INESC-ID

About: INESC-ID is a nonprofit organization based out in Lisbon, Portugal. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Computer science & Context (language use). The organization has 932 authors who have published 2618 publications receiving 37658 citations.

Classification of disfluent phenomena as fluent communicative devices in specific prosodic contexts

Abstract: This work explores prosodic cues of disfluent phenomena. In our previous work, we conducted a perceptual experiment regarding (dis)fluency ratings. Results suggested that some disfluencies may be considered felicitous by listeners, namely filled pauses and prolongations. In an attempt to discriminate which linguistic features are more salient in the classification of disfluencies as either fluent or disfluent phenomena, we used CART techniques on a corpus of 3.5 hours of spontaneous and prepared non-scripted speech. CART results pointed out 2 splits: break indices and contour shape. The first split indicates that events uttered at breaks 3 and 4 are considered felicitous. The second shows that these events must have flat or ascending contours to be considered as such; otherwise they are strongly penalized. Our preliminary results suggest that there are regular trends in the production of these events, namely, prosodic phrasing and contour shape. Index Terms: prosody, disfluency, fluency rating

Let's kick it: how to stop wasting the bottom third of your large screen display

Abstract: Large-scale touch surfaces have been widely studied in literature and adopted for public installations such as interactive billboards. However, current designs do not take into consideration that touching the interactive surface at different heights is not the same; for body-height displays, the bottom portion of the screen is within easier reach of the foot than the hand. We explore the design space of foot input on vertical surfaces, and propose three distinct interaction modalities: hand, foot tapping, and foot gesturing. Our design exploration pays particular attention to areas of the touch surface that were previously overlooked: out of hand's reach and close to the floor. We instantiate our design space with a working prototype of an interactive surface, in which we are able to distinguish between finger and foot tapping and extend the input area beyond the bottom of the display to support foot gestures.

Balancing gossip exchanges in networks with firewalls

Abstract: Gossip protocols are an important building block of many large-scale systems. They have inherent load-balancing properties as long as nodes are deployed over a network with a "flat" topology, that is, a topology where any pair of nodes may engage in a gossip exchange. Unfortunately, the Internet is not flat in the sense that firewalls and NAT boxes block many peer-wise interactions. In particular, nodes that are behind a firewall can initiate communication with nodes on the public Internet, but not vice versa. This may easily unbalance the number of gossip exchanges in which nodes are involved. In particular, nodes in well connected regions of the network tend to participate in many more interactions than other nodes and may suffer from resource exhaustion. In this paper we present and evaluate a new approach to balance gossip exchanges in networks with firewalls. Our solution requires only local information and has no coordination overhead, allowing nodes to participate in a similar number of gossip exchanges independent of the network topology.

Identifying Combinatorial Effects in Requirements Engineering

Abstract: There are several best practices and proposals that help to design and develop software systems immune (to some extent) to combinatorial effects as these systems evolve. Normalized Systems theory, considered at the software architecture level, is one of such proposals. However, at the requirements engineering (RE)-level, little research has been done regarding this issue. This paper discusses examples related with this problem considering two distinct RE abstract levels, namely at the business and system levels. The examples provided follow the notations and techniques typical used to model the software system at such levels, namely DEMO/EO, BPMN, and UML (Use Cases and Class diagrams). The analysis of these examples suggests that combinatorial effects can be easily found at these different levels. This paper also proposes a research agenda to further investigate this matter in terms of the effects of combinatorial effects, and envisions the mechanisms and solutions for dealing with them. It is suggested that an artifact-based, domain-specific approach is best suited to achieve highly agile enterprises and RE-processes in the future.

What can i do with this?: finding possible interactions between characters and objects

Abstract: Virtual environments are often populated by autonomous synthetic agents capable of acting and interacting with other agents as well as with humans. These virtual worlds also include objects that may have different uses and types of interactions. As such, these agents need to identify possible interactions with the objects in the environment and measure the consequences of these interactions. This is particularly difficult when the agents never interacted with some of the objects beforehand. This paper describes SOTAI - Smart ObjecT-Agent Interaction, a framework that will help agents to identify possible interactions with unknown objects based on their past experiences. In SOTAI, agents can learn world regularities, like object attributes and frequent relations between attributes. They gather qualitative symbolic descriptions from their sensorial data when interacting with objects and perform inductive reasoning to acquire concepts about them. We implemented an initial case study and the results show that our agents are able to acquire valid conceptual knowledge.