Public Awareness and Education for Flooding Disasters

In recent years, dramatic river flooding occurred in the city of Prague causing the raising of the river water level more than 8 m and the inundation of the lower parts of the city. The disaster resulted in numerous casualties and damages of buildings and infrastructures. Prior disaster analysis showed that the city was not well prepared for facing the disasters. A digital training could be a powerful tool for increasing knowledge and awareness of the citizens and providing training facilities about response to such disasters. A special Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), therefore, has been developed focused on flooding in Prague offering educational material in crisis flooding. Dedicated technologies have been developed such as a flooding alert and a nonverbal communication language based on icons. The MOOC enables participants to train the new technologies. Participants can also play roles in the crisis management team to increase the sensitivity of the complexity of a flooding crisis and its measurements. The first prototype of the MOOC was tested on a group of students of the Technical Universities of Prague and Delft. The test results will be reported

Automated Dialogue Generation for Behavior Intervention on Mobile Devices

AbstractCommunication in the form of dialogues between a virtual coach and a human patient (coachee) is one of the pillars in an intervention app for smartphones. The virtual coach is considered as a cooperative partner that supports the individual with various exercises for a behavior intervention therapy. To perform its supportive behavior, the coach follows a certain interaction model and its requirements, such as alignment, mutual commitment and adaptation. In this paper, we propose E-Coach MarkUp Language (ECML), a standard XML specification for scripting discourses that define how the virtual coach maintains a dialogue with a coachee following the interaction model. The format of the language allows messages to be tailored at a fine-grained level. Each sentence is synthesized based on the inferred goals of the coaching process and the current beliefs of the user, incorporating everything that has been said previously in the conversation. The design enables inexpensive implementation on mobile devices for a flexible, seamless coaching dialogue. With expert-based evaluations, we validated the language using scenarios on implemented ECML in the field of insomnia therapy

Graduation Committee:

ii Thesis Report: My_Eliza, a Multimodal Communication System The field Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an active area of research. One of the possible applications of NLP systems is a question answering system – QA system. QA system is a program that attempts to simulate typed conversation in human natural language. In contrast with it, there are only a few researches involving research in Nonverbal Communication. Even though, it is proved that beyond the speech bodily activities give real substance to face-to-face interaction in real life conversation. Motivated by this issue, in this report we investigate a design and implementation of a multimodal communication system, called my_Eliza. The design of this system is based on Weizenbaum’s Eliza [WEI66]. A user or client can communicate with the system using typed natural language. The system will reply by text-prompts and appropriate facial-expressions. In order to communicate using a nonverbal facial display, the developed system should be able to process natural language and emotional reasoning