Towards the generation of dialogue acts in socio-affective ECAs: a corpus-based prosodic analysis

We present a corpus-based prosodic analysis with the aim of uncovering the relationship between dialogue acts, personality and prosody in view to providing guidelines for the ECA Greta’s text-to-speech system. The corpus used is the SEMAINE corpus, featuring four different personalities, further annotated for dialogue acts and prosodic features. In order to show the importance of the choice of dialogue act taxonomy, two different taxonomies were used, the first corresponding to Searle’s taxonomy of speech acts and the second, inspired by Bunt’s DIT++, including a division of directive acts into finer categories. Our results show that finer-grained distinctions are important when choosing a taxonomy. We also show with some preliminary results that the prosodic correlates of dialogue acts are not always as cited in the literature and prove more complex and variable. By studying the realisation of different directive acts, we also observe differences in the communicative strategies of the ECA depending on personality, in view to providing input to a speech system.     

Direction prediction for avoiding occlusion in visual surveillance

Occurrence of occlusion while providing visual surveillance leads to anarchy as the track of the subject under motion may be lost. This often results into the failure of the surveillance system. The approach of predicting motion of moving subjects and hence the chances of their mutual occlusion gives an upper hand to surveillance system to take in-time necessary action towards mitigation of loss of track during dynamic occlusion. Direction of motion of a moving subject plays a major role while studying its motion. Direction along with the velocity of a subject in a 3D plane completely describes the motion of any subject. This article proposes a model‘-based approach for direction prediction of a moving subject in a 3D global plane as acquired in a 2D camera plane. The proposed approach uses the eight discrete directions of motion as proposed in and models different directions. The proposed direction prediction method is experimentally verified with six different classifiers, i.e. regression analysis, simple logistic regression, MLP, k-NN, SVM and Bays classifier over existing as well as self-acquired databases. The initial simulation results are motivating as the overall accuracies achieved through different classifiers are of the range of 87–94 \(\%\), which advocates the suitability of the said approach.     

Massively parallel Lucas Kanade optical flow for real-time video processing applications

This paper deals with dense optical flow estimation from the perspective of the trade-off between quality of the estimated flow and computational cost which is required by real-world applications. We propose a fast and robust local method, denoted by eFOLKI, and describe its implementation on GPU. It leads to very high performance even on large image formats such as 4 K (3,840 × 2,160) resolution. In order to assess the interest of eFOLKI, we first present a comparative study with currently available GPU codes, including local and global methods, on a large set of data with ground truth. eFOLKI appears significantly faster while providing quite accurate and highly robust estimated flows. We then show, on four real-time video processing applications based on optical flow, that eFOLKI reaches the requirements both in terms of estimated flows quality and of processing rate.     

QoS aggregation for service orchestrations based on workflow pattern rules and MCDM method: evaluation at design time and runtime

Service consumers satisfaction is considered today as one of the main concern to be ensured by service providers, especially with the spread of concurrency and the increase of functionally equivalent services. This satisfaction is closely related to quality of service (QoS) perceived by service consumers. In this context, we propose an approach to determine the satisfaction degree corresponding to the QoS of service-based applications, with regard to service consumers’ QoS expectations. Our approach is based on a preference model, which is built only on the basis of service consumer’s provided information. This preference model is also based on the 2-additive Choquet operator that takes into account preferential dependencies. In this paper, we target both design time and runtime aggregation of QoS of service-based applications.     

The vehicle routing problem with restricted mixing of deliveries and pickups

The vehicle routing problem with deliveries and pickups is one of the main problems within reverse logistics. This paper focuses on an important assumption that divides the literature on the topic, namely the restriction that all deliveries must be completed before pickups can be made. A generalised model is presented, together with a mathematical formulation and its resolution. The latter is carried out by adopting a suitable implementation of the reactive tabu search metaheuristic. Results show that significant savings can be achieved by allowing a mixture of delivery and pickup loads on-board and yet not incurring delays and driver inconvenience.     

Active XML-based Web data integration

Today, the Web is the largest source of information worldwide. There is currently a strong trend for decision-making applications such as Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) to move onto the Web, especially in the cloud. Integrating data into DW/BI applications is a critical and time-consuming task. To make better decisions in DW/BI applications, next generation data integration poses new requirements to data integration systems, over those posed by traditional data integration. In this paper, we propose a generic, metadata-based, service-oriented, and event-driven approach for integrating Web data timely and autonomously. Beside handling data heterogeneity, distribution and interoperability, our approach satisfies near real-time requirements and realize active data integration. For this sake, we design and develop a framework that utilizes Web standards (e.g., XML and Web services) for tackling data heterogeneity, distribution and interoperability issues. Moreover, our framework utilizes Active XML (AXML) to warehouse passive data as well as services to integrate active and dynamic data on-the-fly. AXML embedded services and changes detection services ensure near real-time data integration. Furthermore, the idea of integrating Web data actively and autonomously revolves around mining events logged by the data integration environment. Therefore, we propose an incremental XML-based algorithm for mining association rules from logged events. Then, we define active rules dynamically upon mined data to automate and reactivate integration tasks. Finally, as a proof of concept, we implement a framework prototype as a Web application using open-source tools.     

Static Strategies for Worksharing with Unrecoverable Interruptions

One has a large workload that is “divisible”—its constituent work’s granularity can be adjusted arbitrarily—and one has access to p remote worker computers that can assist in computing the workload. How can one best utilize the workers? Complicating this question is the fact that each worker is subject to interruptions (of known likelihood) that kill all work in progress on it. One wishes to orchestrate sharing the workload with the workers in a way that maximizes the expected amount of work completed. Strategies are presented for achieving this goal, by balancing the desire to checkpoint often—thereby decreasing the amount of vulnerable work at any point—vs. the desire to avoid the context-switching required to checkpoint. Schedules must also temper the desire to replicate work, because such replication diminishes the effective remote workforce. The current study demonstrates the accessibility of strategies that provably maximize the expected amount of work when there is only one worker (the case p=1) and, at least in an asymptotic sense, when there are two workers (the case p=2); but the study strongly suggests the intractability of exact maximization for p≥2 computers, as work replication on multiple workers joins checkpointing as a vehicle for decreasing the impact of work-killing interruptions. We respond to that challenge by developing efficient heuristics that employ both checkpointing and work replication as mechanisms for decreasing the impact of work-killing interruptions. The quality of these heuristics, in expected amount of work completed, is assessed through exhaustive simulations that use both idealized models and actual trace data.     

Urban flood risk assessment using sewer flooding databases

Sustainable water management is a global challenge for the 21st century. One key aspect remains protection against urban flooding. The main objective is to ensure or maintain an adequate level of service for all inhabitants. However, level of service is still difficult to assess and the high-risk locations difficult to identify. In this article, we propose a methodology, which (i) allows water managers to measure the service provided by the urban drainage system with regard to protection against urban flooding; and (ii) helps stakeholders to determine effective strategies for improving the service provided. One key aspect of this work is to use a database of sewer flood event records to assess flood risk. Our methodology helps urban water managers to assess the risk of sewer flooding; this approach does not seek to predict flooding but rather to inform decision makers on the current level of risk and on actions which need to be taken to reduce the risk. This work is based on a comprehensive definition of risk, including territorial vulnerability and perceptions of urban water stakeholders. This paper presents the results and the methodological contributions from implementing the methodology on two case studies: the cities of Lyon and Mulhouse.     

Dual-color fluorescence lifetime correlation spectroscopy to quantify protein-protein interactions in live cell

Dual-color fluorescence correlation spectroscopy is an interesting method to quantify protein interaction in living cells. But, when performing these experiments, one must compensate for a known spectral bleed through artifact that corrupts cross-correlation data. In this article, problems with crosstalk were overcome with an approach based on fluorescence lifetime correlation spectroscopy (FLCS). We show that FLCS applied to dual-color EGFP and mCherry cross-correlation allows the determination of protein-protein interactions in living cells without the need of spectral bleed through calibration. The methodology was validated by using EGFP-mCherry tandem in comparison with coexpressed EGFP and mCherry in live cell. The dual-color FLCS experimental procedure where the different laser intensities do not have to be controlled during experiment is really very helpful to study quantitatively protein interactions in live sample.     

Synthesis and structure-activity study of quaternary ammonium functionalized beta-cyclodextrin-carboxymethylcellulose polymers

Carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) and beta-cyclodextrin (beta-CD)-based polymers functionalized with two types of quaternary ammonium compounds (QACs), the alkaquat DMB-451 (N-alkyl (50% C14, 40% C12, 10% C10) dimethylbenzylammonium chloride) (DMD-451) named polymer DMB-451, and FMB 1210-8 (a blend of 32 w% N-alkyl (50% C14, 40% C12, 10% C10) dimethylbenzylammonium chloride and 48 w% of didecyldimethylammonium chloride) named polymer FMB 1210-8, were synthethized and characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The antimicrobial activities of these polymers against Eschericia coli were also evaluated at 25 degrees C in wastewater. The results have indicated that the polymer FMB 1210-8 possesses a high-affinity binding with bacterial cells that induces a rapid disinfection process. Moreover, in the same experimental conditions of disinfection (mixture of 1.0 g of polymer and 100 mL of wastewater), the polymer FMB 1210-8 has a higher antimicrobial efficiency (99.90%) than polymer DMB-451 (92.8%). This phenomenon might be associated to a stronger interaction with bacterial cells due to stronger binding affinity for E. coli cells and greater killing efficiency of the C10 alkyl chains QAC of polymer FMB 1210-8 to disrupt the bacterial cell membrane as compared to N-alkyl (50% C14, 40% C12, 10% C10) dimethylbenzylammonium chloride. Together, these results suggest that the polymer FMB 1210-8 could constitute a good disinfectant against Escherichia coli, which could be advantageously used in wastewater treatments due to the low toxicity of beta-CD and CMC, and moderated toxicity of FMB 1210-8 to human and environment.