Programming an intelligent personal assistant for biomedical database analysis

Amazon Echo is a hands-free speaker controlled by voice. Our goal is to program Alexa, the intelligence behind Echo, to analyze biomedical database such as patients characteristics in order to obtain future successful predictions. This will be done by creating a custom skill for Alexa based on python programming language

Concordia online shopping assistant : an intelligent user interface for distributed database computing

This project demonstrates a prototype for an intelligent user interface for an Online Shopping Assistant coded using Visual Basic 6, Oracle, and MS SAPI SDK on Windows NT environment. The purpose of this project is to explore state of the art technology to build a simple, functionally elegant, intelligent user interface to make software easy to use. This project has some unique features which differentiate it from other online shopping tools. The speech enabled GUI can response to user action accordingly and can give comments and recommendations to the user about a particular product. It has three language versions, English, French, and Chinese. Speech is only in English because the Microsoft speech engine has only an English version. It supports heterogeneous databases and has hyperlink features to link the image catalogue to a particular web site. The goal of this project is make the catalogue style online shopping enjoyable and retain the attention of potential consumers. This report presents the architectural design of the COSA system, the, design and implementation of client part GUI and server part databases. The success of most software is determined by its GUI, COSA system is no exemption. When designing and implementing COSA, a great deal of effort is focused on its usability and usability testing. Finally, future work related to COSA is presented

"Hey Siri, do you understand me?": Virtual Assistants and Dysarthria

Voice-activated devices are becoming common place: people can use their voice to control smartphones, smart vacuum robots, and interact with their smart homes through virtual assistant devices like Amazon Echo or Google Home. The spread of such voice-controlled devices is possible thanks to the increasing capabilities of natural language processing, and generally have a positive impact on the device accessibility, e.g., for people with disabilities. However, a consequence of these devices embracing voice control is that people with dysarthria or other speech impairments may be unable to control their intelligent environments, at least with proficiency. This paper investigates to which extent people with dysarthria can use and be understood by the three most common virtual assistants, namely Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa. Starting from the sentences in the TORGO database of dysarthric articulation, the differences between such assistants are investigated and discussed. Preliminary results show that the three virtual assistants have comparable performance, with an accuracy of the recognition in the range of 50-60%

Realising intelligent virtual design

This paper presents a vision and focus for the CAD Centre research: the Intelligent Design Assistant (IDA). The vision is based upon the assumption that the human and computer can operate symbiotically, with the computer providing support for the human within the design process. Recently however the focus has been towards the development of integrated design platforms that provide general support irrespective of the domain, to a number of distributed collaborative designers. This is illustrated within the successfully completed Virtual Reality Ship (VRS) virtual platform, and the challenges are discussed further within the NECTISE, SAFEDOR and VIRTUE projects

Issues in integrating existing multi-agent systems for power engineering applications

Multi-agent systems (MAS) have proven to be an effective platform for diagnostic and condition monitoring applications in the power industry. For example, a multi-agent system architecture, entitled condition monitoring multi-agent system (COMMAS) (McArthur et al., 2004), has been applied to the ultra high frequency (UHF) monitoring of partial discharge activity inside transformers. Additionally, a multi-agent system, entitled protection engineering diagnostic agents (PEDA) (Hossack et al., 2003), has demonstrated the use of MAS technology for automated and enhanced post-fault analysis of power systems disturbances based on SCADA and digital fault recorder (DFR) data. In this paper, the authors propose the integration of COMMAS and PEDA as a means of offering enhanced decision support to engineers tasked with managing transformer assets. By providing automatically interpreted data related to condition monitoring and power system disturbances, the proposed integrated system offer engineers a more comprehensive picture of the health of a given transformer. Defects and deterioration in performance can be correlated with the operating conditions it experiences. The integration of COMMAS and PEDA has highlighted the issues inherent to the inter-operation of existing multi-agent systems and, in particular, the issues surrounding the use of differing ontologies. The authors believe that these issues need to be addressed if there is to be widespread deployment of MAS technology within the power industry. This paper presents research undertaken to integrate the two MAS and to deal with ontology issues

Realising intelligent virtual design

This paper presents a vision and focus for the CAD Centre research: the Intelligent Design Assistant (IDA). The vision is based upon the assumption that the human and computer can operate symbiotically, with the computer providing support for the human within the design process. Recently however the focus has been towards the development of integrated design platforms that provide general support irrespective of the domain, to a number of distributed collaborative designers. This is illustrated within the successfully completed Virtual Reality Ship (VRS) virtual platform, and the challenges are discussed further within the NECTISE, SAFEDOR and VIRTUE projects

Towards an Intelligent Database System Founded on the SP Theory of Computing and Cognition

The SP theory of computing and cognition, described in previous publications, is an attractive model for intelligent databases because it provides a simple but versatile format for different kinds of knowledge, it has capabilities in artificial intelligence, and it can also function like established database models when that is required. This paper describes how the SP model can emulate other models used in database applications and compares the SP model with those other models. The artificial intelligence capabilities of the SP model are reviewed and its relationship with other artificial intelligence systems is described. Also considered are ways in which current prototypes may be translated into an 'industrial strength' working system

Automated post-fault diagnosis of power system disturbances

In order to automate the analysis of SCADA and digital fault recorder (DFR) data for a transmission network operator in the UK, the authors have developed an industrial strength multi-agent system entitled protection engineering diagnostic agents (PEDA). The PEDA system integrates a number of legacy intelligent systems for analyzing power system data as autonomous intelligent agents. The integration achieved through multi-agent systems technology enhances the diagnostic support offered to engineers by focusing the analysis on the most pertinent DFR data based on the results of the analysis of SCADA. Since November 2004 the PEDA system has been operating online at a UK utility. In this paper the authors focus on the underlying intelligent system techniques, i.e. rule-based expert systems, model-based reasoning and state-of-the-art multi-agent system technology, that PEDA employs and the lessons learnt through its deployment and online use