Abstract: Wearable cameras can gather large amounts of image data that provide rich visual information about the daily activities of the wearer. Motivated by the large number of health applications that could be enabled by the automatic recognition of daily activities, such as lifestyle characterization for habit improvement, context-aware personal assistance and tele-rehabilitation services, we propose a system to classify 21 daily activities from photo-streams acquired by a wearable photo-camera. Our approach combines the advantages of a late fusion ensemble strategy relying on convolutional neural networks at image level with the ability of recurrent neural networks to account for the temporal evolution of high-level features in photo-streams without relying on event boundaries. The proposed batch-based approach achieved an overall accuracy of 89.85%, outperforming state-of-the-art end-to-end methodologies. These results were achieved on a dataset consists of 44,902 egocentric pictures from three persons captured during 26 days in average.

Abstract: Nucleus accumbens has been reported as a key structure in the neurobiology of schizophrenia. Studies analyzing structural abnormalities have shown conflicting results, possibly related to confounding factors. We investigated the nucleus accumbens volume using manual delimitation in first-episode psychosis (FEP) controlling for age, cannabis use and medication. Thirty-one FEP subjects who were naive or minimally exposed to antipsychotics and a control group were MRI scanned and clinically assessed from baseline to 6 months of follow-up. FEP showed increased relative and total accumbens volumes. Clinical correlations with negative symptoms, duration of untreated psychosis and cannabis use were not significant.

Abstract: Major advances have recently been made in merging language and vision representations. Most tasks considered so far have confined themselves to the processing of objects and lexicalised relations amongst objects (content words). We know, however, that humans (even pre-school children) can abstract over raw multimodal data to perform certain types of higher level reasoning, expressed in natural language by function words. A case in point is given by their ability to learn quantifiers, i.e. expressions like few, some and all. From formal semantics and cognitive linguistics, we know that quantifiers are relations over sets which, as a simplification, we can see as proportions. For instance, in most fish are red, most encodes the proportion of fish which are red fish. In this paper, we study how well current neural network strategies model such relations. We propose a task where, given an image and a query expressed by an object–property pair, the system must return a quantifier expressing which proportions of the queried object have the queried property. Our contributions are twofold. First, we show that the best performance on this task involves coupling state-of-the-art attention mechanisms with a network architecture mirroring the logical structure assigned to quantifiers by classic linguistic formalisation. Second, we introduce a new balanced dataset of image scenarios associated with quantification queries, which we hope will foster further research in this area.