The role of phonology in visual word recognition: evidence from Chinese

Posters - Letter/Word Processing V: abstract no. 5024The hypothesis of bidirectional coupling of orthography and phonology predicts that phonology plays a role in visual word recognition, as observed in the effects of feedforward and feedback spelling to sound consistency on lexical decision. However, because orthography and phonology are closely related in alphabetic languages (homophones in alphabetic languages are usually orthographically similar), it is difficult to exclude an influence of orthography on phonological effects in visual word recognition. Chinese languages contain many written homophones that are orthographically dissimilar, allowing a test of the claim that phonological effects can be independent of orthographic similarity. We report a study of visual word recognition in Chinese based on a mega-analysis of lexical decision performance with 500 characters. The results from multiple regression analyses, after controlling for orthographic frequency, stroke number, and radical frequency, showed main effects of feedforward and feedback consistency, as well as interactions between these variables and phonological frequency and number of homophones. Implications of these results for resonance models of visual word recognition are discussed.postprin

Interactive effects of orthography and semantics in Chinese picture naming

Posters - Language Production/Writing: abstract no. 4035Picture-naming performance in English and Dutch is enhanced by presentation of a word that is similar in form to the picture name. However, it is unclear whether facilitation has an orthographic or a phonological locus. We investigated the loci of the facilitation effect in Cantonese Chinese speakers by manipulating—at three SOAs (2100, 0, and 1100 msec)—semantic, orthographic, and phonological similarity. We identified an effect of orthographic facilitation that was independent of and larger than phonological facilitation across all SOAs. Semantic interference was also found at SOAs of 2100 and 0 msec. Critically, an interaction of semantics and orthography was observed at an SOA of 1100 msec. This interaction suggests that independent effects of orthographic facilitation on picture naming are located either at the level of semantic processing or at the lemma level and are not due to the activation of picture name segments at the level of phonological retrieval.postprin

Smart and Secure Augmented Reality for Assisted Living

Augmented reality (AR) is one of the biggest technology trends which enables people to see the real-life surrounding environment with a layer of virtual information overlaid on it. Assistive devices use this match of information to help people better understand the environment and consequently be more efficient. Specially, AR has been extremely useful in the area of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). AR-based AAL solutions are designed to support people in maintaining their autonomy and compensate for slight physical and mental restrictions by instructing them on everyday tasks. The discovery of visual attention for assistive aims is a big challenge since in dynamic cluttered environments objects are constantly overlapped and partial object occlusion is also frequent. Current solutions use egocentric object recognition techniques. However, the lack of accuracy affects the system's ability to predict users’ needs and consequently provide them with the proper support. Another issue is the manner that sensitive data is treated. This highly private information is crucial for improving the quality of healthcare services. However, current blockchain approaches are used only as a permission management system, while the data is still stored locally. As a result, there is a potential risk of security breaches. Privacy risk in the blockchain domain is also a concern. As major investigation tackles privacy issues based on off-chain approaches, there is a lack of effective solutions for providing on-chain data privacy. Finally, the Blockchain size has been shown to be a limiting factor even for chains that store simple transactional data, much less the massive blocks that would be required for storing medical imaging studies. To tackle the aforementioned major issues, this research proposes a framework to provide a smarter and more secure AR-based solution for AAL. Firstly, a combination of head-worn eye-trackers cameras with egocentric video is designed to improve the accuracy of visual attention object recognition in free-living settings. A heuristic function is designed to generate a probability estimation of visual attention over objects within an egocentric video. Secondly, a novel methodology for the storage of large sensitive AR-based AAL data is introduced in a decentralized fashion. By leveraging the power of the IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) protocol to tackle the lack of storage issue in the Blockchain. Meanwhile, a blockchain solution on the Secret Network blockchain is developed to tackle the existent lack of privacy on smart contracts, which provides data privacy at both transactional and computational levels. In addition, is included a new off-chain solution encapsulates a governing body for permission management purposes to solve the problem of the lost or eventual theft of private keys. Based on the research findings, that visual attention-object detection approach is applicable to cluttered environments which presents a transcend performance compared to the current methods. This study also produced an egocentric indoor dataset annotated with human fixation during natural exploration in a cluttered environment. Comparing to previous works, this dataset is more realistic because it was recorded in real settings with variations in terms of objects overlapping regions and object sizes. With respect to the novel decentralized storage methodology, results indicate that sensitive data can be stored and queried efficiently using the Secret Network blockchain. The proposed approach achieves both computational and transactional privacy with significantly less cost. Additionally, this approach mitigates the risk of permanent loss of access to the patient on-chain data records. The proposed framework can be applied as an assistive technology in a wide range of sectors that requires AR-based solution with high-precision visual-attention object detection, efficient data access, high-integrity data storage and full data privacy and security

Feature based dynamic intra-video indexing

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyWith the advent of digital imagery and its wide spread application in all vistas of life, it has become an important component in the world of communication. Video content ranging from broadcast news, sports, personal videos, surveillance, movies and entertainment and similar domains is increasing exponentially in quantity and it is becoming a challenge to retrieve content of interest from the corpora. This has led to an increased interest amongst the researchers to investigate concepts of video structure analysis, feature extraction, content annotation, tagging, video indexing, querying and retrieval to fulfil the requirements. However, most of the previous work is confined within specific domain and constrained by the quality, processing and storage capabilities. This thesis presents a novel framework agglomerating the established approaches from feature extraction to browsing in one system of content based video retrieval. The proposed framework significantly fills the gap identified while satisfying the imposed constraints of processing, storage, quality and retrieval times. The output entails a framework, methodology and prototype application to allow the user to efficiently and effectively retrieved content of interest such as age, gender and activity by specifying the relevant query. Experiments have shown plausible results with an average precision and recall of 0.91 and 0.92 respectively for face detection using Haar wavelets based approach. Precision of age ranges from 0.82 to 0.91 and recall from 0.78 to 0.84. The recognition of gender gives better precision with males (0.89) compared to females while recall gives a higher value with females (0.92). Activity of the subject has been detected using Hough transform and classified using Hiddell Markov Model. A comprehensive dataset to support similar studies has also been developed as part of the research process. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) providing a friendly and intuitive interface has been integrated into the developed system to facilitate the retrieval process. The comparison results of the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) shows that the performance of the system closely resembles with that of the human annotator. The performance has been optimised for time and error rate

Vision-based representation and recognition of human activities in image sequences

Magdeburg, Univ., Fak. für Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik, Diss., 2013von Samy Sadek Mohamed Bakhee

Integration and disintegration of human visual awareness.

The neuronal underpinnings of visual awareness has recently become the primary question of interest for many researchers, with many theories suggesting distinct mechanisms. The aim of this thesis was to test predictions of the low-level modular theory of visual awareness. This modular view is encapsulated in the 'microconsciousness' framework (Zeki & Bartels, 1999) in which each visual processing system, such as that for colour, is capable of generating a conscious correlate autonomously in parallel across space, within each of the different functionally specialised areas of the visual brain, and across time, with different attributes perceived at different times. Given the scope of this topic, we approached it from three diverse angles: (1) Two psychophysical experiments investigated temporal aspects of visual perception - in particular these addressed the issue of whether the timing of awareness is an 'online* phenomenon rather than integrated into a temporal buffer zone prior to awareness. We measured the relative perceptual times of different magnitudes of direction changes and investigated the 'flash-lag' effect (Nijhawan, 1994) and related illusions of positional localisation. (2) The first two fMRI experiments examined the necessity of frontal and parietal areas for visual awareness in the context of bistable figures, combined with dynamic causal modelling (Friston et al., 2003), and perception outside the focus of attention. (3) We looked to extend the concept of modularity of awareness to that of 'access consciousness', that is the ability to give a report of a conscious experience (Block, 1996), in addition to the previous studies on phenomenal consciousness. To this end, we combined psychophysics with fMRI to investigate the interaction between report modality and visual perception. We conclude that the low-level modular theory of stands up to direct tests of its predictions and remains a viable theory of visual awareness

Integrated systems healing: a unified assessment and psycho-educational approach in psychological trauma treatment

This doctoral study examines the aspects of psychological trauma and investigates why singular explanatory models fail compared with a holistic approach. Part of this integrated approach includes the development of a benchmarked psychometric test, the Sherry Trauma Assessment Test [STAT]) (Copyrighted © Richard Sherry 2011). The test’s reliability was evaluated using Chronbach’s alpha (p< 0.001 levels of significance), which these findings were crosschecked with the findings from eleven other psychometric tests to standardise the results. In comparing the data sets, the STAT test project data was used to both answer fundamental questions within the field of clinical trauma psychology and confirm the reliability of the newly developed psychometric test. Furthermore, the information was collected and used to derive a principle component analysis (PCA) to help in developing a model to support current thinking within the social neuro-scientific arenas as well as to better organize clinical psychology assessment and treatment approaches. These findings have important implications on how trauma, in particular, the human neuropsychological learning process, is addressed. This psychometric foundation was then used to develop this newer model and adaptive tele-medicine platform (Zielinski et al., 2006). This multidisciplinary integration of information, expertise and models, has served to clarify the effects of maturation in relationship to traumatic response and helped to refine the understanding of how traumatic phenomena serves to fragment the integration of embedded systems, and what can be done to reverse these problematic processes in order to replace them with positive cycles of development. The STAT test findings have shown statistically significant results (p< 0.001 level), which provide quantitatively grounded evidence in support of this psychometric measure and improve clinical assessment and treatment approaches. The theoretical model of the STAT test is included in the concept of Integrated Systems Healing, which was developed independently, but has similar theoretical roots in Goetz and Caron’s (2005) bio-psychosocial model of the Systemic Healing used in the treatment of sick children. The author describes further conceptual developments within the concept of Integrated Systems Healing (Copyrighted © Richard Sherry 2011) to include the holistic systems approach, which could be used for a large-scale treatment with specific interacting components of Integration, Compassion, Developmentally scaled interventions, and Sustainability or the ICDS Model (Copyrighted © Richard Sherry 2011). This project has evolved improved strategies for integrative assessment, feedback, and holistic approaches for learning and programme development to improve people’s lives. These foundations of improved internal and external dynamic assessment connect to flexible tele-health approaches, using defined cut-off scores, elearning modules, and strategies for checking and reassessment. Further work links and integrates processes to identify and reduce vulnerability and strengthen resiliency and support

Shut Up and Take My Money: Engaging Facebook Communities to Build the Brand Narrative

Social media is revolutionizing the way firms manage their brands. A broad variety of platforms provide businesses an opportunity to engage in bidirectional dialogue with their customers, the effect of which is to enhance the brand/consumer relationship. This paper contends that virtual brand communities of the type that form through social media have an important role to play in the development of a brand’s personality. Using a case study approach we demonstrate how one firm has adopted Facebook to provide their brand community with a voice which contributes to the development of the brand narrative. We find that by using well-crafted content the firm elicits the support of their community and that this interaction contributes to the development of the brand ethos