Artificial Intelligence-based System for Detecting Attention Levels in Students.

The attention level of students in a classroom can be improved through the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. By automatically identifying the attention level, teachers can employ strategies to regain students' focus. This can be achieved through various sources of information. One source is to analyze the emotions reflected on students' faces. AI can detect emotions, such as neutral, disgust, surprise, sadness, fear, happiness, and anger. Additionally, the direction of the students' gaze can also potentially indicate their level of attention. Another source is to observe the students' body posture. By using cameras and deep learning techniques, posture can be analyzed to determine the level of attention. For example, students who are slouching or resting their heads on their desks may have a lower level of attention. Smartwatches distributed to the students can provide biometric and other data, including heart rate and inertial measurements, which can also be used as indicators of attention. By combining these sources of information, an AI system can be trained to identify the level of attention in the classroom. However, integrating the different types of data poses a challenge that requires creating a labeled dataset. Expert input and existing studies are consulted for accurate labeling. In this paper, we propose the integration of such measurements and the creation of a dataset and a potential attention classifier. To provide feedback to the teacher, we explore various methods, such as smartwatches or direct computers. Once the teacher becomes aware of attention issues, they can adjust their teaching approach to re-engage and motivate the students. In summary, AI techniques can automatically identify the students' attention level by analyzing their emotions, gaze direction, body posture, and biometric data. This information can assist teachers in optimizing the teaching-learning process.

Accurate Multilevel Classification for Wildlife Images.

The most common approaches for classification rely on the inference of a specific class. However, every category could be naturally organized within a taxonomic tree, from the most general concept to the specific element, and that is how human knowledge works. This representation avoids the necessity of learning roughly the same features for a range of very similar categories, and it is easier to understand and work with and provides a classification for each abstraction level. In this paper, we carry out an exhaustive study of different methods to perform multilevel classification applied to the task of classifying wild animals and plant species. Different convolutional backbones, data setups, and ensembling techniques are explored to find the model which provides the best performance. As our experimentation remarks, in order to achieve the best performance on the datasets that are arranged in a tree-like structure, the classifier must feature an EfficientNetB5 backbone with an input size of 300 × 300 px, followed by a multilevel classifier. In addition, a Multiscale Crop data augmentation process must be carried out. Finally, the accuracy of this setup is a 62% top-1 accuracy and 88% top-5 accuracy. The architecture could benefit for an accuracy boost if it is involved in an ensemble of cascade classifiers, but the computational demand is unbearable for any real application.

Enhancing the Ambient Assisted Living Capabilities with a Mobile Robot.

Ambient assisted living (AAL) environments are currently a key focus of interest as an option to assist and monitor disabled and elderly people. These systems can improve their quality of life and personal autonomy by detecting events such as entering potentially dangerous areas, potential fall events, or extended stays in the same place. Nonetheless, there are areas that remain outside the scope of AAL systems due to the placement of cameras. There also exist sources of danger in the scope of the camera that the AAL system cannot detect. These sources of danger are relatively small in size, occluded, or nonstatic. To solve this problem, we propose the inclusion of a robot which maps such uncovered areas looking for new potentially dangerous areas that go unnoticed by the AAL. The robot then sends this information to the AAL system in order to improve its performance. Experimentation in real-life scenarios successfully validates our approach.

Geoffrey: An Automated Schedule System on a Social Robot for the Intellectually Challenged.

The accelerated growth of the percentage of elder people and persons with brain injury-related conditions and who are intellectually challenged are some of the main concerns of the developed countries. These persons often require special cares and even almost permanent overseers that help them to carry out diary tasks. With this issue in mind, we propose an automated schedule system which is deployed on a social robot. The robot keeps track of the tasks that the patient has to fulfill in a diary basis. When a task is triggered, the robot guides the patient through its completion. The system is also able to detect if the steps are being properly carried out or not, issuing alerts in that case. To do so, an ensemble of deep learning techniques is used. The schedule is customizable by the carers and authorized relatives. Our system could enhance the quality of life of the patients and improve their self-autonomy. The experimentation, which was supervised by the ADACEA foundation, validates the achievement of these goals.