Phil W. Grant

From web data to visualization via ontology mapping

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for automatic generation of visualizations from domain‐specific data available on the web. We describe a general system pipeline that combines ontology mapping and probabilistic reasoning techniques. With this approach, a web page is first mapped to a Domain Ontology, which stores the semantics of a specific subject domain (e.g., music charts). The Domain Ontology is then mapped to one or more Visual Representation Ontologies, each of which captures the semantics of a visualization style (e.g., tree maps). To enable the mapping between these two ontologies, we establish a Semantic Bridging Ontology, which specifies the appropriateness of each semantic bridge. Finally each Visual Representation Ontology is mapped to a visualization using an external visualization toolkit. Using this approach, we have developed a prototype software tool, SemViz, as a realisation of this approach. By interfacing its Visual Representation Ontologies with public domain software such as ILOG Discovery and Prefuse, SemViz is able to generate appropriate visualizations automatically from a large collection of popular web pages for music charts without prior knowledge of these web pages.

Image-based Aging Using Evolutionary Computing

Aging has considerable visual effects on the human face and is difficult to simulate using a universally‐applicable global model. In this paper, we focus on the hypothesis that the patterns of age progression (and regression) are related to the face concerned, as the latter implicitly captures the characteristics of gender, ethnic origin, and age group, as well as possibly the person‐specific development patterns of the individual. We use a data‐driven framework for automatic image‐based facial transformation in conjunction with a database of facial images. We build a novel parameterized model for encoding age‐transformation in addition with the traditional model for face description. We utilize evolutionary computing to learn the relationship between the two models. To support this work, we also developed a new image warping algorithm based on non‐uniform radial basis functions (NURBFs). Evolutionary computing was also used to handle the large parameter space associated with NURBFs. In comparison with several different methods, it consistently provides the best results against the ground truth.

JACIE-an authoring language for rapid prototyping net-centric, multimedia and collaborative applications

The World Wide Web (WWW) is now accepted as a de facto standard for human–computer interaction and human–human communication, so it is desirable to develop net-centric, multimedia and collaborative applications. In this paper, we present a new scripting language, JACIE, designed to support rapid prototyping and implementation of such applications. The support for the management of multimedia interaction and communication in collaborative applications is highlighted. JACIE facilitates such support through the concepts of channels and a collection of interaction protocols. A template-based programming style is adopted by JACIE, using a single program for both client and server, and platform-independence achieved by employing Java as the target language. All these features characterise a desirable multimedia software engineering tool.

Visualization of time-series data in parameter space for understanding facial dynamics

Over the past decade, computer scientists and psychologists have made great efforts to collect and analyze facial dynamics data that exhibit different expressions and emotions. Such data is commonly captured as videos and are transformed into feature‐based time‐series prior to any analysis. However, the analytical tasks, such as expression classification, have been hindered by the lack of understanding of the complex data space and the associated algorithm space. Conventional graph‐based time‐series visualization is also found inadequate to support such tasks. In this work, we adopt a visual analytics approach by visualizing the correlation between the algorithm space and our goal – classifying facial dynamics. We transform multiple feature‐based time‐series for each expression in measurement space to a multi‐dimensional representation in parameter space. This enables us to utilize parallel coordinates visualization to gain an understanding of the algorithm space, providing a fast and cost‐effective means to support the design of analytical algorithms.

Designing interaction protocols using noughts and crosses type games

Interaction management is concerned with the protocols that govern structured interactive activities among multiple users or agents in networked collaborative environments. It is an important aspect of networked software in many application domains such as online meetings, online groupware and online games. However, there is limited support in most programming languages and programming environments for implementing interaction management. High-level features, such as interaction protocols and management policies, are usually hard coded by skilled network programmers, who are often scarce in many applications such as e-learning. In this paper, we present an abstraction of various collaborative applications in the form of the noughts and crosses game and its variations. We examine the needs in these games for programming interaction protocols, and propose a comprehensive collection of program constructs for supporting interaction. We report our efforts for incorporating these new constructs into JACIE (Java-based Authoring language for Collaborative Interactive Environments), an existing scripting language designed to support rapid prototyping and implementation of collaborative applications. We demonstrate, through variations of the noughts and crosses game and an on-line bridge game, the usefulness of these language constructs.

Discriminant Feature Manifold for Facial Aging Estimation

Computerised facial aging estimation, which has the potential for many applications in human-computer interactions, has been investigated by many computer vision researchers in recent years. In this paper, a feature-based discriminant subspace is proposed to extract more discriminating and robust representations for aging estimation. After aligning all the faces by a piece-wise affine transform, orthogonal locality preserving projection (OLPP) is employed to project local binary patterns (LBP) from the faces into an age-discriminant subspace. The feature extracted from this manifold is more distinctive for age estimation compared with the features using in the state-of-the-art methods. Based on the public database FG-NET, the performance of the proposed feature is evaluated by using two different regression techniques, quadratic function and neural-network regression. The proposed feature subspace achieves the best performance based on both types of regression.

Managing interaction for multimedia collaboration: through the keyhole of noughts and crosses games

Interaction management is concerned with the protocols that govern structured interactive activities among multiple users or agents in distributed and collaborative environments. Research in this area has largely been carried out in specific application domains, such as 3D virtual environments. We present an abstraction of various collaborative applications in the form of variations of noughts and crosses. We examine the needs in these games for programming interaction protocols, and propose a comprehensive collection of program constructs for supporting interaction management. We demonstrate, through these variations of the game, the usefulness of these language constructs.

Recognizing Conversational Interaction Based on 3D Human Pose

In this paper, we take a bag of visual words approach to investigate whether it is possible to distinguish conversational scenarios from observing human motion alone, in particular gestures in 3D. The conversational interactions concerned in this work have rather subtle differences among them. Unlike typical action or event recognition, each interaction in our case contain many instances of primitive motions and actions, many of which are shared among different conversation scenarios. Hence, extracting and learning temporal dynamics are essential. We adopt Kinect sensors to extract low level temporal features. These features are then generalized to form a visual vocabulary that can be further generalized to a set of topics from temporal distributions of visual vocabulary. A subject-specific supervised learning approach based on both generative and discriminative classifiers is employed to classify the testing sequences to seven different conversational scenarios. We believe this is among one of the first work that is devoted to conversational interaction classification using 3D pose features and to show this task is indeed possible.

Comparing feature-based metrics for facial dynamics analysis

The automatic analysis and classification of facial expressions is a challenging problem. It has been an active area of research for many years, with a range of applications, including affective computing, human computer interaction and lipreading. Although it is possible to capture an expression using still images, videos are more widely used in facial dynamics analysis [Zhang et al. 2008] with the advantage that the onset, peak and offset duration of the expression can be captured and used. The facial action coding system (FACS) is most commonly used for analysing facial behaviour. It segments face into action units (AUs) and relates them to the contraction of a specific or set of facial muscles. To automatically assign AUs, such system requires facial feature extraction.

A graphical simulator for programmable logic controllers based on Petri nets

Abstract In this paper an extended Petri net, the programmable logic controller net (PLCNet) is defined. A rule-based PLCNet simulator has been designed based on the semantics of PLCNets, with facilities provided to set up and control simulation. Both step and time responses are provided for the presentation of simulation results. A graphical environment is provided for the construction of the PLCNet, simulation and the presentation of simulation results.