Gun Source and Muzzle Head Detection

There is a surging need across the world for protection against gun violence. There are three main areas that we have identified as challenging in research that tries to curb gun violence: temporal location of gunshots, gun type prediction and gun source (shooter) detection. Our task is gun source detection and muzzle head detection, where the muzzle head is the round opening of the firing end of the gun. We would like to locate the muzzle head of the gun in the video visually, and identify who has fired the shot. In our formulation, we turn the problem of muzzle head detection into two sub-problems of human object detection and gun smoke detection. Our assumption is that the muzzle head typically lies between the gun smoke caused by the shot and the shooter. We have interesting results both in bounding the shooter as well as detecting the gun smoke. In our experiments, we are successful in detecting the muzzle head by detecting the gun smoke and the shooter.

An Adaptive Conversational Bot Framework

How can we enable users to heavily specify criteria for database queries in a user-friendly way? This paper describes a general framework of a conversational bot that extracts meaningful information from user's sentences, that asks subsequent questions to complete missing information, and that adjusts its questions and information-extraction parameters for later conversations depending on users' behavior. Additionally, we provide a comparison of existing tools and give novel techniques to implement such framework. Finally, we exemplify the framework with a bot to query movies in a database, whose code is available for Microsoft employees.