Robotic user interface enabled interactive dialogue with intelligent spaces

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-86).Users can communicate with ubiquitous computing environments by natural means such as voice communication. However, users of the Intelligent Room at MIT CSAIL, a ubiquitous environment, have reported dissatisfaction communicating with the room due to the absence of a focal point and the room's inability to hold a dialogue. To enrich the user's interactive experience, we integrated a Robotic User Interface to the room, and augmented the room's natural language system to enable it to hold dialogues with users. The robotic teddy bear serves two purposes. First, it acts as the focal point of the room which users can address. Second, it enables the room to physically communicate with users by robotic gestures. We also incorporated a book recommendation system to illustrate the room's new ability to converse with users. These enhancements have heightened user experience in communicating with the Intelligent Room, as indicated by our user study.by Rubaiyat Khan.M.Eng

Online control of a mobility assistance smart walker

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia BiomédicaThis work presents the NeoASAS project that was developed at the Bioengineering Group, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Madrid. Further, it continued with adaptations and improvements at Minho University with the Adaptive System Behavior Group (ASBG) in Guimarães, being designated by ASBGo Project. These developments include the conceptual design, implementation and validation of Smart Walkers with a new interface approach integrated into these devices. This interface is based on a joystick and it is intended to extract the user’s movement intentions. It was designed to be user-friendly and efficient, meeting usability aspects and focused on a commercial implementation, but not being demanding at the user cognitive level. Considering the ASBGo walker, the overall assemblage, mechanical adjustments, electronics and computing have been performed. First, a review about the mobility assistive devices is presented, specially focused on Smart Walkers. Despite the intensive research, in current literature, there are not many works providing a "point of the situation", and explaining the role that robotics can play in this domain. Healthy users performed preliminary sets of experiments with each walker, which showed the sensibility of the joystick to extract command intentions from the user. These signals presented a higher frequency component that was attenuated by a Benedict-Bordner g-h filter, considering the NeoASAS walker and by a Butterworth circuit, considering the ASBGo walker. These methodologies offer a cancelation of the undesired components from joystick data, allowing the system to extract in real-time user’s commands. Based on this identification, an approach to the control architecture based on a fuzzy logic algorithm was developed, in order to allow the control of the walkers’ motors. In addition, a set of sensors were integrated on the walker for safety reasons: an infrared sensor to detect if the user is falling forwards; two force sensors to make sure that the user is properly grabbing the hand support; and two force sensors in the support forearms to verify if the user is with his forearms properly supported. This will make sure that the device stops when one of these situations happens. Thus, an assistive device to provide safety and natural manoeuvrability was conceived and offers a certain degree of intelligence in assistance and decision-making. These results will be used to advance towards a commercial product with an affordable cost, but presenting high reliability and safety. The motivation is that this will contribute to improve rehabilitation purposes by promoting ambulatory daily exercises and thus extend users’ independent living.Este trabalho apresenta o projecto NeoASAS desenvolvido no Grupo de Bioengenharia, do Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) em Madrid. Este teve continuidade com adaptações e melhorias na Universidade do Minho com o grupo Adaptative System Behaviour (ASBG) em Guimarães, sendo designado por projecto ASBGo. Estes desenvolvimentos incluem o projecto concetual, implementação e validação de andarilhos inteligentes com uma nova interface integrada nestes dispositivos. Esta interface é baseada num joystick e tem como objetivo a extração de intenções de comando do utilizador, sendo intuitiva e eficiente. Atende a aspectos de usabilidade e está focada numa aplicação comercial, não sendo exigente a nível cognitivo. Considerando o andarilho ASBGo, foi realizada a construção deste, bem como, ajustes mecânicos, eletrónicos e programação. É apresentada uma revisão sobre os dispositivos de assistência à marcha, tendo especial enfoque os andarilhos. Apesar da intensa investigação, na literatura não existem trabalhos que apresentem o ponto de situação desta área, bem como o seu papel na robótica de reabilitação. Depois foram realizados testes com utilizadores, mostrando a sensibilidade que o joytick tem na identificação de inteções de comando do utilizador. Além disso, os sinais apresentam uma componente de alta frequência que foi atenuada, no caso do NeoASAS, com um filtro g-h Benedict-Bordner, e no caso do ASBGo, através de um filtro Butterworth implementado em hardware. As metodologias apresentadas oferecem um cancelamento componentes indesejáveis, permitindo ao sistema a extração das intenções de comando do utilizador em tempo real. Desta forma, uma arquitetura de controlo baseada em fuzzy logic foi desenvolvida de maneira a fornecer uma assistência segura ao utilizador, através do controlo dos motores. Foram também integrados um conjunto de sensores no andarilho por razões de segurança: um sensor infravermelho para detetar a queda frontal do utilizador, dois sensores de força nos apoios de mão para detetar se o utilizador está a agarrá-los, e dois sensores de força nos suportes de antebraço para certificar que o utilizador está devidamente apoiado. Assim, foi concebido um dispositivo que garante a segurança do utilizador e oferece um certo grau de inteligência e tomada de decisão. Estes resultados serão utilizados para a criação de um produto comercial com custo acessível, mas com alta confiabilidade. A motivação deste trabalho reflete-se na contribuição que este dispositivo terá na melhoria da reabilitação e desenvolvimento de dispositivos ambulatórios para promover exercicios diários, e melhorar a vida dos utilizadores

An analysis of the application of AI to the development of intelligent aids for flight crew tasks

This report presents the results of a study aimed at developing a basis for applying artificial intelligence to the flight deck environment of commercial transport aircraft. In particular, the study was comprised of four tasks: (1) analysis of flight crew tasks, (2) survey of the state-of-the-art of relevant artificial intelligence areas, (3) identification of human factors issues relevant to intelligent cockpit aids, and (4) identification of artificial intelligence areas requiring further research

Resource-aware plan recognition in instrumented environments

This thesis addresses the problem of plan recognition in instrumented environments, which is to infer an agent';s plans by observing its behavior. In instrumented environments such observations are made by physical sensors. This introduces specific challenges, of which the following two are considered in this thesis: - Physical sensors often observe state information instead of actions. As classical plan recognition approaches usually can only deal with action observations, this requires a cumbersome and error-prone inference of executed actions from observed states. - Due to limited physical resources of the environment it is often not possible to run all sensors at the same time, thus sensor selection techniques have to be applied. Current plan recognition approaches are not able to support the environment in selecting relevant subsets of sensors. This thesis proposes a two-stage approach to solve the problems described above. Firstly, a DBN-based plan recognition approach is presented which allows for the explicit representation and consideration of state knowledge. Secondly, a POMDP-based utility model for observation sources is presented which can be used with generic utility-based sensor selection algorithms. Further contributions include the presentation of a software toolkit that realizes plan recognition and sensor selection in instrumented environments, and an empirical evaluation of the validity and performance of the proposed models.Diese Arbeit behandelt das Problem der Planerkennung in instrumentierten Umgebungen. Ziel ist dabei das Erschließen der Pläne des Nutzers anhand der Beobachtung seiner Handlungen. In instrumentierten Umgebungen erfolgt diese Beobachtung über physische Sensoren. Dies wirft spezifische Probleme auf, von denen zwei in dieser Arbeit näher betrachtet werden: - Physische Sensoren beobachten in der Regel Zustände anstelle direkter Nutzeraktionen. Klassische Planerkennungsverfahren basieren jedoch auf der Beobachtung von Aktionen, was bisher eine aufwendige und fehlerträchtige Ableitung von Aktionen aus Zustandsbeobachtungen notwendig macht. - Aufgrund beschränkter Resourcen der Umgebung ist es oft nicht möglich alle Sensoren gleichzeitig zu aktivieren. Aktuelle Planerkennungsverfahren bieten keine Möglichkeit, die Umgebung bei der Auswahl einer relevanten Teilmenge von Sensoren zu unterstützen. Diese Arbeit beschreibt einen zweistufigen Ansatz zur Lösung der genannten Probleme. Zunächst wird ein DBN-basiertes Planerkennungsverfahren vorgestellt, das Zustandswissen explizit repräsentiert und in Schlussfolgerungen berücksichtigt. Dieses Verfahren bildet die Basis für ein POMDP-basiertes Nutzenmodell für Beobachtungsquellen, das für den Zweck der Sensorauswahl genutzt werden kann. Des Weiteren wird ein Toolkit zur Realisierung von Planerkennungs- und Sensorauswahlfunktionen vorgestellt sowie die Gültigkeit und Performanz der vorgestellten Modelle in einer empirischen Studie evaluiert

References to graphical objects in interactive multimodel queries

This thesis describes a computational model for interpreting natural language expressions in an interactive multimodal query system integrating both natural language text and graphic displays. The primary concern of the model is to interpret expressions that might involve graphical attributes, and expressions whose referents could be objects on the screen.Graphical objects on the screen are used to visualise entities in the application domain and their attributes (in short, domain entities and domain attributes). This is why graphical objects are treated as descriptions of those domain entities/attributes in the literature. However, graphical objects and their attributes are visible during the interaction, and are thus known by the participants of the interaction. Therefore, they themselves should be part of the mutual knowledge of the interaction.This poses some interesting problems in language processing. As part of the mutual knowledge, graphical attributes could be used in expressions, and graphical objects could be referred to by expressions. In consequence, there could be ambiguities about whether an attribute in an expression belongs to a graphical object or to a domain entity. There could also be ambiguities about whether the referent of an expression is a graphical object or a domain entity.The main contributions of this thesis consist of analysing the above ambiguities, de¬ signing, implementing and testing a computational model and a demonstration system for resolving these ambiguities. Firstly, a structure and corresponding terminology are set up, so these ambiguities can be clarified as ambiguities derived from referring to different databases, the screen or the application domain (source ambiguities). Secondly, a meaning representation language is designed which explicitly represents the information about which database an attribute/entity comes from. Several linguistic regularities inside and among referring expressions are described so that they can be used as heuristics in the ambiguity resolution. Thirdly, a computational model based on constraint satisfaction is constructed to resolve simultaneously some reference ambiguities and source ambiguities. Then, a demonstration system integrating natural language text and graphics is implemented, whose core is the computational model.This thesis ends with an evaluation of the computational model. It provides some concrete evidence about the advantages and disadvantages of the above approach

Net.Sense

Net.sense will server as a proof-of-concept of a new type of network management system, using biological models and statistical principles to address scalability, predictability, and reliability issues associated with managing the highly complex computer systems that we as a society have come to depend on

Consumers motivations to use self-checkout

Esta dissertação de mestrado tem como objetivo compreender a motivação dos consumidores para usar a opção de self-service checkout e entender o perfil dos seus usuários. Para atingir o objetivo, foi desenvolvida uma profunda revisão da literatura e, com esses fundamentos, foi proposto um modelo. Para validar as hipóteses elaboradas, um questionário on-line foi realizado e testado com 251 participantes. Para analisar os resultados, foi criada um modelo de Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). Os resultados revelaram que os benefícios Economias de Tempo e Controlo estão positivamente correlacionados com a intenção de uso de um self-service checkout. Mas que uma característica psicológica como Necessidade de Interação representa um impacto negativo na intenção de uso. Também foi possível concluir que os consumidores mais velhos tendem a ser menos propensos ao uso de tecnologias de self-checkout. Habitualmente os self-checkouts estão mais presentes em supermercados. Contudo, estão a tornar-se numa tendência em diferentes tipos de retalho, como restaurantes, moda, lojas de desporto, beleza, entre outros. Para além da função típica de pagamento, algumas destas self-service checkouts têm funções adicionais e mais interativas. Quando bem aceites pelos consumidores e implementados corretamente, as caixas de self-checkout permitem que as empresas obtenham eficiência e reduzam custos. No entanto, embora, como regra geral, a aceitação de self-checkout esteja a aumentar, é importante ter em consideração que a implementação desta tecnologia representa: investimentos monetários, realocação de funções de funcionários, risco de roubo, e possível falta de aceitação por parte do cliente. Esta dissertação oferece informações relevantes que podem ser usadas do ponto de vista empresarial, para quem tenciona implementar ou publicitar um serviço semelhante.This master thesis aims to understand the consumers' motivation to use self-checkout and understand the profile of its users. To achieve the objective, a deep literature review was developed, and with those foundations, a model was proposed. In order to validate the designed hypotheses, an online survey was conducted and contended with 251 participants. To analyze its results, a Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) was created. The research reveals that benefits such as Time-Saving and Control are positively correlated with the Intention of Usage of a self-service technology (SST). But that a trait such as Need for Interaction represents a negative impact on the intention of usage. It was also possible to conclude that older consumers tend to be less prone to the usage of self-service technologies. Self-service checkouts were usually seen at supermarkets but are becoming a trend across different types of retails such as restaurants, fashion, sports, beauty, among others. As well as additional features, rather than the only common option to pay. When well accepted and correctly implemented, self-service checkouts allow companies to gain efficiency and reduce costs. However, even though, as a general rule, the self-service check-out acceptance by consumers, and use are increasing, it is important to take into account what the implementation of self-service technology (SST) represents: monetary investments, employee and employee's job function reallocation, risk of robbery and ultimately potential lack of customer acceptance. This paper provides important insights that can be used from a managerial point of view when thinking of implementing or advertising it an SST. Understandings of the traits of these consumers, demographics and preferences