This study presents a quantitative analysis of humor markers in computer-mediated communication (CMC). The data for this analysis consists of naturally occurring asynchronous CMC interactions from a public fan forum. Posts were tagged and coded as either humorous or non-humorous, and each individual humorous unit was coded as being one of 8 specific forms of humor. Next, each post was tagged and coded for the use of linguistic markers in the following categories: Punctuation, formatting, emoticons, laughter, and explicit. Descriptive and inferential statistics determined the following in the present data set: 1) Markers from each of the 5 marker categories occurred significantly more in humorous than non- humorous turns (p > 0.001); 2) Each of the 8 forms of humor present in the data were tested for the use of each marker-type, which suggests the existence of correlations between the iconic use of formatting in hyperbole (p > 0.001), the use of laughter in jocularity (p = 0.019) and insult (p = 0.024), and the use of emoticon in jocularity (p = 0.031); and 3) Humorous units which used humor markers gained significantly more humor response than unmarked humorous units (p > 0.001). These results provide a better understanding of features potentially related to the automated identification of humor.

An anticipated increase in the number of people withdementia will lead to an escalation in health and socialcare spending unless it is altered by a major breakthroughin treatment or prevention. Behavioral symptomsassociated with dementia (BSD) are some of themost difficult problems faced by caregivers. Severalmeasurement issues have hampered the progress oftimely intervention for BSD. Sensor technology mayoffer a solution to the early detection of BSD that willguide the development of tailored interventions. Similarly,a clinical conceptualization of BSD and its measurementissues can facilitate the engineering of sensornetworks and algorithms for activity recognition. Multidisciplinarycollaboration and the consideration of ethicalissues will improve the adoption of these technologiesin healthcare research.

Intelligent wheelchairs can help increase independent mobility for elderly residents with cognitive impairment, who are currently excluded from the use of powered wheelchairs. This paper presents three case studies, demonstrating the efficacy of the NOAH (Navigation and Obstacle Avoidance Help) system. The findings reported can be used to refine our understanding of user needs and help identify methods to improve the quality of life of the intended users.

While machine learning methods have proven to be a highly valuable tool in solving numerous problems in assistive technology,state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms and corresponding results are not always accessible to assistive technology researchers due to required domain knowledge and complicated model parameters. This work explores the use of recent work in machine learning to entirely automate the machine learning pipeline, from feature extraction to classification. A nonparametrically guided autoencoder is used toextract features and perform classification while Bayesian optimization is used to automatically tune the parameters of the model for best performance. Empirical analysis is performed on a real-world rehabilitation research problem. The entirely automated approach significantly outperforms previously published results using carefully tuned machine learning algorithms on the same data.

Ambient activity monitoring systems produce large amounts of data, which can be used for health monitoring.The problem is that patterns in this data reflecting health status are not identified yet. In this paper the possibility is explored of predicting the functional health status (the motor score of AMPS = Assessment of Motor and Process Skills) of a person from data of binary ambient sensors. Data is collected of five independently living elderly people. Based on expert knowledge, features are extracted from the sensor data and several subsets are selected. We use standard linear regression and Gaussian processes for mapping the features to the functional status and predict the status of a test person using a leave-one-person-out cross validation. The results show that Gaussian processes perform better than the linear regression model, and that both models perform better with the basic feature set than with location or transition based features.Some suggestions are provided for better feature extraction and selection for the purpose of health monitoring.These results indicate that automated functional health assessment is possible, but some challenges lie ahead. The most important challenge is eliciting expert knowledge and translating that into quantifiable features.

Falls are a major problem for older adults. A continuous unobtrusive in-home monitoring system that provides an accurate automated assessment of fall risk and detects when falls have occurred would allow for timely intervention and prevention allowing individual to remain healthier and independent longer. Sensor networks have been installed in apartments of older adult volunteers at TigerPlace, an independent senior living community. Initial results comparing gait parameters captured with a Microsoft Kinect with ground truth clinical fall risk assessments and GAITRite data are presented.

In this paper we discuss the gap that exists between the caregivers of older adults attempting to age-in-place and sophisticated ”smart-home” systems that can sense the environment and provide assistance when needed. We argue that smart-home systems need to be customizable by end-users, and we present a general-purpose model for cognitive assistive technology that can be adapted to suit many different tasks, users and environments. Al- though we can provide mechanisms for engineers and designers to build and adapt smart-home systems based on this general-purpose model, these mechanisms are not easily understood by or sufficiently user-friendly for actual end users such as older adults and their care- givers. Our goal is therefore to study how to bridge the gap between the end-users and this technology. In this paper, we discuss our work on this problem from both sides: developing technology that is customizable and general-purpose, and studying user’s abilities and needs when it comes to building smart-home systems to help with activities of daily living. We show how a large gap still exists, and propose ideas for how to bridge the gap.

This research is a discriminative analysis of conversational dialogs involving individuals suffering from dementia of Alzheimer’s type. Several metric analyses are applied to the transcripts of the Carolina Conversation Corpus (Pope and Davis 2011) in order to determine if there are significant statistical differences between individuals with and without Alzheimer’s disease. Results from the analysis indicate that go-ahead utterances, certain fluency measures, and paraphrasing provide defensible means of differentiating the linguistic characteristics of spontaneous speech between healthy individuals and those with Alzheimer’s disease. Several machine learning algorithms were used to classify the speech of individuals with and without dementia of the Alzheimer’s type.

We thank all the discussants for their careful reading of our paper, and for their insightful critiques. We would also like to thank the editors for organizing this discussion. Our paper contributes to the area of high-dimensional statistics which has received much attention over the past several years across the statistics, machine learning and signal processing communities. In this rejoinder we clarify and comment on some of the points raised in the discussions. Finally, we also remark on some interesting challenges that lie ahead in latent variable modeling. Briefly, we considered the problem of latent variable graphical model selection in the Gaussian setting.

Abstract: K-nearest neighbors (KNN) method is used in many supervised learning classification problems. Potential Energy (PE) method is also developed for classification problems based on its physical metaphor. The energy potential used in the experiments are Yukawa potential and Gaussian Potential. In this paper, I use both applet and MATLAB program with real life benchmark data to analyze the performances of KNN and PE method in classification problems. The results show that in general, KNN and PE methods have similar performance. In particular, PE with Yukawa potential has worse performance than KNN when the density of the data is higher in the distribution of the database. When the Gaussian potential is applied, the results from PE and KNN have similar behavior. The indicators used are correlation coefficients and information gain. Keywords: K-nearest neighbor, potential energy method, Yukawa potential, Gaussian potential, correlation coefficients, information gain 1. Introduction The target of supervised learning is to learn a mapping from the input to an output whose correct values are provided. However for unsupervised learning, no correct values are provided hence the only known object is the input data and the target is to find the regularities in the input. Classification is considered as an object of supervised learning.