Positive Emotion Amplification by Representing Excitement Scene with TV Chat Agents.

This paper proposes emotion amplification for TV chat agents allowing users to get more excited in TV sports programs, and a model that estimates the excitement level of TV programs based on the number of social comment posts. The proposed model extracts the exciting intervals from social comments to the program scenes. By synchronizing recorded video streams and the intervals, the agents may talk with the user dynamically changing the frequency and volume of upbeat utterances, increasing the excitement of the user. To test these agents, participants watched TV content under three conditions: without an agent, with four agents that utter with a flat voice, and with four agents with emotion amplification. Results from 24 young adult Japanese individuals showed that their arousal of participants' subjective and physiological emotional responses were boosted because of the agents, enhancing their motivation to interact with the agent in the future. With empirical evidence, this paper supports these expectations and demonstrates that these agents can amplify the positive emotions of TV watchers, enhancing their motivation to interact with the agent in the future.

Intrinsic group behaviour: Dependence of pedestrian dyad dynamics on principal social and personal features.

Being determined by human social behaviour, pedestrian group dynamics may depend on "intrinsic properties" such as the purpose of the pedestrians, their personal relation, gender, age, and body size. In this work we investigate the dynamical properties of pedestrian dyads (distance, spatial formation and velocity) by analysing a large data set of automatically tracked pedestrian trajectories in an unconstrained "ecological" setting (a shopping mall), whose apparent physical and social group properties have been analysed by three different human coders. We observed that females walk slower and closer than males, that workers walk faster, at a larger distance and more abreast than leisure oriented people, and that inter-group relation has a strong effect on group structure, with couples walking very close and abreast, colleagues walking at a larger distance, and friends walking more abreast than family members. Pedestrian height (obtained automatically through our tracking system) influences velocity and abreast distance, both growing functions of the average group height. Results regarding pedestrian age show that elderly people walk slowly, while active age adults walk at the maximum velocity. Groups with children have a strong tendency to walk in a non-abreast formation, with a large distance (despite a low abreast distance). A cross-analysis of the interplay between these intrinsic features, taking in account also the effect of an "extrinsic property" such as crowd density, confirms these major results but reveals also a richer structure. An interesting and unexpected result, for example, is that the velocity of groups with children increases with density, at least in the low-medium density range found under normal conditions in shopping malls. Children also appear to behave differently according to the gender of the parent.

Effectiveness of social behaviors for autonomous wheelchair robot to support elderly people in Japan.

We developed a wheelchair robot to support the movement of elderly people and specifically implemented two functions to enhance their intention to use it: speaking behavior to convey place/location related information and speed adjustment based on individual preferences. Our study examines how the evaluations of our wheelchair robot differ when compared with human caregivers and a conventional autonomous wheelchair without the two proposed functions in a moving support context. 28 senior citizens participated in the experiment to evaluate three different conditions. Our measurements consisted of questionnaire items and the coding of free-style interview results. Our experimental results revealed that elderly people evaluated our wheelchair robot higher than the wheelchair without the two functions and the human caregivers for some items.

Deciphering the crowd: modeling and identification of pedestrian group motion.

Associating attributes to pedestrians in a crowd is relevant for various areas like surveillance, customer profiling and service providing. The attributes of interest greatly depend on the application domain and might involve such social relations as friends or family as well as the hierarchy of the group including the leader or subordinates. Nevertheless, the complex social setting inherently complicates this task. We attack this problem by exploiting the small group structures in the crowd. The relations among individuals and their peers within a social group are reliable indicators of social attributes. To that end, this paper identifies social groups based on explicit motion models integrated through a hypothesis testing scheme. We develop two models relating positional and directional relations. A pair of pedestrians is identified as belonging to the same group or not by utilizing the two models in parallel, which defines a compound hypothesis testing scheme. By testing the proposed approach on three datasets with different environmental properties and group characteristics, it is demonstrated that we achieve an identification accuracy of 87% to 99%. The contribution of this study lies in its definition of positional and directional relation models, its description of compound evaluations, and the resolution of ambiguities with our proposed uncertainty measure based on the local and global indicators of group relation.

An indication for correlation between the serum ADA level and gastric cancer risk.

BACKGROUND: Gastric atrophy caused by Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infection is a risk factor for gastric cancer. We aimed to evaluate the relationship between gastric cancer risk and tumor markers in the general population. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A total of 688 volunteers were examined to test their serum pepsinogen (PG) levels and anti-H. pylori antibodies, in addition to a total of 22 serum tumor markers. The participants were classified into four groups according to their anti-H. pylori antibody and serum PG serological status. Accordingly, groups A and D were negative, whereas groups B and C were positive for anti-H. pylori antibodies; and groups A and B were normal, whereas groups C and D were abnormal for serum PG levels. All the blood examination results were statistically evaluated using Student's t-test among these groups. RESULTS: There were 424, 202, 50, and 12 individuals in groups A, B, C, and D, respectively. Because of the small number of participants in groups C and D, we combined these two groups. Compared to the normal group (A), a statistically significant higher in adenosine deaminase level was found in group C+D (p=0.01). CONCLUSION: This result supports a previous study indicating that adenosine deaminase is involved in the regulatory system of chronic atrophic gastritis and gastric cancer risk.

Serum levels of CA15-3, KL-6 and BCA225 are positively correlated with each other in the general population.

BACKGROUND: Carbohydrate antigen 15-3 (CA15-3), Kerbs von den Lungen (KL-6) and breast cancer antigen 225 (BCA225) are widely used tumor markers for breast and lung cancer respectively. PATIENTS AND METHODS: We analyzed 460 Japanese volunteers for 99 items on blood examination including 27 serum tumor markers. Correlations between 27 tumor markers and the other items were statistically analyzed. RESULTS: Positive correlations were identified between CA15-3 vs. KL-6, CA15-3 vs. BCA225, and KL-6 vs. BCA225, with correlation coefficients of 0.84, 0.86, and 0.79, respectively. CONCLUSION: This is the first report to show a positive correlation among these markers in the general population. All of these are recognized as belonging to the mucin family, and this might be the reason for the positive correlation.