A new method for extracting common themes from written text is introduced and applied to 1,165 open-ended self-descriptive narratives. Drawing on a lexical approach to personality, the most commonly-used adjectives within narratives written by college students were identified using computerized text analytic tools. A factor analysis on the use of these adjectives in the self-descriptions produc...

In a 2-wave longitudinal study, 9th-grade students (N = 468) completed self-report measures of stressful life events, depressive symptoms, and 5 domains of self-perceived competence (i.e., academic competence, social acceptance, physical appearance, behavioral conduct, and athletic competence). Teachers and peers also reported about the participants' depressive symptoms. In longitudinal analyse...

We describe a generative model of ‘talking head’ facial behaviour, intended for use in both video synthesis and model-based interpretation. The model is learnt, without supervision, from talking head video, parameterised by tracking with an Active Appearance Model (AAM). We present a integrated probabilistic framework for capturing both the short-term visual dynamics and longer-term behavioural...

One of the major drawbacks of the Active Appearance Model (AAM) is that it requires a training set of pseudo-dense correspondences. Most methods for automatic correspondence finding involve a groupwise model building process which optimises over all images in the training sequence simultaneously. In this work, we pose the problem of correspondence finding as an adaptive template tracking proces...

Appearance variations result in many difficulties in face image analysis. To deal with this challenge, we present a Unified Tensor-based Active Appearance Model (UT-AAM) for jointly modelling the geometry and texture information of 2D faces. For each type of face information, namely shape and texture, we construct a unified tensor model capturing all relevant appearance variations. This contras...

[I]t is no exaggeration to say that the modification of outward appearance by visual characteristics, directed towards a seeing public, and serving either to facilitate recognition or to frustrate it, has been one of the main results attained in the evolution of higher animals; and such characteristics comprise some of the most outstanding examples of adaptation in the whole field of biology. (...

X-ray videography is one of the most important techniques for the locomotion analysis of animals in biology, motion science and robotics. Unfortunately, the evaluation of vast amounts of acquired data is a tedious and time-consuming task. Until today, the anatomical landmarks of interest have to be located manually in hundreds of images for each image sequence. Therefore, an automatization of t...

Rational investor hypothesis, efficient markets hypothesis(EMH), and random walk of yield rate are three basic concepts of modern capital market theory. However, it could not be proved that real capital markets are full with rational investors. The theory, which regards the price movement of capital market as random walks, and regards the yield time series as a normal distribution, is not suppo...