Action Recognition in Videos: from Motion Capture Labs to the Web

This paper presents a survey of human action recognition approaches based on visual data recorded from a single video camera. We propose an organizing framework which puts in evidence the evolution of the area, with techniques moving from heavily constrained motion capture scenarios towards more challenging, realistic, "in the wild" videos. The proposed organization is based on the representation used as input for the recognition task, emphasizing the hypothesis assumed and thus, the constraints imposed on the type of video that each technique is able to address. Expliciting the hypothesis and constraints makes the framework particularly useful to select a method, given an application. Another advantage of the proposed organization is that it allows categorizing newest approaches seamlessly with traditional ones, while providing an insightful perspective of the evolution of the action recognition task up to now. That perspective is the basis for the discussion in the end of the paper, where we also present the main open issues in the area.Comment: Preprint submitted to CVIU, survey paper, 46 pages, 2 figures, 4 table

A Peer-reviewed Newspaper About_ Machine Feeling

On the ability of technologies to capture and structure feelings and experiences that are active, in flux, and situated in the present. Publication resulting from research workshop at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, organised in collaboration with CRASSH, University of Cambridge and transmediale festival for art and digital culture, Berlin

Transmediale workshops and publications

APRJA is an annual open-access research journal (of which Cox is co-founder and co-editor) produced in collaboration with Transmediale festival for art and digital culture in Berlin. The title “A Peer-Reviewed Journal About” invites the addition of a specific research topic to complete the full title of each issue, broadly addressing the annual festival theme, and following an iterative form: following an open call released through Transmediale, participants collaborate online, and join a research workshop to exchange ideas. Subsequently they produce short articles for a (newspaper) publication distributed at the festival, alongside a public event, held at Haus der Kulteren der Welt, Berlin. Researchers are then invited to develop longer scientific papers for the online journal. The aim is to promote research by a new generation of researchers and promote the very latest thinking in the field. The overall aim of APRJA is to publish new research that promotes open access but without losing sight of rigorous academic conventions of peer-review. Since 2014, all submissions are anonymized and distributed to independent qualified experts via our advisory board and extended networks. The combined sharing of work online, as part of the workshop and the public presentation at Transmediale further qualifies the academic rigour of submissions through peer critique. The partnership with Transmediale, the foremost festival for art and digital culture in Europe, brings the journal widespread attention, and an engaged specialist audience and readership. In addition, each issue of the journal is underpinned by wider partnerships with other key institutions to form an expanding network of collaboration: Kunsthal Aarhus (2014); City University Hong Kong (2015); Liverpool John Moores University & Liverpool Biennial (2016); Constant Association for Art and Media, Brussels (2017); Brandenburg Center for Media Studies – ZeM, Potsdam (2018); CRASSH, University of Cambridge (2019); Global Emergent Media Lab, Concordia University (2020)

E-topia: Utopia after the Mediated Body

open access journalA custom-made media installation, diplorasis, will be used to explore the body in digital media. This mediated body attempts to re-think how the Deleuzian time-image is translated from its cinematic confinement to the space of new media. In diplorasis the digitized time-image becomes more directly incorporated with-in the bodily schema. Consequently, the thinking of the virtual and actual space of the body in diplorasis enables a questioning of bodily space-time, and particularly the relation between self and digitized self-image. It is thus crucial to re-frame how this digitized mediated body is distinct from a conventional notion of a metric and habitual space—one that is reinforced by, for example, the medium of linear perspective. The articulation of the mediated body will be used to in-form and extend Elizabeth Grosz’s paradoxical reading of embodiment and utopia, by revisiting the notions of utopia as eu-topic/ou-topic. The spatio-temporality of the topos must be re-considered before utopia. Foucault’s analogy of the mirror will then serve to superimpose the dual and slippery relations between utopia and the heterotopic. The digitized mediated body will thus seek to explore emerging ways by which to consider the utopic by conflating embodiment, time and space within an electronic topos. It is argued that as the sensing and cognitive body becomes increasingly pliable in relation to technological mediations, our very understanding of space-time is changing

Psychopower and Ordinary Madness: Reticulated Dividuals in Cognitive Capitalism

Despite the seemingly neutral vantage of using nature for widely-distributed computational purposes, neither post-biological nor post-humanist teleology simply concludes with the real "end of nature" as entailed in the loss of the specific ontological status embedded in the identifier "natural." As evinced by the ecological crises of the Anthropocene—of which the 2019 Brazil Amazon rainforest fires are only the most recent—our epoch has transfixed the “natural order" and imposed entropic artificial integration, producing living species that become “anoetic,” made to serve as automated exosomatic residues, or digital flecks. I further develop Gilles Deleuze’s description of control societies to upturn Foucauldian biopower, replacing its spacio-temporal bounds with the exographic excesses in psycho-power; culling and further detailing Bernard Stiegler’s framework of transindividuation and hyper-control, I examine how becoming-subject is predictively facilitated within cognitive capitalism and what Alexander Galloway terms “deep digitality.” Despite the loss of material vestiges qua virtualization—which I seek to trace in an historical review of industrialization to postindustrialization—the drive-based and reticulated "internet of things" facilitates a closed loop from within the brain to the outside environment, such that the aperture of thought is mediated and compressed. The human brain, understood through its material constitution, is susceptible to total datafication’s laminated process of “becoming-mnemotechnical,” and, as neuroplasticity is now a valid description for deep-learning and neural nets, we are privy to the rebirth of the once-discounted metaphor of the “cybernetic brain.” Probing algorithmic governmentality while posing noetic dreaming as both technical and pharmacological, I seek to analyze how spirit is blithely confounded with machine-thinking’s gelatinous cognition, as prosthetic organ-adaptation becomes probabilistically molded, networked, and agentially inflected (rather than simply externalized)

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research