Abstract: Libraries are in deep transformation both in EU and around the world, and they are thriving within a great window of opportunity for innovation. In this paper, we show how the Library Living Lab in Barcelona participated of this changing scenario and contributed to create the Bibliolab program, where more than 200 public libraries give voice to their users in a global user-centric innovation initiative, using technology as enabling factor. The Library Living Lab is a real 4-helix implementation where Universities, Research Centers, Public Administration, Companies and the Neighbors are joint together to explore how technology transforms the cultural experience of people. This case is an example of scalability and provides reference tools for policy making, sustainability, user engage methodologies and governance. We provide specific examples of new prototypes and services that help to understand how to redefine the role of the Library as a real hub for social innovation.

Abstract: Many algorithms formulate graph matching as an optimization of an objective function of pairwise quantification of nodes and edges of two graphs to be matched. Pairwise measurements usually consider local attributes but disregard contextual information involved in graph structures. We address this issue by proposing contextual similarities between pairs of nodes. This is done by considering the tensor product graph (TPG) of two graphs to be matched, where each node is an ordered pair of nodes of the operand graphs. Contextual similarities between a pair of nodes are computed by accumulating weighted walks (normalized pairwise similarities) terminating at the corresponding paired node in TPG. Once the contextual similarities are obtained, we formulate subgraph matching as a node and edge selection problem in TPG. We use contextual similarities to construct an objective function and optimize it with a linear programming approach. Since random walk formulation through TPG takes into account higher order information, it is not a surprise that we obtain more reliable similarities and better discrimination among the nodes and edges. Experimental results shown on synthetic as well as real benchmarks illustrate that higher order contextual similarities increase discriminating power and allow one to find approximate solutions to the subgraph matching problem.

Abstract: Most approaches to human attribute and action recognition in still images are based on image representation in which multi-scale local features are pooled across scale into a single, scale-invariant encoding. Both in bag-of-words and the recently popular representations based on convolutional neural networks, local features are computed at multiple scales. However, these multi-scale convolutional features are pooled into a single scale-invariant representation. We argue that entirely scale-invariant image representations are sub-optimal and investigate approaches to scale coding within a bag of deep features framework. Our approach encodes multi-scale information explicitly during the image encoding stage. We propose two strategies to encode multi-scale information explicitly in the final image representation. We validate our two scale coding techniques on five datasets: Willow, PASCAL VOC 2010, PASCAL VOC 2012, Stanford-40 and Human Attributes (HAT-27). On all datasets, the proposed scale coding approaches outperform both the scale-invariant method and the standard deep features of the same network. Further, combining our scale coding approaches with standard deep features leads to consistent improvement over the state of the art.

Abstract: Nowadays, there are still many handwritten historical documents in archives waiting to be transcribed and indexed. Since manual transcription is tedious and time consuming, the automatic transcription seems the path to follow. However, the performance of current handwriting recognition techniques is not perfect, so a manual validation is mandatory. Crowdsourcing is a good strategy for manual validation, however it is a tedious task. In this paper we analyze experiences based in gamification
in order to propose and design a gamesourcing framework that increases the interest of users. Then, we describe and analyze our experience when validating the automatic transcription using the gamesourcing application. Moreover, thanks to the combination of clustering and handwriting recognition techniques, we can speed up the validation while maintaining the performance.

Abstract: One of the fundamental properties of a salient object region is its contrast
with the immediate context. The problem is that numerous object regions
exist which potentially can all be salient. One way to prevent an exhaustive
search over all object regions is by using object proposal algorithms. These
return a limited set of regions which are most likely to contain an object. Several saliency estimation methods have used object proposals. However, they focus on the saliency of the proposal only, and the importance of its immediate context has not been evaluated.
In this paper, we aim to improve salient object detection. Therefore, we extend object proposal methods with context proposals, which allow to incorporate the immediate context in the saliency computation. We propose several saliency features which are computed from the context proposals. In the experiments, we evaluate five object proposal methods for the task of saliency segmentation, and find that Multiscale Combinatorial Grouping outperforms the others. Furthermore, experiments show that the proposed context features improve performance, and that our method matches results on the FT datasets and obtains competitive results on three other datasets (PASCAL-S, MSRA-B and ECSSD).

Abstract: Our recent work suggests that, thanks to nowadays powerful CNNs, image-based 2D pose estimation is a promising cue for determining pedestrian intentions such as crossing the road in the path of the ego-vehicle, stopping before entering the road, and starting to walk or bending towards the road. This statement is based on the results obtained on non-naturalistic sequences (Daimler dataset), i.e. in sequences choreographed specifically for performing the study. Fortunately, a new publicly available dataset (JAAD) has appeared recently to allow developing methods for detecting pedestrian intentions in naturalistic driving conditions; more specifically, for addressing the relevant question is the pedestrian going to cross? Accordingly, in this paper we use JAAD to assess the usefulness of 2D pose estimation for answering such a question. We combine CNN-based pedestrian detection, tracking and pose estimation to predict the crossing action from monocular images. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides new state-ofthe-art results.

Abstract: Pain is a symptom of many disorders associated with actual or potential tissue damage in human body. Managing pain is not only a duty but also highly cost prone. The most primitive state of pain management is the assessment of pain. Traditionally it was accomplished by self-report or visual inspection by experts. However, automatic pain assessment systems from facial videos are also rapidly evolving due to the need of managing pain in a robust and cost effective way. Among different challenges of automatic pain assessment from facial video data two issues are increasingly prevalent: first, exploiting both spatial and temporal information of the face to assess pain level, and second, incorporating multiple visual modalities to capture complementary face information related to pain. Most works in the literature focus on merely exploiting spatial information on chromatic (RGB) video data on shallow learning scenarios. However, employing deep learning techniques for spatio-temporal analysis considering Depth (D) and Thermal (T) along with RGB has high potential in this area. In this paper, we present the first state-of-the-art publicly available database, 'Multimodal Intensity Pain (MIntPAIN)' database, for RGBDT pain level recognition in sequences. We provide a first baseline results including 5 pain levels recognition by analyzing independent visual modalities and their fusion with CNN and LSTM models. From the experimental evaluation we observe that fusion of modalities helps to enhance recognition performance of pain levels in comparison to isolated ones. In particular, the combination of RGB, D, and T in an early fusion fashion achieved the best recognition rate.