Learning hierarchical prototypes of motion time series for interactive systems

Abstract. For interactive systems, recognition, reproduction, and generalization of observed motion data are crucial for successful interaction. In this paper, we present a novel method for analysis of motion data that we refer to as K-OMM-trees. K-OMM-trees combine Ordered Means Models (OMMs) a model-based machine learning approach for time series with an hierarchical analysis technique for very large data sets, the K-tree algorithm. The proposed K-OMM-trees enable unsupervised prototype extraction of motion time series data with hierarchical data representation. After introducing the algorithmic details, we apply the proposed method to a gesture data set that includes substantial inter-class variations. Results from our studies show that K-OMM-trees are able to substantially increase the recognition performance and to learn an inherent data hierarchy with meaningful gesture abstractions.

Re-targeting choreographic enquiry through motion capture

This creative work is the outcome of preliminary experiments through practice aiming to explore the collaboration of a Dancer/choreographer with an Animator, along with enquiry into the intergeneration of motion capture technologies within the work-flow. The animated visuals derived from the motion capture data is not aimed at just re-targeting of movement from one source to another but looks at describing the thought and emotions of the choreographed dance through visual aesthetics.

A picture is worth a thousand words : a cross-curricular approach to learning about visuals in STEM

Visuals are a central feature of STEM in all levels of education and many areas of employment. The wide variety of visuals that students are expected to master in STEM prevents an approach that aims to teach students about every type of visual that they may encounter. This paper proposes a pedagogy that can be applied across year levels and learning areas, allowing a school-wide, cross-curricular, approach to teaching about visual, that enhances learning in STEM and all other learning areas. Visuals are classified into six categories based on their properties, unlike traditional methods that classify visuals according to purpose. As visuals in the same category share common properties, students are able to transfer their knowledge from the familiar to unfamiliar in each category. The paper details the classification and proposes some strategies that can be can be incorporated into existing methods of teaching students about visuals in all learning areas. The approach may also assist students to see the connections between the different learning areas within and outside STEM.

A retrospective cohort investigation of active range of motion within one week of open reduction and internal fixation of distal radius fractures

Distal radius fractures stabilized by open reduction internal fixation (ORIF) have become increasingly common. There is currently no consensus on the optimal time to commence range of motion (ROM) exercises post-ORIF. A retrospective cohort review was conducted over a five-year period to compare wrist and forearm range of motion outcomes and number of therapy sessions between patients who commenced active ROM exercises within the first seven days and from day eight onward following ORIF of distal radius fractures. One hundred and twenty-one patient cases were identified. Clinical data, active ROM at initial and discharge therapy assessments, fracture type, surgical approaches, and number of therapy sessions attended were recorded. One hundred and seven (88.4%) cases had complete datasets. The early active ROM group (n = 37) commenced ROM a mean (SD) of 4.27 (1.8) days post-ORIF. The comparator group (n = 70) commenced ROM exercises 24.3 (13.6) days post-ORIF. No significant differences were identified between groups in ROM at initial or discharge assessments, or therapy sessions attended. The results from this study indicate that patients who commenced active ROM exercises an average of 24 days after surgery achieved comparable ROM outcomes with similar number of therapy sessions to those who commenced ROM exercises within the first week.

Displacement motion prediction of a landing deck for recovery operations of rotary UAVs

This paper proposes a practical prediction procedure for vertical displacement of a Rotarywing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (RUAV) landing deck in the presence of stochastic sea state disturbances. A proper time series model tending to capture characteristics of the dynamic relationship between an observer and a landing deck is constructed, with model orders determined by a novel principle based on Bayes Information Criterion (BIC) and coefficients identified using the Forgetting Factor Recursive Least Square (FFRLS) method. In addition, a fast-converging online multi-step predictor is developed, which can be implemented more rapidly than the Auto-Regressive (AR) predictor as it requires less memory allocations when updating coefficients. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed prediction approach exhibits satisfactory prediction performance, making it suitable for integration into ship-helicopter approach and landing guidance systems in consideration of computational capacity of the flight computer.

Motion capture and the future of virtual production

Motion capture continues to be adopted across a range of creative fields including, animation, games, visual effects, dance, live theatre and the visual arts. This panel will discuss and showcase the use of motion capture across these creative fields and consider the future of virtual production in the creative industries.

The development of a kinematic model to quantify in-shoe foot motion

A multi-segment foot model was used to develop an accurate and reliable kinematic model to describe in-shoe foot kinematics during gait.

Buzz in motion pictures : what is buzz and how can marketing create it?

In the movie industry, the extraordinarily successful theatrical performance of certain films is largely attributed to buzz. Despite longstanding commentary about the role of buzz in successful movie marketing and the belief that it accelerates new product diffusion, limited scholarly evidence exists to support these assertions. This is primarily due to the lack of conceptual distinction of buzz from word-of-mouth, which is often used as the main basis for conceptualising buzz. However, word-of-mouth does not fully explain the buzz surrounding films such as 'Gone With The Wind', 'The Dark Knight' and 'Avatar'. Informed by valuable insights from key experts who have launched some of the most successful movies in box office history, as well as a range of moviegoers, this thesis developed a deeper understanding of what buzz is and how it is created. This thesis concludes that buzz is not the same as word-of-mouth.

The effect of organ motion of radiotherapy plans

Organ motion as a result of respiration is an important field of research for medical physics. Knowledge of magnitude and direction of this motion is necessary to allow for more accurate radiotherapy treatment planning. This will result in higher doses to the tumour whilst sparing healthy tissue. This project involved human trials, where the radiation therapy patient's kidneys were CT scanned under three different conditions; whilst free breathing (FB), breath-hold at normal tidal inspiration (BHIN), and breath-hold at normal tidal expiration (BHEX). The magnitude of motion was measured by recording the outline of the kidney from a Beam's Eye View (BEV). The centre of mass of this 2D shape was calculated for each set using "ImageJ" software and the magnitude of movement determined from the change in the centroid's coordinates between the BHIN and BHEX scans. The movement ranged from, for the left and right kidneys, 4-46mm and 2-44mm in the superior/inferior (axial) plane, 1-21mm and 2- 16mm in the anterior/posterior (coronal) plane, and 0-6mm and 0-8mm in the lateral/medial (sagittal) plane. From exhale to inhale, the kidneys tended to move inferiorly, anteriorly and laterally. A standard radiotherapy plan, designed to treat the para-aortics with opposed lateral fields was performed on the free breathing (planning) CT set. The field size and arrangement was set up using the same parameters for each subject. The prescription was to deliver 45 Gray in 25 fractions. This field arrangement and prescription was then copied over to the breath hold CT sets, and the dosimetric differences were compared using Dose Volume Histograms (DVH). The point of comparison for the three sets was recorded as the percentage volume of kidney receiving less than or equal to 10 Gray. The QUASAR respiratory motion phantom was used with the range of motion determined from the human study. The phantom was imaged, planned and treated with a linear accelerator with dose determined by film. The effect of the motion was measured by the change in the penumbra of the film and compared to the penumbra from the treatment planning system.

Made by motion, Series one

“Made by Motion” is a collaboration between digital artist Paul Van Opdenbosch and performer and choreographer Elise May; a series of studies on captured motion data used to generating experimental visual forms that reverberate in space and time. The project investigates the invisible forces generated by and influencing the movement of a dancer. Along with how the forces can be captured and applied to generating visual outcomes that surpass simple data visualisation, projecting the intent of the performer’s movements. The source or ‘seed’ comes from using an Xsens MVN - Inertial Motion Capture system to capture spontaneous dance movements, with the visual generation conducted through a customised dynamics simulation. In this first series the visual investigation focused on manipulating the movement date at the instance of capture, capture been the recording of three-dimensional movement as ‘seen’ by the hardware and ‘understood’ through the calibration of software. By repositioning the capture hardware on the body we can effectively change how the same sequence of movements is ‘seen’ by the motion capture system thus generating a different visual result from effetely identical movement. The outcomes from the experiments clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of using motion capture hardware as a creative tool to manipulate the perception of the capture subject, in this case been a sequence of dance movements. The creative work exhibited is a cross-section of the experiments conducted in practice with the first animated work (Movement A - Control) using the motion capture hardware in its default ‘normal’ configuration. Following this is the lower body moved to the upper body (Lb-Ub), right arm moved onto the left arm (Ra-La), right leg moved onto the left leg (Rl-Ll) and finally the left leg moved onto a object that is then held in the left hand (Ll-Pf (Lh)).

Experimental arts practice incorporating motion capture

My practice-led research explores and maps workflows for generating experimental creative work involving inertia based motion capture technology. Motion capture has often been used as a way to bridge animation and dance resulting in abstracted visuals outcomes. In early works this process was largely done by rotoscoping, reference footage and mechanical forms of motion capture. With the evolution of technology, optical and inertial forms of motion capture are now more accessible and able to accurately capture a larger range of complex movements. Made by Motion is a collaboration between digital artist Paul Van Opdenbosch and performer and choreographer Elise May; a series of studies on captured motion data used to generate experimental visual forms that reverberate in space and time. The project investigates the invisible forces generated by and influencing the movement of a dancer. Along with how the forces can be captured and applied to generating visual outcomes that surpass simple data visualisation, projecting the intent of the performer’s movements. The source or ‘seed’ comes from using an Xsens MVN – Inertial Motion Capture system to capture spontaneous dance movements, with the visual generation conducted through a customised dynamics simulation. In my presentation I will be displaying and discussing a selected creative works from the project along with the process and considerations behind the work.

The human topoisomerase I damage response plays a role in apoptosis

Previous studies have shown that human topoisomerase I cleavage complexes form as a response to various DNA damages in vivo, the so called human topoisomerase I “damage response”. It was suggested that this damage response may play a role in DNA repair as well as in apoptosis, but only very few investigations have been done and the significance of the damage response still remains unclear. Here we demonstrate that human topoisomerase I cleavage complexes induced by high doses of UV irradiation are highly stable for up to 48 h. Furthermore, we show that human topoisomerase I cleavage complexes correlate with apoptosis. However, at low UV doses the cleavage complex level was very low and the complexes were repaired. Surprisingly, we found that high levels of stable cleavage complexes were not only found in UV-irradiated cells but also in untreated cells that underwent apoptosis. A possible role of human topoisomerase I in apoptosis is discussed.

Toward understanding social engineering

There is no doubt that social engineering plays a vital role in compromising most security defenses, and in attacks on people, organizations, companies, or even governments. It is the art of deceiving and tricking people to reveal critical information or to perform an action that benefits the attacker in some way. Fraudulent and deceptive people have been using social engineering traps and tactics using information technology such as e-mails, social networks, web sites, and applications to trick victims into obeying them, accepting threats, and falling victim to various crimes and attacks such as phishing, sexual abuse, financial abuse, identity theft, impersonation, physical crime, and many other forms of attack. Although organizations, researchers, practitioners, and lawyers recognize the severe risk of social engineering-based threats, there is a severe lack of understanding and controlling of such threats. One side of the problem is perhaps the unclear concept of social engineering as well as the complexity of understand human behaviors in behaving toward, approaching, accepting, and failing to recognize threats or the deception behind them. The aim of this paper is to explain the definition of social engineering based on the related theories of the many related disciplines such as psychology, sociology, information technology, marketing, and behaviourism. We hope, by this work, to help researchers, practitioners, lawyers, and other decision makers to get a fuller picture of social engineering and, therefore, to open new directions of collaboration toward detecting and controlling it.

Motion planning and stochastic control with experimental validation on a planetary rover

Motion planning for planetary rovers must consider control uncertainty in order to maintain the safety of the platform during navigation. Modelling such control uncertainty is difficult due to the complex interaction between the platform and its environment. In this paper, we propose a motion planning approach whereby the outcome of control actions is learned from experience and represented statistically using a Gaussian process regression model. This model is used to construct a control policy for navigation to a goal region in a terrain map built using an on-board RGB-D camera. The terrain includes flat ground, small rocks, and non-traversable rocks. We report the results of 200 simulated and 35 experimental trials that validate the approach and demonstrate the value of considering control uncertainty in maintaining platform safety.