Generating commonsense assertions within a given story context remains a difficult task for modern language models. Previous research has addressed this problem by aligning commonsense inferences with stories and training language generation models accordingly. One of the challenges is determining which topic or entity in the story should be the focus of an inferred assertion. Prior approaches lack the ability to control specific aspects of the generated assertions. In this work, we introduce "hinting," a data augmentation technique that enhances contextualized commonsense inference. "Hinting" employs a prefix prompting strategy using both hard and soft prompts to guide the inference process. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we apply "hinting" to two contextual commonsense inference datasets: ParaCOMET and GLUCOSE, evaluating its impact on both general and context-specific inference. Furthermore, we evaluate "hinting" by incorporating synonyms and antonyms into the hints. Our results show that "hinting" does not compromise the performance of contextual commonsense inference while offering improved controllability.

Researchers from the University of Waterloo got a valuable assist from artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help capture and analyze data from professional hockey games more quickly and more accurately, something which could have implications for the business of sports. The growing field of hockey analytics currently relies on the manual analysis of video footage from games. Professional hockey teams across the sport, notably in the National Hockey League (NHL), make important decisions regarding players' careers based on that information. "The goal of our research is to interpret a hockey game through video more effectively and efficiently than a human," said Dr David Clausi, a professor in Waterloo's Department of Systems Design Engineering. Bounding boxes are used to identify players as they move on the ice in broadcast game video.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo are developing technology to automatically analyse videos of hockey games using artificial intelligence. Their deep-learning technique can identify players by their sweater numbers with 90 percent accuracy. "That is significant because the only major cue you have to identify a particular player in a hockey video is jersey number," said Kanav Vats, a PhD student in systems design engineering who led the project. "Players on a team otherwise appear very similar because of their helmets and uniforms." Player identification is one aspect of a complicated challenge as members of the Vision and Image Processing (VIP) Lab at Waterloo work with an industry partner on AI software to analyse player performance and produce other data-driven insights.

Researchers have made a key advancement in the development of technology to automatically analyze video of hockey games using artificial intelligence. Engineers at the University of Waterloo combined two existing deep-learning AI techniques to identify players by their sweater numbers with 90-per-cent accuracy. "That is significant because the only major cue you have to identify a particular player in a hockey video is jersey number," said Kanav Vats, a Ph.D. student in systems design engineering who led the project. "Players on a team otherwise appear very similar because of their helmets and uniforms." Player identification is one aspect of a complicated challenge as members of the Vision and Image Processing (VIP) Lab at Waterloo work with industry partner Stathletes Inc. on AI software to analyze player performance and produce other data-driven insights.

Non-recurring traffic congestion is caused by temporary disruptions, such as accidents, sports games, adverse weather, etc. We use data related to real-time traffic speed, jam factors (a traffic congestion indicator), and events collected over a year from Nashville, TN to train a multi-layered deep neural network. The traffic dataset contains over 900 million data records. The network is thereafter used to classify the real-time data and identify anomalous operations. Compared with traditional approaches of using statistical or machine learning techniques, our model reaches an accuracy of 98.73 percent when identifying traffic congestion caused by football games. Our approach first encodes the traffic across a region as a scaled image. After that the image data from different timestamps is fused with event- and time-related data. Then a crossover operator is used as a data augmentation method to generate training datasets with more balanced classes. Finally, we use the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis to tune the sensitivity of the classifier. We present the analysis of the training time and the inference time separately.

We describe a software tool to select among camera feeds from multiple virtual cameras in a virtual environment using semiring constraint satisfaction problem techniques (SCSP), a soft constraint approach. We show how to encode a designer's preferences, and select the best camera feed even in over-constrained or under-constrained environments. The system functions in real time for dynamic scenes, using only current information (ie. no prediction). To reduce computation costs for a final implementation, the SCSP evaluation can be cached and converted to native code. Our approach is implemented in two virtual environments: a virtual hockey game using a spectator viewpoint, and a virtual 3D maze game using a third person perspective. Comparisons against hard constraints (constraint satisfaction problems) are made.