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Abstract Homophily, the tendency for individuals to preferentially interact with others similar to themselves is typically documented via self-report and, for children, adult report. Few studies have investigated homophily directly using objective measures of social movement. We quantified homophily in children with developmental disabilities (DD) and typical development (TD) using objective measures of position/orientation in preschool inclusion classrooms, designed to promote interaction between these groups of children. Objective measurements were collected using ultra-wideband radio-frequency tracking to determine social approach and social contact, measures of social movement and interaction. Observations of 77 preschoolers (47 with DD, and 30 TD) were conducted in eight inclusion classrooms on a total of 26 days. We compared DD and TD groups with respect to how children approached and shared time in social contact with peers using mixed-effects models. Children in concordant dyads (DD-DD and TD-TD) both moved toward each other at higher velocities and spent greater time in social contact than discordant dyads (DD-TD), evidencing homophily. DD-DD dyads spent less time in social contact than TD-TD dyads but were comparable to TD-TD dyads in their social approach velocities. Children’s preference for similar peers appears to be a pervasive feature of their naturalistic interactions.

Abstract Current models of COVID-19 transmission predict infection from reported or assumed interactions. Here we leverage high-resolution observations of interaction to simulate infectious processes. Ultra-Wide Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems were employed to track the real-time physical movements and directional orientation of children and their teachers in 4 preschool classes over a total of 34 observations. An agent-based transmission model combined observed interaction patterns (individual distance and orientation) with CDC-published risk guidelines to estimate the transmission impact of an infected patient zero attending class on the proportion of overall infections, the average transmission rate, and the time lag to the appearance of symptomatic individuals. These metrics highlighted the prophylactic role of decreased classroom density and teacher vaccinations. Reduction of classroom density to half capacity was associated with an 18.2% drop in overall infection proportion while teacher vaccination receipt was associated with a 25.3% drop. Simulation results of classroom transmission dynamics may inform public policy in the face of COVID-19 and similar infectious threats.

The high speed and low latency of 5G mobile network have accelerated the speed and amount of information transmission. Web video is likely to become the main mode of news production and dissemination in the future for its richer information and more convenient dissemination, which will subvert the traditional mode of event mining. Therefore, event mining based on web videos has become a new research hotspot. However, web videos are vulnerable to video editing, lighting, shooting perspective and shooting angle, and other factors, resulting in the inaccurate visual similarity detection problem. Generally speaking, effectively integrating humungous volumes of cross-model information would give a great help. However, web videos are described with few terms, and thus sparse text information becomes a challenge for cross-model information combination. To address this issue, this paper proposes a new collaborative optimization framework with the combination of inaccurate visual similarity detection information and sparse textual information. This framework is composed of three steps. After obtaining the statistics of the distribution characteristics of each word in all Near-Duplicate Keyframes (NDKs), the high-level semantic cross-correlation between NDKs is first mined with the help of textual features, forming a new set of semantic relevant NDKs with different visual expressions. Next, textual distribution features are enriched through finding more semantically related words by the new NDK set with various forms of visual expressions, solving the sparse distribution problem for each word in all NDKs. Finally, Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) is used to mine the events. Experimental results with a large number of real data demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the existing methods for web video event mining.

Best practice for the assessment of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptom severity relies on clinician ratings of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, 2nd Edition (ADOS-2), but the association of these ratings with objective measures of children's social gaze and smiling is unknown. Sixty-six preschool-age children (49 boys, M = 39.97 months, SD = 10.58) with suspected ASD (61 confirmed ASD) were administered the ADOS-2 and provided social affect calibrated severity scores (SA CSS). Children's social gaze and smiling during the ADOS-2, captured with a camera contained in eyeglasses worn by the examiner and parent, were obtained via a computer vision processing pipeline. Children who gazed more at their parents (p = 0.04) and whose gaze at their parents involved more smiling (p = 0.02) received lower social affect severity scores, indicating fewer social affect symptoms, adjusted R[superscript 2] = 0.15, p = 0.003.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in more than 440 million confirmed cases globally and almost 6 million reported deaths as of March 2022. Consequently, the world experienced grave repercussions to citizens' lives, health, wellness, and the economy. In responding to such a disastrous global event, countermeasures are often implemented to slow down and limit the virus's rapid spread. Meanwhile, disaster recovery, mitigation, and preparation measures have been taken to manage the impacts and losses of the ongoing and future pandemics. Data-driven techniques have been successfully applied to many domains and critical applications in recent years. Due to the highly interdisciplinary nature of pandemic management, researchers have proposed and developed data-driven techniques across various domains. However, a systematic and comprehensive survey of data-driven techniques for pandemic management is still missing. In this article, we review existing data analysis and visualization techniques and their applications for COVID-19 and future pandemic management with respect to four phases (namely, Response, Recovery, Mitigation, and Preparation) in disaster management. Data sources utilized in these studies and specific data acquisition and integration techniques for COVID-19 are also summarized. Furthermore, open issues and future directions for data-driven pandemic management are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the start, the airline industry has remarkably connected countries all over the world through rapid long-distance transportation, helping people overcome geographic barriers. Consequently, this has ushered in substantial economic growth, both nationally and internationally. The airline industry produces vast amounts of data, capturing a diverse set of information about their operations, including data related to passengers, freight, flights, and much more. Analyzing air travel data can advance the understanding of airline market dynamics, allowing companies to provide customized, efficient, and safe transportation services. Due to big data challenges in such a complex environment, the benefits of drawing insights from the air travel data in the airline industry have not yet been fully explored. This article aims to survey various components and corresponding proposed data analysis methodologies that have been identified as essential to the inner workings of the airline industry. We introduce existing data sources commonly used in the papers surveyed and summarize their availability. Finally, we discuss several potential research directions to better harness airline data in the future.We anticipate this study to be used as a comprehensive reference for both members of the airline industry and academic scholars with an interest in airline research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of machine learning is witnessing its golden era as deep learning slowly becomes the leader in this domain. Deep learning uses multiple layers to represent the abstractions of data to build computational models. Some key enabler deep learning algorithms such as generative adversarial networks, convolutional neural networks, and model transfers have completely changed our perception of information processing. However, there exists an aperture of understanding behind this tremendously fast-paced domain, because it was never previously represented from a multiscope perspective. The lack of core understanding renders these powerful methods as black-box machines that inhibit development at a fundamental level. Moreover, deep learning has repeatedly been perceived as a silver bullet to all stumbling blocks in machine learning, which is far from the truth. This article presents a comprehensive review of historical and recent state-of-theart approaches in visual, audio, and text processing; social network analysis; and natural language processing, followed by the in-depth analysis on pivoting and groundbreaking advances in deep learning applications. It was also undertaken to review the issues faced in deep learning such as unsupervised learning, black-box models, and online learning and to illustrate how these challenges can be transformed into prolific future research avenues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the proliferation of online services and mobile technologies, the world has stepped into a multimedia big data era. A vast amount of research work has been done in the multimedia area, targeting different aspects of big data analytics, such as the capture, storage, indexing, mining, and retrieval of multimedia big data. However, very few research work provides a complete survey of the whole pine-line of the multimedia big data analytics, including the management and analysis of the large amount of data, the challenges and opportunities, and the promising research directions. To serve this purpose, we present this survey, which conducts a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art research work on multimedia big data analytics. It also aims to bridge the gap between multimedia challenges and big data solutions by providing the current big data frameworks, their applications in multimedia analyses, the strengths and limitations of the existing methods, and the potential future directions in multimedia big data analytics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey that targets the most recent multimedia management techniques for very large-scale data and also provides the research studies and technologies advancing the multimedia analyses in this big data era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decades, we have witnessed an explosion of multimedia data, especially with the development of social media websites and blooming popularity of smart devices. As a result, multimedia semantic concept mining and retrieval whose objective is to mine useful information from the large amount of multimedia data including texts, images, and videos has become more and more important. The huge amount of multimedia data and the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level semantic concepts have made it even more challenging. To address these challenges, the correlations among the classes can provide important context cues to help bridge the semantic gap. Meanwhile, many real-world datasets do not have uniform class distributions while the minority instances actually represent the concept of interests, like frauds in transactions, intrusions in network security, and unusual events in surveillance. Despite extensive research efforts, imbalanced concept retrieval remains one of the most challenging research problems in multimedia data mining. Different from existing frameworks regarding concept correlations among labels, this paper presents a novel concept correlation analysis model using the correlation between the retrieval scores and labels. Experimental results on the TRECVID benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework can enhance imbalanced concept mining and retrieval even with trivial scores from the minority class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, bioimages such as microscopic images and in situ hybridization images increase exponentially. The rapid growth of such images calls for efficient and effective methods for mining significant patterns in them. As a biological process usually consists of several temporal stages, one important task in bioimage analysis is to classify images into different stages. In this paper, a multi-layer model collaboration approach is proposed to capitalize the class correlations in order to enhance the multi-class classification accuracy. First, several middle-level classes, which are relatively easy to annotate are created. A set of subspace-based classifiers are trained. Next, the classification scores output from these models are integrated with the target class classification scores. The score integration problem was formulated as a convex optimization problem, which is solved by the gradient descent approach. Experiments on four biological image data sets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms other current state-of-the-art algorithms, which indicates the proposed framework is promising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motion concepts mean those concepts containing motion information such as racing car and dancing. In order to achieve high retrieval accuracy comparing with those static concepts such as car or person in semantic retrieval tasks, the temporal information has to be considered. Additionally, if a video sequence is captured by an amateur using a hand-held camera containing significant camera motion, the complexities of the uncontrolled backgrounds would aggravate the difficulty of motion concept retrieval. Therefore, the retrieval of semantic concepts containing motion in non-static background is regarded as one of the most challenging tasks in multimedia semantic analysis and video retrieval. To address such a challenge, this paper proposes a motion concept retrieval framework including a motion region detection model and a concept retrieval model that integrates the spatial and temporal information in video sequences. The motion region detection model uses a new integral density method (adopted from the idea of integral images) to quickly identify the motion regions in an unsupervised way. Specially, key information locations on video frames are first obtained as maxima and minima of the result of Difference of Gaussian (DoG) function. Then a motion map of adjacent frames is generated from the diversity of the outcomes from the Simultaneous Partition and Class Parameter Estimation (SPCPE) framework. The usage of the motion map is to filter key information locations into key motion locations (KMLs) that imply the regions containing motion. The motion map can also indicate the motion direction which guides the proposed "integral density" approach to locate the motion regions quickly and accurately. Based on the motion region detection model, moving object-level information is extracted for semantic retrieval. In the proposed conceptual retrieval model, temporally semantic consistency among the consecutive shots isanalyzed and presented into a conditional probability model, which is then used to re-rank the similarity scores to improve the final retrieval results. The results of our proposed novel motion concept retrieval framework are not only illustrated visually demonstrating its robustness in non-static background, but also verified by the promising experimental results demonstrating that the concept retrieval performance can be improved by integrating the spatial and temporal visual information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one on a graphical annotation tool based on a region-based hierarchical representation of images, one on a machine learning-based interesting region detection algorithm for consumer photos, and one on the state of the art in MPEG-7 based ontologies.

Abstract  In this paper, an adaptive framework for video streaming over the Internet is presented. The framework is a joint design of packet scheduling and rate control with optimal bandwidth resource allocation. The transmission rate is dynamically adjusted to obtain maximal utilization of the client buffer and minimal allocation of the bandwidth. Under the constraint of the transmission rate, a prioritized packet scheduling is designed to provide a better visual quality of video frames. The packet scheduling is a refined bandwidth allocation which takes into account of varying importance of the different packets in a compressed video stream. Moreover, the proposed approach is scalable with increasing multimedia flows in the distributed Internet environment. Comparisons are made with the most current streaming approaches to evaluate the performance of the framework using the H.264 video codec. The extensive simulation results show that the average Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) increases in our proposed approach. It provides a better quality of the decoded frames, and the quality of the decoded frames changes more smoothly. The achieved video quality among different users also has a lower fluctuation, which indicates a fair sharing of network resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a subspace-based multimedia data mining framework is proposed for video semantic analysis, specifically video event/concept detection, by addressing two basic issues, i.e., semantic gap and rare event/concept detection. The proposed framework achieves full automation via multimodal content analysis and intelligent integration of distance-based and rule-based data mining techniques. The content analysis process facilitates the comprehensive video analysis by extracting low-level and middle-level features from audio/visual channels. The integrated data mining techniques effectively address these two basic issues by alleviating the class imbalance issue along the process and by reconstructing and refining the feature dimension automatically. The promising experimental performance on goal/corner event detection and sports/commercials/building concepts extraction from soccer videos and TRECVID news collections demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Furthermore, its unique domain-free characteristic indicates the great potential of extending the proposed multimedia data mining framework to a wide range of different application domains. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Management of data imprecision and uncertainty has become increasingly important, especially in situation awareness and assessment applications where reliability of the decision- making process is critical (e.g., in military battlefields). These applications require the following: 1) an effective methodology for modeling data imperfections and 2) procedures for enabling knowledge discovery and quantifying and propagating partial or incomplete knowledge throughout the decision-making process. In this paper, using a Dempster-Shafer belief-theoretic relational database (DS-DB) that can conveniently represent a wider class of data imperfections, an association rule mining (ARM)-based classification algorithm possessing the desirable functionality is proposed. For this purpose, various ARM-related notions are revisited so that they could be applied in the presence of data imperfections. A data structure called belief item set tree is used to efficiently extract frequent item sets and generate association rules from the proposed DS-DB. This set of rules is used as the basis on which an unknown data record, whose attributes are represented via belief functions, is classified. These algorithms are validated on a simplified situation assessment scenario where sensor observations may have caused data imperfections in both attribute values and class labels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, network security has become an extremely vital issue that beckons the development of accurate and efficient solutions capable of effectively defending our network systems and the valuable information journeying through them. In this article, a distributed multiagent intrusion detection system (IDS) architecture is proposed, which attempts to provide an accurate and lightweight solution to network intrusion detection by tackling issues associated with the design of a distributed multiagent system, such as poor system scalability and the requirements of excessive processing power and memory storage. The proposed IDS architecture consists of (i) the Host layer with lightweight host agents that perform anomaly detection in network connections to their respective hosts, and (ii) the Classification layer whose main functions are to perform misuse detection for the host agents, detect distributed attacks, and disseminate network security status information to the whole network. The intrusion detection task is achieved through the employment of the lightweight Adaptive Sub-Eigenspace Modeling (ASEM)-based anomaly and misuse detection schemes. Promising experimental results indicate that ASEM-based schemes outperform the KNN and LOF algorithms, with high detection rates and low false alarm rates in the anomaly detection task, and outperform several well-known supervised classification methods such as C4.5 Decision Tree, SVM, NN, KNN, Logistic, and Decision Table (DT) in the misuse detection task. To assess the performance in a real-world scenario, the Relative Assumption Model, feature extraction techniques, and common network attack generation tools are employed to generate normal and anomalous traffic in a private LAN testbed. Furthermore, the scalability performance of the proposed IDS architecture is investigated through the simulation of the proposed agent communication scheme, and satisfactory linear relationships for both degradation of system response time and agent communication generated network traffic overhead are achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the content based image retrieval systems which has the dynamic user concept pattern. For an effective text-based retrieval systems there should be a proper retrieval framework. This has been implemented so that the users can bring their focus to understand the concept of the retrieval systems learning process. Retrieval performance, however, is tested to set the standards of the proposed learning and retrieval framework.

Abstract  The performance of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems is largely limited by the gap between the low-level features and high-level semantic concepts. In this paper, a probabilistic semantic network-based image retrieval framework using relevance feedback is proposed to bridge this gap, which not only takes into consideration the low-level image content features, but also learns high-level concepts from a set of training data, such as access frequencies and access patterns of the images. One of the distinct properties of our framework is that it exploits the structured description of visual contents as well as the relative affinity measurements among the images. Consequently, it provides the capability to bridge the gap between the low-level features and high-level concepts. Moreover, such high-level concepts can be learned off-line, and can be utilized and refined based on the user’s specific interest during the on-line retrieval process. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework can effectively assist in retrieving more accurate results for user queries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel framework for video event detection. The core of the framework is an advanced temporal analysis and multimodal data mining method that consists of three major components: low-level feature extraction, temporal pattern analysis, and multimodal data mining. One of the unique characteristics of this framework is that it offers strong generality and extensibility with the capability of exploring representative event patterns with little human interference. The framework is presented with its application to the detection of the soccer goal events over a large collection of soccer video data with various production styles [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focuses on the use of unsupervised learning-based segmentation and object tracking in intelligent transportation systems. Tracking for traffic video sequences; Background learning and extraction.

The number of information sources and the volumes of data in these information sources have greatly increased, which may be attributed to the ever-increasing complexity of real-world applications. The enormous amount of information available in the information sources in a distributed information-providing environment has created a need to provide users with tools to effectively and efficiently navigate and retrieve information. Queries in such an environment often access information from multiple information sources. This may be attributed to navigational characteristics. Clusters provide a structure for organizing the large number of information sources for efficient browsing, searching, and retrieval. This paper presents a stochastically-based clustering mechanism, called the Markov model mediator (MMM), to group the information sources into a set of useful clusters. Each information source cluster groups those information sources that show similarities In their data access behavior. Information sources within the same cluster are expected to be able to provide most of the required information among themselves for user queries that are closely related with respect to a particular application. This can significantly improve system response time, query performance, and result in an overall improvement in decision support. Empirical studies on real databases are performed and the results demonstrate that our proposed mechanism leads to a better set of clusters in comparison with other clustering methods. This serves to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed MMM mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The innovation and diversification of development in multimedia technology and network infrastructures have brought a significant impact to education, especially for distance learning. This paper presents a model-based asynchronous distance learning system development that consists of a presentation semantic model called the multimedia augmented transition network (MATN) model and an asynchronous distance learning system called the Java-based Integrated Asynchronous Distance Learning (JIADL) system. The MATN model is powerful in modeling the synchronization and quality-of-service (QoS) for distance learning multimedia presentations. The JIADL system can support diverse asynchronous distance learning services by integrating RealPlayer and Java technology to augment the superiority of both models. A course sample is used to illustrate and validate the effectiveness of the system. How to use the MATN model to model the diversity requirements of a distance learning multimedia presenta-tion is also discussed. Furthermore, the initial experimental results show that our system is cost effective and has a wide range of applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One key technology of intelligent transportation systems is the use of advanced sensor systems for on-line surveillance to gather detailed information on traffic conditions. Traffic video analysis can provide a wide range of useful information to traffic planners. In this context, the object-level indexing of video data can enable vehicle classification, traffic flow analysis, incident detection and analysis at intersections, vehicle tracking for traffic operations, and update of design warrants. In this paper, a learning-based automatic framework is proposed to support the multimedia data indexing and querying of spatio-temporal relationships of vehicle objects in a traffic video sequence. The spatio-temporal relationships of vehicle objects are captured via the proposed unsupervised image/video segmentation method and object tracking algorithm, and modeled using a multimedia augmented transition network model and multimedia input strings. An efficient and effective background learning and subtraction technique is employed to eliminate the complex background details in the traffic video frames. It substantially enhances the efficiency of the segmentation process and the accuracy of the segmentation results to enable more accurate video indexing and annotation. The paper uses four real-life traffic video sequences from several road intersections under different weather conditions in the study experiments. The results show that the proposed framework is effective in automating data collection and access for complex traffic situations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent advances in airborne light detection and ranging (LIDAR) technology allow rapid and inexpensive measurements of topography over large areas. This technology is becoming a primary method for generating high-resolution digital terrain models (DTMs) that are essential to numerous applications such as flood modeling and landslide prediction. Airborne LIDAR systems usually return a three-dimensional cloud of point measurements from reflective objects scanned by the laser beneath the flight path. In order to generate a DTM, measurements from non-ground features such as buildings, vehicles, and vegetation have to be classified and removed. In this paper, a progressive morphological filter was developed to detect non-ground LIDAR measurements. By gradually increasing the window size of the filter and using elevation difference thresholds, the measurements of vehicles, vegetation, and buildings are removed, while ground data are preserved. Datasets from mountainous and flat urbanized areas were selected to test the progressive morphological filter. The results show that the filter can remove most of the non-ground points effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various topics published within the issue including one by Kasturi Chatterjee and Shu-Ching Chen about a multimedia data management approach, one by Shih-Hsi Liu and Ming Li about the semantics and data-driven biomedical multimedia software system and one by Masaru Miyazaki and Masahiro Shibata about baseball digest production system using inductive logic programming.