United States

PETRA 2021

Bioinformatics systems for monitoring and mitigating epidemics: The STAMINA Paradigm

health care informatics

Welcome Seabirders!  

Welcome to Virtual World Seabird Conference 3 - vWSC3! Whether you are in your office or lab, at home, in a coffee shop or bar poaching some wifi, or at a remote field site or research vessel – we are very excited to welcome you to the third ever World Seabird Conference. 

We would like to thank ALL of you for being so patient as WSC3 was scheduled, postponed, rescheduled, revised to virtual, and scheduled again. Throughout all those iterations there was one message that remained perfectly clear – seabirders were eager to meet and share their science. If we could not meet in person then virtual it would have to be, but a 3rd WSC was something everyone wanted. That support and commitment helped the WSU Board of Directors and Member Societies sort through all of the challenges they faced to plan and hold this conference. 

The list of those that need to be thanked is long and, while we plan on recognizing many during the live closing plenary, it is important to do so here in writing as well. 

The Australasian Seabird Group was our Local Host for our plan to meet in Hobart, Tasmania. They invested substantial time and effort to find venues and plan events that we unfortunately were not able to visit. Nonetheless we appreciate their work on behalf of WSC3 and encourage all of you to thank them when you see their members in Gathertown or elsewhere during our virtual meeting. Their willingness to host created the initial excitement for WSC3 and without that our vWSC would not have been possible.

We also wish to thank the Science Program Committee, the Virtual Committee, and the Early Career Scientist Committee for their hard work planning the logistics, events, and schedule for vWSC3. These committees also had to deal with changing parameters and short timelines that made what is always a challenging task even more challenging. The Travel Awards Committee also invested time and effort in developing procedures for awarding travel funds that ultimately would not be implemented. 

Our ability to shift from an in-person to a virtual meeting, and to do so in a way that would be financially feasible, was due to the effective efforts of The International Fundraising Committee and to our financial sponsors. The IFC raised funds to support WSC3 and then, through the good relationships they built with sponsors, ensured we could re-envision how those funds could be used to support a virtual conference that would be affordable and high-quality.

We all owe the WSU Board of Directors and the Representatives of the Member Societies a great deal of thanks. They are the ones who manage the WSU and, for the past 18 months, have had to have a series of challenging meetings and conversations, have had to make a series of difficult choices, have had to do all of that while considering the short- and long-term health of WSU and the World Seabird Conferences, and did this while also managing their own challenges at their day jobs. We are grateful for their diligence, patience, foresight, and throughout all of the meetings, their collegiality. Also – a 6-year term is quite a commitment!

There would not be a WSC3 without a successful WSC1 and WSC2. Thanks go to the Pacific Seabird Group for their support of WSC1 in Victoria, Canada, and to the African Seabird Group for their support of WSC2 in Cape Town, South Africa. In each of these endeavors and for our current conference we were fortunate to work with a dependable and trustworthy partner in Podium Conferences. Michelle Smith and Marischal de Armond have become valued members of our team and have not only helped us plan conferences but have assisted and advised the WSU Chairs and Board on issues above and beyond conference planning. 

As we embark on our vWSC3 week we extend to all of you our thanks for showing up, for being patient, and most importantly for the work you do with seabirds. We are all part of a unique, global community that shares an interest, a fascination, and a passion for birds that make a living in our world’s oceans. We have advanced the science, conservation, and management of seabirds as well the ecosystems they inhabit. We are consistently impressed and motivated by the work you do. 

The WSU formed in 2010 because we saw the need for a global organization to address challenges at a global level. Over the past 11 years WSU has grown, adapted, and evolved to become the community that this week is making vWSC3 a reality. Enjoy the week, appreciate and support the friends and colleagues you have made in the community, and if you see us in a virtual hallway please stop and say hello! 

Thank you for the opportunity to serve all of you and the WSU over the past few years,

Nicholas Carlile, Interim Chair, WSU<br>
Patrick Jodice, 2nd Chair of the WSU<br><br>

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3rd World Seabird Conference

Join us for four days of science, networking and virtual engagement with delegates from around the world!

workshop paper

**About**
<br>The PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) conference is a highly interdisciplinary conference that focuses on computational and engineering approaches to improve the quality of life and enhance human performance in a wide range of settings, in the workplace, at home, in public spaces, urban environments, and other. Outcomes of this conference have a broad impact in application areas that include, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy systems, security and safety, robotics, biomedicine, environment and conservation, and many others. PETRA brings together very different types of technologies to also address important social and healthcare issues for sensitive populations, such as the elderly, persons suffering from chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Cerebral Palsy, and other disabilities or traumas.

<br>PETRA (which means “stone” in Greek) addresses important human living needs. From a technological perspective, PETRA motivates and inspires new scientific thrusts, innovations and discoveries to improve living environments, a particularly important issue, in an increasingly crowded and complex world where the need for inclusiveness and connectivity with the rest of the world is key. For the elderly in particular, PETRA addresses the fact that, as people grow older; they will increasingly rely on technology to be able to prolong staying in their homes and enjoy an independent life.

<br>The PETRA 2021 proceedings will be published in the ACM Digital Library as part of the ACM ICPS program. The ISBN number assigned to PETRA '21 is 978-1-4503-8792-7
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The PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) conference is a highly interdisciplinary conference that focuses on computational and engineering approaches to improve the quality of life and enhance human performance in a wide range of settings, in the workplace, at home, in public spaces, urban environments, and other. Outcomes of this conference have a broad impact in application areas that include, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy systems, security and safety, robotics, biomedicine, environment and conservation, and many others. PETRA brings together very different types of technologies to also address important social and healthcare issues for sensitive populations, such as the elderly, persons suffering from chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Cerebral Palsy, and other disabilities or traumas.

The world’s population is ageing rapidly while cognitive impairment in older ages is more evident than ever. Hence, the health and wellbeing among the elderly is an issue of paramount importance. The speedy growth of technology and its application within healthcare has advanced computerized cognitive interventions, which aim to delay the onset and potential progression of cognitive decline. Consequently, the traditional cognitive interventions have made a swift to novel multimedia systems to promote independent, active and healthy ageing. The primary objective of the present study is to introduce an innovative computerized cognitive gamified training and social activation program for health and mildly cognitive impaired older adults. The platform is designed as an extension and adaptation of a previous computerized cognitive training program called ‘SOCIABLE’. Evaluation of the newly designed platform through a single-arm feasibility study followed by a full randomized double-blind controlled trial is recommended as future steps for this piece of work.

Design, method and apparatus of a computerized cognitive gamified training program targeting to maintain and improve cognitive health in older adults

A highly user-centered design approach for developing a mobile health app for pain management (PainApp)

Over the course of the coming decades, the societal goal of maximizing the number of older adults who experience positive trajectories of ageing has been established. To this end, innovative technologybased interventions tailored to older adults’ functional levels and focused on healthy lifestyles are considered imperative. The purpose of this work is to present a cluster of digital solutions aims at supporting and maintaining healthy and independent living for older adults, who face permanently or temporarily reduced functionality and capabilities.

Assistive Technologies for Supporting Wellbeing of Older Adults

Inferring the emotional state of an individual by viewing his/her facial expression seems to be present in all human cultures. Numerous
studies have shown that various changes in facial muscles determine the resulting facial expression. The analysis of images of faces
expressing emotional states promises to contribute to the quantification
of the claimed observations. Here, we use a suite of AI (artificial
intelligence) algorithms, along with ML (maximum likelihood) estimated distributions to quantify the shift in facial expression from
“neutral”→“fear” and “pain”→“pleasure”. The images are single
frames of five emotional states (neutral, fear, pain, pleasure, laugh)
expressed by actors and actresses in BDSM videos. We extract a feature vector for each image, dimension-reduce these feature vectors
by mapping them onto a two-dimensional manifold and calculate
the norms of the normalized displacement vectors for each emotional pair. We then find that the ML distributions of the norms are
Gamma-distributed and that the modes for each pair are different
for both males and females. We use Wilks lambda to determine
significance. We find that the distributions for the females are significantly different, but not for the males. The methodology we present
here has widespread applications: monitoring the emotional states
of humans in various settings; among these: determining whether
participants in BDSM and similar videos are indeed volunteering
their participation or are victims of criminal activity.

Visual Analysis of Emotions Using AI Image-Processing Software: Possible Male/Female Differences between the Emotion Pairs “Neutral”–“Fear” and “Pleasure”–“Pain”

As the field of robotics develops, so do the methods of interfacing with and controlling those robots. Many modern robots can be communicated with using commands that require neither speech nor touch. The two main motivations behind this trend are the assistance of people with disabilities and the desire for more natural Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). In allowing nonverbal communication with robots, accessibility of the systems increases to allow more people to interact with and benefit from robotics systems. Additionally, nonverbal communication provides more natural communication, which can lead to many benefits in HRI. This paper
provides an overview of existing technologies in touchless and nonverbal human-robot interfaces; it presents the most prevalent interface methods, their uses, and limitations. Discussions are provided on future directions for research.

Interfacing with Robots without the use of Touch or Speech

Force control is nowadays a mature technology and it is becoming more and more common in severed robotic applications. Despite this, an effective standardized and comprehensive method to assess force control performance does not exist. Defining the performance of a force-controlled system is not a trivial task, and one of the reason is that performance does not only depend on the dynamics of the robot, but also on the dynamics of the environment, which are usually uncertain and time-varying. Exerting a force on a soft environment is different from exerting a force on a rigid environment. Indeed, the same force-controlled robot can have different force responses in different environments. This paper proposes a methodology to standardize the benchmarking of force control algorithms applied to different actuation architectures and considering a wide set of possible environments and disturbances, defined by the application of interest.

Benchmarking Force Control Algorithms

We are presenting a conceptual design of a post-stroke rehabilitation
device, which is aimed for training the coupled movement
of wrist and fingers from flexion to extension in three modalities –
passive, active-assisted and active mode of operation. We will describe the configuration, actuation and control system of the
robotic device and provide the results of the mechanism’s mock-up
evaluation, therapists’ feedback on the design, future work and
development plans.

Robotic device for wrist and finger exercise

Automatic building extraction from satellite RGB images, is a low-cost alternative to perform important urban planning tasks. Yet, itis a challenging one, especially when natural and non-city block objects interfere in the semantic segmentation of algorithms that extract their key features. In this work we approach the automatic building extraction using a Convolution Neural Network based on the U-Net architecture. In contrast to existing approaches, it successfully encodes important features and decodes the buildings’ localization by requiring both reduced computational time and dataset size. We evaluate the U-Net’s performance using RGB images selected from the SpaceNet 1 dataset and the experimental results show an accuracy in building localization of 92.3%. Finally,favorable comparison with existing CNN approaches to hyper-spectral images targeting the SpaceNet 1 dataset, demonstrated its effectiveness.

Building Extraction from RGB Satellite Images using Deep Learning: A U-Net Approach

The presentation provides a novel method for reducing a multi-class Confusion Matrix into a 2 × 2 version enabling the use of the relevant performance metrics and methods like the Receiver Operating Characteristic and the Area Under the Curve for the assessment of different classification algorithms. The reduction method is based on class grouping and leads to a specific Confusion Matrix format. The developed method is then exploited for the assessment of several state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms applied on a customer experience metric called Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Multi-Class Confusion Matrix Reduction method and its application on Net Promoter Score classification problem

Man overboard incidents in a maritime vessel are serious accidents where, the efficient and rapid detection is crucial in the recovery of the victim. The severity of such accidents, urge the use of intelligent systems that are able to automatically detect a fall and provide relevant alerts. To this end the use of novel deep learning and computer vision algorithms have been tested and proved efficient in problems with similar structure. This paper presents the use of a deep learning framework for automatic detection of man overboard incidents. We investigate the use of simple RGB video streams for extracting specific properties of the scene, such as movement and saliency, and use convolutional spatiotemporal autoencoders to model the normal conditions and identify anomalies. Moreover, in this work we present a dataset that was created to train and test the efficacy of our approach.

Bioinformatics systems for monitoring and mitigating epidemics: The STAMINA Paradigm

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Design, method and apparatus of a computerized cognitive gamified training program targeting to maintain and improve cognitive health in older adults

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Bioinformatics systems for monitoring and mitigating epidemics: The STAMINA Paradigm

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Next from PETRA 2021

Design, method and apparatus of a computerized cognitive gamified training program targeting to maintain and improve cognitive health in older adults

Similar lecture

Substantial viral diversity in Antarctic penguins and their ticks: no evidence for low pathogen pressure

Downloads