court\u27s concern with segregating citizens by religion. The first relies on the apprehension that citizens who share a common religion will exercise public power in an unconstitutional fashion. The second relies not on how such delegated public power will be used, but rather on the state\u27s drawing a district line around a village known to be populated by a religiously homogeneous group of citizens. I respond to these concerns in Part I. First, in Part L.A, I set forth the complete exit model. Many people can accept a model of complete exit: A community should have a significant berth of religious freedom if it exits completely and seeks a purely private domain of action. I then turn to the partial exit problem: Even for those who accept the complete exit model, it is harder to accept a community\u27s wanting the rewards of both the private realm (living separately as a religious community) and the public realm (receiving certain accoutrements of public power at the same time). If the Satmars truly want to be alone, one might argue (and Kiryas Joel seems to imply), then let them forgo governmental power that comes more appropriately to groups that accept the integrationist model. The first half of Part I.B responds to the concern that citizens who share a common religion will exercise public power in a religious way. The second half of Part I.B responds to the argument that states may not draw political lines around groups of citizens known to share a common religion, i.e., that states may not enact religious gerrymanders. Although a law favoring one religious sect over others should be invalidated, there is no evidence that New York\u27s law exhibited such favoritism. This is the Court\u27s second mistake about equality, which I discuss in Part II. Part IIA responds to the argument that relies not on the absolute unconstitutionality of a governmental benefit for the Satmars, but rather on the conditional concern that New York might not grant a similar benefit to other groups. Second, in Part II.B, I suggest that the Court\u27s opinions on this point are best understood as relying on a more generalized concern with special governmental benefits for racial or religious groups. Part III sketches the contention that there are other, constitutional measures for combating voluntary religious or racial separation. The government speech model permits government great power to encourage people to live together in heterogeneous communities

Approaches to decision making

This book is designed as a brief introduction to the understanding of decision making in work settings. It is designed for use in graduate courses and should be supported by a wide range of additional reading materials and practical exercises. The approach is multi-disciplinary and pluralistic: there are many perspectives from which decision making may be viewed. Similarly, there are many differences in decision making between individuals and between contexts. The book is intended to contribute to a raised awareness of the many issues and high complexity attaching to important decisions. It may or may not help the reader to become a better decision maker. That outcome depends on personal desire and availability of resources, including time and pressure, as much as anything else. However it is hoped that those readers who are accustomed to the traditional focus on \u27rational\u27 decision making will quickly learn that decision making is a complex and many faceted activity. The text is divided into six modules or parts, each looking at a specific aspect of decision making in organisations. Module 1 looks at some important philosophical issues, and introduces the \u27convential\u27 theories based in economics and sociology. Theoretical and empirical explanations of the decision process are examined in Module 2. Module 3 explores some of the aids to decision making. The individual as decision maker is the subject of Module 4, and Module 5 examines group decision making behaviours. Module 6 is a review, and suggests some of the implications and consequences of a course of study into decision making..

Consciosusness in Cognitive Architectures. A Principled Analysis of RCS, Soar and ACT-R

This report analyses the aplicability of the principles of consciousness developed in the ASys project to three of the most relevant cognitive architectures. This is done in relation to their aplicability to build integrated control systems and studying their support for general mechanisms of real-time consciousness.\ud To analyse these architectures the ASys Framework is employed. This is a conceptual framework based on an extension for cognitive autonomous systems of the General Systems Theory (GST).\ud A general qualitative evaluation criteria for cognitive architectures is established based upon: a) requirements for a cognitive architecture, b) the theoretical framework based on the GST and c) core design principles for integrated cognitive conscious control systems