An Empirical Evaluation On Vibrotactile Feedback For Wristband System

With the rapid development of mobile computing, wearable wrist-worn is becoming more and more popular. But the current vibrotactile feedback patterns of most wrist-worn devices are too simple to enable effective interaction in nonvisual scenarios. In this paper, we propose the wristband system with four vibrating motors placed in different positions in the wristband, providing multiple vibration patterns to transmit multi-semantic information for users in eyes-free scenarios. However, we just applied five vibrotactile patterns in experiments (positional up and down, horizontal diagonal, clockwise circular, and total vibration) after contrastive analyzing nine patterns in a pilot experiment. The two experiments with the same 12 participants perform the same experimental process in lab and outdoors. According to the experimental results, users can effectively distinguish the five patterns both in lab and outside, with approximately 90% accuracy (except clockwise circular vibration of outside experiment), proving these five vibration patterns can be used to output multi-semantic information. The system can be applied to eyes-free interaction scenarios for wrist-worn devices.Comment: 10 pages

Learning Multimodal Latent Attributes

Abstract—The rapid development of social media sharing has created a huge demand for automatic media classification and annotation techniques. Attribute learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for bridging the semantic gap and addressing data sparsity via transferring attribute knowledge in object recognition and relatively simple action classification. In this paper, we address the task of attribute learning for understanding multimedia data with sparse and incomplete labels. In particular we focus on videos of social group activities, which are particularly challenging and topical examples of this task because of their multi-modal content and complex and unstructured nature relative to the density of annotations. To solve this problem, we (1) introduce a concept of semi-latent attribute space, expressing user-defined and latent attributes in a unified framework, and (2) propose a novel scalable probabilistic topic model for learning multi-modal semi-latent attributes, which dramatically reduces requirements for an exhaustive accurate attribute ontology and expensive annotation effort. We show that our framework is able to exploit latent attributes to outperform contemporary approaches for addressing a variety of realistic multimedia sparse data learning tasks including: multi-task learning, learning with label noise, N-shot transfer learning and importantly zero-shot learning

Moveable worlds/digital scenographies

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ Intellect Ltd 2010.The mixed reality choreographic installation UKIYO explored in this article reflects an interest in scenographic practices that connect physical space to virtual worlds and explore how performers can move between material and immaterial spaces. The spatial design for UKIYO is inspired by Japanese hanamichi and western fashion runways, emphasizing the research production company's commitment to various creative crossovers between movement languages, innovative wearable design for interactive performance, acoustic and electronic sound processing and digital image objects that have a plastic as well as an immaterial/virtual dimension. The work integrates various forms of making art in order to visualize things that are not in themselves visual, or which connect visual and kinaesthetic/tactile/auditory experiences. The ‘Moveable Worlds’ in this essay are also reflections of the narrative spaces, subtexts and auditory relationships in the mutating matrix of an installation-space inviting the audience to move around and follow its sensorial experiences, drawn near to the bodies of the dancers.Brunel University, the British Council, and the Japan Foundation

Action perception is intact in autism spectrum disorder

Date of Acceptance:10/11/2014. Copyright © 2015 the authors 0270-6474/15/351849-09$15.00/0. Copyright of all material published in The Journal of Neuroscience remains with the authors. The authors grant the Society for Neuroscience an exclusive license to publish their work for the first 6 months. After 6 months the work becomes available to the public to copy, distribute, or display under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Methodological considerations concerning manual annotation of musical audio in function of algorithm development

In research on musical audio-mining, annotated music databases are needed which allow the development of computational tools that extract from the musical audiostream the kind of high-level content that users can deal with in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) contexts. The notion of musical content, and therefore the notion of annotation, is ill-defined, however, both in the syntactic and semantic sense. As a consequence, annotation has been approached from a variety of perspectives (but mainly linguistic-symbolic oriented), and a general methodology is lacking. This paper is a step towards the definition of a general framework for manual annotation of musical audio in function of a computational approach to musical audio-mining that is based on algorithms that learn from annotated data. 1

Orality and literacy: epic heroes of human destiny?

Human Speech has often been presented as the crucial line dividing humanity from animals, with Literacy then entering in as the fulfiller of human destiny, the redeemer from primitive orality, and, in alphabetic apotheosis, the all-conquering hero of the west's civilising mission. This epic tale, pervasive as it still remains, is now under attack from many directions, not least in the expanding work on multiple literacy practices. This paper takes the complementary line of starting from the 'oral' end of the apparent equation. Building on anthropological fieldwork, experience of teaching at the UK's Open University, and the gathering comparative literature, it questions the limiting linguistic bias of this tale – itself a kind of myth explaining and justifying the social order. Verbal language is just one of many modes and media of human communication and can only be fully understood in conjunction with them. The traditional myth also underplays the multiplex nature of language itself: researchers across several disciplines are now increasingly revealing the multimodal nature of human speech and writing. To focus on narrower definitions of language and, as in the heroic elevation of 'orality' and 'literacy', to propose the treatment of language as the crucial factor in human culture is to proffer a thin and single-line tale of human history and, with it, a misleading and ethnocentric account not only of humanity more generally but also of many of our actual educational practices. It needs to be replaced by a broader, more cross-cultural and more generous model of both learning and communication

Contours of Inclusion: Inclusive Arts Teaching and Learning

The purpose of this publication is to share models and case examples of the process of inclusive arts curriculum design and evaluation. The first section explains the conceptual and curriculum frameworks that were used in the analysis and generation of the featured case studies (i.e. Understanding by Design, Differentiated Instruction, and Universal Design for Learning). Data for the cases studies was collected from three urban sites (i.e. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston) and included participant observations, student and teacher interviews, curriculum documentation, digital documentation of student learning, and transcripts from discussion forum and teleconference discussions from a professional learning community.The initial case studies by Glass and Barnum use the curricular frameworks to analyze and understand what inclusive practices look like in two case studies of arts-in-education programs that included students with disabilities. The second set of precedent case studies by Kronenberg and Blair, and Jenkins and Agois Hurel uses the frameworks to explain their process of including students by providing flexible arts learning options to support student learning of content standards. Both sets of case studies illuminate curricular design decisions and instructional strategies that supported the active engagement and learning of students with disabilities in educational settings shared with their peers. The second set of cases also illustrate the reflective process of using frameworks like Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to guide curricular design, responsive instructional differentiation, and the use of the arts as a rich, meaningful, and engaging option to support learning. Appended are curriculum design and evaluation tools. (Individual chapters contain references.

The biological cost of consciousness

Some philosophers maintain that consciousness as subjective experience has no biological function. However, conscious brain events seem very different from unconscious ones. The cortex and thalamus support the reportable qualitative contents of consciousness. Subcortical structures like the cerebellum do not. Likewise, attended sensory stimuli are typically reportable as conscious, while memories of those stimuli are not so reportable until they are specifically recalled. 

Reports of conscious experiences in normal humans always involve subjectivity and an implicit observing ego. Unconscious brain events are not reportable, even under optimal conditions of report. While there are claimed exceptions to these points, they are rare or poorly validated. 

Normal consciousness also implies high availability (rapid conscious access) of the questions routinely asked of neurological patients in the Mental Status Examination, such as common sense features of personal identity, time, place, and social context. Along with “current concerns,” recent conscious contents, and the like, these contents correspond to high frequency items in working memory. While working memory contents are not immediately conscious, they can be rapidly re-called to consciousness. 

The anatomy and physiology of reportable conscious sensorimotor contents are ultraconserved over perhaps 200 million years of mammalian evolution. By comparison, full-fledged language is thought to arise some 100,000 years ago in homo sapiens, while writing, which enables accel-erated cultural development, dates between 2.5 and 6 millennia. Contrary to some claims, therefore, conscious waking precedes language by hundreds of millions of years. 

Like other major adaptations, conscious and unconscious brain events have distinctive biological pros and cons. These involve information processing efficiency, metabolic costs and benefits, and behavioral pros and cons. The well known momentary limited capacity of conscious contents is an example of an information processing cost, while the very large and energy-hungry corticothalamic system makes costly metabolic demands. 

After a century of scientific neglect, fundamental concepts like “conscious,” “unconscious,” “voluntary” and “non-voluntary” are still vitally important, because they refer to major biopsychological phenomena that otherwise are difficult to discuss. 
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Action-based effects on music perception

The classical, disembodied approach to music cognition conceptualizes action and perception as separate, peripheral processes. In contrast, embodied accounts of music cognition emphasize the central role of the close coupling of action and perception. It is a commonly established fact that perception spurs action tendencies. We present a theoretical framework that captures the ways in which the human motor system and its actions can reciprocally influence the perception of music. The cornerstone of this framework is the common coding theory, postulating a representational overlap in the brain between the planning, the execution, and the perception of movement. The integration of action and perception in so-called internal models is explained as a result of associative learning processes. Characteristic of internal models is that they allow intended or perceived sensory states to be transferred into corresponding motor commands (inverse modeling), and vice versa, to predict the sensory outcomes of planned actions (forward modeling). Embodied accounts typically refer to inverse modeling to explain action effects on music perception (Leman, 2007). We extend this account by pinpointing forward modeling as an alternative mechanism by which action can modulate perception. We provide an extensive overview of recent empirical evidence in support of this idea. Additionally, we demonstrate that motor dysfunctions can cause perceptual disabilities, supporting the main idea of the paper that the human motor system plays a functional role in auditory perception. The finding that music perception is shaped by the human motor system and its actions suggests that the musical mind is highly embodied. However, we advocate for a more radical approach to embodied (music) cognition in the sense that it needs to be considered as a dynamical process, in which aspects of action, perception, introspection, and social interaction are of crucial importance