Automatic Measurement of Affect in Dimensional and Continuous Spaces: Why, What, and How?

This paper aims to give a brief overview of the current state-of-the-art in automatic measurement of affect signals in dimensional and continuous spaces (a continuous scale from -1 to +1) by seeking answers to the following questions: i) why has the field shifted towards dimensional and continuous interpretations of affective displays recorded in real-world settings? ii) what are the affect dimensions used, and the affect signals measured? and iii) how has the current automatic measurement technology been developed, and how can we advance the field

Automatic Segmentation of Spontaneous Data using Dimensional Labels from Multiple Coders

This paper focuses on automatic segmentation of spontaneous data using continuous dimensional labels from multiple coders. It introduces efficient algorithms to the aim of (i) producing ground-truth by maximizing inter-coder agreement, (ii) eliciting the frames or samples that capture the transition to and from an emotional state, and (iii) automatic segmentation of spontaneous audio-visual data to be used by machine learning techniques that cannot handle unsegmented sequences. As a proof of concept, the algorithms introduced are tested using data annotated in arousal and valence space. However, they can be straightforwardly applied to data annotated in other continuous emotional spaces, such as power and expectation

Affective Computing for Human-Robot Interaction Research: Four Critical Lessons for the Hitchhiker

Social Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research relies on different Affective Computing (AC) solutions for sensing, perceiving and understanding human affective behaviour during interactions. This may include utilising off-the-shelf affect perception models that are pre-trained on popular affect recognition benchmarks and directly applied to situated interactions. However, the conditions in situated human-robot interactions differ significantly from the training data and settings of these models. Thus, there is a need to deepen our understanding of how AC solutions can be best leveraged, customised and applied for situated HRI. This paper, while critiquing the existing practices, presents four critical lessons to be noted by the hitchhiker when applying AC for HRI research. These lessons conclude that: (i) The six basic emotions categories are irrelevant in situated interactions, (ii) Affect recognition accuracy (%) improvements are unimportant, (iii) Affect recognition does not generalise across contexts, and (iv) Affect recognition alone is insufficient for adaptation and personalisation. By describing the background and the context for each lesson, and demonstrating how these lessons have been learnt, this paper aims to enable the hitchhiker to successfully and insightfully leverage AC solutions for advancing HRI research.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

THE IMPEDIMENTS ENCOUNTERED WHILE LEARNING MATHEMATICS BY EIGHT GRADE STUDENTS

Mathematics is seen by many people as the best way to get a good life and a good career. It is also thought as an assistant to understand life and the world and to produce ideas about them. Therefore, new reform studies are being held to construct a new system that assists students to learn mathematics in a comprehensive way (Dursun & Dede, 2004). The importance of mathematics lessons and how to teach mathematics are increasing because of its potential to develop scientific thinking in accordance with the contemporary conditions and to implement these abilities into students’ daily life (Yildiz & Uyanik, 2004). Despite these studies, most of the students perceive mathematics as a difficult lesson and get low grades from mathematics tests. Therefore, the impediments in the mathematics learning process have been seen necessary. The aim of this research is to take the students’ opinions about the impediments while learning mathematics. The questionnaire prepared by researchers was given to 8th grade students. In the questionnaire, questions about mathematics lessons, mathematics teachers and mathematics learning process were asked to the students. The questions were edited by the experts’ opinions. The impediments in the mathematics learning process were determined with regard to the students’ opinions. The results will be presented and based on these results, some recommendations will be given.  Article visualizations

Biologically-Inspired Motion Encoding for Robust Global Motion Estimation.

The growing use of cameras embedded in autonomous robotic platforms and worn by people is increasing the importance of accurate global motion estimation (GME). However, existing GME methods may degrade considerably under illumination variations. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a biologically-inspired GME method that achieves high estimation accuracy in the presence of illumination variations. We mimic the early layers of the human visual cortex with the spatio-temporal Gabor motion energy by adopting the pioneering model of Adelson and Bergen and we provide the closed-form expressions that enable the study and adaptation of this model to different application needs. Moreover, we propose a normalisation scheme for motion energy to tackle temporal illumination variations. Finally, we provide an overall GME scheme which, to the best of our knowledge, achieves the highest accuracy on the Pose, Illumination, and Expression (PIE) database

Robust Registration of Dynamic Facial Sequences.

Accurate face registration is a key step for several image analysis applications. However, existing registration methods are prone to temporal drift errors or jitter among consecutive frames. In this paper, we propose an iterative rigid registration framework that estimates the misalignment with trained regressors. The input of the regressors is a robust motion representation that encodes the motion between a misaligned frame and the reference frame(s), and enables reliable performance under non-uniform illumination variations. Drift errors are reduced when the motion representation is computed from multiple reference frames. Furthermore, we use the L2 norm of the representation as a cue for performing coarse-to-fine registration efficiently. Importantly, the framework can identify registration failures and correct them. Experiments show that the proposed approach achieves significantly higher registration accuracy than the state-of-the-art techniques in challenging sequences.The research work of Evangelos Sariyanidi and Hatice Gunes has been partially supported by the EPSRC under its IDEAS Factory Sandpits call on Digital Personhood (Grant Ref.: EP/L00416X/1)

Culture-Based Explainable Human-Agent Deconfliction

Law codes and regulations help organise societies for centuries, and as AI systems gain more autonomy, we question how human-agent systems can operate as peers under the same norms, especially when resources are contended. We posit that agents must be accountable and explainable by referring to which rules justify their decisions. The need for explanations is associated with user acceptance and trust. This paper's contribution is twofold: i) we propose an argumentation-based human-agent architecture to map human regulations into a culture for artificial agents with explainable behaviour. Our architecture leans on the notion of argumentative dialogues and generates explanations from the history of such dialogues; and ii) we validate our architecture with a user study in the context of human-agent path deconfliction. Our results show that explanations provide a significantly higher improvement in human performance when systems are more complex. Consequently, we argue that the criteria defining the need of explanations should also consider the complexity of a system. Qualitative findings show that when rules are more complex, explanations significantly reduce the perception of challenge for humans.L3Harris ASV and the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 185

Face Alignment Assisted by Head Pose Estimation

In this paper we propose a supervised initialization scheme for cascaded face alignment based on explicit head pose estimation. We first investigate the failure cases of most state of the art face alignment approaches and observe that these failures often share one common global property, i.e. the head pose variation is usually large. Inspired by this, we propose a deep convolutional network model for reliable and accurate head pose estimation. Instead of using a mean face shape, or randomly selected shapes for cascaded face alignment initialisation, we propose two schemes for generating initialisation: the first one relies on projecting a mean 3D face shape (represented by 3D facial landmarks) onto 2D image under the estimated head pose; the second one searches nearest neighbour shapes from the training set according to head pose distance. By doing so, the initialisation gets closer to the actual shape, which enhances the possibility of convergence and in turn improves the face alignment performance. We demonstrate the proposed method on the benchmark 300W dataset and show very competitive performance in both head pose estimation and face alignment.Comment: Accepted by BMVC201