Will they buy?

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 127-137).The proliferation of inexpensive video recording hardware and enormous storage capacity has enabled the collection of retail customer behavior at an unprecedented scale. The vast majority of this data is used for theft prevention and never used to better understand the customer. In what ways can this huge corpus be leveraged to improve the experience of customer and the performance of the store? This thesis presents MIMIC, a system that processes video captured in a retail store into predictions about customer proclivity to purchase. MIMIC relies on the observation that aggregate patterns of all of a store's patrons-the gestalt-captures behavior indicative of an imminent transaction. Video is distilled into a homogenous feature vector that captures the activity distribution by first tracking the locations of customers, then discretizing their movements into a feature vector using a collection of functional locations-areas of the store relevant to the tasks of patrons and employees. A time series of these feature vectors can then be classified as predictive-of-transaction using a Hidden Markov Model. MIMIc is evaluated on a small operational retail store located in the Mall of America near Minneapolis, Minnesota. Its performance is characterized across a wide cross-section of the model's parameters. Through manipulation of the training data supplied to MiMic, the behavior of customers in the store can be examined at fine levels of detail without foregoing the potential afforded by big data. MIMIC enables a suite of valuable tools. For ethnographic researchers, it offers a technique for identifying key moments in hundreds or thousands of hours of raw video. Retail managers gain a fine-grained metric to evaluate the performance of their stores, and interior designers acquire a critical component in a store layout optimization framework.by Rony Daniel Kubat.Ph.D

Selected Papers from the 5th International Electronic Conference on Sensors and Applications

This Special Issue comprises selected papers from the proceedings of the 5th International Electronic Conference on Sensors and Applications, held on 15–30 November 2018, on sciforum.net, an online platform for hosting scholarly e-conferences and discussion groups. In this 5th edition of the electronic conference, contributors were invited to provide papers and presentations from the field of sensors and applications at large, resulting in a wide variety of excellent submissions and topic areas. Papers which attracted the most interest on the web or that provided a particularly innovative contribution were selected for publication in this collection. These peer-reviewed papers are published with the aim of rapid and wide dissemination of research results, developments, and applications. We hope this conference series will grow rapidly in the future and become recognized as a new way and venue by which to (electronically) present new developments related to the field of sensors and their applications

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This Special Issue provides a collection of recent research and reviews that investigate many areas of welfare assessment, such as novel approaches and technologies used to evaluate the welfare of farmed, captive, or wild animals. Research in this Special Issue includes welfare assessment related to pilot whales, finishing pigs, commercial turkey flocks, and dairy goats; the use of sensors or wearable technologies, such as heart rate monitors to assess sleep in dairy cows, ear tag sensors, and machine learning to assess commercial pig behaviour; non-invasive measures, such as video monitoring of behaviour, computer vision to analyse video footage of red foxes, remote camera traps of free-roaming wild horses, infrared thermography of effort and sport recovery in sport horses; telomere length and regulatory genes as novel biomarkers of stress in broiler chickens; the effect of environment on growth physiology and behaviour of laboratory rare minnows and housing system on anxiety, stress, fear, and immune function of laying hens; and discussions of natural behaviour in farm animal welfare and maintaining health, welfare, and productivity of commercial pig herds

Cellular Automata

Modelling and simulation are disciplines of major importance for science and engineering. There is no science without models, and simulation has nowadays become a very useful tool, sometimes unavoidable, for development of both science and engineering. The main attractive feature of cellular automata is that, in spite of their conceptual simplicity which allows an easiness of implementation for computer simulation, as a detailed and complete mathematical analysis in principle, they are able to exhibit a wide variety of amazingly complex behaviour. This feature of cellular automata has attracted the researchers' attention from a wide variety of divergent fields of the exact disciplines of science and engineering, but also of the social sciences, and sometimes beyond. The collective complex behaviour of numerous systems, which emerge from the interaction of a multitude of simple individuals, is being conveniently modelled and simulated with cellular automata for very different purposes. In this book, a number of innovative applications of cellular automata models in the fields of Quantum Computing, Materials Science, Cryptography and Coding, and Robotics and Image Processing are presented