AVEC 2011–The First International Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge

The Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC 2011) is the first competition event aimed at comparison of multimedia processing and machine learning methods for automatic audio, visual and audiovisual emotion analysis, with all participants competing under strictly the same conditions. This paper first describes the challenge participation conditions. Next follows the data used – the SEMAINE corpus – and its partitioning into train, development, and test partitions for the challenge with labelling in four dimensions, namely activity, expectation, power, and valence. Further, audio and video baseline features are introduced as well as baseline results that use these features for the three sub-challenges of audio, video, and audiovisual emotion recognition.

Understanding Online Audio-Visual Content: A European Initiative, Media Literacy and the User

Recent debates about media literacy and the internet have begun to acknowledge the importance of active user-engagement and interaction. It is not enough simply to access material online, but also to comment upon it and re-use. Yet how do these new user expectations fit within digital initiatives which increase access to audio-visual-content but which prioritise access and preservation of archives and online research rather than active user-engagement? This article will address these issues of media literacy in relation to audio-visual content. It will consider how these issues are currently being addressed, focusing particularly on the high-profile European initiative EUscreen. EUscreen brings together 20 European television archives into a single searchable database of over 40,000 digital items. Yet creative re-use restrictions and copyright issues prevent users from re-working the material they find on the site. Instead of re-use, EUscreen instead offers access and detailed contextualisation of its collection of material. But if the emphasis for resources within an online environment rests no longer upon access but on user-engagement, what does EUscreen and similar sites offer to different users?

Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition under Noisy Audio-Video Conditions

This paper presents the maximum weighted stream posterior (MWSP) model as a robust and efficient stream integration method for audio-visual speech recognition in environments, where the audio or video streams may be subjected to unknown and time-varying corruption. A significant advantage of MWSP is that it does not require any specific measurements of the signal in either stream to calculate appropriate stream weights during recognition, and as such it is modality-independent. This also means that MWSP complements and can be used alongside many of the other approaches that have been proposed in the literature for this problem. For evaluation we used the large XM2VTS database for speaker-independent audio-visual speech recognition. The extensive tests include both clean and corrupted utterances with corruption added in either/both the video and audio streams using a variety of types (e.g., MPEG-4 video compression) and levels of noise. The experiments show that this approach gives excellent performance in comparison to another well-known dynamic stream weighting approach and also compared to any fixed-weighted integration approach in both clean conditions or when noise is added to either stream. Furthermore, our experiments show that the MWSP approach dynamically selects suitable integration weights on a frame-by-frame basis according to the level of noise in the streams and also according to the naturally fluctuating relative reliability of the modalities even in clean conditions. The MWSP approach is shown to maintain robust recognition performance in all tested conditions, while requiring no prior knowledge about the type or level of noise.

Using Audio-visual Presentation to Teach Global Mindedness in Social Work Education

Direct experience of social work in another country is making an increasingly important contribution to internationalising the social work academic curriculum together with the cultural competency of students. However at present this opportunity is still restricted to a limited number of students. The aim of this paper is to describe and reflect on the production of an audio-visual presentation as representing the experience of three students who participated in an exchange with a social work programme in Pune, India. It describes and assesses the rationale, production and use of video to capture student learning from the Belfast/Pune exchange. We also describe the use of the video in a classroom setting with a year group of 53 students from a younger cohort. This exercise aimed to stimulate students’ curiosity about international dimensions of social work and add to their awareness of poverty, social justice, cultural competence and community social work as global issues. Written classroom feedback informs our discussion of the technical as well as the pedagogical benefits and challenges of this approach. We conclude that some benefit of audio-visual presentation in helping students connect with diverse cultural contexts, but that a complementary discussion challenging stereotyped viewpoints and unconscious professional imperialism is also crucial.

Departament de Psicologia [Ressenya del llibre Adolescents and audio-visual media in five countries, de Ferran Casas, Irene Rizzini, Rose September, Per Egil Mjaavatn i Usha Nayar (coord.)]

Aquest llibre és el producte d'anys de cooperació entre equips de recerca de cinc països diferents, tot ells Key Institutions de la xarxa Childwatch International, en el marc d'un projecte plurinacional sobre adolescents i mitjans

Confección del documental audio-visual histórico-etnográfico : los religiosos castellano-leoneses en la evangelización de América.

No está publicado.

Iris : proyecto audio-visual : base de datos e im??genes sobre personas con discapacidad

El v??deo est?? realizado por profesores de las ??reas de Did??ctica y Organizaci??n Escolar y Teor??a e Historia de la Educaci??n, durante los a??os 2000 y 2001. Recoge la opini??n de profesionales, padres y madres y personas con discapacidad f??sica (sordos, ciegos y P.C.I.)y personas con discapacidad mental en relaci??n con diferentes aspectos de la vida diaria: hogar, inserci??n laboral, etc. Este recurso did??ctico est?? dise??ado para el visionado, interpretaci??n te??rico-pr??ctica y contraste de opiniones en el aula, de ense??anza superior, para abordar la formaci??n de los profesionales que van a desarrollar su actividad con personas con discapacidad.

La metodología estructuro-global audio-visual y la enseñanza del francés a distancia.

La función de la Lengua en el Bachillerato es triple: como factor de promoción socio-económica que permite en algunos casos obtener mejoras salariales y en otros alcanzar puestos vedados a los que no conocen idiomas, la UNESCO recomienda su estudio por su función educativa respecto al ser humano, integrante de los distintos grupos nacionales, enriquecimiento del sentido crítico y de tolerancia al apreciar las diferencias y semejanzas de los distintos pueblos, una cultura humanista que debe procurar el estudio de la lengua francesa, máxime para nosotros si tenemos en cuenta que es un país fronterizo nuestro y que permite el camino para llegar a Europa, es lógico que la lengua francesa sea tan importante para nosotros debido a las relaciones comerciales, económicas, etcétera que se desarrollan en esta lengua.; como tercera función, y primordial, el apredizaje de, por lo menos, un idioma, es primordial para la formación de la personalidad. A partir de 1975 son importantes los avances conseguidos en el estudio de un idioma, sobre todo los esfuerzos de renovación didáctica, destacando las aportaciones de la metodología estructuroglobal audiovisual, nacida a partir de los años cincuenta y que está siendo renovada constantemente. Si el alumno ha de aprender el francés a distancia debe tener un material adecuado a través de cassettes con diálogos para aprender a pronunciar correctamente. Después se aprenderá a leer y escribir porque se supone que se sabe pronunciar correctamente y el transcribir la lengua oral es un ejercicio para fijar los conocimientos. Pero el aprendizaje de un idioma debe realizarse dedicando todos los días un tiempo concreto, esta regularidad es la permite aprenderlo. Así, en cada caso el alumno deberá actuar de acuerdo con las orientaciones más precisas y personales de su profesor-tutor y con sus hábitos de trabajo siempre y cuando resulten eficaces.

Auditory and audio-visual reception of words in noise by observers with normal and impaired hearing

This dissertation examines auditory perception and audio-visual reception in noise for both hearing-impaired and normal hearing persons, with a goal of determining some of the noise conditions under which amplified acoustic cues for speech can be beneficial to hearing-impaired persons.

Televised Whorf: cognitive restructuring in advanced foreign language learners as a function of audio-visual media exposure

The encoding of goal-oriented motion events varies across different languages. Speakers of languages without grammatical aspect (e.g., Swedish) tend to mention motion endpoints when describing events, e.g., “two nuns walk to a house,”, and attach importance to event endpoints when matching scenes from memory. Speakers of aspect languages (e.g., English), on the other hand, are more prone to direct attention to the ongoingness of motion events, which is reflected both in their event descriptions, e.g., “two nuns are walking.”, and in their non-verbal similarity judgements. This study examines to what extent native speakers of Swedish (n = 82) with English as a foreign language (FL) restructure their categorisation of goal-oriented motion as a function of their English proficiency and experience with the English language (e.g., exposure, learning). Seventeen monolingual native English speakers from the United Kingdom (UK) were engaged for comparison purposes. Data on motion event cognition were collected through a memory-based triads matching task, in which a target scene with an intermediate degree of endpoint orientation was matched with two alternative scenes with low and high degrees of endpoint orientation, respectively. Results showed that the preference among the Swedish speakers of L2 English to base their similarity judgements on ongoingness rather than event endpoints was correlated with their use of English in their everyday lives, such that those who often watched television in English approximated the ongoingness preference of the English native speakers. These findings suggest that event cognition patterns may be restructured through the exposure to FL audio-visual media. The results thus add to the emerging picture that learning a new language entails learning new ways of observing and reasoning about reality.