HybridMingler: Towards Mixed-Reality Support for Mingling at Hybrid Conferences

Mingling, the activity of ad-hoc, private, opportunistic conversations ahead of, during, or after breaks, is an important socializing activity for attendees at scheduled events, such as in-person conferences. The Covid-19 pandemic had a dramatic impact on the way conferences are organized, so that most of them now take place in a hybrid mode where people can either attend on-site or remotely. While on-site attendees can resume in-person mingling, hybrid modes make it challenging for remote attendees to mingle with on-site peers. In addressing this problem, we propose a collaborative mixed-reality (MR) concept, including a prototype, called HybridMingler. This is a distributed MR system supporting ambient awareness and allowing both on-site and remote conference attendees to virtually mingle. HybridMingler aims to provide both on-site and remote attendees with a spatial sense of co-location in the very same venue location, thus ultimately improving perceived presence

Improving the quality of set yoghurt using milk fat globule membrane fragments

Lacprodan PL20, a dairy ingredient that is rich in protein and polar lipids, was added into set yoghurts produced from nonhomogenized raw milk. The set yoghurts were prepared using concentrations of 2%, 4%, and 6% Lacprodan PL20, while the control sample was only supplemented with skim milk powder. The effect of Lacprodan PL20 concentrations on the physical and chemical properties, rheology, and microstructure of set yoghurt was thoroughly investigated to determine some likely improvement or changes in quality. Consequently, Lacprodan PL20 showed a gradual improvement in the set yoghurt nutritive values, water holding capacity, and apparent viscosity. The results indicated that the firmness of set yoghurt was altered which steadily improved the gel strength, especially at 4% and 6% concentrations. The fermentation process was slightly delayed at 4% and 6% concentrations and pH values were raised as Lacprodan PL20 concentration increased. The microstructures of the set yoghurts produced with Lacprodan PL20, as examined by scanning electron microscopy, revealed compacted structures with fewer and smaller holes in the gel matrices. Also, a slight color change was observed in set yoghurt using a colorimeter. These results vividly showed that Lacprodan PL20, an enriched milk fat globule membrane fragment, has the potential to improve set yoghurt quality by reducing some defects associated with set yoghurt, such as low gel strength, low dry solids, and the likes

An experiment in Interactive Retrieval for the lifelog moment retrieval task at imageCLEFlifelog2020.

The development of technology has led to an increase in mobile devices’ use to keep track of individual daily activities, as known as Lifelogging. Lifelogging has raised many research challenges, one of which is how to retrieve a specific moment in response to a user’s information need. This paper presents an efficient interactive search engine for large multimodal lifelog data which is evaluated in the ImageCLEFlifelog2020 Lifelog Moment Retrieval task (LMRT). The system is the modified version of the Myscéal demonstrator used in the Lifelog Search Challenge 2020, with the addition of visual similarity and a new method of visualising results. In interactive experimentation, our system achieved an F1@ 10 score of 0.48 in the official submission but can be significantly improved by implementing a number of post-processing steps

A VR interface for browsing visual spaces at VBS2021

The Video Browser Showdown (VBS) is an annual competition in which each participant prepares an interactive video retrieval system and partakes in a live comparative evaluation at the annual MMMConference. In this paper, we introduce Eolas, which is a prototype video/image retrieval system incorporating a novel virtual reality (VR)interface. For VBS’21, Eolas represented each keyframe of the collection by an embedded feature in a latent vector space, into which a query would also be projected to facilitate retrieval within a VR environment. A user could then explore the space and perform one of a number of filter operations to traverse the space and locate the correct result

Extensive Gene-Specific Translational Reprogramming in a Model of B Cell Differentiation and Abl-Dependent Transformation

To what extent might the regulation of translation contribute to differentiation programs, or to the molecular pathogenesis of cancer? Pre-B cells transformed with the viral oncogene v-Abl are suspended in an immortalized, cycling state that mimics leukemias with a BCR-ABL1 translocation, such as Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML) and Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL). Inhibition of the oncogenic Abl kinase with imatinib reverses transformation, allowing progression to the next stage of B cell development. We employed a genome-wide polysome profiling assay called Gradient Encoding to investigate the extent and potential contribution of translational regulation to transformation and differentiation in v-Abl-transformed pre-B cells. Over half of the significantly translationally regulated genes did not change significantly at the level of mRNA abundance, revealing biology that might have been missed by measuring changes in transcript abundance alone. We found extensive, gene-specific changes in translation affecting genes with known roles in B cell signaling and differentiation, cancerous transformation, and cytoskeletal reorganization potentially affecting adhesion. These results highlight a major role for gene-specific translational regulation in remodeling the gene expression program in differentiation and malignant transformation

Myscéal: a deeper analysis of an interactive lifelog search engine

There is a growing number of lifelogging retrieval systems that have been introduced in several lifelogging workshops and events. Across all systems at the LSC, which is an annual international challenge on lifelogging retrieval, our Myscéal is currently considered as the state-of-the-art. In this paper, we describe the system in detail and show how it has been upgraded through time since firstly introduced in 2020. In addition, we analyse Myscéal performance not only in the three lifelog retrieval competitions it participated in but also with additional user experiments. The result shows that the fast searching time of Myscéal is the system's most important feature that helps it get some significant advantages in competitions. On the other hand, the findings from user experiments indicate that Myscéal still needs some improvements for novice users who are unfamiliar with how to interact with the system. Moreover, the user study plays a vital role in the development of Myscéal as many updates of this system came from the feedback of the participating users. We also demonstrate the efficacy of Myscéal as a lifelog retrieval system to help the lifeloggers, who capture their daily life in images, recall memorable moments in their massive lifelog archives

360TourGuiding: Towards Virtual Reality Training for Tour Guiding

Tour guiding plays an important role in turning sightseeing tours into memorable experiences. Tour guides, especially inexperienced ones, must practice intensively to perfect their craft. It is key that guides acquire knowledge about sights, in-situ presentation skills, and perfection ability to interact with and engage tourists. Therefore, tour-guide education requires on-site training at the place of interest including live tourist audiences. However, for modest budgets, such setups are costly and tourism students have to practice tour guiding at home or in simulated class-room setups. It has become a challenge for students to adequately prepare themselves for jobs in terms of relevant knowledge and skills. To tackle this problem, we propose 360TourGuiding, a VR system enabling its users to practice tour guiding with 360 travel videos plus the attendance of remote audiences participating through their mobile and personal device. This paper reports on the concept, on our design, current implementation, and on a pilot study with the current 360TourGuiding prototype. Based on qualitative feedback gained through the pilot study, we discuss possible system improvements, future system updates, and plans for empirical evaluation

QASA : advanced document retriever for open-domain question answering by learning to rank question-aware self-attentive document representations

For information consumers, being able to obtain a short and accurate answer for a query is one of the most desirable features. This motivation, along with the rise of deep learning, has led to a boom in open-domain Question Answering (QA) research. While the problem of machine comprehension has received multiple success with the help of large training corpora and the emergence of attention mechanism, the development of document retrieval in open-domain QA is lagged behind. In this work, we propose a novel encoding method for learning question-aware self-attentive document representations. By applying pair-wise ranking approach to these encodings, we build a Document Retriever, called QASA, which is then integrated with a machine reader to form a complete open-domain QA system. Our system is thoroughly evaluated using QUASAR-T dataset and shows surpassing results compared to other state-of-the-art methods.Accepted versio