Resolving Mismatches in U.S. Ocean Governance

Problems in ocean resource management derive from governance, not science. Ocean zoning would replace mismatched and fragmented approaches with integrated regulatory domains

Detection of Affective States From Text and Speech for Real-Time Human–Computer Interaction

Objective: The goal of this work is to develop and test an automated system methodology that can detect emotion from text and speech features. Background: Affective human-computer interaction will be critical for the success of new systems that will be prevalent in the 21st century. Such systems will need to properly deduce human emotional state before they can determine how to best interact with people. Method: Corpora and machine learning classification models are used to train and test a methodology for emotion detection. The methodology uses a stepwise approach to detect sentiment in sentences by first filtering out neutral sentences, then distinguishing among positive, negative, and five emotion classes. Results: Results of the classification between emotion and neutral sentences achieved recall accuracies as high as 77% in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) corpus and 61% in the Louisiana State University medical drama (LSU-MD) corpus for emotion samples. Once neutral sentences were filtered out, the methodology achieved accuracy scores for detecting negative sentences as high as 92.3%. Conclusion: Results of the feature analysis indicate that speech spectral features are better than speech prosodic features for emotion detection. Accumulated sentiment composition text features appear to be very important as well. This work contributes to the study of human communication by providing a better understanding of how language factors help to best convey human emotion and how to best automate this process. Application: Results of this study can be used to develop better automated assistive systems that interpret human language and respond to emotions through 3-D computer graphics. Copyright © 2012, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society

Identifying the Targets of the Emotions Expressed in Health Forums

International audienceIn the framework of the French project Patients’ Mind, we focus on the semi-automatic analysis of online health forums. Online health forums are areas of exchange where patients, on condition of anonymity, can talk about their personal experiences freely. These resources are a gold mine for health professionals, giving them access to patient to patient exchanges, patient to health professional exchanges and even health professional to health professional exchanges. In this paper, we focus on the emotions expressed by the authors of the messages and more precisely on the targets of these emotions. We suggest an innovative method to identify these targets, based on the notion of semantic roles and using the FrameNet resource. Our method has been successfully validated on real data set

Security spheres: a phenomenology of maritime spatial practices

This article explores maritime protection zones (MPZ), which are being created in the territorial waters of a number of European states. Through the work of Gaston Bachelard and Peter Sloterdijk, the article analyses maritime zonation as a paradigmatic global security mechanism. It examines how maritime spatial planning seeks to reconfigure sea-space into multi-dimensional spheres of predictability and rationality. These processes, it proposes, seek to routinize the use of sea-space and reconcile tensions between the governance of land and sea, and between fixed infrastructure and mobile capital flows. The political and economic redistribution at stake in the construction of a global network of vast maritime zones, which act as hubs of wealth creation and environmental management, creates further tensions where commercial and military security imaginaries meet local and ecological interests. The article traces the ontology of multi-dimensional zonation and concludes that space which emerges from a pluralist and less anthropocentric understanding of the maritime would provide more effective security