School of Computing 2010-0501 Dealing with Activities with Diffuse Boundaries

Activity recognition has mainly focused to date on identifying repetitious and/or clearly delineated events. Our experience, drawing on many years’ research in smart and sensorised systems, leads us to observe that many (if not most) interesting activities fall into a different category: sporadically occurring and poorly differentiated from other concurrent activities. This implies that decision-making remains uncertain across the entire system, and suggests that progress would be greatly supported by standard evaluation methodologies and data sets.