A prototype for a conversational companion for reminiscing about images

This work was funded by the COMPANIONS project sponsored by the European Commission as part of the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme under EC grant number IST-FP6-034434. Companions demonstrators can be seen at: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/∼roberta/companions/Web/.This paper describes an initial prototype of the Companions project (www.companions-project.org): the Senior Companion (SC), designed to be a platform to display novel approaches to: (1) The use of Information Extraction (IE) techniques to extract the content of incoming dialogue utterances after an ASR phase. (2) The conversion of the input to RDF form to allow the generation of new facts from existing ones, under the control of a Dialogue Manager (DM), that also has access to stored knowledge and knowledge accessed in real time from the web, all in RDF form. (3) A DM expressed as a stack and network virtual machine that models mixed initiative in dialogue control. (4) A tuned dialogue act detector based on corpus evidence. The prototype platform was evaluated, and we describe this; it is also designed to support more extensive forms of emotion detection carried by both speech and lexical content, as well as extended forms of machine learning. We describe preliminary studies and results for these, in particular a novel approach to enabling reinforcement learning for open dialogue systems through the detection of emotion in the speech signal and its deployment as a form of a learned DM, at a higher level than the DM virtual machine and able to direct the SC’s responses to a more emotionally appropriate part of its repertoire. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.peer-reviewe

Web Service Deployment for Selecting a Right Steganography Scheme for Optimizing Both the Capacity and the Detectable Distortion

The principal objective of this effort is to organize a network facility to hide the secret information in an image folder without disturbing its originality. In the literature lot of algorithms are there to hide the information in an image file but most of it consumes high resource for completing the task which is not suitable for light weight mobile devices. Few basic algorithms like 1LSB, 2LSB and 3LSB methods in the literature are suitable for mobile devices since the computational complexity is very low. But, these methods either lack in maintaining the originality of the source image or in increasing the number of bits to be fixed. Furthermore, every algorithm in the literature has its own merits and demerits and we cannot predict which algorithm is best or worst since, based on the parameters such as size of the safety duplicate and encryption algorithm used to generate the cipher text the steganography schemes may produce best or worst result with respect to computational complexity, capacity, and detectable distortion. In our proposed work, we have developed a web service that takes cover image and plain text as the input from the clients and returns the steganoimage to the clients. The steganoimage will be generated by our proposed work by analyzing the above said parameters and by applying the right steganography scheme. The proposed work helps in reducing the detectable distortion, computational complexity of the client device, and in increasing the capacity. The experimental result says that, the proposed system performs better than the legacy schemes with respect to capacity, computational complexity, and detectable distortion. This proposed work is more useful to the client devices with very low computational resource since all the computational tasks are deployed in the server side

A review and open issues of diverse text watermarking techniques in spatial domain

Nowadays, information hiding is becoming a helpful technique and fetches more attention due to the fast growth of using the internet; it is applied for sending secret information by using different techniques. Watermarking is one of major important technique in information hiding. Watermarking is of hiding secret data into a carrier media to provide the privacy and integrity of information so that no one can recognize and detect it's accepted the sender and receiver. In watermarking, many various carrier formats can be used such as an image, video, audio, and text. The text is most popular used as a carrier files due to its frequency on the internet. There are many techniques variables for the text watermarking; each one has its own robust and susceptible points. In this study, we conducted a review of text watermarking in the spatial domain to explore the term text watermarking by reviewing, collecting, synthesizing and analyze the challenges of different studies which related to this area published from 2013 to 2018. The aims of this paper are to provide an overview of text watermarking and comparison between approved studies as discussed according to the Arabic text characters, payload capacity, Imperceptibility, authentication, and embedding technique to open important research issues in the future work to obtain a robust method

Conversational Agent: Developing a Model for Intelligent Agents with Transient Emotional States

The inclusion of human characteristics (i.e., emotions, personality) within an intelligent agent can often increase the effectiveness of information delivery and retrieval. Chat-bots offer a plethora of benefits within an eclectic range of disciplines (e.g., education, medicine, clinical and mental health). Hence, chatbots offer an effective way to observe, assess, and evaluate human communication patterns. Current research aims to develop a computational model for conversational agents with an emotional component to be applied to the army leadership training program that will allow for the examination of interpersonal skills in future research. Overall, the current research explores the application of the deep learning algorithm to the development of a generalized framework that will be based upon modeling empathetic conversation between an intelligent conversational agent (chatbot) and a human user in order to allow for higher level observation of interpersonal communication skills. Preliminary results demonstrate the promising potential of the seq2seq technique (e.g., through the use of Dialog Flow Chatbot platform) when applied to emotion-oriented conversational tasks. Both the classification and generative conversational modeling tasks demonstrate the promising potential of the current research for representing human to agent dialogue. However, this implementation may be extended by utilizing, a larger more high-quality dataset

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning

Feature based dynamic intra-video indexing

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyWith the advent of digital imagery and its wide spread application in all vistas of life, it has become an important component in the world of communication. Video content ranging from broadcast news, sports, personal videos, surveillance, movies and entertainment and similar domains is increasing exponentially in quantity and it is becoming a challenge to retrieve content of interest from the corpora. This has led to an increased interest amongst the researchers to investigate concepts of video structure analysis, feature extraction, content annotation, tagging, video indexing, querying and retrieval to fulfil the requirements. However, most of the previous work is confined within specific domain and constrained by the quality, processing and storage capabilities. This thesis presents a novel framework agglomerating the established approaches from feature extraction to browsing in one system of content based video retrieval. The proposed framework significantly fills the gap identified while satisfying the imposed constraints of processing, storage, quality and retrieval times. The output entails a framework, methodology and prototype application to allow the user to efficiently and effectively retrieved content of interest such as age, gender and activity by specifying the relevant query. Experiments have shown plausible results with an average precision and recall of 0.91 and 0.92 respectively for face detection using Haar wavelets based approach. Precision of age ranges from 0.82 to 0.91 and recall from 0.78 to 0.84. The recognition of gender gives better precision with males (0.89) compared to females while recall gives a higher value with females (0.92). Activity of the subject has been detected using Hough transform and classified using Hiddell Markov Model. A comprehensive dataset to support similar studies has also been developed as part of the research process. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) providing a friendly and intuitive interface has been integrated into the developed system to facilitate the retrieval process. The comparison results of the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) shows that the performance of the system closely resembles with that of the human annotator. The performance has been optimised for time and error rate