An Overview of Computational Approaches for Interpretation Analysis

It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But how exactly can we characterize such discrepancies in interpretation? For example, are there any specific features of an image that makes person A regard an image as beautiful while person B finds the same image displeasing? Such questions ultimately aim at explaining our individual ways of interpretation, an intention that has been of fundamental importance to the social sciences from the beginning. More recently, advances in computer science brought up two related questions: First, can computational tools be adopted for analyzing ways of interpretation? Second, what if the "beholder" is a computer model, i.e., how can we explain a computer model's point of view? Numerous efforts have been made regarding both of these points, while many existing approaches focus on particular aspects and are still rather separate. With this paper, in order to connect these approaches we introduce a theoretical framework for analyzing interpretation, which is applicable to interpretation of both human beings and computer models. We give an overview of relevant computational approaches from various fields, and discuss the most common and promising application areas. The focus of this paper lies on interpretation of text and image data, while many of the presented approaches are applicable to other types of data as well.Comment: Preprint submitted to Digital Signal Processin

Informal and shared mobility: A bibliometric analysis and researcher network mapping

This study was commissioned by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations to inform the content of the next phase of its Future Urban Transport programme. The aim of the study was to define the subject field (provisionally described by VREF as ‘informal public transport’ and ‘shared mobility’), analyse its bibliometric attributes. The study method involved an analysis of the nomenclature and focus of seminal or consolidating in-field literature to delineate the scope of the study, a systematic search of multiple platforms for in-field English language publications between 2010 and the present, the creation and augmentation of a database for bibliometric analysis, and a survey of leading researchers across eight global regions. The subject field was divided into four main categories of passenger services (flexible transport, informal transport, shared mobility and for-hire transport), which sit between purely private transport and scheduled mass public transport, and can be found in various guises across the Global North and Global South. The timeline of innovation in the field reveals complex and multi-directional global diffusion of service innovations, triggered by changed operating environments and technology disruption. It was found that research in this field is growing fast (doubling every four years). The recent literature is dominated by authors affiliated to universities in Europe, Eastern Asia and Northern America at a regional scale, and to universities in China and the United States at a country scale. Shared mobility (and bike-sharing, car-sharing and ride hailing in particular) has received most attention (62%), followed by for-hire transport (17%), informal transport (11%), and flexible transport (10%). Most publications concerning shared mobility and for-hire transport were produced by lead authors in China (19,3% and 44,1%), followed by the United States (15,0% and 9,9%). Most publications concerning informal transport were produced in South Africa (18,2%) followed by India (9,8%), and concerning flexible transport were produced in the United States (13,1%) followed by Australia (9,6%). There has been extensive international research collaboration, with collaboration between research institutions in China and the United States found to be particularly strong, as was collaboration between China and other East Asian countries. Somewhat paradoxically, while the quantity of collaborations with universities in Africa, Latin America, and Western Asia was relatively small, authors from many countries within these regions are most likely to publish through international collaboration. Citation networks between institutions followed a similar pattern to collaboration networks. Geographical gaps in the literature were found, with heatmaps revealing countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, that received no dedicated research attention. While difficult to quantify, there were also indications of thematic gaps in the literature, or at least disparity between the prevalence of a service type and the number of publications about it. Most notably, compared to their global prevalence, bike-sharing, car-sharing and carpooling were well researched, compared to informal for-hire transport and informal public transport, which received significantly less attention. Given the multi-directional innovation diffusion in the subject field, and the disparity of research capacity and output across regions, it is a field of inquiry that presents rich possibilities for global research collaboration in the next phase of the FUT programme. The survey of leading researchers suggested that: integrating with mass public transport services; serving the needs of vulnerable passengers; regulating service providers; introducing electric vehicles into shared mobility and informal transport fleets; and digitalising aspects of informal transport operations; are priority future research needs

Approaches to decision-making among late-stage melanoma patients: a multifactorial investigation.

PurposeThe treatment decisions of melanoma patients are poorly understood. Most research on cancer patient decision-making focuses on limited components of specific treatment decisions. This study aimed to holistically characterize late-stage melanoma patients' approaches to treatment decision-making in order to advance understanding of patient influences and supports.Methods(1) Exploratory analysis of longitudinal qualitative data to identify themes that characterize patient decision-making. (2) Pattern analysis of decision-making themes using an innovative method for visualizing qualitative data: a hierarchically-clustered heatmap. Participants were 13 advanced melanoma patients at a large academic medical center.ResultsExploratory analysis revealed eight themes. Heatmap analysis indicated two broad types of patient decision-makers. "Reliant outsiders" relied on providers for medical information, demonstrated low involvement in decision-making, showed a low or later-in-care interest in clinical trials, and expressed altruistic motives. "Active insiders" accessed substantial medical information and expertise in their networks, consulted with other doctors, showed early and substantial interest in trials, demonstrated high involvement in decision-making, and employed multiple decision-making strategies.ConclusionWe identified and characterized two distinct approaches to decision-making among patients with late-stage melanoma. These differences spanned a wide range of factors (e.g., behaviors, resources, motivations). Enhanced understanding of patients as decision-makers and the factors that shape their decision-making may help providers to better support patient understanding, improve patient-provider communication, and support shared decision-making

Energy planning tools for low carbon transitions: an example of a multicriteria spatial planning tool for district heating

Energy planning tools can support transitions to low carbon energy by helping planners to identify technology options and scenarios. Exploring a case study of district heating development to support heat decarbonisation in the United Kingdom (UK), this article uses thematic analysis of qualitative semistructured interviews conducted between May 2013 and August 2015 with local and regional government officials, in order to consider how energy planning decision-making tools can be designed to support the early stages of low carbon transitions as a form of strategic niche management. The findings of this analysis are then tested through the development of a spatial heat planning tool covering England and Wales, designed to respond to the needs of niche actors seeking to facilitate early development of district heating projects. The tool is for use by local government actors as they seek to build social networks of stakeholders to support the technology change, to demonstrate its value and to support skills development. The research shows the importance of designing flexible tools which can go beyond techno-economic criteria and reflect the wider motivations and decision criteria of local actors, including social criteria

Hunting Group Clues with Transformers for Social Group Activity Recognition

This paper presents a novel framework for social group activity recognition. As an expanded task of group activity recognition, social group activity recognition requires recognizing multiple sub-group activities and identifying group members. Most existing methods tackle both tasks by refining region features and then summarizing them into activity features. Such heuristic feature design renders the effectiveness of features susceptible to incomplete person localization and disregards the importance of scene contexts. Furthermore, region features are sub-optimal to identify group members because the features may be dominated by those of people in the regions and have different semantics. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose to leverage attention modules in transformers to generate effective social group features. Our method is designed in such a way that the attention modules identify and then aggregate features relevant to social group activities, generating an effective feature for each social group. Group member information is embedded into the features and thus accessed by feed-forward networks. The outputs of feed-forward networks represent groups so concisely that group members can be identified with simple Hungarian matching between groups and individuals. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the Volleyball and Collective Activity datasets.Comment: Accepted to ECCV202

Governing low carbon socio-technical transitions – a case study of district heating in Great Britain

District heating (DH) has the potential to play an important role in enabling a transition to a low carbon, affordable and secure energy system, because of its ability to utilise renewable and waste heat sources as well as to provide a means for energy storage and flexibility. Countries new to DH, such as Great Britain, are looking to establish innovations in governance structures, business models, and policy approaches to overcome the numerous and complex barriers that exist for increasing deployment of DH. This thesis uses socio-technical transitions literatures to explore a case study of DH development in Great Britain, an example of a liberalised energy market and centralised energy system. ‘Niches’ are highlighted in the literature as playing an important role in enabling transitions. The processes that take place within niches enable the creation of a protected space where an innovation can be demonstrated and developed. Niche processes also act as a catalyst for driving change in the wider ‘regime’ of established norms and practices that have formed around the incumbent technology configuration. However, debate continues within the socio-technical transitions literature about how actors can develop the agency to govern for more radical change. Using analysis of case study data, this work considers the potential of actors from across the sectors to utilise different governing measures to support niche processes and drive a transition to DH. The work shows that effective governing measures develop the capacities of niche actors to exploit tensions in the incumbent regime and enable strategic development of DH at the local level. This requires support from actors across geographical scales and sectors. However, actors’ agency to govern a transition is strongly influenced by dynamics in the incumbent regime. Support for niche processes needs to be complemented with activities to bring about destabilisation of the incumbent regime

Realising local government visions for developing district heating: experiences from a learning country

District heating (DH) has an important role to play in enabling cities to transition to low-carbon heating. Although schemes are commonplace in some countries, in ‘learning countries’ where building-level technologies make up the majority of heating systems there are numerous barriers to introducing DH. Local governments are seen as key actors in helping to create a ‘shared vision’ for DH amongst stakeholders. This study uses interviews with stakeholders from a range of sectors in the UK (an example of a learning country) to examine the visions of local actors for developing DH and the types of national policy that would support local implementation of these visions. The analysis shows that in engaging with DH development local governments seek multiple types of value. Realising this value will most likely happen by taking a long-term, planned approach to development. In contrast, national government policy is geared towards techno-economic criteria and may lead to only a minority of potential sites being developed, without realisation of wider social or environmental benefits aligned to local visions. The work highlights the importance of local strategic planning, enabled by aligned national policy, in realising the full economic, environmental and social benefits of DH

Identification of Campylobacter virulence and colonisation factors

Campylobacter jejuni is the most common Campylobacter species associated with campylobacteriosis. Contamination of poultry with C. jejuni during processing and subsequent poor food handling is the major cause of infection in humans. Effective strategies to control Campylobacter contamination and to prevent campylobacteriosis are still lacking. Since contaminated poultry is the major source of campylobacteriosis in industrialised countries, identification of virulence and colonisation factors will without doubt lead to new strategies for minimising colonisation of C. jejuni in poultry intestines. A starting point for identifying potential virulence factors is to identify proteins that are secreted from Campylobacter and therefore can interact with host molecules/cells. In 2000, the complete genome sequence of C. jejuni subsp. jejuni NCTC 11168 was completed, which contains 1,654 coding DNA sequences (CDS). A range of bioinformatics techniques have been employed in this study to identify secreted and surface-exposed proteins, which may have the ability to interact with chicken immune cells. Results indicate that 6.96% of C. jejuni proteins have been predicted to contain a signal peptide, and 8.63% are predicted to be non-classically secreted using the web servers SignalP4.0 and Secretome2.0. Among them, a subset of 70 putative non-classically secreted proteins have been selected for further analysis, as they were predicted to be located on the cell surface or extracellularly using Gneg-PLoc and Gneg-mPLoc. They have been analysed further for the presence of transmembrane helices, transmembrane beta-barrels, putative proteases, enzymes, and virulence. One of the proteins from the list, Cj0391c, was selected to be expressed as a recombinant protein in an E. coli BL21(DE3) pRSET-A expression system. This purified recombinant protein was shown to induce a reduction in viability of chicken macrophage HD11 cells, and induced apoptosis, suggestive of possible roles of this protein in immune system evasion or suppression of immune responses in poultry. Furthermore, this protein was computationally modelled and molecular dynamics simulations performed at different conditions. The constructed Cj0391c hexameric structural model was modelled, inserted and simulated in a phosphatidylethanolamine-phosphatidylglycerol bilayer. Under simulated conditions, the model maintained structural integrity at low temperature (300 K) without the presence of zinc, but not at higher temperatures, 310 K and 314 K. The helical bundle was maintained with the presence of zinc from low temperature 300 K to higher temperature 314 K. Simulations also suggest a wider pore in the presence of zinc, suggestive of higher channel conductance. Thus, similar to human dermcidin, zinc may play a role in enabling formation of a stable hexameric channel with a pore of sufficient size to cause pathological membrane permeability, leading to cell death. Results from this study will help to improve our understanding of pathogenic mechanisms, more specifically, the virulence factors involved in C. jejuni pathogenicity. The molecular modelling and simulation revealed one possible mechanism of a protein toxic to chicken macrophage cells. These potential extracellular virulence factors can be used as virulence candidates for anti-Campylobacter strategies. By modelling identified proteins, antigenic determinants and/or functional regions/mechanisms may be found, which can then be used to design vaccines aimed at immunising poultry against Campylobacter colonisation