Multimodal Deep Learning for Activity and Context Recognition

Wearables and mobile devices see the world through the lens of half a dozen low-power sensors, such as, barometers, accelerometers, microphones and proximity detectors. But differences between sensors ranging from sampling rates, discrete and continuous data or even the data type itself make principled approaches to integrating these streams challenging. How, for example, is barometric pressure best combined with an audio sample to infer if a user is in a car, plane or bike? Critically for applications, how successfully sensor devices are able to maximize the information contained across these multi-modal sensor streams often dictates the fidelity at which they can track user behaviors and context changes. This paper studies the benefits of adopting deep learning algorithms for interpreting user activity and context as captured by multi-sensor systems. Specifically, we focus on four variations of deep neural networks that are based either on fully-connected Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) or Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Two of these architectures follow conventional deep models by performing feature representation learning from a concatenation of sensor types. This classic approach is contrasted with a promising deep model variant characterized by modality-specific partitions of the architecture to maximize intra-modality learning. Our exploration represents the first time these architectures have been evaluated for multimodal deep learning under wearable data -- and for convolutional layers within this architecture, it represents a novel architecture entirely. Experiments show these generic multimodal neural network models compete well with a rich variety of conventional hand-designed shallow methods (including feature extraction and classifier construction) and task-specific modeling pipelines, across a wide-range of sensor types and inference tasks (four different datasets). Although the training and inference overhead of these multimodal deep approaches is in some cases appreciable, we also demonstrate the feasibility of on-device mobile and wearable execution is not a barrier to adoption. This study is carefully constructed to focus on multimodal aspects of wearable data modeling for deep learning by providing a wide range of empirical observations, which we expect to have considerable value in the community. We summarize our observations into a series of practitioner rules-of-thumb and lessons learned that can guide the usage of multimodal deep learning for activity and context detection.This project received funding from the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 687698, through a HiPEAC Collaboration Gran

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

Multimodal Explanations: Justifying Decisions and Pointing to the Evidence

Deep models that are both effective and explainable are desirable in many settings; prior explainable models have been unimodal, offering either image-based visualization of attention weights or text-based generation of post-hoc justifications. We propose a multimodal approach to explanation, and argue that the two modalities provide complementary explanatory strengths. We collect two new datasets to define and evaluate this task, and propose a novel model which can provide joint textual rationale generation and attention visualization. Our datasets define visual and textual justifications of a classification decision for activity recognition tasks (ACT-X) and for visual question answering tasks (VQA-X). We quantitatively show that training with the textual explanations not only yields better textual justification models, but also better localizes the evidence that supports the decision. We also qualitatively show cases where visual explanation is more insightful than textual explanation, and vice versa, supporting our thesis that multimodal explanation models offer significant benefits over unimodal approaches.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1612.0475

EmbraceNet for Activity: A Deep Multimodal Fusion Architecture for Activity Recognition

Human activity recognition using multiple sensors is a challenging but promising task in recent decades. In this paper, we propose a deep multimodal fusion model for activity recognition based on the recently proposed feature fusion architecture named EmbraceNet. Our model processes each sensor data independently, combines the features with the EmbraceNet architecture, and post-processes the fused feature to predict the activity. In addition, we propose additional processes to boost the performance of our model. We submit the results obtained from our proposed model to the SHL recognition challenge with the team name "Yonsei-MCML."Comment: Accepted in HASCA at ACM UbiComp/ISWC 2019, won the 2nd place in the SHL Recognition Challenge 201