Automating Behavioral Coding in Psychotherapy

bring the machines in the game

Psychotherapy quality assessment is typically addressed by human raters who evaluate recorded sessions along specific behavioral codes, as defined by standard coding manuals. The recordings capture the complex series of interactions between the therapist and the client, and as such, they encode the active ingredients of the therapy. However, the... [Read More]

Automatic Sleep Staging Using HMMs

did you sleep well last night?

Human sleep can be divided into time periods with similar characteristics called sleep stages. Patterns found in biomedical signals, such as those generated by the cerebral cortex, the muscles of the face, and the movement of the eyes, are used to label small time windows in a procedure known as... [Read More]

Acoustic Features for Robust Speech Recognition

no, they are not MFCCs

Sophisticated techhniques for acoustic and language modeling have resulted in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems which can even beat human performance under clean conditions, with the speech signal typically represented by the Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCCs). However, when the speech signal is distorted by background noise or reverberation there is... [Read More]

Identifying Saliency for Movie Summarization

let's create some trailers!

Humans have a unique capability of quickly identifying points of interests in a visual scene. Being able to efficiently extract, through a computational process, such salient segments in a video would lead to high-quality automated movie summaries. Motivated by neurobiological and psychophysical evidence about the way the human brain performs... [Read More]