Kashef has not had the best few days in the office. Unfortunately for our artificial intelligence (AI) predictor, the adrenaline-fuelled, high-octane football being played in the opening set of fixtures has resulted in several major upsets. The good news for us sentient beings is that every time Kashef has got it wrong, we have been treated to a veritable feast of World Cup magic. Just take Saudi Arabia's historic victory over Argentina as a case in point. Today, Kashef has processed the historical data and performances of all the teams who are in action to predict the results of each game.

In this study, conversations between humans and avatars are linguistically, organizationally, and structurally analyzed, focusing on what is necessary for creating face-to-face multimodal interfaces for machines. We videorecorded thirty-four human-avatar interactions, performed complete linguistic microanalysis on video excerpts, and marked all the occurrences of multimodal actions and events. Statistical inferences were applied to data, allowing us to comprehend not only how often multimodal actions occur but also how multimodal events are distributed between the speaker (emitter) and the listener (recipient). We also observed the distribution of multimodal occurrences for each modality. The data show evidence that double-loop feedback is established during a face-to-face conversation. This led us to propose that knowledge from Conversation Analysis (CA), cognitive science, and Theory of Mind (ToM), among others, should be incorporated into the ones used for describing human-machine multimodal interactions. Face-to-face interfaces require an additional control layer to the multimodal fusion layer. This layer has to organize the flow of conversation, integrate the social context into the interaction, as well as make plans concerning 'what' and 'how' to progress on the interaction. This higher level is best understood if we incorporate insights from CA and ToM into the interface system.

We introduce AVCAffe, the first Audio-Visual dataset consisting of Cognitive load and Affect attributes. We record AVCAffe by simulating remote work scenarios over a video-conferencing platform, where subjects collaborate to complete a number of cognitively engaging tasks. AVCAffe is the largest originally collected (not collected from the Internet) affective dataset in English language. We recruit 106 participants from 18 different countries of origin, spanning an age range of 18 to 57 years old, with a balanced male-female ratio. AVCAffe comprises a total of 108 hours of video, equivalent to more than 58,000 clips along with task-based self-reported ground truth labels for arousal, valence, and cognitive load attributes such as mental demand, temporal demand, effort, and a few others. We believe AVCAffe would be a challenging benchmark for the deep learning research community given the inherent difficulty of classifying affect and cognitive load in particular. Moreover, our dataset fills an existing timely gap by facilitating the creation of learning systems for better self-management of remote work meetings, and further study of hypotheses regarding the impact of remote work on cognitive load and affective states.

Numerous approaches have been proposed to discover causal dependencies in machine learning and data mining; among them, the state-of-the-art VAR-LiNGAM (short for Vector Auto-Regressive Linear Non-Gaussian Acyclic Model) is a desirable approach to reveal both the instantaneous and time-lagged relationships. However, all the obtained VAR matrices need to be analyzed to infer the final causal graph, leading to a rise in the number of parameters. To address this issue, we propose the CGP-LiNGAM (short for Causal Graph Process-LiNGAM), which has significantly fewer model parameters and deals with only one causal graph for interpreting the causal relations by exploiting Graph Signal Processing (GSP).

Air transportation is essential for society, and it is increasing gradually due to its importance. To improve the airspace operation, new technologies are under development, such as Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). In fact, in the past few years, there has been a growth in UAS numbers in segregated airspace. However, there is an interest in integrating these aircraft into the National Airspace System (NAS). The UAS is vital to different industries due to its advantages brought to the airspace (e.g., efficiency). Conversely, the relationship between UAS and Air Traffic Control (ATC) needs to be well-defined due to the impacts on ATC capacity these aircraft may present. Throughout the years, this impact may be lower than it is nowadays because the current lack of familiarity in this relationship contributes to higher workload levels. Thereupon, the primary goal of this research is to present a comprehensive review of the advancements in the integration of UAS in the National Airspace System (NAS) from different perspectives. We consider the challenges regarding simulation, final approach, and optimization of problems related to the interoperability of such systems in the airspace. Finally, we identify several open challenges in the field based on the existing state-of-the-art proposals.

One of the challenges of developing a summarization model arises from the difficulty in measuring the factual inconsistency of the generated text. In this study, we reinterpret the decoder overconfidence-regularizing objective suggested in (Miao et al., 2021) as a hallucination risk measurement to better estimate the quality of generated summaries. We propose a reference-free metric, HaRiM+, which only requires an off-the-shelf summarization model to compute the hallucination risk based on token likelihoods. Deploying it requires no additional training of models or ad-hoc modules, which usually need alignment to human judgments. For summary-quality estimation, HaRiM+ records state-of-the-art correlation to human judgment on three summary-quality annotation sets: FRANK, QAGS, and SummEval. We hope that our work, which merits the use of summarization models, facilitates the progress of both automated evaluation and generation of summary.

Investing in children and youth is a critical step towards inclusive, equitable, and sustainable development for current and future generations. Several international agendas for accomplishing common global goals emphasize the need for active youth participation and engagement for sustainable development. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development emphasizes the need for youth engagement and the inclusion of youth perspectives as an important step toward addressing each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The aim of this study is to analyze youth perspectives, values, and sentiments towards issues addressed by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals through social network analysis using machine learning. Social network data collected during 7 major sustainability conferences aimed at engaging children and youth is analyzed using natural language processing techniques for sentiment analysis. This data categorized using a natural language processing text classifier trained on a sample dataset of social network data during the 7 youth sustainability conferences for deeper understanding of youth perspectives in relation to the SDGs. Machine learning identified demographic and location attributes and features are utilized in order to identify bias and demographic differences between ages, gender, and race among youth. Using natural language processing, the qualitative data collected from over 7 different countries in 3 languages are systematically translated, categorized, and analyzed, revealing key trends and focus areas for sustainable youth development policies. The obtained results reveal the general youth's depth of knowledge on sustainable development and their attitudes towards each of the 17 SDGs. The findings of this study serve as a guide toward better understanding the interests, roles, and perspectives of children and youth in achieving the goals of Agenda 2030.

During physical human robot collaboration, it is important to be able to implement a time-varying interactive behaviour while ensuring robust stability. Admittance control and passivity theory can be exploited for achieving these objectives. Nevertheless, when the admittance dynamics is time-varying, it can happen that, for ensuring a passive and stable behaviour, some spurious dissipative effects have to be introduced in the admittance dynamics. These effects are perceived by the user and degrade the collaborative performance. In this paper we exploit the task redundancy of the manipulator in order to harvest energy in the null space and to avoid spurious dynamics on the admittance. The proposed architecture is validated by simulations and by experiments onto a collaborative robot.

We are looking for a highly motivated candidate who holds a Master of Science in Geography, Geology, Archaeology or Natural Sciences. You will be required to carry out fieldwork in the Bolivian Amazon and travel there for a period of 2 to 3 months during the dry seasons (July - October) of 2023 and 2024. The field work will involve flying a drone with a LIDAR over approx. Back in Barcelona your work will focus on building a database of the archaeological sites, calculating the volume of each site and analysing their patterns and properties. You are expected to publish at least 3 papers in well-known scientific journals by the end of the 4 yrs position.

During the last years, European intraday power markets have gained importance for balancing forecast errors due to the rising volumes of intermittent renewable generation. However, compared to day-ahead markets, the drivers for the intraday price process are still sparsely researched. In this paper, we propose a modelling strategy for the location, shape and scale parameters of the return distribution in intraday markets, based on fundamental variables. We consider wind and solar forecasts and their intraday updates, outages, price information and a novel measure for the shape of the merit-order, derived from spot auction curves as explanatory variables. We validate our modelling by simulating price paths and compare the probabilistic forecasting performance of our model to benchmark models in a forecasting study for the German market. The approach yields significant improvements in the forecasting performance, especially in the tails of the distribution. At the same time, we are able to derive the contribution of the driving variables. We find that, apart from the first lag of the price changes, none of our fundamental variables have explanatory power for the expected value of the intraday returns. This implies weak-form market efficiency as renewable forecast changes and outage information seems to be priced in by the market. We find that the volatility is driven by the merit-order regime, the time to delivery and the closure of cross-border order books. The tail of the distribution is mainly influenced by past price differences and trading activity. Our approach is directly transferable to other continuous intraday markets in Europe.