Dynamic Facial Expression of Emotion Made Easy

Facial emotion expression for virtual characters is used in a wide variety of areas. Often, the primary reason to use emotion expression is not to study emotion expression generation per se, but to use emotion expression in an application or research project. What is then needed is an easy to use and flexible, but also validated mechanism to do so. In this report we present such a mechanism. It enables developers to build virtual characters with dynamic affective facial expressions. The mechanism is based on Facial Action Coding. It is easy to implement, and code is available for download. To show the validity of the expressions generated with the mechanism we tested the recognition accuracy for 6 basic emotions (joy, anger, sadness, surprise, disgust, fear) and 4 blend emotions (enthusiastic, furious, frustrated, and evil). Additionally we investigated the effect of VC distance (z-coordinate), the effect of the VC's face morphology (male vs. female), the effect of a lateral versus a frontal presentation of the expression, and the effect of intensity of the expression. Participants (n=19, Western and Asian subjects) rated the intensity of each expression for each condition (within subject setup) in a non forced choice manner. All of the basic emotions were uniquely perceived as such. Further, the blends and confusion details of basic emotions are compatible with findings in psychology

Problems and opportunities of applying data-& audio-mining techniques to ethnic music

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"Re-engineering Cyprus" : information technologies and transformation processes in the Republic of Cyprus

By most Western Europeans Cyprus is probably perceived as a tourist resort rather than a technologically highly developed country. Interested German visitors are informed by the travel brochure published by the Republic of Cyprus' tourist office that "in the villages old customs and traditions still exist" (Zypern. 9000 Jahre Geschichte und Kultur 1997, 11). Pictures of places of antiquity, churches, monasteries, fortresses, archaic villages and of people engaged in agricultural work and crafts convey the image of a traditional Mediterranean society. However, the Republic of Cyprus is a rapidly modernising country. It has developed recently "from a poor agrarian into a high-income service economy" (Christodoulou 1995, 11) and "radical transformation processes" are observed (cf. ibid., 18). The forthcoming accession to the European Union additionally accelerates the pace of these transformation processes. Due to its position on the extreme rim of Europe in the Eastern Mediterranean region at the crossroads of three continents, the island is perceived both as marginal (cf. Pace 1999) and as a link between Europe and the Asian and African continents (cf. Kasoulides 1999). Cyprus is conceptualised for the future as a centre and intersection: as regional hub of the modern capital market, as communications and trade centre in the Eastern Mediterranean, as "telecommunications hub for the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East region", as "international services centre". The Republic of Cyprus has a highly developed telecommunications infrastructure, which is the basic prerequisite for the conversion into such a centre and is one of the most important factors for the economic competitiveness of Cyprus. The global nature of communication platforms today, especially the Internet, is regarded as the key to the integration of Cyprus into the world economy. By implementing information technologies and promoting necessary expertise, economic progress and modernisation of the country as well as its global competitiveness is assumed to be guaranteed. Investments in the information technology infrastructure are regarded as essential for the development of Cyprus, fostering the implementation of the information society. This aim and the necessary implementation measures feature increasingly on the agendas of scientific and economic conferences and symposia in Cyprus

A Theme-Rewriting Approach for Generating Algebra Word Problems

Texts present coherent stories that have a particular theme or overall setting, for example science fiction or western. In this paper, we present a text generation method called {\it rewriting} that edits existing human-authored narratives to change their theme without changing the underlying story. We apply the approach to math word problems, where it might help students stay more engaged by quickly transforming all of their homework assignments to the theme of their favorite movie without changing the math concepts that are being taught. Our rewriting method uses a two-stage decoding process, which proposes new words from the target theme and scores the resulting stories according to a number of factors defining aspects of syntactic, semantic, and thematic coherence. Experiments demonstrate that the final stories typically represent the new theme well while still testing the original math concepts, outperforming a number of baselines. We also release a new dataset of human-authored rewrites of math word problems in several themes.Comment: To appear EMNLP 201

ICT, cultural knowledge, and teacher education in\ud Africa

In this paper, we make a case for the need to carry out more culturally\ud appropriate research on ICT and teacher education in Africa generally and in\ud Uganda more specifically. We begin by examining the promise of ICTs and digital\ud literacies, and highlight the importance ascribed to ICTs for national development\ud and educational change. While agreeing that ICTs may have transformative\ud potential in developing countries, we argue that the much-hyped potential may not\ud be realized if the major focus of promoting ICTs in a developing country like\ud Uganda is merely to provide greater access to global information, rather than\ud encouraging local knowledge production for wealth creation. We frame our\ud argument with reference to the New Literacy Studies perspective of viewing\ud literacy as a social practice situated in a specific sociocultural context

Genetic improvement and utilisation of indigenous tilapia in southern Africa: final technical report, December 1st 1998 to June 31st, 2002

Mozambique tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) is an indigenous tilapia species in southern Africa, until now the majority of genetic research has been carried out on Asian species of tilapia but this project aims to look at this African species. Those most suited to further development in aquaculture in southern Africa have now been identified. The genetic characterisation of strains has been completed. This information has aided the choice of strains for use in small scale aquaculture and for genetically male tilapia (GMT) production. They will form the basis of future strategies for further genetic improvement, and management of genetic diversity of Mozambique tilapia. The information will also contribute towards responsible management and development of genetic resources, particularly with regard to indigenous species of tilapia. Good progress has been made with the adaptation and implementation of producing the supermale fish required to produce all male offspring, resulting in faster growing populations of tilapia. The presence of the project and its associated activity has been a catalyst for a surge in interest in tilapia culture throughout southern Africa. [PDF contains 183 pages

Towards a competency model for adaptive assessment to support lifelong learning

Adaptive assessment provides efficient and personalised routes to establishing the proficiencies of learners. We can envisage a future in which learners are able to maintain and expose their competency profile to multiple services, throughout their life, which will use the competency information in the model to personalise assessment. Current competency standards tend to over simplify the representation of competency and the knowledge domain. This paper presents a competency model for evaluating learned capability by considering achieved competencies to support adaptive assessment for lifelong learning. This model provides a multidimensional view of competencies and provides for interoperability between systems as the learner progresses through life. The proposed competency model is being developed and implemented in the JISC-funded Placement Learning and Assessment Toolkit (mPLAT) project at the University of Southampton. This project which takes a Service-Oriented approach will contribute to the JISC community by adding mobile assessment tools to the E-framework

Using ODL and ICT to develop the skills of the unreached: a contribution to the ADEA triennial of the Working Group on Distance Education and Open Learning

Innovation in technology is occurring at rapid pace thus shrinking the distances and making information and knowledge more than ever accessible to everyone irrespective of where the person resides. This paper consists of four main articles. The first one deals with technological trends. The second one focuses on the deployment and use of open and distance education mode in rural areas by documenting initiatives that embrace information and communication technologies (ICTs). Due to challenges faced in rural areas only a few success stories/cases currently exist and some of these are cited in this article. The challenges faced in the deployment of ICT enhanced ODL have been highlighted as well as the potential of developing and delivering effective and relevant ODL programmes in rural areas in order to ensure that issues of educational equity and social exclusion rural communities are adequately addressed. ICTs in ODL are perhaps the greatest tool to date for self-education and value addition to any community’s development efforts, yet poor rural communities particularly in Africa do not have the necessary awareness, skills or facilities to enable themselves to develop using ICTs. Inadequate ICT infrastructures in rural areas remain a major source for the digital divide in Africa and for under-performance of distance learners. The third one analyses the support provided to ODL learners who often encounter difficulties in completing their studies through the distance education mode due to loneliness, uncertainties and de-motivation. ICT has not been able to sufficiently support distance learners in overcoming those obstacles efficiently. An investigation regarding those learning supports has been conducted in ten distance learning institutions, along with an intensive literature review with the aim of understanding the high percentage of dropout rates of distant learners. The learners’ interactions have been scrutinized through content analysis of their synchronous exchanges, during a completely online course. After taking into account the limited technical and human resources in Africa, a technological virtual environment along with a pedagogical framework has been proposed with the aim of giving adequate educational support to them. The fourth article has explored The Open University (UK) and its efforts to use new technologies to deliver online courses to difficult-to- reach learners in prison environments. The case study analysed here is an international course (called, B201- Business Organisations and their environments) which also touches an African cohort of learners. The implications for designing and delivering online ODL to the complex unreachable environments of prisons anywhere, and particularly in Africa, have been discussed

The Locus Algorithm IV: Performance metrics of a grid computing system used to create catalogues of optimised pointings

This paper discusses the requirements for and performance metrics of the the Grid Computing system used to implement the Locus Algorithm to identify optimum pointings for differential photometry of 61,662,376 stars and 23,779 quasars. Initial operational tests indicated a need for a software system to analyse the data and a High Performance Computing system to run that software in a scalable manner. Practical assessments of the performance of the software in a serial computing environment were used to provide a benchmark against which the performance metrics of the HPC solution could be compared, as well as to indicate any bottlenecks in performance. These performance metrics indicated a distinct split in the performance dictated more by differences in the input data than by differences in the design of the systems used. This indicates a need for experimental analysis of system performance, and suggests that algorithmic complexity analyses may lead to incorrect or naive conclusions, especially in systems with high data I/O overhead such as grid computing. Further, it implies that systems which reduce or eliminate this bottleneck such as in-memory processing could lead to a substantial increase in performance