Analyzing mutual gaze statistically in video conversation

Multimediatekniikan nykykehitys on tuomassa vuorovaikutteisten, animoitujen virtuaalihahmojen toteutuksen osaksi käyttöliittymäsuunnittelua. Mitä luonnollisempi ihmisen ja hahmon välisestä vuorovaikutustilanteesta halutaan, sitä enemmän hahmon tulee katsekäyttäytymiseltään muistuttaa ihmistä. Vaikka erilaisia katseenohjausalgoritmeja on viime vuosina testattu monia, ei niistä yksikään ole vielä tiettävästi perustunut parametreihin, jotka olisi mitattu suoraan kahden ihmisen välisestä aidosta keskustelusta. Tässä diplomityössä tutkittiin kahden henkilön katsekäyttäytymistä reaaliaikaisessa videokeskustelussa. Tavoitteena oli selvittää, millaista tilastollista dataa henkilöiden katseen kohdistamisista voidaan erityisesti katsekontaktin osalta saada, kun katseiden suunnat mitataan molemmilta henkilöiltä samanaikaisesti. Diplomityö toteutettiin mittaamalla koehenkilöparien silmänliikkeet kahden videopohjaisen katseenseurantalaitteiston avulla kolmessa erilaisessa kokeessa. Lähtökohtana oli ajatus, että kahden ihmisen välinen videokeskustelu on tilanteena vertailukelpoinen ihmisen ja virtuaalihahmon välisen kommunikaation kanssa. Työn tuloksena saatiin laskettua 32 yksittäistä tunnuslukua koehenkilöiden katsekäyttäytymisestä. Lukujen väliset keskinäiset riippuvuudet laskettiin myös. Voimakkaita yhteyksiä havaittiin esimerkiksi yksilön katseen prosentuaalisen kokonaismäärän ja katseen keskipituuden välillä. Tuloksia voidaan hyödyntää kehitettäessä ja testattaessa olemassa olevia katseenohjausalgoritmeja virtuaalihahmojen suunnittelutyössä.The development of multimedia technology is making the implementation of interactive, animated, Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) a part of interface designing. The more natural interaction one wants, the more should the agent's gaze behaviour resemble that of a human being. Even though various different gaze control algorithms have been tested in the past few years, as far as is known, none of them have been based on parameters measured directly from an authentic conversation between two people. This Master's Thesis examined gaze behaviour between two people in real-time video conversation. The goal was to discover what kind of statistical data of the subjects' gaze behaviour, mutual gaze in particular, can be gathered when gaze directions of both subjects are measured simultaneously. The Master's Thesis was carried out by measuring the dyads' eye movements with the help of two video-based eye trackers in three different experiments. The experiments were based on the notion that as a situation, a video conversation between two people is comparable to communication between a person and an ECA. As a result, one was able to calculate 32 separate key figures in the subjects' gaze behaviour. The correlations between the figures were also calculated. Significant correlations were observed between, for example, subjects' total gaze and mean duration of gaze. The results can be used in developing and testing existing gaze control algorithms and in designing ECAs

Spiritually ours, factually yours: Karelia and Russia in Finnish public consciousness

Diese Veröffentlichung erforscht auf der Grundlage einer Untersuchung der führenden finnischen Tageszeitung Helsingin Sanomat die Einstellungen und das Verständnis der Finnen zu Russland. Sie beschäftigt sich besonders mit der sogenannten Karelien-Frage und die Art und Weise, wie diese die öffentliche Diskussion in Finnland geprägt hat. Der Artikel versucht, meinungsbildende Verhaltensweisen in den spezifischen sozialen und kulturellen Verhältnissen zu untersuchen und erläutert die Meinungsbildung als gesellschaftliches Verhalten. Er bewertet, wie sich die öffentliche Meinung, wie sie sich auf der Leserbriefseite der Zeitung ausdrückt, entwickelt hat und von den größeren Veränderungen beeinflusst worden ist, die an der Grenze stattgefunden haben. Es gibt im Laufe der Zeit eindeutige Veränderungen sowohl in quantitativem als auch qualitativen Sinn. Dies lässt sich als Darstellung eines Trends zum allgemeinen Verschwinden in der Geschichte zusammenfassen, aber auch als periodisch auftretender Effekt und als Zusammenspiel zwischen bilateralen Beziehungen und allgemeineren geopolitischer Veränderungen.Based on an analysis of the leading Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, this paper explores Finnish attitudes towards and understandings of Russia. It pays special attention to the so-called Karelia Question and the way it has shaped public discussion in Finland. The article seeks to investigate human signifying practices in the region’s specific social and cultural circumstances and explains meaning-making as a social practice. It evaluates how public opinion, as expressed in the letters page of the newspaper, has evolved and been affected by the broader changes that have occurred at the border. There are clear changes over time, both in a quantitative and qualitative sense. This may be summarised as representing a trend of general fading into history, but also as a more cyclical effect and as the interplay between bilateral relations and broader geopolitical changes

Responsive and Personalized Web Layouts with Integer Programming

Over the past decade, responsive web design (RWD) has become the de facto standard for adapting web pages to a wide range of devices used for browsing. While RWD has improved the usability of web pages, it is not without drawbacks and limitations: designers and developers must manually design the web layouts for multiple screen sizes and implement associated adaptation rules, and its "one responsive design fits all"approach lacks support for personalization. This paper presents a novel approach for automated generation of responsive and personalized web layouts. Given an existing web page design and preferences related to design objectives, our integer programming -based optimizer generates a consistent set of web designs. Where relevant data is available, these can be further automatically personalized for the user and browsing device. The paper includes presentation of techniques for runtime adaptation of the designs generated into a fully responsive grid layout for web browsing. Results from our ratings-based online studies with end users (N = 86) and designers (N = 64) show that the proposed approach can automatically create high-quality responsive web layouts for a variety of real-world websites.Peer reviewe

Does language switching behavior rely on general executive functions?

The assumption that everyday language switching trains bilinguals’ executive functions (EF) presupposes that language switching engages domain-general EF. This study examined associations between three types of tasks in a group of Finnish-English late bilinguals: everyday language switching frequency assessed with Ecological Momentary Assessment, language switching performance on a cued bilingual naming task, and EF as measured with Simon, Flanker, and Number-letter tasks. Cued switching performance showed mainly positive associations with EF performance, but the associations between everyday language switching and cued switching performance, and between everyday switching and the EF tasks were largely against our hypotheses. The findings indicate that participants with lower monitoring capacity make more everyday language switches. This speaks against the idea that everyday language switching would facilitate executive functioning. The results suggest that associations between language switching and general EF are more complex than current models assume.</p

FinnTransFrame : translating frames in the FinnFrameNet project

The article details the formational process of the FinnTransFrame corpus, a part of the FinnFrameNet project. In addition to a large annotated frame semantic corpus of natural language examples, the project created a separate corpus of examples translated from English to Finnish. The research question when creating the FinnTransFrame corpus was to see to what extent the various frames of the original Berkeley FrameNet transfer into Finnish in translated examples, i.e. what are the main problems and how can they be categorized? A variety of Berkeley FrameNet examples were chosen from different frames and then translated by professionals. The FinnFrameNet annotation team checked all the examples and their translations to see if the frames remained intact in translation. Problematic examples were tagged according to the type of the encountered problem, with the main focus on the type of fine-grained mismatches of meaning that caused frame changes even when the translation was the best possible one. The frame-loss amounted to 4.2% of the 88,209 relevant example sentences. Filtering out sentences with other types of problems, we found that 88.1% of all the frame instances still translated into Finnish with their frame intact. In addition, the article analyzes the error types in the problematic frames.Peer reviewe

Risk of lymphoid malignancies increased after Puumala virus infection in Finland, 2009-2019: A retrospective register-based cohort study

Objectives: The Puumala virus (PUUV) is a hantavirus that causes hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome. Studies showing an increased risk of lymphoid malignancies after hantavirus infection, together with the observation that PUUV infects B cells, motivated us to study the risk of lymphoid malignancies after PUUV infection. Methods: We linked data from the Finnish Cancer Registry and National Infectious Diseases Register for 2009-2019. We used a time-dependent Cox regression model to evaluate the hazard of the lymphoid malignancies grouped according to the HAEMACARE classification. Results: We identified 68 cases of lymphoid malignancies after PUUV infection among 16,075 PUUV-infected individuals during 61,114,826 person-years of observation. A total of 10 cases occurred within 3-<12 months and 38 within 1-<5 years after PUUV infection, and the risk of lymphoid malignancies increased with hazard ratios (HRs) of 2.0 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.1-3.7) and 1.6 (95% CI, 1.2-2.3), respectively. The group of mature B cell neoplasms showed an increased risk 3-<12 months and 1-<5 years after PUUV infection, HR 2.2 (95% CI, 1.2-4.3) and HR 1.8 (95% CI, 1.3-2.5), respectively. Conclusion: PUUV infection is associated with lymphoid malignancies in the Finnish population, supporting the earlier studies. Further research is required to understand the pathophysiological mechanisms behind this association