FACSGen 2.0 animation software: generating three-dimensional FACS-valid facial expressions for emotion research

In this article, we present FACSGen 2.0, new animation software for creating static and dynamic threedimensional facial expressions on the basis of the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). FACSGen permits total control over the action units (AUs), which can be animated at all levels of intensity and applied alone or in combination to an infinite number of faces. In two studies, we tested the validity of the software for the AU appearance defined in the FACS manual and the conveyed emotionality of FACSGen expressions. In Experiment 1, four FACS-certified coders evaluated the complete set of 35 single AUs and 54 AU combinations for AU presence or absence, appearance quality, intensity, and asymmetry. In Experiment 2, lay participants performed a recognition task on emotional expressions created with FACSGen software and rated the similarity of expressions displayed by human and FACSGen faces. Results showed good to excellent classification levels for all AUs by the four FACS coders, suggesting that the AUs are valid exemplars of FACS specifications. Lay participants’ recognition rates for nine emotions were high, and comparisons of human and FACSGen expressions were very similar. The findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the software in producing reliable and emotionally valid expressions, and suggest its application in numerous scientific areas, including perception, emotion, and clinical and euroscience research.

Prescription software for recovery and rehabilitation using Microsoft Kinect

Brain injuries, including stroke, can be debilitating incidents with potential for severe long term effects; many people stop making significant progress once leaving in-patient medical care and are unable to fully restore their quality of life when returning home. The aim of this collaborative project, between the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Reading, is to provide a low cost portable system that supports a patient's condition and their recovery in hospital or at home. This is done by providing engaging applications with targeted gameplay that is individually tailored to the rehabilitation of the patient's symptoms. The applications are capable of real-time data capture and analysis in order to provide information to therapists on patient progress and to further improve the personalized care that an individual can receive.

Evaluating the climate and air quality impacts of short-lived pollutants

This paper presents a summary of the work done within the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme project ECLIPSE (Evaluating the Climate and Air Quality Impacts of Short-Lived Pollutants). ECLIPSE had a unique systematic concept for designing a realistic and effective mitigation scenario for short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs; methane, aerosols and ozone, and their precursor species) and quantifying its climate and air quality impacts, and this paper presents the results in the context of this overarching strategy. The first step in ECLIPSE was to create a new emission inventory based on current legislation (CLE) for the recent past and until 2050. Substantial progress compared to previous work was made by including previously unaccounted types of sources such as flaring of gas associated with oil production, and wick lamps. These emission data were used for present-day reference simulations with four advanced Earth system models (ESMs) and six chemistry transport models (CTMs). The model simulations were compared with a variety of ground-based and satellite observational data sets from Asia, Europe and the Arctic. It was found that the models still underestimate the measured seasonality of aerosols in the Arctic but to a lesser extent than in previous studies. Problems likely related to the emissions were identified for northern Russia and India, in particular. To estimate the climate impacts of SLCPs, ECLIPSE followed two paths of research: the first path calculated radiative forcing (RF) values for a large matrix of SLCP species emissions, for different seasons and regions independently. Based on these RF calculations, the Global Temperature change Potential metric for a time horizon of 20 years (GTP20) was calculated for each SLCP emission type. This climate metric was then used in an integrated assessment model to identify all emission mitigation measures with a beneficial air quality and short-term (20-year) climate impact. These measures together defined a SLCP mitigation (MIT) scenario. Compared to CLE, the MIT scenario would reduce global methane (CH4) and black carbon (BC) emissions by about 50 and 80 %, respectively. For CH4, measures on shale gas production, waste management and coal mines were most important. For non-CH4 SLCPs, elimination of high-emitting vehicles and wick lamps, as well as reducing emissions from gas flaring, coal and biomass stoves, agricultural waste, solvents and diesel engines were most important. These measures lead to large reductions in calculated surface concentrations of ozone and particulate matter. We estimate that in the EU, the loss of statistical life expectancy due to air pollution was 7.5 months in 2010, which will be reduced to 5.2 months by 2030 in the CLE scenario. The MIT scenario would reduce this value by another 0.9 to 4.3 months. Substantially larger reductions due to the mitigation are found for China (1.8 months) and India (11–12 months). The climate metrics cannot fully quantify the climate response. Therefore, a second research path was taken. Transient climate ensemble simulations with the four ESMs were run for the CLE and MIT scenarios, to determine the climate impacts of the mitigation. In these simulations, the CLE scenario resulted in a surface temperature increase of 0.70 ± 0.14 K between the years 2006 and 2050. For the decade 2041–2050, the warming was reduced by 0.22 ± 0.07 K in the MIT scenario, and this result was in almost exact agreement with the response calculated based on the emission metrics (reduced warming of 0.22 ± 0.09 K). The metrics calculations suggest that non-CH4 SLCPs contribute ~ 22 % to this response and CH4 78 %. This could not be fully confirmed by the transient simulations, which attributed about 90 % of the temperature response to CH4 reductions. Attribution of the observed temperature response to non-CH4 SLCP emission reductions and BC specifically is hampered in the transient simulations by small forcing and co-emitted species of the emission basket chosen. Nevertheless, an important conclusion is that our mitigation basket as a whole would lead to clear benefits for both air quality and climate. The climate response from BC reductions in our study is smaller than reported previously, possibly because our study is one of the first to use fully coupled climate models, where unforced variability and sea ice responses cause relatively strong temperature fluctuations that may counteract (and, thus, mask) the impacts of small emission reductions. The temperature responses to the mitigation were generally stronger over the continents than over the oceans, and with a warming reduction of 0.44 K (0.39–0.49) K the largest over the Arctic. Our calculations suggest particularly beneficial climate responses in southern Europe, where surface warming was reduced by about 0.3 K and precipitation rates were increased by about 15 (6–21) mm yr−1 (more than 4 % of total precipitation) from spring to autumn. Thus, the mitigation could help to alleviate expected future drought and water shortages in the Mediterranean area. We also report other important results of the ECLIPSE project.

Importance of estimating matrix quality for modeling species distribution in complex tropical landscapes: a test with Atlantic forest small mammals

Information to guide decision making is especially urgent in human dominated landscapes in the tropics, where urban and agricultural frontiers are still expanding in an unplanned manner. Nevertheless, most studies that have investigated the influence of landscape structure on species distribution have not considered the heterogeneity of altered habitats of the matrix, which is usually high in human dominated landscapes. Using the distribution of small mammals in forest remnants and in the four main altered habitats in an Atlantic forest landscape, we investigated 1) how explanatory power of models describing species distribution in forest remnants varies between landscape structure variables that do or do not incorporate matrix quality and 2) the importance of spatial scale for analyzing the influence of landscape structure. We used standardized sampling in remnants and altered habitats to generate two indices of habitat quality, corresponding to the abundance and to the occurrence of small mammals. For each remnant, we calculated habitat quantity and connectivity in different spatial scales, considering or not the quality of surrounding habitats. The incorporation of matrix quality increased model explanatory power across all spatial scales for half the species that occurred in the matrix, but only when taking into account the distance between habitat patches (connectivity). These connectivity models were also less affected by spatial scale than habitat quantity models. The few consistent responses to the variation in spatial scales indicate that despite their small size, small mammals perceive landscape features at large spatial scales. Matrix quality index corresponding to species occurrence presented a better or similar performance compared to that of species abundance. Results indicate the importance of the matrix for the dynamics of fragmented landscapes and suggest that relatively simple indices can improve our understanding of species distribution, and could be applied in modeling, monitoring and managing complex tropical landscapes.

Generating Segmented Quality Meshes from Images

Techniques devoted to generating triangular meshes from intensity images either take as input a segmented image or generate a mesh without distinguishing individual structures contained in the image. These facts may cause difficulties in using such techniques in some applications, such as numerical simulations. In this work we reformulate a previously developed technique for mesh generation from intensity images called Imesh. This reformulation makes Imesh more versatile due to an unified framework that allows an easy change of refinement metric, rendering it effective for constructing meshes for applications with varied requirements, such as numerical simulation and image modeling. Furthermore, a deeper study about the point insertion problem and the development of geometrical criterion for segmentation is also reported in this paper. Meshes with theoretical guarantee of quality can also be obtained for each individual image structure as a post-processing step, a characteristic not usually found in other methods. The tests demonstrate the flexibility and the effectiveness of the approach.

Using metrics from complex networks to evaluate machine translation

Establishing metrics to assess machine translation (MT) systems automatically is now crucial owing to the widespread use of MT over the web. In this study we show that such evaluation can be done by modeling text as complex networks. Specifically, we extend our previous work by employing additional metrics of complex networks, whose results were used as input for machine learning methods and allowed MT texts of distinct qualities to be distinguished. Also shown is that the node-to-node mapping between source and target texts (English-Portuguese and Spanish-Portuguese pairs) can be improved by adding further hierarchical levels for the metrics out-degree, in-degree, hierarchical common degree, cluster coefficient, inter-ring degree, intra-ring degree and convergence ratio. The results presented here amount to a proof-of-principle that the possible capturing of a wider context with the hierarchical levels may be combined with machine learning methods to yield an approach for assessing the quality of MT systems. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Scheduling Grid Applications with Software Requirements

The aim of task scheduling is to minimize the makespan of applications, exploiting the best possible way to use shared resources. Applications have requirements which call for customized environments for their execution. One way to provide such environments is to use virtualization on demand. This paper presents two schedulers based on integer linear programming which schedule virtual machines (VMs) in grid resources and tasks on these VMs. The schedulers differ from previous work by the joint scheduling of tasks and VMs and by considering the impact of the available bandwidth on the quality of the schedule. Experiments show the efficacy of the schedulers in scenarios with different network configurations.

The effects of Kanban in software development teams : a study of the implementation at Sandvik

In software development organizations there is sometimes a need for change. In order to meet continuously increasing demands from their customers, Sandvik IT Services- SITS, at Sandvik in Sweden, required improving the way they worked with software development. Due to issues like a lot of work in progress and lot of simultaneous tasks for individuals in the teams that caused stress, it was almost impossible to address the question of working with improvements. In order to enable the improvement process Kanban was introduced in the software development teams. Kanban for software development is a change method created by David J. Anderson. The purpose of this thesis is twofold. One part is to assess what effects Kanban has had on the software development teams. The other part is to make a documentation of the Kanban implementation process at SITS. The documentation has been made on the basis of both company internal resources and observations of the Kanban implementation process. The effects of Kanban have been researched with an interview survey to the teams that have gone through the Kick start of the Kanban process. The result of the thesis is also twofold. One part of the result is an extensive documentation of the implementation process of Kanban at SITS. The other part is an assessment of the effects that Kanban has had at SITS. The major effects have been that the teams are experiencing less stress, more focus on quality and better customer collaboration. It is also evident is that it takes time for some effects to evolve when implementing Kanban

What will affect software reuse: a causal model analysis

Software reuse is an important topic due to its potential benefits in increasing product quality and decreasing cost. Although more and more people are aware that not only technical issues, but also nontechnical issues are important to the success of software reuse, people are still not certain which factors will have direct effect on the success of reuse. In this paper, we applied a causal discovery algorithm to the software reuse survey data [2]. Ensemble strategy is incorporated to locate a probable causal model structure for software reuse, and find all those factors which have direct effect on the success of reuse. Our discovery results reinforced some conclusions of Morisio et al. and found some new conclusions which might significantly improve the odds of a reuse project succeeding.

Personalised Grid Service Discovery

The authors take a broad view that ultimately Grid- or Web-services must be located via personalised, semantic-rich discovery processes. They argue that such processes must rely on the storage of arbitrary metadata about services that originates from both service providers and service users. Examples of such metadata are reliability metrics, quality of service data, or semantic service description markup. This paper presents UDDI-MT, an extension to the standard UDDI service directory approach that supports the storage of such metadata via a tunnelling technique that ties the metadata store to the original UDDI directory. They also discuss the use of a rich, graph-based RDF query language for syntactic queries on this data. Finally, they analyse the performance of each of these contributions in our implementation.

The relationship between channel metrics, strategy and marketing performance

The role of marketing channels is to implement marketing strategy. The difficulty of channel strategy is compounded by the emergence of e-channels and the need to integrate e-channels into traditional or “bricks and mortar” channels (Rowley 2002). As a result, managing performance across a greater number of channels with diverse characteristics is more difficult.

Organization and marketing performance is to some degree a function of the quality of channel implementation and particularly channel performance measurement. The channels literature suggests a “channel performance metric paradox”. Approaches to channel performance metrics have been mutually orthogonal or even negatively correlated. (Jeuland & Shugan 1983; Lewis & Lambert 1991; Larson & Lusch 1992). This paradox implies that it is impossible for all channel performance metrics to be maximized simultaneously and tradeoffs exist.

This paper proposes a research model and propositions which extend previous research and attempts to reconcile this “channel performance metric paradox”. The model assumes that testing the relationship between the Miles and Snow strategy types and a comprehensive range of channel performance metrics may explain this paradox. Previous implementation performance research has focused more on the Porter strategies rather than the Miles and Snow strategy types.

RQF publication quality measures: methodoligical issues

The Research Quality Framework uses Thomson-ISI citation benchmarks as its main set of objective measures of research quality. The Thomson-ISI measures rely on identifying a core set of journals in which the major publications for a discipline are to be found. The core for a discipline is determined by applying a nontransparent process that is partly based on Bradford’s Law (1934). Yet Bradford was not seeking measures about quality of publications or journals. How valid then is it to base measures of publication quality on Bradford’s Law? We explore this by returning to Bradford’s Law and subsequent related research asking ‘what is Bradford’s Law really about?’ We go further, and ask ‘does Bradford’s Law apply in Information Systems?’ We use data from John Lamp’s internationally respected Index of Information Systems Journals to explore the latter question. We have found that Information Systems may have a core of journals only a subset of which is also in the list of Thomson-ISI journals. There remain many unanswered questions about the RQF metrics based on Thomson-ISI and their applicability to information systems.