Supporting the creative drive: investigating paralinguistic voice as a mode of interaction for artists with upper limb disabilities

For people with upper limb disabilities visual art is an important activity that allows for expression of individuality and independence. They show remarkable endurance, patience and determination to adapt their remaining capabilities to create visual art. There are significant advantages of digital technologies in assisting artists with upper limb disabilities. Paralinguistic voice recognition technologies have proven to be a particularly promising mode of interaction. Despite these benefits, technological support for people with upper limb disabilities to create visual art is scarce. This paper reports on a number of case studies of several artists with upper limb disabilities. These case studies illustrate the struggles they face to be creative and also show the significant advantages of digital technologies in assisting such artists. An investigation into people’s ability to use the volume of their voice to control cursor movement to create drawings on the screen is also reported. With motivation, training and practise, use of volume to control drawing tasks shows great promise. It is believed that paralinguistic voice has wider implications beyond assisting artists with upper limb disabilities, such as: an alternative mode of interaction for disabled people to perform tasks other than creating visual art, alternative mode of interaction for hands busy environments and as a voice training system for people with speech impairments.     

改善PLC的兼容性和功能灵活性

兼容性方面的问题可能使整个升级项目趋于停滞。威勒工程公司是一家原始设备制造商(OEM)。当他们在对无菌包装制造机械的驱动系统进行升级时,遇到了新系统与现有控制器之间无法兼容的问题,并因此限制了设备功能的充分发挥。这时,一种具有针对性的PLC整合工程解决方案不仅提供了威勒工程公司所需要的机器操作界面,而且显著提高了PLC应用上的灵活性。     

Analysis of the influence of binder properties on the mechanical response of bituminous mixtures

Asphalt mixtures are composed by a mass of aggregates (more than 90% of their total weight), which are bonded by a bituminous binder. Despite the fact that the binder is not the main component of these materials (around 5% of their total weight), it exerts a high influence on their mechanical response. In this sense, the service life of asphalt pavements will directly depend on the type of binder used, and thus an adequate choice is crucial to construct more durable roads. Because of this fact, it is necessary to know the characteristics of the bitumen in order to reduce the impact of different distresses that appear on roads. For this purpose, this paper studies the influence of the binder properties in the appearance of the main distresses that affect asphalt pavements around the world (stripping, fatigue cracking and plastic deformations). Five bitumens with different properties have been analysed during this research using diverse binder (UCL, multiple stress creep and recovery test and dynamic shear rheometer time sweep) and mixture (water sensitivity, wheel tracking and UGR-FACT) tests. The results obtained show that the properties of the binder influence the long-term performance of bituminous mixtures. In this sense, it can be said that flexible binders which are able to recover plastic deformations could extend the service life of the pavements.     

Normalized Interactions between autonomous agents

The CEC Project GOAL (Esprit 6283) aims to develop generic software tools to support a new project management paradigm, in which projects are collaborative, decentralised and inter-organizational. To support inter-organizational interaction, communication and cooperation, we are developing a design framework for formalizing the flow of information between organizations, specifying access to and provision of project services, and defining project-wide standards and procedures. This framework is based on normalizing interactions between autonomous software agents by specifying messages and protocols for inter-agent communication and cooperation. This paper reviews the framework, and then focusses on the specification and implementation of a case study, the automation of a distributed document review procedure. This is both a successful proof of concept and a demonstration of how Artificial Intelligence technologies can support inter-organizational project management. It also points the way to agent brokering, an enhancement of object brokering in distributed open systems, where the satisfaction of service requests can be subject to negotiation.Supported by CEC Esprit Project GOAL (Esprit 6283) and CEC Esprit BRA Medlar II (Esprit 6471).Supported by CEC Esprit Project GOAL (Esprit 6283).     

Tetra-trees properties in graphic interaction

The localization of the components of an object near to a device before obtaining the real interaction is usually determined by means of a proximity measurement to the device of the object’s features. In order to do this efficiently, hierarchical decompositions are used, so that the features of the objects are classified into several types of cells, usually rectangular.In this paper we propose a solution based on the classification of a set of points situated on the device in a little-known spatial decomposition named tetra-tree. Using this type of spatial decomposition gives us several quantitative and qualitative properties that allow us a more realistic and intuitive visual interaction, as well as the possibility of selecting inaccessible components. These features could be used in virtual sculpting or accessibility tasks.In order to show these properties we have compared an interaction system based on tetra-trees to one based on octrees.     

A Timing Assumption and Two t-Resilient Protocols for Implementing an Eventual Leader Service in Asynchronous Shared Memory Systems

This paper considers the problem of electing an eventual leader in an asynchronous shared memory system. While this problem has received a lot of attention in message-passing systems, very few solutions have been proposed for shared memory systems. As an eventual leader cannot be elected in a pure asynchronous system prone to process crashes, the paper first proposes to enrich the asynchronous system model with an additional assumption. That assumption (denoted AWB) is particularly weak. It is made up of two complementary parts. More precisely, it requires that, after some time, (1) there is a process whose write accesses to some shared variables be timely, and (2) the timers of (t−f) other processes be asymptotically well-behaved (t denotes the maximal number of processes that may crash, and f the actual number of process crashes in a run). The asymptotically well-behaved timer notion is a new notion that generalizes and weakens the traditional notion of timers whose durations are required to monotonically increase when the values they are set to increase (a timer works incorrectly when it expires at arbitrary times, i.e., independently of the value it has been set to). The paper then focuses on the design of t-resilient AWB-based eventual leader protocols. “t-resilient” means that each protocol can cope with up to t process crashes (taking t=n−1 provides wait-free protocols, i.e., protocols that can cope with any number of process failures). Two protocols are presented. The first enjoys the following noteworthy properties: after some time only the elected leader has to write the shared memory, and all but one shared variables have a bounded domain, be the execution finite or infinite. This protocol is consequently optimal with respect to the number of processes that have to write the shared memory. The second protocol guarantees that all the shared variables have a bounded domain. This is obtained at the following additional price: t+1 processes are required to forever write the shared memory. A theorem is proved which states that this price has to be paid by any protocol that elects an eventual leader in a bounded shared memory model. This second protocol is consequently optimal with respect to the number of processes that have to write in such a constrained memory model. In a very interesting way, these protocols show an inherent tradeoff relating the number of processes that have to write the shared memory and the bounded/unbounded attribute of that memory.     

An investigation of student practices in asynchronous computer conferencing courses

This study investigated the online practices of students enrolled in graduate-level distance education courses. Using interviews and a questionnaire as data sources, the study sought to: (a) identify common practices that students adopt in asynchronous discussions, and (b) gain an understanding of why students adopt them. An analysis of the data suggests that many of the practices are coping mechanisms developed to help students more easily meet course participation requirements. Some of these are time saving strategies designed to reduce information overload (e.g., skimming messages rather than reading them carefully). Other strategies are designed to help students project an image of themselves as knowledgeable and collaborative course participants. It is argued that although these practices provide students with a level of efficiency in terms of meeting course requirements, they may inadvertently undermine learning.     

Free-living inferential modeling of blood glucose level using only noninvasive inputs

The goal of this work is to present a causation modeling methodology with the ability to accurately infer blood glucose levels using a large set of highly correlated noninvasive input variables over an extended period of time. These models can provide insight to improve glucose monitoring, and glucose regulation through advanced model-based control technologies. The efficacy of this approach is demonstrated using real data from a type 2 diabetic (T2D) subject collected under free-living conditions over a period of 25 consecutive days. The model was identified and tested using eleven variables that included three food variables as well as several activity and stress variables. The model was trained using 20 days of data and validated using 5 days of data. This gave a fitted correlation coefficient of 0.70 and an average absolute error (AAE) (i.e., the average of the absolute values for the measured glucose concentration minus modeled glucose concentration) of 13.3 mg/dL for the validation data. This AAE result was significantly better than the subject’s personal glucose meter AAE of 15.3 mg/dL for replicated measurements.     

Social evaluations of embodied agents and avatars

The purpose of this study was to examine social evaluations (i.e., perceptions of empathy and positivity) following peoples’ interactions with digital human representations. Female research participants engaged in a 3-min interaction while immersed in a 3-D immersive virtual environment with a “peer counselor.” Participants were led to believe that the peer counselor was either an embodied agent (i.e., computer algorithm) or an avatar (i.e., another person). During the interaction, the peer counselor either smiled or not. As predicted, a digitally-rendered smile was found to affect participants’ social evaluations. However, these effects were moderated by participants’ beliefs about their interaction partner. Specifically, smiles enhanced social evaluations of embodied agents but degraded them for avatars. Although these results are consistent with other findings concerning the communicative realism of embodied agents and avatars they uniquely demonstrate that people’s beliefs alone, rather than actual differences in virtual representations, can impact social evaluations.     

An order-clique-based approach for mining maximal co-locations

Most algorithms for mining spatial co-locations adopt an Apriori-like approach to generate size-k prevalence co-locations after size-(k − 1) prevalence co-locations. However, generating and storing the co-locations and table instances is costly. A novel order-clique-based approach for mining maximal co-locations is proposed in this paper. The efficiency of the approach is achieved by two techniques: (1) the spatial neighbor relationships and the size-2 prevalence co-locations are compressed into extended prefix-tree structures, which allows the order-clique-based approach to mine candidate maximal co-locations and co-location instances; and (2) the co-location instances do not need to be stored after computing some characteristics of the corresponding co-location, which significantly reduces the execution time and space required for mining maximal co-locations. The performance study shows that the new method is efficient for mining both long and short co-location patterns, and is faster than some other methods (in particular the join-based method and the join-less method).