Non-local Neural Networks

Both convolutional and recurrent operations are building blocks that process one local neighborhood at a time. In this paper, we present non-local operations as a generic family of building blocks for capturing long-range dependencies. Inspired by the classical non-local means method in computer vision, our non-local operation computes the response at a position as a weighted sum of the features at all positions. This building block can be plugged into many computer vision architectures. On the task of video classification, even without any bells and whistles, our non-local models can compete or outperform current competition winners on both Kinetics and Charades datasets. In static image recognition, our non-local models improve object detection/segmentation and pose estimation on the COCO suite of tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/video-nonlocal-net .Comment: CVPR 2018, code is available at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/video-nonlocal-ne

Affective Music Information Retrieval

Much of the appeal of music lies in its power to convey emotions/moods and to evoke them in listeners. In consequence, the past decade witnessed a growing interest in modeling emotions from musical signals in the music information retrieval (MIR) community. In this article, we present a novel generative approach to music emotion modeling, with a specific focus on the valence-arousal (VA) dimension model of emotion. The presented generative model, called \emph{acoustic emotion Gaussians} (AEG), better accounts for the subjectivity of emotion perception by the use of probability distributions. Specifically, it learns from the emotion annotations of multiple subjects a Gaussian mixture model in the VA space with prior constraints on the corresponding acoustic features of the training music pieces. Such a computational framework is technically sound, capable of learning in an online fashion, and thus applicable to a variety of applications, including user-independent (general) and user-dependent (personalized) emotion recognition and emotion-based music retrieval. We report evaluations of the aforementioned applications of AEG on a larger-scale emotion-annotated corpora, AMG1608, to demonstrate the effectiveness of AEG and to showcase how evaluations are conducted for research on emotion-based MIR. Directions of future work are also discussed.Comment: 40 pages, 18 figures, 5 tables, author versio

The 1990 progress report and future plans

This document describes the progress and plans of the Artificial Intelligence Research Branch (RIA) at ARC in 1990. Activities span a range from basic scientific research to engineering development and to fielded NASA applications, particularly those applications that are enabled by basic research carried out at RIA. Work is conducted in-house and through collaborative partners in academia and industry. Our major focus is on a limited number of research themes with a dual commitment to technical excellence and proven applicability to NASA short, medium, and long-term problems. RIA acts as the Agency's lead organization for research aspects of artificial intelligence, working closely with a second research laboratory at JPL and AI applications groups at all NASA centers

Representing spatial and domain knowledge within a spatial decision support framework.

Experts are looking for ways to improve the monitoring of unstable slopes. A spatial decision support system (SDSS) is a software tool that can be used to support an expert in making complex decisions when solving problems. Many SDSSs use a geographic information system (GIS) to help analyze and manage spatial data. However, many GISs do not take advantage of expert knowledge. An expert system (ES) is a program that can be used to represent and reason with different kinds of knowledge when solving unstructured problems. The ability to find solutions to these problems can be enhanced by integrating a CIS and an ES. This research presents a candidate framework that represents basic spatial and domain knowledge through ontologies and integrates the knowledge within an ES-GIS environment. C Language Integrated Production System and ArcCIS provide the ES-GIS framework that is used to demonstrate this candidate framework through two small monitoring examples.Dept. of Earth Sciences. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2006 .R698. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-01, page: 0470. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2006