Mood sensing from social media texts and its applications

We present a large-scale mood analysis in social media texts. We organise the paper in three parts: (1) addressing the problem of feature selection and classification of mood in blogosphere, (2) we extract global mood patterns at different level of aggregation from a large-scale data set of approximately 18 millions documents (3) and finally, we extract mood trajectory for an egocentric user and study how it can be used to detect subtle emotion signals in a user-centric manner, supporting discovery of hyper-groups of communities based on sentiment information. For mood classification, two feature sets proposed in psychology are used, showing that these features are efficient, do not require a training phase and yield classification results comparable to state of the art, supervised feature selection schemes, on mood patterns, empirical results for mood organisation in the blogosphere are provided, analogous to the structure of human emotion proposed independently in the psychology literature, and on community structure discovery, sentiment-based approach can yield useful insights into community formation.

The complete fool: Insights and trajectories from an ancient path

This study presents a novel and accompanying exegesis which explore the fool behind the Fool by stripping away his usual costume and arenas of power and folly to expose an essence – an impulse of potentiality – that helps explain the Fool’s perpetuity and argues his critical significance as a catalyst for creative thinking.

Automatic attribution of ancient Roman imperial coins

Classification of coins is an important but laborious aspect of numismatics - the field that studies coins and currency. It is particularly challenging in the case of ancient coins. Due to the way they were manufactured, as well as wear from use and exposure to chemicals in the soil, the same ancient coin type can exhibit great variability in appearance. We demonstrate that geometry-free models of appearance do not perform better than chance on this task and that only a small improvement is gained by previously proposed models of combined appearance and geometry. Thus, our first major contribution is a new type of feature which is efficient in terms of computational time and storage requirements, and which effectively captures geometric configurations between descriptors corresponding to local features. Our second contribution is a description of a fully automatic system based on the proposed features, which robustly localizes, segments out and classifies coins from cluttered images. We also describe a large database of ancient coins that we collected and which will be made publicly available. Finally, we report the results of empirical comparison of different coin matching techniques. The features proposed in this paper are found to greatly outperform existing methods.

Reading ancient coins: automatically identifying denarii using obverse legend seeded retrieval

The aim of this paper is to automatically identify a Roman Imperial denarius from a single query photograph of its obverse and reverse. Such functionality has the potential to contribute greatly to various national schemes which encourage laymen to report their finds to local museums. Our work introduces a series of novelties: (i) this is the first paper which describes a method for extracting the legend of an ancient coin from a photograph; (ii) we are also the first to suggest the idea and propose a method for identifying a coin using a series of carefully engineered retrievals, each harnessed for further information using visual or meta-data processing; (iii) we show how in addition to a unique standard reference number for a query coin, the proposed system can be used to extract salient coin information (issuing authority, obverse and reverse descriptions, mint date) and retrieve images of other coins of the same type.

Georgics of the mind and the architecture of fortune: Francis Bacon's therapeutic ethics

This essay complements recent work by Soreana Corneanu situating Bacon’s epistemology in a larger lineage of literature concerning ‘cultura animi’ in early modern Europe, by focusing on Bacon’s conception of a therapeutic philosophical ‘Georgics of the mind’ in The Advancement of Learning, the Essays, and other texts. We aim to show firstly (in Part 2) how Bacon’s conception of human nature, and the importance of habit and custom, reflects the ancient pagan thinkers’ justifications of philosophical therapeutics. Attention will also be paid in this connection to Bacon’s sensitivity to another marker of ancient therapeutic philosophy as Pierre Hadot in particular has recently presented it: the proliferation of different rhetorical and literary forms aiming at different pedagogic, therapeutic, and psychogogic aims. Part 3 then will examine Bacon’s changes in practical or ‘magistral’ philosophy, carried out on the therapeutic ethical grounds which Part 2 has examined, but proposing a much more active ‘architecture of fortune’ to philosophical and political aspirants.

China’s foundational thought and ancient philosophers

China's Spring and Autumn (770 BC-403 BC) and Warring States (403 BC-221 BC) periods, though marked by disunity and constant wars, witnessed an unprecedented era of cultural prosperity and intellectual activities. This paper takes this political context and intellectual background into consideration when examining the main schools of thought in that era, and argues that the atmosphere of reform and new ideas was attributed to the struggle for survival among warring regional lords, who needed an ever-increasing number of well-educated officials.