Audio-Visual Sentiment Analysis for Learning Emotional Arcs in Movies

Stories can have tremendous power -- not only useful for entertainment, they can activate our interests and mobilize our actions. The degree to which a story resonates with its audience may be in part reflected in the emotional journey it takes the audience upon. In this paper, we use machine learning methods to construct emotional arcs in movies, calculate families of arcs, and demonstrate the ability for certain arcs to predict audience engagement. The system is applied to Hollywood films and high quality shorts found on the web. We begin by using deep convolutional neural networks for audio and visual sentiment analysis. These models are trained on both new and existing large-scale datasets, after which they can be used to compute separate audio and visual emotional arcs. We then crowdsource annotations for 30-second video clips extracted from highs and lows in the arcs in order to assess the micro-level precision of the system, with precision measured in terms of agreement in polarity between the system's predictions and annotators' ratings. These annotations are also used to combine the audio and visual predictions. Next, we look at macro-level characterizations of movies by investigating whether there exist `universal shapes' of emotional arcs. In particular, we develop a clustering approach to discover distinct classes of emotional arcs. Finally, we show on a sample corpus of short web videos that certain emotional arcs are statistically significant predictors of the number of comments a video receives. These results suggest that the emotional arcs learned by our approach successfully represent macroscopic aspects of a video story that drive audience engagement. Such machine understanding could be used to predict audience reactions to video stories, ultimately improving our ability as storytellers to communicate with each other.Comment: Data Mining (ICDM), 2017 IEEE 17th International Conference o

Uncertain Costs, Unclear Benefits: China’s Social Insurance System and Foreign Workers

China’s fairly recent implementation of a social security insurance scheme that includes foreign workers has generated unintended uncertainties and inconsistencies both for foreign companies in China and for Chinese companies working outside China, without generating clear benefits for foreign workers. This Note provides an overview of the new scheme, which requires, for the first time, all foreign workers and their employers to pay into the social security insurance system. Weaknesses in this new scheme include inconsistent implementation, scattered timelines, and incomplete information on coverage. In the face of these and other shortcomings, China should focus on the benefits of reciprocity and totalization by implementing more bilateral social security agreements as well as clarifying the existing social insurance system

Start-up Power Requirements of Ammonia Filled Aerospace Thermosyphon Heat Pipes

Boiling and condensing of internal working fluids are essential heat transfer concepts which heat pipe technology relies on for transporting a large amount of heat between two distanced points effectively. Tilt angle and working fluid saturation temperature have a direct impact on how well the evaporator is flooded. This paper focuses on how the tilt angle and the working fluid saturation temperature affect the start-up heat input requirements for an S shaped axial grooved ammonia thermosyphon heat pipe. A series of experiments was performed by supplying and extracting heat to the evaporator and condenser of the thermosyphon heat pipe. Temperature of the evaporator and condenser was monitored to capture start-up behavior upon heat input. The evaporator temperature was found to be slightly elevated before the internal working fluid begins to boil. It decreased once boiling starts and initiates the thermosyphon process. The test results showed that the evaporator start-up temperature difference was found to be higher as fluid saturation temperature increases, and becomes lower as the fluid saturation temperature decreases. The start-up heat input requirement to initiate start-up in the evaporator was determined to be constant throughout the range of tilt angles and saturation temperatures

Characterisation & optimisation of computational functional blocks for ATM switches GaAs MESFET technology

Thesis (MESc) -- University of Adelaide, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 199