Baseline analysis of a conventional and virtual reality lifelog retrieval system

Continuous media capture via a wearable devices is currently one of the most popular methods to establish a comprehensive record of the entirety of an individual's life experience, referred to in the research community as a lifelog. These vast multimodal corpora include visual and other sensor data and are enriched by content analysis, to generate as extensive a record of an individual's life experience. However, interfacing with such datasets remains an active area of research, and despite the advent of new technology and a plethora of competing mediums for processing digital information, there has been little focus on newly emerging platforms such as virtual reality. In this work, we suggest that the increase in immersion and spatial dimensions provided by virtual reality could provide significant benefits to users when compared to more conventional access methodologies. Hence, we motivate virtual reality as a viable method of exploring multimedia archives (specifically lifelogs) by performing a baseline comparative analysis using a novel application prototype built for the HTC Vive and a conventional prototype built for a standard personal computer

Christian Heroes and Blood-Stained Villains: The Civil War in Historic Peace Church Memory, 1865-1915

This dissertation examines the Civil War memory of the three historic peace churches (the Society of Friends, the Mennonites, and the German Baptist Brethren) in the years between 1865 and 1915. It argues that these three groups, in their Civil War remembrance, challenged the culturally prevalent definition of heroism as militaristic in nature, an expression found in military monuments, Decoration Day observances, and Blue-Gray veterans’ reunion. The study looks at periodicals, books, and biographies produced by these three religious bodies (and letters and diaries written by individual members) in the fifty years after the war to uncover both their narratives of nonresistant wartime experience and their commentary on the war’s aftereffects on Gilded Age and Progressive Era America. In their wartime narratives, the peace churches remembered the warm reception given to them by President Abraham Lincoln, positioned suffering nonresistant conscripts as “Christian soldiers,” and occasionally used hagiographic language in order to elevate peace heroes to martyr status. In their postbellum commentary, nonresistants characterized the Civil War as a “de-moralizing” historical event resulting in countless national sins and also sought to present a “demilitarized” historical account of the war which removed the celebration of martial values

Lifelog exploration prototype in virtual reality

Efficiently exploring large lifelog datasets is the subject of much research in the lifelogging community. In this paper we describe a pioneer lifelog interaction prototype developed for virtual reality. This prototype was created as part of a larger research effort to explore the feasibility and potential of exploring visual lifelogs in virtual environments. In this paper we describe the prototype and its design

ViRMA: Virtual Reality Multimedia Analytics at LSC 2021

In this paper we describe the first iteration of the ViRMA prototype system, a novel approach to multimedia analysis in virtual reality and inspired by the M3 data model. We intend to evaluate our approach via the Lifelog Search Challenge (LSC) to serve as a benchmark against other multimedia analytics systems

Dashboard visualisation of lifelog data for summarisation and pattern recognition to promote behavioural change

Lifelogging is a form of pervasive computing, which is capable of recording a catalogue of the totality of an individual’s experiences. Lifelogging data can take many forms from daily step counts, sleep monitoring and heart rate data to location based information to video/image diaries from cameras embedded into glasses or clothing or worn. From the perspective of behavioural change, lifelog data is an invaluable resource that can contain many potential insights into a person's patterns and experiences. One major issue with Lifelogging is the sheer volume of user generated data and analysing this wealth of data in a coherent and efficient manner can become increasingly difficult as the datasets become larger and more varied. Through utilising data visualisation techniques in a dashboard interface, or similar, one can make high-level analyses and summarisations of this data much more achievable. This visually intuitive approach to disseminating rich datasets alongside automated and algorithmic machine-learning techniques can lead to valuable user insights and the potential to significantly promote behavioural change

Visual access to lifelog data in a virtual environment

Continuous image capture via a wearable camera is currently one of the most popular methods to establish a comprehensive record of the entirety of an indi- vidual’s life experience, referred to in the research community as a lifelog. These vast image corpora are further enriched by content analysis and combined with additional data such as biometrics to generate as extensive a record of a person’s life as possible. However, interfacing with such datasets remains an active area of research, and despite the advent of new technology and a plethora of com- peting mediums for processing digital information, there has been little focus on newly emerging platforms such as virtual reality. We hypothesise that the increase in immersion, accessible spatial dimensions, and more, could provide significant benefits in the lifelogging domain over more conventional media. In this work, we motivate virtual reality as a viable method of lifelog exploration by performing an in-depth analysis using a novel application prototype built for the HTC Vive. This research also includes the development of a governing design framework for lifelog applications which supported the development of our prototype but is also intended to support the development of future such lifelog systems

Wearable cameras for real-time activity annotation

Google Glass has potential to be a real-time data capture and annotation tool. With professional sports as a use-case, we present a platform which helps a football coach capture and annotate interesting events using Google Glass. In our implementation, an interesting event is indicated by a predefined hand gesture or motion, and our platform can automatically detect these gestures in a video without training any classifier. Three event detectors are examined and our experiment shows that the detector with combined edgeness and color moment features gives the best detection performance

DCU at the NTCIR-13 Lifelog-2 Task

In this work, we outline the submissions of Dublin City University (DCU) team, the organisers, to the NTCIR-13 Lifelog-2 Task. We submitted runs to the Lifelog Semantics Access (LSAT) and the Lifelog Insight (LIT) sub-tasks