Conceptual spatial representations for indoor mobile robots

We present an approach for creating conceptual representations of human-made indoor environments using mobile robots. The concepts refer to spatial and functional properties of typical indoor environments. Following findings in cognitive psychology, our model is composed of layers representing maps at different levels of abstraction. The complete system is integrated in a mobile robot endowed with laser and vision sensors for place and object recognition. The system also incorporates a linguistic framework that actively supports the map acquisition process, and which is used for situated dialogue. Finally, we discuss the capabilities of the integrated system

BeSpaceD: Towards a Tool Framework and Methodology for the Specification and Verification of Spatial Behavior of Distributed Software Component Systems

In this report, we present work towards a framework for modeling and checking behavior of spatially distributed component systems. Design goals of our framework are the ability to model spatial behavior in a component oriented, simple and intuitive way, the possibility to automatically analyse and verify systems and integration possibilities with other modeling and verification tools. We present examples and the verification steps necessary to prove properties such as range coverage or the absence of collisions between components and technical details

A Novel Approach to Multimedia Ontology Engineering for Automated Reasoning over Audiovisual LOD Datasets

Multimedia reasoning, which is suitable for, among others, multimedia content analysis and high-level video scene interpretation, relies on the formal and comprehensive conceptualization of the represented knowledge domain. However, most multimedia ontologies are not exhaustive in terms of role definitions, and do not incorporate complex role inclusions and role interdependencies. In fact, most multimedia ontologies do not have a role box at all, and implement only a basic subset of the available logical constructors. Consequently, their application in multimedia reasoning is limited. To address the above issues, VidOnt, the very first multimedia ontology with SROIQ(D) expressivity and a DL-safe ruleset has been introduced for next-generation multimedia reasoning. In contrast to the common practice, the formal grounding has been set in one of the most expressive description logics, and the ontology validated with industry-leading reasoners, namely HermiT and FaCT++. This paper also presents best practices for developing multimedia ontologies, based on my ontology engineering approach

Learning Social Relation Traits from Face Images

Social relation defines the association, e.g, warm, friendliness, and dominance, between two or more people. Motivated by psychological studies, we investigate if such fine-grained and high-level relation traits can be characterised and quantified from face images in the wild. To address this challenging problem we propose a deep model that learns a rich face representation to capture gender, expression, head pose, and age-related attributes, and then performs pairwise-face reasoning for relation prediction. To learn from heterogeneous attribute sources, we formulate a new network architecture with a bridging layer to leverage the inherent correspondences among these datasets. It can also cope with missing target attribute labels. Extensive experiments show that our approach is effective for fine-grained social relation learning in images and videos.Comment: To appear in International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 201

Web Data Extraction, Applications and Techniques: A Survey

Web Data Extraction is an important problem that has been studied by means of different scientific tools and in a broad range of applications. Many approaches to extracting data from the Web have been designed to solve specific problems and operate in ad-hoc domains. Other approaches, instead, heavily reuse techniques and algorithms developed in the field of Information Extraction. This survey aims at providing a structured and comprehensive overview of the literature in the field of Web Data Extraction. We provided a simple classification framework in which existing Web Data Extraction applications are grouped into two main classes, namely applications at the Enterprise level and at the Social Web level. At the Enterprise level, Web Data Extraction techniques emerge as a key tool to perform data analysis in Business and Competitive Intelligence systems as well as for business process re-engineering. At the Social Web level, Web Data Extraction techniques allow to gather a large amount of structured data continuously generated and disseminated by Web 2.0, Social Media and Online Social Network users and this offers unprecedented opportunities to analyze human behavior at a very large scale. We discuss also the potential of cross-fertilization, i.e., on the possibility of re-using Web Data Extraction techniques originally designed to work in a given domain, in other domains.Comment: Knowledge-based System

On the role of pre and post-processing in environmental data mining

The quality of discovered knowledge is highly depending on data quality. Unfortunately real data use to contain noise, uncertainty, errors, redundancies or even irrelevant information. The more complex is the reality to be analyzed, the higher the risk of getting low quality data. Knowledge Discovery from Databases (KDD) offers a global framework to prepare data in the right form to perform correct analyses. On the other hand, the quality of decisions taken upon KDD results, depend not only on the quality of the results themselves, but on the capacity of the system to communicate those results in an understandable form. Environmental systems are particularly complex and environmental users particularly require clarity in their results. In this paper some details about how this can be achieved are provided. The role of the pre and post processing in the whole process of Knowledge Discovery in environmental systems is discussed

Heap Abstractions for Static Analysis

Heap data is potentially unbounded and seemingly arbitrary. As a consequence, unlike stack and static memory, heap memory cannot be abstracted directly in terms of a fixed set of source variable names appearing in the program being analysed. This makes it an interesting topic of study and there is an abundance of literature employing heap abstractions. Although most studies have addressed similar concerns, their formulations and formalisms often seem dissimilar and some times even unrelated. Thus, the insights gained in one description of heap abstraction may not directly carry over to some other description. This survey is a result of our quest for a unifying theme in the existing descriptions of heap abstractions. In particular, our interest lies in the abstractions and not in the algorithms that construct them. In our search of a unified theme, we view a heap abstraction as consisting of two features: a heap model to represent the heap memory and a summarization technique for bounding the heap representation. We classify the models as storeless, store based, and hybrid. We describe various summarization techniques based on k-limiting, allocation sites, patterns, variables, other generic instrumentation predicates, and higher-order logics. This approach allows us to compare the insights of a large number of seemingly dissimilar heap abstractions and also paves way for creating new abstractions by mix-and-match of models and summarization techniques.Comment: 49 pages, 20 figure