Other Computer Engineering Commons^™

Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume. Volume 2

Human-Machine Communication

This is the complete volume of HMC Volume 2.

Reading Robot, Gillian Watts, Andrew Myers, Sabrinna Tan, Taylor Klein, Omeed Djassemi

General Engineering

Presently, there is an insufficient availability of human experts to assist students in reading competency and comprehension. Our team’s goal was to create an improved socially assistive robot for use by therapists, teachers, and parents to help children and adults develop reading skills while they do not have access to specialists. HAPI is a socially assistive robot that we created with the goal of helping students practice their reading comprehension skills. HAPI enables a student to improve their reading skills without an educator present, while enabling educators to review the student's performance remotely. Design constraints included: physical size, weight, duration …

Cyber Metaphors And Cyber Goals: Lessons From “Flatland”, Pierre Trepagnier

Military Cyber Affairs

Reasoning about complex and abstract ideas is greatly influenced by the choice of metaphors through which they are represented. In this paper we consider the framing effect in military doctrine of considering cyberspace as a domain of action, parallel to the traditional domains of land, sea, air, and space. By means of the well-known Victorian science-fiction novella Flatland, we offer a critique of this dominant cyber metaphor. In Flatland, the problems of lower-dimensional beings comprehending additional dimensions are explored at some length. Inspired by Flatland, our suggested alternate metaphor for cyber is an additional (fourth) dimension. We …

Content Mining Techniques For Detecting Cyberbullying In Social Media, Shawniece L. Parker, Yen-Hung Hu

Virginia Journal of Science

The use of social media has become an increasingly popular trend, primarily among teenagers. A major problem concerning teens using social media is that they are often unaware of the dangers involved when using these media. They are also more inclined to misuse social media because they are often unaware of the privacy rights associated with their use, or the rights of other users. As a result, cyberbullying cases have steadily risen in recent years, often going undiscovered or not being discovered until serious harm has been caused to the victims. This study aims to create an effective algorithm that …

Network Structure, Network Flows And The Phenomenon Of Influence In Online Social Networks: An Exploratory Empirical Study Of Twitter Conversations About Youtube Product Categories, Nitin Venkat Mayande

Dissertations and Theses

Traditional marketing models are swiftly being upended by the advent of online social networks. Yet, practicing firms that are engaging with online social networks neither have a reliable theory nor sufficient practical experience to make sense of the phenomenon. Extant theory in particular is based on observations of the real world, and may thus not apply to online social networks. Practicing firms may consequently be misallocating a large amount of resources, simply because they do not know how the online social networks with which they interact are organized.

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate how online social networks …

The Mayaarch3d Project: A 3d Webgis For Analyzing Ancient Architecture And Landscapes, Jennifer Von Schwerin, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Fabio Remondino, Giorgio Agugario, Gabrio Girardi

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

There is a need in the humanities for a 3D WebGIS with analytical tools that allow researchers to analyze 3D models linked to spatially referenced data. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) allow for complex spatial analysis of 2.5D data. For example, they offer bird’s eye views of landscapes with extruded building footprints, but one cannot ‘get on the ground’ and interact with true 3D models from a pedestrian perspective. Meanwhile, 3D models and virtual environments visualize data in 3D space, but analytical tools are simple rotation or lighting effects. The MayaArch3D Project is developing a 3D WebGIS—called QueryArch3D—to allow these two …

Geospatial Virtual Heritage: A Gesture-Based 3d Gis To Engage The Public With Ancient Maya Archaeology, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Jim Robertsson, Jennifer Von Schwerin, Giorgio Agugario, Fabio Remondino, Gabrio Girardi

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

This paper presents our research to develop a gesture-based 3D GIS system to engage the public in cultural heritage. It compares two types of interaction—device-based vs. natural interaction— and summarizes the beta-testing results of a 3D GIS tool for archaeology, called QueryArch3D, in which participants used device-based interaction (i.e. mouse and keyboard). It follows with a description of the gesture-based system—that we developed in response to these beta-tests. The system uses QueryArch3D and Microsoft’s Kinect to enable people use body movements (in lieu of keyboard or mouse) to navigate a virtual reality landscape, query 3D objects, and call up photos, …

A Crowdsourcing Approach To Labelling A Mood Induced Speech Corpus, John Snel, Alexey Tarasov, Charlie Cullen, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

This paper demonstrates the use of crowdsourcing to accumulate ratings from na ̈ıve listeners as a means to provide labels for a naturalistic emotional speech dataset. In order to do so, listening tasks are performed with a rating tool, which is delivered via the web. The rating requirements are based on the classical dimensions, activation and evaluation, presented to the participant as two discretised 5-point scales. Great emphasis is placed on the participant’s overall understanding of the task, and on the ease-of-use of the tool so that labelling accuracy is reinforced. The accumulation process is ongoing with a goal to …

Kinect And 3d Gis In Archaeology, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Fabio Remondino, Jim Robersson, Jennifer Von Schwerin, Giorgio Agugiaro, Gabrio Girardi

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

This paper explores the potential of using Microsoft's Kinect to create a low-cost and portable system to virtually navigate, through a prototype 3D GIS, the digitally reconstructed ancient Maya city and UNESCO World Heritage Site of Copan in Honduras. The 3D GIS, named QueryArch3D, was developed as part of the MayaArch3D project (http://mayaarch3d.unm.edu), which explores the possibilities of integrating databases and 3D digital tools for research and teaching on ancient architectures and landscapes. The developed system, based on the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST), controls in a remote and touchless mode the movements in the 3D environment in …

Obtaining Speech Assets For Judgement Analysis On Low-Pass Filtered Emotional Speech, John Snel, Charlie Cullen

Conference papers

Investigating the emotional content in speech from acoustic characteristics requires separating the semantic con- tent from the acoustic channel. For natural emotional speech, a widely used method to separate the two channels is the use of cue masking. Our objective is to investigate the use of cue masking in non-acted emotional speech by analyzing the extent to which filtering impacts the perception of emotional content of the modified speech material. However, obtaining a corpus of emotional speech can be quite difficult whereby verifying the emotional content is an issue thoroughly discussed. Currently, speech research is showing a tendency toward constructing …

Emotional Speech Corpus Construction, Annotation And Distribution, Brian Vaughan, Charlie Cullen, Spyros Kousidis, John Mcauley

Conference papers

This paper details a process of creating an emotional speech corpus by collecting natural emotional speech assets, analysisng and tagging them (for certain acoustic and linguistic features) and annotating them within an on-line database. The definition of specific metadata for use with an emotional speech corpus is crucial, in that poorly (or inaccurately) annotated assets are of little use in analysis. This problem is compounded by the lack of standardisation for speech corpora, particularly in relation to emotion content. The ISLE Metadata Initiative (IMDI) is the only cohesive attempt at corpus metadata standardisation performed thus far. Although not a comprehensive …