GEMRec: A graph-based emotion-aware music recommendation approach

© Springer International Publishing AG 2016. Music recommendation has gained substantial attention in recent times. As one of the most important context features,user emotion has great potential to improve recommendations,but this has not yet been sufficiently explored due to the difficulty of emotion acquisition and incorporation. This paper proposes a graph-based emotion-aware music recommendation approach (GEMRec) by simultaneously taking a user’s music listening history and emotion into consideration. The proposed approach models the relations between user,music,and emotion as a three-element tuple (user,music,emotion),upon which an Emotion Aware Graph (EAG) is built,and then a relevance propagation algorithm based on random walk is devised to rank the relevance of music items for recommendation. Evaluation experiments are conducted based on a real dataset collected from a Chinese microblog service in comparison to baselines. The results show that the emotional context from a user’s microblogs contributes to improving the performance of music recommendation in terms of hitrate,precision,recall,and F1 score

The pretenders and why do you want to know? Writing a memoir in the face of intergenerational trauma: A reflective thesis

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThis thesis consists of a memoir and a critical commentary. The memoir, The Pretenders, follows three generations of my family, from my grandparents’ experiences during the Japanese Occupation, through my father’s childhood amongst the rubber plantations of Indonesia, to my upbringing in modern day Singapore. The memoir examines depression, and the failings of material wealth, while exploring how a family struggles to live up to and accept the success of their forefathers. Using Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory as a basis, the accompanying critical commentary questions how my grandparents’ experiences during the Second World War affected my father’s childhood and how the lingering trauma is continued in our own relationship. By analysing The Pretenders in conjunction with three narratives which are thematically linked through their exploration of familial relations, Alice Pung’s Her Father’s Daughter (2011), Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous (2019), and Irene Vilar’s The Ladies Gallery (1998), the first chapter of my thesis examines the narrative devices used by these writers in order to present the way their identity is impacted by intergenerational trauma. This search for identity follows two stages, (1) an attempt to reconcile their parents’ traumatic past with their own upbringing, and (2) an attempt to understand the differences between the country their parents’ trauma originated from with the country they were raised in. The second chapter considers how the myths that build a nation are echoed in the myths that build a family legacy. The chapter continues by examining the use of phantoms as a writing device and how familial myths can root an otherwise unanchored diasporic history. The third chapter reflects on the choices a memoirist can make in portraying their subjects, and concludes that a balance between artistic licence and ethics is required when presenting ‘truth’

WiFi-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Attention-Based BiLSTM

Recently, significant efforts have been made to explore human activity recognition (HAR) techniques that use information gathered by existing indoor wireless infrastructures through WiFi signals without demanding the monitored subject to carry a dedicated device. The key intuition is that different activities introduce different multi-paths in WiFi signals and generate different patterns in the time series of channel state information (CSI). In this paper, we propose and evaluate a full pipeline for a CSI-based human activity recognition framework for 12 activities in three different spatial environments using two deep learning models: ABiLSTM and CNN-ABiLSTM. Evaluation experiments have demonstrated that the proposed models outperform state-of-the-art models. Also, the experiments show that the proposed models can be applied to other environments with different configurations, albeit with some caveats. The proposed ABiLSTM model achieves an overall accuracy of 94.03%, 91.96%, and 92.59% across the 3 target environments. While the proposed CNN-ABiLSTM model reaches an accuracy of 98.54%, 94.25% and 95.09% across those same environments

Night of Awakening: Strength and Empowerment in the Young Adult Fiction Genre

The Young Adult Fantasy genre is often written off as a useless, or immature form of writing. However, there are studies that prove that this specific genre is not only engaging, but it is also empowering for young readers. By writing toward adolescent readers, authors are able to promote various ways in which their characters adjust or interact with their surroundings, which also influences their readers’ self and social awareness. By representing feminist perspectives and depicting the effects of trauma, YA literature fosters progressive social change and conveys the importance of mental health. In writing my own novel, The Night of Awakening, for my Douglas Honors College Thesis, I discovered how my own characters could represent young women’s power and mental health awareness to change long-standing institutions related to oppression and incorrect representations. My main character, Alina, is isolated from all those around her because of a mysterious power that has taken her hostage. While seemingly “powerless” in a world of magic, Alina embodies feminist power as she finds her own ways to battle ancient powers and acknowledge the trauma her own family has inflicted upon her. By using scholarly articles to meter my study, I was able to discover the ways in which my novel might impact the literature scene and influence young, impressionable minds

Behavior quantification as the missing link between fields: Tools for digital psychiatry and their role in the future of neurobiology

The great behavioral heterogeneity observed between individuals with the same psychiatric disorder and even within one individual over time complicates both clinical practice and biomedical research. However, modern technologies are an exciting opportunity to improve behavioral characterization. Existing psychiatry methods that are qualitative or unscalable, such as patient surveys or clinical interviews, can now be collected at a greater capacity and analyzed to produce new quantitative measures. Furthermore, recent capabilities for continuous collection of passive sensor streams, such as phone GPS or smartwatch accelerometer, open avenues of novel questioning that were previously entirely unrealistic. Their temporally dense nature enables a cohesive study of real-time neural and behavioral signals. To develop comprehensive neurobiological models of psychiatric disease, it will be critical to first develop strong methods for behavioral quantification. There is huge potential in what can theoretically be captured by current technologies, but this in itself presents a large computational challenge -- one that will necessitate new data processing tools, new machine learning techniques, and ultimately a shift in how interdisciplinary work is conducted. In my thesis, I detail research projects that take different perspectives on digital psychiatry, subsequently tying ideas together with a concluding discussion on the future of the field. I also provide software infrastructure where relevant, with extensive documentation. Major contributions include scientific arguments and proof of concept results for daily free-form audio journals as an underappreciated psychiatry research datatype, as well as novel stability theorems and pilot empirical success for a proposed multi-area recurrent neural network architecture.Comment: PhD thesis cop

An Educator\u27s Journey Of Finding Post-Traumatic Growth After Intimate Partner Violence Through Scholarly Personal Narrative Writing: Implications For Survivors, Advocates, And Educators

In this thesis, I share my personal story of finding healing—post-traumatic growth—after experiencing intimate partner violence seven years ago. Written in Scholarly Personal Narrative format, I dig into my own past, draw upon research and scholarship to better understand and make meaning of and from my experiences, and finally, make connections with other survivors, advocates, and educators through my narrative. I discuss how survivors of intimate partner violence can move closer to healing; provide practical tips on how individuals and educators can support survivors and better understand the complexities of abusive relationships; and explain how educators can use writing, specifically the Scholarly Personal Narrative format, as an avenue for healing and growth for their students in a classroom setting. My thesis is an example of how, when given the opportunity, educators can encourage students to experience post-traumatic growth within the American University

Indecent foodie : a mini trilogy : streamed essays in memories.

The eighteen essays in Indecent Foodie: a Mini Trilogy speak of how alone and ashamed, a promiscuous woman deprives herself of healthy attachments, healthy intakes, and healthy perspective. She devours the world and hides her obesity. Her coming of age transforms her from a curious, good girl into a dirty, slam pig before she can find a way to balance the two. Good food, good family, and just a little bit of danger stabilize this promiscuous girl and give her the courage to love an over-the-top man and conquer her guilt-ridden past. The first section of essays touches on the dangers--perceived or real--present in the narrator's life. Their intent relies on the creation of a neurotic persona, one that both seeks and fears dangerous situations. Control seems to heighten her panic and damage her perception of herself, her actions, and those she allows herself to associate with. These ideas leak into the next mini memoir--showing the dangers of love. The second section touches on several faucets of love--the fun, the new, and the difficult, for the self, for subjects and hobbies, for sharing. These essays are the most diverse, as love often proves the case. A direct correlation is shown between new love and established love--or the realistic portrayal of marriage, as the narrator shows can be a constant battle to maintain and understand. As the section continues, the narrator demonstrates a love for culture--family culture, food culture, and a fascination of popular culture. Yet, "I Can't Believe It's Not God," begins another transition of awareness of self and again hitting on the idea of control. However, the overarching theme, which connects the beginning and ending mini memoirs, demonstrates this search for love through means outside the self as unhealthy as a means of coming to terms with one's past. Finally, the last of the mini memoirs focuses on reflection of family and the past. The narrator takes on the persona of her parents in order to understand their behavior and her turbulent childhood home and family. An exploration of memory ends the section, and the fear resurfaces, leaving the reader with both growth and an inability to move beyond one's past. Limitations are real for this narrator, and her stories show an attempt to come to terms with past rather than redeeming herself and taking on the freedom of a new personhood