Conceptual Frameworks for Multimodal Social Signal Processing

This special issue is about a research area which is developing rapidly. Pentland gave it a name which has become widely used, ‘Social Signal Processing’ (SSP for short), and his phrase provides the title of a European project, SSPnet, which has a brief to consolidate the area. The challenge that Pentland highlighted was understanding the nonlinguistic signals that serve as the basis for “subconscious discussions between humans about relationships, resources, risks, and rewards”. He identified it as an area where computational research had made interesting progress, and could usefully make more

Linking Conversation Analysis and Motion Capturing: How to robustly track multiple participants?

Pitsch K, Brüning B-A, Schnier C, Dierker H, Wachsmuth S. Linking Conversation Analysis and Motion Capturing: How to robustly track multiple participants? In: Kipp M, Martin J-C, Paggio P, Heylen D, eds. Proceedings of the LREC Workshop on Multimodal Corpora: Advances in Capturing, Coding and Analyzing Multimodality (MMC 2010). 2010: 63-69.If we want to model the dynamic and contingent nature of human social interaction (e.g. for the design of human robot interaction), analysis and description of natural interaction is required that combines different methodologies and research tools (qualitative/quantitative; manual/automated). In this paper, we pinpoint the requirements and technical challenges for constituting and managing multimodal corpora that arise when linking Conversation Analysis with novel 3D motion capture technologies: i.e. to robustly track multiple participants over an extended period of time. We present and evaluate a solution to by-pass the limits of the current standard Vicon system (using rigid bodies) and ways of mapping the obtained coordinates to a human skeleton model (inverse kinematics) and to export the data into a format that is supported by standard annotation tools (such as ANVIL)

Landscape structure affects the prevalence and distribution of a tick-borne zoonotic pathogen

Background Landscape structure can affect pathogen prevalence and persistence with consequences for human and animal health. Few studies have examined how reservoir host species traits may interact with landscape structure to alter pathogen communities and dynamics. Using a landscape of islands and mainland sites we investigated how natural landscape fragmentation affects the prevalence and persistence of the zoonotic tick-borne pathogen complex Borrelia burgdorferi(sensu lato), which causes Lyme borreliosis. We hypothesized that the prevalence of B. burgdorferi (s.l.) would be lower on islands compared to the mainland and B. afzelii, a small mammal specialist genospecies, would be more affected by isolation than bird-associated B. garinii and B. valaisiana and the generalist B. burgdorferi (sensu stricto). Methods Questing (host-seeking) nymphal I. Ricinus ticks (n = 6567) were collected from 12 island and 6 mainland sites in 2011, 2013 and 2015 and tested for B. burgdorferi(s.l.). Deer abundance was estimated using dung transects. Results The prevalence of B. burgdorferi (s.l.) was significantly higher on the mainland (2.5%, 47/1891) compared to island sites (0.9%, 44/4673) (P < 0.01). While all four genospecies of B. burgdorferi (s.l.) were detected on the mainland, bird-associated species B. garinii and B. valaisiana and the generalist genospecies B. burgdorferi(s.s.) predominated on islands. Conclusion We found that landscape structure influenced the prevalence of a zoonotic pathogen, with a lower prevalence detected among island sites compared to the mainland. This was mainly due to the significantly lower prevalence of small mammal-associated B. afzelii. Deer abundance was not related to pathogen prevalence, suggesting that the structure and dynamics of the reservoir host community underpins the observed prevalence patterns, with the higher mobility of bird hosts compared to small mammal hosts leading to a relative predominance of the bird-associated genospecies B. garinii and generalist genospecies B. burgdorferi (s.s.) on islands. In contrast, the lower prevalence of B. afzelii on islands may be due to small mammal populations there exhibiting lower densities, less immigration and stronger population fluctuations. This study suggests that landscape fragmentation can influence the prevalence of a zoonotic pathogen, dependent on the biology of the reservoir host

Bacterial Stressors in Minimally Processed Food

Stress responses are of particular importance to microorganisms, because their habitats are subjected to continual changes in temperature, osmotic pressure, and nutrients availability. Stressors (and stress factors), may be of chemical, physical, or biological nature. While stress to microorganisms is frequently caused by the surrounding environment, the growth of microbial cells on its own may also result in induction of some kinds of stress such as starvation and acidity. During production of fresh-cut produce, cumulative mild processing steps are employed, to control the growth of microorganisms. Pathogens on plant surfaces are already stressed and stress may be increased during the multiple mild processing steps, potentially leading to very hardy bacteria geared towards enhanced survival. Cross-protection can occur because the overlapping stress responses enable bacteria exposed to one stress to become resistant to another stress. A number of stresses have been shown to induce cross protection, including heat, cold, acid and osmotic stress. Among other factors, adaptation to heat stress appears to provide bacterial cells with more pronounced cross protection against several other stresses. Understanding how pathogens sense and respond to mild stresses is essential in order to design safe and effective minimal processing regimes

Development of a Two-Stage Radial Inflow Turbine for a Mini-ORC

editorial reviewed-Ce travail est centré sur la construction d'un modèle 0-D de conception de roue turbine radial pour des fluides non idéaux. Ce modèle est appliqué au cas d'un cycle ORC de 10kW e à deux étages d'expansion. Le point de fonctionnement du système ainsi que le fluide de travail sont choisi sur base des contraintes propres aux turbomachines. Enfin, une vérification CFD sur base des roues concues est réalisée afin de valider le modèle, et de vérifier certaines caractéristiques de l'écoulement prédites sur base du modèle 0-D

Multimodal Corpora: From Models of Natural Interaction to Systems and Applications

The book presents a cross-section of state-of-the-art research on multimodal corpora,a highly interdisciplinary area that is a prerequisite for various specialized disciplines. A number of the papers included are revised and expanded versions of papers accepted to the InternationalWorkshop on Multimodal Corpora: From Models of Natural Interaction to Systems and Applications, held in conjunction with the 6th International Conference for Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) on May 27, 2008, in Marrakech, Morocco

The Bielefeld Speech and Gesture Alignment Corpus (SaGA)

Lücking A, Bergmann K, Hahn F, Kopp S, Rieser H. The Bielefeld Speech and Gesture Alignment Corpus (SaGA). In: Kipp M, Martin J-P, Paggio P, Heylen D, eds. LREC 2010 Workshop: Multimodal Corpora–Advances in Capturing, Coding and Analyzing Multimodality. 2010: 92-98.People communicate multimodally. Most prominently, they co-produce speech and gesture. How do they do that? Studying the interplay of both modalities has to be informed by empirically observed communication behavior. We present a corpus built of speech and gesture data gained in a controlled study. We describe 1) the setting underlying the data; 2) annotation of the data; 3) reliability evalution methods and results; and 4) applications of the corpus in the research domain of speech and gesture alignment