Challenges in Annotation of useR Data for UbiquitOUs Systems: Results from the 1st ARDUOUS Workshop

Labelling user data is a central part of the design and evaluation of pervasive systems that aim to support the user through situation-aware reasoning. It is essential both in designing and training the system to recognise and reason about the situation, either through the definition of a suitable situation model in knowledge-driven applications, or through the preparation of training data for learning tasks in data-driven models. Hence, the quality of annotations can have a significant impact on the performance of the derived systems. Labelling is also vital for validating and quantifying the performance of applications. In particular, comparative evaluations require the production of benchmark datasets based on high-quality and consistent annotations. With pervasive systems relying increasingly on large datasets for designing and testing models of users' activities, the process of data labelling is becoming a major concern for the community. In this work we present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the challenges associated with annotation of user data and possible strategies towards addressing these challenges. The analysis was based on the data gathered during the 1st International Workshop on Annotation of useR Data for UbiquitOUs Systems (ARDUOUS) and consisted of brainstorming as well as annotation and questionnaire data gathered during the talks, poster session, live annotation session, and discussion session

Labeling subtle conversational interactions within the CONVERSE dataset

The field of Human Action Recognition has ex- panded greatly in previous years, exploring actions and inter- actions between individuals via the use of appearance and depth based pose information. There are numerous datasets that display action classes composed of behaviors that are well defined by their key poses, such as ‘kicking’ and ‘punching’. The CONVERSE dataset presents conversational interaction classes that show little explicit relation to the poses and gestures they exhibit. Such a complex and subtle set of interactions is a novel challenge to the Human Action Recognition community, and one that will push the cutting edge of the field in both machine learning and the understanding of human actions. CONVERSE contains recordings of two person interactions from 7 conversational scenarios, represented as sequences of human skeletal poses captured by the Kinect depth sensor. In this study we discuss a method providing ground truth labelling for the set, and the complexity that comes with defining such annotation. The CONVERSE dataset it made available online