Ontologies and Information Extraction

This report argues that, even in the simplest cases, IE is an ontology-driven process. It is not a mere text filtering method based on simple pattern matching and keywords, because the extracted pieces of texts are interpreted with respect to a predefined partial domain model. This report shows that depending on the nature and the depth of the interpretation to be done for extracting the information, more or less knowledge must be involved. This report is mainly illustrated in biology, a domain in which there are critical needs for content-based exploration of the scientific literature and which becomes a major application domain for IE

A Smart Watch with Embedded Sensors to Recognize Objects, Grasps and Forearm Gestures

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An Approach to Pattern Recognition by Evolutionary Computation

Evolutionary Computation has been inspired by the natural phenomena of evolution. It provides a quite general heuristic, exploiting few basic concepts: reproduction of individuals, variation phenomena that affect the likelihood of survival of individuals, inheritance of parents features by offspring. EC has been widely used in the last years to effectively solve hard, non linear and very complex problems. Among the others, EC–based algorithms have also been used to tackle classification problems. Classification is a process according to which an object is attributed to one of a finite set of classes or, in other words, it is recognized as belonging to a set of equal or similar entities, identified by a label. Most likely, the main aspect of classification concerns the generation of prototypes to be used to recognize unknown patterns. The role of prototypes is that of representing patterns belonging to the different classes defined within a given problem. For most of the problems of practical interest, the generation of such prototypes is a very hard problem, since a prototype must be able to represent patterns belonging to the same class, which may be significantly dissimilar each other. They must also be able to discriminate patterns belonging to classes different from the one that they represent. Moreover, a prototype should contain the minimum amount of information required to satisfy the requirements just mentioned. The research presented in this thesis, has led to the definition of an EC–based framework to be used for prototype generation. The defined framework does not provide for the use of any particular kind of prototypes. In fact, it can generate any kind of prototype once an encoding scheme for the used prototypes has been defined. The generality of the framework can be exploited to develop many applications. The framework has been employed to implement two specific applications for prototype generation. The developed applications have been tested on several data sets and the results compared with those obtained by other approaches previously presented in the literature

Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications

The International Workshop on Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications (MAVEBA) came into being in 1999 from the particularly felt need of sharing know-how, objectives and results between areas that until then seemed quite distinct such as bioengineering, medicine and singing. MAVEBA deals with all aspects concerning the study of the human voice with applications ranging from the neonate to the adult and elderly. Over the years the initial issues have grown and spread also in other aspects of research such as occupational voice disorders, neurology, rehabilitation, image and video analysis. MAVEBA takes place every two years always in Firenze, Italy

What is a Faithful Interpretation?

Fidelity to the source message for both spoken language and sign language interpreters has been at the core of our conception of the role of the interpreter. This article presents a selection of research and reflections on the theme of the faithful interpretation in an effort to bring this research to the attention of the practicing interpreter. It includes brief sections on the history of conference interpreting and community interpreting, the professionalization of interpreting, models of the interpreter’s role, consumer expectations of interpreting services, the unique situation of sign language interpreters in regard to transliteration, and the measurements applied to fidelity in interpreting

ConceptFusion: Open-set Multimodal 3D Mapping

Building 3D maps of the environment is central to robot navigation, planning, and interaction with objects in a scene. Most existing approaches that integrate semantic concepts with 3D maps largely remain confined to the closed-set setting: they can only reason about a finite set of concepts, pre-defined at training time. Further, these maps can only be queried using class labels, or in recent work, using text prompts. We address both these issues with ConceptFusion, a scene representation that is (1) fundamentally open-set, enabling reasoning beyond a closed set of concepts and (ii) inherently multimodal, enabling a diverse range of possible queries to the 3D map, from language, to images, to audio, to 3D geometry, all working in concert. ConceptFusion leverages the open-set capabilities of today's foundation models pre-trained on internet-scale data to reason about concepts across modalities such as natural language, images, and audio. We demonstrate that pixel-aligned open-set features can be fused into 3D maps via traditional SLAM and multi-view fusion approaches. This enables effective zero-shot spatial reasoning, not needing any additional training or finetuning, and retains long-tailed concepts better than supervised approaches, outperforming them by more than 40% margin on 3D IoU. We extensively evaluate ConceptFusion on a number of real-world datasets, simulated home environments, a real-world tabletop manipulation task, and an autonomous driving platform. We showcase new avenues for blending foundation models with 3D open-set multimodal mapping. For more information, visit our project page https://concept-fusion.github.io or watch our 5-minute explainer video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkXgws8fiD

CLiFF Notes: Research In Natural Language Processing at the University of Pennsylvania

CLIFF is the Computational Linguists\u27 Feedback Forum. We are a group of students and faculty who gather once a week to hear a presentation and discuss work currently in progress. The \u27feedback\u27 in the group\u27s name is important: we are interested in sharing ideas, in discussing ongoing research, and in bringing together work done by the students and faculty in Computer Science and other departments. However, there are only so many presentations which we can have in a year. We felt that it would be beneficial to have a report which would have, in one place, short descriptions of the work in Natural Language Processing at the University of Pennsylvania. This report then, is a collection of abstracts from both faculty and graduate students, in Computer Science, Psychology and Linguistics. We want to stress the close ties between these groups, as one of the things that we pride ourselves on here at Penn is the communication among different departments and the inter-departmental work. Rather than try to summarize the varied work currently underway at Penn, we suggest reading the abstracts to see how the students and faculty themselves describe their work. The report illustrates the diversity of interests among the researchers here, as well as explaining the areas of common interest. In addition, since it was our intent to put together a document that would be useful both inside and outside of the university, we hope that this report will explain to everyone some of what we are about

Biometric walk recognizer. Research and results on wearable sensor-based gait recognition

Gait is a biometric trait that can allow user authentication, though being classified as a "soft" one due to a certain lack in permanence, and to sensibility to specific conditions. The earliest research relies on computer vision-based approaches, especially applied in video surveillance. More recently, the spread of wearable sensors, especially those embedded in mobile devices, which are able to capture the dynamics of the walking pattern through simpler 1D signals, has spurred a different research line. This capture modality can avoid some problems related to computer vision-based techniques, but suffers from specific limitations. Related research is still in a less advanced phase with respect to other biometric traits. However, the promising results achieved so far, the increasing accuracy of sensors, the ubiquitous presence of mobile devices, and the low cost of related techniques, make this biometrics attractive and suggest to continue the investigations in this field. The first Chapters of this thesis deal with an introduction to biometrics, and more specifically to gait trait. A comprehensive review of technologies, approaches and strategies exploited by gait recognition proposals in the state-of-the-art is also provided. After such introduction, the contributions of this work are presented in details. Summarizing, it improves preceding result achieved during my Master Degree in Computer Science course of Biometrics and extended in my following Master Degree Thesis. The research deals with different strategies, including preprocessing and recognition techniques, applied to the gait biometrics, in order to allow both an automatic recognition and an improvement of the system accuracy