A privacy-preserving AI-based Intent Recognition engine with Probabilistic Spell-Editing for an Italian Smart Home Voice Assistant

Negli ultimi decenni, il mercato dei dispositivi per la Smart Home si è espanso notevolmente. Tra le varie interfacce che permettono di inviare comandi a questi dispositivi, è di particolare interesse quella fornita dagli assistenti virtuali, testuali e/o vocali, soprattutto in quanto capace di offrire più indipendenza alle persone con disabilità e alle persone anziane, gruppo in aumento significativo in Italia. Purtroppo le soluzioni attuali sul mercato, come gli smart speaker, sono basate sull'invio dei comandi a server remoti, facendo sorgere preoccupazioni più o meno legittime riguardo la privacy. Le alternative open-source attualmente disponibili, di contro, sono poco accurate per la lingua italiana. L’obiettivo di questa tesi è di sviluppare un nuovo motore di Intent Recognition, chiamato Converso, per assistenti domotici in lingua italiana che possono essere integrati in piattaforme locali come Home Assistant. Per raggiungere quest'obiettivo, è stato generato un dataset sintetico, pre-processato tramite embedding Word2Vec, per addestrare modelli di Machine Learning per la classificazione degli Intent e degli slot; inoltre, è stato sviluppato un algoritmo basato su N-grammi per correggere gli errori ortografici o di riconoscimento vocale. L’agente di conversazione derivante, che si serve di una Support Vector Machine e non richiede alcuna connessione a server remoti, è stato valutato con un esperimento in condizioni realistiche, dimostrando un'accuratezza superiore al 60%

HIDE: User centred Domotic evolution toward Ambient Intelligence

Pervasive Computing and Ambient Intelligence (AmI) visions are still far from being achieved, especially with regard to Domotics and home applications. According to the vision of Ambient Intelligence (AmI), the most advanced technologies are those that disappear: at maturity, computer technology should become invisible. All the objects surrounding us must possess sufficient computing capacity to interact with users, the surroundings and each other. The entire physical environment in which users are immersed should thus be a hidden computer system equipped with the appropriate software in order to exhibit intelligent behavior. Even though many implementations have started to appear in several contexts, few applications have been made available for the home environment and the general public. This is mainly due to the segmentation of standards and proprietary solutions, which are currently confusing the market with a sparse offer of uninteroperable devices and systems. Although modern houses are equipped with smart technological appliances, still very few of these appliances can be seamlessly connected to each other. The objective of this research work is to take steps in these directions by proposing, on the one hand, a software system designed to make today’s heterogeneous, mostly incompatible domotic systems fully interoperable and, on the other hand, a feasible software application able to learn the behavior and habits of home inhabitants in order to actively contribute to anticipating user needs, and preventing emergency situations for his health. By applying machine learning techniques, the system offers a complete, ready-to-use practical application that learns through interaction with the user in order to improve life quality in a technological living environment, such as a house, a smart city and so on. The proposed solution, besides making life more comfortable for users without particular needs, represents an opportunity to provide greater autonomy and safety to disabled and elderly occupants, especially the critically ill ones. The prototype has been developed and is currently running at the Pisa CNR laboratory, where a home environment has been faithfully recreated

Cognitive assistance in intelligent environments

Tese de doutoramento em Engenharia BiomédicaCurrently society responds badly to some social issues. One of the problems lies on the society concept itself. The common pyramid describing the social strata does not reflect the new social reality, given that the elderly strata largely exceed the teenage strata. This fact also implies a change in terms of social and medical needs. Thus, a great number of medical services should be adapted to respond to the needs of the elderly people. In fact, any common family cannot take care of an elderly person and, in many cases they cannot also afford the required medical care. Having less time, and often, less money, a family cannot have their older relatives in their homes. In addition, the necessary support required to overcome the elderly limitations, makes it even more difficult. One solution could be that elderly people go to nursing homes or care centers. However, due to the overgrowth of the elderly community, geriatric units are not enough to take care of all those people. As a solution, technology can provide wellbeing and assistance in the elderly everyday life through personalized services at low cost. This thesis presents a cognitive assistant platform, named iGenda. A cognitive assistant provides numerous user oriented services, and it ubiquitously and transparently interacts directly with the user. Therefore, this research work has as motto: impacting the user’s life without causing an impact. It means that the platform aim is to influence the user’s life, by providing a greater quality of life, without being too complex to use. The answers to our society’s social and technological challenges are provided by the development of a platform that is intuitive to the user, cheap and able to be integrated in an Ambient Assisted Living ecosystem. Thus, this thesis presents a multi-agent, platform-independent architecture capable of intelligent scheduling. Being the cognitive assistant implemented in four case studies, namely: a sensor platform, a digital clinical guideline system, an orientation system based on augmented reality, and a fall detection application. These case studies validate the social and technological challenges, therefore the iGenda too. This is due to the complete integration with other systems, without major changes of the architecture and archetype.Atualmente, a sociedade debate-se com um problema para o qual não há uma solução simples. O problema reside na própria sociedade, mais especificamente no seu conceito. A pirâmide populacional clássica não retrata a sociedade como é atualmente, sendo que o número de idosos ultrapassa o número de jovens. Ora, este facto acarreta uma mudança nas necessidades sociais e cuidados médicos. Deste modo, um grande número de serviços médicos têm que ser reajustados para as necessidades das pessoas mais idosas. Com menos tempo e frequentemente sem dinheiro, a família não é capaz de ter um idoso na sua casa. Tendo em conta as limitações das pessoas idosas em termos de saúde, a incapacidade de assistir uma pessoa idosa é ainda maior. Uma possível solução é colocar os idosos em casas de repouso ou centros geriátricos. Contudo, devido ao crescimento da comunidade idosa, não existem unidades geriátricas suficientes para todas as pessoas. A tecnologia pode providenciar assistência e bem-estar na vida cotidiana de uma pessoa idosa, através de serviços personalizados de baixo custo, servindo como uma possível resposta aos problemas apresentados. Nesta tese apresenta-se o iGenda, como uma plataforma de desenvolvimento de assistentes cognitivos. Um assistente cognitivo que assegura vários serviços orientados ao utilizador, interagindo com o utilizador de forma ubíqua e transparente. Este trabalho de investigação tem como lema: mudar a vida do utilizador sem o mudar. Isto significa que a plataforma tem como objetivo mudar a vida do utilizador, ao proporcionar uma maior qualidade de vida, sem que o utilizador tenha dificuldade a adaptar-se ou a utilizar a plataforma. As respostas para os desafios sociais e tecnológicos apresentados pela nossa sociedade são fornecidas pelo desenvolvimento de uma plataforma intuitiva, barata e capaz de ser integrada num ecossistema de Ambient Assisted Living. Deste modo, o processo de agendamento inteligente é assegurado por uma arquitetura multiagente e independente de plataformas, apresentada nesta tese. Sendo que o assistente cognitivo é implementado em quatro casos de estudo: uma plataforma de sensores, um sistema digital de guias clínicos, um sistema de orientação baseado em realidade aumentada e um sistema de deteção de quedas. Estes casos de estudo validam os desafios sociais e tecnológicos, portanto validando também o iGenda. Isto verifica-se com a integração completa com outros sistemas, sem muitas alterações à arquitetura ou ao arquétip

Optimal Domotic Systems Based on Archival Data Trend Analysis

Domotics is the integration of technology into building systems. Due to the rapid growth in the use of domotic systems in recent years, the industry is struggling to establish consistency and standardization. The purpose of this archival-based qualitative case study was to identify current trends and patterns in scholarly domotic research to create an instrument to evaluate domotic systems and domotic interrelationships using bibliometric searches. The facilities management and modeling system provided the framework for the study. Archival research data were examined to identify trends and patterns in domotic research and provide visualization of domotic relationships through technology trajectory mapping and technology s-curve charts. Text-mining techniques were used to explore trends and patterns in recent scholarly domotic research. The technology s-curve was used to determine trends and patterns in domotic systems design. The results included a tool for the evaluation of domotic systems, which may provide domotic designers with a tool to evaluate the progress of domotic systems. The study also provided results on trends in domotic technologies, which may be used to improve building design development

Journal of Accessibility and Design for All

This volume 2, number 1 of the Journal of Accessibility and Design for All comprises a selection of papers presented at the IV International Congress on Design, Research Networks, and Technology for all held in Madrid, June, 27 - 29, 2011. This congress is promoted by the ONCE Foundation for cooperation and social inclusion of persons with disabilities and intends to monitor the progress of assistive technologies for people with disabilities. Therefore, papers here presented cover different areas related to learning, health, communication and social life, which are also in line with the philosophy of the journal and complement some of the five research areas of this journal.Peer Reviewe

Emotion transplantation through adaptation in HMM-based speech synthesis

This paper proposes an emotion transplantation method capable of modifying a synthetic speech model through the use of CSMAPLR adaptation in order to incorporate emotional information learned from a different speaker model while maintaining the identity of the original speaker as much as possible. The proposed method relies on learning both emotional and speaker identity information by means of their adaptation function from an average voice model, and combining them into a single cascade transform capable of imbuing the desired emotion into the target speaker. This method is then applied to the task of transplanting four emotions (anger, happiness, sadness and surprise) into 3 male speakers and 3 female speakers and evaluated in a number of perceptual tests. The results of the evaluations show how the perceived naturalness for emotional text significantly favors the use of the proposed transplanted emotional speech synthesis when compared to traditional neutral speech synthesis, evidenced by a big increase in the perceived emotional strength of the synthesized utterances at a slight cost in speech quality. A final evaluation with a robotic laboratory assistant application shows how by using emotional speech we can significantly increase the students’ satisfaction with the dialog system, proving how the proposed emotion transplantation system provides benefits in real applications

Intelligent Systems

This book is dedicated to intelligent systems of broad-spectrum application, such as personal and social biosafety or use of intelligent sensory micro-nanosystems such as "e-nose", "e-tongue" and "e-eye". In addition to that, effective acquiring information, knowledge management and improved knowledge transfer in any media, as well as modeling its information content using meta-and hyper heuristics and semantic reasoning all benefit from the systems covered in this book. Intelligent systems can also be applied in education and generating the intelligent distributed eLearning architecture, as well as in a large number of technical fields, such as industrial design, manufacturing and utilization, e.g., in precision agriculture, cartography, electric power distribution systems, intelligent building management systems, drilling operations etc. Furthermore, decision making using fuzzy logic models, computational recognition of comprehension uncertainty and the joint synthesis of goals and means of intelligent behavior biosystems, as well as diagnostic and human support in the healthcare environment have also been made easier

Unifying interaction across distributed controls in a smart environment using anthropology-based computing to make human-computer interaction "Calm"

Rather than adapt human behavior to suit a life surrounded by computerized systems, is it possible to adapt the systems to suit humans? Mark Weiser called for this fundamental change to the design and engineering of computer systems nearly twenty years ago. We believe it is possible and offer a series of related theoretical developments and practical experiments designed in an attempt to build a system that can meet his challenge without resorting to black box design principles or Wizard of Oz protocols. This culminated in a trial involving 32 participants, each of whom used two different multimodal interactive techniques, based on our novel interaction paradigm, to intuitively control nine distributed devices in a smart home setting. The theoretical work and practical developments have led to our proposal of seven contributions to the state of the art