Early Turn-taking Prediction with Spiking Neural Networks for Human Robot Collaboration

Turn-taking is essential to the structure of human teamwork. Humans are typically aware of team members' intention to keep or relinquish their turn before a turn switch, where the responsibility of working on a shared task is shifted. Future co-robots are also expected to provide such competence. To that end, this paper proposes the Cognitive Turn-taking Model (CTTM), which leverages cognitive models (i.e., Spiking Neural Network) to achieve early turn-taking prediction. The CTTM framework can process multimodal human communication cues (both implicit and explicit) and predict human turn-taking intentions in an early stage. The proposed framework is tested on a simulated surgical procedure, where a robotic scrub nurse predicts the surgeon's turn-taking intention. It was found that the proposed CTTM framework outperforms the state-of-the-art turn-taking prediction algorithms by a large margin. It also outperforms humans when presented with partial observations of communication cues (i.e., less than 40% of full actions). This early prediction capability enables robots to initiate turn-taking actions at an early stage, which facilitates collaboration and increases overall efficiency.Comment: Submitted to IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 201

China’s Financial Institutions: Analysis of the Dynamic Changes and Associated Inefficiencies Under a Hybrid Capitalistic Approach

Chinahas risen to the forefront of international scrutiny because of its unique political and economic structure and evolution. The growth and development ofChinaas a world economic power has resulted from the political-economic reform efforts of Communist leaders withinChina. Under Mao Ze Dong, during the pre-socialistic modernization period,Chinabegan its reform of rehabilitation from war time and social-economic restructuring by instituting socialistic ideology. During the Dengist period under Deng Xiao Ping, there was a transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy. After Deng, socialist modernization reform has continued underChina’s hybrid capitalistic economic model, with particularly significant effects on the rapidly structured financial market. Entrenched with the withinChina’s hybrid capitalistic economic model are the politically and socially inextricable characteristics of which are based on generations of behavior. Reform inefficiencies have resulted from state enterprises that lacked control, financial structure, and balance between state and private behavior. The evolving capital market withinChinafaced serious problems due to inefficiencies within state sector enterprises’ financial system. Moreover, the banking system withinChinais inefficient and poorly organized. Problematic issues such as financial institutions’ weak intermediary role, disorganization of financial assets, and unstable lending policy has been masked by the public’s trust in the state and political-social behavior of Chinese enterprises. However, in order to transitionChina’s banking system to modern practice, bank intermediation, capital asset balance, and foreign investment decontrol must be established. Creating a modern financial system inChinawill rely on reforming behavior as much, if not more than the reformation of policy