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Background:
Brain lesions in language-related cortical areas remain a challenge in the clinical routine. In recent years the resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) was shown to be a feasible method for preoperative language assessment. The aim of this study was to examine whether language-related resting-state components, which have been obtained using a data-driven independent-component-based identification algorithm, can be supportive in determining language dominance in the left or right hemisphere.
Methods:
Twenty patients suffering from brain lesions close to supposed language relevant cortical areas were included. Rs-fMRI and task-based (tb-fMRI) were performed for the purpose of preoperative language assessment. Tb-fMRI included a verb generation task with an appropriate control condition (a syllable switching task) to decompose language critical and language supportive processes. Subsequently, the best fitting ICA component for the resting-state language network (RSLN) referential to general linear models (GLMs) of the tb-fMRI (including models with and without linguistic control conditions) was identified using an algorithm based on the Dice-index.
Results:
The RSLNs associated with GLMs using a linguistic control condition led to significantly higher laterality indices than GLM baseline contrasts. LIs derived from GLM contrasts with and without control conditions alone did not differ significantly.
Conclusion:
In general, the results suggest that determining language dominance in the human brain is feasible both with tb-fMRI and rs-fMRI, and in particular, the combination of both approaches yields a higher specificity in preoperative language assessment. Moreover, we can conclude that the choice of the language mapping paradigm is crucial for the mentioned benefits.
This short survey reviews the recent literature on the relationship between the brain structure and its functional dynamics. Imaging techniques such as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) make it possible to reconstruct axonal fiber tracks and describe the structural connectivity (SC) between brain regions. By measuring fluctuations in neuronal activity, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provides insights into the dynamics within this structural network. One key for a better understanding of brain mechanisms is to investigate how these fast dynamics emerge on a relatively stable structural backbone. So far, computational simulations and methods from graph theory have been mainly used for modeling this relationship. Machine learning techniques have already been established in neuroimaging for identifying functionally independent brain networks and classifying pathological brain states. This survey focuses on methods from machine learning, which contribute to our understanding of functional interactions between brain regions and their relation to the underlying anatomical substrate.
Brain lesions in language-related cortical areas remain a challenge in the clinical routine. In recent years, the resting-state fMRI (RS-fMRI) was shown to be a feasible method for preoperative language assessment. The aim of this study was to examine whether language-related resting-state components, which have been obtained using a data-driven independent-component-based identification algorithm, can be supportive in determining language dominance in the left or right hemisphere. Twenty patients suffering from brain lesions close to supposed language-relevant cortical areas were included. RS-fMRI and task-based (TB-fMRI) were performed for the purpose of preoperative language assessment. TB-fMRI included a verb generation task with an appropriate control condition (a syllable switching task) to decompose language-critical and language-supportive processes. Subsequently, the best fitting ICA component for the resting-state language network (RSLN) referential to general linear models (GLMs) of the TB-fMRI (including models with and without linguistic control conditions) was identified using an algorithm based on the Dice index. Thereby, the RSLNs associated with GLMs using a linguistic control condition led to significantly higher laterality indices than GLM baseline contrasts. LIs derived from GLM contrasts with and without control conditions alone did not differ significantly. In general, the results suggest that determining language dominance in the human brain is feasible both with TB-fMRI and RS-fMRI, and in particular, the combination of both approaches yields a higher specificity in preoperative language assessment. Moreover, we can conclude that the choice of the language mapping paradigm is crucial for the mentioned benefits.
Lebensdauerbemessung
(2021)
Christoph Gehlen, Till Felix Mayer, Charlotte Thiel und Christian Fischer beschreiben die Lebensdauerbemessung von Beton. Umfassend werden Transport‐ und Schädigungsmodelle vorgestellt, die die Mechanismen der Carbonatisierung, der Chlorideindringung, der Korrosion und der korrosionsinduzierten Rissbildung im Stahlbeton beschreiben. Die damit einhergehende Verbundthematik wird erläutert. Auch wird auf alle Mechanismen der Betonkorrosion eingegangen. Die Bemessung in Bezug auf die Dauerhaftigkeit und damit Abschätzungen für die Lebensdauer von Beton wird in drei unterschiedlich genauen Formaten geführt. Neben dem vollprobabilistischen Format wird beschrieben, wie Bemessungen auch auf Grundlage von Nachweisen basierend auf Teilsicherheitsbeiwerten durchgeführt werden können. Daran anschließend wird aufgezeigt, welche deskriptiven Bemessungsansätze sich daraus ableiten lassen. An einigen exemplarisch herausgegriffenen Objektbeispielen wird die Lebensdauerbemessung konkret vorgeführt.
Single-task construction robots (STCRs) have become a popular research topic for decades. However, there is still a gap in the ubiquitous application of STCRs for onsite construction due to various reasons, such as cost concerns. Therefore, cost–benefit analysis (CBA) can be used to measure the net economic benefit of the STCRs, compared to traditional construction methods, in order to boost the implementation of STCRs. This paper presents a simple and practical framework for the economic evaluation of STCRs and conducts a case study of a cable-driven facade installation robot to verify the method. The results show that the cable-driven robot for facade installation is worth investing in in the UK, as well as in the majority of G20 countries. Furthermore, other socioenvironmental implications of STCRs and the limitations of the study are also discussed. In conclusion, the proposed method is highly adaptable and reproducible. Therefore, researchers, engineers, investors, and policy makers can easily follow and customize this method to assess the economic advantages of any STCR systems, compared to traditional construction technologies.
Population aging is one of the major challenges facing the world. In particular, the advent of China's aging society caused by various factors will be a major threat to its future development. Therefore, serious measures need to be taken to achieve its demographic sustainability. Smart furniture can be considered as a novel subcategory of gerontechnology. One of the main outcomes of the EU-funded REACH project was a variety of smart furniture named Personalized Intelligent Interior Units (PI2Us) which served as the key component of a distributed intelligent home to promote the health and activity level of older adults. This outcome can potentially be a solution to mitigate the consequences caused by population aging. In order to understand the attitudes and opinions of Chinese older adults towards the relevant technologies, the authors conducted an opinion survey using the PI2Us as an example, which sampled more than 380 older adults in 26 out of 34 provincial-level administrative divisions of China. The survey showed that Chinese older adults in general have a highly positive attitude towards smart furniture and smart home technologies. Several other insights also can be revealed from the survey. Based on further analyses, the paper summarized why the elderly-oriented smart furniture and distributed intelligent home has the potential to thrive in China's market soon. Finally, a three-year project action plan for implementing localized solutions in cooperation with a large Chinese furniture manufacturer was presented.
Guest Editorial Introduction to the Focused Section on Mechatronics and Automation for Constructions
(2021)
Rapid advances in modern technologies have completely revolutionized many industries in recent years. It is anticipated that mechatronic and automation technologies would play an important role in transforming the construction industry to embrace for the fourth industrial revolution. However, construction automation problems bring up new research challenges that diverge from traditional methods. Unlike the factory environment, which is typically structured and predictable, construction sites are dynamic places where the working environment is unstructured and always changing. Due to lack of skilled labor, time and cost overruns, quality deficiencies, and the recent pandemics, mechatronic and automation technologies offer solutions for future safe, rapid, performative, prize worthy, and digitally protocolled construction projects. The coexistence of human workers, heavy vehicles, varying environmental conditions, and automated mechatronic systems also make safe human–machine interaction an important issue. Beyond expertise in a specific discipline, construction automation also requires multidisciplinary expertise to integrate with various fields, such as Internet of Things (IOT), robotics and its construction oriented subsystems, adaptive/robust control, machine vision, sensing technologies, artificial intelligence (AI), and building/construction/process information modeling (BIM/CIM/PIM) for automated construction process management and design. The main aims of this focused section in the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics (TMECH) are to document the current state of the art in mechatronics and automation for constructions, and to present new results in several emerging research areas.
COVID-19 and the ageing workforce: global perspectives on needs and solutions across 15 countries
(2021)
BACKGROUND: COVID-19 has a direct impact on the employment of older people. This adds to the challenge of ageism. The World Health Organization has started a worldwide campaign to combat ageism and has called for more research and evidence-based strategies that have the potential to be scaled up. This study specifically aims to identify solutions to combat the adverse effects of COVID-19 on the global ageing workforce.
METHODS: We present 15 case studies from different countries and report on what those countries are doing or not doing to address the impact of COVID-19 on ageing workers.
RESULTS: We provide examples of how COVID-19 influences older people's ability to work and stay healthy, and offer case studies of what governments, organizations or individuals can do to help ensure older people can obtain, maintain and, potentially, expand their current work. Case studies come from Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Germany, Israel, Japan, Nigeria, Romania, Singapore, Sweden, South Korea, Thailand, United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US). Across the countries, the impact of COVID-19 on older workers is shown as widening inequalities. A particular challenge has arisen because of a large proportion of older people, often with limited education and working in the informal sector within rural areas, e.g. in Nigeria, Thailand and China. Remedies to the particular disadvantage experienced by older workers in the context of COVID are presented. These range from funding support to encouraging business continuity, innovative product and service developments, community action, new business models and localized, national and international actions. The case studies can be seen as frequently fitting within strategies that have been proven to work in reducing ageism within the workplace. They include policy and laws that have increased benefits to workers during lockdowns (most countries); educational activities such as coaching seniorpreneurship (e,g, Australia); intergenerational contact interventions such as younger Thai people who moved back to rural areas and sharing their digital knowledge with older people and where older people reciprocate by teaching the younger people farming knowledge.
CONCLUSION: Global sharing of this knowledge among international, national and local governments and organizations, businesses, policy makers and health and human resources experts will further understanding of the issues that are faced by older workers. This will facilitate the replication or scalability of solutions as called for in the WHO call to combat ageism in 2021. We suggest that policy makers, business owners, researchers and international organisations build on the case studies by investing in evidence-based strategies to create inclusive workplaces. Such action will thus help to challenge ageism, reduce inequity, improve business continuity and add to the quality of life of older workers.
Dubbing, i.e., the lip-synchronous translation and revoicing of audio-visual media into a target language from a different source language, is essential for the full-fledged reception of foreign audio-visual media, be it movies, instructional videos or short social media clips. In this paper, we objectify influences on the ‘dubbability’ of translations, i.e., how well a translation would be synchronously revoiceable to the lips on screen. We explore the value of traditional heuristics used in evaluating the qualitative aspects, in particular matching bilabial consonants and the jaw opening while producing vowels, and control for quantity, i.e., that translations are similar to the source in length. We perform an ablation study using an adversarial neural classifier which is trained to differentiate “true” dubbing translations from machine translations. While we are able to confirm the value of matching lip closure in dubbing, we find that the opening angle of the jaw as determined by the realized vowel may be less relevant than frequently considered in audio-visual translation.
In this paper, we present a study in which a robot initiates interactions with people passing by in an in-the-wild scenario. The robot adapts the loudness of its voice dynamically to the distance of the respective person approached, thus indicating who it is talking to. It furthermore tracks people based on information on body orientation and eye gaze and adapts the text produced based on people's distance autonomously. Our study shows that the adaptation of the loudness of its voice is perceived as personalization by the participants and that the likelihood that they stop by and interact with the robot increases when the robot incrementally adjusts its behavior.
We present an open source plugin for live subtitling in the popular open source video conferencing software BigBlueBut-ton. Our plugin decodes each speaker’s audio stream separately and in parallel, thereby obliviating the need for speaker di-arization and seamlessly handling overlapped talk. Any Kaldi-compatible nnet3 model can be used with our plugin and we demonstrate it using freely available TDNN-HMM-based ASR models for English and German. Our subtitles can be used as they are (e.g., in loud environments) or can form the basis for further NLP processes. Our tool can also simplify the collection of remotely recorded multi-party dialogue corpora.
We present a fully automatic solution for German video subtitling, with a focus on lecture videos. We rely entirely on open source models and scripts for German ASR, automatic punctuation reconstruction and subtitle segmentation. All training scripts, 1000h of German speech training data, pre-trained models and the final subtitling program are publicly available. It can readily be integrated into lecture video platforms such as Lecture2Go. The automatically generated subtitles can also serve as a basis to make the video material more accessible (e.g. via search, keyword clouds, and the like) or for further manual revision, potentially helping in significantly speeding up manual work. A particular challenge that we observe in lectures are technical terms that are frequent in a particular lecture, but infrequent in a typical language model and that might be out of vocabulary for a general purpose ASR. We approach this challenge by extracting texts from accompanying lecture slides to adapt the language model of our TDNN-HMM based ASR system. We demonstrate the usability of the full system and its generated subtitles and evaluate on a dataset of manually transcribed lectures with an average of 26.3% WER.
Speech quality and likability is a multi-faceted phenomenon consisting of a combination of perceptory features that cannot easily be computed nor weighed automatically. Yet, it is often easy to decide which of two voices one likes better, even though it would be hard to describe why, or to name the underlying basic perceptory features. Although likability is inherently subjective and individual preferences differ, generalizations are useful and there is often a broad intersubjective consensus about whether one speaker is more likeable than another. We present a methodology to efficiently create a likability ranking for many speakers from crowdsourced pairwise likability ratings which focuses manual rating effort on pairs of similar quality using an active sampling technique. Using this methodology, we collected pairwise likability ratings for many speakers (>220) from many raters (>160). We analyze listener preferences by correlating the resulting ranking with various acoustic and prosodic features. We also present a neural network that is able to model the complexity of listener preferences and the underlying temporal evolution of features. The recurrent neural network achieves remarkably high performance in estimating the pairwise decisions and an ablation study points toward the criticality of modeling temporal aspects in speech quality assessment.
The SMOOTH-robot is a mobile robot that-due to its modularity-combines a relatively low price with the possibility to be used for a large variety of tasks in a wide range of domains. In this article, we demonstrate the potential of the SMOOTH-robot through three use cases, two of which were performed in elderly care homes. The robot is designed so that it can either make itself ready or be quickly changed by staff to perform different tasks. We carefully considered important design parameters such as the appearance, intended and unintended interactions with users, and the technical complexity, in order to achieve high acceptability and a sufficient degree of utilization of the robot. Three demonstrated use cases indicate that such a robot could contribute to an improved work environment, having the potential to free resources of care staff which could be allocated to actual care-giving tasks. Moreover, the SMOOTH-robot can be used in many other domains, as we will also exemplify in this article.
The development of new technologies like advanced driver assistance systems or automated driving requires a flexible simulation environment of sufficient complexity. In general this flexibility is not provided by commercial software packages. This paper presents a three-dimensional and nonlinear hand-made model for heavy commercial vehicles including tractor and trailer as well as tractor and semitrailer combinations that can be used in different simulation environments, as well as in real-time applications. As typical for trucks, the torsional flexibility of the frame and a suspended driver's cabin are taken into account. The design kinematics makes it possible to handle different and quite complex axle suspensions very efficiently. Appropriate force elements are used to model various couplings between tractor and trailer or tractor and semitrailer, respectively. The virtual test truck environment (VTT) coded in ANSI C is extremely portable and can easily be embedded in commercial simulation packages like MATLAB/Simulink. It includes the TMeasy tyre model and offers flexible interfaces to third-party software tools.
Axles with leaf spring suspension systems are still a popular choice in many commercial vehicles. However, leaf springs are not in perfect conformity to standard multibody vehicle models because they combine guidance and suspension in one single element. Combining standard multibody vehicle models with sophisticated finite element leaf spring models results in rather complex and computing time-consuming solutions. Purely kinematic models, defined by lookup tables or the design kinematics approach, cover only some but not all features of the leaf spring suspension. As shown here, the five-link model, which incorporates a quasi-static solution of the leaf spring compliance, provides a very practical model. It is comparatively lean and provides results of sufficient accuracy in the whole application range.