Newcastle University

I am a Lecturer in "Context Aware Computing". My research agenda is centered on "Computational Behaviour Analysis", which basically means that I am building computational (that is statistical) models that describe and shall help assessing human behaviour. The basis for this is the analysis of behavioural data that are captured in a pretty opportunistic way utilising a variety of sensing modalities, most notably pervasive / ubiquitous sensors (e.g., accelerometers, RFID, environmental sensors), cameras, or microphones. The modelling itself is agnostic in terms of the actual choice of sensing modalities as long as the relevant information for behaviour analysis is captured. Behaviour data are sequential by definition. Consequently, related modelling techniques are focussed on sequential models (for example of Markovian type). I am especially interested in quantitative assessments of human behaviour, which is of value for, e.g., skill assessment. My day-to-day work can probably best be summarised as applied machine learning for activity recognition.

The central theme of my research is to develop techniques and systems that actually have an impact on people's life. Therefore, my research is almost always connected to some practical application (in contrast to purely theoretical work) and I am keen on deploying systems I develop in the "wild", i.e., in real-world settings. The most prominent domain for this kind of work is health where I am working on computational assessments of behavioural phenotypes of, for example, Parkinson's, Dementia, or Autism. Within the Digital Interaction group I am involved in a number of projects that address these research themes from different angles.

contact me:

thomas.ploetz@newcastle.ac.uk

mobile: +44 7588 043643

landline: +44 191 246 4628

A (hopefully) up-to-date list of my publications including those from before my Newcastle time can be found on Mendeley:

• Ploetz T, Hammerla N, Rozga A, Reavis A, Call N, Abowd G. Automatic Assessment of Problem Behavior in Individuals with Developmental Disabilities. In: Proc. Int. Conf. Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp). 2012. In Press.
• Ploetz T, Chen C, Hammerla N, Abowd G. Automatic Synchronization of Wearable Sensors and Video-Cameras for Ground Truth Annotation – A Practical Approach. In: 16th Annual International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC). 2012, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. In Press.
• Seedhouse P, Olivier P, Preston A, Jackson D, Heslop P, Wagner J, Ploetz T, Ali S. Can a kitchen teach me French?: Using digital technology to learn French language and cuisine. Francophonie 2012, 46. In Press.
• Moeller A, Roalter L, Diewald S, Kranz M, Hammerla N, Olivier P, Ploetz T. GymSkill: A Personal Trainer for Physical Exercises. In: International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom). 2012, Lugano, Switzerland: IEEE. In Press.
• Thomaz E, Ploetz T, Essa I, Abowd G. Hydrostream: A Platform for Collecting, Annotating and Analyzing Water Pressure for Health Applications. In: Workshop on Personal Informatics in Practice: Improving Quality of Life Through Data (in conjunction with CHI). 2012, Austin, Texas, USA. In Press.
• Thomaz E, Ploetz T, Essa I, Abowd G. Interactive Techniques for Labeling Activities Of Daily Living to Assist Machine Learning. In: International Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare. 2012, Austin, Texas, USA.
• Moeller A, Hammerla N, Ploetz T, Roalter L, Diewald S, Olivier P, Kranz M. Physical Mobile Physical Exercises: Individualized Skill Assessment Using Mobile Interaction Devices. Pervasive and Mobile Computing 2012. In Press.
• Thomaz E, Bettadapura V, Reyes G, Sandesh M, Schindler G, Ploetz T, Abowd G, Essa I. Recognizing Water-Based Activities in the Home Through Infrastructure-Mediated Sensing. In: Proc. Int. Conf. Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp). 2012. In Press.
• Hooper C, Preston A, Balaam M, Seedhouse P, Pham C, Jackson D, Ploetz T, Ladha Cassim, Ladha Karim, Heslop Phil, Olivier P. The French Kitchen: Task-Based Learning in an Instrumented Kitchen. In: Proc. Int. Conf. Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp). 2012. In Press.
• Ploetz T, Moynihan P, Pham C, Olivier P. Activity Recognition and Healthier Food Preparation. In: Chen, L., Nugent, C.D., Biswas, J., Hoey, J, ed. Activity Recognition in Pervasive Intelligent Environments. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Atlantis Press, 2011, pp.313-339.
• Hammerla N, Ploetz T, Andras P, Olivier P. Assessing Motor Performance with PCA. In: International Workshop on Frontiers in Activity Recognition using Pervasive Sensing (in conjunction with Pervasive). 2011, San Francisco, California, USA.
• McNaney R, Lindsay S, Ladha K, Ladha C, Schofield G, Ploetz T, Hammerla N, Jackson D, Walker R, Miller N, Olivier P. Cueing for drooling in Parkinson's disease. In: 29th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). 2011, Vancouver, Canada: ACM Press.
• Ploetz T, Hammerla N, Olivier P. Feature Learning for Activity Recognition in Ubiquitous Computing. In: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'11). 2011, Barcelona, Spain: AAAI Press.
• Moeller A, Scherr J, Roalter L, Diewald S, Kranz M, Hammerla N, Ploetz T, Olivier P. GymSkill: Mobile Exercise Skill Assessment to Support Personal Health and Fitness. In: International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive). 2011, San Francisco, California, USA.
• Apabhai S, Gorman GS, Sutton L, Elson JL, Ploetz T, Turnbull DM, Trenell MI. Habitual Physical Activity in Mitochondrial Disease. PLoS One 2011, 6(7), e22294.
• Seedhouse P, Ali S, Jackson D, Ploetz T, Olivier P. Learning French in a Digital Kitchen. In: International Conference of the European Association on Computer-Assisted Language Learning. 2011, Nottingham, UK.
• Ploetz T, Fink G. Markov Models for Handwriting Recognition. London, UK: Springer, 2011.
• Newton JL, Pairman J, Hallsworth K, Moore S, Ploetz T, Trenell MI. Physical activity intensity but not sedentary activity is reduced in chronic fatigue syndrome and is associated with autonomic regulation. QJM 2011, 104(8), 681-687.
• Hoey J, Ploetz T, Jackson D, Monk A, Pham C, Olivier P. Rapid specification and automated generation of prompting systems to assist people with dementia. Pervasive and Mobile Computing 2011, 7(3), 299-318.
• Ploetz T, Pham C, Olivier P. Sensor-Based Actor Identification in the Kitchen. In: Workshop on Frontiers in Activity Recognition using Pervasive Sensing, Pervasive Computing. 2011, San Francisco, California, USA.
• Wagner J, van Halteren A, Hoonhout J, Ploetz T, Pham C, Moynihan P, Jackson D, Ladha C, Ladha K, Olivier P. Towards a pervasive kitchen infrastructure for measuring cooking competence. In: International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (PervasiveHealth'11). 2011, Dublin, Ireland: IEEE.
• Ploetz T, Pham C, Olivier P. Who is Cooking? Sensor-Based Actor Identification in the Kitchen. In: International Workshop on Frontiers in Activity Recognition using Pervasive Sensing (in conjunction with Pervasive). 2011, San Francisco, California, USA.
• Pham C, Ploetz T, Olivier P. A Dynamic Time Warping Approach to Real-Time Activity Recognition for Food Preparation. In: Ambient Intelligence: First International Joint Conference. 2010, Málaga, Spain: Springer.
• Schneider M, Kröner A, Stephan P, Ploetz T, Kawsar F, Kortuem G. Digital object memories in the internet of things workshop (DOME-IoT 2010). In: UbiComp'10 - Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. 2010, Copenhagen, Denmark: ACM.
• Ploetz T, Fink G, Sabri M, Vajda S, ed. Frontiers in Arabic Handwriting Recognition (workshop proceedings). Dortmund, Germany: TU Dortmund, 2010.
• Ploetz T. How to do good research in Activity Recognition?. In: Workshop on “How to do good research in Activity Recognition” (in conjunction with Pervasive). 2010, Helsinki, Finland.
• Pham C, Ploetz T, Olivier P. Real-Time Activity Recognition for Food Preparation. In: IEEE International Conference on Computing and Communication Technologies. 2010, Allahabad, India.
• Hammerla N, Ploetz T, Vajda S, Fink G. Towards Feature Learning for HMM-based Offline Handwriting Recognition. In: International Workshop on Frontiers of Arabic Handwriting Recognition. 2010, Istanbul, Turkey.
• Hennecke M, Ploetz T, Fink G, Schmalenstroeer J, Haeb-Umbach R. A Hierarchical Approach to Unsupervised Shape Calibration of Microphone Array Networks. In: IEEE Workshop on Stat. Signal Proc. 2009, Cardiff, UK: IEEE.
• Schauerte B, Ploetz T, Fink G. A Multi-Modal Attention System for Smart Environments. In: International Conference on Computer Vision Systems (ICVS). 2009, Liège, Belgium.
• Vajda S, Ramforth T, Ploetz T, Fink G. Camera-Based Analysis of Whiteboard Notes. In: International Workshop on Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition. 2009, Barcelona, Spain.
• Vajda S, Ploetz T, Fink G. Layout analysis for camera-based whiteboard notes. Journal of Universal Computer Science 2009, 15(18), 3307-3324.
• Ploetz T, Fink G. Markov Models for Offline Handwriting Recognition: A Survey. International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition 2009, 12(4), 269-298.
• Schauerte B, Richarz J, Ploetz T, Thurau C, Fink G. Multi-Modal and Multi-Camera Attention in Smart Environments. In: International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI). 2009, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
• Lienemann K, Ploetz T, Fink G. Automatic Classification of NMR Spectra by Ensembles of Local Experts. In: International Conference on Structural, Syntactic, and Statistical Pattern Recognition. 2008, Tampa, Florida, USA.
• Moeller B, Ploetz T, Fink G. Calibration-free Camera Hand-Over for Fast and Reliable Person Tracking in Multi-Camera Setup. In: International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR). 2008, Tampa, Florida, USA.
• Ploetz T, Thurau C, Fink G. Camera-based Whiteboard Reading: New Approaches to a Challenging Task. In: International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition. 2008, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
• Fink G, Ploetz T. Developing Pattern Recognition Systems Based on Markov Models: The ESMERALDA Framework. Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis 2008, 18(2), 207-215.
• Kray C, Larsen LB, Olivier P, Biemans M, van Bunningen A, Fetter M, Jay T, Khan VJ, Leitner G, Mulder I, Muller J, Ploetz T, de Vallejo IL. Evaluating Ubiquitous Systems with Users (Workshop Summary). In: Constructing Ambient Intelligence: AmI 2007 Workshops. 2008, Darmstadt, Germany: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
• Lienemann K, Ploetz T, Pestel S. NMR-based urine analysis in rats: Prediction of proximal tubule kidney toxicity and phospholipidosis. Journal of Pharmacologial and Toxicological Methods 2008, 58(1), 41-49.
• Ploetz T, Fink G. On the use of Empirically Determined Impulse Responses for Improving Distant Talking Speech Recognition. In: Joint Workshop on Hands-free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays. 2008, Trento, Italy.
• Richarz J, Ploetz T, Fink G. Real-time Detection and Interpretation of 3D Deictic Gestures for Interaction With an Intelligent Environment. In: International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR). 2008, Tampa, Florida, USA.
• Ploetz T, Richarz J, Fink G. Robust Hand Detection in Still Video Images Using a Combination of Salient Regions and Color Cues for Interaction With an Intelligent Environment. Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis 2008, 18(3), 417-430.
• Lienemann K, Ploetz T, Fink G. SVM Ensemble Classification of NMR Spectra Based on Different Configurations of Data Processing Techniques. In: International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR). 2008, Tampa, Florida, USA.
• Kleine-Cosack C, Ploetz T, Fink G. Towards a Human Centered Infrastructure for KNX enabled Intelligent Environments. In: KNX Scientific Conference. 2008, Belgium.
• Ploetz T, Kleine-Cosack C, Fink G. Towards Human Centered Ambient Intelligence. In: European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI). 2008, Nuremberg, Germany.