Learning commonsense human-language descriptions from temporal and spatial sensor-network data

Embedded-sensor platforms are advancing toward such sophistication that they can differentiate between subtle actions. For example, when placed in a wristwatch, such platforms can tell whether a person is shaking hands or turning a doorknob. Sensors placed on objects in the environment now report many parameters, including object location, movement, sound, and temperature. A persistent problem, however, is the description of these sense data in meaningful human-language. This is an important problem that appears across domains ranging from organizational security surveillance to individual activity journaling. Previous models of activity recognition pigeon-hole descriptions into small, formal categories specified in advance; for example, location is often categorized as "at home" or "at the office." These models have not been able to adapt to the wider range of complex, dynamic, and idiosyncratic human activities. We hypothesize that the commonsense, semantically related, knowledge bases can be used to bootstrap learning algorithms for classifying and recognizing human activities from sensors.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Program In Media Arts and Sciences

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Morgan, Bo

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Walter Bender.

• Architecture. Program In Media Arts and Sciences

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37383

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37383