Affective Feedback Synthesis Towards Multimodal Text and Image Data

In this paper, we have defined a novel task of affective feedback synthesis that deals with generating feedback for input text & corresponding image in a similar way as humans respond towards the multimodal data. A feedback synthesis system has been proposed and trained using ground-truth human comments along with image-text input. We have also constructed a large-scale dataset consisting of image, text, Twitter user comments, and the number of likes for the comments by crawling the news articles through Twitter feeds. The proposed system extracts textual features using a transformer-based textual encoder while the visual features have been extracted using a Faster region-based convolutional neural networks model. The textual and visual features have been concatenated to construct the multimodal features using which the decoder synthesizes the feedback. We have compared the results of the proposed system with the baseline models using quantitative and qualitative measures. The generated feedbacks have been analyzed using automatic and human evaluation. They have been found to be semantically similar to the ground-truth comments and relevant to the given text-image input.

Detection of Gait Abnormalities caused by Neurological Disorders

In this paper, we leverage gait to potentially detect some of the important neurological disorders, namely Parkinson's disease, Diplegia, Hemiplegia, and Huntington's Chorea. Persons with these neurological disorders often have a very abnormal gait, which motivates us to target gait for their potential detection. Some of the abnormalities involve the circumduction of legs, forward-bending, involuntary movements, etc. To detect such abnormalities in gait, we develop gait features from the key-points of the human pose, namely shoulders, elbows, hips, knees, ankles, etc. To evaluate the effectiveness of our gait features in detecting the abnormalities related to these diseases, we build a synthetic video dataset of persons mimicking the gait of persons with such disorders, considering the difficulty in finding a sufficient number of people with these disorders. We name it \textit{NeuroSynGait} video dataset. Experiments demonstrated that our gait features were indeed successful in detecting these abnormalities.