An agent-based self-adaptation architecture for implementing smart devices in Smart Space

Smart Space is a major currently challenging domain that includes ubiquitous, grid, and pervasive computing to provide intelligence, insight, and vision for emerging world of intelligent environment, products, services and human interaction. Smart Space consists of various objects (devices and applications) and, their extremely tight integration of and coordination between information world and physical resources. In Smart Space, people are allowed to acquire useful information and control devices anytime and anywhere with various smart devices. However the physical world where devices are deployed has much uncertainty and uncontrollable conditions, so that it is impossible to make devices suited to all situations. To achieve user satisfaction and overcome the system failure, devices in Smart Space must be dependable, secure, safe, and efficient, and operate in real-time. In addition, they must be scalable, cost-effective and adaptive. Especially, to deal with uncertainty and uncontrollable condition, devices in Smart Space could be more intelligent in the adaptation. In this paper, we propose an agent-based self-adaptation architecture for implementing smart devices in Smart Space. A self-adaptive smart device reasons about its state and environment, and adapts itself at runtime automatically and dynamically in response to changes. Also we present an adaptation mechanism used to implementing a self-adaptive system.     

Multimodal integration

Advances in multimedia, virtual reality, and immersive environments have expanded human computer interaction beyond text and vision to include touch, gestures, voice, and 3D sound. Although well developed single modalities for communication already exist, we do not really understand the general problem of designing integrated multimodal systems. We explore this issue and the diverse approaches to it, with emphasis on a generic platform to support multimodal interaction     

基于多媒体融合的图像检索系统的实现

提出一种融合了文本、语音、图像等信息特征的图像检索方案,并以MATLAB为平台构建了一种基于语音识别技术的新型图像检索系统.与基于文本或基于内容的图像检索系统相比,该系统既提高了检索性能,又使得人机交互更加便利.     

新一代(第四代)人机交互的概念框架特征及关键技术

人机交互是研究人与计算机之间通过相互理解的交流与通信,在最大程度上为人们完成信息管理,服务和处理等功能的一门技术科学.本文给出新一代(第四代)人机交互的概念框架和其四个标志性特征,即:(1)具有多模感知(听觉,视觉,手势,笔势等)功能的人机交互方式;(2)可进行基于Agent的听、视觉对话,作为人机交互的界面;(3)具有Internet数据仓库和基于内容检索的知识处理能力,作为人机交互内容;(4)可以在二维或虚拟的三维环境中实现人机通信,作为人机交互的环境.文中给出了解决和实现该四大特征的关键技术,描述了实验系统平台的全面功能,可以为同类研究人员作参考.     

智能家居控制系统的研究与发展

智能家居是21 世纪最重要的新兴产业.这是在融合了大量自动化技术、网络通讯技术和传感器技术的基础之上发展起来的.由于连接设备多,相互之间信息耦合强度大,智能家居的系统构成和通讯方式正在趋于复杂化.智能家居技术总体上划分为两个层面:一是家居生活过程的自动化,二是家居生活的感知学习及对生活需求的智能响应.这两方面的技术实现通常独立于家居设备存在,但又必须和所有家居设备进行通讯互联,构成一类智能控制的技术平台.其中包括可扩展的功能设计空间及可组态的人机交互环境,随时适应家居生活需求的变化.在云计算、云控制和云服务技术快速发展的今天,连接云环境的智能家居技术的发展也是指日可待的.     

Towards Human-Centred Intelligent Systems — The Intelligent Assistant

In this paper, we describe some abstract features of human/machine interaction systems that are required for the production of intelligent behaviour. We introduce a subset of intelligent systems called human-centered intelligent systems (HCIS) and argue that such systems must be autonomous, robust and adaptive in order to be intelligent. We also propose soft computing as a promising new technique that can be used to build HCIS, and present examples where this is already being done. The paper defines flexibility to be a combination of the often-conflicting requirements of robustness and adaptability, and based on this we claim that the right balance between these two features is necessary to achieve intelligent behaviour.We describe the intelligent assistant (IA) system and its various components which automatically perform helpful tasks for its user, so as to enable the user to improve productivity. These tasks include time, information and communication management. Time management involves planning and scheduling, decision making and learning user habits. Information management involves information seeking and filtering, information fusion, decision making and learning user preferences. Communication management involves recognising user behaviour and learning user priorities. All these tasks depend on many factors including the type of activity, its originator, the mood of the user, past experience, and the priority of the task. The IA uses a multimodal interface with conventional interfaces such as keyboard and mouse enhanced to include vision, speech and natural language processing. The inclusion of such extra modalities extends the capabilities of existing systems at the cost of introducing extra complexity. The IA is 'smart' because it has the knowledge about tasks and the capability to learn and adapt to new interactions with its user and with other systems.     

Clever computers-why should engineers use AI?

Interest in AI began in the 1950s, when it was realised that the computer could be used to simulate theories of mental processes. Because it can accurately reveal the true implications of such complex theories, the computer is a valuable tool for furthering our understanding of human thought processes and perhaps of intelligence itself. Work done under the AI banner can be grouped very roughly into two areas: those aspects concerned with interaction with the world, and what might be termed higher mental functions. The former includes vision, speech perception, sonar interpretation, speech generation and robotics. Here, the authors focus on the higher functions: such activities as playing chess, planning, proving theorems and solving problems     

家庭信息化中云计算技术的应用

文章提出一种基于云计算的家庭信息化系统架构体系,该体系通过家庭内部网络和面向家庭的云平台的交互来实现家庭内部智能设备的远程控制,家庭信息化应用能够利用云平台的开放共享服务来满足用户的实际需求,从而实现家庭信息化与云计算的相互融合。     

Animated Talking Head with Personalized 3D Head Model

Natural Human-Computer Interface requires integration of realistic audio and visual information for perception and display. An example of such an interface is an animated talking head displayed on the computer screen in the form of a human-like computer agent. This system converts text to acoustic speech with synchronized animation of mouth movements. The talking head is based on a generic 3D human head model, but to improve realism, natural looking personalized models are necessary. In this paper, we report a semi-automatic method for adapting a generic head model to 3D range data of a human head obtained from a 3D-laser range scanner. This personalized model is incorporated into the talking head system. With texture mapping, the personalized model offers a more natural and realistic look than the generic model. The model created with the proposed method compares favorable to generic models.     

机器视觉技术、标准及安全产业应用

聚焦机器视觉技术及标准化,分析了机器视觉、计算机视觉与人类视觉的异同,列举了与机器视觉相关的技术,介绍了网络信息安全、智能监控和智能交通等机器视觉产业典型应用,以及国际及国内主流标准化组织针对机器视觉技术、系统和应用的标准化工作进展、现状和布局。重点介绍了VCM和DCM等涉及机器视觉核心技术——机器视觉编码标准的工作,以及机器视觉系统和应用标准化组织。在此基础上,分析了机器视觉技术研究和标准化的未来发展方向。     

基于限制性玻尔兹曼机的微博主题分类

智慧城市依赖于对大数据的充分利用。近年来,随着移动互联网的发展,在线微博平台,比如新浪微博、Twitter等,已经成为了大数据的主要来源之一。微博平台上产生的海量短文文本信息使用户很难找到自己感兴趣主题的相关信息。本文提出了一种基于限制性玻尔兹曼机的微博短文本的主题分类方法。通过对短文本进行主题建模,挖掘出潜在主题信息,根据短文本的潜在主题信息可实现对短文本的主题分类。     

Infrastructure for Intelligent Automation Services in the Smart Grid

The electricity grid is undergoing a radical transformation from a production-driven to a demand-driven energy delivery platform known as the smart grid. The integration of a large amount of renewable and distributed energy resources, together with new patterns of electricity production, accentuates the need for research in information and communication technologies to control bi-directional energy flows. The European FP7 project: “Energy Demand Aware Open Services for Smart Grid Intelligent Automation” is contributing to this research by providing an intelligent infrastructure for service deployment for the smart grid. The project defines a system architecture that provides interoperability between wireless sensors in home area networks connected over the Internet to a service provider function deployed in a cloud infrastructure. A key component in this infrastructure is the Home Energy Controlling Hub that, on the one hand, provides a platform for monitoring and aggregation of electricity consumption data from devices and appliances and, on the other hand, is the link between the deployed intelligent automation services and the home. To ensure openness and simplicity, the proposed infrastructure is based on the representational state transfer style architecture. This is adopted by implementing the emerging ZigBee IP and Smart Energy Profile 2.0 standards that to a wide extend conform with the Internet Protocol suite and state-of-the art web services development.     

A multimedia front-end for an expert network management system

A multimedia natural-language interface for an expert network-management system is described. The different media discussed are speech, text, and graphics. An object-oriented, multimedia interaction language called Milan is used to describe the multimedia information. Application of the multimedia interface to a digital data services (DDS) network is illustrated. It is believed that such multimedia front ends will play a major role in the design of intelligent human-machine interfaces     

基于Android平台的智能英语发音训练系统的设计与研究

随着计算机科学技术的发展,英语学习软件的研发和应用数量也逐渐增多.在英语的学习中,智能英语发音训练是练习英语口语的重要部分,目前在英语的发音训练研究中语音识别技术受到高度的关注.随着移动互联网技术的发展,基于Android平台的便携移动设备作为安装英语发音辅助学习系统的主要工具得到了广泛的应用.本文对Android应用程序和英语教学中的英语发音训练进行了分析和研究,在Android平台的基础之上提出了智能英语发音训练系统设计的方案.     

Audio-Visual Biometrics

Biometric characteristics can be utilized in order to enable reliable and robust-to-impostor-attacks person recognition. Speaker recognition technology is commonly utilized in various systems enabling natural human computer interaction. The majority of the speaker recognition systems rely only on acoustic information, ignoring the visual modality. However, visual information conveys correlated and complimentary information to the audio information and its integration into a recognition system can potentially increase the system's performance, especially in the presence of adverse acoustic conditions. Acoustic and visual biometric signals, such as the person's voice and face, can be obtained using unobtrusive and user-friendly procedures and low-cost sensors. Developing unobtrusive biometric systems makes biometric technology more socially acceptable and accelerates its integration into every day life. In this paper, we describe the main components of audio-visual biometric systems, review existing systems and their performance, and discuss future research and development directions in this area     

Recent advances in the automatic recognition of audiovisual speech

Visual speech information from the speaker's mouth region has been successfully shown to improve noise robustness of automatic speech recognizers, thus promising to extend their usability in the human computer interface. In this paper, we review the main components of audiovisual automatic speech recognition (ASR) and present novel contributions in two main areas: first, the visual front-end design, based on a cascade of linear image transforms of an appropriate video region of interest, and subsequently, audiovisual speech integration. On the latter topic, we discuss new work on feature and decision fusion combination, the modeling of audiovisual speech asynchrony, and incorporating modality reliability estimates to the bimodal recognition process. We also briefly touch upon the issue of audiovisual adaptation. We apply our algorithms to three multisubject bimodal databases, ranging from small- to large-vocabulary recognition tasks, recorded in both visually controlled and challenging environments. Our experiments demonstrate that the visual modality improves ASR over all conditions and data considered, though less so for visually challenging environments and large vocabulary tasks.     

基于模糊控制的智能车系统设计

随着汽车工业的发展,汽车智能化成为大势所趋。智能汽车是一个集环境感知、规划决策、自主控制等多种功于一体的综合系统,它集中地运用了计算机技术、人工智能与自动控制技术、现代传感器技术、信息与通信等技术,是典型的高新技术的综合体。通过以四轮车模为研究对象,以MC9S12XS128单片机为主控芯片,设计并实现了一个基于模糊控制的智能车控制系统。通过仿真与实验,证明所提出的控制方法能很好完成智能车的导航控制。     

Integrated information modalities for human/machine communication: HuMaNet, an experimental system for conferencing

Ease of use is a major consideration as information systems become more sophisticated. A number of technologies for human/machine communication now permit natural interaction with complex systems for communication and computation. These technologies include automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis, audio and image compression, hands-free sound pickup, and hypertext methods for data base management. A digital teleconferencing system is described which integrates these information modalities for hands-free, voice-interactive operation. The system is implemented for voice, image, and data communication over public-switched commercial digital transport, namely, basic-rate ISDN.     

Estimating Travel Times of Field Engineers

BT's Work Manager platform uses a dynamic scheduler to plan the daily jobs of field engineers. In order to produce reliable schedules, Work Manager requires accurate estimates about the time an engineer spends on travelling from one job location to the next (inter-job time) and how much time is required to complete a job. We have developed a generic platform called Intelligent Travel Time Estimation and Management System (ITEMS) that we have used to derive a specialised version for modelling the behaviour of BT's mobile workforce. This travel time estimation system (TTE) receives job data every night and learns a new estimation model on a daily basis. When a new estimation model significantly differs from the currently used model, the new estimation model is automatically uploaded into Work Manager. The estimation algorithm has been used in a loosely coupled trial for about two years. Currently, we are undertaking trials of TTE — a tightly coupled Web-based system that fully automates the learning and management of estimation models, providing a graphical user interface that displays rich detail about the travel patterns of BT's mobile workforce. During the trial period we have observed that using TTE can quickly improve the accuracy of travel time estimates by up to 10%. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

语音识别实现多媒体检索的系统设计

设计并实现利用语音识别对多媒体信息检索的系统。该系统综合运用分类法．主题法和基于内容的多媒体检索方法,并嵌入语音识别技术。以达到综合运用多媒体低级内容特征和高级语义特征来提高检索性能的目的,同时使得人机交互更为便利。