ad:mt Research Seminars

Date: 21 March 2012
Time: 13.00-14.00
Place: NJ14 3-228 (Las Vegas)

In this presentation, I will present a trend of my research focusing on relations between culture and technology. I will discuss this topic from two different perspectives: culture for technology, and technology for culture. There will be a particular focus on knowledge representation, human-computer interaction and educational technology, the idea being to approach several of my research interests  going from cultural modeling and cultural knowledge gathering, to serious games for intercultural education.

Bio
Emmanuel G. BLANCHARD received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from University of Montréal, Canada in 2003 and 2007 respectively. His Ph.D thesis entitled “Motivation and Culture in e-Learning” has appeared on the list of honor of the Dean of Graduate Studies in 2007. His research is focused on the inclusion of human factors in (educational) technology, which has highly influenced his educational and work background. After completing his Ph.D, he was successively a guest researcher at Osaka University, where he trained to formal ontology engineering, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology of McGill University where he improved his expertise in cognitive and educational psychology, and a senior lecturer at Polytechnic of Namibia in Africa in order to improve his understanding of cultural dynamics. Dr Blanchard has been especially active at supporting the emerging field of culturally-aware technology. He created and co-chaired the three editions of the international workshop on “Culturally-Aware Tutoring Systems”. He is the lead editor of the “Handbook of Research on Culturally-aware Information Technology: Perspectives and Models”, and is frequently requested to act as a program committee member or reviewer for major conferences and journals in the field of educational technologies (ITS, AIED, ECTEL, ACM SIGCHI, ICCE, CSEDU, IJTLT, IJEL, AI & Society).

Date: 09 March 2012 (Friday!)
Time: 11.00-12.00
Place: NJ14 3-228

Mobile devices and services are rapidly becoming the preeminent conduit for human computer interaction. This talk will focus on two areas of research in this domain. The first looks at the user experience of watching videos on mobile devices and the second explores how mobile applications and devices can be enhanced for use by illiterate people.

Mobile services rely on wireless spectrum, a shared and scarce resource that service providers like to allocate economically, especially for resource intensive multimedia applications. Therefore, they need to know at which point the user experience becomes unacceptable due to under-resourced video quality. My research has explored these limits of user experience and how they should be measured. I will describe how a mix of quantitative and qualitative approaches has provided evidence that the user experience cannot be properly understood through the common approach of video quality but requires the more comprehensive notion of visual experience.

I will also highlight some of the design and methodological challenges that appear when creating and evaluating mobile applications for and with illiterates users based on ongoing research that I am conducting as part of an ICT for development project in rural India.

Bio
Hendrik Knoche holds an MSc (UoHamburg) and PhD (UC London) in computer science. His research interests include human-centered design, design thinking, mediated experiences, proxemics, and ICT for development along with methods for prototyping and evaluating applications and their user experiences “in the wild”.

Date: 7 March 2012
Time: 13.00-14.00
Place: NJ14 3-228 (Las Vegas)

When people are first exposed to statistics, they usually learn about (un)biased estimators, confidence intervals, and p-values. These concepts (and several others) have their roots in the statistical school called classical statistics or sampling theory, and they are widely used
inference tools among students and researchers. However, the inference results obtained by classical statistics are not always sensible and are often misinterpreted.

This talk aims at demonstrating some of the problems with classical statistics and how these problems can be avoided by using Bayesian statistics instead. In particular, we consider three simple examples which are described below.

1. Point Estimation: Are optimal estimators always unbiased?
   Case: If you observe N IID samples from a Gaussian distribution with unknown mean and variance, what is the best way to estimate the variance?
2. Interval Estimation: How you should NOT interpret a confidence interval.
   Case: If you observe N IID samples from a uniform distribution with unknown mean but known width, how do you find and interpret a confidence interval for the mean?>
3. Hypothesis testing: p-values depend on irrelevant information.
   Case: If you observe the sequence HHHTHHHHTHHT of IID coin flips, do you accept or reject the hypothesis that the coin is unbiased?

We also briefly comment on the (mostly practical) problems of Bayesian statistics and give a few real world simulation examples demonstrating its usefulness.

Bio
Jesper Kjær Nielsen was born in Struer, Denmark, in 1982. He received the B.Sc and M.Sc (Cum Laude) degrees in electrical engineering from Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark, in 2007 and 2009, respectively. He is currently with the Department of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University, as a Ph.D. student. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Signal Processing and Communications Laboratory, University of Cambridge and at the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include spectral estimation, (sinusoidal) parameter estimation as well as statistical and Bayesian methods for signal processing.

Date: 29 February 2012
Time: 13.00-14.00
Place: NJ14 3-228 (Las Vegas)

I will talk about my everyday work at Polytechnic of Namibia and present the field trips and results focusing on best practices for planning and conducting these field trips. You will also get insights into the challenges of doing experiments in the rural back country of Namibia.

Bio
Kasper Rodil graduated as M.Sc. from Medialogy in 2011 at AAU.  He has had a long commitment with virtual spaces and digital visualisations, and based on a 9th sem. project on preserving indigenous knowledge, he was offered a job as Research Fellow at the Polytechnic of Namibia. During his contract with Polytechnic of Namibia, he ran an honours course in 3D digital visualizations and Game mechanics while continuing research on how to communicate, co-design and preserve indigeous knowledge through digital visualizations.

Date: 15 February 2012
Time: 13.00-14.00
Place: NJ14 3-228 (Las Vegas)

In agricultural production, weeds compete with crops for nutrition, sunlight and water. If uncontrolled, they may outnumber the crop plants and cause heavy loss to the yield. In order to control weeds, typical method is application of herbicide chemicals. Indiscriminate use of chemicals, on the other hand, is detrimental to environment and a lot of research has been done to control the quantities of chemicals in farming. Still, the utmost precision of applying the herbicides only when and where needed (known as Site Specific Weed management ‐ SSWM) is a big challenge because it requires an automatic computerized system of constantly monitoring all the plants in a field.

The research under this PhD study addresses this problem. It is focused at developing tools for an autonomous  ground vehicle (robot) for weed detection in sugar beet fields using 3D image data. So far, predominantly 2D images have been used in research in weed detection. A prerequisite for use of 2D data is that the individual plants are well separated not occluding each other. When plants grow in size, overlapping canopies make this approach difficult to resolve plants and analyze their structures. In such a case, 3D data will be beneficial. In this way, this study will help in localized spray of chemicals, hence reducing the amount of chemicals used in farming using image processing and computer vision.

This PhD study is financed by Danish Council of Strategic Research under project ASETA (Adaptive Surveying and Early treatment of crops with a Team of Autonomous vehicles) which also involves aerial vehicles and aerial imaging. Major research work will be carried out at Department of Architecture and Media Technology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, while the test campaigns will take place in the fields prepared by University of Copenhagen, Department of Agriculture and  Ecology at Taastrup.

Date: 16 November 2011
Time: 12.30-13.30
Place: NJ14 

Music for the lute and its relatives played a central role in the European cultural landscape for centuries until the rise of the piano in the late 18th Century saw its decline. That the music remains little known and under-represented in music histories is perhaps due almost entirely to its notation — the tablatures used are very different to the staff notation used for most other music of the time.

In my talk, I introduce the music and its notation and describe a proposed project to use Optical Music Recognition technologies currently being developed to digitise the complete printed lute music holdings of several libraries. Amateur lutenists and enthusiasts would then be recruited to correct and edit the resulting collection online, resulting in a large, searchable resource, which could make the music available in forms that are more accessible to non-specialists or that are capable of machine-analysis.

Bio
David Lewis trained as a historical musicologist at Kings College, London. He has since specialised in developing computer tools for musicologists or musicians. He is currently based at the Birmingham Conservatoire, where he is developing a score editor and technical infrastructure for a new complete edition and translation of the theoretical works of Johannes Tinctoris (building on earlymusictheory.org/tinctoris/tinctoris.html), and at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he has worked on a lute music corpus (www.ecolm.org) and a general-purpose music-processing framework called AMusE. He is also a doctoral student in the Goldsmiths computing department.

Date: 9 November 2011
Time: 12.30-13.30
Place: NJ14 4-205

[BIZ] Business Interaction Zquad supports your cooperation with private companies in Nordjylland from the first day. All time spend on preparation, during meetings or in the aftermath will qualify for a 50% bonus on your time tracking record. If you want to apply for EU funding in cooperation with private companies (at least one of them from Nordjylland) all your activities right up to the day the funding is granted will qualify. When you are running a student course with with company visits or business guest speakers you will qualify and also when you are the supervisor for student groups cooperating with companies. And these activities are just a few examples.  [BIZ] already has hours allocated for you, so you do not have to do a lot of paperwork to get started, – an initial registration and a monthly statement of the hours used on the activities and that´s it. Come to this meeting and get all the details needed to get started.

Date: 2 November 2011
Time: 12.30-13.30
Place: NJ14 3-228 (Las Vegas)

The talk will present our current activities where we are analyzing the occupancy of 10 sports arenas in Aalborg using a thermal camera. The technical heart of the system is based on a master thesis (by Rikke and Anders). First image processing is used to segment potential human objects. Next, these objects are analysed to figure out if they are noise, a single human or multiple humans grouped together. In the latter case, an un-grouping is performed to isolate individuals. Positions are mapped to the floor’s coordinate system and accumulated over time to give an average occupancy over time.

We have recently received funding to continue this work the next three years. The talk will therefore also present the ambition for the future. More info can be found here: http://www.create.aau.dk/bbh/