With the rapid development of intelligent detection algorithms based on deep learning, much progress has been made in automatic road defect recognition and road marking parsing. This can effectively address the issue of an expensive and time-consuming process for professional inspectors to review the street manually. Towards this goal, we present RoadAtlas, a novel end-to-end integrated system that can support 1) road defect detection, 2) road marking parsing, 3) a web-based dashboard for presenting and inputting data by users, and 4) a backend containing a well-structured database and developed APIs.

The majority of existing methods for empathetic response generation rely on the emotion of the context to generate empathetic responses. However, empathy is much more than generating responses with an appropriate emotion. It also often entails subtle expressions of understanding and personal resonance with the situation of the other interlocutor. Unfortunately, such qualities are difficult to quantify and the datasets lack the relevant annotations. To address this issue, in this paper we propose an approach that relies on exemplars to cue the generative model on fine stylistic properties that signal empathy to the interlocutor. To this end, we employ dense passage retrieval to extract relevant exemplary responses from the training set. Three elements of human communication -- emotional presence, interpretation, and exploration, and sentiment are additionally introduced using synthetic labels to guide the generation towards empathy. The human evaluation is also extended by these elements of human communication. We empirically show that these approaches yield significant improvements in empathetic response quality in terms of both automated and human-evaluated metrics. The implementation is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/exemplary-empathy.

Australian aged care provider, the IRT Group, has announced a world-first partnership with UK-based technology firm RDM Autonomous to develop driverless vehicles for residential aged care facilities. The Australian Ageing Agenda (AAA) reports that RDM Autonomous has recently opened its first satellite office in South Australia, and will be working with the IRT Group to bring autonomous cars to retirement homes. Details of the program will be revealed at the 2017 Information Technology in Aged Care (ITAC) Conference on the Gold Coast in late November, though the AAA reports that the companies plan to introduce RDM's Pod Zero (pictured) for initial testing at IRT's Kangara Waters facility in Canberra. Following the ITAC Conference, the Pod Zero will also make its way to one of the IRT Group's bases in Brisbane. Speaking with the AAA, Winston Mitchell, IRT IT project coordinator, said: "Piloting the technology on private roads within aged care communities hasn't been done before and IRT is eager to understand how driverless cars can improve residents' independence and quality of life". "Pod Zero will be programmed to safely navigate private roads within IRT Communities and residents will be able to hail Pod Zero and travel independently to appointments and social activities within their community."