Productivity Measurement of Call Centre Agents using a Multimodal Classification Approach

Call centre channels play a cornerstone role in business communications and transactions, especially in challenging business situations. Operations’ efficiency, service quality, and resource productivity are core aspects of call centres’ competitive advantage in rapid market competition. Performance evaluation in call centres is challenging due to human subjective evaluation, manual assortment to massive calls, and inequality in evaluations because of different raters. These challenges impact these operations' efficiency and lead to frustrated customers. This study aims to automate performance evaluation in call centres using various deep learning approaches. Calls recorded in a call centre are modelled and classified into high- or low-performance evaluations categorised as productive or nonproductive calls. The proposed conceptual model considers a deep learning network approach to model the recorded calls as text and speech. It is based on the following: 1) focus on the technical part of agent performance, 2) objective evaluation of the corpus, 3) extension of features for both text and speech, and 4) combination of the best accuracy from text and speech data using a multimodal structure. Accordingly, the diarisation algorithm extracts that part of the call where the agent is talking from which the customer is doing so. Manual annotation is also necessary to divide the modelling corpus into productive and nonproductive (supervised training). Krippendorff’s alpha was applied to avoid subjectivity in the manual annotation. Arabic speech recognition is then developed to transcribe the speech into text. The text features are the words embedded using the embedding layer. The speech features make several attempts to use the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) upgraded with Low-Level Descriptors (LLD) to improve classification accuracy. The data modelling architectures for speech and text are based on CNNs, BiLSTMs, and the attention layer. The multimodal approach follows the generated models to improve performance accuracy by concatenating the text and speech models using the joint representation methodology. The main contributions of this thesis are: • Developing an Arabic Speech recognition method for automatic transcription of speech into text. • Drawing several DNN architectures to improve performance evaluation using speech features based on MFCC and LLD. • Developing a Max Weight Similarity (MWS) function to outperform the SoftMax function used in the attention layer. • Proposing a multimodal approach for combining the text and speech models for best performance evaluation

Comparing clothing-mounted sensors with wearable sensors for movement analysis and activity classification

Inertial sensors are a useful instrument for long term monitoring in healthcare. In many cases, inertial sensor devices can be worn as an accessory or integrated into smart textiles. In some situations, it may be beneficial to have data from multiple inertial sensors, rather than relying on a single worn sensor, since this may increase the accuracy of the analysis and better tolerate sensor errors. Integrating multiple sensors into clothing improves the feasibility and practicality of wearing multiple devices every day, in approximately the same location, with less likelihood of incorrect sensor orientation. To facilitate this, the current work investigates the consequences of attaching lightweight sensors to loose clothes. The intention of this paper is to discuss how data from these clothing sensors compare with similarly placed body worn sensors, with additional consideration of the resulting effects on activity recognition. This study compares the similarity between the two signals (body worn and clothing), collected from three different clothing types (slacks, pencil skirt and loose frock), across multiple daily activities (walking, running, sitting, and riding a bus) by calculating correlation coefficients for each sensor pair. Even though the two data streams are clearly different from each other, the results indicate that there is good potential of achieving high classification accuracy when using inertial sensors in clothing

Methods and Tools for Objective Assessment of Psychomotor Skills in Laparoscopic Surgery

Training and assessment paradigms for laparoscopic surgical skills are evolving from traditional mentor–trainee tutorship towards structured, more objective and safer programs. Accreditation of surgeons requires reaching a consensus on metrics and tasks used to assess surgeons’ psychomotor skills. Ongoing development of tracking systems and software solutions has allowed for the expansion of novel training and assessment means in laparoscopy. The current challenge is to adapt and include these systems within training programs, and to exploit their possibilities for evaluation purposes. This paper describes the state of the art in research on measuring and assessing psychomotor laparoscopic skills. It gives an overview on tracking systems as well as on metrics and advanced statistical and machine learning techniques employed for evaluation purposes. The later ones have a potential to be used as an aid in deciding on the surgical competence level, which is an important aspect when accreditation of the surgeons in particular, and patient safety in general, are considered. The prospective of these methods and tools make them complementary means for surgical assessment of motor skills, especially in the early stages of training. Successful examples such as the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery should help drive a paradigm change to structured curricula based on objective parameters. These may improve the accreditation of new surgeons, as well as optimize their already overloaded training schedules

Data-Driven Audio Feature Space Clustering for Automatic Sound Recognition in Radio Broadcast News

This is an Open Access article published by World Scientific Publishing Company. It is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) License. Further distribution of this work is permitted, provided the original work is properly cited. T. Theodorou, I. Mpoas, A. Lazaridis, N. Fakotakis, 'Data-Driven Audio Feature Space Clustering for Automatic Sound Recognition in Radio Broadcast News', International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, Vol. 26 (2), April 2017, 1750005 (13 pages), DOI: 10.1142/S021821301750005. © The Author(s).In this paper we describe an automatic sound recognition scheme for radio broadcast news based on principal component clustering with respect to the discrimination ability of the principal components. Specifically, streams of broadcast news transmissions, labeled based on the audio event, are decomposed using a large set of audio descriptors and project into the principal component space. A data-driven algorithm clusters the relevance of the components. The component subspaces are used by sound type classifier. This methodology showed that the k-nearest neighbor and the artificial intelligent network provide good results. Also, this methodology showed that discarding unnecessary dimension works in favor on the outcome, as it hardly deteriorates the effectiveness of the algorithms.Peer reviewe

Técnicas de análise de imagens para detecção de retinopatia diabética

Orientadores: Anderson de Rezende Rocha. Jacques WainerTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Retinopatia Diabética (RD) é uma complicação a longo prazo do diabetes e a principal causa de cegueira da população ativa. Consultas regulares são necessárias para diagnosticar a retinopatia em um estágio inicial, permitindo um tratamento com o melhor prognóstico capaz de retardar ou até mesmo impedir a cegueira. Alavancados pela evolução da prevalência do diabetes e pelo maior risco que os diabéticos têm de desenvolver doenças nos olhos, diversos trabalhos com abordagens bem estabelecidas e promissoras vêm sendo desenvolvidos para triagem automática de retinopatia. Entretanto, a maior parte dos trabalhos está focada na detecção de lesões utilizando características visuais particulares de cada tipo de lesão. Além do mais, soluções artesanais para avaliação de necessidade de consulta e de identificação de estágios da retinopatia ainda dependem bastante das lesões, cujo repetitivo procedimento de detecção é complexo e inconveniente, mesmo se um esquema unificado for adotado. O estado da arte para avaliação automatizada de necessidade de consulta é composto por abordagens que propõem uma representação altamente abstrata obtida inteiramente por meio dos dados. Usualmente, estas abordagens recebem uma imagem e produzem uma resposta ¿ que pode ser resultante de um único modelo ou de uma combinação ¿ e não são facilmente explicáveis. Este trabalho objetivou melhorar a detecção de lesões e reforçar decisões relacionadas à necessidade de consulta, fazendo uso de avançadas representações de imagens em duas etapas. Nós também almejamos compor um modelo sofisticado e direcionado pelos dados para triagem de retinopatia, bem como incorporar aprendizado supervisionado de características com representação orientada por mapa de calor, resultando em uma abordagem robusta e ainda responsável para triagem automatizada. Finalmente, tivemos como objetivo a integração das soluções em dispositivos portáteis de captura de imagens de retina. Para detecção de lesões, propusemos abordagens de caracterização de imagens que possibilitem uma detecção eficaz de diferentes tipos de lesões. Nossos principais avanços estão centrados na modelagem de uma nova técnica de codificação para imagens de retina, bem como na preservação de informações no processo de pooling ou agregação das características obtidas. Decidir automaticamente pela necessidade de encaminhamento do paciente a um especialista é uma investigação ainda mais difícil e muito debatida. Nós criamos um método mais simples e robusto para decisões de necessidade de consulta, e que não depende da detecção de lesões. Também propusemos um modelo direcionado pelos dados que melhora significativamente o desempenho na tarefa de triagem da RD. O modelo produz uma resposta confiável com base em respostas (locais e globais), bem como um mapa de ativação que permite uma compreensão de importância de cada pixel para a decisão. Exploramos a metodologia de explicabilidade para criar um descritor local codificado em uma rica representação em nível médio. Os modelos direcionados pelos dados são o estado da arte para triagem de retinopatia diabética. Entretanto, mapas de ativação são essenciais para interpretar o aprendizado em termos de importância de cada pixel e para reforçar pequenas características discriminativas que têm potencial de melhorar o diagnósticoAbstract: Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a long-term complication of diabetes and the leading cause of blindness among working-age adults. A regular eye examination is necessary to diagnose DR at an early stage, when it can be treated with the best prognosis and the visual loss delayed or deferred. Leveraged by the continuous expansion of diabetics and by the increased risk that those people have to develop eye diseases, several works with well-established and promising approaches have been proposed for automatic screening. Therefore, most existing art focuses on lesion detection using visual characteristics specific to each type of lesion. Additionally, handcrafted solutions for referable diabetic retinopathy detection and DR stages identification still depend too much on the lesions, whose repetitive detection is complex and cumbersome to implement, even when adopting a unified detection scheme. Current art for automated referral assessment resides on highly abstract data-driven approaches. Usually, those approaches receive an image and spit the response out ¿ that might be resulting from only one model or ensembles ¿ and are not easily explainable. Hence, this work aims at enhancing lesion detection and reinforcing referral decisions with advanced handcrafted two-tiered image representations. We also intended to compose sophisticated data-driven models for referable DR detection and incorporate supervised learning of features with saliency-oriented mid-level image representations to come up with a robust yet accountable automated screening approach. Ultimately, we aimed at integrating our software solutions with simple retinal imaging devices. In the lesion detection task, we proposed advanced handcrafted image characterization approaches to detecting effectively different lesions. Our leading advances are centered on designing a novel coding technique for retinal images and preserving information in the pooling process. Automatically deciding on whether or not the patient should be referred to the ophthalmic specialist is a more difficult, and still hotly debated research aim. We designed a simple and robust method for referral decisions that does not rely upon lesion detection stages. We also proposed a novel and effective data-driven model that significantly improves the performance for DR screening. Our accountable data-driven model produces a reliable (local- and global-) response along with a heatmap/saliency map that enables pixel-based importance comprehension. We explored this methodology to create a local descriptor that is encoded into a rich mid-level representation. Data-driven methods are the state of the art for diabetic retinopathy screening. However, saliency maps are essential not only to interpret the learning in terms of pixel importance but also to reinforce small discriminative characteristics that have the potential to enhance the diagnosticDoutoradoCiência da ComputaçãoDoutor em Ciência da ComputaçãoCAPE

Cooperation between expert knowledge and data mining discovered knowledge: Lessons learned

Expert systems are built from knowledge traditionally elicited from the human expert. It is precisely knowledge elicitation from the expert that is the bottleneck in expert system construction. On the other hand, a data mining system, which automatically extracts knowledge, needs expert guidance on the successive decisions to be made in each of the system phases. In this context, expert knowledge and data mining discovered knowledge can cooperate, maximizing their individual capabilities: data mining discovered knowledge can be used as a complementary source of knowledge for the expert system, whereas expert knowledge can be used to guide the data mining process. This article summarizes different examples of systems where there is cooperation between expert knowledge and data mining discovered knowledge and reports our experience of such cooperation gathered from a medical diagnosis project called Intelligent Interpretation of Isokinetics Data, which we developed. From that experience, a series of lessons were learned throughout project development. Some of these lessons are generally applicable and others pertain exclusively to certain project types

Reverse Image Search Using Deep Unsupervised Generative Learning and Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Reverse image search has been a vital and emerging research area of information retrieval. One of the primary research foci of information retrieval is to increase the space and computational efficiency by converting a large image database into an efficiently computed feature database. This paper proposes a novel deep learning-based methodology, which captures channel-wise, low-level details of each image. In the first phase, sparse auto-encoder (SAE), a deep generative model, is applied to RGB channels of each image for unsupervised representational learning. In the second phase, transfer learning is utilized by using VGG-16, a variant of deep convolutional neural network (CNN). The output of SAE combined with the original RGB channel is forwarded to VGG-16, thereby producing a more effective feature database by the ensemble/collaboration of two effective models. The proposed method provides an information rich feature space that is a reduced dimensionality representation of the image database. Experiments are performed on a hybrid dataset that is developed by combining three standard publicly available datasets. The proposed approach has a retrieval accuracy (precision) of 98.46%, without using the metadata of images, by using a cosine similarity measure between the query image and the image database. Additionally, to further validate the proposed methodology’s effectiveness, image quality has been degraded by adding 5% noise (Speckle, Gaussian, and Salt pepper noise types) in the hybrid dataset. Retrieval accuracy has generally been found to be 97% for different variants of nois