Principal investigator in a box: Version 1.2 documentation

Principal Investigator (PI) in a box is a computer system designed to help optimize the scientific results of experiments that are performed in space. The system will assist the astronaut experimenters in the collection and analysis of experimental data, recognition and pursuit of 'interesting' results, optimal use of the time allocated to the experiment, and troubleshooting of the experiment apparatus. This document discusses the problems that motivate development of 'PI-in-a-box', and presents a high- level system overview and a detailed description of each of the modules that comprise the current version of the system

Collecting, Analyzing and Predicting Socially-Driven Image Interestingness

International audienceInterestingness has recently become an emerging concept for visual content assessment. However, understanding and predicting image interestingness remains challenging as its judgment is highly subjective and usually context-dependent. In addition, existing datasets are quite small for in-depth analysis. To push forward research in this topic, a large-scale interestingness dataset (images and their associated metadata) is described in this paper and released for public use. We then propose computational models based on deep learning to predict image interestingness. We show that exploiting relevant contextual information derived from social metadata could greatly improve the prediction results. Finally we discuss some key findings and potential research directions for this emerging topic

PHD-GIFs: Personalized Highlight Detection for Automatic GIF Creation

Highlight detection models are typically trained to identify cues that make visual content appealing or interesting for the general public, with the objective of reducing a video to such moments. However, the "interestingness" of a video segment or image is subjective. Thus, such highlight models provide results of limited relevance for the individual user. On the other hand, training one model per user is inefficient and requires large amounts of personal information which is typically not available. To overcome these limitations, we present a global ranking model which conditions on each particular user's interests. Rather than training one model per user, our model is personalized via its inputs, which allows it to effectively adapt its predictions, given only a few user-specific examples. To train this model, we create a large-scale dataset of users and the GIFs they created, giving us an accurate indication of their interests. Our experiments show that using the user history substantially improves the prediction accuracy. On our test set of 850 videos, our model improves the recall by 8% with respect to generic highlight detectors. Furthermore, our method proves more precise than the user-agnostic baselines even with just one person-specific example.Comment: Accepted for publication at the 2018 ACM Multimedia Conference (MM '18

Aesthetic Approaches to Human-Computer Interaction

Proceedings of the NordiCHI 2004 Workshop, Tampere, Finland, October 24, 200

Supporting exploratory browsing with visualization of social interaction history

This thesis is concerned with the design, development, and evaluation of information visualization tools for supporting exploratory browsing. Information retrieval (IR) systems currently do not support browsing well. Responding to user queries, IR systems typically compute relevance scores of documents and then present the document surrogates to users in order of relevance. Other systems such as email clients and discussion forums simply arrange messages in reverse chronological order. Using these systems, people cannot gain an overview of a collection easily, nor do they receive adequate support for finding potentially useful items in the collection. This thesis explores the feasibility of using social interaction history to improve exploratory browsing. Social interaction history refers to traces of interaction among users in an information space, such as discussions that happen in the blogosphere or online newspapers through the commenting facility. The basic hypothesis of this work is that social interaction history can serve as a good indicator of the potential value of information items. Therefore, visualization of social interaction history would offer navigational cues for finding potentially valuable information items in a collection. To test this basic hypothesis, I conducted three studies. First, I ran statistical analysis of a social media data set. The results showed that there were positive relationships between traces of social interaction and the degree of interestingness of web articles. Second, I conducted a feasibility study to collect initial feedback about the potential of social interaction history to support information exploration. Comments from the participants were in line with the research hypothesis. Finally, I conducted a summative evaluation to measure how well visualization of social interaction history can improve exploratory browsing. The results showed that visualization of social interaction history was able to help users find interesting articles, to reduce wasted effort, and to increase user satisfaction with the visualization tool

Feeling the landscape: six psychological studies into landscape experience

In de zes studies van deze dissertatie zijn een aantal zowel praktische als theoretische vraagstukken met betrekking tot de beleving van landschap onderzocht. Landschapsbeleving wordt gedefinieerd als een dynamisch proces, als het resultaat van interacties tussen cultureel en biologisch bepaalde, algemene determinanten van de ervaring. In de studies wordt een aantal verschillende psychologische theoriën getoetst, en samen tonen deze het belang aan van psychologisch onderzoek naar landschapsbeleving. Het is de toepassing van methodologiën en theoretische perspectieven uit de psychologie, die het mogelijk heeft gemaakt tot de inzichten te komen over de interactie tussen mens en landschap, die het resultaat zijn van deze studie

Human Visual Perception, study and applications to understanding Images and Videos

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH