Measuring stress and cognitive load effects on the perceived quality of a multimodal dialogue system

In this paper we present the results of a pilot study investigating the impact of stress and cognitive load on the perceived interaction quality of a multimodal dialogue system for crisis management. Four test subjects interacted with the system in four differently configured trials aiming to induce low/high levels of stress and cognitive load. To measure the level of stress and cognitive load physiological sensors and subjective ratings were collected. After each trial the subjects filled in an evaluation questionnaire regarding the system interaction quality. In the end we conducted an in-depth interview with each subject. The trials were recorded with a webcam to facilitate the behaviour analysis. Results showed that both factors have an influence on the way subjects perceived the interaction quality, whereas the cognitive load seems to have a higher impact. Further quantitative experiments are needed in order to validate the results and quantify the weight of each factor. \u

Core components for effective infection prevention and control programmes: new WHO evidence-based recommendations

Abstract Health care-associated infections (HAI) are a major public health problem with a significant impact on morbidity, mortality and quality of life. They represent also an important economic burden to health systems worldwide. However, a large proportion of HAI are preventable through effective infection prevention and control (IPC) measures. Improvements in IPC at the national and facility level are critical for the successful containment of antimicrobial resistance and the prevention of HAI, including outbreaks of highly transmissible diseases through high quality care within the context of universal health coverage. Given the limited availability of IPC evidence-based guidance and standards, the World Health Organization (WHO) decided to prioritize the development of global recommendations on the core components of effective IPC programmes both at the national and acute health care facility level, based on systematic literature reviews and expert consensus. The aim of the guideline development process was to identify the evidence and evaluate its quality, consider patient values and preferences, resource implications, and the feasibility and acceptability of the recommendations. As a result, 11 recommendations and three good practice statements are presented here, including a summary of the supporting evidence, and form the substance of a new WHO IPC guideline

Gathering a corpus of multimodal computer-mediated meetings with focus on text and audio interaction

In this paper we describe the gathering of a corpus of synchronised speech and text interaction over the network. The data collection scenarios characterise audio meetings with a significant textual component. Unlike existing meeting corpora, the corpus described in this paper emphasises temporal relationships between speech and text media streams. This is achieved through detailed logging and time stamping of text editing operations, actions on shared user interface widgets and gesturing, as well as generation of speech activity profiles. A set of tools has been developed specifically for these purposes which can be used as a data collection platform for the development of meeting browsers. The data gathered to data consists of nearly 30 hours of recorded audio and time stamped editing operations and gestures

Multimodal Grounding for Language Processing

This survey discusses how recent developments in multimodal processing facilitate conceptual grounding of language. We categorize the information flow in multimodal processing with respect to cognitive models of human information processing and analyze different methods for combining multimodal representations. Based on this methodological inventory, we discuss the benefit of multimodal grounding for a variety of language processing tasks and the challenges that arise. We particularly focus on multimodal grounding of verbs which play a crucial role for the compositional power of language.Comment: The paper has been published in the Proceedings of the 27 Conference of Computational Linguistics. Please refer to this version for citations: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/papers/C/C18/C18-1197