Working with troubles and failures in conversation between humans and robots

In order to carry out human-robot collaborative tasks efficiently, robots have to be able to communicate with their human counterparts. In many applications, speech interfaces are deployed as a way to empower robots with the ability to communicate. Despite the progress made in speech recognition and (multi-modal) dialogue systems, such interfaces continue to be brittle in a number of ways and the experience of the failure of such interfaces is commonplace amongst roboticists. Surprisingly, a rigorous and complete analysis of communicative failures is still missing, and the technical literature is positively skewed towards the success and good performance of speech interfaces. In order to address this blind spot and investigate failures in conversations between humans and robots, an interdisciplinary effort is necessary. This workshop aims to raise awareness of said blind spot and provide a platform for discussing communicative troubles and failures in human-robot interactions and potentially related failures in non-robotic speech interfaces. We aim to bring together researchers studying communication in different fields, to start a scrupulous investigation into communicative failures, to begin working on a taxonomy of such failures, and enable a preliminary discussion on possible mitigating strategies. This workshop intends to be a venue where participants can freely discuss the failures they have encountered, to positively and constructively learn from them

Health care help seeking behaviour among prisoners in Norway

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Prisoners are associated with high health care needs compared with the general population. This study aims to investigate prisoners' use of health service.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A cross-sectional study of 29 prisons in central and southern parts of Norway. A questionnaire was distributed to 1, 454 prisoners (90% response rate). Multilevel analyses were employed to analyse help seeking behaviour among the prisoners.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Help seeking was substantially associated with sleep problems and drug problems. There was also a tendency for closed prisons as well as high staffing levels of healthcare professionals to be associated with elevated health care use.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This study suggests that sleep problems and drug use are most frequently associated with health service use. The differences in health care use between prisons suggest that the implementation of prison health care standards should be addressed.</p

Simultaneous wavelength conversion of two 40 Gbit/s channels using four-wave mixing in a semiconductor optical amplifier

Two 40 Gbit/s wavelength channels have been simultaneously wavelength converted in a single semiconductor optical amplifier using four-wave mixing. Bit error ratio measurements show a good performance in both cases