6,333 research outputs found
Assistive robotics: research challenges and ethics education initiatives
Assistive robotics is a fast growing field aimed at helping healthcarers in hospitals, rehabilitation centers and nursery homes, as well as empowering people with reduced mobility at home, so that they can autonomously fulfill their daily living activities. The need to function in dynamic human-centered environments poses new research challenges: robotic assistants need to have friendly interfaces, be highly adaptable and customizable, very compliant and intrinsically safe to people, as well as able to handle deformable materials.
Besides technical challenges, assistive robotics raises also ethical defies, which have led to the emergence of a new discipline: Roboethics. Several institutions are developing regulations and standards, and many ethics education initiatives include contents on human-robot interaction and human dignity in assistive situations.
In this paper, the state of the art in assistive robotics is briefly reviewed, and educational materials from a university course on Ethics in Social Robotics and AI focusing on the assistive context are presented.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
RRL: A Rich Representation Language for the Description of Agent Behaviour in NECA
In this paper, we describe the Rich Representation Language (RRL) which is used in the NECA system. The NECA system generates interactions between two or more animated characters. The RRL is a formal framework for representing the information that is exchanged at the interfaces between the various NECA system modules
Developing a comprehensive framework for multimodal feature extraction
Feature extraction is a critical component of many applied data science
workflows. In recent years, rapid advances in artificial intelligence and
machine learning have led to an explosion of feature extraction tools and
services that allow data scientists to cheaply and effectively annotate their
data along a vast array of dimensions---ranging from detecting faces in images
to analyzing the sentiment expressed in coherent text. Unfortunately, the
proliferation of powerful feature extraction services has been mirrored by a
corresponding expansion in the number of distinct interfaces to feature
extraction services. In a world where nearly every new service has its own API,
documentation, and/or client library, data scientists who need to combine
diverse features obtained from multiple sources are often forced to write and
maintain ever more elaborate feature extraction pipelines. To address this
challenge, we introduce a new open-source framework for comprehensive
multimodal feature extraction. Pliers is an open-source Python package that
supports standardized annotation of diverse data types (video, images, audio,
and text), and is expressly with both ease-of-use and extensibility in mind.
Users can apply a wide range of pre-existing feature extraction tools to their
data in just a few lines of Python code, and can also easily add their own
custom extractors by writing modular classes. A graph-based API enables rapid
development of complex feature extraction pipelines that output results in a
single, standardized format. We describe the package's architecture, detail its
major advantages over previous feature extraction toolboxes, and use a sample
application to a large functional MRI dataset to illustrate how pliers can
significantly reduce the time and effort required to construct sophisticated
feature extraction workflows while increasing code clarity and maintainability
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