Digital Commons Network^™

Perception Based Misunderstandings In Human-Computer Dialogues, Niels Schütte, John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Articles

In a situated dialogue, misunderstandings may arise if the participants perceive or interpret the environment in different ways. In human-computer dialogue this may be due the sensor errors. We present an experiment system and a series of experiments in which we investigate this problem.

Building A Database Of Political Speech Does Culture Matter In Charisma Annotations?, Andrew Hines, Ailbhe Cullen, Naomi Harte

Conference papers

For both individual politicians and political parties the in- ternet has become a vital tool for self-promotion and the distribution of ideas. The rise of streaming has enabled po- litical debates and speeches to reach global audiences. In this paper, we explore the nature of charisma in political speech, with a view to automatic detection. To this end, we have collected a new database of political speech from YouTube and other on-line resources. Annotation is per- formed both by native listeners, and Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) workers. Detailed analysis shows that both la- bel sets are equally reliable. The results …

Control Design And Performance Analysis For Autonomous Formation Flight Experiments, Caleb M. Rice

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Autonomous Formation Flight is a key approach for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and managing traffic in future high density airspace. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s) have made it possible for the physical demonstration and validation of autonomous formation flight concepts inexpensively and eliminates the flight risk to human pilots. This thesis discusses the design, implementation, and flight testing of three different formation flight control methods, Proportional Integral and Derivative (PID); Fuzzy Logic (FL); and NonLinear Dynamic Inversion (NLDI), and their respective performance behavior. Experimental results show achievable autonomous formation flight and performance quality with a pair of low-cost unmanned research fixed …

Direct Classification Of All American English Phonemes Using Signals From Functional Speech Motor Cortex, Emily M. Mugler, James L. Patton, Robert D. Flint, Zachary A. Wright, Stephan U. Schuele, Joshua Rosenow, Jerry J. Shih, Dean J. Krusienski, Marc W. Slutzky

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Although brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) can be used in several different ways to restore communication, communicative BCI has not approached the rate or efficiency of natural human speech. Electrocorticography (ECoG) has precise spatiotemporal resolution that enables recording of brain activity distributed over a wide area of cortex, such as during speech production. In this study, we investigated words that span the entire set of phonemes in the General American accent using ECoG with 4 subjects. We classified phonemes with up to 36% accuracy when classifying all phonemes and up to 63% accuracy for a single phoneme. Further, misclassified phonemes follow articulation …

The Effects Of Concurrent Driving And In-Vehicle Tasks: A Multivariate Statistical Analysis Of Driver Distraction In A High-Fidelity Driving Simulator, Julius A. Codjoe

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Distracted driving continues to remain a cause of concern for a number of bodies, including government agencies, traffic safety advocacy groups and law enforcement agencies, because of its traffic safety risks. The driving simulator continues to be popular with researchers in collecting data on performance variables that provide scientific knowledge of the effects of distracted driving. Several of these performance variables can be used to quantify a single distracting effect, resulting in a multivariate dataset. A literature review of related studies revealed that researchers overwhelmingly use univariate (single and multiple) tests to analyze the resulting dataset. Performing multiple univariate tests …

The Marine Electronic Highway And Routeing Scheme Along The West Coast Of India And Sri Lanka : Feasibility Study : "Aiming Towards A Sustainable Maritime Transportation System", Sellakkannu I. Abul Kalam Azad

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Analyzing Requirement Type Influence On Generated Solutions, Emily Worinkeng

All Theses

Several ideation methods are available and used by engineering designers to enable the generation of alternative designs [1]. However, there has been little work done to understand the role that the design problem given to participants plays in the ideation process. The contribution of this research is found through the proposed guidelines with respect to the type of requirements to include as part of the design problem in order to achieve the desired quantity, quality, novelty, and variety of solutions during the early stages of the design process. This work is the first attempt at analyzing the effect of requirement …

Knowledge Extraction From Work Instructions Through Text Processing And Analysis, Abhiram Koneru

All Theses

The objective of this thesis is to design, develop and implement an automated approach to support processing of historical assembly data to extract useful knowledge about assembly instructions and time studies to facilitate the development of decision support systems, for a large automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM). At a conceptual level, this research establishes a framework for sustainable and scalable approach to extract knowledge from big data using techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). Process sheets are text documents that contain detailed instructions to assemble a portion of the vehicle, specification of parts and tools to …

Parsing Of Natural Language Requirements, Jamie L. Patterson

Master's Theses

The purpose of this thesis was to automate verification of the software requirements for an implantable cardioverter defibrillator with minimal manual rework. The requirements were written in plain English with only loose stylistic constraints. While full automation proved infeasible, many significant advances were made towards solving the problem, including a framework for storing requirements, a program which translates most of the natural language requirements into the framework, and a novel approach to parts of speech analysis.

Understanding The Role Of Requirements In Engineering Design By Novices, Shraddha Joshi

All Dissertations

Requirements play a critical role in the design process. The broader impact of this research is to develop a systematic understanding of the current use of requirements with an ultimate goal to develop guidelines and recommendations for more effective use of requirements throughout the design process. Thus, this research begins to answer the question about what is the role of requirements in design process and, specifically, its role in idea generation? The answer to this question is explored in three phases. The first phase is to understand how requirements are currently taught to students. To that end, two surveys were …

A Simple Integration Of Social Relationship And Text Data For Identifying Potential Customers In Microblogging, Guansong Pang, Shengyi Jiang, Dongyi Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Identifying potential customers among a huge number of users in microblogging is a fundamental problem for microblog marketing. One challenge in potential customer detection in microblogging is how to generate an accurate characteristic description for users, i.e., user profile generation. Intuitively, the preference of a user’s friends (i.e., the person followed by the user in microblogging) is of great importance to capture the characteristic of the user. Also, a user’s self-defined tags are often concise and accurate carriers for the user’s interests. In this paper, for identifying potential customers in microblogging, we propose a method to generate user profiles via …

Exploiting Contextual Information For Prosodic Event Detection Using Auto-Context, Junhong Zhao, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Hua Yang, Michael T. Johnson, Jia Liu, Shanhong Xia

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Prosody and prosodic boundaries carry significant information regarding linguistics and paralinguistics and are important aspects of speech. In the field of prosodic event detection, many local acoustic features have been investigated; however, contextual information has not yet been thoroughly exploited. The most difficult aspect of this lies in learning the long-distance contextual dependencies effectively and efficiently. To address this problem, we introduce the use of an algorithm called auto-context. In this algorithm, a classifier is first trained based on a set of local acoustic features, after which the generated probabilities are used along with the local features as contextual information …

Robotic Fingerspelling Hand For The Deaf-Blind, Jerry Vin

Master's Theses

Because communication has always been difficult for people who are deaf-blind, The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute (SKERI), in conjunction with the California Polytechnic State University Mechanical Engineering department, has commissioned the design, construction, testing, and programming of a robotic hand capable of performing basic fingerspelling to help bridge the communication gap. The hand parts were modeled using SolidWorks and fabricated using an Objet rapid prototyper. Its fingers are actuated by 11 Maxon motors, and its wrist is actuated by 2 Hitec servo motors. The motors are controlled by Texas Instruments L293D motor driver chips, ATtiny2313 slave microcontroller chips programmed to …

String Similarity Metrics For Ontology Alignment, Michelle Cheatham, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Ontology alignment is an important part of enabling the semantic web to reach its full potential. The vast majority of ontology alignment systems use one or more string similarity metrics, but often the choice of which metrics to use is not given much attention. In this work we evaluate a wide range of such metrics, along with string pre-processing strategies such as removing stop words and considering synonyms, on different types of ontologies. We also present a set of guidelines on when to use which metric. We furthermore show that if optimal string similarity metrics are chosen, those alone can …

Reasoning Across Language And Vision In Machines And Humans, Andrei Barbu

Open Access Dissertations

Humans not only outperform AI and computer-vision systems, but use an unknown computational mechanism to perform tasks for which no suitable approaches exist. I present work investigating both novel tasks and how humans approach them in the context of computer vision and linguistics. I demonstrate a system which, like children, acquires high-level linguistic knowledge about the world. Robots learn to play physically-instantiated board games and use that knowledge to engage in physical play. To further integrate language and vision I develop an approach which produces rich sentential descriptions of events depicted in videos. I then show how to simultaneously detect …

Visual Literacy And The Integration Of Parametric Modeling In The Problem-Based Curriculum, Matthew Benedict Assenmacher

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

This quasi-experimental study investigated the application of visual literacy skills in the form of parametric modeling software in relation to traditional forms of sketching. The study included two groups of high school technical design students. The control and experimental groups involved in the study consisted of two randomly selected groups of students. The participants were exposed to eight weeks of technical drawing and parametric modeling instruction prior to the start of the study.

The potential applications of emerging technologies for the purpose of integrating visual literacy into the curriculum are not fully understood. Society is moving towards a more immediate …

Multi-Segment Multi-Criteria Approach For Selection Of Trenchless Construction Methods, Ashikul Islam

Doctoral Dissertations

The research work presented in this thesis has two broad objectives as well as five individual goals. The first objective is to search and determine the minimum cost and corresponding goodness-of-fit by using a different combination of methods that are capable of resolving the problem that exists in multiple segments. This approach can account for variations in unit price and the cost of the design and the inspection associated with multiple methods. The second objective is to calculate the minimum risk for the preferred solution set. The five individual goals are 1) reduction in total cost, 2) application of Genetic …

Mispronunciation Detection For Language Learning And Speech Recognition Adaptation, Zhenhao Ge

Open Access Dissertations

The areas of "mispronunciation detection" (or "accent detection" more specifically) within the speech recognition community are receiving increased attention now. Two application areas, namely language learning and speech recognition adaptation, are largely driving this research interest and are the focal points of this work.

There are a number of Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) systems with Computer Aided Pronunciation Training (CAPT) techniques that have been developed. In this thesis, a new HMM-based text-dependent mispronunciation system is introduced using text Adaptive Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (AFCCs). It is shown that this system outperforms the conventional HMM method based on Mel Frequency Cepstral …

Efficiency Theory: A Unifying Theory For Information, Computation And Intelligence, Roman V. Yampolskiy

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

The paper serves as the first contribution towards the development of the theory of efficiency: a unifying framework for the currently disjoint theories of information, complexity, communication and computation. Realizing the defining nature of the brute force approach in the fundamental concepts in all of the above mentioned fields, the paper suggests using efficiency or improvement over the brute force algorithm as a common unifying factor necessary for the creation of a unified theory of information manipulation. By defining such diverse terms as randomness, knowledge, intelligence and computability in terms of a common denominator we are able to bring together …

Annotation For Free: Video Tagging By Mining User Search Behavior, Yao Ting, Tao Mei, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shipeng Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The problem of tagging is mostly considered from the perspectives of machine learning and data-driven philosophy. A fundamental issue that underlies the success of these approaches is the visual similarity, ranging from the nearest neighbor search to manifold learning, to identify similar instances of an example for tag completion. The need to searching for millions of visual examples in high-dimensional feature space, however, makes the task computationally expensive. Moreover, the results can suffer from robustness problem, when the underlying data, such as online videos, are rich of semantics and the similarity is difficult to be learnt from low-level features. This …

Negotiating The Inclusion Of Nanoscience Content And Technology In Science Curriculum: An Examination Of Secondary Teachers' Thinking In A Professional Development Project, Jennifer Gayle Wells

Dissertations and Theses

The Next Generation Science Standards represent a significant challenge for K-12 school reform in the United States in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines (NSTA, 2012). One important difference between the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996) and the Next Generation Science Standards (Achieve, 2013) is the more extensive inclusion of nanoscale science and technology. Teacher PD is a key vehicle for implementing this STEM education reform effort (NRC, 2012; Smith, 2001).

The context of this dissertation study is Project Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Outreach (NANO), a secondary level professional development program for teachers that provides a summer workshop, …

Judging Emotion From Low-Pass Filtered Naturalistic Emotional Speech, John Snel, Charlie Cullen

Conference papers

In speech, low frequency regions play a significant role in paralinguistic communication such as the conveyance of emotion or mood. The extent to which lower frequencies signify or contribute to affective speech is still an area for investigation. To investigate paralinguistic cues, and remove interference from linguistic cues, researchers can low-pass filter the speech signal on the assumption that certain acoustic cues characterizing affect are still discernible. Low-pass filtering is a practical technique to investigate paralinguistic phenomena, and is used here to investigate the inference of naturalistic emotional speech. This paper investigates how listeners perceive the level of Activation, and …

On The Primitives Of Causality: From The Semantics Of Agonist And Antagonist To Models Of Accident Causation And System Safety, Loïc Brevault, Francesca Favaro, Joseph Saleh

Faculty Publications

Controversial discussions on causality have been present in ancient philosophy since the days of Aristotle. Despite the use of this concept in numerous subjects, there is no consensus on the definition of causality and its possible mathematization. Many authors have analyzed the relation between causes and effects; the predominant school of thought reduces causation to a physical relation (either deterministic or probabilistic) between two events. The distinction between causes and consequences is not always clear and meaningful as different “layers of understanding” may be applied to the notion of causality. From this point of view the cause-effect implication relation can …

The Mayaarch3d Project: A 3d Webgis For Analyzing Ancient Architecture And Landscapes, Jennifer Von Schwerin, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Fabio Remondino, Giorgio Agugario, Gabrio Girardi

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

There is a need in the humanities for a 3D WebGIS with analytical tools that allow researchers to analyze 3D models linked to spatially referenced data. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) allow for complex spatial analysis of 2.5D data. For example, they offer bird’s eye views of landscapes with extruded building footprints, but one cannot ‘get on the ground’ and interact with true 3D models from a pedestrian perspective. Meanwhile, 3D models and virtual environments visualize data in 3D space, but analytical tools are simple rotation or lighting effects. The MayaArch3D Project is developing a 3D WebGIS—called QueryArch3D—to allow these two …

Collaborative Audio Transcription And Repair As A Method For Novice Pilots To Learn Approach Briefing Crew Resource Management (Crm) Skills, William A. Tuccio

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The growth of aviation in scope, scale, and complexity increases the demands for student learning, including crew resource management (CRM) skills. Instructor facilitated methods have proven effective for CRM skill learning. This study investigated a method of collaborative audio transcription and repair based learning (CTRBL) offering the potential for reduced demand upon instructor resources for CRM learning. The theory-based CTRBL method was used in this study as a way for novice pilots to learn the CRM skill of conducting a crew approach briefing with a focus on risk mitigation. Learning methods used to develop the CTRBL method were drawn from …

Learning Spatio-Temporal Co-Occurrence Correlograms For Efficient Human Action Classification, Qianru Sun, Hong Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spatio-temporal interest point (STIP) based features show great promises in human action analysis with high efficiency and robustness. However, they typically focus on bag-of-visual words (BoVW), which omits any correlation among words and shows limited discrimination in real-world videos. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to add the spatio-temporal co-occurrence relationships of visual words to BoVW for a richer representation. Rather than assigning a particular scale on videos, we adopt the normalized google-like distance (NGLD) to measure the words' co-occurrence semantics, which grasps the videos' structure information in a statistical way. All pairwise distances in spatial and temporal …

Image Annotation And Topic Extraction Using Super-Word Latent Dirichlet, George E. Noel Iii

Theses and Dissertations

This research presents a multi-domain solution that uses text and images to iteratively improve automated information extraction. Stage I uses local text surrounding an embedded image to provide clues that help rank-order possible image annotations. These annotations are forwarded to Stage II, where the image annotations from Stage I are used as highly-relevant super-words to improve extraction of topics. The model probabilities from the super-words in Stage II are forwarded to Stage III where they are used to refine the automated image annotation developed in Stage I. All stages demonstrate improvement over existing equivalent algorithms in the literature.

Safety Evaluation On Navigation Environment Of Xiazhimen Channel Based On Cloud Mode, Pengpeng Ye

Maritime Safety & Environment Management Dissertations (Dalian)

No abstract provided.

Scitech Book News Reviews, Susan Fingerman

Sci-Tech News

No abstract provided.

Computational Representation Of Linguistic Semantics For Requirement Analysis In Engineering Design, Alex Lash

All Theses

The objective of this research is to use computational linguistics to identify semantic implicit relationships between text-based relationships. Specifically, natural language processing is used to implement linguistic semantics in requirement analyzers. Linguistic semantics is defined as the meaning of words beyond their string form, part of speech, and syntactic function. Many existing design tools use part of speech tagging and sentence parsing as the foundation of their requirement analysis but ultimately use string algorithms to evaluate requirements. These string algorithms cannot capture the implicit knowledge in requirements. This research compares five methods of requirement analysis. A manual analysis provides the …