This study introduces two datasets for multimodal research on cognitive load inference and personality traits. Different to other datasets in Affective Computing, which disregard participants’ personality traits or focus only on emotions, stress, or cognitive load from one specific task, the participants in our experiments performed seven different tasks in total. In the first dataset, 23 participants played a varying difficulty (easy, medium, and hard) game on a smartphone. In the second dataset, 23 participants performed six psychological tasks on a PC, again with varying difficulty. In both experiments, the participants filled personality trait questionnaires and marked their perceived cognitive load using NASA-TLX after each task. Additionally, the participants’ physiological response was recorded using a wrist device measuring heart rate, beat-to-beat intervals, galvanic skin response, skin temperature, and three-axis acceleration. The datasets allow multimodal study of physiological responses of individuals in relation to their personality and cognitive load. Various analyses of relationships between personality traits, subjective cognitive load (i.e., NASA-TLX), and objective cognitive load (i.e., task difficulty) are presented. Additionally, baseline machine learning models for recognizing task difficulty are presented, including a multitask learning (MTL) neural network that outperforms single-task neural network by simultaneously learning from the two datasets. The datasets are publicly available to advance the field of cognitive load inference using commercially available devices.

Edge intelligence is currently facing several important challenges hindering its performance, with the major drawback being meeting the high resource requirements of deep learning by the resource-constrained edge computing devices. The most recent adaptive neural network compression techniques demonstrated, in theory, the potential to facilitate the flexible deployment of deep learning models in real-world applications. However, their actual suitability and performance in ubiquitous or edge computing applications has not, to this date, been evaluated. In this context, our work aims to bridge the gap between the theoretical resource savings promised by such approaches and the requirements of a real-world mobile application by introducing algorithms that dynamically guide the compression rate of a neural network according to the continuously changing context in which the mobile computation is taking place. Through an in-depth trace-based investigation, we confirm the feasibility of our adaptation algorithms in offering a scalable trade-off between the inference accuracy and resource usage. We then implement our approach on real-world edge devices and, through a human activity recognition application, confirm that it offers efficient neural network compression adaptation in highly dynamic environments. The results of our experiment with 21 participants show that, compared to using static network compression, our approach uses 2.18× less energy with only a 1.5% drop in the average accuracy of the classification.

Knowledge graphs are commonly represented by ontology-based databases. Tracking the provenance of ontological changes and ensuring ontology consistency is important. In this work, we propose a transaction manager for ontology-based database manipulation that combines blockchain and Semantic Web technologies. The latter is used for the efficient querying and modification of data, whereas the blockchain is used for the secure storage and tracking of changes. The blockchain enables a decentralized setup and data restoration. We evaluate our solution by measuring cost and time. Our solution introduces some overhead for updates whereas querying works at the same speed as the underlying ontology database.

Natural language processing is used for solving a wide variety of problems. Some scholars and interest groups working with language resources are not well versed in programming, so there is a need for a good graphical framework that allows users to quickly design and test natural language processing pipelines without the need for programming. The existing frameworks do not satisfy all the requirements for such a tool. We, therefore, propose a new framework that provides a simple way for its users to build language processing pipelines. It also allows a simple programming language agnostic way for adding new modules, which will help the adoption by natural language processing developers and researchers. The main parts of the proposed framework consist of (a) a pluggable Docker-based architecture, (b) a general data model, and (c) APIs description along with the graphical user interface. The proposed design is being used for implementation of a new natural language processing framework, called ANGLEr.