Enhancing Human-robot Collaboration by Exploring Intuitive Augmented Reality Design Representations

As the use of Augmented Reality (AR) to enhance interactions between human agents and robotic systems in a work environment continues to grow, robots must communicate their intents in informative yet straightforward ways. This improves the human agent's feeling of trust and safety in the work environment while also reducing task completion time. To this end, we discuss a set of guidelines for the systematic design of AR interfaces for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) systems. Furthermore, we develop design frameworks that would ride on these guidelines and serve as a base for researchers seeking to explore this direction further. We develop a series of designs for visually representing the robot's planned path and reactions, which we evaluate by conducting a user survey involving 14 participants. Subjects were given different design representations to review and rate based on their intuitiveness and informativeness. The collated results showed that our design representations significantly improved the participants' ease of understanding the robot's intents over the baselines for the robot's proposed navigation path, planned arm trajectory, and reactions

Enhancing textual accessibility for readers with dyslexia through transfer learning

This paper explores automated modification of text to make it more accessible for people with dyslexia, a reading disorder affecting a significant percentage of the global population. The modifications are both in terms of changing the appearance of text and simplification of the words, grammar, and length of textual mate- rial. For simplification of text, we built a dataset with original and dyslexia-friendly text verified by human readers that it improve their reading experience by 27% on average. Then we developed a pipeline to generate dyslexia-friendly text automatically using transfer learning. The model learns styles appropriate for dyslexic users and generates dyslexia-friendly text from arbitrary textual data, which is easier for people with dyslexia to read and interpret.Computer Scienc

Selective transmission through very deep zero-order metallic gratings at microwave frequencies

Copyright © 2000 American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in Applied Physics Letters 77 (2000) and may be found at http://link.aip.org/link/?APPLAB/77/2789/1Zero-order metal grating structures are found to give extraordinary selective transmission at microwave frequencies through the resonant excitation of coupled surface waves. The metal slat structures with dielectric spacings as small as 250 µm strongly transmit wavelengths of several millimeters. A simple interpretation of these novel results which treats the deep grating structures as "filled" Fabry–Perot cavity systems gives model transmissivities which agree very well with the experimental data

Supporting Early-Career Academics in the UK Computer Science Community

The early career of a computer science academic in the United Kingdom (UK) — as with most other disciplines — is challenging in terms of balancing research aspirations, learning and teaching responsibilities, wider academic service commitments, as well as their own professional development. In terms of learning and teaching development, this commonly involves working towards Fellow- ship of the Higher Education Academy (now known as Advance HE), either by direct application or via successful completion of an accredited institutional taught postgraduate course. Typically, if a course is required (often as part of their academic probation), the focus will be general higher education learning and teaching pedagogy rather than specifically focused on computer science and cognate areas. The formal institutional course requirements are normally supplemented by mentoring from within their department from experienced academic colleagues. Thus, the quality of development for an early-career academic will be enhanced in part by the strength of the community of practice operating within the department and the communities of practice that exist at a national and international level, often through professional bodies, learned societies and sub-disciplinary groupings. This paper presents the work-in-progress to address some of these structural, cultural and community challenges at both the institutional and national level in the UK, based on empirical themes collected from a workshop held at UKICER’20. We identify a number of specific actions and recommendations to supplement the current formal institutional requirements with enhanced national-level academic practice support and professional development, alongside local and regional professional mentoring

Observations on the ex situ perfusion of livers for transplantation.

Normothermic ex situ liver perfusion might allow viability assessment of livers before transplantation. Perfusion characteristics were studied in 47 liver perfusions, of which 22 resulted in transplants. Hepatocellular damage was reflected in the perfusate transaminase concentrations, which correlated with posttransplant peak transaminase levels. Lactate clearance occurred within 3 hours in 46 of 47 perfusions, and glucose rose initially during perfusion in 44. Three livers required higher levels of bicarbonate support to maintain physiological pH, including one developing primary nonfunction. Bile production did not correlate with viability or cholangiopathy, but bile pH, measured in 16 of the 22 transplanted livers, identified three livers that developed cholangiopathy (peak pH 7.5). In the 11 research livers where it could be studied, bile pH > 7.5 discriminated between the 6 livers exhibiting >50% circumferential stromal necrosis of septal bile ducts and 4 without necrosis; one liver with 25-50% necrosis had a maximum pH 7.46. Liver viability during normothermic perfusion can be assessed using a combination of transaminase release, glucose metabolism, lactate clearance, and maintenance of acid-base balance. Evaluation of bile pH may offer a valuable insight into bile duct integrity and risk of posttransplant ischemic cholangiopathy

Foundations for Open Scholarship Strategy Development, Version 2.1 [Pre-print]

This document aims to agree on a broad, international strategy for the implementation of open scholarship that meets the needs of different national and regional communities but works globally. Scholarly research can be idealised as an inspirational process for advancing our collective knowledge to the benefit of all humankind. However, current research practices often struggle with a range of tensions, in part due to the fact that this collective (or “commons”) ideal conflicts with the competitive system in which most scholars work, and in part because much of the infrastructure of the scholarly world is becoming largely digital. What is broadly termed as Open Scholarship is an attempt to realign modern research practices with this ideal. We do not propose a definition of Open Scholarship, but recognise that it is a holistic term that encompasses many disciplines, practices, and principles, sometimes also referred to as Open Science or Open Research. We choose the term Open Scholarship to be more inclusive of these other terms. When we refer to science in this document, we do so historically and use it as shorthand for more general scholarship. The purpose of this document is to provide a concise analysis of where the global Open Scholarship movement currently stands: what the common threads and strengths are, where the greatest opportunities and challenges lie, and how we can more effectively work together as a global community to recognise and address the top strategic priorities. This document was inspired by the Foundations for OER Strategy Development and work in the FORCE11 Scholarly Commons Working Group, and developed by an open contribution working group. Our hope is that this document will serve as a foundational resource for continuing discussions and initiatives about implementing effective strategies to help streamline the integration of Open Scholarship practices into a modern, digital research culture. Through this, we hope to extend the reach and impact of Open Scholarship into a global context, making sure that it is truly open for all. We also hope that this document will evolve as the conversations around Open Scholarship progress, and help to provide useful insight for both global co-ordination and local action. We believe this is a step forward in making Open Scholarship the norm. Ultimately, we expect the impact of widespread adoption of Open Scholarship to be diverse. We expect novel research practices to accelerate the pace of innovation, and therefore stimulate critical industries around the world. We could also expect to see an increase in public trust of science and scholarship, as transparency becomes more normative. As such, we expect interest in Open Scholarship to increase at multiple levels, due to its inherent influence on society and global economics