People have a tendency to apply human characteristics to animals, i.e anthropomorphisation. With this in mind, along with the ever increasing number of CGI animals in animated media today, this paper examines whether or not perceived eeriness of a 3D cat model increases when there is a mismatch between realism/stylisation in the style of the model and the animation presented. The familiarity a person has towards something increases as that something becomes more human-like, but at a certain point, familiarity dips into what is known as the Uncanny Valley. In this study we research whether or not this phenomenon is exacerbated when a mismatch between a realistic model and stylised animation is applied, or vice versa, using both quantitative and qualitative data. Our results indicate that there is in fact an increase in uncanniness when a mismatch is present, especially on the realistic model, though future work is required tomake a definitive link. / <p>Det finns övrigt digitalt material (t.ex. film-, bild- eller ljudfiler) eller modeller/artefakter tillhörande examensarbetet som ska skickas till arkivet.</p>

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De plus en plus d’applications ont pour objectif d’automatiser l’analyse des comportements humains afin d’aider les experts qui réalisent actuellement ces analyses. Cette thèse traite de l’analyse des expressions faciales qui fournissent des informations clefs sur ces comportements.Les travaux réalisés portent sur une solution innovante, basée sur l’organisation des expressions, permettant de définir efficacement une expression d’un visage.Nous montrons que l’organisation des expressions, telle que définie, est universelle : une expression est alors caractérisée par son intensité et sa position relative par rapport aux autres expressions. La solution est comparée aux méthodes classiques et montre une augmentation significative des résultats de reconnaissance sur 14 expressions non basiques. La méthode a été étendue à des sujets inconnus. L’idée principale est de créer un espace d’apparence plausible spécifique à la personne inconnue en synthétisant ses expressions basiques à partir de déformations apprises sur d’autres sujets et appliquées sur le neutre du sujet inconnu. La solution est aussi mise à l’épreuve dans un environnement multimodal dont l’objectif est la reconnaissance d’émotions lors de conversations spontanées. Notre méthode a été mise en œuvre dans le cadre du challenge international AVEC 2012 (Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge) où nous avons fini 2nd, avec des taux de reconnaissance très proches de ceux obtenus par les vainqueurs. La comparaison des deux méthodes (la nôtre et celles des vainqueurs) semble montrer que l’extraction des caractéristiques pertinentes est la clef de tels systèmes. / More and more applications aim at automating the analysis of human behavior to assist or replace the experts who are conducting these analyzes. This thesis deals with the analysis of facial expressions, which provide key information on these behaviors.Our work proposes an innovative solution to effectively define a facial expression, regardless of the morphology of the subject. The approach is based on the organization of expressions.We show that the organization of expressions, such as defined, is universal and can be effectively used to uniquely define an expression. One expression is given by its intensity and its relative position to the other expressions. The solution is compared with the conventional methods based on appearance data and shows a significant increase in recognition results of 14 non-basic expressions. The method has been extended to unknown subjects. The main idea is to create a plausible appearance space dedicated to the unknown person by synthesizing its basic expressions from deformations learned on other subjects and applied to the neutral face of the unknown subject. The solution is tested in a more comprehensive multimodal environment, whose aim is the recognition of emotions in spontaneous conversations. Our method has been implemented in the international challenge AVEC 2012 (Audio / Visual Emotion Challenge) where we finished 2nd, with recognition rates very close to the winners’ ones. Comparison of both methods (ours and the winners’ one) seems to show that the extraction of relevant features is the key to such systems.

The thesis is focused on the teaching of variable expressions at the eighth grade of elementary school and is divided into the theoretical, preparatory and experimental part. The theoretical part contains a short description of the objectives of the teaching of variable expressions. This section is complemented by the selected results of international comparative research and the classification of mistakes which pupils make in connection with the topic. An important part is the analysis of selected textbooks according them the teaching of variable expressions at the primary schools takes place. In the preparatory part there are presented the selected tasks of generalization which are recommended by the curriculum materials, but are not included in the textbooks. Component of the preparatory part is the presentation of algebra tiles environment. The core of the thesis is the experimental part aiming to compare the results of teaching of variable expressions in two differently taught groups. The first group was taught according to the textbook. In the second group the teaching was based on patterns of algebra tiles. The research of teaching results is focused on pupils' difficulties and the most frequent mistakes. The results indicated that the environment of algebra tiles helps to reduce number of...

En del svårigheter som elever upplever i algebra kan bero på saknad förståelse av strukturen i matematiska uttryck. Struktur, i det här sammanhanget, syftar på hur en matematisk enhet består av delar, och hur dessa delar är relaterade till varandra. Tidigare studier indikerar också att elevers svårigheter inom algebra beror på bristande aritmetiska kunskaper. Inom aritmetiken kan elever ofta använda informella metoder, medan algebraiska aktiviteter kräver en större medvetenhet om matematiska strukturer. Man har därför hävdat att elevers svårigheter att hantera algebraiska uttryck kan bero på saknad förståelse av strukturen i aritmetiska uttryck.  Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur elever i årskurs 5 beräknar och strukturerar utvecklade aritmetiska uttryck, det vill säga, numeriska uttryck med flera räkneoperationer, som exempelvis 5 · 6 + 4 · 2 · 3. I denna studie behandlas numeriska uttryck med tre eller fyra operationer.  I studien ingick 116 elever från tre olika skolor. Analysen baseras på data från lösningar av uppgifter på ett skriftligt arbetsblad. Arbetsbladet bestod av tio aritmetiska räkneuppgifter, som eleverna arbetade med individuellt. I analysen av data framkom olika metoder, som eleverna använde för att strukturera och beräkna de aritmetiska uttrycken, speciellt fyra metoder var återkommande i flera uppgifter. Genom de olika tillvägagångssätten som eleverna använde för att beräkna matematiska uttryck kunde olika sätt att skapa struktur upptäckas. Många elever utgick från uttryckens ytliga struktur och endast få elever visade förmåga att urskilja uttryckens dolda struktur. / Some of the difficulties students experience in algebra can be due to lack of understanding of the structure in mathematical expressions. Structure, in this context, refers to how a mathematical entity consists of its parts, and how these parts are related to each other. Previous studies also indicate that students’ difficulties in algebra devolve upon a lack of arithmetical knowledge. In arithmetic, students can manage by using informal methods, while algebraic activities require a greater awareness of mathematical structures. It has therefore been argued that students’ difficulties with algebraic expressions are caused by a lack of knowledge of the structure in arithmetic expressions.  The purpose of this study is to investigate how 5th grade students calculate and structure longer arithmetic expressions, meaning numerical expressions with several operations, for example, 5 · 6 + 4 · 2 · 3. This study covers numerical expressions with three or four operations.  The study includes 116 students from three different schools. The analysis is based on data from solutions of tasks on a written worksheet. The worksheet consisted of ten arithmetic calculation assignments that the students worked with individually. The analysis of the data revealed different approaches that students used to structure and calculate the arithmetic expressions, particularly four methods were used in several tasks. Through the different approaches that students used to calculate mathematical expressions, different ways to create structure could be discovered. Many students based their calculations on the surface structure of an expression and only a few students seemed to be able to identify the hidden structure of an expression.

The ability to capture the temporal dimension of a natural language text is essential to many natural language processing applications, such as Question Answering, Automatic Summarisation, and Information Retrieval. Temporal processing is a ¯eld of Computational Linguistics which aims to access this dimension and derive a precise temporal representation of a natural language text by extracting time expressions, events and temporal relations, and then representing them according to a chosen knowledge framework. This thesis focuses on the investigation and understanding of the di®erent ways time is expressed in natural language, on the implementation of a temporal processing system in accordance with the results of this investigation, on the evaluation of the system, and on the extensive analysis of the errors and challenges that appear during system development. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop the ability to automatically annotate temporal expressions, verbal events and temporal relations in a natural language text. Temporal expression annotation involves two stages: temporal expression identi¯cation concerned with determining the textual extent of a temporal expression, and temporal expression normalisation which ¯nds the value that the temporal expression designates and represents it using an annotation standard. The research presented in this thesis approaches these tasks with a knowledge-based methodology that tackles temporal expressions according to their semantic classi¯cation. Several knowledge sources and normalisation models are experimented with to allow an analysis of their impact on system performance. The annotation of events expressed using either ¯nite or non-¯nite verbs is addressed with a method that overcomes the drawback of existing methods v which associate an event with the class that is most frequently assigned to it in a corpus and are limited in coverage by the small number of events present in the corpus. This limitation is overcome in this research by annotating each WordNet verb with an event class that best characterises that verb. This thesis also describes an original methodology for the identi¯cation of temporal relations that hold among events and temporal expressions. The method relies on sentence-level syntactic trees and a propagation of temporal relations between syntactic constituents, by analysing syntactic and lexical properties of the constituents and of the relations between them. The detailed evaluation and error analysis of the methods proposed for solving di®erent temporal processing tasks form an important part of this research. Various corpora widely used by researchers studying di®erent temporal phenomena are employed in the evaluation, thus enabling comparison with state of the art in the ¯eld. The detailed error analysis targeting each temporal processing task helps identify not only problems of the implemented methods, but also reliability problems of the annotated resources, and encourages potential reexaminations of some temporal processing tasks.

This thesis describes a program of research that investigated the sensitivity of healthy young adults, healthy older adults and individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) to happiness, sadness and fear emotion specified in facial expressions. In particular, the research investigated the sensitivity of these individuals to the distinctions between spontaneous expressions of emotional experience (genuine expressions) and deliberate, simulated expressions of emotional experience (posed expressions). The specific focus was to examine whether aging and/or AD effects sensitivity to the target emotions. Emotion-categorization and priming tasks were completed by all participants. The tasks employed an original set of cologically valid facial displays generated specifically for the present research. The categorization task (Experiments 1a, 2a, 3a, 4a) required participants to judge whether targets were, or were not showing and feeling each target emotion. The results showed that all 3 groups identified a genuine expression as both showing and feeling the target emotion whilst a posed expression was identified more frequently as showing than feeling the emotion. Signal detection analysis demonstrated that all 3 groups were sensitive to the expression of emotion, reliably differentiating expressions of experienced emotion (genuine expression) from expressions unrelated to emotional experience (posed and neutral expressions). In addition, both healthy young and older adults could reliably differentiate between posed and genuine expressions of happiness and sadness, whereas, individuals with AD could not. Sensitivity to emotion specified in facial expressions was found to be emotion specific and to be independent of both the level of general cognitive functioning and of specific cognitive functions. The priming task (Experiments 1b, 2b, 3b,4b) employed the facial expressions as primes in a word valence task in order to investigate spontaneous attention to facial expression. Healthy young adults only showed an emotion-congruency priming effect for genuine expressions. Healthy older adults and individuals with AD showed no priming effects. Results are discussed in terms of the understanding of the recognition of emotional states in others and the impact of aging and AD on the recognition of emotional states. Consideration is given to how these findings might influence the care and management of individuals with AD.

Decision-making is a complex process. Monetary incentives constitute one of the forces driving it, however the motivational space of decision-makers is much broader. We care about other people, we experience emotional reactions, and sometimes we make mistakes. Such social motivations (Sanfey, 2007) drive our own decisions, as well as affect our beliefs about what motivates others' decisions. Behavioral and brain sciences have started addressing the role of social motivations in economic games (Camerer, 2004; Glimcher et al., 2009), however several aspects of social decisions, such as the process of thinking about others' emotional states - emotional sophistication - have been rarely investigated. The goal of this project is to use automatic measurements of dynamic facial expressions to investigate non-monetary motivations and emotional sophistication. The core of our approach is to use state-of-the-art computer vision techniques to extract facial actions from videos in real-time (based on the Facial Action Coding System of Ekman and Friesen (1978)), while participants are playing economic games. We will use powerful statistical machine learning techniques to make inferences about participants internal emotional states during these interactions. These inferences will be used (a) to predict behavior; (b) to explain why a decision is made in terms of the hidden forces driving it; and (c) to investigate the ways in which people construct their beliefs about other people's future actions. The contributions of this targeted interdisciplinary project are threefold. First, it develops new methodologies to study decision processes. Second, it uses these methods to test hypotheses about the role of first order beliefs about social motivations. Finally, our statistical approach sets the ground for "affectively aware" systems, that can use facial expressions to assess the internal states of their users, thus improving human-machine interactions.

This study examined gender and self-monitoring as separate and interacting variables predicting judgmental accuracy on the part of observers of facial expressions of emotional categories. The main and interaction effects failed to reach significant levels during the preliminary analysis. However, post hoc analyses demonstrated a significant encoder sex variable. Female encoders of emotion were judged more accurately by both sexes. Additionally, when the stimulus was limited to female enactments of emotional categories, the hypothesized main and interaction effects reached significant F levels. This study utilized 100 observers and 10 encoders of seven emotional categories. Methodological considerations and alternatives are examined at length.