Human-robot interaction (HRI) is essential to the widespread use of robots in daily life. Robots will eventually be able to carry out a variety of duties in human civilization through effective social interaction. Creating straightforward and understandable interfaces to engage with robots as they start to proliferate in the personal workspace is essential. Typically, interactions with simulated robots are displayed on screens. A more appealing alternative is virtual reality (VR), which gives visual cues more like those seen in the real world. In this study, we introduce Jubileo, a robotic animatronic face with various tools for research and application development in human-robot social interaction field. Jubileo project offers more than just a fully functional open-source physical robot; it also gives a comprehensive framework to operate with a VR interface, enabling an immersive environment for HRI application tests and noticeably better deployment speed.

Nonparallel multi-domain voice conversion methods such as the StarGAN-VCs have been widely applied in many scenarios. However, the training of these models usually poses a challenge due to their complicated adversarial network architectures. To address this, in this work we leverage the state-of-the-art contrastive learning techniques and incorporate an efficient Siamese network structure into the StarGAN discriminator. Our method is called SimSiam-StarGAN-VC and it boosts the training stability and effectively prevents the discriminator overfitting issue in the training process. We conduct experiments on the Voice Conversion Challenge (VCC 2018) dataset, plus a user study to validate the performance of our framework. Our experimental results show that SimSiam-StarGAN-VC significantly outperforms existing StarGAN-VC methods in terms of both the objective and subjective metrics.

Text segmentation aims to divide text into contiguous, semantically coherent segments, while segment labeling deals with producing labels for each segment. Past work has shown success in tackling segmentation and labeling for documents and conversations. This has been possible with a combination of task-specific pipelines, supervised and unsupervised learning objectives. In this work, we propose a single encoder-decoder neural network that can handle long documents and conversations, trained simultaneously for both segmentation and segment labeling using only standard supervision. We successfully show a way to solve the combined task as a pure generation task, which we refer to as structured summarization. We apply the same technique to both document and conversational data, and we show state of the art performance across datasets for both segmentation and labeling, under both high- and low-resource settings. Our results establish a strong case for considering text segmentation and segment labeling as a whole, and moving towards general-purpose techniques that don't depend on domain expertise or task-specific components.

We present a new approach to the global fairness verification of tree-based classifiers. Given a tree-based classifier and a set of sensitive features potentially leading to discrimination, our analysis synthesizes sufficient conditions for fairness, expressed as a set of traditional propositional logic formulas, which are readily understandable by human experts. The verified fairness guarantees are global, in that the formulas predicate over all the possible inputs of the classifier, rather than just a few specific test instances. Our analysis is formally proved both sound and complete. Experimental results on public datasets show that the analysis is precise, explainable to human experts and efficient enough for practical adoption.

To have the greatest impact, public health initiatives must be made using evidence-based decision-making. Machine learning Algorithms are created to gather, store, process, and analyse data to provide knowledge and guide decisions. A crucial part of any surveillance system is image analysis. The communities of computer vision and machine learning has ended up curious about it as of late. This study uses a variety of machine learning and image processing approaches to detect and forecast the malarial illness. In our research, we discovered the potential of deep learning techniques as smart tools with broader applicability for malaria detection, which benefits physicians by assisting in the diagnosis of the condition. We examine the common confinements of deep learning for computer frameworks and organising, counting need of preparing data, preparing overhead, realtime execution, and explain ability, and uncover future inquire about bearings focusing on these restrictions.

Information seeking is crucial for people's self-care and wellbeing in times of public crises. Extensive research has investigated empirical understandings as well as technical solutions to facilitate information seeking by domestic citizens of affected regions. However, limited knowledge is established to support international migrants who need to survive a crisis in their host countries. The current paper presents an interview study with two cohorts of Chinese migrants living in Japan (N=14) and the United States (N=14). Participants reflected on their information seeking experiences during the COVID pandemic. The reflection was supplemented by two weeks of self-tracking where participants maintained records of their COVIDrelated information seeking practice. Our data indicated that participants often took language detours, or visits to Mandarin resources for information about the COVID outbreak in their host countries. They also made strategic use of the Mandarin information to perform selective reading, cross-checking, and contextualized interpretation of COVID-related information in Japanese or English. While such practices enhanced participants' perceived effectiveness of COVID-related information gathering and sensemaking, they disadvantaged people through sometimes incognizant ways. Further, participants lacked the awareness or preference to review migrant-oriented information that was issued by the host country's public authorities despite its availability. Building upon these findings, we discussed solutions to improve international migrants' COVID-related information seeking in their non-native language and cultural environment. We advocated inclusive crisis infrastructures that would engage people with diverse levels of local language fluency, information literacy, and experience in leveraging public services.

Kittyhawk was founded in 2010 to pioneer the market for so-called eVTOLs -- electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft -- with the lofty goal of democratizing the skies. The secretive company was run by Sebastian Thrun, a Google veteran who worked on self-driving cars, augmented-reality glasses and other projects. The business was one of several startups working on the concept, which has proven to be a greater challenge than some expected. Air taxis have suffered crashes during testing in recent months, raising concerns about their safety. Insider previously reported on Kittyhawk's plans to close.

Hosted by Ben Byford, The Machine Ethics Podcast brings together interviews with academics, authors, business leaders, designers and engineers on the subject of autonomous algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technology's impact on society. This episode we talk with Ricardo Baeza-Yates about responsible AI, the importance of AI governance, questioning people's intent to create AGI, robot rights and brain / neural rights, the evolution of intelligence, ethical risk assessment, machine ethics, making ethical choices on behalf of your users, binary notions of trust, stupid uses of AI and more… Ricardo Baeza-Yates is Director of Research at the Institute for Experiential AI of Northeastern University. He is also a part-time Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and Universidad de Chile in Santiago. Before, he was the CTO of NTENT, a semantic search technology company based in California and prior to these roles, he was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs, based in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California, from 2006 to 2016. He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook, which won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award.

The technical report presents our emotion recognition pipeline for high-dimensional emotion task (A-VB High) in The ACII Affective Vocal Bursts (A-VB) 2022 Workshop \& Competition. Our proposed method contains three stages. Firstly, we extract the latent features from the raw audio signal and its Mel-spectrogram by self-supervised learning methods. Then, the features from the raw signal are fed to the self-relation attention and temporal awareness (SA-TA) module for learning the valuable information between these latent features. Finally, we concatenate all the features and utilize a fully-connected layer to predict each emotion's score. By empirical experiments, our proposed method achieves a mean concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) of 0.7295 on the test set, compared to 0.5686 on the baseline model. The code of our method is available at https://github.com/linhtd812/A-VB2022.

Image clustering is a very useful technique that is widely applied to various areas, including remote sensing. Recently, visual representations by self-supervised learning have greatly improved the performance of image clustering. To further improve the well-trained clustering models, this paper proposes a novel method by first ranking samples within each cluster based on the confidence in their belonging to the current cluster and then using the ranking to formulate a weighted cross-entropy loss to train the model. For ranking the samples, we developed a method for computing the likelihood of samples belonging to the current clusters based on whether they are situated in densely populated neighborhoods, while for training the model, we give a strategy for weighting the ranked samples. We present extensive experimental results that demonstrate that the new technique can be used to improve the State-of-the-Art image clustering models, achieving accuracy performance gains ranging from $2.1\%$ to $15.9\%$. Performing our method on a variety of datasets from remote sensing, we show that our method can be effectively applied to remote--sensing images.