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Autonomous AI Surveillance: Multimodal Deep Learning for Cognitive and Behavioral Monitoring

Hamza, Ameer, But, Zuhaib Hussain, Arif, Umar, Samiya, null, Asad, M. Abdullah, Naeem, Muhammad

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study presents a novel classroom surveillance system that integrates multiple modalities, including drowsiness, tracking of mobile phone usage, and face recognition,to assess student attentiveness with enhanced precision.The system leverages the YOLOv8 model to detect both mobile phone and sleep usage,(Ghatge et al., 2024) while facial recognition is achieved through LResNet Occ FC body tracking using YOLO and MTCNN.(Durai et al., 2024) These models work in synergy to provide comprehensive, real-time monitoring, offering insights into student engagement and behavior.(S et al., 2023) The framework is trained on specialized datasets, such as the RMFD dataset for face recognition and a Roboflow dataset for mobile phone detection. The extensive evaluation of the system shows promising results. Sleep detection achieves 97. 42% mAP@50, face recognition achieves 86. 45% validation accuracy and mobile phone detection reach 85. 89% mAP@50. The system is implemented within a core PHP web application and utilizes ESP32-CAM hardware for seamless data capture.(Neto et al., 2024) This integrated approach not only enhances classroom monitoring, but also ensures automatic attendance recording via face recognition as students remain seated in the classroom, offering scalability for diverse educational environments.(Banada,2025)


AI-based Multimodal Biometrics for Detecting Smartphone Distractions: Application to Online Learning

Becerra, Alvaro, Daza, Roberto, Cobos, Ruth, Morales, Aythami, Cukurova, Mutlu, Fierrez, Julian

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This work investigates the use of multimodal biometrics to detect distractions caused by smartphone use during tasks that require sustained attention, with a focus on computer-based online learning. Although the methods are applicable to various domains, such as autonomous driving, we concentrate on the challenges learners face in maintaining engagement amid internal (e.g., motivation), system-related (e.g., course design) and contextual (e.g., smartphone use) factors. Traditional learning platforms often lack detailed behavioral data, but Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA) and biosensors provide new insights into learner attention. We propose an AI-based approach that leverages physiological signals and head pose data to detect phone use. Our results show that single biometric signals, such as brain waves or heart rate, offer limited accuracy, while head pose alone achieves 87%. A multimodal model combining all signals reaches 91% accuracy, highlighting the benefits of integration. We conclude by discussing the implications and limitations of deploying these models for real-time support in online learning environments.


Predicting and Understanding College Student Mental Health with Interpretable Machine Learning

Chowdhury, Meghna Roy, Xuan, Wei, Sen, Shreyas, Zhao, Yixue, Ding, Yi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Mental health issues among college students have reached critical levels, significantly impacting academic performance and overall wellbeing. Predicting and understanding mental health status among college students is challenging due to three main factors: the necessity for large-scale longitudinal datasets, the prevalence of black-box machine learning models lacking transparency, and the tendency of existing approaches to provide aggregated insights at the population level rather than individualized understanding. To tackle these challenges, this paper presents I-HOPE, the first Interpretable Hierarchical mOdel for Personalized mEntal health prediction. I-HOPE is a two-stage hierarchical model, validated on the College Experience Study, the longest longitudinal mobile sensing dataset. This dataset spans five years and captures data from both pre-pandemic periods and the COVID-19 pandemic. I-HOPE connects raw behavioral features to mental health status through five defined behavioral categories as interaction labels. This approach achieves a prediction accuracy of 91%, significantly surpassing the 60-70% accuracy of baseline methods. In addition, our model distills complex patterns into interpretable and individualized insights, enabling the future development of tailored interventions and improving mental health support. The code is available at https://github.com/roycmeghna/I-HOPE.


Biometrics and Behavioral Modelling for Detecting Distractions in Online Learning

Becerra, Álvaro, Irigoyen, Javier, Daza, Roberto, Cobos, Ruth, Morales, Aythami, Fierrez, Julian, Cukurova, Mutlu

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this article, we explore computer vision approaches to detect abnormal head pose during e-learning sessions and we introduce a study on the effects of mobile phone usage during these sessions. We utilize behavioral data collected from 120 learners monitored while participating in a MOOC learning sessions. Our study focuses on the influence of phone-usage events on behavior and physiological responses, specifically attention, heart rate, and meditation, before, during, and after phone usage. Additionally, we propose an approach for estimating head pose events using images taken by the webcam during the MOOC learning sessions to detect phone-usage events. Our hypothesis suggests that head posture undergoes significant changes when learners interact with a mobile phone, contrasting with the typical behavior seen when learners face a computer during e-learning sessions. We propose an approach designed to detect deviations in head posture from the average observed during a learner's session, operating as a semi-supervised method. This system flags events indicating alterations in head posture for subsequent human review and selection of mobile phone usage occurrences with a sensitivity over 90%.


Using AI to make your smartphone smarter

#artificialintelligence

How many times have you lost your competitive edge because your smartphone starts downloading large email files while you're playing an online game? Or perhaps those concert tickets you've been waiting months for, finally come online and your phone decides to offer you a new system upgrade? The consequences, while not life threatening, are definitely frustrating. These are some of the challenges and issues we are trying to solve at the University of Melbourne and our research suggests that Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be the key. Smartphones are actually not very smart when it comes to system updates and battery conservation.


How Touchkin keeps tabs on your health by tracking your phone usage

#artificialintelligence

Touchkin is a platform that uses AI and machine learning to provide personalised care solutions. For Jo Aggarwal and Ramakant Vempati, one of the biggest concerns they had while working abroad was the health of their family living back in India. The husband and wife duo were working in high-flying corporate jobs with organsations like Pearson Learning Solutions and Goldman Sachs International in the UK. Living away from family, the couple realised that remote care giving was a huge global challenge, not just in India, but abroad as well, especially when it came to understanding the emotional and mental well-being of the families living in their home countries. So, in 2012, the two of them moved back to India to take care of their family.


Can Machine Learning Improve Natural and Human Disaster Outcomes

#artificialintelligence

There are more mobile phones than humans on earth. That presents a unique opportunity for big data and, more importantly, the insights from the data to be applied to greater social good. At this week's PAPIs Connect--a predictive application programming interface (API) conference in Valencia, Spain--Nuria Oliver, the scientific director of Telefonica's R&D program, spoke about how to adapt this data via machine learning. Today, we touch on two of the situations she presented where big data and machine learning gave insight into how governments can better address crises, whether it's a natural disaster or a disease outbreak. In this piece we aren't talking about personalized data or even that which we're offering via our social media accounts.


A Gender-Centric Analysis of Calling Behavior in a Developing Economy Using Call Detail Records

Frias-Martinez, Vanessa (Telefonica Research, Madrid) | Frias-Martinez, Enrique (Telefonica Research, Madrid) | Oliver, Nuria (Telefonica Research, Madrid)

AAAI Conferences

The gender divide in the access to technology in developing economies makes gender characterization and automatic gender identification two of the most critical needs for improving cell phone-based services. Gender identification has been typically solved using voice or image processing.   However, such techniques cannot be applied to cell phone networks mostly due to privacy concerns. In this paper, we present a study aimed at characterizing and automatically identifying the gender of a cell phone user in a developing economy based on behavioral, social and mobility variables. Our contributions are twofold: (1) understanding the role that gender plays on phone usage, and (2) evaluating common machine learning approaches for gender identification. The analysis was carried out using the encrypted CDRs (Call Detail Records) of approximately 10,000 users from a developing economy, whose gender was known a priori. Our results indicate that behavioral and social variables, including the number of input/output calls and the in degree/out degree of the social network, reveal statistically significant differences between male and female callers. Finally, we propose a new gender identification algorithm that can achieve classification rates of up to 80% when the percentage of predicted instances is reduced.


Who’s Calling? Demographics of Mobile Phone Use in Rwanda

Blumenstock, Joshua Evan (University of California, Berkeley) | Gillick, Dan (University of California, Berkeley) | Eagle, Nathan (Santa Fe Institute)

AAAI Conferences

But whereas in the general Rwandan populace males tend Despite the increasing ubiquity of mobile phones in the developing to be much better educated (76.3% of males are literate, but world, remarkably little is known about the structure only 64.7% of females), among mobile phone users it is the and demographics of the mobile phone market. While a women who achieve higher levels of education: the median few qualitative studies have detailed social norms of phone woman completes secondary school, while the median man use in specific communities (Donner 2007; Burrell 2009), does not (t 4.79). Table 1 shows a few statistics on asset and a handful of quantitative researchers have begun to analyze ownership, with associated sampling error.