Pupil detection for head-mounted eye tracking in the wild: an evaluation of the state of the art

Robust and accurate detection of the pupil position is a key building block for head-mounted eye tracking and prerequisite for applications on top, such as gaze-based human–computer interaction or attention analysis. Despite a large body of work, detecting the pupil in images recorded under real-world conditions is challenging given significant variability in the eye appearance (e.g., illumination, reflections, occlusions, etc.), individual differences in eye physiology, as well as other sources of noise, such as contact lenses or make-up. In this paper we review six state-of-the-art pupil detection methods, namely ElSe (Fuhl et al. in Proceedings of the ninth biennial ACM symposium on eye tracking research & applications, ACM. New York, NY, USA, pp 123–130, 2016), ExCuSe (Fuhl et al. in Computer analysis of images and patterns. Springer, New York, pp 39–51, 2015), Pupil Labs (Kassner et al. in Adjunct proceedings of the 2014 ACM international joint conference on pervasive and ubiquitous computing (UbiComp), pp 1151–1160, 2014. doi: 10.1145/2638728.2641695), SET (Javadi et al. in Front Neuroeng 8, 2015), Starburst (Li et al. in Computer vision and pattern recognition-workshops, 2005. IEEE Computer society conference on CVPR workshops. IEEE, pp 79–79, 2005), and ?wirski (?wirski et al. in Proceedings of the symposium on eye tracking research and applications (ETRA). ACM, pp 173–176, 2012. doi: 10.1145/2168556.2168585). We compare their performance on a large-scale data set consisting of 225,569 annotated eye images taken from four publicly available data sets. Our experimental results show that the algorithm ElSe (Fuhl et al. 2016) outperforms other pupil detection methods by a large margin, offering thus robust and accurate pupil positions on challenging everyday eye images.     

Autonomous trucks: an affront to masculinity?

Autonomous (or self-driving) vehicle technology has become a commercial reality in a number of cars being driven on public roads around the globe. However, this technology is not only confined to cars. It is equally applicable to trucks and there is speculation that it will be autonomous trucks that will hit the roads first because they operate in ‘a less complicated traffic environment’ and are therefore ideal starting points for the coming automated vehicle market.¹1 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/06/nevada-self-driving-trucks-public-roads-daimler-inspiration, last accessed 15 December 2016. For example, in May 2015, authorities granted a license to Daimler to test its self-driving trucks on public roads in the US State of Nevada.²2 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/06/nevada-self-driving-trucks-public-roads-daimler-inspiration, last accessed 15 December 2016. These use a series of different technologies, including video cameras and radar, which, when applied in an incremental way, allow drivers to take breaks, although there must always be a qualified driver at the wheel.³3 M Taylor and P Maynard, “Self-driving cars” (2015) 21(5), CTLR 133, 134. It is clear to see the benefits of self-driving trucks to trucking companies, who could use them to transport goods across much longer distances and without all of the scheduled breaks than is presently possible with human truck drivers. But what about the impact on the image of the retained drivers themselves? Traditionally, truck drivers have been men and this representation is well-entrenched in a variety of media. Does the introduction of self-driving truck technology represent an attack on the masculinist truck driving culture as portrayed in TV shows such as ‘Ice Road Truckers’ or ‘Outback Truckers’. If so, is such a change to be encouraged or is the historical image (though objectionable to some) worthy of protection? Given that self-driving trucks could be available for purchase from the middle of the coming decade, the socio-legal aspects of self-driving truck technology will be reflected on and the degree to which this issue can be contemplated at law addressed.     

Modeling and Simulation of Laser Processing of Particulate-Functionalized Materials

The objective of this paper is to focus on one of the “building blocks” of additive manufacturing technologies, namely selective laser-processing of particle-functionalized materials. Following a series of work in Zohdi (Int J Numer Methods Eng 53:1511–1532, 2002; Philos Trans R Soc Math Phys Eng Sci 361(1806):1021–1043, 2003; Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 193(6–8):679–699, 2004; Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 196:3927–3950, 2007; Int J Numer Methods Eng 76:1250–1279, 2008; Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 199:79–101, 2010; Arch Comput Methods Eng 1–17. doi: 10.1007/s11831-013-9092-6, 2013; Comput Mech Eng Sci 98(3):261–277, 2014; Comput Mech 54:171–191, 2014; J Manuf Sci Eng ASME doi: 10.1115/1.4029327, 2015; CIRP J Manuf Sci Technol 10:77–83, 2015; Comput Mech 56:613–630, 2015; Introduction to computational micromechanics. Springer, Berlin, 2008; Introduction to the modeling and simulation of particulate flows. SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics), Philadelphia, 2007; Electromagnetic properties of multiphase dielectrics: a primer on modeling, theory and computation. Springer, Berlin, 2012), a laser-penetration model, in conjunction with a Finite Difference Time Domain Method using an immersed microstructure method, is developed. Because optical, thermal and mechanical multifield coupling is present, a recursive, staggered, temporally-adaptive scheme is developed to resolve the internal microstructural fields. The time step adaptation allows the numerical scheme to iteratively resolve the changing physical fields by refining the time-steps during phases of the process when the system is undergoing large changes on a relatively small time-scale and can also enlarge the time-steps when the processes are relatively slow. The spatial discretization grids are uniform and dense enough to capture fine-scale changes in the fields. The microstructure is embedded into the spatial discretization and the regular grid allows one to generate a matrix-free iterative formulation which is amenable to rapid computation, with minimal memory requirements, making it ideal for laptop computation. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the modeling and simulation approach, which by design, is straightforward to computationally implement, in order to be easily utilized by researchers in the field. More advanced conduction models, based on thermal-relaxation, which are a key feature of fast-pulsing laser technologies, are also discussed.     

Estimating Dynamic Binary Panel Data Model with Random Effects: A Computational Note

Recently, Gao et al. (J Time Ser Anal, 2016 doi:  10.1111/jtsa.12178) propose a new estimation method for dynamic panel probit model with random effects, where the theoretical properties of estimator are derived. In this paper, we extend their estimation method to the \(T\ge 3\) case, and some Monte Carlo simulations are presented to illustrate the extended estimator.     

Rapid building detection using machine learning

This work describes algorithms for performing discrete object detection, specifically in the case of buildings, where usually only low quality RGB-only geospatial reflective imagery is available. We utilize new candidate search and feature extraction techniques to reduce the problem to a machine learning (ML) classification task. Here we can harness the complex patterns of contrast features contained in training data to establish a model of buildings. We avoid costly sliding windows to generate candidates; instead we innovatively stitch together well known image processing techniques to produce candidates for building detection that cover 80–85 % of buildings. Reducing the number of possible candidates is important due to the scale of the problem. Each candidate is subjected to classification which, although linear, costs time and prohibits large scale evaluation. We propose a candidate alignment algorithm to boost classification performance to 80–90 % precision with a linear time algorithm and show it has negligible cost. Also, we propose a new concept called a Permutable Haar Mesh (PHM) which we use to form and traverse a search space to recover candidate buildings which were lost in the initial preprocessing phase. All code and datasets from this paper are made available online (http://kdl.cs.umb.edu/w/datasets/ and https://github.com/caitlinkuhlman/ObjectDetectionCLUtility).     

An interactive satisficing approach for multi-objective optimization with uncertain parameters

Uncertain variables are used to describe the phenomenon where uncertainty appears in a complex system. For modeling the multi-objective decision-making problems with uncertain parameters, a class of uncertain optimization is suggested for the decision systems in Liu and Chen (2013), http://orsc.edu.cn/online/131020 which is called the uncertain multi-objective programming. In order to solve the proposed uncertain multi-objective programming, an interactive uncertain satisficing approach involving the decision-maker’s flexible demands is proposed in this paper. It makes an improvement in contrast to the noninteractive methods. Finally, a numerical example about the capital budget problem is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and the relevant solving approach.     

The XTS-AES Disk Encryption Algorithm and the Security of Ciphertext Stealing

Abstract

This paper describes the importance of the XTS-AES encryption mode of operation and concludes with a new proof for the security of ciphertext stealing as used by XTS-AES. The XTS-AES mode is designed for encrypting data stored on hard disks where there is not additional space for an integrity field. Given this lack of space for an integrity field, XTS-AES builds on the security of AES by protecting the storage device from many dictionary and copy/paste attacks. The operation of the XTS mode of AES is defined in the IEEE 1619-2007 standard [3 IEEE Std 1619–2007 . April 18, 2008 . The XTS-AES Tweakable Block Cipher. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.  [Google Scholar]], and has been adopted by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as an approved mode of operation under FIPS 140-2 [2 Dworkin , M. December 2009 . NIST SP 800-38E, “Recommendation for Block Cipher Modes of Operation: The XTS-AES Mode for Confidentiality on Storage Devices”.  [Google Scholar]]. XTS-AES builds on the XEX (Xor-Encrypt-Xor) mode originally proposed by Rogaway [8 Rogaway , P. 2004 . Efficient Instantiations of Tweakable Block ciphers and Refinements to Modes OCB and PMAC. Advances in Cryptology–Asiacrypt 2004, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3329, Springer-Verlag, pp. 16–31. Available at http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/rogaway/papers/offsets.pdf (Accessed 6 January 2012) . [Google Scholar]].     

A corpus for research in text processing for evidence based medicine

Evidence based medicine (EBM) urges the medical doctor to incorporate the latest available clinical evidence at point of care. A major stumbling block in the practice of EBM is the difficulty to keep up to date with the clinical advances. In this paper we describe a corpus designed for the development and testing of text processing tools for EBM, in particular for tasks related to the extraction and summarisation of answers and corresponding evidence related to a clinical query. The corpus is based on material from the Clinical Inquiries section of The Journal of Family Practice. It was gathered and annotated by a combination of automated information extraction, crowdsourcing tasks, and manual annotation. It has been used for the original summarisation task for which it was designed, as well as for other related tasks such as the appraisal of clinical evidence and the clustering of the results. The corpus is available at SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ebmsumcorpus/).     

Twenty years of artificial life art

This essay begins with discussion of four relatively recent works which are representative of major themes and preoccupations in Artificial Life Art: ‘Propagaciones’ by Leo Nuñez; ‘Sniff’ by Karolina Sobecka and Jim George; ‘Universal Whistling Machine’ by Marc Boehlen; and ‘Performative Ecologies’ by Ruari Glynn. This essay is an attempt to contextualise these works by providing an overview of the history and forms of Artificial Life Art as it has developed over two decades, along with some background in the ideas of the Artificial Life movement of the late 1980s and 1990s.1 A more extensive study of the theoretical history of Artificial Life can be found in my paper ‘Artificial Life Art—A Primer’, in the Proceedings of DAC09 and also at http://www.ace.uci.edu/Penny. Excerpts from that essay are included here.      

On pseudo-BL-algebras and pseudo-hoops with normal maximal filters

We study the class of pseudo-BL-algebras whose every maximal filter is normal. We present an equational base for this class and we extend these results for the class of basic pseudo hoops with fixed strong unit. This is a continuation of the research from Botur et al. (Soft Comput 16:635–644, doi: 10.1007/s00500-011-0763-7, 2012).     

An extended Hamiltonian QR algorithm

An extended QR algorithm specifically tailored for Hamiltonian matrices is presented. The algorithm generalizes the customary Hamiltonian QR algorithm with additional freedom in choosing between various possible extended Hamiltonian Hessenberg forms. We introduced in Ferranti et al. (Calcolo, 2015. doi: 10.1007/s10092-016-0192-1) an algorithm to transform certain Hamiltonian matrices to such forms. Whereas the convergence of the classical QR algorithm is related to classical Krylov subspaces, convergence in the extended case links to extended Krylov subspaces, resulting in a greater flexibility, and possible enhanced convergence behavior. Details on the implementation, covering the bidirectional chasing and the bulge exchange based on rotations are presented. The numerical experiments reveal that the convergence depends on the selected extended forms and illustrate the validity of the approach.     

Violation of Bell inequalities from $$S_4$$ symmetry: the three orbits case

The recently proposed (Güney and Hillery in Phys Rev A 90:062121, 2014; Phys Rev A 91:052110, 2015) group theoretical approach to the problem of violating the Bell inequalities is applied to \(S_4\) group. The Bell inequalities based on the choice of three orbits in the representation space corresponding to standard representation of \(S_4\) are derived and their violation is described. The corresponding nonlocal games are analyzed.     

Linearity and iterator types for Gödel’s System

System Open image in new window is a linear λ-calculus with numbers and an iterator, which, although imposing linearity restrictions on terms, has all the computational power of Gödel’s System  Open image in new window . System Open image in new window owes its power to two features: the use of a closed reduction strategy (which permits the construction of an iterator on an open function, but only iterates the function after it becomes closed), and the use of a liberal typing rule for iterators based on iterative types. In this paper, we study these new types, and show how they relate to intersection types. We also give a sound and complete type reconstruction algorithm for System  Open image in new window .     

MRx as a participatory platform

Abstract

Facilitating and supporting various modes of social interaction has been part of Mixed Reality (MR^x)¹1 As defined in the introductory article for this series, MR^x experiences are conceptualized as site-specific; hybrid; and aesthetic, performative and/or social (For a detailed history of MR see, Introduction to this special issue) (Rouse et al., 2015b Rouse, R., Engberg, M., JafariNaimi, N., and Bolter, J. 2015b. “MR^x Design and Criticism: The Confluence of Media Studies, Performance, and Social Interaction.” Digital Creativity 26 (3/4). doi:10.1080/14626268.2015.1100124.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). design experiments and discourse over the past twenty years. But what vision of social interaction is sought and advanced through Mixed Reality environments? In this paper, I identify two dominant ways that social interaction is envisioned in MR^x designs, broadly construed as material and political, and illustrated through a series of examples. I further draw on them to highlight the potentials, boundaries, and limitations of each with regards to the kinds of social interactions that are sought and cultivated through the integration of digital media on physical space. I suggest that as MR becomes mainstream, it is important to go beyond these visions to consider whether and how MR^x environments might connect with the economic, social, and cultural specificity of local sites to meaningfully serve the always evolving social needs and purposes of their communities.     

Supervised collaboration for syntactic annotation of Quranic Arabic

The Quranic Arabic Corpus (http://corpus.quran.com) is a collaboratively constructed linguistic resource initiated at the University of Leeds, with multiple layers of annotation including part-of-speech tagging, morphological segmentation (Dukes and Habash 2010) and syntactic analysis using dependency grammar (Dukes and Buckwalter 2010). The motivation behind this work is to produce a resource that enables further analysis of the Quran, the 1,400 year-old central religious text of Islam. This project contrasts with other Arabic treebanks by providing a deep linguistic model based on the historical traditional grammar known as i′rāb (?????). By adapting this well-known canon of Quranic grammar into a familiar tagset, it is possible to encourage online annotation by Arabic linguists and Quranic experts. This article presents a new approach to linguistic annotation of an Arabic corpus: online supervised collaboration using a multi-stage approach. The different stages include automatic rule-based tagging, initial manual verification, and online supervised collaborative proofreading. A popular website attracting thousands of visitors per day, the Quranic Arabic Corpus has approximately 100 unpaid volunteer annotators each suggesting corrections to existing linguistic tagging. To ensure a high-quality resource, a small number of expert annotators are promoted to a supervisory role, allowing them to review or veto suggestions made by other collaborators. The Quran also benefits from a large body of existing historical grammatical analysis, which may be leveraged during this review. In this paper we evaluate and report on the effectiveness of the chosen annotation methodology. We also discuss the unique challenges of annotating Quranic Arabic online and describe the custom linguistic software used to aid collaborative annotation.     

Perceptual and physiological heat strain: Examination in firefighters in laboratory- and field-based studies

Firefighting demands performing heavy muscular work under adverse and potentially dangerous conditions. Although the physiological and psychological responses to simulated firefighting activities have been described, the heat strain has not been characterised using standardised indices of exercise–heat strain. The purpose of the study is to describe the physiological and perceptual strain associated with working in personal protective equipment and performing simulated firefighting activities in a hot environment using recently developed strain indices (Physiological Strain Index (PhSI); Perceptual Strain Index (PeSI)). Data from two previously published studies (Smith et al. 1995 Smith, D. L. 1995. Selected physiological and psychological responses to physical activity in different configurations of firefighting gear. Ergonomics, 38: 2065–2077. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2001 Smith, D. L. 2001. Effect of strenuous live-fire fire fighting drills on hematological, blood chemistry and psychological measures. Journal of Thermal Biology, 26: 375–379. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) – one a laboratory-based study and one a field-based study – were re-analysed incorporating the strain indices. The laboratory study involved walking on a treadmill for 15 min while wearing three different clothing and equipment configurations. The field study involved three trials of standardised firefighting tasks in a live-fire training structure (mean trial length = 5.76 min). Heart rate, rectal temperature, thermal sensations and ratings of perceived exertion were collected in each study. PhSI and PeSI values were calculated using the formulae developed by Moran et al. (1998b Moran, D. S., Shitzer, A. and Pandolf, K. B. 1998b. A physiological strain index to evaluate heat stress. American Journal of Physiology, 275: R129–R134. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Tikuisis et al. (2002 Tikuisis, P., McLellan, T. M. and Selkirk, G. 2002. Perceptual versus physiological heat strain during exercise-heat stress. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 34: 1454–1461. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), respectively. PhSI and PeSI increased significantly over time in both studies. Even relatively brief bouts of exercise while wearing heavy impermeable clothing or simulated firefighting activity in the heat results in moderate to high levels of heat strain as assessed by PhSI and PeSI.     

Work-Domain Experts as Evaluators: Usability Inspection of Domain-Specific Work-Support Systems

Work on how consumers evaluate electronic service quality is both topical and important due to the well-accepted criticality of electronic channels in selling products and services. However, most of the relevant research on electronic research quality is preoccupied with the website Internet context and most of the studies are single-country studies, inhibiting conclusions of generalizibility. Theoretically rooted in the Nordic Model of perceived service quality, this exploratory study uses an e-service quality scale to measure mobile Internet service quality in different national settings. Consistent with the available e-service quality literature, results indicate that e-service quality is a second-order factor, with three reflective first-order dimensions: efficiency, outcome, and customer care. Most important, cross-validation investigations using samples drawn from Korean, Hong Kong, and Japanese mobile Internet user populations, support the factorial structure invariance of the construct. Following Cheung and Reynolds's (2002) Cheung, G. W. and Rensvold, R. B. 2002. Evaluating goodness-of-fit indexes for testing measurement invariance. Structural Equation Modeling, 9: 233–255. [Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] suggestions, factor means differences between the three countries contributing to the scarce cross-national electronic service quality literature are tentatively examined. These initial empirical findings imply that although consumers in different countries use the same dimensions to evaluate mobile Internet services, importance weightings assigned on these dimension are probably not the same.     

Stability and Scepticism in the Modelling of Doxastic States: Probabilities and Plain Beliefs

There are two prominent ways of formally modelling human belief. One is in terms of plain beliefs (yes-or-no beliefs, beliefs simpliciter), i.e., sets of propositions. The second one is in terms of degrees of beliefs, which are commonly taken to be representable by subjective probability functions. In relating these two ways of modelling human belief, the most natural idea is a thesis frequently attributed to John Locke: a proposition is or ought to be believed (accepted) just in case its subjective probability exceeds a contextually fixed probability threshold \(t<1\). This idea is known to have two serious drawbacks: first, it denies that beliefs are closed under conjunction, and second, it may easily lead to sets of beliefs that are logically inconsistent. In this paper I present two recent accounts of aligning plain belief with subjective probability: the Stability Theory of Leitgeb (Ann Pure Appl Log 164(12):1338–1389, 2013; Philos Rev 123(2):131–171, 2014; Proc Aristot Soc Suppl Vol 89(1):143–185, 2015a; The stability of belief: an essay on rationality and coherence. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015b) and the Probalogical Theory (or Tracking Theory) of Lin and Kelly (Synthese 186(2):531–575, 2012a; J Philos Log 41(6):957–981, 2012b). I argue that Leitgeb’s theory may be too sceptical for the purposes of real life.