Voice Operated Information System in Slovak

Speech communication interfaces (SCI) are nowadays widely used in several domains. Automated spoken language human-computer interaction can replace human-human interaction if needed. Automatic speech recognition (ASR), a key technology of SCI, has been extensively studied during the past few decades. Most of present systems are based on statistical modeling, both at the acoustic and linguistic levels. Increased attention has been paid to speech recognition in adverse conditions recently, since noise-resistance has become one of the major bottlenecks for practical use of speech recognizers. Although many techniques have been developed, many challenges still have to be overcome before the ultimate goal -- creating machines capable of communicating with humans naturally -- can be achieved. In this paper we describe the research and development of the first Slovak spoken language dialogue system. The dialogue system is based on the DARPA Communicator architecture. The proposed system consists of the Galaxy hub and telephony, automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, backend, transport and VoiceXML dialogue management modules. The SCI enables multi-user interaction in the Slovak language. Functionality of the SLDS is demonstrated and tested via two pilot applications, ``Weather forecast for Slovakia'' and ``Timetable of Slovak Railways''. The required information is retrieved from Internet resources in multi-user mode through PSTN, ISDN, GSM and/or VoIP network

Multimodal and ubiquitous computing systems: supporting independent-living older users

We document the rationale and design of a multimodal interface to a pervasive/ubiquitous computing system that supports independent living by older people in their own homes. The Millennium Home system involves fitting a resident’s home with sensors – these sensors can be used to trigger sequences of interaction with the resident to warn them about dangerous events, or to check if they need external help. We draw lessons from the design process and conclude the paper with implications for the design of multimodal interfaces to ubiquitous systems developed for the elderly and in healthcare, as well as for more general ubiquitous computing applications

Exploring the use of new school buildings through post-occupancy evaluation and participatory action research

This paper presents the results of the development and testing of an integrated post-occupancy evaluation (POE) approach for teachers, staff, pupils and community members using newly constructed school buildings. It focusses on three cases of UK secondary schools, demonstrating how users can be inspired to engage with the problems of school design and energy use awareness. The cases provided new insights into the engagement of school teachers, staff and young people regarding issues of sustainability, management, functional performance and comfort. The integrative approach adopted in these cases provided a more holistic understanding of these buildings’ performance than could have been achieved by either observational or more traditional questionnaire-based methods. Moreover, the whole-school approach, involving children in POE, provided researchers with highly contextualised information about how a school is used, how to improve the quality of school experiences (both socially and educationally) and how the school community is contributing to the building's energy performance. These POE methods also provided unique opportunities for children to examine the social and cultural factors impeding the adoption of energy-conscious and sustainable behaviours

Geoweb 2.0 for Participatory Urban Design: Affordances and Critical Success Factors

In this paper, we discuss the affordances of open-source Geoweb 2.0 platforms to support the participatory design of urban projects in real-world practices.We first introduce the two open-source platforms used in our study for testing purposes. Then, based on evidence from five different field studies we identify five affordances of these platforms: conversations on alternative urban projects, citizen consultation, design empowerment, design studio learning and design research. We elaborate on these in detail and identify a key set of success factors for the facilitation of better practices in the future

On social function: new language for discussing technology for social action

Designers of technology for social action can often become embroiled in issues of platform and technical functionality at a very early stage in the development process, before the precise social value of an approach has been explored. The loyalty of designers to particular technologies and to ways of working can divide activist communities and, arguably, has weakened the social action world’s performance in exploiting technology with maximum usefulness and usability. In this paper, we present a lexicon for discussing technology and social action by reference to the intention and relationship to use, rather than to detailed functionality. In short, we offer a language to support discussions of social function, and thus to avoid premature commitment or argument about architecture or implementation details.</p

Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable

Development of a Semi-Autonomous Robotic System to Assist Children with Autism in Developing Visual Perspective Taking Skills

Robot-assisted therapy has been successfully used to help children with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) develop their social skills, but very often with the robot being fully controlled remotely by an adult operator. Although this method is reliable and allows the operator to conduct a therapy session in a customised child-centred manner, it increases the cognitive workload on the human operator since it requires them to divide their attention between the robot and the child to ensure that the robot is responding appropriately to the child's behaviour. In addition, a remote-controlled robot is not aware of the information regarding the interaction with children (e.g., body gesture and head pose, proximity etc) and consequently it does not have the ability to shape live HRIs. Further to this, a remote-controlled robot typically does not have the capacity to record this information and additional effort is required to analyse the interaction data. For these reasons, using a remote-controlled robot in robot-assisted therapy may be unsustainable for long-term interactions. To lighten the cognitive burden on the human operator and to provide a consistent therapeutic experience, it is essential to create some degrees of autonomy and enable the robot to perform some autonomous behaviours during interactions with children. Our previous research with the Kaspar robot either implemented a fully autonomous scenario involving pairs of children, which then lacked the often important input of the supervising adult, or, in most of our research, has used a remote control in the hand of the adult or the children to operate the robot. Alternatively, this paper provides an overview of the design and implementation of a robotic system called Sense- Think-Act which converts the remote-controlled scenarios of our humanoid robot into a semi-autonomous social agent with the capacity to play games autonomously (under human supervision) with children in the real-world school settings. The developed system has been implemented on the humanoid robot Kaspar and evaluated in a trial with four children with ASC at a local specialist secondary school in the UK where the data of 11 Child-Robot Interactions (CRIs) was collected. The results from this trial demonstrated that the system was successful in providing the robot with appropriate control signals to operate in a semi-autonomous manner without any latency, which supports autonomous CRIs, suggesting that the proposed architecture appears to have promising potential in supporting CRIs for real-world applications.Peer reviewe