New measurement paradigms

This collection of New Measurement Paradigms papers represents a snapshot of the variety of measurement methods in use at the time of writing across several projects funded by the National Science Foundation (US) through its REESE and DR K–12 programs. All of the projects are developing and testing intelligent learning environments that seek to carefully measure and promote student learning, and the purpose of this collection of papers is to describe and illustrate the use of several measurement methods employed to achieve this. The papers are deliberately short because they are designed to introduce the methods in use and not to be a textbook chapter on each method. The New Measurement Paradigms collection is designed to serve as a reference point for researchers who are working in projects that are creating e-learning environments in which there is a need to make judgments about students’ levels of knowledge and skills, or for those interested in this but who have not yet delved into these methods

MULTI-MODAL TASK INSTRUCTIONS TO ROBOTS BY NAIVE USERS

This thesis presents a theoretical framework for the design of user-programmable robots. The objective of the work is to investigate multi-modal unconstrained natural instructions given to robots in order to design a learning robot. A corpus-centred approach is used to design an agent that can reason, learn and interact with a human in a natural unconstrained way. The corpus-centred design approach is formalised and developed in detail. It requires the developer to record a human during interaction and analyse the recordings to find instruction primitives. These are then implemented into a robot. The focus of this work has been on how to combine speech and gesture using rules extracted from the analysis of a corpus. A multi-modal integration algorithm is presented, that can use timing and semantics to group, match and unify gesture and language. The algorithm always achieves correct pairings on a corpus and initiates questions to the user in ambiguous cases or missing information. The domain of card games has been investigated, because of its variety of games which are rich in rules and contain sequences. A further focus of the work is on the translation of rule-based instructions. Most multi-modal interfaces to date have only considered sequential instructions. The combination of frame-based reasoning, a knowledge base organised as an ontology and a problem solver engine is used to store these rules. The understanding of rule instructions, which contain conditional and imaginary situations require an agent with complex reasoning capabilities. A test system of the agent implementation is also described. Tests to confirm the implementation by playing back the corpus are presented. Furthermore, deployment test results with the implemented agent and human subjects are presented and discussed. The tests showed that the rate of errors that are due to the sentences not being defined in the grammar does not decrease by an acceptable rate when new grammar is introduced. This was particularly the case for complex verbal rule instructions which have a large variety of being expressed

Sketch interpretation using multiscale stochastic models of temporal patterns

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-114).Sketching is a natural mode of interaction used in a variety of settings. For example, people sketch during early design and brainstorming sessions to guide the thought process; when we communicate certain ideas, we use sketching as an additional modality to convey ideas that can not be put in words. The emergence of hardware such as PDAs and Tablet PCs has enabled capturing freehand sketches, enabling the routine use of sketching as an additional human-computer interaction modality. But despite the availability of pen based information capture hardware, relatively little effort has been put into developing software capable of understanding and reasoning about sketches. To date, most approaches to sketch recognition have treated sketches as images (i.e., static finished products) and have applied vision algorithms for recognition. However, unlike images, sketches are produced incrementally and interactively, one stroke at a time and their processing should take advantage of this. This thesis explores ways of doing sketch recognition by extracting as much information as possible from temporal patterns that appear during sketching.(cont.) We present a sketch recognition framework based on hierarchical statistical models of temporal patterns. We show that in certain domains, stroke orderings used in the course of drawing individual objects contain temporal patterns that can aid recognition. We build on this work to show how sketch recognition systems can use knowledge of both common stroke orderings and common object orderings. We describe a statistical framework based on Dynamic Bayesian Networks that can learn temporal models of object-level and stroke-level patterns for recognition. Our framework supports multi-object strokes, multi-stroke objects, and allows interspersed drawing of objects - relaxing the assumption that objects are drawn one at a time. Our system also supports real-valued feature representations using a numerically stable recognition algorithm. We present recognition results for hand-drawn electronic circuit diagrams. The results show that modeling temporal patterns at multiple scales provides a significant increase in correct recognition rates, with no added computational penalties.by Tevfik Metin Sezgin.Ph.D

Concept of a Robust & Training-free Probabilistic System for Real-time Intention Analysis in Teams

Die Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Analyse von Teamintentionen in Smart Environments (SE). Die fundamentale Aussage der Arbeit ist, dass die Entwicklung und Integration expliziter Modelle von Nutzeraufgaben einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Entwicklung mobiler und ubiquitärer Softwaresysteme liefern können. Die Arbeit sammelt Beschreibungen von menschlichem Verhalten sowohl in Gruppensituationen als auch Problemlösungssituationen. Sie untersucht, wie SE-Projekte die Aktivitäten eines Nutzers modellieren, und liefert ein Teamintentionsmodell zur Ableitung und Auswahl geplanten Teamaktivitäten mittels der Beobachtung mehrerer Nutzer durch verrauschte und heterogene Sensoren. Dazu wird ein auf hierarchischen dynamischen Bayes’schen Netzen basierender Ansatz gewählt

Toward Understanding Human Expression in Human-Robot Interaction

Intelligent devices are quickly becoming necessities to support our activities during both work and play. We are already bound in a symbiotic relationship with these devices. An unfortunate effect of the pervasiveness of intelligent devices is the substantial investment of our time and effort to communicate intent. Even though our increasing reliance on these intelligent devices is inevitable, the limits of conventional methods for devices to perceive human expression hinders communication efficiency. These constraints restrict the usefulness of intelligent devices to support our activities. Our communication time and effort must be minimized to leverage the benefits of intelligent devices and seamlessly integrate them into society. Minimizing the time and effort needed to communicate our intent will allow us to concentrate on tasks in which we excel, including creative thought and problem solving. An intuitive method to minimize human communication effort with intelligent devices is to take advantage of our existing interpersonal communication experience. Recent advances in speech, hand gesture, and facial expression recognition provide alternate viable modes of communication that are more natural than conventional tactile interfaces. Use of natural human communication eliminates the need to adapt and invest time and effort using less intuitive techniques required for traditional keyboard and mouse based interfaces. Although the state of the art in natural but isolated modes of communication achieves impressive results, significant hurdles must be conquered before communication with devices in our daily lives will feel natural and effortless. Research has shown that combining information between multiple noise-prone modalities improves accuracy. Leveraging this complementary and redundant content will improve communication robustness and relax current unimodal limitations. This research presents and evaluates a novel multimodal framework to help reduce the total human effort and time required to communicate with intelligent devices. This reduction is realized by determining human intent using a knowledge-based architecture that combines and leverages conflicting information available across multiple natural communication modes and modalities. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated using dynamic hand gestures and simple facial expressions characterizing basic emotions. It is important to note that the framework is not restricted to these two forms of communication. The framework presented in this research provides the flexibility necessary to include additional or alternate modalities and channels of information in future research, including improving the robustness of speech understanding. The primary contributions of this research include the leveraging of conflicts in a closed-loop multimodal framework, explicit use of uncertainty in knowledge representation and reasoning across multiple modalities, and a flexible approach for leveraging domain specific knowledge to help understand multimodal human expression. Experiments using a manually defined knowledge base demonstrate an improved average accuracy of individual concepts and an improved average accuracy of overall intents when leveraging conflicts as compared to an open-loop approach

An Exploration of Multi-touch Interaction Techniques

Research in multi-touch interaction has typically been focused on direct spatial manipulation; techniques have been created to result in the most intuitive mapping between the movement of the hand and the resultant change in the virtual object. As we attempt to design for more complex operations, the effectiveness of spatial manipulation as a metaphor becomes weak. We introduce two new platforms for multi-touch computing: a gesture recognition system, and a new interaction technique. I present Multi-Tap Sliders, a new interaction technique for operation in what we call non-spatial parametric spaces. Such spaces do not have an obvious literal spatial representation, (Eg.: exposure, brightness, contrast and saturation for image editing). The multi-tap sliders encourage the user to keep her visual focus on the tar- get, instead of requiring her to look back at the interface. My research emphasizes ergonomics, clear visual design, and fluid transition between modes of operation. Through a series of iterations, I develop a new technique for quickly selecting and adjusting multiple numerical parameters. Evaluations of multi-tap sliders show improvements over traditional sliders. To facilitate further research on multi-touch gestural interaction, I developed mGestr: a training and recognition system using hidden Markov models for designing a multi-touch gesture set. Our evaluation shows successful recognition rates of up to 95%. The recognition framework is packaged into a service for easy integration with existing applications

16th Sound and Music Computing Conference SMC 2019 (28–31 May 2019, Malaga, Spain)

The 16th Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC 2019) took place in Malaga, Spain, 28-31 May 2019 and it was organized by the Application of Information and Communication Technologies Research group (ATIC) of the University of Malaga (UMA). The SMC 2019 associated Summer School took place 25-28 May 2019. The First International Day of Women in Inclusive Engineering, Sound and Music Computing Research (WiSMC 2019) took place on 28 May 2019. The SMC 2019 TOPICS OF INTEREST included a wide selection of topics related to acoustics, psychoacoustics, music, technology for music, audio analysis, musicology, sonification, music games, machine learning, serious games, immersive audio, sound synthesis, etc