267 research outputs found
Developing and Implementing a Software Program for Configuring Three Dairy Corral Designs
No full textEleven simulation models were developed to plan and design several dairy farm facilities. A decision tree was developed for each simulation model, and then the simulation models were integrated into the relevant decision trees. C# programming language was used to develop a software program via the simulation models and decision trees. The objective is to develop a software program to plan and design dairy farm facilities for dairy farms in hot climates. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Assistant Professor, Agricultural Engineering Department, Faculty of Agriculture, Cairo University, Gammaa Street, 12613 Giza, Egypt* Corresponding Author, Email: [email protected] Cite This Article As: Â M. Samer. 2010. Developing and Implementing a Software Program for Configuring Three Dairy Corral Designs. J. Exp. Sci. 1(3): 19-22.Â
Towards rich multimodal behavior in spoken dialogues with embodied agents
No full textSpoken dialogue frameworks have traditionally been designed to handle a single stream of data - the speech signal. Research on human-human communication has been providing large evidence and quantifying the effects and the importance of a multitude of other multimodal nonverbal signals that people use in their communication, that shape and regulate their interaction. Driven by findings from multimodal human spoken interaction, and the advancements of capture devices and robotics and animation technologies, new possibilities are rising for the development of multimodal human-machine interaction that is more affective, social, and engaging. In such face-to-face interaction scenarios, dialogue systems can have a large set of signals at their disposal to infer context and enhance and regulate the interaction through the generation of verbal and nonverbal facial signals. This paper summarizes several design decision, and experiments that we have followed in attempts to build rich and fluent multimodal interactive systems using a newly developed hybrid robotic head called Furhat, and discuss issues and challenges that this effort is facing.</p
Do infants detect A→V articulator congruency for non-native click consonants?
No full textIn a prior study infants habituated to an audio-only labial or alveolar, native English voiceless or non-native ejective stop, then saw silent videos of stops at each place [1]. 4-month-olds gazed more at congruent videos for native and non-native stops. 11-month-olds preferred congruence for native stops but incongruence for non-native ejectives, suggesting language experience biases but does not block detection of non-native A➝V speech relations. But as English adults perceive ejectives as deviant stops [2], we asked whether infants detect A➝V congruence in non-native phones adults hear as nonspeech, i.e., click consonants [3-6]. 4-month-olds preferred incongruency; 11-month-olds showed no preference. We posit that infants prefer A➝V congruency for phones heard as native-like speech; prefer incongruency for phones heard as speech that deviates from native segments; notice extreme deviance earlier (clicks: 4 mo; ejectives: 11 mo); and later treat very deviant phones as discriminable nonspeech sounds [3, 4] that are unrelated to visual speech. Results are at odds with existing AV models, but may be handled by a hybrid of Amodal Articulatory and Intersensory Narrowing views
Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram for Train Platforms
No full textThe macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) relates the flow, density and speed of an entire network. So far, the MFD has been mostly applied to cases where pedestrians and vehicles were aiming to reach their destinations as fast as possible. However, pedestrian facilities involve different behaviours. Especially in train stations, travellers spend more time waiting than walking. Moreover, complex passenger flows (i.e. flows in different directions moving to stairs and escalators distributed over the platform) may occur on the platform, due to passengers. In this paper we show that passenger flows on platforms can be described by an MFD.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Transport and PlanningTransport and Plannin
Perception of nonverbal gestures of prominence in visual speech animation
No full textIt has long been recognized that visual speech information is important for speech perception [McGurk and MacDonald 1976] [Summerfield 1992]. Recently there has been an increasing interest in the verbal and non-verbal interaction between the visual and the acoustic modalities from production and perception perspectives. One of the prosodic phenomena which attracts much focus is prominence. Prominence is defined as when a linguistic segment is made salient in its context.</p
Adjusting Dairy Housing in Hot Climates to Meet Animal Welfare Requirements
No full textSmall dairy farms in hot climates are encountering several problems caused by the design flaws of the implemented housing designs. Consequently, heat stress increase and milk yield dramatically decreases, which leads to economic deficiency of the farm. One key issue is to develop simple means to rectify the design flaws with minimum costs. In order to develop feasible means, design flaws were detected on-site in 14 small dairy farms in Egypt to exemplify the flaws of housing designs in arid and semi-arid zones. A package of interconnected solutions is suggested to rectify the design flaws. Subsequently, the maximum temperature, dry-bulb temperature, black-globe temperature, dew point, relative humidity, shaded area, and air velocity were measured inside the rectified vs. non-rectified cowsheds and compared after conducting the statistical analysis. On the other hand, the Temperature-Humidity Index (THI) and Black Globe Humidity Index (BGHI) were calculated to find out the level of heat stress affecting the dairy cows. Furthermore, the milk yield, respiration rate, skin temperature, feed intake were recorded and compared. Moreover, the costs of the developed means were calculated and a feasibility study was carried out. The results show that the developed means are effective and feasible, where the heat stress decreased (THI decreased from 94.6 to 83.7; dry-bulb temperature decreased from 42.7 to 33.6 oC) and the average milk production increased from 18 to 26 kg/day.cow. Consequently, the costs were minimized and the revenues were maximized, which achieve economic efficiency for the farm where the profit increased by about 427 $/cow.year.     --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Assistant Professor, Agricultural Engineering Department, Faculty of Agriculture, Cairo University, Gammaa Street, 12613 Giza, Egypt * Corresponding Author, Email: [email protected] Please Cite This Article As: M. Samer. 2010. Adjusting Dairy Housing in Hot Climates to Meet Animal Welfare Requirements. J. Exp. Sci. 1(3): 14-18
Perception of gaze direction in 2D and 3D facial projections
No full textIn human-human communication, eye gaze is a fundamental cue in e.g. turn-taking and interaction control [Kendon 1967]. Accurate control of gaze direction is therefore crucial in many applications of animated avatars striving to simulate human interactional behaviors. One inherent complication when conveying gaze direction through a 2D display, however, is what has been referred to as the Mona Lisa effect; if the avatar is gazing towards the camera, the eyes seem to "follow" the beholder whatever vantage point he or she may assume [Boyarskaya and Hecht 2010]. This becomes especially problematic in applications where multiple persons are interacting with the avatar, and the system needs to use gaze to address a specific person. Introducing 3D structure in the facial display, e.g. projecting the avatar face on a face mask, makes the percept of the avatar's gazechange with the viewing angle, as is indeed the case with real faces. To this end, [Delaunay et al. 2010] evaluated two back-projected displays - a spherical "dome" and a face shaped mask. However, there may be many factors influencing gaze directionpercieved from a 3D facial display, so an accurate calibration procedure for gaze directionis called for.</p
Prominence detection in Swedish using syllable correlates
No full textThis paper presents an approach to estimating word level prominence in Swedish using syllable level features. The paper discusses the mismatch problem of annotations between word level perceptual prominence and its acoustic correlates, context, and data scarcity. 200 sentences are annotated by 4 speech experts with prominence on 3 levels. A linear model for feature extraction is proposed on a syllable level features, and weights of these features are optimized to match word level annotations. We show that using syllable level features and estimating weights for the acoustic correlates to minimize the word level estimation error gives better detection accuracy compared to word level features, and that both features exceed the baseline accuracy.</p
IrisTK
No full textIn this paper, we present IrisTK - a toolkit for rapid development of real-time systems for multi-party face-to-face interaction. The toolkit consists of a message passing system, a set of modules for multi-modal input and output, and a dialog authoring language based on the notion of statecharts. The toolkit has been applied to a large scale study in a public museum setting, where the backprojected robot head Furhat interacted with the visitors in multiparty dialog.</p
Acoustic-to-articulatory inversion based on local regression
No full textThis paper presents an Acoustic-to-Articulatory inversionmethod based on local regression. Two types of local regression,a non-parametric and a local linear regression have beenapplied on a corpus containing simultaneous recordings of positionsof articulators and the corresponding acoustics. A maximumlikelihood trajectory smoothing using the estimated dynamicsof the articulators is also applied on the regression estimates.The average root mean square error in estimating articulatorypositions, given the acoustics, is 1.56 mm for the nonparametricregression and 1.52 mm for the local linear regression.The local linear regression is found to perform significantlybetter than regression using Gaussian Mixture Modelsusing the same acoustic and articulatory features.</p
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