Knowledge will Propel Machine Understanding of Content: Extrapolating from Current Examples

Machine Learning has been a big success story during the AI resurgence. One particular stand out success relates to learning from a massive amount of data. In spite of early assertions of the unreasonable effectiveness of data, there is increasing recognition for utilizing knowledge whenever it is available or can be created purposefully. In this paper, we discuss the indispensable role of knowledge for deeper understanding of content where (i) large amounts of training data are unavailable, (ii) the objects to be recognized are complex, (e.g., implicit entities and highly subjective content), and (iii) applications need to use complementary or related data in multiple modalities/media. What brings us to the cusp of rapid progress is our ability to (a) create relevant and reliable knowledge and (b) carefully exploit knowledge to enhance ML/NLP techniques. Using diverse examples, we seek to foretell unprecedented progress in our ability for deeper understanding and exploitation of multimodal data and continued incorporation of knowledge in learning techniques.Comment: Pre-print of the paper accepted at 2017 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1610.0770

Verifying baselines for crisis event information classification on Twitter

Social media are rich information sources during and in the aftermath of crisis events such as earthquakes and terrorist attacks. Despite myriad challenges, with the right tools, significant insight can be gained which can assist emergency responders and related applications. However, most extant approaches are incomparable, using bespoke definitions, models, datasets and even evaluation metrics. Furthermore, it is rare that code, trained models, or exhaustive parametrisation details are made openly available. Thus, even confirmation of self-reported performance is problematic; authoritatively determining the state of the art (SOTA) is essentially impossible. Consequently, to begin addressing such endemic ambiguity, this paper seeks to make 3 contributions: 1) the replication and results confirmation of a leading (and generalisable) technique; 2) testing straightforward modifications of the technique likely to improve performance; and 3) the extension of the technique to a novel and complimentary type of crisis-relevant information to demonstrate it’s generalisability

First impressions: A survey on vision-based apparent personality trait analysis

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Personality analysis has been widely studied in psychology, neuropsychology, and signal processing fields, among others. From the past few years, it also became an attractive research area in visual computing. From the computational point of view, by far speech and text have been the most considered cues of information for analyzing personality. However, recently there has been an increasing interest from the computer vision community in analyzing personality from visual data. Recent computer vision approaches are able to accurately analyze human faces, body postures and behaviors, and use these information to infer apparent personality traits. Because of the overwhelming research interest in this topic, and of the potential impact that this sort of methods could have in society, we present in this paper an up-to-date review of existing vision-based approaches for apparent personality trait recognition. We describe seminal and cutting edge works on the subject, discussing and comparing their distinctive features and limitations. Future venues of research in the field are identified and discussed. Furthermore, aspects on the subjectivity in data labeling/evaluation, as well as current datasets and challenges organized to push the research on the field are reviewed.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Efficient Turkish Text Classification Approach for Crisis Management Systems

In this paper, an effective tweet classification system that fully supports the Turkish language has been developed. The proposed system can be used for mining (classifying) the recently published and publicly available tweets to fmd the crisis's most related and useful tweets to gain situational awareness, which can help in taking the correct responses in order to prevent or at least decrease the effect of such situations. A deep study was carried out to improve and optimize the proposed system. In more detail, some intensive experiments were performed to investigate the performance of some well-known machine learning algorithms, i.e., K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Naive Bayes (NB) when used for text (tweets) classification. Then, the performances of the ensemble systems of the studied algorithms and the Random Forest (RF), AdaBoost Classifier (AdaBoost), GradientBoosting Classifier (GBC) ensemble systems have also been observed. As shown in the experimental evaluation and analysis, the proposed approach has stability, robustness, and can achieve quite good performance when processing the Turkish language. The performance of the proposed classifier was also compared with two state-of-the-art text classification approaches, i.e., "Empirical" and "Turkish Deep "

Crisis Analytics: Big Data Driven Crisis Response

Disasters have long been a scourge for humanity. With the advances in technology (in terms of computing, communications, and the ability to process and analyze big data), our ability to respond to disasters is at an inflection point. There is great optimism that big data tools can be leveraged to process the large amounts of crisis-related data (in the form of user generated data in addition to the traditional humanitarian data) to provide an insight into the fast-changing situation and help drive an effective disaster response. This article introduces the history and the future of big crisis data analytics, along with a discussion on its promise, challenges, and pitfalls

A Process Evaluation of Intelligence Gathering Using Social Media for Emergency Management Organizations in California

When responding to an emergency, correct and timely information is often the difference between a successful response and a potential disaster. The information that emergency managers in California receive from the public often dictates how agencies respond to emergencies. The emergence of social media has presented several benefits to emergency managers regarding intelligence gathering during the emergency response process. Simultaneously, the emergence of social media has raised several concerns for the stakeholders involved. One major issue involves inaccurate information circulating on social media platforms during ongoing disasters. If emergency managers cannot discern incorrect information from correct information, disaster response may be less effective. Rumors and misinformation tend to circulate before, during, and after emergencies. Although incorrect information circulating on social media cannot be stopped in totality, emergency managers can use cutting-edge technology and strategies to discern and counteract false information. New technologies and intelligence gathering tools can be used as a source of intelligence to relay lifesaving information to the public. Past negative examples of inaccurate information on social media influencing stakeholder decision-making raise the focus of this research: How can emergency management agencies in California leverage the flow of valid information on social media during crisis conditions

Semantics-Empowered Big Data Processing with Applications

We discuss the nature of Big Data and address the role of semantics in analyzing and processing Big Data that arises in the context of Physical-Cyber-Social Systems. We organize our research around the Five Vs of Big Data, where four of the Vs are harnessed to produce the fifth V - value. To handle the challenge of Volume, we advocate semantic perception that can convert low-level observational data to higher-level abstractions more suitable for decision-making. To handle the challenge of Variety, we resort to the use of semantic models and annotations of data so that much of the intelligent processing can be done at a level independent of heterogeneity of data formats and media. To handle the challenge of Velocity, we seek to use continuous semantics capability to dynamically create event or situation specific models and recognize relevant new concepts, entities and facts. To handle Veracity, we explore the formalization of trust models and approaches to glean trustworthiness. The above four Vs of Big Data are harnessed by the semantics-empowered analytics to derive value for supporting practical applications transcending physical-cyber-social continuum

Cyber–Physical–Social Frameworks for Urban Big Data Systems: A Survey

The integration of things’ data on the Web and Web linking for things’ description and discovery is leading the way towards smart Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS). The data generated in CPS represents observations gathered by sensor devices about the ambient environment that can be manipulated by computational processes of the cyber world. Alongside this, the growing use of social networks offers near real-time citizen sensing capabilities as a complementary information source. The resulting Cyber–Physical–Social System (CPSS) can help to understand the real world and provide proactive services to users. The nature of CPSS data brings new requirements and challenges to different stages of data manipulation, including identification of data sources, processing and fusion of different types and scales of data. To gain an understanding of the existing methods and techniques which can be useful for a data-oriented CPSS implementation, this paper presents a survey of the existing research and commercial solutions. We define a conceptual framework for a data-oriented CPSS and detail the various solutions for building human–machine intelligence