Does it look safe? An eye tracking study into the visual aspects of fear of crime

Studies of fear of crime often focus on demographic and social factors, but these can be difficult to change. Studies of visual aspects have suggested that features reflecting incivilities, such as litter, graffiti, and vandalism increase fear of crime, but methods often rely on participants actively mentioning such aspects, and more subtle, less conscious aspects may be overlooked. To address these concerns, the present study examined people’s eye movements while they judged scenes for safety. Forty current and former university students were asked to rate images of day-time and night-time scenes of Lincoln, UK (where they studied) and Egham, UK (unfamiliar location) for safety, maintenance and familiarity, while their eye movements were recorded. Another twenty-five observers not from Lincoln or Egham rated the same images in an internet survey. Ratings showed a strong association between safety and maintenance and lower safety ratings for night-time scenes for both groups, in agreement with earlier findings. Eye movements of the Lincoln participants showed increased dwell times on buildings, houses, and vehicles during safety judgments, and increased dwell times on streets, pavements, and markers of incivilities for maintenance. Results confirm that maintenance plays an important role in perceptions of safety, but eye movements suggest that observers also look for indicators of current or recent presence of people

Monogenic Primary Immunodeficiency Disorder Associated with Common Variable Immunodeficiency and Autoimmunity

Background: Common variable immunodeficiency (CVID) is the most frequent primary immunodeficiency disorder mainly characterized by recurrent bacterial infections besides other immunological defects including loss of or dysfunction of B cells and decreased immunoglobulin levels. In this study, our aim is to evaluate clinical, immunological, and molecular data of patients with a primary clinical diagnosis of CVID and autoimmune phenotype with a confirmed genetic diagnosis. Methods: Among 297 patients with CVID, who were registered in the Iranian Primary Immunodeficiency Registry at Children's Medical Center Hospital in Iran, 83 patients have been genetically examined and 27 patients with autoimmunity and confirmed genetic mutations were selected for analysis. Whole-exome sequencing and confirmatory Sanger sequencing methods were used for the study population. A questionnaire was retrospectively filled for all patients to evaluate demographic, laboratory, clinical, and genetic data. Results: In the 27 studied patients, 11 different genetic defects were identified, and the most common mutated gene was LRBA, reported in 17 (63.0) patients. Two patients (7.7) showed autoimmune complications as the first presentation of immunodeficiency. Eleven patients (40.7) developed one type of autoimmunity, and 16 patients (59.3) progressed to poly-autoimmunity. Most of the patients with mono-autoimmunity (n = 9, 90.0) primarily developed infectious complications, while in patients with poly-autoimmunity, the most common first presentation was enteropathy (n = 6, 37.6). In 13 patients (61.9), the diagnosis of autoimmune disorders preceded the diagnosis of primary immunodeficiency. The most frequent autoimmune manifestations were hematologic (40.7), gastrointestinal (48.1), rheumatologic (25.9), and dermatologic (22.2) disorders. Patients with poly-autoimmunity had lower regulatory T cells than patients with mono-autoimmunity. Conclusion: In our cohort, the diagnosis of autoimmune disorders preceded the diagnosis of primary immunodeficiency in most patients. This association highlights the fact that patients referring with autoimmune manifestations should be evaluated for humoral immunity. © 2020 Georg Thieme Verlag. All rights reserved

Inferring visual task from eye movements

From the whole amount of visual information impinging on the eye, only a fraction ascends to the higher levels of visual awareness and consciousness in the brain. Attention is the process of selecting a subset of the available sensory information for further processing in short-term memory, and has equipped the primates with a remarkable ability to interpret complex scenes in real-time, despite the limited computational capacity. In other words, attention implements an information-processing bottleneck that instead of attempting to fully process the massive sensory input in parallel, realizes a serial strategy to achieve near real-time performance. This serial strategy builds up an internal representation of a scene by successively directing a spatially circumscribed region of the visual field corresponding to the highest resolution region of the retina, the so-called fovea, to conspicuous locations and creating eye trajectories by sequentially fixating on attention demanding targets in the scene.Directing the fovea to visual targets in a scene is done through rapid eye movements called saccades that typically occur between two and five times per second. Pattern information is only acquired during periods of relative gaze stability in between the saccades, called fixations, owing to the brain's suppression of information during the saccades. Gaze planning, thus, is the process of directing the fovea through a scene in real-time in the service of ongoing perceptual, cognitive and behavioral activity. The question of exactly what is happening during fixations is still something of a puzzle, but the effect of visual-task on the pattern and specifications of eye movements has been long studied in the literature. Although the effect of visual-tasks on eye movement pattern has been investigated for various tasks, there is not much done in the area of visual-task inference from the eye movements. In this work, we develop a probabilistic method to infer the visual-task of a viewer by analyzing the eye movements. To do so, a task-dependent attention model is developed to infer the attention location from the gaze position. Given the attentional spot and the stimuli we can locate the targets visited during an eye trajectory and infer the ongoing task based on the attended targets.Two different scenarios are studied in the thesis. First a method is developed to infer the tasks in synthetic stimuli, where the location of all objects in the image is given to the model. In the second group of models, the tasks are executed on a set of natural images, where no prior information about the location of targets is provided to the model.A probabilistic approach for task inference is presented, that is based on the theory of Hidden Markov Models (HHM). A HMM is a statistical model based on Markov processes. The proposed model is used in the context of Bayesian learning to realize a fully statistical inference that can incorporate different sources of information about the ongoing task. An alternative approach for the Bayesian inference is also proposed that incorporates the a-priori sources of information about the tasks into the inference model and builds a full-scale visual-task recognition framework.In order to evaluate the performance of the model, the results of task inference are presented in form of confusion matrices and are compared to the inference results of other models. The results support the idea of attention modeling using the HMMs and suggest a solid probabilistic framework for task inference using the HMMs.Sur la quantite d'informations visuelles empieter sur l'oeil, seule une fraction monte a des niveaux superieurs de la conscience visuelle et de la conscience dans le cerveau. L'attention est le processus de selection d'un sous-ensemble de l'information sensorielle disponible pour un traitement ulterieur dans la memoire a court terme, et a equipe les primates avec une remarquable capacite a interpreter des scenes complexes en temps reel, en depit de la capacite de calcul limitee. En d'autres termes, a l'attention implemente un goulot d'etranglement traitement de l'information, au lieu de tenter de traiter la totalite des entrees sensorielles massif en parallele, realise une strategie de serie pour atteindre une performance quasi-temps reel. Cette strategie de serie construit une representation interne d'une scene en dirigeant successivement une region spatialement circonscrits du champ visuel correspondant a la region de la plus haute resolution de la retine, la soi-disant fovea, a des endroits bien visibles et en creant des trajectoires oculaires par fixateur sequentiellement sur l'attention objectifs exigeants de la scene.Dans les activites visuelles, les yeux font des mouvements rapides, appelees saccades, generalement entre deux et cinq fois par seconde, afin d'apporter de l'information environnementale dans la fovea. Informations relatives aux signatures est acquise uniquement pendant les periodes de stabilite relative, du regard appeles fixations, en raison de la suppression par le cerveau de l'information pendant les saccades. Admirez la planification, donc, est le processus de realisation de la fovea a travers une scene en temps reel au service de l'activite perceptive, cognitive et comportementale en cours. La question d'exactement ce qui se passe au cours de fixations est toujours quelque chose d'un puzzle, mais l'effet de la tache visuelle sur le modele et les specifications des mouvements oculaires a ete longuement etudie dans la litterature.Bien que l'effet des taches visuelles comme la lecture, le comptage et la recherche, sur le modele des mouvements oculaires a ete etudiee pour differentes taches, il n'ya pas beaucoup fait dans le domaine de l'optique-tache inference a partir des mouvements oculaires. Dans ce travail, nous developpons une methode probabiliste de deduire le visual-tache d'un spectateur par l'analyze des mouvements oculaires. Deux scenarios differents sont etudies dans la these. D'abord une methode est developpee pour deduire les taches de stimuli synthetiques, ou l'emplacement de tous les objets dans l'image sont donnes au modele. Dans le second groupe de modeles, les taches sont executees sur un ensemble d'images naturelles, ou aucune information prealable sur l'emplacement des cibles sont fournis pour le modele.Une approche probabiliste pour tache inference est presente, qui est base sur la theorie des modeles de Markov caches (HHM). Un HMM est un modele statistique base sur les processus de Markov. Le modele propose est utilise dans le contexte de l'apprentissage bayesien pour realiser une inference statistique pleinement pouvant integrer differentes sources d'information sur la tache en cours.Afin d'evaluer la performance du modele, les resultats de la tache inference sont presentes sous forme de matrices de confusion et sont compares aux resultats de l'inference des modeles d'attention classiques. Les resultats soutiennent l'idee de la modelisation de l'attention en utilisant les HMM et proposent un cadre probabiliste solide pour tache inference utilisant les HMM

Digital music performance for mobile devices based on magnetic interaction

Digital music performance requires a high degree of interaction with input controllers that can provide fast feedback on the user's action. One of the primary considerations of professional artists is a powerful and creative tool that minimizes the number of steps required for the speed-demanding processes. Nowadays, mobile devices have become popular digital instruments for musical performance. Most of the applications designed for mobile devices use touch screen, keypad, or accelerometer as interaction modalities. In this paper, we present a novel interface for musical performance that is based on a magnetic interaction between a user and a device. The proposed method constitutes a touchless interaction modality that is based on the mutual effect between the magnetic field surrounding a device and that of a properly shaped magnet. Extending the interaction space beyond the physical boundary of a device provides the user with higher degree of flexibility for musical performance which, in turn, can open doors to a wide spectrum of new functionalities in digital music performance and production

JAGN1 mutation with distinct clinical features; two case reports and literature review

Abstract Jagunal homolog 1 (JAGN1) has been recognized as an essential protein in neutrophil function. The mutated JAGN1 is responsible for immunodeficiency related to innate and humoral defense mechanisms. This deficiency impairs neutrophil development and function, leading to recurrent infections and facial dysmorphism as phenotypic consequences of severe congenital neutropenia (SCN). We report two siblings having the reported JAGN1 mutation with different clinical manifestations. Recurrent abscess formation unresponsive to antibiotic therapy, a history of delayed umbilical separation, frequent bacterial or fungal infection, dysmorphic face, failure to thrive, and other coexisting organ abnormalities should prompt physicians to syndromic immunodeficiencies involving neutrophils. Genetic investigations to elucidate the responsible mutation is critical as clinical management varies. Once the diagnosis is confirmed, a multi-disciplinary team should perform further workups to investigate other coexisting malformations and neurodevelopmental evaluation