Open Access

An essential measure of autonomy in assistive service robots is adaptivity to the various contexts of human-oriented tasks, which are subject to subtle variations in task parameters that determine optimal behaviour. In this work, we propose an apprenticeship learning approach to achieving context-aware action generalization on the task of robot-to-human object hand-over. The procedure combines learning from demonstration and reinforcement learning: a robot first imitates a demonstrator’s execution of the task and then learns contextualized variants of the demonstrated action through experience. We use dynamic movement primitives as compact motion representations, and a model-based C-REPS algorithm for learning policies that can specify hand-over position, conditioned on context variables. Policies are learned using simulated task executions, before transferring them to the robot and evaluating emergent behaviours. We additionally conduct a user study involving participants assuming different postures and receiving an object from a robot, which executes hand-overs by either imitating a demonstrated motion, or adapting its motion to hand-over positions suggested by the learned policy. The results confirm the hypothesized improvements in the robot’s perceived behaviour when it is context-aware and adaptive, and provide useful insights that can inform future developments.

Im Interview erklärt IT-Security-Experte Professor Dr. Hartmut Pohl die gravierenden Umwälzungen, die das „IT-Sicherheits gesetz 2.0“ in seiner bekannt gewordenen Fassung für Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Technik bringen wird, wo es zu kurz greift und über das Ziel hinausschießt.

Lower back pain is one of the most prevalent diseases in Western societies. A large percentage of European and American populations suffer from back pain at some point in their lives. One successful approach to address lower back pain is postural training, which can be supported by wearable devices, providing real-time feedback about the user’s posture. In this work, we analyze the changes in posture induced by postural training. To this end, we compare snapshots before and after training, as measured by the Gokhale SpineTracker™. Considering pairs of before and after snapshots in different positions (standing, sitting, and bending), we introduce a feature space, that allows for unsupervised clustering. We show that resulting clusters represent certain groups of postural changes, which are meaningful to professional posture trainers.

Vernetzte und miteinander kommunizierende Fahrzeuge bieten grundsätzlich Angriffsmöglichkeiten auf ihre vorgesehenen Funktionen. In diesem Beitrag werden zunächst basierend auf dem „Reference Architectural Model Automotive“ Schutzobjekte aus IT-Sicherheitssicht in Fahrzeugen aufgezeigt. Anschließend wird dargelegt, welche Strukturierungsmöglichkeiten in der IT-Sicherheit bekannt sind, um Sicherheitsanforderungen für diese Schutzobjekte zu definieren und deren Einhaltung und Umsetzung nachzuweisen. Zum Ende zeigt dieser Beitrags auf, wie die bestehende Typprüfung bzw. Hauptuntersuchung erweitert werden könnten, um in diesem Rahmen spezifische IT-Sicherheitsnachweise zu führen.

Designing consumption feedback to support sustainable behavior is an active research topic. In recent years, relevant work has suggested a variety of possible design strategies. Addressing the more recent developments in this field, this paper presents a structured literature review, providing an overview of current information design approaches and highlighting open research questions. We suggest a literature-based taxonomy of used strategies, data source and output media with a special focus on design. In particular, we analyze which visual forms are used in current research to reach the identified strategy goals. Our survey reveals that the trend is towards more complex and contextualized feedback and almost every design within sustainable HCI adopts common visualization forms. Furthermore, adopting more advanced visual forms and techniques from information visualization research is helpful when dealing with ever-increasing data sources at home. Yet so far, this combination has often been neglected in feedback design.

The documentation requirements of data published in long term archives have significantly grown over the last decade. At WDCC the data publishing process is assisted by “Atarrabi”, a web-based workflow system for reviewing and editing metadata information by the data authors and the publication agent. The system ensures high metadata quality for long-term use of the data with persistent identifiers (DOI/URN). By these well-defined references (DOI) credit can properly be given to the data producers in any publication.

This paper addresses the urgent need for international standardization of Context Metadata for e-Learning environments. In particular, E-Learning when distributed over the Internet, can synchronously and asynchronously reach a huge number of learners but also has to deal with a variety of different cultures and societies and the related complications. A lot of the differences strongly demand adaptation processes in which especially the contents are being modified to fit the needs in the targeted contexts. In our approach solving this task, we determined a list of around 160 significant possible differences and defined those as context metadata. In this paper, we show the results of our research regarding to the determination of context related influence factors as well as approaches to deal with them and present a first specification of the representing context-metadata.