Computer Sciences Commons^™

Investigating The Impact Of Unsupervised Feature-Extraction From Multi-Wavelength Image Data For Photometric Classification Of Stars, Galaxies And Qsos, Annika Lindh

Conference papers

Accurate classification of astronomical objects currently relies on spectroscopic data. Acquiring this data is time-consuming and expensive compared to photometric data. Hence, improving the accuracy of photometric classification could lead to far better coverage and faster classification pipelines. This paper investigates the benefit of using unsupervised feature-extraction from multi-wavelength image data for photometric classification of stars, galaxies and QSOs. An unsupervised Deep Belief Network is used, giving the model a higher level of interpretability thanks to its generative nature and layer-wise training. A Random Forest classifier is used to measure the contribution of the novel features compared to a set …

Towards A Computational Model Of Frame Of Reference Alignment In Swedish Dialogue, Simon Dobnik, Christine Howes, Kim Demaret, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

In this paper we examine how people negotiate, interpret and repair the frame of reference (FoR) in online text based dialogues discussing spatial scenes in Swedish. We describe work-in-progress in which participants are given different perspectives of the same scene and asked to locate several objects that are only shown on one of their pictures. This task requires participants to coordinate on FoR in order to identify the missing objects. This study has implications for situated dialogue systems.

Fundamentals Of Machine Learning For Neural Machine Translation, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

This paper presents a short introduction to neural networks and how they are used for machine translation and concludes with some discussion on the current research challenges being addressed by neural machine translation (NMT) research. The primary goal of this paper is to give a no-tears introduction to NMT to readers that do not have a computer science or mathematical background. The secondary goal is to provide the reader with a deep enough understanding of NMT that they can appreciate the strengths of weaknesses of the technology. The paper starts with a brief introduction to standard feed-forward neural networks (what …

The Role Of Perception In Situated Spatial Reference, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

This position paper set out the argument that an interesting avenue of exploration and study of universals and variation in spatial reference is to address this topic in termsa of the universals in human perception and attention and to explore how these universals impact on spatial reference across cultures and languages.

A Pilot Study Of Comparison Gesture Analysis In Motion Driven Video Games, Fabrizio Valerio Covone, Brian Vaughan, Charlie Cullen

Conference Papers

This study investigates whether there are significant differences in the gestures made by gamers and non-gamers whilst playing commercial games that employ gesture inputs. Specifically, the study focuses on testing a prototype of multimodal capture tool that we used to obtain real-time audio, video and skeletal gesture data. Additionally, we developed an experimental design framework for the acquisition of spatio-temporal gesture data and analysed the vector magnitude of a gesture to compare the relative displacement of each participant whilst playing a game.

Investigating The Impact Of Unsupervised Feature-Extraction From Multi-Wavelength Image Data For Photometric Classification Of Stars, Galaxies And Qsos, Annika Lindh

Dissertations

This thesis reviews the current state of photometric classification in Astronomy and identifies two main gaps: a dependence on handcrafted rules, and a lack of interpretability in the more successful classifiers. To address this, Deep Learning and Computer Vision were used to create a more interpretable model, using unsupervised training to reduce human bias.

The main contribution is the investigation into the impact of using unsupervised feature-extraction from multi-wavelength image data for the classification task. The feature-extraction is achieved by implementing an unsupervised Deep Belief Network to extract lower-dimensionality features from the multi-wavelength image data captured by the Sloan Digital …

Towards A Deep Learning-Based Activity Discovery System, Eoin Rogers, John D. Kelleher, Robert J. Ross

Conference papers

Activity discovery is a challenging machine learning problem where we seek to uncover new or altered behavioural patterns in sensor data. In this paper we motivate and introduce a novel approach to activity discovery based on modern deep learning techniques. We hypothesise that our proposed approach can deal with interleaved datasets in a more intelligent manner than most existing AD methods. We also build upon prior work building hierarchies of activities that capture the inherent ag- gregate nature of complex activities and show how this could plausibly be adapted to work with the deep learning technique we present. Finally, we …

A Model For Attention-Driven Judgements In Type Theory With Records, Simon Dobnik, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

This paper makes three contributions to the discussion on the applicability of Type Theory with Records (TTR) to embodied dialogue agents. First, it highlights the problem of type assignment or judgements in practical implementations which is resource intensive. Second, it presents a judgement control mechanism, which consists of grouping of types into clusters or states by their thematic relations and selection of types following two mechanisms inspired by the Load Theory of selective attention and cognitive control (Lavie et al., 2004), that addresses this problem. Third, it presents a computational framework, based on Bayesian inference, that offers a basis for …

Mobilaudio – A Multimodal Content Delivery Platform For Geo-Services, James Carswell, Keith Gardiner, Charlie Cullen

Articles

Delivering high-quality context-relevant information in a timely manner is a priority for location-based services (LBS) where applications require an immediate response based on spatial interaction. Previous work in this area typically focused on ever more accurately determining this interaction and informing the user in the customary graphical way using the visual modality. This paper describes the research area of multimodal LBS and focuses on audio as the key delivery mechanism. This new research extends familiar graphical information delivery by introducing a geoservices platform for delivering multimodal content and navigation services. It incorporates a novel auditory user interface (AUI) that enables …

Factorized Runge-Kutta-Chebyshev Methods, Stephen O'Sullivan

Conference papers

The second-order extended stability Factorized Runge-Kutta-Chebyshev (FRKC2) class of explicit schemes for the integration of large systems of PDEs with diffusive terms is presented. FRKC2 schemes are straightforward to implement through ordered sequences of forward Euler steps with complex stepsizes, and easily parallelised for large scale problems on distributed architectures.

Preserving 7 digits for accuracy at 16 digit precision, the schemes are theoretically capable of maintaining internal stability at acceleration factors in excess of 6000 with respect to standard explicit Runge-Kutta methods. The stability domains have approximately the same extents as those of RKC schemes, and are a third longer …

Predicting Intake Of Applications For First Registration In The Property Registration Authority, Orlaith Mernagh

Dissertations

The motivation for this dissertation is rooted in a real business need. The Property Registration Authority is the state organisation tasked with maintaining a register of land ownership on the island of Ireland. The PRA currently faces a series of challenges; a high level of staff retiring and the inherent loss of knowledge associated with this trend, a lack of recruitment in recent years and a large increase in lodgement of applications for first registration as a result of legislation. The organisation therefore requires a reliable system for predicting future intake. Prior to this project, there has also been a …

Techno-Apocalypse: Technology, Religion, And Ideology In Bryan Singer’S H+, Edward Brennan

Books/Book chapters

This essay critically analyses the digital series H+. In the near future, adults who can afford them, have replaced tablets and cell phones with nanotechnology implants. The H+ implant acts as a medical diagnostic and can overlay the user's senses with a computer interface. The apocalypse comes in the form of a computer virus which infects the H+ network and instantly kills one third of humanity. The series represents the anxiety and religiosity that surrounds the possible social consequences of digital technology. It also explores the tensions and intersections between technology and faith. This essay makes the case, however, that …

Deep Level Lexical Features For Cross-Lingual Authorship Attribution, Marisa Llorens, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

Crosslingual document classification aims to classify documents written in different languages that share a common genre, topic or author. Knowledge-based methods and others based on machine translation deliver state-of-the-art classification accuracy, however because of their reliance on external resources, poorly resourced languages present a challenge for these type of methods. In this paper, we propose a novel set of language independent features that capture language use from a document at a deep level, using features that are intrinsic to the document. These features are based on vocabulary richness measurements and are text length independent and self-contained, meaning that no external …

Towards Reusable Personas For Everyday Design, Ciaran O'Leary, Fredrick Mtenzi, Claire Mcavinia

Papers, presentations and other resources

Personas are artificial character based representations of user goals, attitudes, motivations and abilities which enable designers to focus their design efforts on key, targeted users. The success of personas in design is due to their capacity to enable designers to empathize with users and understand user goals. Persona development is rooted in the rigorous collection and analysis of data specifically related to the design project being undertaken. New design projects thus require the development of new personas. Since redevelopment is not always achievable attention has turned towards reuse of personas and the underlying data. This paper reports on ongoing research …

Face Recognition-Based Real-Time System For Surveillance, Fahad Parvez Mahdi, Md. Mahmudul Habib, Susan Mckeever, A.S.M. Moslehuddin, Pandian Vasant

Articles

The ability to automatically recognize human faces based on dynamic facial images is important in security, surveillance and the health/independent living domains. Specific applications include access control to secure environments, identification of individuals at a particular place and intruder detection. This research proposes a real-time system for surveillance using cameras. The process is broken into two steps: (1) face detection and (2) face recognition to identify particular persons. For the first step, the system tracks and selects the faces of the detected persons. An efficient recognition algorithm is then used to recognize detected faces with a known database. The proposed …

Frankenfolk: Distinctiveness And Attractiveness Of Voice And Motion, Jan Ondřej, Cathy Ennis, Niamh Merriman, Carol O'Sullivan

Articles

It is common practice in movies and games to use different actors for the voice and body/face motion of a virtual character. What effect does the combination of these different modalities have on the perception of the viewer? In this article, we conduct a series of experiments to evaluate the distinctiveness and attractiveness of human motions (face and body) and voices. We also create combination characters called FrankenFolks, where we mix and match the voice, body motion, face motion, and avatar of different actors and ask which modality is most dominant when determining distinctiveness and attractiveness or whether the effects …

Using Topic Modelling Algorithms For Hierarchical Activity Discovery, Eoin Rogers, John D. Kelleher, Robert J. Ross

Conference papers

Activity discovery is the unsupervised process of discovering patterns in data produced from sensor networks that are monitoring the behaviour of human subjects. Improvements in activity discovery may simplify the training of activity recognition models by enabling the automated annotation of datasets and also the construction of systems that can detect and highlight deviations from normal behaviour. With this in mind, we propose an approach to activity discovery based on topic modelling techniques, and evaluate it on a dataset that mimics complex, interleaved sensor data in the real world. We also propose a means for discovering hierarchies of aggregated activities …

Mental Workload In Medicine: Foundations, Applications, Open Problems, Challenges And Future Perspectives, Luca Longo

Conference papers

Mental workload is a design concept borrowed from Ergonomics with a significant adoption in the aviation and automobile industries. Nowadays, the consideration of this construct is also taking place in many modern clinical working environments for designing interacting and complex systems that impose ever greater cognitive demand on operators and less physical load. Measuring mental workload is essential for improving the interaction human-system, enhancing performance, reducing the operator’s error and increasing safety. However, defining, measuring, assessing mental workload and understanding how this impinges on performance are still open problems. This secondary research is firstly aimed at introducing the construct of …

Idiom Token Classification Using Sentential Distributed Semantics, Giancarlo Salton, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

Idiom token classification is the task of deciding for a set of potentially idiomatic phrases whether each occurrence of a phrase is a literal or idiomatic usage of the phrase. In this work we explore the use of Skip-Thought Vectors to create distributed representations that encode features that are predictive with respect to idiom token classification. We show that classifiers using these representations have competitive performance compared with the state of the art in idiom token classification. Importantly, however, our models use only the sentence containing the tar- get phrase as input and are thus less dependent on a potentially …

A Corpus Of Annotated Irish Traditional Dance Music Recordings: Design And Benchmark Evaluations, Pierre Beauguitte, Bryan Duggan, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

An emerging trend in music information retrieval (MIR) is the use of supervised machine learning to train automatic music transcription models. A prerequisite of adopting a machine learning methodology is the availability of annotated corpora. However, different genres of music have different characteristics and modelling these characteristics is an important part of creating state of the art MIR systems. Consequently, although some music corpora are available the use of these corpora is tied to the specific music genre, instrument type and recording context the corpus covers. This paper introduces the first corpus of annotations of audio recordings of Irish traditional …

Harnessing The Power Of Text Mining For The Detection Of Abusive Content In Social Media, Hao Chen, Susan Mckeever, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

Abstract The issues of cyberbullying and online harassment have gained considerable coverage in the last number of years. Social media providers need to be able to detect abusive content both accurately and efficiently in order to protect their users. Our aim is to investigate the application of core text mining techniques for the automatic detection of abusive content across a range of social media sources include blogs, forums, media-sharing, Q&A and chat - using datasets from Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Kongregate, Formspring and Slashdot. Using supervised machine learning, we compare alternative text representations and dimension reduction approaches, including feature selection and …

Using Icicle Trees To Encode The Hierarchical Structure Of Source Code, Ivan Bacher, Brian Mac Namee, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

This paper presents a study which evaluates the use of a tree visualisation (icicle tree) to encode the hierarchical structure of source code. The tree visualisation was combined with a source code editor in order to function as a compact overview to facilitate the process of comprehending the global structure of a source code document. Results from our study show that pro- viding an overview visualisation led to an increase in accuracy and a decrease in completion time when participants performed counting tasks. However, in locating tasks, the presence of the visualisation led to a decrease in participants’ performance.

Sentiment Classification Using Negation As A Proxy For Negative Sentiment, Bruno Ohana, Brendan Tierney, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

We explore the relationship between negated text and neg- ative sentiment in the task of sentiment classification. We propose a novel adjustment factor based on negation occur- rences as a proxy for negative sentiment that can be applied to lexicon-based classifiers equipped with a negation detec- tion pre-processing step. We performed an experiment on a multi-domain customer reviews dataset obtaining accuracy improvements over a baseline, and we further improved our results using out-of-domain data to calibrate the adjustment factor. We see future work possibilities in exploring nega- tion detection refinements, and expanding the experiment to a broader spectrum of opinionated …

Understanding The Everyday Designer In Organisations, Ciaran O'Leary, Fredrick Mtenzi, Claire Mcavinia

Conference papers

This paper builds upon the existing concept of an everyday designer as a non-expert designer who carries out design activities using available resources in a given environment. It does so by examining the design activities undertaken by non-expert, informal, designers in organisations who make use of the formal and informal technology already in use in organisations while designing to direct, influence, change or transform the practices of people in the organisation. These people represent a cohort of designers who are given little attention in the literature on information systems, despite their central role in the formation of practice and enactment …

The Role Of Cryptography In Security For Electronic Commerce, Ann Murphy, David Murphy

The ITB Journal

Many businesses and consumers are wary of conducting business over the Internet due to a perceived lack of security. Electronic business is subject to a variety of threats such as unauthorised access, misappropriation, alteration and destruction of both data and systems. This paper explores the major security concerns of businesses and users and describes the cryptographic techniques used to reduce such risks.

Emotional Facial Expressions In Synthesised Sign Language Avatars: A Manual Evaluation., Robert G Smith, Brian Nolan

Other Resources

This research explores and evaluates the contribution that facial expressions might have regarding improved comprehension and acceptability in sign language avatars. Focusing specifically on Irish sign language (ISL), the Deaf (the uppercase ‘‘D’’ in the word ‘‘Deaf’’ indicates Deaf as a culture as opposed to ‘‘deaf’’ as a medical condition) community’s responsiveness to sign language avatars is examined. The hypothesis of this is as follows: augmenting an existing avatar with the seven widely accepted universal emotions identified by Ekman (Basic emotions: handbook of cognition and emotion. Wiley, London, 2005) to achieve underlying facial expressions will make that avatar more human-like …

Reformulation Strategies Of Repeated References In The Context Of Robot Perception Errors In Situated Dialogue, Niels Schütte, John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Conference papers

We performed an experiment in which human participants interacted through a natural language dialogue interface with a simulated robot to fulfil a series of object manipulation tasks. We introduced errors into the robot’s perception, and observed the resulting problems in the dialogues and their resolutions. We then introduced different methods for the user to request information about the robot’s understanding of the environment. In this work, we describe the effects that the robot’s perceptual errors and the information request options available to the participant had on the reformulation of the referring expressions the participants used when resolving a unsuccessful reference.

Mobisurround: An Auditory User Interface For Geo-Service Delivery, Keith Gardiner, Charlie Cullen, James Carswell

Conference papers

This paper describes original research carried out in the area of Location-Based Services (LBS) with an emphasis on Auditory User Interfaces (AUI) for content delivery. Previous work in this area has focused on accurately determining spatial interactions and informing the user mainly by means of the visual modality. mobiSurround is new research that builds upon these principles with a focus on multimodal content delivery and navigation and in particular the development of an AUI. This AUI enables the delivery of rich media content and natural directions using audio. This novel approach provides a hands free method for navigating a space …

A Defeasible Reasoning Framework For Human Mental Workload Representation And Assessment, Luca Longo

Conference papers

Human mental workload (MWL) has gained importance in the last few decades as an important design concept. It is a multifaceted complex construct mainly applied in cognitive sciences and has been defined in many different ways. Although measuring MWL has potential advantages in interaction and interface design, its formalisation as an operational and computational construct has not sufficiently been addressed. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by providing an extensible framework built upon defeasible reasoning, and implemented with argumentation theory (AT), in which MWL can be better defined, measured, analysed, explained and applied in different human–computer interactive contexts. …

Detection Of Dns Based Covert Channels, Stephen Sheridan, Anthony Keane

Conference Papers

Information theft or data exfiltration, whether personal or corporate, is now a lucrative mainstay of cybercrime activity. Recent security reports have suggested that while information, such as credit card data is still a prime target, other data such as corporate secrets, employee files and intellectual property are increasingly sought after on the black market. Malicious actors that are intent on exfiltrating valuable data, usually employ some form of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) in order to exfiltrate large amounts of data over a long period of time with a high degree of covertness. Botnets are prime examples of APTs that are …