United States

PETRA 2021

Promoting Cybersecurity Culture Change in Healthcare

Truth and Responsibility
“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Many consider anthropology to be a holistic social science dedicated to cross-cultural understanding as a way to reduce bigotry and more fully comprehend “what it means to be human.” Others push against this readily circulated origin story, arguing that “human” remains a highly contested, political category—evident as the presumed set of rights and protections associated with the “human” continue to be stripped away violently in the communities in which some of us live and work. Which violent histories and epistemologies must anthropologists take responsibility for in telling truth(s) about the discipline’s development? How do the dual histories of settler colonialism and slavery continue to influence anthropological thought and practices? In these political times, how can anthropologists throughout the globe work to secure a capacious, progressive vision of the human? How might movements for anti-racism, decoloniality, queer liberation, and healing such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ProtectMaunaKea, and #MeToo push a future anthropology out of the ashes of the anthropological past? Finally, what are the limits and possibilities of the anthropological imagination?

Across subfields, we find truths in patterns of human behavior, language, evolution, and cultural worlds. Industry-positioned anthropologists do this by extending the boundaries of the discipline not as an administrative solution to job shortages but as a source of intervention and knowledge production. Increasingly, anthropologists who make use of the scientific method question how status and identity help to decide which facts come to represent truth. How might quantitative researchers use our methods to identify patterned truths, and what responsibility do we hold in challenging conventional wisdom about these patterns? What responsibility do we have to both our colleagues and larger publics, to push toward increased transparency and ethical grounding in our data collection, analysis, and presentation?

Pedagogy is a key medium for the communication of anthropological truths. Which (and whose) truths are foregrounded in our curricula? What are the possibilities for a liberatory pedagogy in a precarious, “post-truth” era? Conferences, museums, organizing spaces, and classrooms are sites where pedagogy and various forms of communication can help us interrogate the performativity of truth. How might anthropologists conceive of truth performances? Might visual, aural, and choreographic performances during AAA sessions offer anthropologists alternative genres for truth-telling and truth-making that provoke discussions about responsibility?

In accordance with the urgency of the year’s theme, the questions posed in this call for papers do not have easy answers. The hope is that those who submit proposals will take up these questions and engage in collective thinking and imagining about the truths we hold, the truths we challenge, and the responsibilities we bear in co-creating a free and more equitable world. All panel proposals should have a statement about how the panel has incorporated the goals of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and/or analysis of power.

Executive Session proposals have already been selected and speak directly to the theme “Truth and Responsibility.” To practice the critical reflexivity this call for papers invites, we asked that Executive Session submissions explicitly address the diversity of session participants, such as organizational/institutional affiliation, career stage, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, class, religion, national identity, and gender. Proposals for Executive Sessions that demonstrated a commitment to equity and inclusion and/or a clear analysis of power (i.e. anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist, decolonial, anti-ableist, feminist, anti-transphobic, anti-xenophobic, etc) were given priority. We are excited to be in conversation with residents of the Baltimore region and look forward to the discussions, performances, and actions generated by the dynamic group of anthropologists attending the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

workshop paper

**About**
 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.

 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.

 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

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.

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.

Man Overboard: Fall detection using spatiotemporal convolutional autoencoders in maritime environments

Bioinformatics systems for monitoring and mitigating epidemics: The STAMINA Paradigm

Emotion recognition is a field of psychology that involves the process of identifying emotions and treating mental conditions like autism. The advancements in the field of machine learning and deep learning have paved the way for scientists to develop models for evaluating emotions by analyzing facial expressions, speech and text. However, the task of evaluating emotions could be best done by processing the bio-signals and neural imaging of the brain. In that sense, bio-signals such as Electroencephalogram (EEG) are less expensive to use and non-invasive, giving them an edge over traditional methods like Magnetic Resonant Imaging (MRI). However,
not many datasets are publicly available due to privacy issues and their availability is highly limited by the classification task. These constraints, along with the problem of data scarcity, motivates this work as an attempt to enhance the accuracy scores by generating synthetic features that are close to actual data distribution. In this research, we propose a Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network with gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) based model that can help tackle this problem. The dataset that is investigated is DEAP, one of the benchmark datasets for evaluating emotion recognition algorithms. In the method proposed, nine descriptive features are extracted from the original data and baseline models are evaluated. 
Subsequently, a WGAN-GP is trained on these extracted features and is used to generate a new set of synthetic data features. The synthetic features are then analysed for quality and appended to the original data to expand this dataset. Experiments with different augmentation factors (x2, x3, x4) are investigated to evaluate the impact of the data augmentation procedure. The experimental results
demonstrate that the proposed method gives a considerable enhancement of the classification task’s performance.

GAN-Based Data Augmentation For Improving The Classification Of EEG Signals

A novel deep learning methodology for the assessment of ergonomic risks in any given work-related task with high accuracy and in real-time is presented. The proposed method takes as input a video sequence, extracts 3D skeletal features using VIBE algorithm and then processes these features to predict REBA risk scores for the entire body and individual body parts. Results on two well-known datasets and against other state-of-the-art methods verify the ability of the proposed method in predicting REBA ergonomic risk scores with high accuracy.

Towards Real-time Generalized Ergonomic Risk Assessment for the Prevention of Musculoskeletal Disorders

Physiological data are nowadays frequently used to recognize the
affective state of subjects while performing different tasks. Automatic
recognition of a stressful state as a consequence of a high level
of cognitive load is significant to prevent illnesses like depression,
anxiety and sleep disorders that are often due to excessive workload.
The spread of wearable sensors that are increasingly reliable and
comfortable makes them easy to use in day-life activities. However,
due to the nature of experiments that involve subjects, the cardinality
of the acquired data is often low, making difficult to train
deep learning methods from the scratch. In this paper we consider
the photopletismography (PPG) that measures the blood volume
registered just under the skin, which can be used to obtain the heart
rate of the subject. It is well known that PPG data are particularly
relevant to detect high level of arousal that is activated by stress.
We show that, converting monodimensional photopletismography
(PPG) data into bidimensional signals it is possible to apply a pretrained
CNN, obtaining deep features that outperform handcrafted
ones in classification tasks, especially introducing feature selections
strategies to avoid curse of dimensionality.

A Deep Learning Approach to Recognize Cognitive Load using PPG Signalshttps://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3453892.3461625

As access to new technologies becomes increasingly less expensive and complex, technologies such as virtual reality (VR) are also becoming interesting and relevant for applications outside consumer entertainment. Especially with VR for blind and visually impaired people, VR can overcome the limitations of real-world environments (e.g., hazardous locations and reliance on sighted companionship for training) by virtually exploring its digital model using consumer hardware. In this context, we conducted two within-subject user study with 11 and 5 participants that were asked to learn and re-walk an audio-landmark enriched path in a virtual environment. Our results showed, that the ability to learn and re-walk an audio landmark-enriched environment using an auditive only locomotion interface is possible, but yet difficult. To be able to re-walk even a simple corridor entails a relatively big training effort, but distinctive structures are recognizable again. The results also indicated that the intuitive use of controller based locomotion brings advantages over a keyboard and mouse based approach. Furthermore, we discovered different characteristics of auditive navigation (e.g., walking zigzag, in circles or collision-oriented with regard to the rooms' walls), encountered acoustic rendering problems in acute corners and were able to show a training effect when having trained a path within a virtual environment with respect to re-walking, both inside a virtual environment and outside to a physically re-walked path. This work underlines the feasibility, problems, but also chances of different locomotion implementations in VR and is intended to foster future work towards both technical and methodological optimization in this area.

Preliminary Analysis on Interaction Characteristics with Auditive Navigation in Virtual Environments

Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies are nowadays increasingly adopted as core elements of modern applications for creating unique user experiences. 
Following the capabilities of hardware and its constantly reducing cost, their use is moving from scientific and research projects to everyday life applications such as social media, architectural design and of course games.
In this work, we present a state-of-the-art exergame implementation paradigm, which can facilitate the development of exergames exploiting advanced user interactivity, augmented reality and modern gamification techniques.
The platform has been used for the development of a set of prototype games for Android phones based on the popular AR Core framework. 
The overall approach has been evaluated in real-world scenarios with exceptional usability and performance results.

On the development of augmented reality based exergames for assessing human activity and cognition on mobile devices

Increasing digitization in healthcare promises easier exchange and more efficient use of medical information for patients, institutions and research. 
The number of sharing options for medical data increases, e.g., through personal health records, as well as the volume of data.
To use this data in medical research patients' consent is important.
As more and more data access is regulated by consent forms and their complexity also increases.
For the patient, it becomes less comprehensible which information could be gained from his or her disclosed data. 
This becomes more important when presumably anonymized data has the risk of potential re-identification of an individual.
In this paper we introduce a consent-privacy-impact-quantification (CPIQ) as a risk model of consent forms for the release of personal medical data for use within research projects.
CPIQ evaluates how reasonable a consent decision is for the patient. 
It takes relevant factors such as the patient’s preferences into account, the circumstances and benefits of the research project, and the potential risk to the patient.
The model can be parameterized so that different aspects such as the benefit of the research project, the risk of a data leak or the risk of a patient’s confidential data becoming known can be represented.
We present the feasibility of this model by including it in an existing consent management system.

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