Social Context-aware Person Search in Videos via Multi-modal Cues

Person search has long been treated as a crucial and challenging task to support deeper insight in personalized summarization and personality discovery. Traditional methods, e.g., person re-identification and face recognition techniques, which profile video characters based on visual information, are often limited by relatively fixed poses or small variation of viewpoints and suffer from more realistic scenes with high motion complexity (e.g., movies). At the same time, long videos such as movies often have logical story lines and are composed of continuously developmental plots. In this situation, different persons usually meet on a specific occasion, in which informative social cues are performed. We notice that these social cues could semantically profile their personality and benefit person search task in two aspects. First, persons with certain relationships usually co-occur in short intervals; in case one of them is easier to be identified, the social relation cues extracted from their co-occurrences could further benefit the identification for the harder ones. Second, social relations could reveal the association between certain scenes and characters (e.g., classmate relationship may only exist among students), which could narrow down candidates into certain persons with a specific relationship. In this way, high-level social relation cues could improve the effectiveness of person search. Along this line, in this article, we propose a social context-aware framework, which fuses visual and social contexts to profile persons in more semantic perspectives and better deal with person search task in complex scenarios. Specifically, we first segment videos into several independent scene units and abstract out social contexts within these scene units. Then, we construct inner-personal links through a graph formulation operation for each scene unit, in which both visual cues and relation cues are considered. Finally, we perform a relation-aware label propagation to identify characters’ occurrences, combining low-level semantic cues (i.e., visual cues) and high-level semantic cues (i.e., relation cues) to further enhance the accuracy. Experiments on real-world datasets validate that our solution outperforms several competitive baselines.

Reconceptualizing Idol Making in the Context of Bangladesh

While bringing into attention the creative skills of a local Idol maker, this paper aims at exploring Idol making in the light of the maker’s perception and simultaneously placing it within the broader social and cultural context of Bangladesh. It seeks to understand the meaning that idol-making carries to its creator, and the meaning of idol-making that is felt within the larger social context of Bangladesh. While doing so, this paper investigates the concept of art prevailing in contemporary Bangladeshi society and therefore, examines the creative dimensions of idol making from folkloristic and material culture perspectives. Along with bringing forth the unheard stories of a local Bangladeshi idol maker, this paper aims at dismantling the grand narratives of art that existed within Bengali society and therefore, provides an opportunity to reconceptualize the artistic dimension of local idol making in Bangladesh.

Impact of decision-making system in social navigation

Facing human activity-aware navigation with a cognitive architecture raises several difficulties integrating the components and orchestrating behaviors and skills to perform social tasks. In a real-world scenario, the navigation system should not only consider individuals like obstacles. It is necessary to offer particular and dynamic people representation to enhance the HRI experience. The robot’s behaviors must be modified by humans, directly or indirectly. In this paper, we integrate our human representation framework in a cognitive architecture to allow that people who interact with the robot could modify its behavior, not only with the interaction but also with their culture or the social context. The human representation framework represents and distributes the proxemic zones’ information in a standard way, through a cost map. We have evaluated the influence of the decision-making system in human-aware navigation and how a local planner may be decisive in this navigation. The material developed during this research can be found in a public repository (https://github.com/IntelligentRoboticsLabs/social_navigation2_WAF) and instructions to facilitate the reproducibility of the results.

Interdependence as the key for an ethical artificial autonomy

Currently, the autonomy of artificial systems, robotic systems in particular, is certainly one of the most debated issues, both from the perspective of technological development and its social impact and ethical repercussions. While theoretical considerations often focus on scenarios far beyond what can be concretely hypothesized from the current state of the art, the term autonomy is still used in a vague or too general way. This reduces the possibilities of a punctual analysis of such an important issue, thus leading to often polarized positions (naive optimism or unfounded defeatism). The intent of this paper is to clarify what is meant by artificial autonomy, and what are the prerequisites that can allow the attribution of this characteristic to a robotic system. Starting from some concrete examples, we will try to indicate a way towards artificial autonomy that can hold together the advantages of developing adaptive and versatile systems with the management of the inevitable problems that this technology poses both from the viewpoint of safety and ethics. Our proposal is that a real artificial autonomy, especially if expressed in the social context, can only be achieved through interdependence with other social actors (human and otherwise), through continuous exchanges and interactions which, while allowing robots to explore the environment, guarantee the emergence of shared practices, behaviors, and ethical principles, which otherwise could not be imposed with a top-down approach, if not at the price of giving up the same artificial autonomy.

Harms Of Loot Boxes And Approaching Regulation In Singapore

‘Loot boxes’ are a type of videogame monetization model that contains randomized rewards of varying rarities which emerged in recent years. The element of chance seeks to entice players into buying loot boxes in hopes of receiving a rare and desirable reward. The design of loot boxes has been identified to be addictive and to entice players to spend more money than they estimate they would. With links to addiction and gambling behaviours, loot boxes may cause social harm if unregulated. Singapore is not new to the videogaming scene and may seek to regulate loot boxes should it emerge as a social problem amongst Singaporeans. By acknowledging existing approaches towards regulating loot boxes and situating loot boxes in Singapore’s social context, this paper explores Lessig’s four modalities of constraint as a framework to hypothesize regulatory options for Singapore.

FUNCTIONING DISCOURSE MARKERS TO CONSTRUCT A SOCIAL SITUATION IN SPEECH

This study relates the discussion of discourse markers to their functions from a social context. It aims to identify discourse markers and analyze their function to construct a social situation in Steve Jobs’ speech delivered at Stanford Commencement Address. To analyze the data in this study, the researchers used a qualitative descriptive method. This study showed that the dominant discourse markers used were connective, followed by cause result, temporal adverb, and marker of response, respectively, in which the last marker was the least used. Furthermore, all discourse markers functioned to gain coherent message delivery in the speech by considering the “setting and scene," "participants," "ends,” “act sequence,” “key,” “instrumentalities,” “norms of interaction,” and “genre,” all of which were shortened in the acronym of “speaking.” Finally, based on its social situation, the present study is expected to broaden the understanding of discourse markers in a particular text.