James Lanagan

Combining wearable sensors for location-free monitoring of gait in older people

Falls are a major cause of injury and fatality among the older population and the use of wearable sensors to quantify key metrics relating to gait and motor function in order to evaluate potential falls risk are increasing in use. However, one of the problems with current use of quantitative gait data to evaluate falls risk is that it is still tied to a relatively controlled deployment model due to lack of effective methods to label and segment gait data that could be acquired over a long term basis in the uncontrolled home and community setting. This means that we cannot evaluate the potentially powerful impact of environmental factors on gait and motor function in the home and community. In this paper we present a conceptual approach to solving this problem by combining inertial sensing methods for quantitative gait analysis with life logging, using other wearable sensors and a wearable camera that automatically record a wearers contexts, at all times. Using the system, a clinician can use both gait data and lifelog data to mutually index each other to enable a more thorough exploration of data and a greater understanding of the impact of environment on gait function and subsequent falls risk. We also present a single case study of a long term deployment using a prototype of the system, with feedback from an experienced clinician, to illustrate its potential clinical utility.

Query independent measures of annotation and annotator impact

The modern-day web-user plays a far more active role in the creation of content for the web as a whole. In this paper we present Annoby, a free-text annotation system built to give users a more interactive experience of the events of the Rugby World Cup 2007. Annotations can be used for query-independent ranking of both the annotations and the original recorded video footage (or documents) which has been annotated, based on the social interactions of a community of users. We present two algorithms, AuthorRank and MessageRank, designed to take advantage of these interactions so as to provide a means of ranking documents by their social impact.

Video digital libraries: contributive and decentralised

Technology usage is changing rapidly and is becoming a more mobile, more social and more multimedia-based experience. This is especially true in the area of content creation where mobile social applications used by crowds of people are challenging traditional ways of creating and distributing content, especially for applications like news dissemination. Libraries have traditionally functioned as repositories where the information content of a society is analysed, curated, organised and stored, acting as a permanent record of what is to be remembered from a society. How can this function be achieved by present-day libraries attempting to cope with mobile, social, multimedia content who’s nature and utility of which change the type of information we wish to curate and store? This information is both dynamic and organic, posing challenges to the more fixed models of information in digital libraries. In this article we describe two digital library systems that archive video content from the sports domain, and which support user annotations and merging of diverse information sources in an integrated way. We report on analysis of the deployment of these two systems and highlight how they extend the traditional role of a (digital) library.

Creating a web-scale video collection for research

This paper begins by considering a number of important design questions for a large-scale, widely available, multimedia test collection intended to support long-term scientific evaluation and comparison of content-based video analysis and exploitation systems. While the collection presented here is not quite web-scale, it is to our knowledge the largest video collection created to date. It is therefore of use in expanding the scale of any evaluation of multimedia collections and systems. Such exploitation systems would include the kinds of functionality already explored within the annual TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation (TRECVid) benchmarking activity such as search, semantic concept detection, and automatic summarization. We then report on our progress in creating such a multimedia collection from publicly available Internet Archive videos with Creative Commons licenses (IACC.1), which we hope will be a useful approximation of a web-scale collection and will support a next generation of benchmarking activities for content-based video operations. We also report on some possibilities for putting this collection to use in multimedia system evaluation. It is the intended that this collection be partitioned and used within the TRECVid 2010 evaluations, and in subsequent years to that.

SIGIR: scholar vs. scholars' interpretation

Google Scholar allows researchers to search through a free and extensive source of information on scientific publications. In this paper we show that within the limited context of SIGIR proceedings, the rankings created by Google Scholar are both significantly different and very negatively correlated with those of domain experts.