DOCSLIB.ORG

PERVASIVE BEHAVIOR INTERVENTIONS Using Mobile Devices for Overcoming Barriers for Physical Activity

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
PERVASIVE BEHAVIOR INTERVENTIONS Using Mobile Devices for Overcoming Barriers for Physical Activity PERVASIVE BEHAVIOR INTERVENTIONS Using Mobile Devices for Overcoming Barriers for Physical Activity Vom Fachbereich Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik der Technischen Universität Darmstadt zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Doktor-Ingenieurs (Dr.-Ing.) genehmigte Dissertation von DIPL.-INF. UNIV. TIM ALEXANDER DUTZ Geboren am 20. Juli 1978 in Darmstadt Vorsitz: Prof. Dr. techn. Heinz Koeppl Referent: Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Ralf Steinmetz Korreferent: Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Rainer Malaka Tag der Einreichung: 14. September 2016 Tag der Disputation: 28. November 2016 Hochschulkennziffer D17 Darmstadt 2017 Dieses Dokument wird bereitgestellt von tuprints, E-Publishing-Service der Technischen Universität Darmstadt. http://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de [email protected] Bitte zitieren Sie dieses Dokument als: URN: urn:nbn:de:tuda-tuprints-61270 URL: http://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/id/eprint/6127 Die Veröffentlichung steht unter folgender Creative Commons Lizenz: International 4.0 – Namensnennung, nicht kommerziell, keine Bearbeitung https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Für meine Eltern Abstract Extensive cohort studies show that physical inactivity is likely to have negative consequences for one’s health. The World Health Organization thus recommends a minimum of thirty minutes of medium- intensity physical activity per day, an amount that can easily be reached by doing some brisk walking or leisure cycling. Recently, a Taiwanese-American team of scientists was able to prove that even less effort is required for positive health effects and that as little as fifteen minutes of physical activity per day will increase one’s life expectancy by up to three years on the average. However, simply spreading this knowledge is not sufficient. Roughly one in three Europeans and US-Americans does not even meet the minimum recommendations for physical activity, although the majority of these people is aware of the damage that their behavior may do to their health. And this ‘willful wrongdoing’ does not only concern individuals: Due to the large number of inactive people, the problem of sedentary behavior affects societies as a whole, not the least by increasing public health costs. But if it is not a lack of knowledge that causes this problem, what is? And what can be done to stimulate leisure-time physical activity? The Fogg Behavior Model (FBM), developed by psychologist and Stanford-lecturer B.J. Fogg, explains the factors that determine whether or not a given person will show a desired behavior. The core components of the FBM include a trigger that can be perceived by the target person and that she associates with the desired behavior, as well as her ability and motivation for this behavior at the time when the trigger reaches her. If the combined amount of ability and motivation exceeds a lower limit, the so-called activation threshold, then the triggered person will behave in the desired way; otherwise, she will not. Based on the understanding of human behavior that the FBM conveys, this thesis focuses on the question of how mobile devices can assist people in reaching the minimum amount of daily physical activity that is required for health benefits. An in-depth analysis of the problem reveals that of the three possible strategies – trying to increase a user’s ability for leisure-time physical activity, trying to increase her motivation for the same, and trying to increase her short-term awareness for its necessity and feasibility through triggers – the creation of adaptive triggers is the most promising approach. This task in turn consists of several sub- problems, such as the problem of how to recognize the user’s current contextual situation, the problem of how to decide, whether or not the recognized situation is suited for an activation attempt, and the problem of interacting with the user in those cases in which an activation attempt seems worthwhile. Learning from the user’s behavior and understanding her preferences and constraints is the key factor in the creation of accurate and reliable intervention mechanisms. To this end, smartphone sensors, wearables, and Web services are utilized for collecting information about the state of the user and her environment. This data is then analyzed by a supervised learning machine which, based on prior experience, estimates the probability for a successful activation attempt in the current situation. Ideally, the learner will identify a kairotic moment: A situation, in which a trigger is bound to initiate the desired behavior. If it does, it reaches out to the user. Multiple types of such triggering mechanisms were embedded into the mobile exergame ‘Twostone’, an application that requires brisk walking or easy running from its users. During a field study with thirty participants, the performances of these different approaches were compared against one another. The study revealed a surprising result: Not the most-knowledgeable intervention mechanism emerged as a winner, but it was rather the triggering variant that relied on a reduced number of contextual information to achieve both the highest triggering success rates and the best user acceptance. The study also showed that intervention mechanisms can indeed increase the prevalence of a desired behavior, but only if the user has a positive attitude towards the respective activity. As such, both the conceptual model for technology-based interventive measures and the evaluation results that are presented in this thesis offer valuable insights for developers of devices and applications that aim to foster desired behaviors in general and increased levels of daily physical activity in particular. Kurzfassung Die gesundheitlichen Folgen körperlicher Inaktivität sind durch umfangreiche epidemiologische Kohortenstudien hinreichend belegt. Entsprechend empfiehlt die Weltgesundheitsorganisation jedem Erwachsenen ein Mindestmaß von täglich dreißig Minuten körperlicher Aktivität mittlerer Intensität, also beispielsweise zügiges Gehen oder gemütliches Radfahren. Einem taiwanesisch-amerikanischen Forscherteam gelang der Nachweis, dass bereits die Hälfte dieser Menge, also nur fünfzehn Minuten, genügen, um die eigene Lebenserwartung um bis zu drei Jahre zu erhöhen. Allerdings führt das Wissen über den Zusammenhang zwischen Bewegung und Gesundheit nicht zwingend zu einer Erhöhung des Aktivitätslevels. Etwa ein Drittel der europäischen und US-amerikanischen Bevölkerung leistet nicht einmal das erforderliche Mindestmaß, obwohl das Wissen um die möglichen Folgen dieses Verhaltens meist vorhanden ist. In der Häufung hat dieses bewusste Fehlverhalten Einzelner auch Auswirkungen auf die Gesamtgesellschaft, insbesondere durch einen Anstieg staatlicher Gesundheitsausgaben. Wenn Bewegungsmangel aber nicht auf mangelnde Informiertheit zurückzuführen ist, worauf dann? Und welche alternativen Maßnahmen können helfen? Das Foggsche Verhaltensmodell (FBM) des an der Stanford-Universität lehrenden Psychologen B.J. Fogg beschreibt die Faktoren, die darüber entscheiden, ob eine Person ein gewünschtes Zielverhalten zeigt. Die wesentlichen Komponenten des FBM sind ein wahrnehmbarer und gedanklich mit dem Zielverhalten verbundener Auslöser, der Trigger, sowie Befähigung und Motivation für das gewünschte Verhalten zum Zeitpunkt des Auftretens eines solchen Triggers. Sind Befähigung und Motivation in ausreichendem Maße vorhanden und überschreiten in Kombination die sogenannte Aktivierungsgrenze, so zeigt die ‚getriggerte‘ Person das Zielverhalten – andernfalls nicht. Basierend auf diesem Verständnis menschlichen Verhaltens befasst sich die vorliegende Arbeit mit der Frage, wie mobile Endgeräte dazu genutzt werden können, um Personen zuverlässig zum erforderlichen Mindestmaß an körperlicher Aktivität anzuregen. Die Analyse der Problemstellung macht deutlich, dass von den drei möglichen Ansätzen – Steigerung der Befähigung für körperliche Aktivität, Steigerung der Motivation und Steigerung des Bewusstseins für Notwendigkeit und Machbarkeit durch den Einsatz von Triggern – die Entwicklung adaptiver Triggering-Mechanismen am vielversprechendsten ist. Diese Herausforderung lässt sich ihrerseits in mehrere Teilprobleme unterteilen, etwa das Problem des Erfassens der gegenwärtigen Situation, das Problem der Entscheidung, ob ein Interventionsversuch unternommen werden sollte, sowie das Problem der eigentlichen Nutzerinteraktion. Aus dem Nutzerverhalten zu lernen, um Vorlieben und Möglichkeiten des Nutzers richtig einzuschätzen, ist dabei die Schlüsselfähigkeit erfolgreicher Maßnahmen. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird von Smartphonesensorik, Wearables und Web Services Gebrauch gemacht, um Informationen über den Nutzer und die aktuelle Situation zu erhalten. Ein überwachter Lerner analysiert diese Daten und entschiedet auf Basis zurückliegender Erfahrungen, ob ein Aktivierungsversuch erfolgen sollte. Im Idealfall stellt der Lerner dabei fest, dass ein kairotischer Moment vorliegt: eine Situation, in der ein Trigger zuverlässig das gewünschte Verhalten auslöst. Mehrere unterschiedliche Triggering-Mechanismen wurden in das mobile Fitnessspiel ‚Twostone‘ eingebettet, eine Anwendung, die vom Nutzer zügiges Gehen oder lockeres Laufen erfordert. In einer umfangreichen Feldstudie mit dreißig Teilnehmern wurden alle Varianten miteinander verglichen und ein unerwartetes Ergebnis erzielt: nicht derjenige Mechanismus mit der umfangreichsten Wissensbasis erreichte die höchsten Erfolgsraten und die beste Nutzerakzeptanz, sondern eine Variante mit einer reduzierten
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Competition-Based User Expertise Score Estimation
    Competition-based User Expertise Score Estimation Jing Liu†*, Young-In Song‡, Chin-Yew Lin‡ † ‡ Harbin Institute of Technology Microsoft Research Asia No. 92, West Da-Zhi St, Nangang Dist. Building 2, No. 5 Dan Ling St, Haidian Dist. Harbin, China 150001 Beijing, China 100190 [email protected] {yosong, cyl}@microsoft.com ABSTRACT covered by existing web pages. With the explosive growth of web 2.0 sites, community question and answering services (denoted as In this paper, we consider the problem of estimating the relative 1 2 expertise score of users in community question and answering CQA) such as Yahoo! Answers and Baidu Zhidao , have become services (CQA). Previous approaches typically only utilize the important services where people can use natural language rather explicit question answering relationship between askers and an- than keywords to ask questions and seek advice or opinions from swerers and apply link analysis to address this problem. The im- real people who have relevant knowledge or experiences. CQA plicit pairwise comparison between two users that is implied in services provide another way to satisfy a user’s information needs the best answer selection is ignored. Given a question and answer- that cannot be met by traditional search engines. Users are the ing thread, it’s likely that the expertise score of the best answerer unique source of knowledge in CQA sites and all users from ex- is higher than the asker’s and all other non-best answerers’. The perts to novices can generate content arbitrarily. Therefore, it is goal of this paper is to explore such pairwise comparisons inferred desirable to have a system that can automatically estimate the user from best answer selections to estimate the relative expertise expertise score and identify experts who can provide good quality scores of users.
    [Show full text]
  • Empirical Software Engineering at Microsoft Research
    Software Analytics for Digital Games Thomas Zimmermann, Microsoft Research, USA Joint work with Nachi Nagappan and many others. © Microsoft Corporation analytics is the use of analysis, data, and systematic reasoning to make decisions. Definition by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris Analytics at Work – Smarter Decisions, Better Results © Microsoft Corporation history of software analytics Tim Menzies, Thomas Zimmermann: Software Analytics: So What? IEEE Software 30(4): 31-37 (2013) © Microsoft Corporation © Microsoft Corporation trinity of software analytics Dongmei Zhang, Shi Han, Yingnong Dang, Jian-Guang Lou, Haidong Zhang, Tao Xie: Software Analytics in Practice. IEEE Software 30(5): 30-37, September/October 2013. MSR Asia Software Analytics group: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/groups/sa/ © Microsoft Corporation software analytics is © Microsoft Corporation software analytics is diversity © Microsoft Corporation The Stakeholders The Tools The Questions © Microsoft Corporation http://aka.ms/145Questions Andrew Begel, Thomas Zimmermann. Analyze This! 145 Questions for Data Scientists in Software Engineering. ICSE 2014 © Microsoft Corporation Essential + Microsoft’s Top 10 Questions Essential Worthwhile How do users typically use my application? 80.0% 99.2% What parts of a software product are most used and/or loved by 72.0% 98.5% customers? How effective are the quality gates we run at checkin? 62.4% 96.6% How can we improve collaboration and sharing between teams? 54.5% 96.4% What are the best key performance indicators (KPIs) for 53.2% 93.6% monitoring services? What is the impact of a code change or requirements change to 52.1% 94.0% the project and its tests? What is the impact of tools on productivity? 50.5% 97.2% How do I avoid reinventing the wheel by sharing and/or searching 50.0% 90.9% for code? What are the common patterns of execution in my application? 48.7% 96.6% How well does test coverage correspond to actual code usage by 48.7% 92.0% our customers? © Microsoft Corporation Obsessing over our customers is everybody's job.
    [Show full text]
  • The Evaluation of Rating Systems in Online Free-For-All Games
    The Evaluation of Rating Systems in Online Free-for-All Games Arman Dehpanah Muheeb Faizan Ghori Jonathan Gemmell Bamshad Mobasher School of Computing School of Computing School of Computing School of Computing DePaul University DePaul University DePaul University DePaul University Chicago, USA Chicago, USA Chicago, USA Chicago, USA [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract—Online competitive games have become increasingly might also be hampered by the inclusion of new players since popular. To ensure an exciting and competitive environment, these the system does not possess any knowledge of these players. games routinely attempt to match players with similar skill levels. In this paper, we consider six evaluation metrics. We include Matching players is often accomplished through a rating system. There has been an increasing amount of research on developing traditional metrics such as accuracy, mean absolute error, such rating systems. However, less attention has been given to the and Kendall’s rank correlation coefficient. We further include evaluation metrics of these systems. In this paper, we present an metrics adapted from the domain of information retrieval, exhaustive analysis of six metrics for evaluating rating systems in including mean reciprocal rank (MRR), average precision online competitive games. We compare traditional metrics such as (AP), and normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG). accuracy. We then introduce other metrics adapted from the field of information retrieval. We evaluate these metrics against several We analyze the ability of these metrics to capture meaningful well-known rating systems on a large real-world dataset of over insights when they are used to evaluate the performance of 100,000 free-for-all matches.
    [Show full text]
  • Application and Further Development of Trueskill™ Ranking in Sports
    TVE-F 19019 Examensarbete 15 hp Juni 2019 Application and Further Development of TrueSkill™ Ranking in Sports Julia Ibstedt Elsa Rådahl Erik Turesson Magdalena vande Voorde Abstract Application and Further Development of TrueSkill™ Ranking in Sports Julia Ibstedt, Elsa Rådahl, Erik Turesson, Magdalena vande Voorde Teknisk- naturvetenskaplig fakultet UTH-enheten The aim of this study was to explore the ranking model TrueSkill™ developed by Microsoft, applying it on various sports and Besöksadress: constructing extensions to the model. Two different inference Ångströmlaboratoriet Lägerhyddsvägen 1 methods for TrueSkill was constructed using Gibbs sampling and Hus 4, Plan 0 message passing. Additionally, the sequential method using Gibbs sampling was successfully extended into a batch method, in order Postadress: to eliminate game order dependency and creating a fairer, although Box 536 751 21 Uppsala computationally heavier, ranking system. All methods were further implemented with extensions for taking home team advantage, score Telefon: difference and finally a combination of the two into 018 – 471 30 03 consideration. The methods were applied on football (Premier Telefax: League), ice hockey (NHL), and tennis (ATP Tour) and evaluated on 018 – 471 30 00 the accuracy of their predictions before each game. Hemsida: On football, the extensions improved the prediction accuracy from http://www.teknat.uu.se/student 55.79% to 58.95% for the sequential methods, while the vanilla Gibbs batch method reached the accuracy of 57.37%. Altogether, the extensions improved the performance of the vanilla methods when applied on all data sets. The home team advantage performed better than the score difference on both football and ice hockey, while the combination of the two reached the highest accuracy.
    [Show full text]
  • Thesis Template
    Tailoring a Psychophysiologically Driven Rating System MASTER DISSERTATION Harryharasuthan Vasantharajah MASTER IN COMPUTER ENGINEERING SUPERVISOR Sergi Bermúdez I Badia TAILORING A PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICALLY DRIVEN RATING SYSTEM Harryharasuthan Vasantharajah B.Sc. (Hons) Supervised by Sergi Bermúdez I Badia, Ph.D. Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Computer Engineering. Faculty of Exact Sciences and Engineering University of Madeira 2019 Abstract Humans have always been interested in ways to measure and compare their performances to establish who is best at a particular activity. The first Olympic Games, for instance, were carried out in 776 BC, and it was a defining moment in history where ranking based competitive activities managed to reach the general populous. Every competition must face the issue of how to evaluate and rank competitors, and often rules are required to account for many different aspects such as variations in conditions, the ability to cheat, and, of course, the value of entertainment. Nowadays, measurements are performed out through various rating systems, which considers the outcomes of the activity to rate the participants. However, they do not seem to address the psychological aspects of an individual in a competition. This dissertation employs several psychophysiological assessment instruments intending to facilitate the acquisition of skill level rating in competitive gaming. To do so, an exergame that uses non-conventional inputs, such as body tracking to prevent input biases, was developed. The sample size of this study is ten, and the participants were put on a round-robin tournament to provide equal intervals between games for each player. After analyzing the outcome of the competition, it revealed some critical insights on the psychophysiological instruments; Especially the significance of Flow in terms of the prolificacy of a player.
    [Show full text]
  • Ranking (Trueskill) Map #1 #1 Player Map #2 Player #2 Player Vs Player #3 Map Map #3 Map #4 Map #5 #4 Player Ranking Systems ~ 30 Mins Talk
    Math for Game Programmers: Ranking Systems; Elo, TrueSkill and Your Own Mario Izquierdo Sr. Software Engineer at Ranking (TrueSkill) map #1 #1 player map #2 player #2 player vs player #3 map map #3 map #4 map #5 #4 player Ranking Systems ~ 30 mins talk • Elo • TrueSkill • Practical Considerations Elo Rating System Árpád Élő (1903 - 1992) • Physics profesor and master chess player. • Elo's system constituted an improvement on the previous Harkness System. • Elo's system was adopted by the FIDE (World Chess Federation) in 1970. • Published "The Rating of Chessplayers, Past and Present” in 1978. • Fun fact: Up until the mid-80’s, Elo himself made the rating calculations! Elo Rating System: Normal Distribution Assumption: Chess performance is a normally distributed random variable. Using some simplifications (i.e. constant standard deviation) makes easy to calculate the Expected score of a match (probability of win) for two given player skill levels. Elo Rating System: Normal Distribution “Slime Curve” In the eyes of ELO, you are all “slime people” Elo Rating System: Normal Distribution “Slime Curve” Elo Rating System: Formula After a given match, rating points are transferred between players: RatingDiff = (Score - Expected) * K-factor Where: Score is 0 = loss, 0.5 = draw, 1 = win Expected is 0 to 1, the probability of winning K-factor is a constant for maximum change (update “speed”) Elo Rating System: Formula After a given match, rating points are transferred between players: RatingDiff = (Score - Expected) * K-factor Much of the trick is in figuring out what the Expected result of a game is. The original ELO system uses the following formula (from the Normal dist.): Expected[A] = 1/(1+10^(Rating[B-A]/400)) Elo Rating System: Formula After a given match, rating points are transferred between players: RatingDiff = (Score - Expected) * K-factor Much of the trick is in figuring out what the Expected result of a game is.
    [Show full text]
  • Trueskill 2: an Improved Bayesian Skill Rating System
    TrueSkill 2: An improved Bayesian skill rating system Tom Minka Ryan Cleven Yordan Zaykov Microsoft Research The Coalition Microsoft Research March 22, 2018 Abstract Online multiplayer games, such as Gears of War and Halo, use skill-based matchmaking to give players fair and enjoyable matches. They depend on a skill rating system to infer accurate player skills from historical data. TrueSkill is a popular and effective skill rating system, working from only the winner and loser of each game. This paper presents an extension to TrueSkill that incorporates additional information that is readily available in online shooters, such as player experience, membership in a squad, the number of kills a player scored, tendency to quit, and skill in other game modes. This extension, which we call TrueSkill2, is shown to significantly improve the accuracy of skill ratings computed from Halo 5 matches. TrueSkill2 predicts historical match outcomes with 68% accuracy, compared to 52% accuracy for TrueSkill. 1 Introduction When a player wants to play an online multiplayer game, such as Halo or Gears of War, they join a queue of waiting players, and a matchmaking service decides who they will play with. The matchmaking service makes its decision based on several criteria, including geographic location and skill rating. Our goal is to improve the fairness of matches by improving the accuracy of the skill ratings flowing into the matchmaking service. The skill rating of a player is an estimate of their ability to win the next match, based on the results of their previous matches. A typical match result lists the players involved, their team assignments, the length of the match, how long each player played, and the final score of each team.
    [Show full text]
  • Influence of Gameplay on Skill in Halo Reach
    Influence of Gameplay on Skill in Halo Reach Jeff Huang Abstract University of Washington We study the question of how skill develops in video [email protected] game through a rating called TrueSkill. In a previous paper [1] we used the skill ratings from 7 months of Thomas Zimmermann games from over 3 million players to look at how play Microsoft Corporation intensity, breaks in play, other titles played, and skill [email protected] change over time affect skill. In this paper, we briefly summarize our findings and discuss how we plan to Nachiappan Nagappan continue our research. Microsoft Corporation [email protected] Keywords Games, Analytics, Game Usage, Player Progression Bruce Phillips Microsoft Corporation ACM Classification Keywords [email protected] K.8.0 [Personal Computing]: Games. Chuck Harrison General Terms Microsoft Corporation Human Factors, Measurement. [email protected] Introduction In this paper we present a brief overview of player game characteristics in Halo Reach. We discuss play intensity and play patterns with respect to skill development. We present a general method of our analysis that can be applied to other games. We Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). conclude with some of our future plans for mining CHI’13, April 27 – May 2, 2013, Paris, France. game-player data. ACM 978-1-XXXX-XXXX-X/XX/XX. Analysis of Skill Data Skill in Halo Reach Other Titles Played. Players who did not play Halo 3 For our study, we selected a cohort of 3.2 million Halo previously were less skilled but gained skill at about the Step 1: Select a population of Reach players who started playing the game in its first same rate as everyone else in Halo Reach.
    [Show full text]
  • Measuring Cooperative Behavior in Contemporary Multiplayer Games
    MEASURING COOPERATIVE BEHAVIOR IN CONTEMPORARY MULTIPLAYER GAMES Martin Ashton Master of Science School of Computer Science McGill University Montreal, Quebec 2012-08-12 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science Copyright c 2012 Martin Ashton DEDICATION This work is dedicated to my friends Pete, Dave, Kevin, Vanessa, Steve, Mike, Nadina, John, Chris, Max, Dan, Francine, Peter, Daniel, Michael, Dahlia, Sabrina, Michaela, Katrina, Diana, Stevie, Kathy, Bronson, Jess, Theo, Cynthia, Ben, Shayne, Paul, Andre, Fred, Justin, J.P., Aly, Carl, Udhay, Phil, Matt, Simon, Julien, and the rest of the Koalas. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work was supported, in part, by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC), and Le Fonds de Recherche du Qu´ebec - Nature et Technologies (FQRNT). My particular thanks are extended to Prof. Clark Verbrugge for giving me the opportunity to research the exciting domain of modern video games, and to my parents for teaching me the importance of continuously exceeding my own limits. Lastly, I would like to thank the developers at Bungie, Blizzard, and Valve for making such excellent games. iii ABSTRACT Social aspects of multiplayer games are well known as contributors to game success, with online friendships and socialization expected to expand and strengthen a player-base. Understanding the nature of social behavior and determining the impact of cooperation on gameplay is thus important to game design. In this work, we make use of data exposed through in-game and web-based API’s of two contemporary multiplayer games, World of Warcraft and Halo: Reach.
    [Show full text]
  • Model-Based Machine Learning
    Model-Based Machine Learning Christopher M. Bishop Microsoft Research, Cambridge, CB3 0FB, U.K. [email protected] Several decades of research in the field of machine learning have resulted in a multitude of different algorithms for solving a broad range of problems. To tackle a new application a researcher typically tries to map their problem onto one of these existing methods, often influenced by their familiarity with specific algorithms and by the availability of corresponding software implementations. In this paper we describe an alternative methodology for applying machine learning, in which a bespoke solution is formulated for each new application. The solution is expressed through a compact modelling language, and the corresponding custom machine learning code is then generated automatically. This model-based approach offers several major advantages, including the opportunity to create highly tailored models for specific scenarios, as well as rapid prototyping and comparison of a range of alternative models. Furthermore, newcomers to the field of machine learning don’t have to learn about the huge range of traditional methods, but instead can focus their attention on understanding a single modelling environment. In this paper we show how probabilistic graphical models, coupled with efficient inference algorithms, provide a very flexible foundation for model-based machine learning, and we outline a large-scale commercial application of this framework involving tens of millions of users. We also describe the concept of probabilistic programming as a powerful software environment for model-based machine learning, and we discuss a specific probabilistic programming language called Infer.NET, which has been widely used in practical applications.
    [Show full text]
  • Microsoft Research Cambridge
    Welcome to Microsoft Research Cambridge 21st November Alex Butler Cambridge Wireless UX SIG Sensors & Devices Group “No Free Lunch: The Consumer as Product in a Data-Driven Economy” Microsoft Research Presence Mission • Advance the state of the art in Computer Science • Transfer technology to Microsoft business • Lead Microsoft into the future Microsoft Research Cambridge The Numbers STAFF HONOURS OUTPUTS 121 RESEARCHERS 1 KNIGHTHOOD HUNDREDS OF TIER PUBLICATIONS PER YEAR 100 INTERNS PER YEAR 1 TURING AWARD WINNER 45+ PATENTS FILED PER YEAR 17 R&D STAFF FROM OTHER 1 KYOTO PRIZE WINNER MICROSOFT R&D GROUPS 2 MARR PRIZE WINNERS 11 VISITING RESEARCHERS PER YEAR 2 ACM FELLOWS OVER 150 DAY VISITORS, 1 IEEE FELLOW SEMINAR SPEAKERS PER YEAR 3 ROYAL SOCIETY FELLOWS 1 ROYAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH FELLOW 4 ROYAL ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING FELLOWS 1 MACROBERT AWARD 1 ROOKE MEDAL 1 VON NEUMANN MEDAL 1 EADS GRAND PRIZE Research Areas Machine Learning & Perception Computer Vision. Machine Learning. Online Services & Advertising. Constraint Reasoning. Programming Principles & Tools Formal Methods. Programme Structures. Programming Systems. Constructive Security. Systems & Networking Distributed Systems. Networking. Networks, Economics & Algorithms. Operating Systems. Computer-Mediated Living Integrated Systems. Sensors & Devices. Socio-Digital Systems. i3D. Computational Science Biological Computation. Computational Ecology & Environmental Sciences. Research Connections Advanced Research Tools and Services Community, Intellectual Capital Development Earth,
    [Show full text]
  • Microsoft Trademarks
    Microsoft Trademarks March 2021 Microsoft Trademarks The following is a non-exhaustive list of trademarks owned by Microsoft Corporation and its affiliated companies. Their use is subject to the Microsoft Trademark & Brand Guidelines. To the extent a name, icon, or other brand asset does not appear in the list below, this does not constitute a waiver of any intellectual property rights that Microsoft Corporation and/or its subsidiaries may have established in them anywhere in the world. 0-9, A 343 Industries Alt Access AltspaceVR Access Designs AppLocker AppSource Arc AccountGuard As Dusk Falls Active Directory Avatar Famestar ActiveX Avowed Adera Azure Affirmed Design Azure Brainwave Azure Cosmos DB Afternoon Cyber Tea Azure Design Age of Empires Age of Mythology Azure PlayFab AI for Earth Azure Sentinel Aldhabi Azure Sphere B Bahnshrift Blue Dragon Banjo-Kazooie BlueTrack Technology Battletoads BlueTrack Technology Design Bing Bing Designs Bookdings Brainwave BitLocker BranchCache BitLocker To Go Broken Age BizTalk Brutal Legend Bleeding Edge Bloodforge C Calibri Continuum Cambria Convection Candara Corbel ClearType Cortana Clippy Cortana Design Clippy Design Crackdown Creeper Design Comic Sans Compulsion Games Crimson Alliance Conker Crimson Dragon ConnectR Crimson Omen Design Consolas Constantia Crimson Skies D DataSense Direct3D Delve DirectX Delve Designs Double Fine Drivatar Dynamics DeployR Dynamics 365 Desert Ranger Dynamics 365 Design DevelopR DigiGirlz E Edge Designs Excel Excel Designs ElectionGuard Empowering Us All Exchange
    [Show full text]