Privacy Protection for Life-log System

Tremendous advances in wearable computing and storage technologies enable us to record not just snapshots of an event but the whole human experience for a long period of time. Such a \life-logandamp;quot; system captures important events as they happen, rather than an after-thought. Such a system has applications in many areas such as law enforcement, personal archives, police questioning, and medicine. Much of the existing eandamp;reg;orts focus on the pattern recognition and information retrieval aspects of the system. On the other hand, the privacy issues raised by such an intrusive system have not received much attention from the research community. The objectives of this research project are two-fold: andamp;macr;rst, to construct a wearable life-log video system, and second, to provide a solution for protecting the identity of the subjects in the video while keeping the video useful. In this thesis work, we designed a portable wearable life-log system that implements audio distortion and face blocking in a real time to protect the privacy of the subjects who are being recorded in life-log video. For audio, our system automatically isolates the subject\u27s speech and distorts it using a pitch- shifting algorithm to conceal the identity. For video, our system uses a real-time face detection, tracking and blocking algorithm to obfuscate the faces of the subjects. Extensive experiments have been conducted on interview videos to demonstrate the ability of our system in protecting the identity of the subject while maintaining the usability of the life-log video

A Computational Model of Non-Cooperation in Natural Language Dialogue

A common assumption in the study of conversation is that participants fully cooperate in order to maximise the effectiveness of the exchange and ensure communication flow. This assumption persists even in situations in which the private goals of the participants are at odds: they may act strategically pursuing their agendas, but will still adhere to a number of linguistic norms or conventions which are implicitly accepted by a community of language users. However, in naturally occurring dialogue participants often depart from such norms, for instance, by asking inappropriate questions, by avoiding to provide adequate answers or by volunteering information that is not relevant to the conversation. These are examples of what we call linguistic non-cooperation. This thesis presents a systematic investigation of linguistic non-cooperation in dialogue. Given a specific activity, in a specific cultural context and time, the method proceeds by making explicit which linguistic behaviours are appropriate. This results in a set of rules: the global dialogue game. Non-cooperation is then measured as instances in which the actions of the participants are not in accordance with these rules. The dialogue game is formally defined in terms of discourse obligations. These are actions that participants are expected to perform at a given point in the dialogue based on the dialogue history. In this context, non-cooperation amounts to participants failing to act according to their obligations. We propose a general definition of linguistic non-cooperation and give a specific instance for political interview dialogues. Based on the latter, we present an empirical method which involves a coding scheme for the manual annotation of interview transcripts. The degree to which each participant cooperates is automatically determined by contrasting the annotated transcripts with the rules in the dialogue game for political interviews. The approach is evaluated on a corpus of broadcast political interviews and tested for correlation with human judgement on the same corpus. Further, we describe a model of conversational agents that incorporates the concepts and mechanisms above as part of their dialogue manager. This allows for the generation of conversations in which the agents exhibit varying degrees of cooperation by controlling how often they favour their private goals instead of discharging their discourse obligations

Design of an E-learning system using semantic information and cloud computing technologies

Humanity is currently suffering from many difficult problems that threaten the life and survival of the human race. It is very easy for all mankind to be affected, directly or indirectly, by these problems. Education is a key solution for most of them. In our thesis we tried to make use of current technologies to enhance and ease the learning process. We have designed an e-learning system based on semantic information and cloud computing, in addition to many other technologies that contribute to improving the educational process and raising the level of students. The design was built after much research on useful technology, its types, and examples of actual systems that were previously discussed by other researchers. In addition to the proposed design, an algorithm was implemented to identify topics found in large textual educational resources. It was tested and proved to be efficient against other methods. The algorithm has the ability of extracting the main topics from textual learning resources, linking related resources and generating interactive dynamic knowledge graphs. This algorithm accurately and efficiently accomplishes those tasks even for bigger books. We used Wikipedia Miner, TextRank, and Gensim within our algorithm. Our algorithm‘s accuracy was evaluated against Gensim, largely improving its accuracy. Augmenting the system design with the implemented algorithm will produce many useful services for improving the learning process such as: identifying main topics of big textual learning resources automatically and connecting them to other well defined concepts from Wikipedia, enriching current learning resources with semantic information from external sources, providing student with browsable dynamic interactive knowledge graphs, and making use of learning groups to encourage students to share their learning experiences and feedback with other learners.Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería Telemática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Luis Sánchez Fernández.- Secretario: Luis de la Fuente Valentín.- Vocal: Norberto Fernández Garcí

Essential Speech and Language Technology for Dutch: Results by the STEVIN-programme

Computational Linguistics; Germanic Languages; Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics); Computing Methodologie

The Palgrave Handbook of International Energy Economics

This open access handbook is distinguished by its emphasis on international energy, rather than domestic energy policies or international geopolitic aspects. Addressing key topics such as energy production and distribution, renewables and corporate energy structures, alongside global energy trends, regional case studies and emerging areas such as the digitalization of energy and energy transition, this handbook provides a major new contribution to the field of international energy economics. Written by academics, practitioners and policy-makers, this handbook is a valuable and timely addition to the literature on international energy economics. This book was published open access with the support of Eni