We introduce a new problem domain for activity recognition: the analysis of children’s social and communicative behaviors based on video and audio data. We specifically target interactions between children aged 1–2 years and an adult. Such interactions arise naturally in the diagnosis and treatment of developmental disorders such as autism. We introduce a new publicly-available dataset containing over 160 sessions of a 3–5 minute child-adult interaction. In each session, the adult examiner followed a semistructured play interaction protocol which was designed to elicit a broad range of social behaviors. We identify the key technical challenges in analyzing these behaviors, and describe methods for decoding the interactions. We present experimental results that demonstrate the potential of the dataset to drive interesting research questions, and show preliminary results for multi-modal activity recognition. 1.

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This paper presents a method to predict social saliency, the likelihood of joint attention, given an input image or video by leveraging the social interaction data captured by first person cameras. Inspired by electric dipole moments, we introduce a social formation feature that encodes the geometric relationship between joint attention and its so-cial formation. We learn this feature from the first person social interaction data where we can precisely measure the locations of joint attention and its associated members in 3D. An ensemble classifier is trained to learn the geometric relationship. Using the trained classifier, we predict social saliency in real-world scenes with multiple social groups including scenes from team sports captured in a third per-son view. Our representation does not require directional measurements such as gaze directions. A geometric analy-sis of social interactions in terms of the F-formation theory is also presented. 1.