Sensory Communication

Contains table of contents for Section 2 and reports on five research projects.National Institutes of Health Contract 2 R01 DC00117National Institutes of Health Contract 1 R01 DC02032National Institutes of Health Contract 2 P01 DC00361National Institutes of Health Contract N01 DC22402National Institutes of Health Grant R01-DC001001National Institutes of Health Grant R01-DC00270National Institutes of Health Grant 5 R01 DC00126National Institutes of Health Grant R29-DC00625U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-88-K-0604U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-91-J-1454U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-92-J-1814U.S. Navy - Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division Contract N61339-94-C-0087U.S. Navy - Naval Air Warfare Center Training System Division Contract N61339-93-C-0055U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-93-1-1198National Aeronautics and Space Administration/Ames Research Center Grant NCC 2-77

User-centred design of flexible hypermedia for a mobile guide: Reflections on the hyperaudio experience

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the late 90s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques, a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step towards an iterative design that considers the user interaction a central point. The paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system’s behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulation of the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered in the perspective of the developments that followed that first experience: our findings seem still valid despite the passed time

Control Architecture Modeling for Future Power Systems

Uncontrollable power generation, distributed energy resources, controllable demand, etc. are fundamental aspects of energy systems largely based on renewable energy supply. These technologies have in common that they contradict the conventional categories of electric power system operation. As their introduction has proceeded incrementally in the past, operation strategies of the power system could be adapted. For example much more wind power could be integrated than originally anticipated, largely due to the flexibility reserves already present in the power system, and the possibility of interregional electricity exchange. However, at the same time, it seems that the overall system design cannot keep up by simply adapting in response to changes, but that also new strategies have to be designed in anticipation. Changes to the electricity markets have been suggested to adapt to the limited predictability of wind power, and several new control strategies have been proposed, in particular to enable the control of distributed energy resources, including for example, distributed generation or electric vehicles. Market designs addressing the procurement of balancing resources are highly dependent on the operation strategies specifying the resource requirements. How should one decide which control strategy and market configuration is best for a future power system? Most research up to this point has addressed single isolated aspects of this design problem. Those of the ideas that fit with current markets and operation concepts are lucky; they can be evaluated on the present design. But how could they be evaluated on a potential future power system? Approaches are required that support the design and evaluation of power system operation and control in context of future energy scenarios. This work addresses this challenge, not by providing a universal solution, but by providing basic modeling methodology that enables better problem formulation and by suggesting an approach to addressing the general chicken/egg problem of planning and re-design of system operation and control. The dissertation first focuses on the development of models, diagrams, that support the conceptual design of control and operation strategies, where a central theme is the focus on modeling system goals and functions rather than system structure. The perspective is then shifted toward long-term energy scenarios and adaptation of power system operation, considering the integration of energy scenario models with the re-design of operation strategies. The main contributions in the first part are, firstly, by adaptation of an existing functional modeling approach called Multilevel Flow Modeling (MFM) to the power systems domain, identifying the means-ends composition of control levels and development of principles for the consistent modeling of control structures, a formalization of control-as-a-service; secondly, the formal mapping of fluctuating and controllable resources to a multi-scale and multi-stage representation of control and operation structures; and finally the application to some concrete study cases, including a present system balancing, and proposed control structures such as Microgrids and Cells. In the second part, the main contributions are the outline of a formation strategy, integrating the design and model-based evaluation of future power system operation concepts with iterative energy scenario development. Finally, a new modeling framework for development and evaluation of power system operation in context of energy-storage based power system balancing is introduced.<br/

DMRN+18: Digital Music Research Network One-day Workshop 2023

DMRN+18: Digital Music Research Network One-day Workshop 2023 Queen Mary University of London Tuesday 19th December 2023 • Keynote speaker: Stefan Bilbao The Digital Music Research Network (DMRN) aims to promote research in the area of digital music, by bringing together researchers from UK and overseas universities, as well as industry, for its annual workshop. The workshop will include invited and contributed talks and posters. The workshop will be an ideal opportunity for networking with other people working in the area. Keynote speakers: Stefan Bilbao Tittle: Physics-based Audio: Sound Synthesis and Virtual Acoustics. Abstract: Any acoustically-produced sound produced must be the result of physical laws that describe the dynamics of a given system---always at least partly mechanical, and sometimes with an electronic element as well. One approach to the synthesis of natural acoustic timbres, thus, is through simulation, often referred to in this context as physical modelling, or physics-based audio. In this talk, the principles of physics-based audio, and the various different approaches to simulation are described, followed by a set of examples covering: various musical instrument types; the important related problem of the emulation of room acoustics or “virtual acoustics”; the embedding of instruments in a 3D virtual space; electromechanical effects; and also new modular instrument designs based on physical laws, but without a counterpart in the real world. Some more technical details follow, including the strengths, weaknesses and limitations of such methods, and pointers to some links to data-centred black-box approaches to sound generation and effects processing. The talk concludes with some musical examples and recent work on moving such algorithms to a real-time setting.. Bio: Stefan is a Professor (full) at Reid School of Music, University of Edinburgh, he is the Personal Chair of Acoustics and Audio Signal Processing, Music. He currently works on computational acoustics, for applications in sound synthesis and virtual acoustics. Special topics of interest include: Finite difference time domain methods, distributed nonlinear systems such as strings and plates, architectural acoustics, spatial audio in simulation, multichannel sound synthesis, and hardware and software realizations. More information on: https://www.acoustics.ed.ac.uk/group-members/dr-stefan-bilbao/ DMRN+18 is sponsored by The UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence and Music (AIM); a leading PhD research programme aimed at the Music/Audio Technology and Creative Industries, based at Queen Mary University of London

User Interface Abstraction for enabling TV set based Inclusive Access to the Information Society

199 p.The television (TV) set is present in most homes worldwide, and is the most used Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Despite its large implantation in the market, the interactive services consumption on TV set is limited. This thesis focuses on overcoming the following limiting factors: (i) limited Human Computer Interaction and (ii) lack of considering user’s real life context in the digital television (dTV) service integration strategy. Making interactive services accessible to TV set’s large user base, and especially to the most vulnerable ones, is understood as the path to integrate the mankind with the information society. This thesis explores the use of user interface abstraction technologies to reach the introduced goals. The main contributions of this thesis are: (i) an approach to enable the universally accessible remote control of the TV set, (ii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible interactive services through TV sets, and (iii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible services in the TV user’s real life context. We have implemented the contributing approaches for different use cases, and we have evaluated them with real users, achieving good results

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)/American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Summer Faculty Fellowship Program, 1993, volume 2

The JSC NASA/ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowship Program was conducted by Texas A&M University and JSC. The objectives of the program, which began nationally in 1964 and at JSC in 1965, are (1) to further the professional knowledge of qualified engineering and science faculty members; (2) to stimulate an exchange of ideas between participants and NASA; (3) to enrich and refresh the research and teaching activities of participant's institutions; and (4) to contribute to the research objectives of the NASA centers. Each faculty fellow spent at least 10 weeks at JSC engaged in a research project in collaboration with a NASA/JSC colleague. A compilation of the final reports on the research projects completed by the faculty fellows during the summer of 1993 is presented

Human Machine Interfaces for Teleoperators and Virtual Environments

In Mar. 1990, a meeting organized around the general theme of teleoperation research into virtual environment display technology was conducted. This is a collection of conference-related fragments that will give a glimpse of the potential of the following fields and how they interplay: sensorimotor performance; human-machine interfaces; teleoperation; virtual environments; performance measurement and evaluation methods; and design principles and predictive models

Ubiquitous Integration and Temporal Synchronisation (UbilTS) framework : a solution for building complex multimodal data capture and interactive systems

Contemporary Data Capture and Interactive Systems (DCIS) systems are tied in with various technical complexities such as multimodal data types, diverse hardware and software components, time synchronisation issues and distributed deployment configurations. Building these systems is inherently difficult and requires addressing of these complexities before the intended and purposeful functionalities can be attained. The technical issues are often common and similar among diverse applications. This thesis presents the Ubiquitous Integration and Temporal Synchronisation (UbiITS) framework, a generic solution to address the technical complexities in building DCISs. The proposed solution is an abstract software framework that can be extended and customised to any application requirements. UbiITS includes all fundamental software components, techniques, system level layer abstractions and reference architecture as a collection to enable the systematic construction of complex DCISs. This work details four case studies to showcase the versatility and extensibility of UbiITS framework’s functionalities and demonstrate how it was employed to successfully solve a range of technical requirements. In each case UbiITS operated as the core element of each application. Additionally, these case studies are novel systems by themselves in each of their domains. Longstanding technical issues such as flexibly integrating and interoperating multimodal tools, precise time synchronisation, etc., were resolved in each application by employing UbiITS. The framework enabled establishing a functional system infrastructure in these cases, essentially opening up new lines of research in each discipline where these research approaches would not have been possible without the infrastructure provided by the framework. The thesis further presents a sample implementation of the framework on a device firmware exhibiting its capability to be directly implemented on a hardware platform. Summary metrics are also produced to establish the complexity, reusability, extendibility, implementation and maintainability characteristics of the framework.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grants - EP/F02553X/1, 114433 and 11394