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

Physical activity recognition using embedded sensors has enabled many context-aware applications in different areas, such as healthcare Initially, one or more dedicated wearable sensors were used for such applications However, recently, many researchers started using mobile phones for this purpose, since these ubiquitous devices are equipped with various sensors, ranging from accelerometers to magnetic field sensors In most of the current studies, sensor data collected for activity recognition are analyzed offline using machine learning tools However, there is now a trend towards implementing activity recognition systems on these devices in an online manner, since modern mobile phones have become more powerful in terms of available resources, such as CPU, memory and battery The research on offline activity recognition has been reviewed in several earlier studies in detail However, work done on online activity recognition is still in its infancy and is yet to be reviewed In this paper, we review the studies done so far that implement activity recognition systems on mobile phones and use only their on-board sensors We discuss various aspects of these studies Moreover, we discuss their limitations and present various recommendations for future research

https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/files/6518323/sensors-15-02059.pdf

A survey of online activity recognition using mobile phones

The objective of change-point detection is to discover abrupt property changes lying behind time-series data. In this paper, we present a novel statistical change-point detection algorithm based on non-parametric divergence estimation between time-series samples from two retrospective segments. Our method uses the relative Pearson divergence as a divergence measure, and it is accurately and efficiently estimated by a method of direct density-ratio estimation. Through experiments on artificial and real-world datasets including human-activity sensing, speech, and Twitter messages, we demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method.

Change-Point Detection in Time-Series Data by Relative Density-Ratio Estimation (情報論的学習理論と機械学習)

"This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Ramasamy Ramamurthy S, Roy N. Recent trends in machine learning for human activity recognition—A survey. WIREs Data Mining Knowl Discov. 2018;e1254. https://doi.org/10.1002/widm.1254, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/widm.1254. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving."

https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10087464

Recent trends in machine learning for human activity recognition—A survey

Nowadays, there is an ever-increasing migration of people to urban areas. Health care service is one of the most challenging aspects that is greatly affected by the vast influx of people to city centers. Consequently, cities around the world are investing heavily in digital transformation in an effort to provide healthier ecosystems for people. In such a transformation, millions of homes are being equipped with smart devices (e.g., smart meters, sensors, and so on), which generate massive volumes of fine-grained and indexical data that can be analyzed to support smart city services. In this paper, we propose a model that utilizes smart home big data as a means of learning and discovering human activity patterns for health care applications. We propose the use of frequent pattern mining, cluster analysis, and prediction to measure and analyze energy usage changes sparked by occupants’ behavior. Since people’s habits are mostly identified by everyday routines, discovering these routines allows us to recognize anomalous activities that may indicate people’s difficulties in taking care for themselves, such as not preparing food or not using a shower/bath. This paper addresses the need to analyze temporal energy consumption patterns at the appliance level, which is directly related to human activities. For the evaluation of the proposed mechanism, this paper uses the U.K. Domestic Appliance Level Electricity data set—time series data of power consumption collected from 2012 to 2015 with the time resolution of 6 s for five houses with 109 appliances from Southern England. The data from smart meters are recursively mined in the quantum/data slice of 24 h, and the results are maintained across successive mining exercises. The results of identifying human activity patterns from appliance usage are presented in detail in this paper along with the accuracy of short- and long-term predictions.

Mining Human Activity Patterns From Smart Home Big Data for Health Care Applications

Dementia is a clinical syndrome of cognitive deficits that involves both memory and functional impairments. While disruptions in cognition is a striking feature of dementia, it is also closely coupled with changes in functional and behavioral health of older adults. In this paper, we investigate the challenges of improving the automatic assessment of dementia, by better exploiting the emerging physiological sensors in conjunction with ambient sensors in a real field environment with IRB approval. We hypothesize that the cognitive health of older individuals can be estimated by tracking their daily activities and mental arousal states. We employ signal processing on wearable sensor data streams (e.g., Electrodermal Activity (EDA), Photoplethysmogram (PPG), accelerometer (ACC)) and machine learning algorithms to assess cognitive impairments and its correlation with functional health decline. To validate our approach, we quantify the score of machine learning, survey and observation based Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) and signal processing based mental arousal state, respectively for functional and behavioral health measures among 17 older adults living in a continuing care retirement community in Baltimore. We compare clinically observed scores with technology guided automated scores using both machine learning and statistical techniques.

/pdf/automated-functional-and-behavioral-health-assessment-of-1ymd6sroxl.pdf

Automated Functional and Behavioral Health Assessment of Older Adults with Dementia

As computing devices continue to become more heavily integrated into our lives, proper design of human-computer interfaces becomes a more important topic of discussion. Efficient and useful human-computer interfaces need to take into account the abilities of the humans who will be using such interfaces, and adapt to difficulties that different users may face - such as the difficulties that elderly users must deal with. Interfaces that allow for user-specific customization, while taking into account the multiple difficulties that older users might face, can assist the elderly in properly using these newer computing devices, and in doing so possibly achieving a better quality of life through the advanced technological support that these devices offer. In this paper, we explore common problems the elderly face when using computing devices and solutions developed for these problems. Difficulties ultimately fall into several categories: cognition, auditory, haptic, visual, and motor-based troubles. We also present an idea for a new adaptive operating system with advanced customizations that would simplify computing for older users.

/pdf/considerations-in-designing-human-computer-interfaces-for-4dcaqz3obx.pdf

Considerations in Designing Human-Computer Interfaces for Elderly People

We propose CACE (Constraints And Correlations mining Engine) which investigates the challenges of improving the recognition of complex daily activities in multi-inhabitant smart homes, by better exploiting the spatiotemporal relationships across the activities of different individuals. We first propose and develop a loosely-coupled Hierarchical Dynamic Bayesian Network (HDBN), which both (a) captures the hierarchical inference of complex (macro-activity) contexts from lower-layer microactivity context (postural and improved oral gestural context), and (b) embeds the various types of behavioral correlations and constraints (at both micro-and macro-activity contexts) across the individuals. While this model is rich in terms of accuracy, it is computationally prohibitive, due to the explosive increase in the number of jointly-defined states. To tackle this challenge, we employ data mining to learn behaviorally-driven context correlations in the form of association rules, we then use such rules to prune the state space dramatically. To evaluate our framework, we build a customized smart home system and collected naturalistic multi-inhabitant smart home activities data. The system performance is illustrated with results from real-time system deployment experiences in a smart home environment reveals a radical (max 16 fold) reduction in the computational overhead compared to traditional hybrid classification approaches, as well as an improved activity recognition accuracy of max 95%.

https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4582&context=sis_research

CACE: Exploiting Behavioral Interactions for Improved Activity Recognition in Multi-inhabitant Smart Homes

Human activity recognition using multi-modal sensing technologies to automatically collect and classify daily activities has become an active field of research. Given the proliferation of smart and wearable devices and their greater acceptance in human lives, the need for developing real time lightweight activity recognition algorithms become a viable and urgent avenue. Although variants of online and offline lightweight activity recognition algorithms have been developed, realizing them on real time to recognize people's activities is still a challenging research problem due to the computational complexity of building, training, learning and storing activity models in resource constrained smart and wearable devices. To navigate the above challenges, we build Mobeacon: a mobile phone and iBeacon sensor-based smart home activity recognition system. We investigated the viability of extending Bagging Ensemble Learning (BEL) and Packaged Naive Bayes (PNB) classification algorithms for high-level activity recognition on smartphone. We incorporated the semantic knowledge of the testing environment and used that with the built-in adaptive learning models on smartphone to ease the ground truth data annotation. We demonstrated that Mobeacon outperforms existing lightweight activity recognition techniques in terms of accuracy (max. 94%) in a low resource setting and proves itself substantially efficient to reside on smartphones for recognizing ADLs in real time.

Mobeacon: An iBeacon-Assisted Smartphone-Based Real Time Activity Recognition Framework

BACKGROUND Nurses are at the forefront of the COVID 19 pandemic. During the pandemic, nurses have faced an elevated risk of exposure and have experienced the hazards related to a novel virus. While being heralded as lifesaving heroes on the front lines of the pandemic, nurses have experienced more physical, mental and psychosocial problems as a consequence of the COVID-19 outbreak. Social media discussions by nursing professionals participating in publicly formed Facebook groups constitute a valuable resource that offers longitudinal insights. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to explore how COVID-19 impacted nurses through capturing public sentiments expressed by nurses on social media discussion platforms and how these sentiments changed over time. METHODS We collected over 110,993 Facebook discussion posts and comments in an open COVID-19 group for nurses from March 2020 until the end of November 2020. A de-identified offline HTML scraping on social media posts and comments was performed. Using subject-matter expert opinions and social media analytics (topic modeling, information retrieval and sentiment analysis), we performed a human-in-a-loop nursing key perspectives analysis to identify trends of the COVID-19 impact among at-risk nursing communities. We further investigated the key insights of the nursing perspectives trends by detecting temporal changes of comments related to emotional effects, feeling of frustration, impacts of isolation, shortage of safety equipment and the frequency of safety equipment uses. Anonymous quotes were highlighted to add context to the data. RESULTS We determined that COVID-19 impacted nurses' physical, mental and psychosocial health as expressed in the form of emotional distress, anger, anxiety, frustration, loneliness and isolation. Major topics discussed by nurses were related to work during a pandemic, misinformation spread by the media, improper Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), PPE side effects, the effects of testing positive and lost days of work related to illness. CONCLUSIONS Public Facebook nursing groups are venues for nurses to express their experience, opinions and concerns and can offer researchers an important insight to understand the COVID-19 impact on health care workers. CLINICALTRIAL

Mohammad Arif Ul Alam

Papers

Automated Functional and Behavioral Health Assessment of Older Adults with Dementia

Considerations in Designing Human-Computer Interfaces for Elderly People

CACE: Exploiting Behavioral Interactions for Improved Activity Recognition in Multi-inhabitant Smart Homes

Mobeacon: An iBeacon-Assisted Smartphone-Based Real Time Activity Recognition Framework

Nursing Perspectives on The Impacts of COVID-19: A Social Media Analytics Approach.