Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

In the real world, a realistic setting for computer vision or multimedia recognition problems is that we have some classes containing lots of training data and many classes contain a small amount of training data. Therefore, how to use frequent classes to help learning rare classes for which it is harder to collect the training data is an open question. Learning with Shared Information is an emerging topic in machine learning, computer vision and multimedia analysis. There are different level of components that can be shared during concept modeling and machine learning stages, such as sharing generic object parts, sharing attributes, sharing transformations, sharing regularization parameters and sharing training examples, etc. Regarding the specific methods, multi-task learning, transfer learning and deep learning can be seen as using different strategies to share information. These learning with shared information methods are very effective in solving real-world large-scale problems. This special issue aims at gathering the recent advances in learning with shared information methods and their applications in computer vision and multimedia analysis. Both state-of-the-art works, as well as literature reviews, are welcome for submission. Papers addressing interesting real-world computer vision and multimedia applications are especially encouraged. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:  • Multi-task learning or transfer learning for large-scale computer vision and multimedia analysis • Deep learning for large-scale computer vision and multimedia analysis • Multi-modal approach for large-scale computer vision and multimedia analysis • Different sharing strategies, e.g., sharing generic object parts, sharing attributes, sharing transformations, sharing regularization parameters and sharing training examples, • Real-world computer vision and multimedia applications based on learning with shared information, e.g., event detection, object recognition, object detection, action recognition, human head pose estimation, object tracking, location-based services, semantic indexing. • New datasets and metrics to evaluate the benefit of the proposed sharing ability for the specific computer vision or multimedia problem. • Survey papers regarding the topic of learning with shared information.  Authors who are unsure whether their planned submission is in scope may contact the guest editors prior to the submission deadline with an abstract, in order to receive feedback.

IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence

A mobile terminal including a body; a touchscreen provided to a front and extending to side of the body and configured to display content; and a controller configured to detect one side of the body comes into contact with one side of an external terminal, display a first area on the touchscreen corresponding to a contact area of the body and the external terminal and a second area including the content, receive an input of moving the content displayed in the second area to the first area, display the content in the first area, and share the content in the first area with the external terminal.

Mobile terminal and method for controlling the same

Journal of the American Statistical Association: William S. Cleveland, Marylyn E. McGill and Robert McGill, “The shape parameter for a two variable graph” 83 (1988) 289–300

Robotics and autonomous systems

This paper addresses robot audition for dynamic environments, where speakers and/or a robot is moving within a dynamically-changing acoustic environment. Robot Audition studied so far assumed only stationary human-robot interaction scenes, and thus they have difficulties in coping with such dynamic environments. We recently developed new techniques for a robot to listen to several things simultaneously using its own ears even in dynamic environments; MUltiple SIgnal Classification based on Generalized Eigen-Value Decomposition (GEVD-MUSIC), Geometrically constrained High-order Decorrelation based Source Separation with Adaptive Step-size control (GHDSS-AS), Histogram-based Recursive Level Estimation (HRLE), and Template-based Ego Noise Suppression (TENS). GEVD-MUSIC provides noise-robust sound source localization. GHDSS-AS is a new sound source separation method which quickly adapts its sound source separation parameters to dynamic changes. HRLE is a practical post-filtering method with a small number of parameters. ENS estimates the motor noise of the robot by using templates recorded in advance and eliminates it. These methods are implemented as modules for our open-source robot audition software HARK to be easily integrated. We show that each of these methods and their combinations are effective to cope with dynamic environments through off-line experiments and on-line real-time demonstrations.

Robot audition for dynamic environments

A sound processing device includes a separation unit configured to separate at least a music signal and a speech signal from a recorded audio signal, a noise suppression unit, a music feature value estimation unit, a speech recognition unit, a noise-processing confidence calculation unit, a music feature value estimation confidence calculation unit, a speech recognition confidence calculation unit, and a control unit configured to calculate at least one behavioral decision function of a speech behavioral decision function associated with speech and a music behavioral decision function associated with music based on a noise-processing confidence value, a music feature value estimation confidence value, and a speech recognition confidence value and to determine behavior corresponding to the calculated behavioral decision function.

Sound processing device, sound processing method, and sound processing program

Several researches have been conducted to recognize emotions using various modalities such as facial expressions, gestures, speech or physiological signals. Among all these modalities, physiological signals are especially interesting because they are mainly controlled by the autonomic nervous system. It has been shown for example that there is an undeniable relationship between emotional state and Heart Rate Variability (HRV). In this paper, we present a methodology to monitor emotional state from physiological signals acquired remotely. The method is based on a remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) algorithm that estimates remote Heart Rate Variability (rHRV) using a simple camera. We first show that the rHRV signal can be estimated with a high accuracy (more than 96% in frequency domain). Then, frequency-feature of rHRV is calculated and we show that there is a strong correlation between the rHRV feature and different emotional states. This observation has been validated on 12 out of 16 volunteers and video-induced emotions which opens the way to contactless monitoring of emotions from physiological signals.

https://hal-univ-bourgogne.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01678244/document

Remote heart rate variability for emotional state monitoring

We present SoundCraft, a smartwatch prototype embedded with a microphone array, that localizes angularly, in azimuth and elevation, acoustic signatures: non-vocal acoustics that are produced using our hands. Acoustic signatures are common in our daily lives, such as when snapping or rubbing our fingers, tapping on objects or even when using an auxiliary object to generate the sound. We demonstrate that we can capture and leverage the spatial location of such naturally occurring acoustics using our prototype. We describe our algorithm, which we adopt from the MUltiple SIgnal Classification (MUSIC) technique [31], that enables robust localization and classification of the acoustics when the microphones are required to be placed at close proximity. SoundCraft enables a rich set of spatial interaction techniques, including quick access to smartwatch content, rapid command invocation, in-situ sketching, and also multi-user around device interaction. Via a series of user studies, we validate SoundCraft's localization and classification capabilities in non-noisy and noisy environments.

SoundCraft: Enabling Spatial Interactions on Smartwatches using Hand Generated Acoustics

A sound source-separating device includes a sound-collecting part, an imaging part, a sound signal-evaluating part, an image signal-evaluating part, a selection part that selects whether to estimate a sound source direction based on the first sound signal or the first image signal, a person position-estimating part that estimates a sound source direction using the first image signal, a sound source direction-estimating part that estimates a sound source direction, a sound source-separating part that extracts a second sound signal corresponding to the sound source direction from the first sound signal, an image-extracting part that extracts a second image signal of an area corresponding to the estimated sound source direction from the first image signal, and an image-combining part that changes a third image signal of an area other than the area for the second image signal and combines the third image signal with the second image signal.

Keisuke Nakamura

Papers

Robot audition for dynamic environments

Sound processing device, sound processing method, and sound processing program

Remote heart rate variability for emotional state monitoring

SoundCraft: Enabling Spatial Interactions on Smartwatches using Hand Generated Acoustics

Sound source-separating device and sound source -separating method