Yao Wang's Blog

Huge Interface Revision Coming Up Before Final Presentation.

2010-05-27T01:25:00.000+10:00

affectiveflickr. 1.3 Version

Basically it involve a huge implementation improvement.
That's the social collaborative filter.

Collaborative filtering

If user A input "happy" in the website, then some picture came up.

e.g. Picure1

User A select scores 9 for this picture then saved, he press next

Picture 2 came up

User A select scores 4 for this picture then saved.

User B came he input the exact same tag as User A which is then Picture 1 will show up first because Scores 9 > Scores 4.

So generally, picture with higher score will shows firstly then picture with lower scores will shows lately.

Conditions: Tag must be the same.

So database should able to store the every tag

Interface Changes:

Add a small bar under the picture windows shows that more than one result of the picture, for example. If input something then it will shows several result in once. Therefore user could see some other pictures as well.

Other Changes:

Numbers of small bug has been fixed.

more stable and reliable voting system.

new improved database methodology.

Faster porting time.

Draft Treatise

2010-05-21T13:32:00.000+10:00

The Draft Treatise will around 5000 words, and cover most of my work but without the result analysis and the final conclusion. I will list the table of content below which will give a brief go through of my draft treatise.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Abstract

1 Introduction

1.1 Why are emotions important

1.2 Can machines ‘feel’ emotion?

1.3 Developing Emotions

1.4 Basic Emotions

The Nature of Emotions

2 Background

2.1 SAM – Self Assessment Manikin

2.2 IAPS-International Affective Picture System

2.3 Flickr®

3 Development (Draft)

3.1 Emotion Input

3.2 Collect Affective Data

3.3 Emotion Output (Unfinished experiment)

Bibliography

Possible implementations to improvement the user interface

2010-04-30T19:54:00.000+10:00

After a short disscussion with Dr.Raefal I have few idea come up which can improve the user interface to make the website easier to use and understand.

There is a way to simplify the voting process is to combine the axis and the emotion icon panel, the horizontal axis which represent the Pleasureness, and Vertical axis is the Arousal.

Pleasureness

Arousal

so combining the above diagram we get the following

User only have to drag two bar to vote which can delete the axis panel, however the axis panel still will appear on the website just no longer to point it.

SAM analysis

2010-04-22T11:21:00.004+10:00

The IAPS consists of hundreds of pictures created as ‘‘a large set of standardized, emotionally-evocative,internationally-accessible,color photographs that includes images across a wide range of semantic categories’’ (Lang et al., 1997, p. 1). One goal of the developers of the IAPS was to provide a standard stimulus set that could be used across a wide variety of studies on affect and emotion.This goal has been very successfully met, with IAPS pictures being used in hundreds of studies in the behavioral, social, and
neurosciences.
One reason for the popularity of the IAPS is that each picture has a normative score for males, for females, and for both sexes combined on the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM). The SAM was introduced by Lang (1980) as a quick, nonverbal method of quantifying subjective feeling states on the three fundamental dimensions of evaluation identified using the semantic differential in work by Osgood and associates (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957) and by Mehrabian and Russell (1974). The SAM was created to reduce the language requirement of the scale so that children could provide ratings using the same instrument as adults and so that ratings from different cultures could be compared. The SAM has gone through several iterations in both computer-administered and paper-andpencil formats, but its basic characteristics have remained unchanged. A series of graphical figures are used to elicit a single rating for valence (ranging from extremely pleasant to extremely unpleasant),arousal (ranging from extremely aroused to extremely calm), and dominance (ranging from totally controlled to totally in control) dimensions.

These three aspects are not parallel to each other, actually they can form a three dimension phase.

Website Database Done

2010-04-08T19:30:00.000+10:00

After the debugging process, my database for the website finally finished.
Here I want to talk about the database and give a brief explaination to the database.

Above Image is a screen shot of my database, there are four seperate tab for this database: images, picNum, rating and scores.

Images Function : Record the URL address for a certain picture viewed by user.For instance so you will see a address like this : http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4059/4475929936_a88c5f442c.jpg. and a id number.

Score :
ID-Will distribute a integer value to the access order
p_id-Is the integer values for a certain picture,which link to the Images, so we could track which picture has been voted.
type-Is a boolean values which only have 1 and 2 , "1" mean the emotion icon votes, "2" mean the axis panel vote.
score for "2"- This value comes from the emotion axis, which is a integer value arrange by the file point,
point is a flash object in the website ( I will give a detail discussion on future blog post). there are about 7000 points on the axis panel, as the following images shows.

score for "1" - This value is a average value, there are seven image icon on the website so. from 1 to 7,

if user A press the first one, user B press the fifth one so the value for "1" is equal to (1+5)/2 = 3

Hopefully this post will give a better understanding to my database record process.

http://www.affectiveflickr.com/ is now online.

Further Application About SAM

2010-04-01T00:02:00.017+11:00

Understanding emotions is vital to understanding people. Every decision is a combination of rational and emotional factors. And emotion has been shown to be the driver of behavior and preference.

So Why are emotions important?

Well,emotions is a powerful influencers which effect behavior, relationships, evaluation & consideration, to name a few.

Adsam is a assessment model which specialised applied to advertisement, brand and any other form of design, adsam is a non-verbal measure, which eliminates verbal biases and makes its appropriate for cross-cultural use. The globally recognized system includes measurement, analysis, consultation, written reports and recommendations. As we know SAM ( Self-Assessment Manikin) can analysis three aspect of emotion. Pleasure, Arousal, and Dominance, so the user of Adsam can get the result from those aspect and decide which of their advertisment design is more "Emotional".

New Improved Interface

2010-03-29T21:53:00.004+11:00

The New Interface for the affectiveflickr has been done. It has the following Improvement.

1.More Friendly Interface which will give user more directly view the picture.
2.The picture now has the automatic fit to the layer. so the picture can be any resolution.
3.More flexible emotion evaluations. User now can point any coordinate in the axis panel,(before is fix point selection).
4. Drag function, User now can drug the emotion icon to the right hand panel.
5. History Function, user now can be review their or other's old submission on the picture.
6. Output file, we can get a new output file which anaylsis all the emotion submission data on a single picture.

Will Upload the Completed Version to the domain : www.affectiveflickr.com

Prototype is up NOW

2009-10-12T13:32:00.005+11:00

After a week on debugging the prototype of the webisite is up.

http://www.affectiveflickr.com/

there are still some bugs on the website and I still working on it. There will be some major interface changes in the next two weeks. current version is just for prototype purpose.
Will meet Dr.Rafael today hopefully can get some more advice from him.

Some reference for the website. (ref to the screenshot on the top)

1、Default.htm is just a static interface page, in addition all the background work is handled by inde2.aspx and save.aspx.
2、bigsecond.aspx is used to display the history of all images pages.
3、second.aspx is used to display a picture of specific pages。
4、jquery libray is called from js/jquery-1[1].2.1.pack.js this file. The slide1.js in the root directory is use to call this jquery libary.
5、The ajax postback in the default.htm is used jquery framework $.Ajax () method to completed.*

Finally A BETA Version is finished

2009-09-22T12:21:00.006+10:00

Here is some screen shot of my beta version. basically it take 5 weeks to finished, I hope it is not slow, will do some modification during the midterm break , but i don't there will be any huge layout change. Because it use a lots of layer in the code. that's AJAX :) , if any small change then i will need to change the entire layer.

Project Proposal

2009-08-24T22:21:00.002+10:00

Problem Statement:
Determine the application of affective computing by using static image from Flickr.

Method of Attack:
Overall it will divide into two parts, theory and practical.
Theory: Before tackle the website, it is essential to understand affective computing. Book “Affective Computing” by R.Picards is required reading. Also the workshop arrange by Dr.Rafael is very important.
Practical: It is proposed to create a website which implementing “think-feeling axis” and SAM (Self-Assessment-Manikin). The entire website is web2.0 ideas, so it makes communications easier. The code of the website will base on AJAX, JavaScript, SQL and PHP. Development tool will use Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition and other compatible platform.

Schedule:
This is shown in the attached table. A total of two semesters 20 week of time is estimated, which includes about 6 weeks of theory and 14 weeks of practicals. In the first 6 weeks basically is the readying and understanding the background concept. Then following 4 weeks will starting the website part generating the idea for the website. And the last 10 week will work fully on the website and the treatise.

"Affective Computing"

2009-08-16T13:12:00.003+10:00

First Meeting about the Thesis

Topic : Affective Flickr!

Date: 10/08/2009

Basically the meeting is not long but there are lots of things covered in this meeting. firstly Dr Rafael give a more detail description about "what is affective". As he told me there is a system called IAPS stand for (International Affective Picture System ) which is a system that "provides normative ratings of emotion for a set of color photographs that provide a set of normative emotional stimuli for experimental investigations of emotion and attention" .

These days I've been reading the "Affective Computing" by W.Picard. Dr. Rafael said this book is very helpful for me understanding the background of the topic.

Althought this book is a bit old, the theory still very useful in nowaday computing. So I will keep updating the blog about the contect in this book before the thesis purposal date.

All About Flickr!

2009-07-30T23:35:00.004+10:00

OK, Start with Flickr. As we know Flickr is an image and online community platform where allow people to share their personal photographs. Behind the Flickr, it relies on several important technology or control system, e.g. PHP, Smarty, PEAR, Perl, ImageMagicK, MySQL4.0, JAVA, Apache Web Server2 and Macromedia flash. ImageMagick was disposed when Yahoo! acquired Ludicorp and Flickr.

Flickr do provide offical add-ons however I found some very interesting third party Flickr! add-ons:

Bubblr - transform the photo on the Flickr to comics style
Sprinklr -allow user to arrange their photos to different catalogs
Matchr - Flickr puzzle
h4ppierphotos -Flickr photos set organizer with date filter
ZoneTag - can tag your photos with the location in which they were taken
Tiltomo - image search engine
John’s Background Switcher - change computer background periodically source from Flickr!

FlickrLilli - another searching tool for Flickr
RSS2PDF for Flickr - create a PDF file from Flickr RSS
Flickr & Webimager - an screen shot upload tool based on Flickr API.
FlickrFling - An innovative prototype for exploring Flickr photos.
Flickr Logo Maker - can make Flickr style logo from user input
Loopy - Flickr-based endless screensaver
Flapper - an Flickr interface (base on flash 8)
Findr -Find photos on Flickr by browsing and refining related tags.
Clockr - check the photo on the Flickr at present time.
Retrievr - Retrieve the photo on Flickr according to the drawing that you submitted.

Most of those are integrating with Flickr photo database and give out in a Website Forms and method includes three steps: User Input-> Process -> Computer Output. I am thinking using the similar way for doing Affective Flickr as well. Website form is an good choice because is easier to manage and more flexiable.Will draw some basic structure break down on weekend.

Introduction

2009-07-27T18:54:00.003+10:00

Hello EveryOne!

This blog will be used to track progress on my 4th year Computer Engineering Thesis (ELEC4710/4711) @ USYD. so I decided to update this every Friday. Also will update this if I got some information useful.

Supervisor Dr. Rafael Calvo gave me a brief introduction about the topic. Which is "Affective Flickr!" basically from what I understand it can be an addon to a flickr which allow the user to descript their first impression about the picture they viewed. An emotion (eg. MSN EMOTION )will placed beside(or anywhere) the picture by the user.So people can share their feeling easily.

I found this topic is very insteresting , for this week I will start do some research works and brainstorming (include more detail about the topic,development tools)
hopefully can get the proposal starting next week.