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The mental health, adaptive behaviour and intellectual abilities of people with Down syndrome (n=129) were evaluated in a population-based survey of social and health care records. Females had better cognitive abilities and speech production compared with males. Males had more behavioural problems than females. Behaviour suggestive of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder was often seen in childhood. Depression was diagnosed mainly in adults with mild to moderate intellectual disability. Autistic behaviour was most common in individuals with profound intellectual disability. Elderly people often showed decline of adaptive behaviour associated with Alzheimer's disease. Case descriptions are presented to illustrate the multitude of mental health and behavioural issues seen from childhood to old age in this population.

Children with Down syndrome often display speech-comprehensibility and grammatical deficits beyond what would be predicted based upon general mental age. Historically, speech-comprehensibility has often been treated using traditional articulation therapy and oral-motor training so there may be little or no coordination of grammatical and speech-comprehensibility treatment. The purpose of this paper is to provide the rationale for and preliminary evidence in support of integrating speech and grammatical intervention using a type of recast treatment in six children with Down syndrome. Speech-comprehensibility and MLU growth in generalisation sessions occurred in 4/6 and 5/6 participants, respectively. Using multiple baseline design logic, two of these participants showed evidence of treatment effects on speech-comprehensibility and two in MLU in generalisation sessions, respectively. The study constitutes a conservative test of the intervention effects for reasons that are discussed. The theoretical and applied significance of these findings are discussed.

Seeking for knowledge is one of the most important problems that learners frequently face during their learning process. In this research, a computer supported collaboration learning in ubiquitous computing environment is designed and implemented. This environment is called Perkam (personalized knowledge awareness map). Perkam allows the learners to seek for and share knowledge, interact, collaborate, and exchange individual experiences. This system recommends the appropriate educational materials and peer helpers. The knowledge awareness map visualizes the relative distance between the learner's request and location from one side, and the suggested educational materials and peer helpers from the other side. This paper focuses on the design and the implementation of the knowledge awareness map which is personalized according to the learner's interest and location

Deep learning has been successfully applied to solve various complex problems ranging from big data analytics to computer vision and human-level control. Deep learning advances however have also been employed to create software that can cause threats to privacy, democracy and national security. One of those deep learning-powered applications recently emerged is "deepfake". Deepfake algorithms can create fake images and videos that humans cannot distinguish them from authentic ones. The proposal of technologies that can automatically detect and assess the integrity of digital visual media is therefore indispensable. This paper presents a survey of algorithms used to create deepfakes and, more importantly, methods proposed to detect deepfakes in the literature to date. We present extensive discussions on challenges, research trends and directions related to deepfake technologies. By reviewing the background of deepfakes and state-of-the-art deepfake detection methods, this study provides a comprehensive overview of deepfake techniques and facilitates the development of new and more robust methods to deal with the increasingly challenging deepfakes.

Se puede considerar como recurso didáctico todo tipo de medio que facilita las tareas de enseñanza-aprendizaje y, en términos generales, el desarrollo del proceso didáctico globalmente considerado. A partir de esta conceptualización tan amplia podía procederse a realizar distintas clasificaciones de medios. Una de las que presentan mayor aceptación contiene cuatro categorías:

This article reports on the effectiveness of an intervention programme designed to improve the morpho-syntax used by teenagers with Down's syndrome in their speech. The intervention used reading to teach the language. All but one of the teenagers were using longer, more complex sentences, in their conversation at the end of the year's training. The extent of individual progress was significantly related to speech production ability and comprehension of grammar at the end of the year. Future language intervention programmes should focus on both phonology and grammar.

In this paper, we report on the results of our research, which is designed to address two broad questions about the cognitive and linguistic profi le of Down syndrome: (1) Which domains of functioning are especially impaired in individuals with Down syndrome? and (2) Which aspects of the language and cognitive profi le of Down syndrome are syndrome specifi c? To address these questions, we focused on three dimensions of the Down syndrome profi le -receptive language, expressive language, and theory of mind -and made comparisons to individuals with fragile X syndrome, which is an X-linked form of intellectual disability. We identifi ed Down syndrome impairments on all three dimensions that were substantially greater than those seen in nonverbal cognition and that were not shared by individuals with fragile X syndrome. Clinical implications of these fi ndings are considered.

This study investigated the popularity of children with Down syndrome with their peers in mainstream classrooms using established sociometric techniques. The classroom behaviour of 16 children with Down syndrome aged 8 to 11 years were assessed and the relationship between these behaviours and acceptance investigated. For comparison, the relationship between classroom behaviour and acceptance of 122 typically developing children from the same classes was examined. The majority of the children with Down syndrome were found to enjoy average levels of acceptance in the class. Although behaviour problems were significantly worse in the children with Down syndrome, poor behaviour did not influence the other children to reject them. There was a different picture for typically developing children where there was a strong relationship between behaviour and peer acceptance. Language skills were also assessed for the children with Down syndrome. The children's language skills were not related to their popularity with the other children. Neither problem behaviours nor language difficulties influenced friendships in or out of the classroom for the children with Down syndrome.

Nella presente tesi viene approfondito l'uso dei video come strumento di comunicazione dell'archeologia. Lo studio teorico ha poi trovato applicazione pratica nella produzione del documentario "Nora, il racconto dell'archeologo" e di alcuni brevi video divulgativi diffusi sui canali social del progetto Nora.

The Baobab is a storybook app for the iPad that was designed and developed based on research in visual learning, visual phonology, bilingualism, and Deaf children's cognitive development by the National Science Foundation-funded Science of Learning Center on Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2) at Gallaudet University. Developed by an all-Deaf team, the storybook app is designed for early and emerging readers, bridging design principles in ASL storytelling and English text to research foundations, in order to facilitate reading and language acquisition for children who rely heavily on the visual modality for learning.

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has many applications in a variety of fields. Detection and tracking of a specific road in UAV videos play an important role in automatic UAV navigation, traffic monitoring, and ground-vehicle tracking, and also is very helpful for constructing road networks for modeling and simulation. In this paper, an efficient road detection and tracking framework in UAV videos is proposed. In particular, a graph-cut-based detection approach is given to accurately extract a specified road region during the initialization stage and in the middle of tracking process, and a fast homography-based road-tracking scheme is developed to automatically track road areas. The high efficiency of our framework is attributed to two aspects: the road detection is performed only when it is necessary and most work in locating the road is rapidly done via very fast homography-based tracking. Experiments are conducted on UAV videos of real road scenes we captured and downloaded from the Internet. The promising results indicate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, with the precision of 98.4% and processing 34 frames per second for 1046 × 595 videos on average.

Early intervention approaches for facilitating motor development in infants and children with Down syndrome have traditionally emphasised the acquisition of motor milestones. As increasing evidence suggests that motor milestones have limited predictive power for long-term motor outcomes, researchers have shifted their focus to understanding the underlying perceptual-motor competencies that influence motor behaviour in Down syndrome. This paper outlines a series of studies designed to evaluate the nature and extent of perceptual-motor impairments present in children with Down syndrome. 12 children with Down syndrome between the ages of 8-15 years with adaptive ages between 3-7 years (mean age = 5.6 years +/-1.45 years) and a group of 12 typically developing children between the ages of 4-8 years (mean age = 5.4 +/-1.31 years) were tested on their ability to make increasingly complex perceptual discriminations of motor behaviours. The results indicate that children with Down syndrome are able to make basic perceptual discriminations but show impairments in the perception of complex visual motion cues. The implications of these results for early intervention are discussed.

In recent years, researchers have shown a higher interest in gifted individuals, children, teen agers, and even adults. These individuals share many common characteristics such as being highly sensitive, using abstract and complex thinking, enjoying solving problems involving numbers and puzzles, and having a developed sense of idealism and justice at an early age. These are just a few characteristics mentioned in the literature. In the language classroom, teachers can design materials tailored to the needs of these students. In this paper, teachers will be acquainted with various integrated language activities which require the gifted students to use their:  Excellent memory  Unusually large vocabulary and complex sentence structure  Advanced comprehension of abstract ideas  Concern with social and political issues and injustices

This study compares the procedural counting ability (independently and with parental support) and conceptual understanding of cardinality of a group of children with Down syndrome and a group of typically developing children, matched for non-verbal mental age. Participants were 23 children with Down syndrome (chronological age range: 3.5 -7 years; mental age range: 2.5 -4 years) and 20 typically developing children (chronological age range: 2 -4 years; mental age range: 2.5 -4 years), and their main caregiver. The children were asked to count sets of toys (assessing procedural counting skills) and to give sets of toys (assessing understanding of cardinality), with set sizes between 2 and 18 items. The counting task was performed in two conditions, with and without parental support. The children were also asked to say the count word sequence aloud, to assess sequence production independent from object counting. The typically developing children produced signifi cantly more number words altogether, longer standard number sequences and could count larger sets than the children with Down syndrome. Support from an adult improved performance on the count task signifi cantly for both groups of children, and there was no signifi cant difference between the groups in the degree of improvement, i.e. the zone of proximal development. No signifi cant differences were found between the frequency of children (approximately one third) in each group who used counting to solve the give task, indicating an understanding of cardinality.

This study explores the socio-cognitive processes involved in the production of Pakistani music videos with political narratives. The time period of the research is for ten years starting from 2007 to 2017. This study suggests that music video is a newest and powerful tool to construct political narratives through integrative and disintegrative themes in Pakistan, and these narratives are used to stimulate the audience. The study rests upon qualitative analysis through in-depth interviews of the producers of music videos, lyricists and singers. Five respondents are selected for the interviews using purposive sampling technique. Then the themes are extracted from the answers of the respondents. The theoretical perspective integrated to interpret the results, is Rick Altman’s approach to film Genre (1987). The findings suggest an extension in Altman’s ideological approach. Findings also show that the positive themes are mostly portrayed in Pakistani sociopolitical music videos with the sponsorship of state institutions.

A self-tuning image restoration filter based on a simplified version of the Jaffe-McGlamery underwater image formation model is presented. Optimal values of the filter parameters are estimated automatically for each individual image by optimizing a quality criterion based on a global contrast measure. The simplified model is ideally suitable for diffuse-light imaging with limited backscatter, but qualitative tests show good performance in a variety of imaging conditions. In addition, quantitative tests with a large number of frames from six real mission videos indicate a substantial performance improvement when restoration is used as a preprocessor for a classifier detecting man-made objects in unconstrained subsea videos.

Expression is an important aspect of music performance. It is the added value of a performance and is part of the reason that music is interesting to listen to and sounds alive. Understanding and modeling expressive content communication is important for many engineering applications in information technology. For example, in multimedia products, textual information is enriched by means of graphical and audio objects. In this paper, we present an original approach to modify the expressive content of a performance in a gradual way, both at the symbolic and signal levels. To this purpose, we discuss a model that applies a smooth morphing among performances with different expressive content, adapting the audio expressive character to the user's desires. Morphing can be realized with a wide range of graduality (from abrupt to very smooth), allowing adaptation of the system to different situations. The sound rendering is obtained by interfacing the expressiveness model with a dedicated postprocessing environment, which allows for the transformation of the event cues. The processing is based on the organized control of basic audio effects. Among the basic effects used, an original method for the spectral processing of audio is introduced.

Questa tesi continua e amplia il mio progetto di tirocinio “PLaNK! in pillole” basato sulla realizzazione di video divulgativi con la tecnica dello stop motion, già diffusi online attraverso i social media. Per ampliare il progetto iniziale, mi propongo di rendere uno di questi video interattivo e integrabile con documenti e prove di verifica ed esplorarne le possibili applicazioni in didattica e l’interesse dei docenti per questo prodotto, attraverso la somministrazione di un questionario online.  Dopo la discussione i materiali realizzati saranno messi a disposizione dei docenti attraverso un blog dedicato.

Recent studies of exceptional language development and functioning in mentally retarded people raise questions regarding basic issues in language disorders. These studies are summarised and their implications discussed. Possible reasons for the existence of such cases are examined including language training, general cognitive functioning, working memory, cerebral dominance, and deep-seated variation at brain level.

A pesquisa qualitativa na Administração vem ganhando grande expressividade e transversalidade das mais diversas áreas do conhecimento. A análise de vídeos e fotografias dentro da pesquisa qualitativa possibilita reconhecer a construção simbólica, os significados e a representatividade dos sujeitos. Este artigo objetiva apresentar a importância da fotografia e dos vídeos para a pesquisa qualitativa da Administração, evidenciando como estes recursos podem contribuir com novos olhares sobre o território fronteiriço. A partir da triangulação dos dados foi analisada a série Fronteiras do Tráfico (Brasil, Bolívia e Paraguai), elaborada pelo Jornal da Record, e algumas fotografias. Os resultados mostram que os telejornais veem a fronteira como fim, uma área extremamente perigosa e com pouca fiscalização, visão essa não compartilhada pela população que vive na fronteira.

The qualitative research in Administration has been gaining great expressiveness and transversality from the most diverse areas of knowledge. The analysis of videos and photographs within the qualitative research allow the recognition of symbolic construction, meanings and representativeness of the subjects. This article aims to present the importance of photography and videos for the qualitative research of the Administration, evidencing how these resources can contribute with new looks on the frontier territory. Based on data triangulation, the series Traffic Frontiers (Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay), created by " Jornal da Record " , and some photographs were analyzed. The results show that the TV news programs see the frontier as an ending, an extremely dangerous area with little border control. This view is not shared by the population living on the border.

This study tried to answer the following: What are the mean scores of the experimental group and control group in the pretest in terms of HOTS: application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation? Is there a significant difference between the mean scores of the two groups in the specified HOTS? What are the mean scores of two (2) groups in the posttest in terms of HOTS: application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation? Is there a significant difference between the mean scores of both groups in the specified HOTS? What is the percentage gain in terms of HOTS based on the results of the pre and posttest in the experimental/control groups? What is the level of proficiency of both groups in terms of the mean scores in the posttest on the given skills? It utilized quasi-experimental, mean, percentage, standard deviation, and T-test for independent sample means. The following were drawn: Students performed better in analysis, synthesis, and evaluation levels even before the use of videos based on the pretest .The experimental and control groups had the same posttest performance in the application and synthesis levels. But, the experimental group performed better at the analysis and evaluation levels. Students in the control group had a greater percentage gain at the analysis and synthesis levels based on pre and posttest results. The level of proficiency of both groups in the application, analysis, and synthesis skills was average in the evaluation skill for the experimental group. Instructions using both the traditional approach and using videos developed the students' HOTS.

The article deals with the influence of authentic English videos on technical students' memorization and subsequent recall of the English lexis. The process of the brain and memory work when students are exposed to videos in class is clarified. According to the data analysed, clips from English movies and programmes are valuable educational aids in teaching English as a foreign language. This has been verified experimentally. The results of authentic videos' influence on the students' memorization and recall of the English lexis, as well as motivation to continue studying English are provided.

A need exists to facilitate social as well as communal constructivism while fostering self-directed learning in language classrooms at university level. In this regard, videos can be used as a means to motivate students to critically interact with content and to engage collaboratively with new technologies. Furthermore, it is important to consider the duration of videos and as such, short instructional videos were employed for this study. This research reports on how student teachers perceived the creation and use of short instructional videos as multimodal open educational resources in an Afrikaans language classroom at university level. Short instructional videos (as a form of microlearning) boast many advantages that correspond with literature and the perceptions of students. In this article, a qualitative research approach was followed, which involved reflections by the participants submitted by means of a questionnaire with closed and open-ended questions. From this analysis, the following themes were identified: Challenges encountered by students, advantages of using short instructional videos, aspects enjoyed about creating the short instructional videos, and affordances of creating short instructional videos. From the analysis, it was clear that students are positive about the production and use of videos. It was also evident that variables, such as social interaction , knowledge of multimodalities, technical ability, device limitations and the topic of videos, all influence the nature of short videos in this context and that support in classes is necessary in this regard.

— This research paper addresses how academics can engage the Net Generation using YouTube in Higher Education to enhance learning. This explanatory research focuses on user behavior of both Academics and students via interviews and questionnaires. An interpretive constructivism approach examines how academics use YouTube to engage students in the classroom, as well as understanding the learning needs of undergraduate students as relating to video-based interventions. The data collection and analysis employs online questionnaires and semi-formal interview tools in a cross sectional time frame. Results show that students engage emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally when academics deploy YouTube into the classroom. A possible limitation of the research is that all participants in the questionnaires are second year Accounting undergraduate students in the Commerce faculty at the University of Cape Town

Multimedia is ubiquitously available online with large amounts of video increasingly consumed through Web sites such as YouTube or Google Video. However, online multimedia typically limits users to visual/auditory stimulus, with onscreen visual media accompanied by audio. The recent introduction of MPEG-V proposed multi-sensory user experiences in multimedia environments, such as enriching video content with so-called sensory effects like wind, vibration, light, etc. In MPEG-V, these sensory effects are represented as Sensory Effect Metadata (SEM), which is additionally associated to the multimedia content. This paper presents three user studies that utilize the sensory effects framework of MPEG-V, investigating the emotional response of users and enhancement of Quality of Experience (QoE) of Web video sequences from a range of genres with and without sensory effects. In particular, the user studies were conducted in Austria and Australia to investigate whether geography and cultural differences affect users' elicited emotional responses and QoE.

In this contribution we focus on the task of automatically analyzing a speaker's sentiment in on-line videos containing movie reviews. In addition to textual information, we consider adding audio features as typically used in speech-based emotion recognition as well as video features encoding valuable valence information conveyed by the speaker. We combine this multi-modal experimental setup with a detailed analysis of different methods for linguistic sentiment analysis by gradually increasing the level of domain-independence: First, we consider in-domain analysis by examining a cross-validation setup applied on a novel database named Multi-Modal Movie Opinion (ICT-MMMO) corpus. Next, we concentrate on cross-domain analysis by using a large corpus of written movie reviews for training. Finally, we explore the application of on-line knowledge sources for inferring the speaker's sentiment. Our experimental results indicate that training on written movie reviews is a promising alternative to exclusively using (spoken) in-domain data for building a system that analyses spoken movie review videos and that language-independent audiovisual analysis can compete with linguistic analysis.

ARTÍCULOS Un proyecto innovador en arqueología. El uso de material audiovisual como recurso didáctico en la enseñanza universitaria 1 Daniel Casado Rigalt 2 Recibido: 07 de septiembre de 2018 / Aceptado: 30 de noviembre de 2018 Resumen. Los mecanismos de aprendizaje necesitan ser replanteados. El aula física se ha convertido en un espacio limitado de generación del conocimiento y la universidad ha caído en una trampa burocrática que lastra la viabilidad académica. La vídeo-lección y la vídeo-entrevista se están revelando como dos herramientas de enorme potencial, que complementan las clases presenciales y dinamizan la transferencia de contenidos. Permiten economizar recursos a largo plazo y rentabilizar el tiempo invertido por profesores y alumnos, dejando atrás el sistema de la toma de apuntes en las aulas. En el presente artículo se exponen las infinitas posibilidades del vídeo en la educación superior, así como la distinta acogida que está teniendo entre el estamento universitario. A modo de muestreo ha sido sondeada la aceptación del vídeo entre historiadores y arqueólogos del ámbito científico-universitario-de 180 universidades y 30 países-cuyas opiniones han generado interesantes reflexiones y debates. Palabras clave: cultura audiovisual; Plan Bolonia; sociedad de la comunicación; sociedad de la información; TIC (tecnologías de la información y la comunicación); universidad; vídeo; vídeo-entrevista; vídeo-lección; virtualización. [en] An innovative project in archeology. The use of audiovisual material as a didactic resource in university education Abstract. Learning mechanisms need to be rethought. The physical classroom has become a limited space for the current generation to acquire knowledge and the university has fallen into a bureaucratic trap that hampers academic visibility. The video-lesson, as well as the video-interview, are revealing themselves as two tools of enormous potential, which complement face-to-face classes and stimulate the transfer of content. They also allow an economization of resources in the long term as well as making time invested by professors and students profitable, leaving behind a system like "note-taking" in the classroom. In the present article the infinite possibilities of the use of video in higher education are exposed, as well as the contrasting reaction it is receiving in the university establishment. As a sampling, the acceptance of the use of video among historians and archaeologists from the scientific-university sphere-180 universities from 30 countries-have generated interesting reflections, opinions and debates. Sumario: 1. Introducción. Estado de la cuestión. 2. El vídeo como alternativa a la clase presencial. 3. La vídeo-entrevista: un género con gran proyección académica. 4. Un proyecto de innovación docente en el área de la arqueología. El poder de la imagen en la transferencia académica. 5. ¿Vídeo versus academia? Encuesta a nivel mundial entre historiadores y arqueólogos. 6. Desafíos para el futuro. 7. Conclusiones. 8. Bibliografía. Cómo citar: Casado Rigalt, D. (2018): Un proyecto innovador en arqueología. El uso de material audiovisual como recurso didáctico en la enseñanza universitaria Complutum, 29(2): 427-450. Francis Bacon: "el que no aplique nuevos remedios debe esperar nuevos males, porque el tiempo es el máximo innovador. Saber escoger el tiempo es ahorrar tiempo" 1 El presente artículo ha sido concebido en el marco del grupo de investigación en ciencias sociales tecnológicas (GICSO

The tremendous success of the iPad has led to a revolution in portable computing. Many universities, high schools, and elementary schools are attempting to capitalize on this revolution by generating curricula that exploit such portable touchscreen computers. One aspect of this effort is the development of interactive textbooks that go beyond the static display of printed words, equations, and figures. Features that distinguish interactive textbooks include: embedded videos that can be viewed with the tap of a finger, picture slideshows, user-controlled simulations, and interactive forms that accept user input and provide immediate feedback. Unfortunately, the skill sets required to generate such books usually do not reside in one person. Professors have the knowledge and skills to produce traditional textbooks, but they usually lack the knowledge, skill, and time to make the interactive elements. Undergraduate and graduate students can be trained to develop the programming skills to develop the interactive elements, but they lack the knowledge and experience to create the traditional aspects of a textbook. This paper describes how a team was formed to produce an interactive textbook, and it documents the features of such a book created for introductory mechanical design students.

This paper addresses current theoretical perspectives on child language development, and their implications for intervention. It is argued that language is a complex system consisting of a number of distinct, interacting, components, and that no single explanation for its development is likely to be adequate: the evidence suggests, rather, that different factors predominate in the development of different parts of the system. Some recent work with deaf children -on the development of sign phonology, and on maternal strategies for presenting signs to their children in context -is then discussed together with its implications for the use of signs with other groups, focusing particularly on the use of signed input with children with Down's syndrome.

In this paper, we utilise an approach drawn from the field of epidemiology to explore what is known and unknown about young children with Down syndrome and their families. After describing what we mean by an epidemiological approach, we review basic findings for children with intellectual disabilities, as well as challenges to performing such research. In considering the epidemiology of Down syndrome, we note that most studies to date have focused on prevalence, mortality-life expectancy, and rates of diseases and syndrome-related health-physical problems, while neglecting many other important issues. In considering potential advances in the epidemiology of Down syndrome, then, we first overview the process of linking two or more separate administrative records, before reviewing several of our own recent studies. We end this paper by discussing four challenges to future epidemiological studies of children with Down syndrome and their families.

Archeological remnants in urban areas tend to be included in the urban landscape or even remain hidden in subterranean locations which are not visible and, for these reasons, they are accessed with difficulty by visitors. In our previous experience, we developed a mobile application, which guided visitors in real time through various archaeological sites using texts, images, and videos. The results of an evaluation test which collected visitors' impressions and suggestions showed us that the mobile application allowed them to visit archeological remnants in a more participative way but that most visitors were unable to imagine what relation the archaeological remnants had with the ancient urban landscape. To solve this problem and improve the visitors' experience, we are now working at another application, which combines historical and archeological details with an immersive experience. The mobile application recognizes a cultural heritage element by image recognition or by positioning and it augments the interface with various layers of information. Furthermore, the application will provide not only information but it will offer to visitors an emotional experience.

Research in the area of phonological awareness has mainly focused on the nature of the relationship between reading ability and awareness of phonemes. However, a recent study of phonological awareness in children with Down syndrome questioned the existence of any necessary relationship . This paper describes a study of phonological awareness in children with Down syndrome with varying levels of reading ability. The sample consisted of 10 male and 7 female children with Down syndrome (aged 9 years 2 months to 14 years 5 months). All children received a battery of tests which consisted of assessments of: 1) phonological awareness, 2) reading and spelling competence, 3) non-word reading and spelling ability, and 4) non-verbal measures. Children with Down syndrome demonstrated measurable levels of phonological awareness. Signifi cant positive correlations were found between phonological awareness and: reading and spelling competence, ability to spell non-words and non-verbal measures.

The approach presented in this paper tackles the active research problem of the fast automatic modeling of large-scale environments from videos with millions of frames and collection of tens of thousands of photographs downloaded from the Internet. The approach leverages recent research in robust estimation, image based recognition and stereo depth estimation. The high computational speed is achieved through parallelization and execution on commodity graphics hardware. The approach achieves real-time reconstruction from video and reconstructs within less than a day from tens of thousands of downloaded images on a single commodity computer. We demonstrate modeling results on a variety of real-world video sequences and photo collections.

In this paper we introduce a system to track pedestrians using a combined input from RGB and thermal cameras. Two major contributions are presented here. First is the novel model of the scene background where each pixel is represented as a multi-modal distribution with the changing number of modalities for both color and thermal input. We demonstrate how to eliminate the influence of shadows with this type of fusion. Second, based on our background model we introduce a pedestrian tracker designed as a particle filter. We further develop a number of informed reversible transformations to sample the model probability space in order to maximize our model posterior probability. The novelty of our tracking approach also comes from a way we formulate observation likelihoods to account for 3D locations of the bodies with respect to the camera and occlusions by other tracked human bodies as well as static objects. The results of tracking on color and thermal sequences demonstrate that our algorithm is robust to illumination noise and performs well in the outdoor environments.

Increasingly, children with Down syndrome receive literacy instruction with the expectation of acquiring functional reading skills. Unfortunately, little is known about the processes underlying literacy skills in this special population. Phonological awareness contributes to literacy development in typically developing children, however, there is inconclusive evidence about these skills in younger children with Down syndrome. 9 children with Down syndrome (5;6 -8;10 years) participated in this investigation. Due to the paucity of standardised phonological awareness measures for children with special needs, in particular children with Down syndrome, a variety of tasks were adapted from the literature. The assessment battery examined the skills of phonological awareness, literacy, speech production, expressive language, hearing acuity, speech perception, and auditory-visual memory. The results suggest that children with Down syndrome are at risk for reading acquisition difficulties due to reduced phonological awareness skills. These deficits are in addition to delays caused by reduced cognitive skills. Only one of the participants was able to demonstrate rhyme awareness, which may have been due to task effects. Written word recognition ability was correlated with tests of phonemic awareness, and error analysis of the spelling and non-word reading tasks suggested grapheme-phoneme connections deficits. Further research is needed to determine the best methods of assessment and intervention for phonological awareness in children with Down syndrome.

El argumento propuesto en este artículo es que los archivistas y especialistas en medios de comunicación necesitan adoptar nuevas prácticas, como la organización de hackatones o maratones, para facilitar la reutilización creativa de material de archivo. Por medio de esas actividades, podrían respaldar el alcance a las comunidades locales y comprender las sutilezas de reutilizar contenido para contextualizar los registros de los archivos. Para respaldar esta afirmación, expongo un estudio de caso en el que un grupo de escritores y realizadores de video de distintas partes del mundo aúnan fuerzas para reutilizar material de archivo audiovisual en Helsinki, Finlandia. Desarrollo las limitaciones y oportunidades que se presentaron para los artistas, los archivistas y los especialistas en medios durante un evento de un día en el que colaboraron y reutilizaron creativamente material de archivo audiovisual. La exposición revela cuestiones que tienen que ver con la facilitación del proceso de reutilización creativa como medio para generar integración, la representación multicultural de los archivos, el desarrollo de la literacidad mediática a través de procesos colaborativos y los desafíos que se presentan en la práctica de la reutilización legal de material de archivo.

Studies on using still images and dynamic videos in multimedia annotations produced inconclusive results. A further examination, however, showed that the principle of using videos to explain complex concepts was not observed in the previous studies. This study was intended to investigate whether videos, compared with pictures, better assist English learners to learn difficult words. It adopted a three-group immediate posttest and delayed posttest quasi-experimental design. Ten target words were selected and embedded in a reading text, each of which was annotated by three annotation types: text-only, text and picture, and text and video. Three intact classes, a total of 88 students, were recruited in a junior high school in northern Taiwan, each of which was randomly assigned to one of the three groups. All participants took the pretest two weeks before the experiment, the immediate posttest after reading the text, and the delayed posttest two weeks after the experiment. The result revealed significant differences between the three groups, in which the video group outperformed the other two groups. Pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research are also given.

The face provides an important channel for communicating affect valence, the positive or negative emotional charge of an experience. This paper addresses the challenging pattern recognition problem of assigning affect valence labels (positive, negative or neutral) to facial action sequences obtained from unsegmented videos coded using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). The data were obtained from viewers watching eight short movies with each second of video labeled with self-reported valence and hand coded using FACS. We identify the most frequently occurring Facial Actions and propose the usefulness of a Facial Action Unit Spectrogram. We compare both generative and discriminative classifiers on accuracy and computational complexity: Support Vector Machines, Hidden Markov Models, Conditional Random Fields and Latent-Dynamic Conditional Random Fields. We conduct three tests of generalization with each model. The results provide a first benchmark for classification of self-report valences from spontaneous expressions from a large group of people (n=42). Success is demonstrated for increasing levels of generalization and discriminative classifiers are shown to significantly outperform generative classifiers over this large data set. We discuss the challenges encountered in dealing with a naturalistic dataset with sparse observations and its implications on the results.