Google's new privacy policy will further squelch my social life, and possibly also kill Christmas

So yesterday I saw some screen flash up again from Google concerning the new privacy policy. But I was intent on logging into Gmail to chat my Groundhog Day greetings out to my little social world that I clicked on 'Got it' without really a second glance at all of that carefully crafted text that they had written on the page. Hmm. Looks pretty lean for a privacy policy, but I have a bad feeling. I don't think I'll like this.

And I don't. Just as sure as the groundhog saw his shadow yesterday and we received a generous blanket of snow today. I believe there's another six weeks (well, five weeks and six days) of winter coming.

And there's a serious chilly weather coming on in my social life. Google is going to mix up my Gmail, which is a chaotic mixture of shopping and friends, with my YouTube account, which I use to post video for work. The result is sure to be some weird distorted echo of myself that's neither productive nor fun.

I mean, as kids we do the thing of taking a range of food items out of the refrigerator and putting them in the blender. It starts out a strawberry milkshake, but then you get the idea to add a some capers and a spoonful of peanut butter and then some powdered sugar and a zap of lemon juice. It's fun to mix stuff up but the result is usually pretty gross and the main life lesson we learn with this experiment is that there truly is a reason why we generally like to eat our food in separate dishes and don't mash everything together in the middle of the plate.

Now I have to worry about chats from my friends contaminating the little YouTube garden I have been cultivating on the topic of multimedia information retrieval. Am I going to be looking at my YouTube page with colleagues at work and have to wondering if they will see recommendations for videos of things that I have been chatting about? Is my video recommendation list about to be infected by groundhogs? Other rodents?

Today someone wrote me an email mentioning a Wizards/Raptors game. I have no idea what sport this is: and YouTube's going to be mixing it up with the videos I actually want to see? Am I going to write back and say "Please, include no Wizards or Raptors in your messages to me"? Oh dear, that's really going to go down well with my friends.

For me, it's a cold chill without the mitigating effect of a truly cute and relevant rodent or the promise of a mere six weeks duration.

This year, I will be definitely worrying about accidentally doing a Google search in the presence of one of my family members and having my Christmas shopping list lifted from my email and plunked down in the ads or the personalization of my search results. What happened to surprising people with a unexpected holiday gift? Who would have thought that Google turns out to be the Grinch who Stole Christmas? Do I seriously have to hesitate before spontaneously turning my laptop screen so that someone else can seen my browser and I can help them find something on the Internet?

The New York Times tells us that the EU is pressing Google to delay the new privacy policy until the implications can be better understood. I am not the only one, apparently, with the bad feeling. It looks lean, but its not at all a reassuring lean.

Social media is about the joy of the spur of the moment chat -- and what I have right now is a bad taste in my mouth. My natural human urge to share spontaneous Groundhog greetings prompted me initially to click right through the page of information on the new privacy policy without reading it in detail. That was not a responsible click. That bad taste is not only the oncoming strawberry, caper, peanut butter milkshake, but also the yet further erosion of my ability to trust my social intuitions of what topics to raise when with whom. Google seems to want to help make that decision for me.

It looks like I'll be pulling the adjective 'insidious' off the shelf, dusting it off and using it more often.

Just look at this blog post: it's rodents, raptors, strawberries, videos and snow. Any algorithm that's trying to make me a content recommendation on the basis of this text is going to come up with 'quirky', nothing more. Mix all my personal stuff together, Google, and you get...well, useless mud: It is useless, strawberry flavored mud with perhaps a hint of groundhog. You don't need this stuff Google. Think of something else and don't send you privacy policy off in completely the wrong direction.

Passing the time waiting for Wikipedia by musing on SOPA and multimedia information retrieval

It's like the SOPA blackout blacked out my brain or something. I am tired and cranky and feel like I basically spent my day just waiting for Wikipedia to come back on line. I guess I was actually pretty productive, but I did spend a lot of time looking at Twitter. And in fact was looking when a tweet on darkening Flickr photos came through from Mor Naaman and led me to his darkened photo in the screenshot above.

Yes, of course I am a stop SOPA person. If its piracy today, it's free speech under attack tomorrow... my thoughts naturally flow along those lines of logic. If online piracy is indeed a problem, there's gotta be a more creative, effective solution that one concocted by Congress.

But then it occurred to me that maybe SOPA actually would have positive implications for the effectiveness of multimedia retrieval. I mean, hey, if SOPA is going to force website owners to police user-contributed material anyhow, then we should put those website owners to work enforcing complete and consistent metadata.

For every video, every image, SOPA wants to know who it belongs to. Well, we could also require a complete description of its visual content. Stop Online Messy Metadata! Let's propose a SOMMA.

Let's require each multimedia items to have a minimum number of tags, and have those tags to be drawn a set of concepts organized in a formal ontology. The US Federal Government could actually start publishing one -- updating it each year to cut down on those concepts known to not contribute constructively to retrieval. (We could start with LSCOM.)

Let's require people posting videos to make sure that their speech transcripts have been corrected are are flawless (...avoid using words not in the vocabulary of the speech recognizer) and that their songs are published with links to pages containing the lyrics (...avoid including references to obscure Russian novels).

And then to control that overwhelming multimedia flood, we can set limits. Individuals should only publish a small quota of items, so that these can all be kept in a central index and found by a topical look up -- Dewey Decimal Classification style.

Formulating an information need is easy: just choose one from a well organized standardized list, defined to cover everything you could possible want to see in an image.

Basically, if they put their minds to it the US Federal Government could really improve multimedia retrieval.

Well, OK. I'm a stop SOPA person because I like my job and I like my messy world and the messy metadata that goes with it.

In its subtle way, Flickr is telling us that its actually really difficult as an Internet user to be pro-SOPA. The caption on the blacked out photo above is:

A Flickr user has darkened this photo for up to 24 hours as a symbolic gesture to raise awareness about the potential impact of two pieces of pending U.S. anti-piracy legislation - SOPA (The Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (The Protect IP Act).

While the inclusion of this blackout screen is merely a symbolic gesture -- not an actual allegation that this photo violates any copyright -- a user wanted you to take note of the harmful impact these bills could have on innovation online. For more information see http://blog.flickr.net

And then at the bottom there's a link labeled:

Show the photo anyway. I do not wish to participate. Do not darken my photo.

OK. Wait a minute, if I click "Do not darken my photo" is that then literally or symbolically? Flickr is subtly showing us how natural the extension is from our daily use habits to the decision to support the principle-based movement to stop SOPA and preserve the basic freedom of Internet flow.

Look at how this works: Symbolically, what the darkened photo is, is a big message screaming "Do not darken my photo!!" to the US Federal Government. So aren't I really by clicking this link demonstrating that I am against a specific darkened photo, which is nearly the same thing as being against darkened photos in general? And from there also against legislation that might blot out some of that rich multimedia primordial soup that we take in, digest and put out as conversations, comments, more multimedia, the fabric of our online lives?

Hey, SOPA, leave my Internet alone. I do not wish to participate. I want my brain lit back up.

Peaceable Kingdom: Snowflake button for YouTube snow

A post that mixes the magic and delight of the holiday season with multimedia information retrieval? Let's try it and see what happens.

The past couple of weeks holiday cards have been dropping through the mail slot in the front door -- but also emails have been entering my inbox: greetings, photos, and yes, also videos. This morning it was an email with a greeting and a link to a music video "Peaceable Kingdom".

I watched the video for a while and pondered its relationship with Christmas: The music is melodious, soothing and the lyrics take the listener to the manger to make the connection with the adoring state of mind of those who gathered there the first Christmas Eve. Unexpected minor cadences highlight that this is no usual Christmas carol and invite consideration of the multiplicity of the Christmas experience -- how the holiday itself integrates traditions preceding Christianity and how, as each new group and generation reinvents it for their own spirit and needs, it will continue to develop into some future Christmas. From the perspective of the here and now, that future Christmas could seem full of sweetness, hope and light, but also distorted and distinctly pagan.

Of course, the strongest signal I get from the video is that of Margaret Atwood's dystopic visions. I haven't read The Year of the Flood, but what has been written and said about the book has so much fascinated and disturbed me, that the existence of the book as itself as a text seems somehow less important to me -- the setting is already so palpable that what it tells is, in a way, no longer left to be said.

In the end, maybe my personal Christmas feeling associated with the video is that it gives me a chance to spend some time feeling close to the person who sent it to me. The strength of this feeling of connection goes beyond -- indeed exists in a completely different life dimension -- than my reflections on meta-text usurping text or on the length of time that has transpired since I have sat down and read a worthwhile book not related to work.

Where is the multimedia information retrieval tie-in? Well, first, as a result of this video it has occurred to me for the umpteenth time that we need a verb other than "watch" to describe this kind of interaction with this video. It's a music video, so I am mainly listening to it and then looking at the visual stimuli. There could potentially be rather large changes in the visuals -- different pictures, different editing -- and these changes could possibly leave my watching experience largely untouched. I would argue, if I were only "watching", these elements would necessarily have a major defining impact on my experience. They don't. Here, I am rather "watch/listening", which I suppose could give us the new concept of "wistening".

There's a second tie-in as well: There is a little snowflake in the player bar, which I discovered after "wistening" for a while. I usually find snowflake icons ambiguous: especially on climate control units in strange hotel rooms -- do I turn the setting to "snowflake" if it's cold outside or is the "snowflake" setting going to cause the system to start producing cool? I've encountered both. So I've learned just to click on the snowflake and see what happens...

I clicked.

And lo and behold it started snowing. Right into the Peaceable Kingdom -- flakes floating down slowly -- different sorts of flakes at different speeds -- and accumulating at the bottom of the frame. I felt the smile spread on my face -- and grow wider as a realized that I was witnessing one little bit of a sort of world-wide holiday miracle as people in front of screens around the planet discover that you make it snow on YouTube. I thought about people watching this on their laptops and tables, using the mouse to play a bit in the snow and then gathering their friends, colleagues, family around their screens in one big Christmas "You gotta check this out!"

Apparently, you can't do this to every video: and this is where it really starts getting interesting to me. How did YouTube decide which videos to add this feature to? There must have been some multimedia classification algorithm that maybe looked for keywords in the title and description and something like music in the audio channel or colors in the visual channel and combined this with the upload date -- and then enabled "snow" for this video.

I want to make these kinds of algorithms! How do we put everything that we know how to do in terms of multimodal video processing and machine learning and figure out for which videos it needs to be able to snow?

And it's not just snow. There are other ways in which this could go -- and should go -- it has potential to cause so much joy. I am sitting here "wistening" and thinking about friends and family and playing in the snow, but it's clear that we need to go being "wistening" and we need a very for watching+listening+reflecting+playing. It's also clear that we need the technologies that support these activities. Imagine a search engine that can find videos that are appropriate for 'snow': that goes so far beyond user information needs as they are currently conceptualized for multimedia that it sort of takes your breath away.

How to enable the multimedia community to work at these new (from the perspective of this moment, utterly fantastic) frontiers?

The key to doing work in this direction, is to evaluating it. How do we know if we were right in presenting the snow option for a given video? YouTube is probably analyzing its interaction logs at this very moment. But I hate to think that I need to go to work for YouTube in order to ever be able to do the evaluation necessary to write a paper on this topic. Everyone loves the snow, so everyone should be able to work in order to make it better.

Note to self qua New Year's resolution: Keep up commitment to evaluation -- we need it to push ourselves forward into the unknown in a meaningful way. Maybe it's what actually makes the difference between what we call computer science and what we call art. But I'll leave that thought to another day.

In the meantime, the overall conclusion is that holidays and multimedia information retrieval do indeed mix well in a blog post. So happy holidays (ans enjoy the video):

The MediaEval Model for Benchmarking Evaluation

Currently, I'm working to put together the survey for MediaEval 2012. This survey will be used to decide on the tasks that will run in 2012 and also will help to gather information that we will use to further refine the MediaEval model: the set of values and organizational principles that we use to run the benchmark.

At the workshop, someone came up to me and mentioned that he had made use of the model in a different setting, 'I hope you don't mind', he said. Mind? No. Quite to the contrary. We hope that other benchmarking initiatives pick up the MediaEval model and elements of it and put them to use.

I have resolved to be more articulate about exactly what the MediaEval model is. There's no secret sauce or anything -- it's just a set of points that are important to us and that we try to observe as a community.

The MediaEval Model
The MediaEval model for benchmarking evaluation is an evolution of the classic model for an information retrieval benchmarking initiative (used by TREC, CLEF, TRECVid). It runs on a yearly cycle and culminates with a workshop where participants gather to discuss their results and plan future work.

The MediaEval attempts to push beyond existing practice, by maximizing the community involvement in the benchmark. Practically, we do this by emphasizing the following points:

1. Tasks are chosen using a survey, which gathers the opinion of the largest possible number of community members and potential MediaEval participants for the upcoming year.
2. Tasks follow the same overall schedule, but individual tasks are otherwise very autonomous and are managed by the Task Organizers.
3. The Tasks Organizers are encouraged to submit runs to their own tasks, but these runs do not count in the official ranking.
4. The Task Organizers are supported by a group of five core participants who pledge to complete the task "come hell or high water".
5. Each task has an official quantitative evaluation metric, which is used to rank the algorithms of the participating teams. The task also, however, promotes qualitative measures of algorithm goodness: i.e., the extent to which an algorithm embodies a creative and promising extension of the state of the art. These qualitative measures are recognized informally by awarding a set of prizes.

In interview footage from the MediaEval 2012 workshop, I discuss the challenge of forging consensus within the community.



One of the important parts of consensus building is collecting detailed and high-coverage information at the beginning of the year about what everyone in the community (and also potential members of the community) thinks. And so I am working here, going through not only the tasks proposals, but also other forms of feedback we've gotten from last year (questionnaires, emails) in order to make sure that we get the appropriate questions on the survey.

It always takes so much longer than I predict -- but it's definitely worth the effort.

Facebook will sell users their own content back 10 years from now

Tonight I have something like meta-purchase fatigue. My train back from Brussels was canceled and I went to the news stand and bought an International Herald Tribune as a consolation prize: it cost me three Euros. It contained a very interesting article entitled "Disruptions: Privacy Fades in Facebook Era". When I finally came home, I decided to re-read this online and send it to a friend.

But aaargh. The IHT site informs me that I have hit my 20 article limit for the month.

Hey! What's this 20 article limit thing about anyway? I just laid down my 3 Euros -- why can't I see the digital copy of this article.

OK. That's a bad attitude -- that's purchase fatigue, I can overcome that. I care about the content in the IHT -- it's worth something to me so maybe it's time to get an actual subscription. A few fantasies of having a paper delivered to my door in the morning (...and having the time to read it). Really, yes, let's do it. I need to support the news -- creating good news takes money.

Alas, the website is not going to let me do that: My attempts to make an impulse buy of home delivery are met with an error message "Unknown SOA error". There's the meta-purchase fatigue. You try to do the right thing -- spend your money to get something you value -- and somehow that doesn't work either.


The purchase fatigue that faces us in the future will be caused by Facebook. My prediction: In about 10 years, Facebook will start selling us back our historical posts.

Remember those pictures from that college party? Weren't they all gone? Now for a mere $29.99 Facebook will dig them out of its archive and present them to you, labeled with the names of your friends that you have forgotten and festooned with their comments.

Maybe that is the rant of a tired blogger, but otherwise it's also a darn good long term business strategy for Facebook -- if they can somehow fight the "purchase fatigue" that will arise trying to sell people back their own stuff.

At least they should circumvent meta-purchase fatigue and get the subscription service right: when I decide to shell out the cash and sign up for a subscription to get my own past delivered back to me, it would be nice if I didn't an "Unknown SOA error".

In the meantime, I have manged to circumvent the IHT paywall and have a look at the digital version of "Disruptions: Privacy Fades in Facebook Era". Problem solved for now.

And the whole thing distracted me from actually blogging about social multimedia sharing and privacy...

....or about the fact that Google doesn't love me and doesn't return anything useful for the query "purchase fatigue". "Purchase" is a modifier and not part of my search intent in this context, Google.

I know that not interpreting my query as an intent to purchase something is less likely to lead to ad clicks -- but please, really I'm tired of paying for stuff, humor me, really...

Using Narrative to Support Image Search

A strong system metaphor helps to align the needs and expectations with which a user approaches a multimedia search engine and the functionality and types of results that that search engine provides. My conviction on this point is so firm that I found myself dressed up as Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and competing as a finalist at the ACM Multimedia 2011 Grand Challenge in the Yahoo! Image Challenge.

Essentially, the story in the book runs that Alice enters, after a long fall, through a door into another world. Here, she encounters the fantastic and the unexpected, but her views are basically determined by two perspectives: one that she has when she grows to be very big and one that she has when she shrinks to be very small. The book plays with language and with logic and for this reason has a strong intellectual appeal to adults as well as holding the fascination of children.

We built a system based on this narrative, which offers users (in response to an arbitrary Flickr query) sets of unexpected yet fascinating images, created either from a "big" perspective or from a "small" perspective. The "Alice" metaphor tells the user to: (1) Expect the "big" and "small" perspectives (2) Expect a system that can be understood at two levels: as both engaging childlike curiosity and also meriting serious intellectual attention due to the way in which it uses language and statistics (3) Expect a system that will need a little bit of patience since the images appear a bit slowly (we're processing a flood of live Flickr results in the background), like the fading in of the Cheshire Cat.

The Grand Challenge requires participants to present their idea in exactly three minutes in a presentation that addresses the following points:

• What is your solution? Which challenge does it address? How does it address the challenge?
• Does your solution work? Is there evidence that it works?
• Can you demo the system?
• Is the solution generalizable to other problems? What are the limits of your approach?
• Can other people reproduce your results? How?
• Did the audience and the jury understand and ENJOY your presentation?

We used the three minutes to cover these points in a dialogue between Alice and Christoph Kofler (CK), first author on the Grand Challenge paper:

Kofler, C., Larson, M., Hanjalic, A. Alice's Worlds of Wonder: Exploiting Tags to Understand Images in terms of Size and Scale. ACM Multimedia 2011, Grand Challenge paper.

During the dialogue we demonstrated the system running live (We knew it was a risk to run a live demo, but luck was with us and the wireless network held up).

Alice's Worlds of Wonder: Three Minute Dialogue

(showing a rather standard opening slide)
CK: Alice, look at them out there, their image search experience is dry and boring.

Alice: We should show them our answer to the Yahoo! Image Challenge on Novel Image Understanding.

(showing system interface)
CK: The Wonderlands system runs on top of Flickr and sorts search results for the user at search time.

(dialogue during live demo)
Alice: Let’s show them how it works. Do we trust the wireless network?
CK: Yes. We need a Flickr query.
Alice: Let’s do “car”
CK: The Wonderlands system presents the user with the choice to enter “Alice’s Small World” or “Alice’s Big World”
Alice: Let’s choose Small World.

Alice (to audience): If you know me in "Alice in Wonderland", you know that in the story I shrink to become very small. This is the metaphor underlying the Small World of the Wonderlands system. It shrinks you, too, as a Flickr user, by putting you eye-to-eye with small objects pictured in small environments with limited range. You get the impression you have the perspective of a small being viewing the world from down low.

Still Alice: (to CK) Let’s choose Big World now. In the book, I also grow to be very big. The Big World makes you grow again. Objects are large and the perspective is broad.

You can imagine cases in which you were looking for person-sized cars --- here, the Big World would help you focus your search on the images that you really want.

CK: Should we explain how it works?

Alice: Yes.

CK: (Displays "Implicit Physics of Language" slide) We exploit a combination of user tags and the implicit physics of language.

Alice: Exactly.

Alice: Basically, your search engine knows something about the physics of the real world because it indexes large amounts of human language.

Certain queries give you the real-world size of objects: “the flower in her hand” returns a large number of results, so you can infer that a flower is small.

CK: Oh yes! And “the factory in her hand” returns no results so you know a factory is large.

Alice: Basically, the search engine is telling us that a girl holding a flower in her hand is a common situation, but that her holding a factory is not. We get this effect because physics dictates that something commonly held in a human hand must be small.

CK: (Displays with the entry window with the two doors) The sorting algorithm is straightforward. Alice’s Small World contains images whose tags tend to designate smaller objects and Alice’s Big World contains images whose tags tend to designate larger objects.

Alice: Exactly.

CK: So Alice, the system takes a fanciful and engaging perspective. But in order to carry out quantitative evaluation we can look at it in terms of scale. We achieve a weighted precision nearly three times random chance.
(Flash up under the two doors "Evaluation on 1,633 Flickr images from MIRFLICKR data set. 0.773 weighted precision")

Alice: So the scale numbers point to the conclusion that we are creating a genuine two-worlds experience for users.

CK: Right. But, Alice, do we need to stop at two worlds: big and small? Are there other worlds out there?

Alice: Well, Christoph, effectively the only limit is the speed at which we can query Flickr and Yahoo!. You know that the implicit physics of language works because of general physical principles. So, in theory, there are as many different worlds as there are interesting physical properties.

CK: But being Alice, you like the small and the big worlds, right?

Alice: Yes, I do. Shall we try another query?

CK: (Display final slide) Or we can just tell them where to download the system. You know, the code's online.

Alice: Yes, let them try it out! No more dry and boring image search for this group...(TIME UP!!)

Affect and concepts for multimedia retrieval (Halloween III)

This Halloween I just kept on noticing what I am calling "affect pumpkins". These are jack-o-lantern faces labeled with emotion words. Jack-o-lanterns and decorations (such as the ones in this image) that depict jack-o-lanterns are typical for celebrations of Halloween.

I don't remember having my jack-o-lanterns labeled with adjectives when I was a child, so I am rather curious about this phenomenon and have been observing it a bit. Apparently, the activity of giving jack-o-laterns emotion words is quite fun and is, all and all, a harmonious process, characterized by a lack of disagreement or other inter-personal strife. If you have happy jack-o-lantern, there appears to be a high degree of consensus about the applicability of the label 'happy'.

I contrast this smooth and fun pumpkin labeling procedure with the disagreement in the multimedia community that has apparently developed into full-fledged distate for what are referred to as "subjective user tags", tags that express feelings or personal perspectives. Such tags have been referred to as "imprecise and meaningless" in Liu et al. 2009 published at WWW (page 351) and my impression is that many, many researchers agree with this point of view. In the authors' defense, had they used what I feel as the more appropriate formulation of "imprecise and meaningless with respect to a certain subset of multimedia retrieval tasks", the community would still probably be on a rampage against personal and affective tags.

Sometimes it seems everyone has simply made this spontaneous decision to take up arms against the insight of Rosalind Picard, who in 1995 wrote, "Although affective annotations, like content annotations, will not be universal, they will still help reduce time searching for the 'right scene.' Both types of annotation are potentially powerful; we should be exploring them in digital audio and visual libraries." (from "TR 321" p. 11). Do we have a huge case of sour grapes? Have we decided that we have irreversibly failed over the past 15+ years to exploit affective image labels and are therefore now deciding that we should never have considered them potentially interesting in the first place?

Oh, I hope not. Just look at this wall and think about all the walls like this, all the jack-o-lantern pictures that were created this Halloween and posted to the Internet. There are too many pictures of Halloween pumpkins out there that we can afford to overlook the chance to organize them by affect. Of course, some people might hold that this silly pumpkin should actually also be considered a happy pumpkin: We can anticipate some disagreement. However, it is important to keep two points in mind: (1) Labels that are ostensibly 'objective' and have nothing to do with affect are also subject to lack of consensus on their applicability, e.g., the ambiguity on whether a depicted object is a 'pumpkin' and 'jack-o-lantern' discussed in my previous post. (2) Even if we do not agree on the exact affective label, we do have intuitions that we do not agree and on other possible interpretations. For example, someone who insists on 'silly' will also admit that someone else might consider this pumpkin 'happy', but that it would be less likely to expect anyone to find 'sad' as the most appropriate label.

Interestingly, in my observations, I have seen that the emotion word used to describe a jack-o-lantern seem to be chosen from one of two perspectives: Depicted in the image above are "pumpkin perspective" emotion words ('happy', 'silly', 'sad' and 'mad') which designate the emotion being experienced by the jack-o-lantern that explains the jack-o-lantern's expression. In the picture book page in the image from my previous post there is a mixture of this "pumpkin perspective" with a "people perspective". The book reads, "We'll make our jack-o-lanterns--it might be messy, but it's fun!" and then asks "Will yours be scary?" A jack-o-lantern is scary if it causes fear from the perspective of people looking at it. And then it goes on to ask "Happy? Sad?" which are "pumpkin perspective" words. And finally "A sweet or silly one?". Other perspectives are also possible: the affect label could reflect what the carver of the jack-o-lantern intended to achieve by making the pumpkin.

In my own work, I tend to insist on the importance of distinguishing these different perspectives, with the idea that if the underlying model of affect is complete and sound, it will provide a more stable foundation for building a system of annotation. However, in practical use, the affect labels don't need to distinguish the experiencer or understand the principle of empathic sympathy: we simply know a happy pumpkin when we see one and that of course makes us a little happy ourselves.

Dong Liu, Xian-Sheng Hua, Linjun Yang, Meng Wang, and Hong-Jiang Zhang. 2009. Tag ranking. In Proceedings of the 18th international conference on World wide web (WWW '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 351-360.

Rosalind W. Picard, Affective computing, MIT, Media Laboratory Perceptual Computing Section Technical Report 321, November 1995.