Detecting Hands in Egocentric Videos: Towards Action Recognition

Recently, there has been a growing interest in analyzing human daily activities from data collected by wearable cameras. Since the hands are involved in a vast set of daily tasks, detecting hands in egocentric images is an important step towards the recognition of a variety of egocentric actions. However, besides extreme illumination changes in egocentric images, hand detection is not a trivial task because of the intrinsic large variability of hand appearance. We propose a hand detector that exploits skin modeling for fast hand proposal generation and Convolutional Neural Networks for hand recognition. We tested our method on UNIGE-HANDS dataset and we showed that the proposed approach achieves competitive hand detection results

Modeling Expertise in Assistive Navigation Interfaces for Blind People

Evaluating the impact of expertise and route knowledge on task performance can guide the design of intelligent and adaptive navigation interfaces. Expertise has been relatively unexplored in the context of assistive indoor navigation interfaces for blind people. To quantify the complex relationship between the user's walking patterns, route learning, and adaptation to the interface, we conducted a study with 8 blind participants. The participants repeated a set of navigation tasks while using a smartphone-based turn-by-turn navigation guidance app. The results demonstrate the gradual evolution of user skill and knowledge throughout the route repetitions, significantly impacting the task completion time. In addition to the exploratory analysis, we take a step towards tailoring the navigation interface to the user's needs by proposing a personalized recurrent neural net work-based behavior model for expertise level classification

Non-standard quantum so(3,2) and its contractions

A full (triangular) quantum deformation of so(3,2) is presented by considering this algebra as the conformal algebra of the 2+1 dimensional Minkowskian spacetime. Non-relativistic contractions are analysed and used to obtain quantum Hopf structures for the conformal algebras of the 2+1 Galilean and Carroll spacetimes. Relations between the latter and the null-plane quantum Poincar\'e algebra are studied.Comment: 9 pages, LaTe

Probabilistic Guarantees for Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning

Deep reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to many control tasks, but the application of such agents in safety-critical scenarios has been limited due to safety concerns. Rigorous testing of these controllers is challenging, particularly when they operate in probabilistic environments due to, for example, hardware faults or noisy sensors. We propose MOSAIC, an algorithm for measuring the safety of deep reinforcement learning agents in stochastic settings. Our approach is based on the iterative construction of a formal abstraction of a controller's execution in an environment, and leverages probabilistic model checking of Markov decision processes to produce probabilistic guarantees on safe behaviour over a finite time horizon. It produces bounds on the probability of safe operation of the controller for different initial configurations and identifies regions where correct behaviour can be guaranteed. We implement and evaluate our approach on agents trained for several benchmark control problems

h-deformation of GL(1|1)

h-deformation of (graded) Hopf algebra of functions on supergroup GL(1|1) is introduced via a contration of GL_q (1|1). The deformation parameter h is odd (grassmann). Related differential calculus on h-superplane is presented.Comment: latex file, 8 pages, minor change

Integrable deformations of oscillator chains from quantum algebras

A family of completely integrable nonlinear deformations of systems of N harmonic oscillators are constructed from the non-standard quantum deformation of the sl(2,R) algebra. Explicit expressions for all the associated integrals of motion are given, and the long-range nature of the interactions introduced by the deformation is shown to be linked to the underlying coalgebra structure. Separability and superintegrability properties of such systems are analysed, and their connection with classical angular momentum chains is used to construct a non-standard integrable deformation of the XXX hyperbolic Gaudin system.Comment: 15 pages, LaTe

Customized television: Standards compliant advanced digital television

This correspondence describes a European Union supported collaborative project called CustomTV based on the premise that future TV sets will provide all sorts of multimedia information and interactivity, as well as manage all such services according to each user’s or group of user’s preferences/profiles. We have demonstrated the potential of recent standards (MPEG-4 and MPEG-7) to implement such a scenario by building the following services: an advanced EPG, Weather Forecasting, and Stock Exchange/Flight Information

Irreducible decomposition for tensor prodect representations of Jordanian quantum algebras

Tensor products of irreducible representations of the Jordanian quantum algebras U_h(sl(2)) and U_h(su(1,1)) are considered. For both the highest weight finite dimensional representations of U_h(sl(2)) and lowest weight infinite dimensional ones of U_h(su(1,1)), it is shown that tensor product representations are reducible and that the decomposition rules to irreducible representations are exactly the same as those of corresponding Lie algebras.Comment: LaTeX, 14pages, no figur

Jordanian Twist Quantization of D=4 Lorentz and Poincare Algebras and D=3 Contraction Limit

We describe in detail two-parameter nonstandard quantum deformation of D=4 Lorentz algebra $\mathfrak{o}(3,1)$, linked with Jordanian deformation of $\mathfrak{sl} (2;\mathbb{C})$. Using twist quantization technique we obtain the explicit formulae for the deformed coproducts and antipodes. Further extending the considered deformation to the D=4 Poincar\'{e} algebra we obtain a new Hopf-algebraic deformation of four-dimensional relativistic symmetries with dimensionless deformation parameter. Finally, we interpret $\mathfrak{o}(3,1)$ as the D=3 de-Sitter algebra and calculate the contraction limit $R\to\infty$ ($R$ -- de-Sitter radius) providing explicit Hopf algebra structure for the quantum deformation of the D=3 Poincar\'{e} algebra (with masslike deformation parameters), which is the two-parameter light-cone $\kappa$-deformation of the D=3 Poincar\'{e} symmetry.Comment: 13 pages, no figure