Recognition of Facial Expressions with Autoencoders and Convolutional-Nets

Les humains communiquent via différents types de canaux: les mots, la voix, les gestes du corps, des émotions, etc. Pour cette raison, un ordinateur doit percevoir ces divers canaux de communication pour pouvoir interagir intelligemment avec les humains, par exemple en faisant usage de microphones et de webcams. Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons à déterminer les émotions humaines à partir d’images ou de vidéo de visages afin d’ensuite utiliser ces informations dans différents domaines d’applications. Ce mémoire débute par une brève introduction à l'apprentissage machine en s’attardant aux modèles et algorithmes que nous avons utilisés tels que les perceptrons multicouches, réseaux de neurones à convolution et autoencodeurs. Elle présente ensuite les résultats de l'application de ces modèles sur plusieurs ensembles de données d'expressions et émotions faciales. Nous nous concentrons sur l'étude des différents types d’autoencodeurs (autoencodeur débruitant, autoencodeur contractant, etc) afin de révéler certaines de leurs limitations, comme la possibilité d'obtenir de la coadaptation entre les filtres ou encore d’obtenir une courbe spectrale trop lisse, et étudions de nouvelles idées pour répondre à ces problèmes. Nous proposons également une nouvelle approche pour surmonter une limite des autoencodeurs traditionnellement entrainés de façon purement non-supervisée, c'est-à-dire sans utiliser aucune connaissance de la tâche que nous voulons finalement résoudre (comme la prévision des étiquettes de classe) en développant un nouveau critère d'apprentissage semi-supervisé qui exploite un faible nombre de données étiquetées en combinaison avec une grande quantité de données non-étiquetées afin d'apprendre une représentation adaptée à la tâche de classification, et d'obtenir une meilleure performance de classification. Finalement, nous décrivons le fonctionnement général de notre système de détection d'émotions et proposons de nouvelles idées pouvant mener à de futurs travaux.

L’implantation des ingrédients actifs du programme LifeSkills Training Transitions dans un milieu scolaire québécois

Rapport académique présenté à la Faculté des arts et des sciences en vue de l’obtention du grade de M. Sc. en criminologie, option intervention

Vers une meilleure compréhension de la rétroaction orientée vers le changement : observation objective, variations quotidiennes et déterminants en contexte sportif

Une étude récente a démontré qu’une rétroaction orientée vers le changement (ROC) qui est empathique, accompagnée de choix de solutions et de trucs, basée sur des objectifs clairs et atteignables, exempte d’énoncés portant sur la personne et donnée sur un ton respectueux, contribue à soutenir l’autonomie des athlètes (Carpentier & Mageau, 2013). À travers trois articles scientifiques, cette thèse vise à (1) démontrer qu’une telle ROC, offerte en situation réelle d’entrainement, soutient l’autonomie, (2) mieux comprendre ses impacts et (3) explorer ses déterminants. Alors que les études précédentes ont utilisé les perceptions des athlètes afin de définir une ROC soutenant l’autonomie et d’évaluer ses conséquences, l’article 1 utilise le codage de vidéos. La qualité et la quantité de ROC donnée par 53 entraineurs ont été codées et leurs 310 athlètes ont rapporté leurs perceptions d’autonomie. Les résultats soutiennent les résultats d’études passées en démontrant qu’une ROC caractérisée par les six dimensions proposées par Carpentier et Mageau (2013) favorise l’autonomie. À l’opposé, la quantité de ROC est négativement liée à l’autonomie. L’article 2 vise à mieux comprendre les impacts de la ROC en s’intéressant aux variations intra-individuelles. Quarante-neuf athlètes ont complété, immédiatement après 15 entrainements (N = 534), un questionnaire évaluant la ROC reçue au cours de l’entrainement et diverses conséquences situationnelles. Des analyses multiniveaux démontrent que la qualité de la ROC est positivement liée à la qualité de l’expérience de l’athlète. À l’opposé, la quantité de ROC est négativement liée à la motivation autonome et au besoin de compétence. Finalement, l’article 3 s’intéresse à la passion des entraineurs ainsi qu’à leur perception de la motivation de leurs athlètes en tant que déterminants de la qualité et de la quantité de ROC donnée. Au total, 280 athlètes et 48 entraineurs ont rempli un questionnaire. Les résultats démontrent que plus les entraineurs ont une passion obsessive, moins leur ROC soutient l’autonomie des athlètes. Aussi, plus les entraineurs ont une passion obsessive et plus ils perçoivent leurs athlètes comme étant motivés, plus ils donnent de la ROC. Cette thèse contribue à l’avancement des connaissances sur la ROC, à la théorie de l’autodétermination, et à la formation des entraineurs.

Beyond Doing Good: An Interview with Dr. Kirsten Johnson on the Canadian Disaster and Humanitarian Response Training Program

Compte-rendu / Review

Marine Engineering Training in India -A Pedagogic Introspection

Indian marine engineers are renowned for employment globally due to their knowledge, skill and reliability. This praiseworthy status has been achieved mainly due to the systematic training imparted to marine engineering cadets. However, in an era of advancing technology, marine engineering training has to remain dynamic to imbibe latest technology as well as to meet the demands of the shipping industry. New subjects of studies have to be included in the curriculum in a timely manner taking into consideration the industry requirements and best practices in shipping. Technical competence of marine engineers also has to be subjected to changes depending upon the needs of the ever growing and over regulated shipping industry. Besides. certain soft skills are to be developed and improved amongst the marine engineers in order to alter or amend the personality traits leading to their career success.If timely corrective action is taken. Indian marine engineers can be in still greater demand for employment in global maritime field. In order to enhance the employability of our mmine engineers by improving their quality, a study of marine engineers in general and class IV marine engineers in particular was conducted based on three distinct surveys, viz., survey among senior marine engineers, survey among employers of marine engineers and survey of class IV marine engineers themselves.The surveys have been planned and questionnaires have been designed to focus the study of marine engineer officer class IV from the point of view of the three distinct groups of maritime personnels. As a result of this, the strength and weakness of class IV marine engineers are identified with regard to their performance on board ships, acquisition of necessary technical skills. employability and career success. The criteria of essential qualities of a marine engineer are classified as academic, technical, social, psychological. physical, mental, emergency responsive, communicative and leadership, and have been assessed for a practicing marine engineer by statistical analysis of data collected from surveys. These are assessed for class IV marine engineers from the point of view of senior marine engineers and employers separately. The Endings are delineated and graphically depicted in this thesis.Besides. six pertinent personality traits of a marine engineer viz. self esteem. learning style. decision making. motivation. team work and listening self inventory have been subjected to study and their correlation with career success have been established wherever possible. This is carried out to develop a theoretical framework to understand what leads a marine engineer to his career attainment. This enables the author to estimate the personality strengths and weaknesses of a serving marine engineer and eventually to deduce possible corrective measures or modifications in marine engineering training in India.Maritime training is largely based on International Conventions on Standard of Training. Certification and Watch keeping for Seafarers 1995. its associated Code and Merchant Shipping (STCW for Seafarers) Rules 1998. Further, Maritime Education, Training and Assessment (META) Manual was subjected to a critical scrutiny and relevant Endings of thc surveys arc superimposed on the existing rule requirement and curriculum. Views of senior marine engineers and executives of various shipping companies are taken into account before arriving at the revision of syllabus of marine engineering courses. Modifications in the pattern of workshop and sea service for graduate mechanical engineering trainees are recommended. Desirable age brackets of junior engineers and chief engineers. use of Training and Assessment Record book (TAR Book) during training etc. have also been evaluated.As a result of the pedagogic introspection of the existing system of marine engineering training in India. in this thesis, a revised pattern of workshop training of six months duration for graduate mechanical engineers. revised pattern of sea service training of one year duration and modified now diagram incorporating the above have been arrived at. Effects of various personality traits on career success have been established along with certain findings for improvement of desirable personality traits of marine engineers.

Vocational Higher Secondary Education in Kerala: A Status Study of Students, Pass Outs and Training Components

This study analyses the socio-economic backgrounds and entrepreneurial profiles of the students and pass outs of the Vocational Higher Secondary Education in Kerala and the academic achievements of the Vocational Higher Secondary students and pass outs in Kerala in terms of their performance in the examinations. The study also analyses the quality and availability of the various training and support facilities of the Vocational Higher Secondary Schools in Kerala, nature and rate of employment and higher studies among the pass outs of the Vocational Higher Secondary Education in Kerala and the awareness of students, pass outs, teachers and principals regarding the goals and objectives, mode of implementation, apprenticeship training and higher study and employment opportunities of the programme of the Vocational Higher Secondary Education in Kerala.

Recruitment And Training Of Managers In The Public Sector Concerns In Kerala

Public undertakings have been assigned a significant role to play in the systematic socio-economic development of India. My interest in the subject was kindled while I was doing my Masters Diploma in Public Administration at the Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi during 1960-61. It was further strengthened by my teaching of the subject in different courses offered by me at the School of Management Studies and in several programmes organised by various voluntary and training organisations like the Institute of Management in Government, Trivandrum, Centre for Management Development, Trivandrum, etc. The several years in which I served as a member of the faculty in the School of Management Studies, University of Cochin,gave me the opportunity to come into close contact with different public sector concerns and their managers at various levels. This rich opportunity gave me a better insight into the problems faced by these concerns. The present study is a result of the interest so developed.

Feature Extraction Methods Based on Linear Predictive Coding and Wavelet Packet Decomposition for Recognizing Spoken Words in Malayalam

Speech signals are one of the most important means of communication among the human beings. In this paper, a comparative study of two feature extraction techniques are carried out for recognizing speaker independent spoken isolated words. First one is a hybrid approach with Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and the second method uses a combination of Wavelet Packet Decomposition (WPD) and Artificial Neural Networks. Voice signals are sampled directly from the microphone and then they are processed using these two techniques for extracting the features. Words from Malayalam, one of the four major Dravidian languages of southern India are chosen for recognition. Training, testing and pattern recognition are performed using Artificial Neural Networks. Back propagation method is used to train the ANN. The proposed method is implemented for 50 speakers uttering 20 isolated words each. Both the methods produce good recognition accuracy. But Wavelet Packet Decomposition is found to be more suitable for recognizing speech because of its multi-resolution characteristics and efficient time frequency localizations

Alignment Model and Training Technique in SMT from English to Malayalam

This paper investigates certain methods of training adopted in the Statistical Machine Translator (SMT) from English to Malayalam. In English Malayalam SMT, the word to word translation is determined by training the parallel corpus. Our primary goal is to improve the alignment model by reducing the number of possible alignments of all sentence pairs present in the bilingual corpus. Incorporating morphological information into the parallel corpus with the help of the parts of speech tagger has brought around better training results with improved accuracy

Evaluation of the agricultural vocational training programmes conducted by the Krishi Vigyan Kendras (Farm Science Centres) in Indian Punjab

Krishin Vigyan Kendras-KVKs (Farm Science Centres) have been established by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research in 569 districts. The trust areas of KVKs are refinement and demonstration of technologies, and training of farmers and extension functionaries. Imparting vocational trainings in agriculture and allied fields for the rural youth is one of its mandates. The study was undertaken to do a formative and summative (outcome and impact) evaluation of the beekeeping and mushroom growing vocational training programmes in the Indian state of Punjab. One-group pre and post evaluation design was employed for conducting a formative and outcome evaluation. The knowledge tests were administered to 35 beekeeping and 25 mushroom cultivation trainees, before and after the training programmes organized in 2004. The trainees significantly gained in knowledge. A separate sample of 640 trainees, trained prior to 2004, was selected for finding the adoption status. Out of 640, a sample of 200 was selected by proportionate sampling technique out of three categories, namely: non-adopters, discontinued-adopters and continued-adopters for evaluating the long-term impact of these training programmes. Ex-post-facto one-shot case study design was applied for this impact analysis. The vocational training programmes have resulted in continued-adoption of beekeeping and mushroom cultivation enterprises by 20% and 51% trained farmers, respectively. Age and trainee occupation had significant influence on the adoption decision of beekeeping vocation, whereas education and family income significantly affected the adoption decision of mushroom cultivation. The continued adopters of beekeeping and mushroom growing had increased their family income by 49% and 24%, respectively. These training programmes are augmenting the dwindling farm income of the farmers in Indian Punjab.

Enlarging a training set for genomic selction by imputation of un-genotyped animals in populations of varying genetic architecture

Background: The most common application of imputation is to infer genotypes of a high-density panel of markers on animals that are genotyped for a low-density panel. However, the increase in accuracy of genomic predictions resulting from an increase in the number of markers tends to reach a plateau beyond a certain density. Another application of imputation is to increase the size of the training set with un-genotyped animals. This strategy can be particularly successful when a set of closely related individuals are genotyped. ----- Methods: Imputation on completely un-genotyped dams was performed using known genotypes from the sire of each dam, one offspring and the offspring’s sire. Two methods were applied based on either allele or haplotype frequencies to infer genotypes at ambiguous loci. Results of these methods and of two available software packages were compared. Quality of imputation under different population structures was assessed. The impact of using imputed dams to enlarge training sets on the accuracy of genomic predictions was evaluated for different populations, heritabilities and sizes of training sets. ----- Results: Imputation accuracy ranged from 0.52 to 0.93 depending on the population structure and the method used. The method that used allele frequencies performed better than the method based on haplotype frequencies. Accuracy of imputation was higher for populations with higher levels of linkage disequilibrium and with larger proportions of markers with more extreme allele frequencies. Inclusion of imputed dams in the training set increased the accuracy of genomic predictions. Gains in accuracy ranged from close to zero to 37.14%, depending on the simulated scenario. Generally, the larger the accuracy already obtained with the genotyped training set, the lower the increase in accuracy achieved by adding imputed dams. ----- Conclusions: Whenever a reference population resembling the family configuration considered here is available, imputation can be used to achieve an extra increase in accuracy of genomic predictions by enlarging the training set with completely un-genotyped dams. This strategy was shown to be particularly useful for populations with lower levels of linkage disequilibrium, for genomic selection on traits with low heritability, and for species or breeds for which the size of the reference population is limited.

Visibility and Voice for Union Women

A new collection of Case studies about gender and trade unions in nine countries, ranging from Turkey to India, Brazil to Africa, the Philippines and New Zealand. Researched and written by insider/outsider union activists and officers, the book is the culmination of five years of collaborative research by the Global Labour University Gender and Trade Unions Research Group.

Förderung des kritischen Denkens thailändischer Deutschlernender durch Training des kritischen Lesens im Deutschunterricht

Die vorliegende Dissertation untersucht das Leseverhalten thailändischer Deutschlernender mit dem Ziel, ihre Fähigkeit zum kritischen Lesen unter Anwendung des MURDER-Schemas im fremdsprachlichen Deutschunterricht zu fördern. Neben der Lesefertigkeit soll aufgrund der bestehenden Zusammenhänge zusätzlich das kritische Denken der Lernenden gefördert werden.

Rotation Invariant Object Recognition from One Training Example

Local descriptors are increasingly used for the task of object recognition because of their perceived robustness with respect to occlusions and to global geometrical deformations. Such a descriptor--based on a set of oriented Gaussian derivative filters-- is used in our recognition system. We report here an evaluation of several techniques for orientation estimation to achieve rotation invariance of the descriptor. We also describe feature selection based on a single training image. Virtual images are generated by rotating and rescaling the image and robust features are selected. The results confirm robust performance in cluttered scenes, in the presence of partial occlusions, and when the object is embedded in different backgrounds.