A prototype for a conversational companion for reminiscing about images

This work was funded by the COMPANIONS project sponsored by the European Commission as part of the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme under EC grant number IST-FP6-034434. Companions demonstrators can be seen at: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/∼roberta/companions/Web/.This paper describes an initial prototype of the Companions project (www.companions-project.org): the Senior Companion (SC), designed to be a platform to display novel approaches to: (1) The use of Information Extraction (IE) techniques to extract the content of incoming dialogue utterances after an ASR phase. (2) The conversion of the input to RDF form to allow the generation of new facts from existing ones, under the control of a Dialogue Manager (DM), that also has access to stored knowledge and knowledge accessed in real time from the web, all in RDF form. (3) A DM expressed as a stack and network virtual machine that models mixed initiative in dialogue control. (4) A tuned dialogue act detector based on corpus evidence. The prototype platform was evaluated, and we describe this; it is also designed to support more extensive forms of emotion detection carried by both speech and lexical content, as well as extended forms of machine learning. We describe preliminary studies and results for these, in particular a novel approach to enabling reinforcement learning for open dialogue systems through the detection of emotion in the speech signal and its deployment as a form of a learned DM, at a higher level than the DM virtual machine and able to direct the SC’s responses to a more emotionally appropriate part of its repertoire. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.peer-reviewe

The senior companion : a semantic web dialogue system

This work was funded by Companions[3], European Commission Sixth Framework Programme Information Society Technologies Integrated Project IST-34434.7The Senior Companion (SC) is a fully implemented Windows application intended for intermittent use by one user only (a senior citizen) over potentially many years. The thinking behind the SC is to make a device that will give its owner comfort, company, entertainment, and some practical functions. The SC will typically be installed at home, either as an application on a personal computer, or on a dedicated device (like a Chumby) or an intelligent coffee table (like Microsoft's Surface). By means of multimodal input and output, and a graphical interface, the SC provides its 'owner' with different functionalities, which currently include: • conversing with the user about his personal photos • learning about the user, user's family, and life history • telling the user jokes • reading the news (via RSS feed from the internet)peer-reviewe

Robust abandoned object detection integrating wide area visual surveillance and social context

This paper presents a video surveillance framework that robustly and efficiently detects abandoned objects in surveillance scenes. The framework is based on a novel threat assessment algorithm which combines the concept of ownership with automatic understanding of social relations in order to infer abandonment of objects. Implementation is achieved through development of a logic-based inference engine based on Prolog. Threat detection performance is conducted by testing against a range of datasets describing realistic situations and demonstrates a reduction in the number of false alarms generated. The proposed system represents the approach employed in the EU SUBITO project (Surveillance of Unattended Baggage and the Identification and Tracking of the Owner)

The p.M292T NDUFS2 mutation causes complex I-deficient Leigh syndrome in multiple families

Isolated complex I deficiency is the most frequently observed oxidative phosphorylation defect in children with mitochondrial disease, leading to a diverse range of clinical presentations, including Leigh syndrome. For most patients the genetic cause of the biochemical defect remains unknown due to incomplete understanding of the complex I assembly process. Nonetheless, a plethora of pathogenic mutations have been described to date in the seven mitochondrial-encoded subunits of complex I as well as in 12 of the nuclear-encoded subunits and in six assembly factors. Whilst several mitochondrial DNA mutations are recurrent, the majority of these mutations are reported in single families. We have sequenced core structural and functional nuclear-encoded subunits of complex I in a cohort of 34 paediatric patients with isolated complex I deficiency, identifying pathogenic mutations in 6 patients. These included a novel homozygous NDUFS1 mutation in an Asian child with Leigh syndrome, a previously identified NDUFS8 mutation (c.236C>T, p.P79L) in a second Asian child with Leigh-like syndrome and six novel, compound heterozygous NDUFS2 mutations in four white Caucasian patients with Leigh or Leigh-like syndrome. Three of these children harboured an identical NDUFS2 mutation (c.875T>C, p.M292T), which was also identified in conjunction with a novel NDUFS2 splice site mutation (c.866+4A>G) in a fourth Caucasian child who presented to a different diagnostic centre, with microsatellite and single nucleotide polymorphism analyses indicating that this was due to an ancient common founder event. Our results confirm that NDUFS2 is a mutational hotspot in Caucasian children with isolated complex I deficiency and recommend the routine diagnostic investigation of this gene in patients with Leigh or Leigh-like phenotypes

Modelling the emergence of a basis for vocal communication between artificial agents

Understanding the human faculty for speech presents a fundamental and complex problem. We do not know how humans decode the rapid speech signal and the origins and evolution of speech remain shrouded in mystery. Speakers generate a continuous stream of sounds apparently devoid of any specifying invariant features. Despite this absence, we can effortlessly decode this stream and comprehend the utterances of others. Moreover, the form of these utterances is shared and mutually understood by a large population of speakers. In this thesis, we present a multi-agent model that simulates the emergence of a system with shared auditory features and articulatory tokens. Based upon notions of intentionality and the absence of specifying invariants, each agent produces and perceives speech, learning to control an articulatory model of the vocal tract and perceiving the resulting signal through a biologically plausible artificial auditory system. By firmly establishing each aspect of our model in current phonetic theory, we are able to make useful claims and justify our inevitable abstractions. For example, Lindblom’s theory of hyper- and hypo-articulation, where speakers seek maximum auditory distinction for minimal articulatory effort, justifies our choice of an articulatory vocal tract coupled with a direct measure of effort. By removing the abstractions of previous phonetic models we have been able to reconsider the current assumption that specifying invariants, in either the auditory or articulatory domain, must indicate the presence of auditory or articulatory symbolic tokens in the cognitive domain. Rather we consider speech perception to proceed through Gibsonian direct realism where the signal is manipulated by the speaker to enable the perception of the affordances within speech. We conclude that the speech signal is constrained by the intention of the speaker and the structure of the vocal tract and decoded through an interaction of the peripheral auditory system and complex pattern recognition of multiple acoustic cues. Far from passive ‘variance mopping’, this recognition proceeds through the constant refinement of an unbroken loop between production and perception

Initial Modelling of the Alternative Phenotypes Hypothesis

The alternative phenotype hypothesis contends that multiple phenotypes exist in a single genotype and are expressed by environmental or genetic cues. It further states that these multiple phenotypes will be maintained and improved in a population where the environment is unstable, in spite of the increased cost of this plasticity. In this work we propose a simple computational model to investigate the conditions under which alternative phenotypes become beneficial, and persist over evolutionary timescales. We find that the environment must vary to realise this hypothesis, and that these adaptations not only provide a fitness benefit in highly unstable environments but also continue to arise despite increasing stability and a corresponding gradual decline in fitness