Social relations are the foundation of human daily life. Developing techniques to analyze such relations from visual data bears great potential to build machines that better understand us and are capable of interacting with us at a social level. Previous investigations have remained partial due to the overwhelming diversity and complexity of the topic and consequently have only focused on a handful of social relations. In this paper, we argue that the domain-based theory from social psychology is a great starting point to systematically approach this problem. The theory provides coverage of all aspects of social relations and equally is concrete and predictive about the visual attributes and behaviors defining the relations included in each domain. We provide the first dataset built on this holistic conceptualization of social life that is composed of a hierarchical label space of social domains and social relations. We also contribute the first models to recognize such domains and relations and find superior performance for attribute based features. Beyond the encouraging performance of the attribute based approach, we also find interpretable features that are in accordance with the predictions from social psychology literature. Beyond our findings, we believe that our contributions more tightly interleave visual recognition and social psychology theory that has the potential to complement the theoretical work in the area with empirical and data-driven models of social life.
In social events, there are immediate social roles and inherent relations among participants. The notion of social roles'' here models the expected behaviors of certain people @cite_45 @cite_21 @cite_22 @cite_40 . For example, in a child birthday party, social roles are birthday child, parents, friends and guests @cite_45 . Instead of immediate roles, we focus on the identity-specified interpersonal relations, which naturally derive permanent social roles. For example, if leader and subordinate'' is confirmed, then it is easy to define the leader's social role as a manager boss which is much more permanent than the guest in a party''. More importantly, our social relation definition is based on psychology studies that suggest comprehensive social scopes in people's long life.
@cite_40 @cite_22 @cite_45 @cite_21
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We deal with the problem of recognizing social roles played by people in an event. Social roles are governed by human interactions, and form a fundamental component of human event description. We focus on a weakly supervised setting, where we are provided different videos belonging to an event class, without training role labels. Since social roles are described by the interaction between people in an event, we propose a Conditional Random Field to model the inter-role interactions, along with person specific social descriptors. We develop tractable variational inference to simultaneously infer model weights, as well as role assignment to all people in the videos. We also present a novel YouTube social roles dataset with ground truth role annotations, and introduce annotations on a subset of videos from the TRECVID-MED11 [1] event kits for evaluation purposes. The performance of the model is compared against different baseline methods on these datasets. The people in an image are generally not strangers, but instead often share social relationships such as husband-wife, siblings, grandparent-child, father-child, or mother-child. Further, the social relationship between a pair of people influences the relative position and appearance of the people in the image. This paper explores using familial social relationships as context for recognizing people and for recognizing the social relationships between pairs of people. We introduce a model for representing the interaction between social relationship, facial appearance, and identity. We show that the family relationship a pair of people share influences the relative pairwise features between them. The experiments on a set of personal collections show significant improvement in people recognition is achieved by modeling social relationships, even in a weak label setting that is attractive in practical applications. Furthermore, we show the social relationships are effectively recognized in images from a separate test image collection. Social relations are the foundation of human daily life. Developing techniques to analyze such relations from visual data bears great potential to build machines that better understand us and are capable of interacting with us at a social level. Previous investigations have remained partial due to the overwhelming diversity and complexity of the topic and consequently have only focused on a handful of social relations. In this paper, we argue that the domain-based theory from social psychology is a great starting point to systematically approach this problem. The theory provides coverage of all aspects of social relations and equally is concrete and predictive about the visual attributes and behaviors defining the relations included in each domain. We provide the first dataset built on this holistic conceptualization of social life that is composed of a hierarchical label space of social domains and social relations. We also contribute the first models to recognize such domains and relations and find superior performance for attribute based features. Beyond the encouraging performance of the attribute based approach, we also find interpretable features that are in accordance with the predictions from social psychology literature. Beyond our findings, we believe that our contributions more tightly interleave visual recognition and social psychology theory that has the potential to complement the theoretical work in the area with empirical and data-driven models of social life. This paper intends to provide some insights of a scientific problem: how likely one's interests can be inferred from his her social connections -- friends, friends' friends, 3-degree friends, etc? Is "Birds of a Feather Flocks Together" a norm? We do not consider the friending activity on online social networking sites. Instead, we conduct this study by implementing a privacy-preserving large distribute social sensor system in a large global IT company to capture the multifaceted activities of 30,000+ people, including communications (e.g., emails, instant messaging, etc) and Web 2.0 activities (e.g., social bookmarking, file sharing, blogging, etc). These activities occupy the majority of employees' time in work, and thus, provide a high quality approximation to the real social connections of employees in the workplace context. In addition to such "informal networks", we investigated the "formal networks", such as their hierarchical structure, as well as the demographic profile data such as geography, job role, self-specified interests, etc. Because user ID matching across multiple sources on the Internet is very difficult, and most user activity logs have to be anonymized before they are processed, no prior studies could collect comparable multifaceted activity data of individuals. That makes this study unique. In this paper, we present a technique to predict the inference quality by utilizing (1) network analysis and network autocorrelation modeling of informal and formal networks, and (2) regression models to predict user interest inference quality from network characteristics. We verify our findings with experiments on both implicit user interests indicated by the content of communications or Web 2.0 activities, and explicit user interests specified in user profiles. We demonstrate that the inference quality prediction increases the inference quality of implicit interests by 42.8 , and inference quality of explicit interests by up to 101 .