The Virtual University and Avatar Technology: E-learning Through Future Technology

E-learning gains increasingly importance in academic education. Beyond present distance learning technologies a new opportunity emerges by the use of advanced avatar technology. Virtual robots acting in an environment of a virtual campus offer opportunities of advanced learning experiences. Human Machine Interaction (HMI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can bridge time zones and ease professional constraints of mature students. Undergraduate students may use such technology to build up topics of their studies beyond taught lectures. Objectives of the paper are to research the options, extent and limitations of avatar technology for academic studies in under- and postgraduate courses and to discuss students' potential acceptance or rejection of interaction with AI. The research method is a case study based on Sir Tony Dyson's avatar technology iBot2000. Sir Tony is a worldwide acknowledged robot specialist, creator of Star Wars' R2D2, who developed in recent years the iBot2000 technology, intelligent avatars adaptable to different environments with the availability to speak up to eight different languages and capable to provide logic answers to questions asked. This technology underwent many prototypes with the latest specific goal to offer blended E-learning entering the field of the virtual 3-D university extending Web2.0 to Web3.0 (Dyson. 2009). Sir Tony included his vast experiences gained in his personal (teaching) work with children for which he received his knighthood. The data was mainly collected through interviews with Sir Tony Dyson, which helps discover the inventor’s view on why such technology is of advantage for academic studies. Based on interviews with Sir Tony, this research critically analyses the options, richness and restrictions, which avatar (iBot2000) technology may add to academic studies. The conclusion will discuss the opportunities, which avatar technology may be able to bring to learning and teaching activities, and the foreseeable limitations – the amount of resources required and the complexity to build a fully integrated virtual 3-D campus. Key Words: virtual learning, avatar technology, iBot2000, virtual universit

Crowdsourced real-world sensing: sentiment analysis and the real-time web

The advent of the real-time web is proving both challeng- ing and at the same time disruptive for a number of areas of research, notably information retrieval and web data mining. As an area of research reaching maturity, sentiment analysis oers a promising direction for modelling the text content available in real-time streams. This paper reviews the real-time web as a new area of focus for sentiment analysis and discusses the motivations and challenges behind such a direction

FrameNet annotation for multimodal corpora: devising a methodology for the semantic representation of text-image interactions in audiovisual productions

Multimodal analyses have been growing in importance within several approaches to Cognitive Linguistics and applied fields such as Natural Language Understanding. Nonetheless fine-grained semantic representations of multimodal objects are still lacking, especially in terms of integrating areas such as Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision, which are key for the implementation of multimodality in Computational Linguistics. In this dissertation, we propose a methodology for extending FrameNet annotation to the multimodal domain, since FrameNet can provide fine-grained semantic representations, particularly with a database enriched by Qualia and other interframal and intraframal relations, as it is the case of FrameNet Brasil. To make FrameNet Brasil able to conduct multimodal analysis, we outlined the hypothesis that similarly to the way in which words in a sentence evoke frames and organize their elements in the syntactic locality accompanying them, visual elements in video shots may, also, evoke frames and organize their elements on the screen or work complementarily with the frame evocation patterns of the sentences narrated simultaneously to their appearance on screen, providing different profiling and perspective options for meaning construction. The corpus annotated for testing the hypothesis is composed of episodes of a Brazilian TV Travel Series critically acclaimed as an exemplar of good practices in audiovisual composition. The TV genre chosen also configures a novel experimental setting for research on integrated image and text comprehension, since, in this corpus, text is not a direct description of the image sequence but correlates with it indirectly in a myriad of ways. The dissertation also reports on an eye-tracker experiment conducted to validate the approach proposed to a text-oriented annotation. The experiment demonstrated that it is not possible to determine that text impacts gaze directly and was taken as a reinforcement to the approach of valorizing modes combination. Last, we present the Frame2 dataset, the product of the annotation task carried out for the corpus following both the methodology and guidelines proposed. The results achieved demonstrate that, at least for this TV genre but possibly also for others, a fine-grained semantic annotation tackling the diverse correlations that take place in a multimodal setting provides new perspective in multimodal comprehension modeling. Moreover, multimodal annotation also enriches the development of FrameNets, to the extent that correlations found between modalities can attest the modeling choices made by those building frame-based resources.Análises multimodais vêm crescendo em importância em várias abordagens da Linguística Cognitiva e em diversas áreas de aplicação, como o da Compreensão de Linguagem Natural. No entanto, há significativa carência de representações semânticas refinadas de objetos multimodais, especialmente em termos de integração de áreas como Processamento de Linguagem Natural e Visão Computacional, que são fundamentais para a implementação de multimodalidade no campo da Linguística Computacional. Nesta tese, propomos uma metodologia para estender o método de anotação da FrameNet ao domínio multimodal, uma vez que a FrameNet pode fornecer representações semânticas refinadas, particularmente com um banco de dados enriquecido por Qualia e outras relações interframe e intraframe, como é o caso do FrameNet Brasil. Para tornar a FrameNet Brasil capaz de realizar análises multimodais, delineamos a hipótese de que, assim como as palavras em uma frase evocam frames e organizam seus elementos na localidade sintática que os acompanha, os elementos visuais nos planos de vídeo também podem evocar frames e organizar seus elementos na tela ou trabalhar de forma complementar aos padrões de evocação de frames das sentenças narradas simultaneamente ao seu aparecimento na tela, proporcionando diferentes perfis e opções de perspectiva para a construção de sentido. O corpus anotado para testar a hipótese é composto por episódios de um programa televisivo de viagens brasileiro aclamado pela crítica como um exemplo de boas práticas em composição audiovisual. O gênero televisivo escolhido também configura um novo conjunto experimental para a pesquisa em imagem integrada e compreensão textual, uma vez que, neste corpus, o texto não é uma descrição direta da sequência de imagens, mas se correlaciona com ela indiretamente em uma miríade de formas diversa. A Tese também relata um experimento de rastreamento ocular realizado para validar a abordagem proposta para uma anotação orientada por texto. O experimento demonstrou que não é possível determinar que o texto impacta diretamente o direcionamento do olhar e foi tomado como um reforço para a abordagem de valorização da combinação de modos. Por fim, apresentamos o conjunto de dados Frame2, produto da tarefa de anotação realizada para o corpus seguindo a metodologia e as diretrizes propostas. Os resultados obtidos demonstram que, pelo menos para esse gênero de TV, mas possivelmente também para outros, uma anotação semântica refinada que aborde as diversas correlações que ocorrem em um ambiente multimodal oferece uma nova perspectiva na modelagem da compreensão multimodal. Além disso, a anotação multimodal também enriquece o desenvolvimento de FrameNets, na medida em que as correlações encontradas entre as modalidades podem atestar as escolhas de modelagem feitas por aqueles que criam recursos baseados em frames.CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superio

The non-Verbal Structure of Patient Case Discussions in Multidisciplinary Medical Team Meetings

Meeting analysis has a long theoretical tradition in social psychology, with established practical rami?cations in computer science, especially in computer supported cooperative work. More recently, a good deal of research has focused on the issues of indexing and browsing multimedia records of meetings. Most research in this area, however, is still based on data collected in laboratories, under somewhat arti?cial conditions. This paper presents an analysis of the discourse structure and spontaneous interactions at real-life multidisciplinary medical team meetings held as part of the work routine in a major hospital. It is hypothesised that the conversational structure of these meetings, as indicated by sequencing and duration of vocalisations, enables segmentation into individual patient case discussions. The task of segmenting audio-visual records of multidisciplinary medical team meetings is described as a topic segmentation task, and a method for automatic segmentation is proposed. An empirical evaluation based on hand labelled data is presented which determines the optimal length of vocalisation sequences for segmentation, and establishes the competitiveness of the method with approaches based on more complex knowledge sources. The effectiveness of Bayesian classi?cation as a segmentation method, and its applicability to meeting segmentation in other domains are discusse

Information in the Context of Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences

This textbook briefly maps as many as possible areas and contexts in which information plays an important role. It attempts an approach that also seeks to explore areas of research that are not commonly associated, such as informatics, information and library science, information physics, or information ethics. Given that the text is intended especially for students of the Master's Degree in Cognitive Studies, emphasis is placed on a humane, philosophical and interdisciplinary approach. It offers rather directions of thought, questions, and contexts than a complete theory developed into mathematical and technical details