Translation of a book of evidence and its impact on a criminal trial - A case study

Interpreting in a legal setting in Ireland is not subject to any regulation. Police and court interpreters are neither certified nor tested. The current study aims to analyse the impact on a criminal trial of unqualified interpreters’ assistance in the pre-trial process. The starting point of the investigation is an analysis of witness statements written with the assistance of unqualified interpreters. It is followed by an analysis of the statements’ translation into Polish. The analysis of statements is performed based on Juliane House’s translation quality assessment model. Finally, analysis of court transcripts investigates the impact of translation and interpreting on the trial. The findings show that covert translation of witness statements disrupts the flow of the trial and suggest that overt translation may be more appropriate for this text type. The investigation highlights the dangers related to commissioning unqualified interpreters and translators in a legal setting and confirms an urgent need to regulate this field in Ireland. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that Juliane House’s translation quality assessment model can be successfully applied to legal texts such as witness statements

PolyMorph: A P300 Polymorphic Speller

P300 is an electric signal emitted by brain about 300 milliseconds after a rare, but relevant-for-the-user event. Even if it is hard to identify and it provides a low-rate communication channel, it can be used in cases in which other evoked potentials fail. One of the applications of this signal is a speller that enables subjects who lost the control of their motor pathways to communicate by selecting one by one each character of a sentence in a matrix containing all the alphabet symbols. This paper provides an improvement of this paradigm and it aims at reducing both the error rate and the time required to spell a sentence by exploiting the redundancy which is present in all the natural languages

BCI-Based Neuro-Rehabilitation Treatment for Parkinson’s Disease: cases Report

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is characterized by motor and cognitive decay, coupled to an alteration of brain oscillatory patterns. In this study a novel neuro-rehabilitation tool, based on the application of motor imagery into a Brain Computer Interface system, is presented with some preliminary data. Three patients were evaluated (with motor, neuropsychological and EEG testing) before and after a neuro-rehabilitation protocol made by 15 experimental sessions. Patients showed a decrease of freezing of gait severity, an improvement in alpha and beta EEG bands power, and a better performance on some attention and executive tasks

Visuomotor adaptation changes tactile discrimination: an ERP study

We recorded brain activity in SI, elicited by the electrical stimulation of the right forearm during a 2PTD task (the two point distance selected according to the individual threshold) after visuomotor adaptation sessions, including normal and extended reaches. A reliable increase in brain activity was observed after the visuomotor adaptation with extended but not normal reaches. Visuomotor adaptation changes body representation and preset the tactile circuits involved in the 2TPD task via top-down links from multisensory areas in the posterior parietal cortex into the somatosensory corte

Neurofeedback induced restoration on sensorimotor rhythm after 24h of hand immobilization.

In this study, we examined the effect of neurofeedback on EEG changes due to immobilization of the dominant hand. Desynchronization of the sensorimotor rhythms during motor imagery was used as a tool to investigate brain activity. The study is based on 8 healthy subjects who underwent immobilization of the dominant hand for 24 hours. The electrical activity of the sensorimotor region of the cerebral cortex was registered during mental imagery of hand movements before the immobilization, soon after its removal and after a single session of neurofeedback. The control of the feedback stimuli was based on changes in sensorimotor rhythms produced by imagination of movement. Preliminary results show that immobilization caused changes in alpha and beta rhythms that were rapidly reversed after a single session of neurofeedback. At the end of the full study, if the here presented observations will still hold, the neurofeedback protocol will be proposed for routine rehabilitation sessions in patients suffering partial or total limb disability

Nuovi sistemi per la comunicazione alternativa basati su Brain Computer Interface.

2011/2012La comunicazione alternativa attraverso le BCIs può risultare uno strumento per agevolare le condizioni di vita di pazienti affetti dai disturbi neurologici. La comunicazione via BCI è ancora molto più lenta rispetto alla comunicazione con il linguaggio naturale. L’obiettivo di questo lavoro di tesi si inserisce in tale ambito, consistendo nello sviluppo di nuove applicazioni in grado di migliorare la velocità di comunicazione con utilizzo delle BCIs. Sono stati sviluppati due sistemi di comunicazione alternativa basati sulla componente P300. Il primo sistema chiamato ‘Multimenu’ permette una selezione veloce di messaggi e di comandi impostati in una struttura gerarchica. Il secondo sistema di tipo predittivo, denominato PolyMorph, grazie ad algoritmi appositamente sviluppati, predice i caratteri e/o le parole successivi a quelli già selezionati in precedenza.XXV Ciclo198

Performance of EEG Motor-Imagery based spatial filtering methods: A BCI study on Stroke patients

The study reports the performance of stroke patients to operate Motor-Imagery based Brain-Computer Interface (MI-BCI) in early post-stroke neurorehabilitation and compares three different BCI spatial filtering techniques. The experiment was conducted on five stroke patients who performed a total of 15 MI-BCI sessions targeting paretic limbs. The EEG data were collected during the initial calibration phase of each session, and the individual BCI models were made by using Source Power Co-Modulation (SPoC), Spectrally weighted Common Spatial Patterns (SpecCSP), and Filter-Bank Common Spatial Patterns (FBCSP) BCI approaches. The accuracy of FBCSP was significantly higher than the accuracy of SPoC (85.1\ub11.9 % vs. 83.0\ub11.9 %; p=0.002), while the accuracy of FBCSP was slightly higher than the accuracy of SpecCSP (85.1\ub11.9 % vs. 83.8\ub12.0 %; p=0.068). No significant difference was found between SPoC and SpecCSP (p=0.616). The average false positive ratio was 16.9%, 17.1%, 14.3%, while the average false negative was 15.5 %, 16.9 %, 15.5 % for SpecCSP, SPoC, FBCSP, respectively. In conclusion, we demonstrated that the stroke patients were capable of controlling MI-BCI, with high accuracy and that FBCSP may be used as the MI-BCI approach for complementary neurorehabilitation during early stroke phases

Evaluation of Motor Imagery-Based BCI methods in neurorehabilitation of Parkinson's Disease patients

The study reports the performance of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients to operate Motor-Imagery based Brain-Computer Interface (MI-BCI) and compares three selected pre-processing and classification approaches. The experiment was conducted on 7 PD patients who performed a total of 14 MI-BCI sessions targeting lower extremities. EEG was recorded during the initial calibration phase of each session, and the specific BCI models were produced by using Spectrally weighted Common Spatial Patterns (SpecCSP), Source Power Comodulation (SPoC) and Filter-Bank Common Spatial Patterns (FBCSP) methods. The results showed that FBCSP outperformed SPoC in terms of accuracy, and both SPoC and SpecCSP in terms of the false-positive ratio. The study also demonstrates that PD patients were capable of operating MI-BCI, although with lower accuracy