05491 Abstracts Collection -- Spatial Cognition: Specialization and Integration

From 04.12.05 to 09.12.05, the Dagstuhl Seminar 05491 ``Spatial Cognition: Specialization and Integration\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Feature space analysis for human activity recognition in smart environments

Activity classification from smart environment data is typically done employing ad hoc solutions customised to the particular dataset at hand. In this work we introduce a general purpose collection of features for recognising human activities across datasets of different type, size and nature. The first experimental test of our feature collection achieves state of the art results on well known datasets, and we provide a feature importance analysis in order to compare the potential relevance of features for activity classification in different datasets

Exploring the GLIDE model for Human Action-effect Prediction

We address the following action-effect prediction task. Given an image depicting an initial state of the world and an action expressed in text, predict an image depicting the state of the world following the action. The prediction should have the same scene context as the input image. We explore the use of the recently proposed GLIDE model for performing this task. GLIDE is a generative neural network that can synthesize (inpaint) masked areas of an image, conditioned on a short piece of text. Our idea is to mask-out a region of the input image where the effect of the action is expected to occur. GLIDE is then used to inpaint the masked region conditioned on the required action. In this way, the resulting image has the same background context as the input image, updated to show the effect of the action. We give qualitative results from experiments using the EPIC dataset of ego-centric videos labelled with actions

A logic of directions

We propose a logic of directions for points (LD)over 2D Euclidean space, which formalises primary direction relations east (E), west (W), and indeterminate east/west (Iew), north (N), south (S) and indeterminate north/south (Ins). We provide a sound and complete axiomatisation of it, and prove that its satisfiability problem is NP-complete

Unsupervised grounding of textual descriptions of object features and actions in video

We propose a novel method for learning visual concepts and their correspondence to the words of a natural language. The concepts and correspondences are jointly inferred from video clips depicting simple actions involving multiple objects, together with corresponding natural language commands that would elicit these actions. Individual objects are first detected, together with quantitative measurements of their colour, shape, location and motion. Visual concepts emerge from the co-occurrence of regions within a measurement space and words of the language. The method is evaluated on a set of videos generated automatically using computer graphics from a database of initial and goal configurations of objects. Each video is annotated with multiple commands in natural language obtained from human annotators using crowd sourcing

A Logic of East and West

We propose a logic of east and west (LEW) for points in 1D Euclidean space. It formalises primitive direction relations: east (E), west (W) and indeterminate east/west (Iew). It has a parameter τ ∈ ℕ&gt;1, which is referred to as the level of indeterminacy in directions. For every τ ∈ ℕ&gt;1, we provide a sound and complete axiomatisation of LEW, and prove that its satisfiability problem is NP-complete. In addition, we show that the finite axiomatisability of LEW depends on τ: if τ = 2 or τ = 3, then there exists a finite sound and complete axiomatisation; if τ &gt; 3, then the logic is not finitely axiomatisable. LEW can be easily extended to higher-dimensional Euclidean spaces. Extending LEW to 2D Euclidean space makes it suitable for reasoning about not perfectly aligned representations of the same spatial objects in different datasets, for example, in crowd-sourced digital maps.</p

SEEING THE UNSEEN: DELIVERING INTEGRATED UNDERGROUND UTILITY DATA IN THE UK

In earlier work we proposed a framework to integrate heterogeneous geospatial utility data in the UK. This paper provides an update on the techniques used to resolve semantic and schematic heterogeneities in the UK utility domain. Approaches for data delivery are discussed, including descriptions of three pilot projects and domain specific visualization issues are considered. A number of practical considerations are discussed that will impact on how any implementation architecture is derived from the integration framework. Considerations of stability, security, currency, operational impact and response time can reveal a number of conflicting constraints. The impacts of these constraints are discussed in respect of either a virtual or materialised delivery system. 1