Perception of non-verbal emotional listener feedback

This paper reports on a listening test assessing the perception of short non-verbal emotional vocalisations emitted by a listener as feedback to the speaker. We clarify the concepts backchannel and feedback, and investigate the use of affect bursts as a means of giving emotional feedback via the backchannel. Experiments with German and Dutch subjects confirm that the recognition of emotion from affect bursts in a dialogical context is similar to their perception in isolation. We also investigate the acceptability of affect bursts when used as listener feedback. Acceptability appears to be linked to display rules for emotion expression. While many ratings were similar between Dutch and German listeners, a number of clear differences was found, suggesting language-specific affect bursts

The SEMAINE API: Towards a Standards-Based Framework for Building Emotion-Oriented Systems

This paper presents the SEMAINE API, an open source framework for building emotion-oriented systems. By encouraging and simplifying the use of standard representation formats, the framework aims to contribute to interoperability and reuse of system components in the research community. By providing a Java and C++ wrapper around a message-oriented middleware, the API makes it easy to integrate components running on different operating systems and written in different programming languages. The SEMAINE system 1.0 is presented as an example of a full-scale system built on top of the SEMAINE API. Three small example systems are described in detail to illustrate how integration between existing and new components is realised with minimal effort

Price of Anarchy in Bernoulli Congestion Games with Affine Costs

We consider an atomic congestion game in which each player participates in the game with an exogenous and known probability $p_{i}\in[0,1]$, independently of everybody else, or stays out and incurs no cost. We first prove that the resulting game is potential. Then, we compute the parameterized price of anarchy to characterize the impact of demand uncertainty on the efficiency of selfish behavior. It turns out that the price of anarchy as a function of the maximum participation probability $p=\max_{i} p_{i}$ is a nondecreasing function. The worst case is attained when players have the same participation probabilities $p_{i}\equiv p$. For the case of affine costs, we provide an analytic expression for the parameterized price of anarchy as a function of $p$. This function is continuous on $(0,1]$, is equal to $4/3$ for $0<p\leq 1/4$, and increases towards $5/2$ when $p\to 1$. Our work can be interpreted as providing a continuous transition between the price of anarchy of nonatomic and atomic games, which are the extremes of the price of anarchy function we characterize. We show that these bounds are tight and are attained on routing games -- as opposed to general congestion games -- with purely linear costs (i.e., with no constant terms).Comment: 29 pages, 6 figure

Eco-friendly 3d-routing : a GIS based 3d-routing-model to estimate and reduce co2-emissions of distribution transports

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesRoad Freight Transportation accounts for a significant share of the worldwide CO2-Emissions, indicating that respective operations are not sustainable. Regarding the forecasted increase in CO2-Emissions from Road Freight Transportation, this sector needs to undertake responsibilities for its environmental impact. Although technical and strategic solutions to reduce emissions have been introduced or are in development, such solutions rarely yield instant emission reduction potentials. A strategic approach to reduce them instantly, based on the given infrastructure and existing vehicle fleet, is represented through route optimization. Route optimization is a well-researched topic in the transportation domain. However, it is mainly used to reduce transportation times and expenses. Rising expectation towards sustainability through stakeholders such as authorities and consumers, let to an increased interest in route optimization where environmental externalities as fuel consumption and CO2-Emissions are minimized. This paper introduces a Geographic Information System (GIS) based 3D-Routing-Model, which incorporates models to estimate vehicle fuel consumption while taking effects as road inclination and varying velocities into account. The proposed model utilizes a Digital Elevation Model to enrich a Road Network with elevation data – An approach which is applicable to any area where respective data is available. To evaluate the effects of road inclination on a vehicles fuel consumption and its proportional CO2-Emissions, the 3D-Routing-Model is applied in different distribution scenarios within the framework of an artificial company in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. The obtained results indicate that eco-friendly routes can yield significant fuel and emission saving potentials of up to 20 % in the tested scenarios. However, the results also indicate that eco-friendly routes are characterized through longer distances as well as operation times, which eventually leads to increased expenses. It remains the question if companies within the transportation sector are more interested in maximizing their profits, or to invest in a sustainable future

Synchronizing noisy nonidentical oscillators by transient uncoupling

Synchronization is the process of achieving identical dynamics among coupled identical units. If the units are different from each other, their dynamics cannot become identical; yet, after transients, there may emerge a functional relationship between them -- a phenomenon termed "generalized synchronization." Here, we show that the concept of transient uncoupling, recently introduced for synchronizing identical units, also supports generalized synchronization among nonidentical chaotic units. Generalized synchronization can be achieved by transient uncoupling even when it is impossible by regular coupling. We furthermore demonstrate that transient uncoupling stabilizes synchronization in the presence of common noise. Transient uncoupling works best if the units stay uncoupled whenever the driven orbit visits regions that are locally diverging in its phase space. Thus, to select a favorable uncoupling region, we propose an intuitive method that measures the local divergence at the phase points of the driven unit's trajectory by linearizing the flow and subsequently suppresses the divergence by uncoupling

Quantifying Transient Spreading Dynamics on Networks

Spreading phenomena on networks are essential for the collective dynamics of various natural and technological systems, from information spreading in gene regulatory networks to neural circuits or from epidemics to supply networks experiencing perturbations. Still, how local disturbances spread across networks is not yet quantitatively understood. Here we analyze generic spreading dynamics in deterministic network dynamical systems close to a given operating point. Standard dynamical systems' theory does not explicitly provide measures for arrival times and amplitudes of a transient, spreading signal because it focuses on invariant sets, invariant measures and other quantities less relevant for transient behavior. We here change the perspective and introduce effective expectation values for deterministic dynamics to work out a theory explicitly quantifying when and how strongly a perturbation initiated at one unit of a network impacts any other. The theory provides explicit timing and amplitude information as a function of the relative position of initially perturbed and responding unit as well as on the entire network topology.Comment: 9 pages and 4 figures main manuscript 9 pages and 3 figures appendi

Transient Uncoupling Induces Synchronization

Finding conditions that support synchronization is a fertile and active area of research with applications across multiple disciplines. Here we present and analyze a scheme for synchronizing chaotic dynamical systems by transiently uncoupling them. Specifically, systems coupled only in a fraction of their state space may synchronize even if fully coupled they do not. Although, for many standard systems, coupling strengths need to be bounded to ensure synchrony, transient uncoupling removes this bound and thus enables synchronization in an infinite range of effective coupling strengths. The presented coupling scheme thus opens up the possibility to induce synchrony in (biological or technical) systems whose parameters are fixed and cannot be modified continuously.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figure

NUMERICAL DISCRETISATION OF BUILT STRUCTURES ASSUMPTION AND REALITY

The second half of the 20th century was affected by the introduction of electronic data processing. The numerical methods appeared to be capable of solving every engineering problem. However, dealing with real problems, an appropriate numerical discretization of built structures is in many cases a difficult task, since fundamental input data concerning the actual properties of the structure, material and the mechanical boundary condition couldn’t always be met. Typical difficulties are an incomplete documentation, unknown effects of structural faults and uncertain material properties. In this paper our experience in experimental assessment of structures is described and the outcome of experimental versus numerical results is compared in several examples. This paper summarizes finally both prospects and limitations of numerical simulations of built structures and shall show that the identified load bearing capacity is strongly bound to the quality of the numerical structural model