Toward emotional interactive videogames for children with autism spectrum disorder

Technology and videogames have been proven as motivating tools for working attention and complex communication skills, especially in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this work, we present two experiences that used interactive games for promoting communication and attention. The first game considers emotions in order to measure children’s attention, concentration and satisfaction, while the second uses tangible tabletops for fostering cognitive planning. The analysis of the results obtained allows to propose a new study integrating both, in which the tangible interactive game is complemented with the emotional trainer in a way that allows identifying and classifying children’s emotion with ASD when they collaborate to solve cognitively significant and contextualized challenges. The first application proposed is an emotional trainer application in which the child can work out the seven basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise and neutral). Further, a serious videogame is proposed: a 3D maze where the emotions can be captured. The second case study was carried out in a Special Education Center, where a set of activities for working cognitive planning was proposed. In this case, a tangible interactive tabletop was used to analyze, in students with ASD, how the communication processes with these interfaces affect to the attention, memory, successive and simultaneous processing that compose cognitive planning from the PASS model. The results of the first study, suggest that the autistic children did not act with previous planning, but they used their perception to adjust their actions a posteriori (that explains the higher number of collisions). On the second case study, the successive processing was not explored. The inclusion of the mazes of case study 1 to a semantic rich scenario could allow us to measure the prior planning and the emotions involved in the maze game. The new physiological sensors will also help to validate the emotions felt by the children. The first study has as objective the capability to imitate emotions and resolve a maze without semantic context. The second study organized all the actions from a semantic context close to users. The attention results presented by the second study are coherent with the first study and complement it showing that attention can be receptive or selective. In the first study case, the receptive attention was the focus of analysis. In the second case, both contributed to explain and understand how it can be developed from a videogame

2019 Undergraduate Research Symposium: Full Program

Full program with schedule and abstracts for the 2019 Undergraduate Research Symposium

Studio teaching experiments - spatial transitioning for autism schools

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a teaching model involving an experimental studio project for first-year interior architecture university students. Design/methodology/approach – Content, process, teaching style and feedback are examined in a project, run over five years, concerning transitioning between environments for people with autism in an attempt to advance design of autism schools. Research methodology, teaching model, outcomes and group dynamics are critiqued. Findings – Feedback from experienced autism-specific teachers across eight case study schools raise recurring issues framing a series of design problems navigated by students. The teaching model enhances student exploration of how sensory processing difficulties, through spatial transitioning strategies, might be approached, whilst furthering their specialist knowledge as future designers of inclusive spaces. Research limitations/implications – Each transitioning platform requires deeper research to form a realistic interior typology. A further project to install and evaluate specific “transitioning insertions” into circulation spaces of an autism school is proposed for future research. Practical implications – The identification of this teaching model illustrates how to embed design for autism in the university curriculum. Social implications – The project brief helps address the National Autistic Society’s public autism awareness campaign “Too Much Information” highlighting anxieties that “unexpected change” causes. Effective design of transitioning spaces can help people with autism to cope with their environment, reducing behaviours and improving learning. Originality/value – The creation of the “Co-specialist ASD-educator model” will be of value to universities. “Ten Spatial Transitioning Platforms” were uncovered relating to Transitions. This will be of importance to autism researchers and eventually design practitioners. Keywords Sensory, Spatial, Autism schools, Educator, Studio teaching, Transitioning Paper type Research pape

Spatially-Distributed Interactive Behaviour Generation for Architecture-Scale Systems Based on Reinforcement Learning

This thesis is part of the research activities of the Living Architecture System Group (LASG). LASG develops immersive, interactive art sculptures combining concepts of architecture, art, and electronics which allow occupants to interact with immersively. The primary goal of this research is to investigate the design of effective human-robot interaction behaviours using reinforcement learning. In this thesis, reinforcement learning is used adapt human designed behaviours to maximize occupant engagement. Algorithms were tested in a simulation environment created using Unity. The system developed by LASG was simulated and simplified human visitor models are designed for the tests. Three adaptive behaviour modes and two exploration methods were compared in the simulated environment. We showed that reinforcement learning algorithms can learn to increase engagement by adapting to visitors' preferences and exploring with parameter noise performed better than action noise because of wider exploration. A field study was conducted based on the LASG's installation Aegis, Transforming Space exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) from June 2nd to October 8th, 2018. The experiment was conducted in a natural setting where no constraints are imposed on visitors and group interaction is accommodated. Experimental results demonstrated that learning on top of human designed pre-scripted behaviours (PLA) is better at increasing visitors engagement than only using pre-scripted behaviours (PB). Visitor responses to the GodSpeed standardized questionnaire suggested that PLA is more highly rated than PB in terms of Likeability and interactivity

Contract and Grant Awards Fiscal Year 2005

I invite you to read this report Contract & Grant Awards, fiscal year 2005, which lists contract and grant (C&G) awards received by the University of New Mexico (UNM) during the period from July 1, 2004 - June 30, 2005 (FY05). These awards represent new funds that were acquired during FY05 by the main campus, branch campuses and education centers, and the Health Sciences Center (HSC). The HSC includes the School of Medicine, College of Nursing, and College of Pharmacy. The awards received for FY05 total $295.4M, of which$167.6M is attributed to the main campus and $127.8M to HSC. These awards assist in providing resources that are necessary to support and enhance the quality of research and teaching at UNM, as well as the opportunities for students to be trained in state-of-the-art laboratories in a variety of disciplines

A generative network model of neurodevelopmental diversity in structural brain organization.

The formation of large-scale brain networks, and their continual refinement, represent crucial developmental processes that can drive individual differences in cognition and which are associated with multiple neurodevelopmental conditions. But how does this organization arise, and what mechanisms drive diversity in organization? We use generative network modeling to provide a computational framework for understanding neurodevelopmental diversity. Within this framework macroscopic brain organization, complete with spatial embedding of its organization, is an emergent property of a generative wiring equation that optimizes its connectivity by renegotiating its biological costs and topological values continuously over time. The rules that govern these iterative wiring properties are controlled by a set of tightly framed parameters, with subtle differences in these parameters steering network growth towards different neurodiverse outcomes. Regional expression of genes associated with the simulations converge on biological processes and cellular components predominantly involved in synaptic signaling, neuronal projection, catabolic intracellular processes and protein transport. Together, this provides a unifying computational framework for conceptualizing the mechanisms and diversity in neurodevelopment, capable of integrating different levels of analysis-from genes to cognition

Participative Urban Health and Healthy Aging in the Age of AI

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval, ICOST 2022, held in Paris, France, in June 2022. The 15 full papers and 10 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 submissions. They cover topics such as design, development, deployment, and evaluation of AI for health, smart urban environments, assistive technologies, chronic disease management, and coaching and health telematics systems

The Kati Module System: Modular Design for Delivering Character Focused Dialogue in Games

The Kati Module System is an interconnected set of programming modules intended to facilitate dynamic text authoring for interactive experiences (for example, games). It is a long-standing goal for interactive experiences to dynamically adapt their textual output based on the user or player\u27s choices and predilections, but to account for this vast possibility space requires an amount of authoring that is frequently untenable, especially for small studios. Advances in machine learning have produced incredible progress in the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG). Though this produces impressive surface level text, it does so without an internal representation that can be reasoned over previous game states, resulting in output with deep local coherence and low global coherence. Kati attempts to provide the best of both worlds by allowing authors to author configurable text snippets. Kati dynamically rearranges and chooses dialogue phrases based on game state, allowing for high degrees of authorial control, global coherence, and dynamic adaptability to player choice

2018 EURēCA Abstract Book

Listing of student participant abstracts