The Effects of Foreign Accent and Language on Reaction Time and Accuracy in an Air Traffic Control Task

The present study examines the effect of foreign accent interference with the ability to execute commands presented in speech format. The objective of this study was to demonstrate that a foreign accent influences performance. Participants were between 18 and 40 years of age. Half of the participants were native speakers of Spanish who began learning English as a second language via the classroom setting. The other half were native English-speaking with little or no exposure to the Spanish language. The experimental design was similar to an aviation scenario where participants listened to simulated ATC procedural commands and execute them on a simulated control panel. Response time (in milliseconds) and accuracy were recorded. Accuracy was measure by incorrect responses and false starts. Incorrect responses were measured when participants pressed an arrow key different from the commanded direction. False starts occurred when the participant pressed a key before the command was presented. The results of this study did not reveal an effect of language for reaction time. However, the false start data indicated a significant effect on accent for native English speakers, but not an effect on accent for non-native English speakers. On the contrary, the data from incorrect responses does not show a significant effect of accent for native English speakers but a significant difference in effect of accent on non-native English speakers. Therefore, the accuracy hypotheses were not supported

Education and Training Needs in the Field of Logistic Structures and Services in the Lower Danube Region

The approach of the subject concerning the training of specialists in the domain of logistic structures and services in the region of the inferior Danube is enlisted within a larger context, the Strategy of the Danube, but also in a more restrained one, the Program of Cross-Border Cooperation Romania – Bulgaria, 2007-2013. The Strategy of the Danube represents a project initiated in the year 2008 by Germany, Austria and Romania to which subsequently there adhered the other states on the Danube and which became a program of the European Commission. It shall have allotted a budget of 50 milliards euro until the year 2013. It shall be preponderantly addressed to the population in the Danube Basin, which is estimated at 115 millions, following to be developed through cross-border projects. In December 2010 there is foreseen the approval of the Action Plan for the program the Strategy of the Danube by the European Commission. The integration process needs premises and conditions for further development. One of them is the connectivity and it supporting system – the logistics. The problem of the connectivity is one of the pillars of the Danube strategy, which could play an important role in the Lower Danube Macro region’s development. Those problems need different approaches, specialized research and training. The situation of the two countries in the domain of fluvial logistics may be characterized as unsatisfactory in relation to their potential. At the present moment there is a single bridge which connects the two countries (Giurgiu – Ruse) and several travels with the passage boat. The harbour infrastructures are old and inefficient. There are no modern multi-modal platforms or a coherent vision in their design. The transportation on the Danube is insufficiently exploited. As well, the river is not capitalized in other domains, too: agriculture, pisciculture, energy, ecology, tourism, arrangement of the territory, etc.Within a more restrained context, but correlated with the Strategy of the Danube, Romania and Bulgaria cooperate within the Cross-Border Program 2007-2013. Within it, the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest and thee Economic Academy Dimitar Apostolov Tsenov in Svishtov proposed themselves to collaborate in the domain “Cooperation concerning the development of human resources – the joint development of abilities and knowledge”.fluvial logistics, multi-modal platform, education, transportation, cross-border, Lower Danube Macro region, territorial connectivity

ATCO2 corpus: A Large-Scale Dataset for Research on Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding of Air Traffic Control Communications

Personal assistants, automatic speech recognizers and dialogue understanding systems are becoming more critical in our interconnected digital world. A clear example is air traffic control (ATC) communications. ATC aims at guiding aircraft and controlling the airspace in a safe and optimal manner. These voice-based dialogues are carried between an air traffic controller (ATCO) and pilots via very-high frequency radio channels. In order to incorporate these novel technologies into ATC (low-resource domain), large-scale annotated datasets are required to develop the data-driven AI systems. Two examples are automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU). In this paper, we introduce the ATCO2 corpus, a dataset that aims at fostering research on the challenging ATC field, which has lagged behind due to lack of annotated data. The ATCO2 corpus covers 1) data collection and pre-processing, 2) pseudo-annotations of speech data, and 3) extraction of ATC-related named entities. The ATCO2 corpus is split into three subsets. 1) ATCO2-test-set corpus contains 4 hours of ATC speech with manual transcripts and a subset with gold annotations for named-entity recognition (callsign, command, value). 2) The ATCO2-PL-set corpus consists of 5281 hours of unlabeled ATC data enriched with automatic transcripts from an in-domain speech recognizer, contextual information, speaker turn information, signal-to-noise ratio estimate and English language detection score per sample. Both available for purchase through ELDA at http://catalog.elra.info/en-us/repository/browse/ELRA-S0484. 3) The ATCO2-test-set-1h corpus is a one-hour subset from the original test set corpus, that we are offering for free at https://www.atco2.org/data. We expect the ATCO2 corpus will foster research on robust ASR and NLU not only in the field of ATC communications but also in the general research community.Comment: Manuscript under review; The code will be available at https://github.com/idiap/atco2-corpu

The Proceedings of the International Civil Aviation English Association (2019) Conference

Hosted by All Nippon Airways (ANA) in Chiba, Tokyo, Japan, the 2019 International Civil Aviation English Association (ICAEA) annual conference focused on exploring the aviation English training needs of ab-initio pilots and air traffic controllers, as well as aircraft maintenance personnel. Globally, much of the demand for new pilots and air traffic controllers is located in areas of world for which English is not a first or national language. Exploring this resulting need to train non-native English speaking personnel was a primary focus of the 2019 ICAEA conference, including consideration of the language proficiency required for success in initial training, test design and implementation, instructional techniques, and the actual language used by this target population. Further, although the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Language Proficiency Requirements (LPRs) do not directly apply to maintenance personnel, the widespread use of English in the international aviation maintenance industry necessitates language-training solutions. For the first time, the ICAEA conference included a specific track for presenters to share their knowledge and experience related to training aircraft maintenance personnel which, until now, has been an underrepresented and underdeveloped area of aviation English. The conference featured plenary presentations, Q&A panels, and practical workshops. More than 100 participants from over 35 countries attended ICAEA’s first event in Asia in seven years. Attendees included representatives from airlines, flight training organizations (FTOs), air navigation service providers (ANSPs), civil aviation authorities (CAAs), universities, and training and testing providers from all over the world. These proceedings feature six articles written by seven of the presenters, summarizing their practical experiences and research findings which were shared at the conference. This publication is recommended to anyone interested in aeronautical communication. The accompanying presentation materials, as well as shorter summaries of other presentations and workshops, can be found on Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Scholarly Commons page

A Survey of Green Networking Research

Reduction of unnecessary energy consumption is becoming a major concern in wired networking, because of the potential economical benefits and of its expected environmental impact. These issues, usually referred to as "green networking", relate to embedding energy-awareness in the design, in the devices and in the protocols of networks. In this work, we first formulate a more precise definition of the "green" attribute. We furthermore identify a few paradigms that are the key enablers of energy-aware networking research. We then overview the current state of the art and provide a taxonomy of the relevant work, with a special focus on wired networking. At a high level, we identify four branches of green networking research that stem from different observations on the root causes of energy waste, namely (i) Adaptive Link Rate, (ii) Interface proxying, (iii) Energy-aware infrastructures and (iv) Energy-aware applications. In this work, we do not only explore specific proposals pertaining to each of the above branches, but also offer a perspective for research.Comment: Index Terms: Green Networking; Wired Networks; Adaptive Link Rate; Interface Proxying; Energy-aware Infrastructures; Energy-aware Applications. 18 pages, 6 figures, 2 table

The Proceedings of the International Civil Aviation English Association (2018) Conference

The 2018 International Civil Aviation English Association (ICAEA)1 hosted its annual conference at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University2 in Daytona Beach, Florida, USA. The conference, entitled “Building on the ICAO LPRs– Communication as a Human Factor: New Perspectives on Aviation English Training and Testing,” explored issues beyond the ICAO Language Proficiency Requirements (LPRs) including: incorporating communication strategies into best practices for training and testing, the effect of language and culture on communication as a human factor, considerations for future policy developments in language and communication. The event featured plenary presentations, Q&A panels, interactive panel presentations, practical workshops, and poster sessions. With more than 120 participants from 35+ countries, this was one of ICAEA’s most internationally-attended recent events. Attendees included representatives from airlines, flight training organizations (FTOs), air navigation service providers (ANSPs), civil aviation authorities (CAAs), universities, and training and testing providers from all over the world. These proceedings feature seven articles written by eight of the conference’s presenters, summarizing their practical experiences and research findings which were shared at the conference. This publication is recommended to anyone interested in aeronautical communication