Sharing emotions and space - empathy as a basis for cooperative spatial interaction

Boukricha H, Nguyen N, Wachsmuth I. Sharing emotions and space - empathy as a basis for cooperative spatial interaction. In: Kopp S, Marsella S, Thorisson K, Vilhjalmsson HH, eds. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2011). LNAI. Vol 6895. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2011: 350-362.Empathy is believed to play a major role as a basis for humans’ cooperative behavior. Recent research shows that humans empathize with each other to different degrees depending on several modulation factors including, among others, their social relationships, their mood, and the situational context. In human spatial interaction, partners share and sustain a space that is equally and exclusively reachable to them, the so-called interaction space. In a cooperative interaction scenario of relocating objects in interaction space, we introduce an approach for triggering and modulating a virtual humans cooperative spatial behavior by its degree of empathy with its interaction partner. That is, spatial distances like object distances as well as distances of arm and body movements while relocating objects in interaction space are modulated by the virtual human’s degree of empathy. In this scenario, the virtual human’s empathic emotion is generated as a hypothesis about the partner’s emotional state as related to the physical effort needed to perform a goal directed spatial behavior

Accommodation coefficient of HOBr on deliquescent sodium bromide aerosol particles

Uptake of HOBr on sea salt aerosol, sea salt brine or ice is believed to be a key process providing a source of photolabile bromine (Br₂) and sustaining ozone depletion cycles in the Arctic troposphere. In the present study, uptake of HOBr on sodium bromide (NaBr) aerosol particles was investigated at an extremely low HOBr concentration of 300 cm^-3 using the short-lived radioactive isotopes ^83-86Br. Under these conditions, at maximum one HOBr molecule was taken up per particle. The rate of uptake was clearly limited by the mass accommodation coefficient, which was calculated to be 0.6 ± 0.2. This value is a factor of 10 larger than estimates used in earlier models. The atmospheric implications are discussed using the box model "MOCCA'', showing that the increase of the accommodation coefficient of HOBr by a factor of 10 only slightly affects net ozone loss, but significantly increases chlorine release

Multi-Modal Human-Machine Communication for Instructing Robot Grasping Tasks

A major challenge for the realization of intelligent robots is to supply them with cognitive abilities in order to allow ordinary users to program them easily and intuitively. One way of such programming is teaching work tasks by interactive demonstration. To make this effective and convenient for the user, the machine must be capable to establish a common focus of attention and be able to use and integrate spoken instructions, visual perceptions, and non-verbal clues like gestural commands. We report progress in building a hybrid architecture that combines statistical methods, neural networks, and finite state machines into an integrated system for instructing grasping tasks by man-machine interaction. The system combines the GRAVIS-robot for visual attention and gestural instruction with an intelligent interface for speech recognition and linguistic interpretation, and an modality fusion module to allow multi-modal task-oriented man-machine communication with respect to dextrous robot manipulation of objects.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figure

Sufficient second-order conditions for bang-bang control problems

We provide sufficient optimality conditions for optimal control problems with bang-bang controls. Building on a structural assumption on the adjoint state, we additionally need a weak second-order condition. This second-order condition is formulated with functions from an extended critical cone, and it is equivalent to a formulation posed on measures supported on the set where the adjoint state vanishes. If our sufficient optimality condition is satisfied, we obtain a local quadratic growth condition in L1(Ω)The first author was partially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under project MTM2014-57531-P. The second author was partially supported by the DFG under grant Wa 3626/1-1

Functional MRI Readouts From BOLD and Diffusion Measurements Differentially Respond to Optogenetic Activation and Tissue Heating

Functional blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) MRI provides a brain-wide readout that depends on the hemodynamic response to neuronal activity. Diffusion fMRI has been proposed as an alternative to BOLD fMRI and has been postulated to directly rely on neuronal activity. These complementary functional readouts are versatile tools to be combined with optogenetic stimulation to investigate networks of the brain. The cell-specificity and temporal precision of optogenetic manipulations promise to enable further investigation of the origin of fMRI signals. The signal characteristics of the diffusion fMRI readout vice versa may better resolve network effects of optogenetic stimulation. However, the light application needed for optogenetic stimulation is accompanied by heat deposition within the tissue. As both diffusion and BOLD are sensitive to temperature changes, light application can lead to apparent activations confounding the interpretation of fMRI data. The degree of tissue heating, the appearance of apparent activation in different fMRI sequences and the origin of these phenomena are not well understood. Here, we disentangled apparent activations in BOLD and diffusion measurements in rats from physiological activation upon sensory or optogenetic stimulation. Both, BOLD and diffusion fMRI revealed similar signal shapes upon sensory stimulation that differed clearly from those upon heating. Apparent activations induced by high-intensity light application were dominated by T2∗-effects and resulted in mainly negative signal changes. We estimated that even low-intensity light application used for optogenetic stimulation reduces the BOLD response close to the fiber by up to 0.4%. The diffusion fMRI signal contained T2, T2∗ and diffusion components. The apparent diffusion coefficient, which reflects the isolated diffusion component, showed negative changes upon both optogenetic and electric forepaw stimulation. In contrast, positive changes were detected upon high-intensity light application and thus ruled out heating as a major contributor to the diffusion fMRI signal

Cosmic multi-muon events observed in the underground CERN-LEP tunnel with the ALEPH experiment

Multimuon events have been recorded with the ALEPH-detector, located 140 m underground, in parallel with e$^+$e$^-$ data taking. Benefitting from the high spatial and momentum resolution of the ALEPH tracking chambers narrowly spaced muons in high multiplicity bundles could be analysed. The bulk of the data can be successfully described by standard production phenomena. The multiplicity distribution favors, though not with very high significance, a chemical composition which changes from light to heavier elements with increasing energy around the ``knee". The five highest multiplicity events, with up to 150 muons within an area of $\sim$ 8 m$^2$, occur with a frequency which is almost an order of magnitude above the simulation. To establish a possible effect, more of these events should be recorded with a larger area detector

Spectrum and Charge Ratio of Vertical Cosmic Ray Muons up to Momenta of 2.5 TeV/c

The ALEPH detector at LEP has been used to measure the momentum spectrum and charge ratio of vertical cosmic ray muons underground. The sea-level cosmic ray muon spectrum for momenta up to 2.5 TeV/c has been obtained by correcting for the overburden of 320 meter water equivalent (mwe). The results are compared with Monte Carlo models for air shower development in the atmosphere. From the analysis of the spectrum the total flux and the spectral index of the cosmic ray primaries is inferred. The charge ratio suggests a dominantly light composition of cosmic ray primaries with energies up to 10^15 eV

The UK and German low-carbon industry transitions from a sectoral innovation and system failures perspective

Industrial processes are associated with high amounts of energy consumed and greenhouse gases emitted, stressing the urgent need for low-carbon sectoral transitions. This research reviews the energy-intensive iron and steel, cement and chemicals industries of Germany and the United Kingdom, two major emitting countries with significant activity, yet with different recent orientation. Our socio-technical analysis, based on the Sectoral Innovation Systems and the Systems Failure framework, aims to capture existing and potential drivers of or barriers to diffusion of sustainable industrial technologies and extract implications for policy. Results indicate that actor structures and inconsistent policies have limited low-carbon innovation. A critical factor for the successful decarbonisation of German industry lies in overcoming lobbying and resistance to technological innovation caused by strong networks. By contrast, a key to UK industrial decarbonisation is to drive innovation and investment in the context of an industry in decline and in light of Brexit-related uncertainty

Entwicklung und sozialverträgliche Gestaltung von Expertensystemen in der Medizin

Wachsmuth I, Meyer-Fujara J. Entwicklung und sozialverträgliche Gestaltung von Expertensystemen in der Medizin. In: Wetter T, Engelbrecht R, Haux R, Puppe F, Voß H, eds. Wissensbasierte Systeme in der Medizin: Abstracts des 1. gemeinsamen Workshops der AG Expertensysteme der GMDS und der FG Diagnostik und Klassifikation im GI-Fachausschuß 1.5. Heidelberg: IBM Deutschland GmbH; 1990