18,520 research outputs found
Vision- and tactile-based continuous multimodal intention and attention recognition for safer physical human-robot interaction
Employing skin-like tactile sensors on robots enhances both the safety and
usability of collaborative robots by adding the capability to detect human
contact. Unfortunately, simple binary tactile sensors alone cannot determine
the context of the human contact -- whether it is a deliberate interaction or
an unintended collision that requires safety manoeuvres. Many published methods
classify discrete interactions using more advanced tactile sensors or by
analysing joint torques. Instead, we propose to augment the intention
recognition capabilities of simple binary tactile sensors by adding a
robot-mounted camera for human posture analysis. Different interaction
characteristics, including touch location, human pose, and gaze direction, are
used to train a supervised machine learning algorithm to classify whether a
touch is intentional or not with an F1-score of 86%. We demonstrate that
multimodal intention recognition is significantly more accurate than monomodal
analyses with the collaborative robot Baxter. Furthermore, our method can also
continuously monitor interactions that fluidly change between intentional or
unintentional by gauging the user's attention through gaze. If a user stops
paying attention mid-task, the proposed intention and attention recognition
algorithm can activate safety features to prevent unsafe interactions. We also
employ a feature reduction technique that reduces the number of inputs to five
to achieve a more generalized low-dimensional classifier. This simplification
both reduces the amount of training data required and improves real-world
classification accuracy. It also renders the method potentially agnostic to the
robot and touch sensor architectures while achieving a high degree of task
adaptability.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, preprint under revie
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Ensuring Access to Safe and Nutritious Food for All Through the Transformation of Food Systems
An exploration of the language within Ofsted reports and their influence on primary school performance in mathematics: a mixed methods critical discourse analysis
This thesis contributes to the understanding of the language of Ofsted reports, their similarity to one another and associations between different terms used within ‘areas for improvement’ sections and subsequent outcomes for pupils. The research responds to concerns from serving headteachers that Ofsted reports are overly similar, do not capture the unique story of their school, and are unhelpful for improvement. In seeking to answer ‘how similar are
Ofsted reports’ the study uses two tools, a plagiarism detection software (Turnitin) and a discourse analysis tool (NVivo) to identify trends within and across a large corpus of reports.
The approach is based on critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk, 2009; Fairclough, 1989) but shaped in the form of practitioner enquiry seeking power in the form of impact on pupils and practitioners, rather than a more traditional, sociological application of the method.
The research found that in 2017, primary school section 5 Ofsted reports had more than half of their content exactly duplicated within other primary school inspection reports published that same year. Discourse analysis showed the quality assurance process overrode variables such as inspector designation, gender, or team size, leading to three distinct patterns of duplication: block duplication, self-referencing, and template writing. The most unique part of a report was found to be the ‘area for improvement’ section, which was tracked to externally verified outcomes for pupils using terms linked to ‘mathematics’. Those
required to improve mathematics in their areas for improvement improved progress and attainment in mathematics significantly more than national rates. These findings indicate that there was a positive correlation between the inspection reporting process and a beneficial impact on pupil outcomes in mathematics, and that the significant similarity of one report to another had no bearing on the usefulness of the report for school improvement purposes
within this corpus
Model Parameter Identification via a Hyperparameter Optimization Scheme for Autonomous Racing Systems
In this letter, we propose a model parameter identification method via a
hyperparameter optimization scheme (MI-HPO). Our method adopts an efficient
explore-exploit strategy to identify the parameters of dynamic models in a
data-driven optimization manner. We utilize our method for model parameter
identification of the AV-21, a full-scaled autonomous race vehicle. We then
incorporate the optimized parameters for the design of model-based planning and
control systems of our platform. In experiments, MI-HPO exhibits more than 13
times faster convergence than traditional parameter identification methods.
Furthermore, the parametric models learned via MI-HPO demonstrate good fitness
to the given datasets and show generalization ability in unseen dynamic
scenarios. We further conduct extensive field tests to validate our model-based
system, demonstrating stable obstacle avoidance and high-speed driving up to
217 km/h at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Las Vegas Motor Speedway. The
source code for our work and videos of the tests are available at
https://github.com/hynkis/MI-HPO.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures. Published in IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS
Optimal Control of the Landau-de Gennes Model of Nematic Liquid Crystals
We present an analysis and numerical study of an optimal control problem for
the Landau-de Gennes (LdG) model of nematic liquid crystals (LCs), which is a
crucial component in modern technology. They exhibit long range orientational
order in their nematic phase, which is represented by a tensor-valued (spatial)
order parameter . Equilibrium LC states correspond to functions
that (locally) minimize an LdG energy functional. Thus, we consider an
-gradient flow of the LdG energy that allows for finding local minimizers
and leads to a semi-linear parabolic PDE, for which we develop an optimal
control framework. We then derive several a priori estimates for the forward
problem, including continuity in space-time, that allow us to prove existence
of optimal boundary and external ``force'' controls and to derive optimality
conditions through the use of an adjoint equation. Next, we present a simple
finite element scheme for the LdG model and a straightforward optimization
algorithm. We illustrate optimization of LC states through numerical
experiments in two and three dimensions that seek to place LC defects (where
) in desired locations, which is desirable in applications.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figure
Strategies for Early Learners
Welcome to learning about how to effectively plan curriculum for young children. This textbook will address: • Developing curriculum through the planning cycle • Theories that inform what we know about how children learn and the best ways for teachers to support learning • The three components of developmentally appropriate practice • Importance and value of play and intentional teaching • Different models of curriculum • Process of lesson planning (documenting planned experiences for children) • Physical, temporal, and social environments that set the stage for children’s learning • Appropriate guidance techniques to support children’s behaviors as the self-regulation abilities mature. • Planning for preschool-aged children in specific domains including o Physical development o Language and literacy o Math o Science o Creative (the visual and performing arts) o Diversity (social science and history) o Health and safety • Making children’s learning visible through documentation and assessmenthttps://scholar.utc.edu/open-textbooks/1001/thumbnail.jp
Learning disentangled speech representations
A variety of informational factors are contained within the speech signal and a single short recording of speech reveals much more than the spoken words. The best method to extract and represent informational factors from the speech signal ultimately depends on which informational factors are desired and how they will be used. In addition, sometimes methods will capture more than one informational factor at the same time such as speaker identity, spoken content, and speaker prosody.
The goal of this dissertation is to explore different ways to deconstruct the speech signal into abstract representations that can be learned and later reused in various speech technology tasks. This task of deconstructing, also known as disentanglement, is a form of distributed representation learning. As a general approach to disentanglement, there are some guiding principles that elaborate what a learned representation should contain as well as how it should function. In particular, learned representations should contain all of the requisite information in a more compact manner, be interpretable, remove nuisance factors of irrelevant information, be useful in downstream tasks, and independent of the task at hand. The learned representations should also be able to answer counter-factual questions.
In some cases, learned speech representations can be re-assembled in different ways according to the requirements of downstream applications. For example, in a voice conversion task, the speech content is retained while the speaker identity is changed. And in a content-privacy task, some targeted content may be concealed without affecting how surrounding words sound. While there is no single-best method to disentangle all types of factors, some end-to-end approaches demonstrate a promising degree of generalization to diverse speech tasks.
This thesis explores a variety of use-cases for disentangled representations including phone recognition, speaker diarization, linguistic code-switching, voice conversion, and content-based privacy masking. Speech representations can also be utilised for automatically assessing the quality and authenticity of speech, such as automatic MOS ratings or detecting deep fakes. The meaning of the term "disentanglement" is not well defined in previous work, and it has acquired several meanings depending on the domain (e.g. image vs. speech). Sometimes the term "disentanglement" is used interchangeably with the term "factorization". This thesis proposes that disentanglement of speech is distinct, and offers a viewpoint of disentanglement that can be considered both theoretically and practically
Iron Oxide Nanoparticles and Nano-Composites: An Efficient Tool for Cancer Theranostics
In recent years, functional Iron oxides nanoparticles and nano-composites have gained a special traction in the field of nano-biomedicine, owing to their multifunctional capabilities that includes the inherent magnetic resonance imaging, magnetic bioseparation, cargo delivery and magnetic hyperthermia behavior. Interestingly, there are various forms of iron oxides available, with each form having their own specific characteristics. The different polymorphic forms of iron oxides are obtained through various synthetic routes and are usually surface modified to prevent their oxidation. The chapter shall encompass the synthesis and surface modification of Iron oxides nanoparticles, physicochemical properties, and theranostic application of the magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles in cancer. Also, the future directions of Iron oxide nanoparticles and nano-composites towards the achievement of clinically realizable nanoformulation for cancer theranostic applications were highlighted
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Meaning-Making Practices of Emergent Arabic–English Bilingual Kindergarten Children in Cairo
The number of British Schools in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is growing. The National Curriculum of England is used by an increasing number of such schools. As well as exporting a culturally-specific curriculum, these schools usually adopt an ideology of monolingualism, thus potentially limiting communication for emergent bilinguals and failing to acknowledge the multiple ways of meaning-making.
Current studies of translanguaging are moving the focus to multimodal forms of communication as a resource for thinking and communicating (GarcÃa and Wei 2014, Wei 2018). Building on the work of Kress (1997, 2010) I explore pre-school emergent bilinguals’ wider signifying practices and create an analytical framework, which I call MMTL (multimodal translanguaging), used as a lens to illustrate meaning-making.
Valley Hill in Cairo, Egypt is a British school which encourages ‘English-only’ as the medium of instruction in the kindergarten. Using a case study methodology, this research explores the meaning-making practices of eight emergent bilingual children aged 3–4 during child-initiated play, later reduced to four in the thesis to provide a detailed multimodal analysis. The principal aim is to explore their speech, gaze, gesture, and their engagement (layout/position) with artefacts during play.
The findings of this study suggest that although there is an ‘English-only’ approach, these young emergent bilingual children are meaning-making in a variety of ways. Children are translanguaging but it is never in isolation from other modes of communication. Emergent bilinguals use a range of modes to mediate their understanding and communication with others. They use gesture, gaze, and artefacts alongside translingual practices to move meaning across to more accessible modes, enabling communication and understanding. The implications for schools should be to embrace such hybrid practices and for teachers to be more responsive to young children’s meaning-making to enable learning
Embodying entrepreneurship: everyday practices, processes and routines in a technology incubator
The growing interest in the processes and practices of entrepreneurship has
been dominated by a consideration of temporality. Through a thirty-six-month
ethnography of a technology incubator, this thesis contributes to extant
understanding by exploring the effect of space. The first paper explores how
class structures from the surrounding city have appropriated entrepreneurship
within the incubator. The second paper adopts a more explicitly spatial analysis
to reveal how the use of space influences a common understanding of
entrepreneurship. The final paper looks more closely at the entrepreneurs within
the incubator and how they use visual symbols to develop their identity. Taken
together, the three papers reject the notion of entrepreneurship as a primarily
economic endeavour as articulated through commonly understood language and
propose entrepreneuring as an enigmatic attractor that is accessed through the
ambiguity of the non-verbal to develop the ‘new’. The thesis therefore contributes
to the understanding of entrepreneurship and proposes a distinct role for the non-verbal in that understanding
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