Jordan J. Bird

Nottingham Trent University | NTU · Department of Computer Science

Recently, the quality of artworks generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI) has increased significantly, resulting in growing difficulties in detecting synthetic artworks. However, limited studies have been conducted on identifying the authenticity of synthetic artworks and their source. This paper introduces AI-ArtBench, a dataset featuring 185...

The integration of new literature into the English curriculum remains a challenge since educators often lack scalable tools to rapidly evaluate readability and adapt texts for diverse classroom needs. This study proposes to address this gap through a multimodal approach that combines transformer-based text classification with linguistic feature ana...

Biophilic design is a well-recognised discipline aimed at enhancing health and well-being, however, most buildings lack adequate representation of nature or nature-inspired art. Notable barriers exist such as wealth, education, and physical ability restricting people’s accessibility to nature and associated artworks. An AI-based Biophilic arts cura...

Customer service is an important and expensive aspect of business, often being the largest department in most companies. With growing societal acceptance and increasing cost efficiency due to mass production, service robots are beginning to cross from the industrial domain to the social domain. Currently, customer service robots tend to be digital...

Research has shown that the use of biophilic elements in public or private spaces is effective in alleviating stress, improving mental well-being, and increasing innovativeness in the general public. Studies reveal that exposure to Biophilic art can improve an individual’s mental well-being. Many urban settings have few natural representations henc...

Technological intervention to support care areas that some people may not have access to is of paramount importance to promote sustainable development of good health and wellbeing. This study aims to explore the linguistic similarities and differences between human professionals and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) conversational agents in t...

In an era of rapid climate change and its adverse effects on food production, technological intervention to monitor pollinator conservation is of paramount importance for environmental monitoring and conservation for global food security. The survival of the human species depends on the conservation of pollinators. This article explores the use of...

Identification of seizure sources in the brain is of paramount importance, particularly for drug-resistant epilepsy patients who may require surgical operation. Interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs), which may or may not be frequent, are known to originate from seizure networks. Delayed responses (DRs) to brain electrical stimulation have been...

Identification of sources of seizures in the brain is of paramount importance, particularly for drug-resistant epilepsy patients who may require surgical operation. Interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs), which may or may not be frequent, are known to originate from seizure networks. Delayed responses (DRs) to brain electrical stimulation have b...

Stress has emerged as a major concern in modern society, significantly impacting human health and well-being. Statistical evidence underscores the extensive social influence of stress, especially in terms of work-related stress and associated healthcare costs. This paper addresses the critical need for accurate stress detection, emphasising its far...

AI-generated artworks are rapidly improving in quality, and bring many ethical issues to the forefront of discussion. Data scarcity leaves many individuals under-represented due to aspects such as age and ethnicity, which can provide useful context when transferring artistic styles to an image. In this study, we consider current issues through the...

Stress has emerged as a major concern in modern society, significantly impacting human health and well-being. Statistical evidence underscores the extensive social influence of stress, especially in terms of work-related stress and associated healthcare costs. This work addresses the critical need for accurate stress detection, emphasising its far-...

This work proposes a new formulation for common spatial patterns (CSP), often used as a powerful feature extraction technique in brain-computer interfacing (BCI) and other neurological studies. In this approach, applied to multiple subjects' data and named as hyperCSP, the individual covariance and mutual correlation matrices between multiple simul...

Recent advances in synthetic data have enabled the generation of images with such high quality that human beings cannot tell the difference between real-life photographs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated images. Given the critical necessity of data reliability and authentication, this article proposes to enhance our ability to recognise AI...

Abstract: Since time immemorial artworks have consistently recorded human creativity, and discerning the emotions evoked by artworks is a challenging yet enthralling task. Emotions are complex and open to interpretation therefore, building an Artificially Intelligent model capable of generalising emotions from visual art is a difficult task. This r...

Non-verbal communication frameworks such as Sign Language and Makaton serve as a vital means of communication for millions of people with hearing impairments. The development of accurate and efficient recognition systems for non-verbal communication is of great importance towards fostering inclusion through accessible systems. In this paper, we pro...

Explainability is an aspect of modern AI that is vital for impact and usability in the real world. The main objective of this paper is to emphasise the need to understand the predictions of Computer Vision models, specifically Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based models. Existing methods of explaining CNN predictions are mostly based on Gradien...

There are growing implications surrounding generative AI in the speech domain that enable voice cloning and real-time voice conversion from one individual to another. This technology poses a significant ethical threat and could lead to breaches of privacy and misrepresentation, thus there is an urgent need for real-time detection of AI-generated sp...

Detecting fall compensatory behaviour from large EEG datasets poses a difficult problem in big data which can be alleviated by evolutionary computation-based machine learning strategies. In this article, hyperheuristic optimisation solutions via evolutionary optimisation of deep neural network topologies and genetic programming of machine learning...

Recent technological advances in synthetic data have enabled the generation of images with such high quality that human beings cannot tell the difference between real-life photographs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated images. Given the critical necessity of data reliability and authentication, this article proposes to enhance our ability t...

Forgery of a signature with the aim of deception is a serious crime. Machine learning is often employed to detect real and forged signatures. In this study, we present results which argue that robotic arms and generative models can overcome these systems and mount false-acceptance attacks. Convolutional neural networks and data augmentation strateg...

The use of artificial intelligence has become increasingly popular in recent years, allowing technology once thought of as futuristic to become possible and utilised at the consumer level. Many technological barriers to human-computer interaction have been overcome, and there is now a focus on the sociological acceptance of such technology. Inferri...

The ability to autonomously detect a physical fall is one of the many enabling technologies towards better independent living. This work explores how genetic programming can be leveraged to develop machine learning pipelines for the classification of falls via EEG brainwave activity. Eleven physical activities (5 types of falls and 6 non-fall activ...

In this paper, we introduce a GAN-based solution for generating synthetic multispectral images from fully-annotated RGB images for data augmentation purposes in forestry robotics applications at ground-level. Fully-annotated multispectral datasets are difficult to obtain with sufficient training samples when compared to RGB-based datasets, since an...

This study explores how robots and generative approaches can be used to mount successful false-acceptance adversarial attacks on signature verification systems. Initially, a convolutional neural network topology and data augmentation strategy are explored and tuned, producing an 87.12% accurate model for the verification of 2,640 human signatures....

In modern society, people should not be identified based on their disability, rather, it is environments that can disable people with impairments. Improvements to automatic Sign Language Recognition (SLR) will lead to more enabling environments via digital technology. Many state-of-the-art approaches to SLR focus on the classification of static han...

In state-of-the-art deep learning for object recognition, SoftMax and Sigmoid functions are most commonly employed as the predictor outputs. Such layers often produce overconfident predictions rather than proper probabilistic scores, which can thus harm the decision-making of `critical' perception systems applied in autonomous driving and robotics....

Contemporary Artificial Intelligence technologies allow for the employment of Computer Vision to discern good crops from bad, providing a step in the pipeline of selecting healthy fruit from undesirable fruit, such as those which are mouldy or damaged. State-of-the-art works in the field report high accuracy results on small datasets (<1000 images)...

In state-of-the-art deep learning for object recognition, Softmax and Sigmoid layers are most commonly employed as the predictor outputs. Such layers often produce overconfidence predictions rather than proper probabilistic scores, which can thus harm the decision-making of ‘critical’ perception systems applied in autonomous driving and robotics. G...

With growing societal acceptance and increasing cost efficiency due to mass production, service robots are beginning to cross from the industrial to the social domain. Currently, customer service robots tend to be digital and emulate social interactions through on-screen text, but state-of-the-art research points towards physical robots soon provid...

Much of the state-of-the-art in image synthesis inspired by real artwork are either entirely generative by filtered random noise or inspired by the transfer of style. This work explores the application of image inpainting to continue famous artworks and produce generative art with a Conditional GAN. During the training stage of the process, the bor...

In this work we present the Chatbot Interaction with Artificial Intelligence (CI-AI) framework as an approach to the training of a transformer based chatbot-like architecture for task classification with a focus on natural human interaction with a machine as opposed to interfaces, code, or formal commands. The intelligent system augments human-sour...

In this work, we achieve up to 92% classification accuracy of electromyographic data between five gestures in pseudo-real-time. Most current state-of-the-art methods in electromyographical signal processing are unable to classify real-time data in a post-learning environment, that is, after the model is trained and results are analysed. In this wor...

Contemporary Artificial Intelligence technologies allow for the employment of Computer Vision to discern good crops from bad, providing a step in the pipeline of selecting healthy fruit from undesirable fruit, such as those which are mouldy or gangrenous. State-of-the-art works in the field report high accuracy results on small datasets (<1000 imag...

In this work we achieve up to 92% classification accuracy of electromyographic data between five gestures in pseudo-real-time. Most current state-of-the-art methods in electromyography signal processing are unable to classify real-time data in a post-learning environment, that is, after the model is trained and results are analysed. In this work we...

Synthetic data augmentation is of paramount importance for machine learning classification, particularly for biological data, which tend to be high dimensional and with a scarcity of training samples. The applications of robotic control and augmentation in disabled and able-bodied subjects still rely mainly on subject-specific analyses. Those can r...

In modern Human-Robot Interaction, much thought has been given to accessibility regarding robotic locomotion, specifically the enhancement of awareness and lowering of cognitive load. On the other hand, with social Human-Robot Interaction considered, published research is far sparser given that the problem is less explored than pathfinding and loco...

Objective The novelty of this study consists of the exploration of multiple new approaches of data pre-processing of brainwave signals, wherein statistical features are extracted and then formatted as visual images based on the order in which dimensionality reduction algorithms select them. This data is then treated as visual input for 2D and 3D CN...

In this study, we present a transfer learning method for gesture classification via an inductive and supervised transductive approach with an electromyographic dataset gathered via the Myo armband. A ternary gesture classification problem is presented by states of ’thumbs up’, ’thumbs down’, and ’relax’ in order to communicate in the affirmative or...

In this work we present a three-stage Machine Learning strategy to country-level risk classification based on countries that are reporting COVID-19 information. A K% binning discretisation (K = 25) is used to create four risk groups of countries based on the risk of transmission (coronavirus cases per million population), risk of mortality (coronav...

The novelty of this study consists in a multi-modality approach to scene classification, where image and audio complement each other in a process of deep late fusion. The approach is demonstrated on a difficult classification problem, consisting of two synchronised and balanced datasets of 16,000 data objects, encompassing 4.4 hours of video of 8 e...

In this work, we present the Chatbot Interaction with Artificial Intelligence (CI-AI) framework as an approach to the training of deep learning chatbots for task classification. The intelligent system augments human-sourced data via artificial paraphrasing in order to generate a large set of training data for further classical, attention, and langu...

In this work, we show that a late fusion approach to multimodality in sign language recognition improves the overall ability of the model in comparison to the singular approaches of image classification (88.14%) and Leap Motion data classification (72.73%). With a large synchronous dataset of 18 BSL gestures collected from multiple subjects, two de...

Preliminary results to a new approach for neurocognitive training on academic engagement and monitoring of attention levels in children with learning difficulties is presented. Machine Learning (ML) techniques and a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) are used to develop an interactive AI-based game for educational therapy to monitor the progress of chi...

In this work, we show that a late fusion approach to multi-modality in sign language recognition improves the overall ability of the model in comparison to the singular approaches of Computer Vision (88.14%) and Leap Motion data classification (72.73%). With a large synchronous dataset of 18 BSL gestures collected from multiple subjects, two deep n...

The novelty of this study consists in a multi-modality approach to scene classification, where image and audio complement each other in a process of deep late fusion. The approach is demonstrated on a difficult classification problem, consisting of two synchronised and balanced datasets of 16,000 data objects, encompassing 4.4 hours of video of 8 e...

In speech recognition problems, data scarcity often poses an issue due to the willingness of humans to provide large amounts of data for learning and classification. In this work, we take a set of 5 spoken Harvard sentences from 7 subjects and consider their MFCC attributes. Using character level LSTMs (supervised learning) and OpenAI's attention-b...

In this work, we show that both fine-tune learning and cross-domain sim-to-real transfer learning from virtual to real-world environments improve the starting and final scene classification abilities of a computer vision model. A 6-class computer vision problem of scene classification is presented from both videogame environments and photographs of...

In this work, we argue that the implications of pseudorandom and quantum-random number generators (PRNG and QRNG) inexplicably affect the performances and behaviours of various machine learning models that require a random input. These implications are yet to be explored in soft computing until this work. We use a CPU and a QPU to generate random n...

Deep networks are currently the state-of-the-art for sensory perception in autonomous driving and robotics. However, deep models often generate overconfident predictions precluding proper probabilistic interpretation which we argue is due to the nature of the SoftMax layer. To reduce the overconfidence without compromising the classification perfor...

Autonomous speaker identification suffers issues of data scarcity due to it being unrealistic to gather hours of speaker audio to form a dataset, which inevitably leads to class imbalance in comparison to the large data availability from non-speakers since large-scale speech datasets are available online. In this study, we explore the possibility o...

Recent advances in the availability of computational resources allow for more sophisticated approaches to speech recognition than ever before. This study considers Artificial Neural Network and Hidden Markov Model methods of classification for Human Speech Recognition through Diphthong Vowel sounds in the English Phonetic Alphabet rather than the c...

Recent advances in the availability of computational resources allow for more sophisticated approaches to speech recognition than ever before. This study considers Artificial Neural Network and Hidden Markov Model methods of classification for Human Speech Recognition through Diphthong Vowel sounds in the English Phonetic Alphabet rather than the c...

In this work, we show the success of unsupervised transfer learning between Electroencephalographic (brainwave) classification and Electromyographic (muscular wave) domains with both MLP and CNN methods. To achieve this, signals are measured from both the brain and forearm muscles and EMG data is gathered from a 4-class gesture classification exper...

The implications of realistic human speech imitation are both promising but potentially dangerous. In this work, a pre-trained Tacotron Spectrogram Feature Prediction Network is fine tuned with two 1.6 h speech datasets for 100,000 learning iterations, producing two individual models. The two Speech datasets are completely identical in content othe...

This work presents an image classification approach to EEG brainwave classification. The proposed method is based on the representation of temporal and statistical features as a 2D image, which is then classified using a deep Convolutional Neural Network. A three-class mental state problem is investigated, in which subjects experience either relaxa...

In this work, we argue that the implications of Pseudo and Quantum Random Number Generators (PRNG and QRNG) inexplicably affect the performances and behaviours of various machine learning models that require a random input. These implications are yet to be explored in Soft Computing until this work. We use a CPU and a QPU to generate random numbers...

In this work, we argue that the implications of Pseudo and Quantum Random Number Generators (PRNG and QRNG) inexplicably affect the performances and behaviours of various machine learning models that require a random input. These implications are yet to be explored in Soft Computing until this work. We use a CPU and a QPU to generate random numbers...

This work presents an image classification approach to EEG brainwave classification. The proposed method is based on the representation of temporal and statistical features as a 2D image, which is then classified using a deep Convolutional Neural Network. A three-class mental state problem is investigated, in which subjects experience either relaxa...

The implications of realistic human speech imitation are both promising but potentially dangerous. In this work, a pre-trained Tacotron Spectrogram Feature Prediction Network is fine tuned with two 1.6 hour speech datasets for 100,000 learning iterations, producing two individual models. The two Speech datasets are completely identical in content o...

This study suggests a new approach to EEG data classification by exploring the idea of using evolutionary computation to both select useful discriminative EEG features and optimise the topology of Artificial Neural Networks. An evolutionary algorithm is applied to select the most informative features from an initial set of 2550 EEG statistical feat...