The 48 hour game making challenge: Jams, Jellybeans and the fruits of passion

Performance / Event Documentation and Curatorial Research Statement

Automatically detecting pain in video through facial action units

In a clinical setting, pain is reported either through patient self-report or via an observer. Such measures are problematic as they are: 1) subjective, and 2) give no specific timing information. Coding pain as a series of facial action units (AUs) can avoid these issues as it can be used to gain an objective measure of pain on a frame-by-frame basis. Using video data from patients with shoulder injuries, in this paper, we describe an active appearance model (AAM)-based system that can automatically detect the frames in video in which a patient is in pain. This pain data set highlights the many challenges associated with spontaneous emotion detection, particularly that of expression and head movement due to the patient's reaction to pain. In this paper, we show that the AAM can deal with these movements and can achieve significant improvements in both the AU and pain detection performance compared to the current-state-of-the-art approaches which utilize similarity-normalized appearance features only.

Examination of gaze behaviors under in situ and video simulation task constraints reveals differences in information pickup for perception and action

Gaze and movement behaviors of association football goalkeepers were compared under two video simulation conditions (i.e., verbal and joystick movement responses) and three in situ conditions (i.e., verbal, simplified body movement, and interceptive response). The results showed that the goalkeepers spent more time fixating on information from the penalty kick taker’s movements than ball location for all perceptual judgment conditions involving limited movement (i.e., verbal responses, joystick movement, and simplified body movement). In contrast, an equivalent amount of time was spent fixating on the penalty taker’s relative motions and the ball location for the in situ interception condition, which required the goalkeepers to attempt to make penalty saves. The data suggest that gaze and movement behaviors function differently, depending on the experimental task constraints selected for empirical investigations. These findings highlight the need for research on perceptual— motor behaviors to be conducted in representative experimental conditions to allow appropriate generalization of conclusions to performance environments.

Analysing the effect of digital technology on channel strategy, power and disintermediation in the home video market : the demise of the video store?

The antecedents of channel power (e.g. El-Ansary and Stern, 1972) and the impact of channel structure ( e.g. Anderson and Narus,1984) on channel dynamics have long been important topics within the channel literature. In addition to the theoretical and methodological contributions, research in these areas has helped channel managers to understand how power is generated and used in coordinating distribution strategies in different contexts. The study presented in this paper builds upon these previous literatures, which are first briefly reviewed below.

Automated object identification using optical video cameras on construction sites

Visual recording devices such as video cameras, CCTVs, or webcams have been broadly used to facilitate work progress or safety monitoring on construction sites. Without human intervention, however, both real-time reasoning about captured scenes and interpretation of recorded images are challenging tasks. This article presents an exploratory method for automated object identification using standard video cameras on construction sites. The proposed method supports real-time detection and classification of mobile heavy equipment and workers. The background subtraction algorithm extracts motion pixels from an image sequence, the pixels are then grouped into regions to represent moving objects, and finally the regions are identified as a certain object using classifiers. For evaluating the method, the formulated computer-aided process was implemented on actual construction sites, and promising results were obtained. This article is expected to contribute to future applications of automated monitoring systems of work zone safety or productivity.

Year 3 Media Arts : teaching the key concepts through video editing

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Facilitating learning in a real time strategy computer game

The aim of this project was to implement a just-in-time hints help system into a real time strategy (RTS) computer game that would deliver information to the user at the time that it would be of the most benefit. The goal of this help system is to improve the user’s learning in terms of their rate of learning, retention and avoidance of stagnation. The first stage of this project was implementing a computer game to incorporate four different types of skill that the user must acquire, namely motor, perceptual, declarative knowledge and strategic. Subsequently, the just-in-time hints help system was incorporated into the game to assess the user’s knowledge and deliver hints accordingly. The final stage of the project was to test the effectiveness of this help system by conducting two phases of testing. The goal of this testing was to demonstrate an increase in the user’s assessment of the helpfulness of the system from phase one to phase two. The results of this testing showed that there was no significant difference in the user’s responses in the two phases. However, when the results were analysed with respect to several categories of hints that were identified, it became apparent that patterns in the data were beginning to emerge. The conclusions of the project were that further testing with a larger sample size would be required to provide more reliable results and that factors such as the user’s skill level and different types of goals should be taken into account.

Hybrid-Game Strategies for multi-objective design optimization in engineering

A number of Game Strategies (GS) have been developed in past decades. They have been used in the fields of economics, engineering, computer science and biology due to their efficiency in solving design optimization problems. In addition, research in multi-objective (MO) and multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) has focused on developing robust and efficient optimization methods to produce a set of high quality solutions with low computational cost. In this paper, two optimization techniques are considered; the first optimization method uses multi-fidelity hierarchical Pareto optimality. The second optimization method uses the combination of two Game Strategies; Nash-equilibrium and Pareto optimality. The paper shows how Game Strategies can be hybridised and coupled to Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEA) to accelerate convergence speed and to produce a set of high quality solutions. Numerical results obtained from both optimization methods are compared in terms of computational expense and model quality. The benefits of using Hybrid-Game Strategies are clearly demonstrated

Investigating the cost-effectiveness of video telephone based support for newly diagnosed paediatric oncology patients and their families: design of a randomised controlled trial

Background Providing ongoing family centred support is an integral part of childhood cancer care. For families living in regional and remote areas, opportunities to receive specialist support are limited by the availability of health care professionals and accessibility, which is often reduced due to distance, time, cost and transport. The primary aim of this work is to investigate the cost-effectiveness of videotelephony to support regional and remote families returning home for the first time with a child newly diagnosed with cancer Methods/design We will recruit 162 paediatric oncology patients and their families to a single centre randomised controlled trial. Patients from regional and remote areas, classified by Accessibility/Remoteness Index of Australia (ARIA+) greater than 0.2, will be randomised to a videotelephone support intervention or a usual support control group. Metropolitan families (ARIA+ ≤ 0.2) will be recruited as an additional usual support control group. Families allocated to the videotelephone support intervention will have access to usual support plus education, communication, counselling and monitoring with specialist multidisciplinary team members via a videotelephone service for a 12-week period following first discharge home. Families in the usual support control group will receive standard care i.e., specialist multidisciplinary team members provide support either face-to-face during inpatient stays, outpatient clinic visits or home visits, or via telephone for families who live far away from the hospital. The primary outcome measure is parental health related quality of life as measured using the Medical Outcome Survey (MOS) Short Form SF-12 measured at baseline, 4 weeks, 8 weeks and 12 weeks. The secondary outcome measures are: parental informational and emotional support; parental perceived stress, parent reported patient quality of life and parent reported sibling quality of life, parental satisfaction with care, cost of providing improved support, health care utilisation and financial burden for families. Discussion This investigation will establish the feasibility, acceptability and cost-effectiveness of using videotelephony to improve the clinical and psychosocial support provided to regional and remote paediatric oncology patients and their families.

Automatic generation of effective video summaries

As the popularity of video as an information medium rises, the amount of video content that we produce and archive keeps growing. This creates a demand for shorter representations of videos in order to assist the task of video retrieval. The traditional solution is to let humans watch these videos and write textual summaries based on what they saw. This summarisation process, however, is time-consuming. Moreover, a lot of useful audio-visual information contained in the original video can be lost. Video summarisation aims to turn a full-length video into a more concise version that preserves as much information as possible. The problem of video summarisation is to minimise the trade-off between how concise and how representative a summary is. There are also usability concerns that need to be addressed in a video summarisation scheme. To solve these problems, this research aims to create an automatic video summarisation framework that combines and improves on existing video summarisation techniques, with the focus on practicality and user satisfaction. We also investigate the need for different summarisation strategies in different kinds of videos, for example news, sports, or TV series. Finally, we develop a video summarisation system based on the framework, which is validated by subjective and objective evaluation. The evaluation results shows that the proposed framework is effective for creating video skims, producing high user satisfaction rate and having reasonably low computing requirement. We also demonstrate that the techniques presented in this research can be used for visualising video summaries in the form web pages showing various useful information, both from the video itself and from external sources.