Rapid developments in urbanisation and autonomous industrial environments have augmented and expedited the need for intelligent real-time video surveillance. Recent developments in artificial intelligence for anomaly detection in video surveillance only address some of the challenges, largely overlooking the evolving nature of anomalous behaviours over time. Tightly-coupled dependence on a known normality training dataset and sparse evaluation based on reconstruction error are further limitations. In this paper, we propose the Incremental Spatio-Temporal Learner (ISTL) to address challenges and limitations of anomaly detection and localisation for real-time video surveillance. ISTL is an unsupervised deep learning approach that utilises active learning with fuzzy aggregation, to continuously update and distinguish between new anomalies and normality that evolve over time. ISTL is demonstrated and evaluated on accuracy, robustness, computational overhead as well as contextual indicators, using three benchmark datasets. Results of these experiments validate our contribution and confirm its suitability for real-time video surveillance.

This paper presents the “CDAC AI life cycle,” a comprehensive life cycle for the design, development, and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) systems and solutions. It addresses the void of a practical and inclusive approach that spans beyond the technical constructs to also focus on the challenges of risk analysis of AI adoption, transferability of prebuilt models, increasing importance of ethics and governance, and the composition, skills, and knowledge of an AI team required for successful completion. The life cycle is presented as the progression of an AI solution through its distinct phases—design, develop, and deploy—and 19 constituent stages from conception to production as applicable to any AI initiative. This life cycle addresses several critical gaps in the literature where related work on approaches and methodologies are adapted and not designed specifically for AI. A technical and organizational taxonomy that synthesizes the functional value of AI is a further contribution of this article.

Mental health issues are at the forefront of healthcare challenges facing contemporary human society. These issues are most prevalent among working-age people, impacting negatively on the individual, his/her family, workplace, community, and the economy. Conventional mental healthcare services, although highly effective, cannot be scaled up to address the increasing demand from affected individuals, as evidenced in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Conversational agents, or chatbots, are a recent technological innovation that has been successfully adapted for mental healthcare as a scalable platform of cross-platform smartphone applications that provides first-level support for such individuals. Despite this disposition, mental health chatbots in the extant literature and practice are limited in terms of the therapy provided and the level of personalisation. For instance, most chatbots extend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) into predefined conversational pathways that are generic and ineffective in recurrent use. In this paper, we postulate that Behavioural Activation (BA) therapy and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are more effectively materialised in a chatbot setting to provide recurrent emotional support, personalised assistance, and remote mental health monitoring. We present the design and development of our BA-based AI chatbot, followed by its participatory evaluation in a pilot study setting that confirmed its effectiveness in providing support for individuals with mental health issues.

The emerging information revolution makes it necessary to manage vast amounts of unstructured data rapidly. As the world is increasingly populated by IoT devices and sensors that can sense their surroundings and communicate with each other, a digital environment has been created with vast volumes of volatile and diverse data. Traditional AI and machine learning techniques designed for deterministic situations are not suitable for such environments. With a large number of parameters required by each device in this digital environment, it is desirable that the AI is able to be adaptive and self-build (i.e. self-structure, self-configure, self-learn), rather than be structurally and parameter-wise pre-defined. This study explores the benefits of self-building AI and machine learning with unsupervised learning for empowering big data analytics for smart city environments. By using the growing self-organizing map, a new suite of self-building AI is proposed. The self-building AI overcomes the limitations of traditional AI and enables data processing in dynamic smart city environments. With cloud computing platforms, the self-building AI can integrate the data analytics applications that currently work in silos. The new paradigm of the self-building AI and its value are demonstrated using the IoT, video surveillance, and action recognition applications.

The advancements of the Internet of Things (IoT) and voice-based multimedia applications have resulted in the generation of big data consisting of patterns, trends and associations capturing and representing many features of human behaviour. The latent representations of many aspects and the basis of human behaviour is naturally embedded within the expression of emotions found in human speech. This signifies the importance of mining audio data collected from human conversations for extracting human emotion. Ability to capture and represent human emotions will be an important feature in next-generation artificial intelligence, with the expectation of closer interaction with humans. Although the textual representations of human conversations have shown promising results for the extraction of emotions, the acoustic feature-based emotion detection from audio still lags behind in terms of accuracy. This paper proposes a novel approach for feature extraction consisting of Bag-of-Audio-Words (BoAW) based feature embeddings for conversational audio data. A Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based state-of-the-art emotion detection model is proposed that captures the conversation-context and individual party states when making real-time categorical emotion predictions. The performance of the proposed approach and the model is evaluated using two benchmark datasets along with an empirical evaluation on real-time prediction capability. The proposed approach reported 60.87% weighted accuracy and 60.97% unweighted accuracy for six basic emotions for IEMOCAP dataset, significantly outperforming current state-of-the-art models.

A primary variant of social media, online support groups (OSG) extend beyond the standard definition to incorporate a dimension of advice, support and guidance for patients. OSG are complementary, yet significant adjunct to patient journeys. Machine learning and natural language processing techniques can be applied to these large volumes of unstructured text discussions accumulated in OSG for intelligent extraction of patient-reported demographics, behaviours, decisions, treatment, side effects and expressions of emotions. New insights from the fusion and synthesis of such diverse patient-reported information, as expressed throughout the patient journey from diagnosis to treatment and recovery, can contribute towards informed decision-making on personalized healthcare delivery and the development of healthcare policy guidelines. We have designed and developed an artificial intelligence based analytics framework using machine learning and natural language processing techniques for intelligent analysis and automated aggregation of patient information and interaction trajectories in online support groups. Alongside the social interactions aspect, patient behaviours, decisions, demographics, clinical factors, emotions, as subsequently expressed over time, are extracted and analysed. More specifically, we utilised this platform to investigate the impact of online social influences on the intimate decision scenario of selecting a treatment type, recovery after treatment, side effects and emotions expressed over time, using prostate cancer as a model. Results manifest the three major decision-making behaviours among patients, Paternalistic group, Autonomous group and Shared group. Furthermore, each group demonstrated diverse behaviours in post-decision discussions on clinical outcomes, advice and expressions of emotion during the twelve months following treatment. Over time, the transition of patients from information and emotional support seeking behaviours to providers of information and emotional support to other patients was also observed. Findings from this study are a rigorous indication of the expectations of social media empowered patients, their potential for individualised decision-making, clinical and emotional needs. The increasing popularity of OSG further confirms that it is timely for clinicians to consider patient voices as expressed in OSG. We have successfully demonstrated that the proposed platform can be utilised to investigate, analyse and derive actionable insights from patient-reported information on prostate cancer, in support of patient focused healthcare delivery. The platform can be extended and applied just as effectively to any other medical condition.