Brain Computer Interfaces and Emotional Involvement: Theory, Research, and Applications

This reprint is dedicated to the study of brain activity related to emotional and attentional involvement as measured by Brain–computer interface (BCI) systems designed for different purposes. A BCI system can translate brain signals (e.g., electric or hemodynamic brain activity indicators) into a command to execute an action in the BCI application (e.g., a wheelchair, the cursor on the screen, a spelling device or a game). These tools have the advantage of having real-time access to the ongoing brain activity of the individual, which can provide insight into the user’s emotional and attentional states by training a classification algorithm to recognize mental states. The success of BCI systems in contemporary neuroscientific research relies on the fact that they allow one to “think outside the lab”. The integration of technological solutions, artificial intelligence and cognitive science allowed and will allow researchers to envision more and more applications for the future. The clinical and everyday uses are described with the aim to invite readers to open their minds to imagine potential further developments

Ubiquitous Technologies for Emotion Recognition

Emotions play a very important role in how we think and behave. As such, the emotions we feel every day can compel us to act and influence the decisions and plans we make about our lives. Being able to measure, analyze, and better comprehend how or why our emotions may change is thus of much relevance to understand human behavior and its consequences. Despite the great efforts made in the past in the study of human emotions, it is only now, with the advent of wearable, mobile, and ubiquitous technologies, that we can aim to sense and recognize emotions, continuously and in real time. This book brings together the latest experiences, findings, and developments regarding ubiquitous sensing, modeling, and the recognition of human emotions

Face Image and Video Analysis in Biometrics and Health Applications

Computer Vision (CV) enables computers and systems to derive meaningful information from acquired visual inputs, such as images and videos, and make decisions based on the extracted information. Its goal is to acquire, process, analyze, and understand the information by developing a theoretical and algorithmic model. Biometrics are distinctive and measurable human characteristics used to label or describe individuals by combining computer vision with knowledge of human physiology (e.g., face, iris, fingerprint) and behavior (e.g., gait, gaze, voice). Face is one of the most informative biometric traits. Many studies have investigated the human face from the perspectives of various different disciplines, ranging from computer vision, deep learning, to neuroscience and biometrics. In this work, we analyze the face characteristics from digital images and videos in the areas of morphing attack and defense, and autism diagnosis. For face morphing attacks generation, we proposed a transformer based generative adversarial network to generate more visually realistic morphing attacks by combining different losses, such as face matching distance, facial landmark based loss, perceptual loss and pixel-wise mean square error. In face morphing attack detection study, we designed a fusion-based few-shot learning (FSL) method to learn discriminative features from face images for few-shot morphing attack detection (FS-MAD), and extend the current binary detection into multiclass classification, namely, few-shot morphing attack fingerprinting (FS-MAF). In the autism diagnosis study, we developed a discriminative few shot learning method to analyze hour-long video data and explored the fusion of facial dynamics for facial trait classification of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in three severity levels. The results show outstanding performance of the proposed fusion-based few-shot framework on the dataset. Besides, we further explored the possibility of performing face micro- expression spotting and feature analysis on autism video data to classify ASD and control groups. The results indicate the effectiveness of subtle facial expression changes on autism diagnosis

Gaining Insight into Determinants of Physical Activity using Bayesian Network Learning

Contains fulltext : 228326pre.pdf (preprint version ) (Open Access) Contains fulltext : 228326pub.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)BNAIC/BeneLearn 202

Computational Optimizations for Machine Learning

The present book contains the 10 articles finally accepted for publication in the Special Issue “Computational Optimizations for Machine Learning” of the MDPI journal Mathematics, which cover a wide range of topics connected to the theory and applications of machine learning, neural networks and artificial intelligence. These topics include, among others, various types of machine learning classes, such as supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, deep neural networks, convolutional neural networks, GANs, decision trees, linear regression, SVM, K-means clustering, Q-learning, temporal difference, deep adversarial networks and more. It is hoped that the book will be interesting and useful to those developing mathematical algorithms and applications in the domain of artificial intelligence and machine learning as well as for those having the appropriate mathematical background and willing to become familiar with recent advances of machine learning computational optimization mathematics, which has nowadays permeated into almost all sectors of human life and activity

Discovering Causal Relations and Equations from Data

Physics is a field of science that has traditionally used the scientific method to answer questions about why natural phenomena occur and to make testable models that explain the phenomena. Discovering equations, laws and principles that are invariant, robust and causal explanations of the world has been fundamental in physical sciences throughout the centuries. Discoveries emerge from observing the world and, when possible, performing interventional studies in the system under study. With the advent of big data and the use of data-driven methods, causal and equation discovery fields have grown and made progress in computer science, physics, statistics, philosophy, and many applied fields. All these domains are intertwined and can be used to discover causal relations, physical laws, and equations from observational data. This paper reviews the concepts, methods, and relevant works on causal and equation discovery in the broad field of Physics and outlines the most important challenges and promising future lines of research. We also provide a taxonomy for observational causal and equation discovery, point out connections, and showcase a complete set of case studies in Earth and climate sciences, fluid dynamics and mechanics, and the neurosciences. This review demonstrates that discovering fundamental laws and causal relations by observing natural phenomena is being revolutionised with the efficient exploitation of observational data, modern machine learning algorithms and the interaction with domain knowledge. Exciting times are ahead with many challenges and opportunities to improve our understanding of complex systems.Comment: 137 page

Machine Learning Methods with Noisy, Incomplete or Small Datasets

In many machine learning applications, available datasets are sometimes incomplete, noisy or affected by artifacts. In supervised scenarios, it could happen that label information has low quality, which might include unbalanced training sets, noisy labels and other problems. Moreover, in practice, it is very common that available data samples are not enough to derive useful supervised or unsupervised classifiers. All these issues are commonly referred to as the low-quality data problem. This book collects novel contributions on machine learning methods for low-quality datasets, to contribute to the dissemination of new ideas to solve this challenging problem, and to provide clear examples of application in real scenarios

Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task

Wearable and Nearable Biosensors and Systems for Healthcare

Biosensors and systems in the form of wearables and “nearables” (i.e., everyday sensorized objects with transmitting capabilities such as smartphones) are rapidly evolving for use in healthcare. Unlike conventional approaches, these technologies can enable seamless or on-demand physiological monitoring, anytime and anywhere. Such monitoring can help transform healthcare from the current reactive, one-size-fits-all, hospital-centered approach into a future proactive, personalized, decentralized structure. Wearable and nearable biosensors and systems have been made possible through integrated innovations in sensor design, electronics, data transmission, power management, and signal processing. Although much progress has been made in this field, many open challenges for the scientific community remain, especially for those applications requiring high accuracy. This book contains the 12 papers that constituted a recent Special Issue of Sensors sharing the same title. The aim of the initiative was to provide a collection of state-of-the-art investigations on wearables and nearables, in order to stimulate technological advances and the use of the technology to benefit healthcare. The topics covered by the book offer both depth and breadth pertaining to wearable and nearable technology. They include new biosensors and data transmission techniques, studies on accelerometers, signal processing, and cardiovascular monitoring, clinical applications, and validation of commercial devices