Multi-score Learning for Affect Recognition: the Case of Body Postures

An important challenge in building automatic affective state recognition systems is establishing the ground truth. When the groundtruth is not available, observers are often used to label training and testing sets. Unfortunately, inter-rater reliability between observers tends to vary from fair to moderate when dealing with naturalistic expressions. Nevertheless, the most common approach used is to label each expression with the most frequent label assigned by the observers to that expression. In this paper, we propose a general pattern recognition framework that takes into account the variability between observers for automatic affect recognition. This leads to what we term a multi-score learning problem in which a single expression is associated with multiple values representing the scores of each available emotion label. We also propose several performance measurements and pattern recognition methods for this framework, and report the experimental results obtained when testing and comparing these methods on two affective posture datasets

Surface-wave imaging of the weakly-extended Malawi Rift from ambient-noise and teleseismic Rayleigh waves from onshore and lake-bottom seismometers

Located at the southernmost sector of the Western Branch of the East African Rift System, the Malawi Rift exemplifies an active, magma-poor, weakly extended continental rift. To investigate the controls on rifting, we image crustal and uppermost mantle structure beneath the region using ambient-noise and teleseismic Rayleigh-wave phase velocities between 9 and 100 s period. Our study includes six lake-bottom seismometers located in Lake Malawi (Nyasa), the first time seismometers have been deployed in any of the African rift lakes. Noise-levels in the lake are lower than that of shallow oceanic environments and allow successful application of compliance corrections and instrument orientation determination. Resulting phase-velocity maps reveal slow velocities primarily confined to Lake Malawi at short periods (T 25 s) a prominent low-velocity anomaly exists beneath the Rungwe Volcanic Province at the northern terminus of the rift basin. Estimates of phase-velocity sensitivity indicates these low velocities occur within the lithospheric mantle and potentially uppermost asthenosphere, suggesting that mantle processes may control the association of volcanic centers and the localization of magmatism. Beneath the main portion of the Malawi Rift, a modest reduction in velocity is also observed at periods sensitive to the crust and upper mantle, but these velocities are much higher than those observed beneath Rungwe

Factors Associated with Revision Surgery after Internal Fixation of Hip Fractures

Background: Femoral neck fractures are associated with high rates of revision surgery after management with internal fixation. Using data from the Fixation using Alternative Implants for the Treatment of Hip fractures (FAITH) trial evaluating methods of internal fixation in patients with femoral neck fractures, we investigated associations between baseline and surgical factors and the need for revision surgery to promote healing, relieve pain, treat infection or improve function over 24 months postsurgery. Additionally, we investigated factors associated with (1) hardware removal and (2) implant exchange from cancellous screws (CS) or sliding hip screw (SHS) to total hip arthroplasty, hemiarthroplasty, or another internal fixation device. Methods: We identified 15 potential factors a priori that may be associated with revision surgery, 7 with hardware removal, and 14 with implant exchange. We used multivariable Cox proportional hazards analyses in our investigation. Results: Factors associated with increased risk of revision surgery included: female sex, [hazard ratio (HR) 1.79, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.25-2.50; P = 0.001], higher body mass index (fo

Mobile Visual Aid Tools for Users with Visual Impairments

Visual impairments affect a large percentage of population in various ways [1] including color-deficiency, presbyopia, low vision, and other more severe visual disabilities. Current estimates suggest there are approximately 10 million blind or visually impaired individuals in the United States alone. Visual impairmen