SALSA: A Novel Dataset for Multimodal Group Behavior Analysis

Studying free-standing conversational groups (FCGs) in unstructured social settings (e.g., cocktail party ) is gratifying due to the wealth of information available at the group (mining social networks) and individual (recognizing native behavioral and personality traits) levels. However, analyzing social scenes involving FCGs is also highly challenging due to the difficulty in extracting behavioral cues such as target locations, their speaking activity and head/body pose due to crowdedness and presence of extreme occlusions. To this end, we propose SALSA, a novel dataset facilitating multimodal and Synergetic sociAL Scene Analysis, and make two main contributions to research on automated social interaction analysis: (1) SALSA records social interactions among 18 participants in a natural, indoor environment for over 60 minutes, under the poster presentation and cocktail party contexts presenting difficulties in the form of low-resolution images, lighting variations, numerous occlusions, reverberations and interfering sound sources; (2) To alleviate these problems we facilitate multimodal analysis by recording the social interplay using four static surveillance cameras and sociometric badges worn by each participant, comprising the microphone, accelerometer, bluetooth and infrared sensors. In addition to raw data, we also provide annotations concerning individuals' personality as well as their position, head, body orientation and F-formation information over the entire event duration. Through extensive experiments with state-of-the-art approaches, we show (a) the limitations of current methods and (b) how the recorded multiple cues synergetically aid automatic analysis of social interactions. SALSA is available at http://tev.fbk.eu/salsa.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

Living Knowledge

Diversity, especially manifested in language and knowledge, is a function of local goals, needs, competences, beliefs, culture, opinions and personal experience. The Living Knowledge project considers diversity as an asset rather than a problem. With the project, foundational ideas emerged from the synergic contribution of different disciplines, methodologies (with which many partners were previously unfamiliar) and technologies flowed in concrete diversity-aware applications such as the Future Predictor and the Media Content Analyser providing users with better structured information while coping with Web scale complexities. The key notions of diversity, fact, opinion and bias have been defined in relation to three methodologies: Media Content Analysis (MCA) which operates from a social sciences perspective; Multimodal Genre Analysis (MGA) which operates from a semiotic perspective and Facet Analysis (FA) which operates from a knowledge representation and organization perspective. A conceptual architecture that pulls all of them together has become the core of the tools for automatic extraction and the way they interact. In particular, the conceptual architecture has been implemented with the Media Content Analyser application. The scientific and technological results obtained are described in the following

Machine Understanding of Human Behavior

A widely accepted prediction is that computing will move to the background, weaving itself into the fabric of our everyday living spaces and projecting the human user into the foreground. If this prediction is to come true, then next generation computing, which we will call human computing, should be about anticipatory user interfaces that should be human-centered, built for humans based on human models. They should transcend the traditional keyboard and mouse to include natural, human-like interactive functions including understanding and emulating certain human behaviors such as affective and social signaling. This article discusses a number of components of human behavior, how they might be integrated into computers, and how far we are from realizing the front end of human computing, that is, how far are we from enabling computers to understand human behavior

Multimodal Classification of Urban Micro-Events

In this paper we seek methods to effectively detect urban micro-events. Urban micro-events are events which occur in cities, have limited geographical coverage and typically affect only a small group of citizens. Because of their scale these are difficult to identify in most data sources. However, by using citizen sensing to gather data, detecting them becomes feasible. The data gathered by citizen sensing is often multimodal and, as a consequence, the information required to detect urban micro-events is distributed over multiple modalities. This makes it essential to have a classifier capable of combining them. In this paper we explore several methods of creating such a classifier, including early, late, hybrid fusion and representation learning using multimodal graphs. We evaluate performance on a real world dataset obtained from a live citizen reporting system. We show that a multimodal approach yields higher performance than unimodal alternatives. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our hybrid combination of early and late fusion with multimodal embeddings performs best in classification of urban micro-events