The Sweet-Home speech and multimodal corpus for home automation interaction

International audienceAmbient Assisted Living aims at enhancing the quality of life of older and disabled people at home thanks to Smart Homes and Home Automation. However, many studies do not include tests in real settings, because data collection in this domain is very expensive and challenging and because of the few available data sets. The SWEET-H OME multimodal corpus is a dataset recorded in realistic conditions in D OMUS, a fully equipped Smart Home with microphones and home automation sensors, in which participants performed Activities of Daily living (ADL). This corpus is made of a multimodal subset, a French home automation speech subset recorded in Distant Speech conditions, and two interaction subsets, the first one being recorded by 16 persons without disabilities and the second one by 6 seniors and 5 visually impaired people. This corpus was used in studies related to ADL recognition, context aware interaction and distant speech recognition applied to home automation controled through voice

The EEE corpus: socio-affective "glue" cues in elderly-robot interactions in a Smart Home with the EmOz platform

International audienceThe aim of this preliminary study of feasibility is to give a glance at interactions in a Smart Home prototype between the elderly and a companion robot that is having some socio-affective language primitives as the only vector of communication. The paper particularly focuses on the methodology and the scenario made to collect a spontaneous corpus of human-robot interactions. Through a Wizard of Oz platform (EmOz), which was specifically developed for this issue, a robot is introduced as an intermediary between the technological environment and some elderly who have to give vocal commands to the robot to control the Smart Home. The robot vocal productions increases progressively by adding prosodic levels: (1) no speech, (2) pure prosodic mouth noises supposed to be the "glue's" tools, (3) lexicons with supposed "glue" prosody and (4) subject's commands imitations with supposed "glue" prosody. The elderly subjects' speech behaviours confirm the hypothesis that the socio-affective "glue" effect increase towards the prosodic levels, especially for socio-isolated people. The actual corpus is still on recording process and is motivated to collect data from socio-isolated elderly in real need

The EEE corpus: socio-affective "glue" cues in elderly-robot interactions in a Smart Home with the EmOz platform

International audienceThe aim of this preliminary study of feasibility is to give a glance at interactions in a Smart Home prototype between the elderly and a companion robot that is having some socio-affective language primitives as the only vector of communication. The paper particularly focuses on the methodology and the scenario made to collect a spontaneous corpus of human-robot interactions. Through a Wizard of Oz platform (EmOz), which was specifically developed for this issue, a robot is introduced as an intermediary between the technological environment and some elderly who have to give vocal commands to the robot to control the Smart Home. The robot vocal productions increases progressively by adding prosodic levels: (1) no speech, (2) pure prosodic mouth noises supposed to be the "glue's" tools, (3) lexicons with supposed "glue" prosody and (4) subject's commands imitations with supposed "glue" prosody. The elderly subjects' speech behaviours confirm the hypothesis that the socio-affective "glue" effect increase towards the prosodic levels, especially for socio-isolated people. The actual corpus is still on recording process and is motivated to collect data from socio-isolated elderly in real need

The SWEET-HOME Project: Audio Technology in Smart Homes to improve Well-being and Reliance

International audienceThe SWEET-HOME project aims at providing audio-based interaction technology that lets the user have full control over their home environment, at detecting distress situations and at easing the social inclusion of the elderly and frail population. This paper presents an overview of the project focusing on the implemented techniques for speech and sound recognition as context-aware decision making with uncertainty. A user experiment in a smart home demonstrates the interest of this audio-based technology

Altimetry for the future: Building on 25 years of progress

In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and more recently, in 2018, in Ponta Delgada, Portugal, 25 Years of Progress in Radar Altimetry. On this latter occasion it was decided to collect contributions of scientists, engineers and managers involved in the worldwide altimetry community to depict the state of altimetry and propose recommendations for the altimetry of the future. This paper summarizes contributions and recommendations that were collected and provides guidance for future mission design, research activities, and sustainable operational radar altimetry data exploitation. Recommendations provided are fundamental for optimizing further scientific and operational advances of oceanographic observations by altimetry, including requirements for spatial and temporal resolution of altimetric measurements, their accuracy and continuity. There are also new challenges and new openings mentioned in the paper that are particularly crucial for observations at higher latitudes, for coastal oceanography, for cryospheric studies and for hydrology. The paper starts with a general introduction followed by a section on Earth System Science including Ocean Dynamics, Sea Level, the Coastal Ocean, Hydrology, the Cryosphere and Polar Oceans and the ‘‘Green” Ocean, extending the frontier from biogeochemistry to marine ecology. Applications are described in a subsequent section, which covers Operational Oceanography, Weather, Hurricane Wave and Wind Forecasting, Climate projection. Instruments’ development and satellite missions’ evolutions are described in a fourth section. A fifth section covers the key observations that altimeters provide and their potential complements, from other Earth observation measurements to in situ data. Section 6 identifies the data and methods and provides some accuracy and resolution requirements for the wet tropospheric correction, the orbit and other geodetic requirements, the Mean Sea Surface, Geoid and Mean Dynamic Topography, Calibration and Validation, data accuracy, data access and handling (including the DUACS system). Section 7 brings a transversal view on scales, integration, artificial intelligence, and capacity building (education and training). Section 8 reviews the programmatic issues followed by a conclusion

The FLUXNET2015 dataset and the ONEFlux processing pipeline for eddy covariance data

The FLUXNET2015 dataset provides ecosystem-scale data on CO2, water, and energy exchange between the biosphere and the atmosphere, and other meteorological and biological measurements, from 212 sites around the globe (over 1500 site-years, up to and including year 2014). These sites, independently managed and operated, voluntarily contributed their data to create global datasets. Data were quality controlled and processed using uniform methods, to improve consistency and intercomparability across sites. The dataset is already being used in a number of applications, including ecophysiology studies, remote sensing studies, and development of ecosystem and Earth system models. FLUXNET2015 includes derived-data products, such as gap-filled time series, ecosystem respiration and photosynthetic uptake estimates, estimation of uncertainties, and metadata about the measurements, presented for the first time in this paper. In addition, 206 of these sites are for the first time distributed under a Creative Commons (CC-BY 4.0) license. This paper details this enhanced dataset and the processing methods, now made available as open-source codes, making the dataset more accessible, transparent, and reproducible.Peer reviewe

Altimetry for the future: building on 25 years of progress

In 2018 we celebrated 25 years of development of radar altimetry, and the progress achieved by this methodology in the fields of global and coastal oceanography, hydrology, geodesy and cryospheric sciences. Many symbolic major events have celebrated these developments, e.g., in Venice, Italy, the 15th (2006) and 20th (2012) years of progress and more recently, in 2018, in Ponta Delgada, Portugal, 25 Years of Progress in Radar Altimetry. On this latter occasion it was decided to collect contributions of scientists, engineers and managers involved in the worldwide altimetry community to depict the state of altimetry and propose recommendations for the altimetry of the future. This paper summarizes contributions and recommendations that were collected and provides guidance for future mission design, research activities, and sustainable operational radar altimetry data exploitation. Recommendations provided are fundamental for optimizing further scientific and operational advances of oceanographic observations by altimetry, including requirements for spatial and temporal resolution of altimetric measurements, their accuracy and continuity. There are also new challenges and new openings mentioned in the paper that are particularly crucial for observations at higher latitudes, for coastal oceanography, for cryospheric studies and for hydrology. The paper starts with a general introduction followed by a section on Earth System Science including Ocean Dynamics, Sea Level, the Coastal Ocean, Hydrology, the Cryosphere and Polar Oceans and the “Green” Ocean, extending the frontier from biogeochemistry to marine ecology. Applications are described in a subsequent section, which covers Operational Oceanography, Weather, Hurricane Wave and Wind Forecasting, Climate projection. Instruments’ development and satellite missions’ evolutions are described in a fourth section. A fifth section covers the key observations that altimeters provide and their potential complements, from other Earth observation measurements to in situ data. Section 6 identifies the data and methods and provides some accuracy and resolution requirements for the wet tropospheric correction, the orbit and other geodetic requirements, the Mean Sea Surface, Geoid and Mean Dynamic Topography, Calibration and Validation, data accuracy, data access and handling (including the DUACS system). Section 7 brings a transversal view on scales, integration, artificial intelligence, and capacity building (education and training). Section 8 reviews the programmatic issues followed by a conclusion

Systèmes de production agricole en Afrique tropicale

Cet article établit un bilan provisoire sur les différents débats concernant les systèmes de production. Le système de production n'est pas une théorie, mais un simple instrument. C'est un modèle, une construction mentale, qui permet de mieux organiser les données recueillies sur un terrain, qui en facilite l'interprétation. Sa portée est limitée, car il n'aide à décrypter qu'une partie des rapports de production. L'usage d'un nouvel outil d'observation et d'interprétation ne doit pas éclipser les acquis antérieurs

Systèmes de production agricole en Afrique tropicale

Cet article établit un bilan provisoire sur les différents débats concernant les systèmes de production. Le système de production n'est pas une théorie, mais un simple instrument. C'est un modèle, une construction mentale, qui permet de mieux organiser les données recueillies sur un terrain, qui en facilite l'interprétation. Sa portée est limitée, car il n'aide à décrypter qu'une partie des rapports de production. L'usage d'un nouvel outil d'observation et d'interprétation ne doit pas éclipser les acquis antérieurs