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Most VE-frameworks try to support many different input and output devices. They do not concentrate so much on the rendering because this is tradi- tionally done by graphics workstation. In this short paper we present a modern VE framework that has a small kernel and is able to use different renderers. This includes sound renderers, physics renderers and software based graphics renderers. While our VE framework, named basho is still under development we have an alpha version running under Linux and MacOS X.
In this paper, we introduce an optical sensor system, which is integrated into an industrial push-button. The sensor allows to classify the type of material that is in contact with the button when pressed into different material categories on the basis of the material's so called "spectral signature". An approach for a safety sensor system at circular table saws on the same base has been introduced previously on SIAS-2007. This contactless working sensor is able to distinguish reliably between skin, textiles, leather and various other kinds of materials. A typical application for this intelligent push-button is the use at possibly dangerous machines, whose operating instructions include either the prohibition or the obligation to wear gloves during the work at the machine. An exemple of machines at which no gloves are allowed are pillar drilling machines, because of the risk of getting caught in the drill chuck and being turned in by the machine. In many cases this causes very serious hand injuries. Depending on the application needs, the sensor system integrated into the push-button can be configured flexibly by software to prevent the operator from accidentally starting a machine with or without gloves, which can decrease the risk of severe accidents significantly. Especially two-hand controls are incentive to manipulation for easier handling. By equipping both push-buttons of a two-hand control with material classification properties, the user is forced to operate the controls with his bare fingers. That limitation disallows the manipulation of a two-hand control by a simple rodding device.
Die Forschung zur kontrovers diskutierten Robotik in der Pflege und Begleitung von Personen mit Demenz steht noch am Anfang, wenngleich bereits erste Systeme auf dem Markt sind. Der Beitrag gibt entlang beispielhafter, fallbezogener Auszüge Einblicke in das laufende multidisziplinäre Projekt EmoRobot, das sich explorativ und interpretativ mit der Erkundung des Einsatzes von Robotik in der emotionsorientierten Pflege und Versorgung von Personen mit Demenz befasst. Fokussiert werden dabei die je eigenen Relevanzen der Personen mit Demenz.
Kleinere, günstigere und effizientere Sensoren und Aktoren sowie Funkprotokolle haben dazu geführt, dass Smart Home Produkte in zunehmend auch für den privaten Massenmarkt erschwinglich werden. Damit stehen Hersteller und Anbieter vor der Herausforderung, komplexe cyber-physische Systeme für Jedermann handhabbar zu gestalten. Es fehlen allerdings empirische Erkenntnisse über die Rolle von Smart Home im Alltag. Wir präsentieren Ergebnisse aus einer Living Lab Studie, in der 14 Haushalte mit einer am Markt erhältlichen Smart Home Nachrüstlösung ausgestattet und über neun Monate empirisch begleitet wurden. Anhand der Analyse von Interviews, Beobachtungen und Co-Design Workshops in den Phasen der Produktauswahl, Installation, Konfiguration und längerfristigen Nutzung zeigen wir Herausforderungen und Potentiale von Smart Home Systemen auf. Unsere Erkenntnisse deuten darauf hin, dass das Smart Home immer noch von technischen Details dominiert wird. Zugleich fehlen Nutzern angemessene Steuerungs- und Kontrollmöglichkeiten, um weiterhin die Entscheidungshoheit im eigenen Zuhause zu behalten.
„Industrie 4.0“ und weitere Schlagwörter wie „Big Data“, „Internet der Dinge“ oder „Cyber-physical Systems“ werden gegenwärtig in der Wirtschaft häufig aufgegriffen. Ausgangspunkt hierfür ist die Vernetzung von IT-Technologien sowie die durchgängige Digitalisierung. Nicht nur die Geschäftsfelder und Business-Modelle der Unternehmen selbst unterliegen dabei ei-nem entsprechend radikalen Wandel, dieser bezieht sich auch auf die Arbeitsumgebungen der Mitarbeiter, sowie den privaten und den öffentlichen Raum (Botthof, 2015; Hartmann, 2015).
Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie (IKT) in den Bereichen Smart Home und Smart Living ist durch die zunehmende Vernetzung des häuslichen Anwendungsfelds mit der Digitalisierung des Stromnetzes, alternativen Möglichkeiten der Energiegewinnung und -speicherung und neuer Mobilitätskonzepte geprägt und zu einem unverzichtbaren Bestandteil privaten wie unternehmerischen Handelns geworden.
UX-Professionals stehen vor der Aufgabe ihre Fertigkeiten und Kenntnisse kontinuierlich auszubauen. Eine Möglichkeit dies zu tun sind Communities of Practice, also Gemeinschaften von Personen mit ähnlichen Aufgaben und Schwerpunkten sowie einem gemeinsamen Interesse an Lösungen. Sie agieren weitgehend selbstorganisiert und dienen dem Austausch und der gegenseitigen Unterstützung. So entstehen ein gemeinsamer Wissensschatz sowie ein Netzwerk zwischen allen UX-Interessierten. Der Aufbau einer Community of Practice für UX-Professionals wurde in einem mittelständigen Unternehmen über 18 Monate begleitet und ausgewertet. Die Ergebnisse führten zu Handlungsempfehlungen, um Hindernisse beim Aufbau zu reduzieren und einen Mehrwert für alle Beteiligten herbeizuführen.
Die Entwicklung intelligenter Technologien zur Unterstützung im Alltag und in den eigenen vier Wänden begleitet unsere Gesellschaft schon seit dem Zeitalter des Personal Computers. Mit dem Aufkommen des Internet der Dinge und begünstigt durch immer kleiner und günstiger werdende Hardware ergeben sich neue Potenziale, die das Thema Smart Home attraktiver als je zuvor werden lassen. Eine Vielzahl der aktuell im Markt verfügbaren Lösungen adressiert die Bedürfnisse Komfort, Sicherheit und effiziente Energienutzung. Die versprochene Intelligenz – smartness, wie sie der Begriff selbst suggeriert – wird vor allem bei Lösungen im privaten Nachrüstbereich überwiegend durch die Interaktion der Nutzer selbst und entsprechende regelbasierte Konfigurationen erzeugt. Diese notwendige Art der Interaktion und die damit verbundenen Aufwände sind jedoch von starker Bedeutung für das gesamte Nutzungserlebnis Smart Home und führen nicht selten zu Frustration oder gar Resignation in der Nutzung.
Getrieben durch kleiner und günstiger werdende Sensoren und der damit verbundenen Messbarmachung immer weiter reichender Teile des Alltages, hat sich die Gestaltung von Verbrauchsvisualisierunen bzw. Verbrauchsfeedbacksystemen zur Unterstützung von nachhaltigem Verhalten zu einem sehr aktiven Forschungsfeld entwickelt.
Noncooperative Game Theory
(2016)
The detection of human skin in images is a very desirable feature for applications such as biometric face recognition, which is becoming more frequently used for, e.g., automated border or access control. However, distinguishing real skin from other materials based on imagery captured in the visual spectrum alone and in spite of varying skin types and lighting conditions can be dicult and unreliable. Therefore, spoofing attacks with facial disguises or masks are still a serious problem for state of the art face recognition algorithms. This dissertation presents a novel approach for reliable skin detection based on spectral remission properties in the short-wave infrared (SWIR) spectrum and proposes a cross-modal method that enhances existing solutions for face verification to ensure the authenticity of a face even in the presence of partial disguises or masks. Furthermore, it presents a reference design and the necessary building blocks for an active multispectral camera system that implements this approach, as well as an in-depth evaluation. The system acquires four-band multispectral images within T = 50ms. Using a machine-learning-based classifier, it achieves unprecedented skin detection accuracy, even in the presence of skin-like materials used for spoofing attacks. Paired with a commercial face recognition software, the system successfully rejected all evaluated attempts to counterfeit a foreign face.
Advances in computer graphics enable us to create digital images of astonishing complexity and realism. However, processing resources are still a limiting factor. Hence, many costly but desirable aspects of realism are often not accounted for, including global illumination, accurate depth of field and motion blur, spectral effects, etc. especially in real‐time rendering. At the same time, there is a strong trend towards more pixels per display due to larger displays, higher pixel densities or larger fields of view. Further observable trends in current display technology include more bits per pixel (high dynamic range, wider color gamut/fidelity), increasing refresh rates (better motion depiction), and an increasing number of displayed views per pixel (stereo, multi‐view, all the way to holographic or lightfield displays). These developments cause significant unsolved technical challenges due to aspects such as limited compute power and bandwidth. Fortunately, the human visual system has certain limitations, which mean that providing the highest possible visual quality is not always necessary. In this report, we present the key research and models that exploit the limitations of perception to tackle visual quality and workload alike. Moreover, we present the open problems and promising future research targeting the question of how we can minimize the effort to compute and display only the necessary pixels while still offering a user full visual experience.
Females are influenced more than males by visual cues during many spatial orientation tasks; but females rely more heavily on gravitational cues during visual-vestibular conflict. Are there gender biases in the relative contributions of vision, gravity and the internal representation of the body to the perception of upright? And might any such biases be affected by low gravity? 16 participants (8 female) viewed a highly polarized visual scene tilted ±112° while lying supine on the European Space Agency's short-arm human centrifuge. The centrifuge was rotated to simulate 24 logarithmically spaced g-levels along the long axis of the body (0.04-0.5g at ear-level). The perception of upright was measured using the Oriented Character Recognition Test (OCHART). OCHART uses the ambiguous symbol "p" shown in different orientations. Participants decided whether it was a "p" or a "d" from which the perceptual upright (PU) can be calculated for each visual/gravity combination. The relative contribution of vision, gravity and the internal representation of the body were then calculated. Experiments were repeated while upright. The relative contribution of vision on the PU was less in females compared to males (t=-18.48, p≤0.01). Females placed more emphasis on the gravity cue instead (f:28.4%, m:24.9%) while body weightings were constant (f:63.0%, m:63.2%). When upright (1g) in this and other studies (e.g., Barnett-Cowan et al. 2010, EJN, 31,1899) females placed more emphasis on vision in this task than males. The reduction in weight allocated by females to vision when in simulated low-gravity conditions compared to when upright under normal gravity may be related to similar female behaviour in response to other instances of visual-vestibular conflict. Why this is the case and at which point the perceptual change happens requires further research.
Background: Virtual reality combined with spherical treadmills is used across species for studying neural circuits underlying navigation.
New Method: We developed an optical flow-based method for tracking treadmil ball motion in real-time using a single high-resolution camera.
Results: Tracking accuracy and timing were determined using calibration data. Ball tracking was performed at 500 Hz and integrated with an open source game engine for virtual reality projection. The projection was updated at 120 Hz with a latency with respect to ball motion of 30 ± 8 ms.
Comparison: with Existing Method(s) Optical flow based tracking of treadmill motion is typically achieved using optical mice. The camera-based optical flow tracking system developed here is based on off-the-shelf components and offers control over the image acquisition and processing parameters. This results in flexibility with respect to tracking conditions – such as ball surface texture, lighting conditions, or ball size – as well as camera alignment and calibration.
Conclusions: A fast system for rotational ball motion tracking suitable for virtual reality animal behavior across different scales was developed and characterized.
Computer graphics research strives to synthesize images of a high visual realism that are indistinguishable from real visual experiences. While modern image synthesis approaches enable to create digital images of astonishing complexity and beauty, processing resources remain a limiting factor. Here, rendering efficiency is a central challenge involving a trade-off between visual fidelity and interactivity. For that reason, there is still a fundamental difference between the perception of the physical world and computer-generated imagery. At the same time, advances in display technologies drive the development of novel display devices. The dynamic range, the pixel densities, and refresh rates are constantly increasing. Display systems enable a larger visual field to be addressed by covering a wider field-of-view, due to either their size or in the form of head-mounted devices. Currently, research prototypes are ranging from stereo and multi-view systems, head-mounted devices with adaptable lenses, up to retinal projection, and lightfield/holographic displays. Computer graphics has to keep step with, as driving these devices presents us with immense challenges, most of which are currently unsolved. Fortunately, the human visual system has certain limitations, which means that providing the highest possible visual quality is not always necessary. Visual input passes through the eye’s optics, is filtered, and is processed at higher level structures in the brain. Knowledge of these processes helps to design novel rendering approaches that allow the creation of images at a higher quality and within a reduced time-frame. This thesis presents the state-of-the-art research and models that exploit the limitations of perception in order to increase visual quality but also to reduce workload alike - a concept we call perception-driven rendering. This research results in several practical rendering approaches that allow some of the fundamental challenges of computer graphics to be tackled. By using different tracking hardware, display systems, and head-mounted devices, we show the potential of each of the presented systems. The capturing of specific processes of the human visual system can be improved by combining multiple measurements using machine learning techniques. Different sampling, filtering, and reconstruction techniques aid the visual quality of the synthesized images. An in-depth evaluation of the presented systems including benchmarks, comparative examination with image metrics as well as user studies and experiments demonstrated that the methods introduced are visually superior or on the same qualitative level as ground truth, whilst having a significantly reduced computational complexity.
In mathematical modeling by means of performance models, the Fitness-Fatigue Model (FF-Model) is a common approach in sport and exercise science to study the training performance relationship. The FF-Model uses an initial basic level of performance and two antagonistic terms (for fitness and fatigue). By model calibration, parameters are adapted to the subject’s individual physical response to training load. Although the simulation of the recorded training data in most cases shows useful results when the model is calibrated and all parameters are adjusted, this method has two major difficulties. First, a fitted value as basic performance will usually be too high. Second, without modification, the model cannot be simply used for prediction. By rewriting the FF-Model such that effects of former training history can be analyzed separately – we call those terms preload – it is possible to close the gap between a more realistic initial performance level and an athlete's actual performance level without distorting other model parameters and increase model accuracy substantially. Fitting error of the preload-extended FF-Model is less than 32% compared to the error of the FF-Model without preloads. Prediction error of the preload-extended FF-Model is around 54% of the error of the FF-Model without preloads.
In this paper, we provide a participatory design study of a mobile health platform for older adults that provides an integrative perspective on health data collected from different devices and apps. We illustrate the diversity and complexity of older adults’ perspectives in the context of health and technology use, the challenges which follow on for the design of mobile health platforms that support active and healthy ageing (AHA) and our approach to addressing these challenges through a participatory design (PD) process. Interviews were conducted with older adults aged 65+ in a two-month study with the goal of understanding perspectives on health and technologies for AHA support. We identified challenges and derived design ideas for a mobile health platform called “My-AHA”. For researchers in this field, the structured documentation of our procedures and results, as well as the implications derived provide valuable insights for the design of mobile health platforms for older adults.
This work addresses the issue of finding an optimal flight zone for a side-by-side tracking and following Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) adhering to space-restricting factors brought upon by a dynamic Vector Field Extraction (VFE) algorithm. The VFE algorithm demands a relatively perpendicular field of view of the UAV to the tracked vehicle, thereby enforcing the space-restricting factors which are distance, angle and altitude. The objective of the UAV is to perform side-by-side tracking and following of a lightweight ground vehicle while acquiring high quality video of tufts attached to the side of the tracked vehicle. The recorded video is supplied to the VFE algorithm that produces the positions and deformations of the tufts over time as they interact with the surrounding air, resulting in an airflow model of the tracked vehicle. The present limitations of wind tunnel tests and computational fluid dynamics simulation suggest the use of a UAV for real world evaluation of the aerodynamic properties of the vehicle’s exterior. The novelty of the proposed approach is alluded to defining the specific flight zone restricting factors while adhering to the VFE algorithm, where as a result we were capable of formalizing a locally-static and a globally-dynamic geofence attached to the tracked vehicle and enclosing the UAV.
Facial emotion recognition is the task to classify human emotions in face images. It is a difficult task due to high aleatoric uncertainty and visual ambiguity. A large part of the literature aims to show progress by increasing accuracy on this task, but this ignores the inherent uncertainty and ambiguity in the task. In this paper we show that Bayesian Neural Networks, as approximated using MC-Dropout, MC-DropConnect, or an Ensemble, are able to model the aleatoric uncertainty in facial emotion recognition, and produce output probabilities that are closer to what a human expects. We also show that calibration metrics show strange behaviors for this task, due to the multiple classes that can be considered correct, which motivates future work. We believe our work will motivate other researchers to move away from Classical and into Bayesian Neural Networks.
This paper introduces FaceHaptics, a novel haptic display based on a robot arm attached to a head-mounted virtual reality display. It provides localized, multi-directional and movable haptic cues in the form of wind, warmth, moving and single-point touch events and water spray to dedicated parts of the face not covered by the head-mounted display.The easily extensible system, however, can principally mount any type of compact haptic actuator or object. User study 1 showed that users appreciate the directional resolution of cues, and can judge wind direction well, especially when they move their head and wind direction is adjusted dynamically to compensate for head rotations. Study 2 showed that adding FaceHaptics cues to a VR walkthrough can significantly improve user experience, presence, and emotional responses.
Foreword to the Special Section on the Symposium on Virtual and Augmented Reality 2019 (SVR 2019)
(2020)
Kollaborative Industrieroboter werden für produzierende Unternehmen immer kosteneffizienter. Während diese Systeme für den menschlichen Mitarbeiter eine große Hilfe sein können, stellen sie gleichzeitig ein ernstes Gesundheitsrisiko dar, wenn die zwingend notwendigen Sicherheitsmaßnahmen nur unzureichend umgesetzt werden. Herkömmliche Sicherheitseinrichtungen wie Zäune oder Lichtvorhänge bieten einen guten Schutz, aber solch statische Schutzvorrichtungen sind in neuen, hochdynamischen Arbeitsszenarien problematisch.
Im Forschungsprojekt BeyondSPAI wurde ein Funktionsmuster eines Multisensorsystems zur Absicherung solcher dynamischer Arbeitsszenarien entworfen, implementiert und im Feld getestet. Kern des Systems ist eine robuste optische Materialklassifikation, die mit Hilfe eines intelligenten InGaAs-Kamerasystems Haut von anderen typischen Werkstückoberflächen (z.B. Holz, Metalle od. Kunststoffe) unterscheiden kann. Diese einzigartige Eigenschaft wird genutzt, um menschliche Mitarbeiter zuverlässig zu erkennen, so dass ein konventioneller Roboter in Folge als personenbewusster Cobot arbeiten kann.
Das System ist modular und kann leicht mit weiteren Sensoren verschiedenster Art erweitert werden. Es kann an verschiedene Marken von Industrierobotern angepasst werden und lässt sich schnell an bestehenden Robotersystemen integrieren. Die vier vom System bereitgestellten Sicherheitsausgänge können dazu verwendet werden - abhängig von der durchdrungenen Überwachungszone - entweder eine Warnung auszugeben, die Bewegung des Roboters auf eine sichere Geschwindigkeit zu verlangsamen, oder den Roboter sicher anzuhalten. Sobald alle Zonen wieder als „eindeutig frei von Personen“ identifiziert sind, kann der Roboter wieder beschleunigen, seine ursprüngliche Bewegung wiederaufnehmen und die Arbeit fortsetzen.
The majority of biomedical knowledge is stored in structured databases or as unstructured text in scientific publications. This vast amount of information has led to numerous machine learning-based biological applications using either text through natural language processing (NLP) or structured data through knowledge graph embedding models (KGEMs). However, representations based on a single modality are inherently limited. To generate better representations of biological knowledge, we propose STonKGs, a Sophisticated Transformer trained on biomedical text and Knowledge Graphs. This multimodal Transformer uses combined input sequences of structured information from KGs and unstructured text data from biomedical literature to learn joint representations. First, we pre-trained STonKGs on a knowledge base assembled by the Integrated Network and Dynamical Reasoning Assembler (INDRA) consisting of millions of text-triple pairs extracted from biomedical literature by multiple NLP systems. Then, we benchmarked STonKGs against two baseline models trained on either one of the modalities (i.e., text or KG) across eight different classification tasks, each corresponding to a different biological application. Our results demonstrate that STonKGs outperforms both baselines, especially on the more challenging tasks with respect to the number of classes, improving upon the F1-score of the best baseline by up to 0.083. Additionally, our pre-trained model as well as the model architecture can be adapted to various other transfer learning applications. Finally, the source code and pre-trained STonKGs models are available at https://github.com/stonkgs/stonkgs and https://huggingface.co/stonkgs/stonkgs-150k.
Over the last decades, different kinds of design guides have been created to maintain consistency and usability in interactive system development. However, in the case of spatial applications, practitioners from research and industry either have difficulty finding them or perceive such guides as lacking relevance, practicability, and applicability. This paper presents the current state of scientific research and industry practice by investigating currently used design recommendations for mixed reality (MR) system development. We analyzed and compared 875 design recommendations for MR applications elicited from 89 scientific papers and documentation from six industry practitioners in a literature review. In doing so, we identified differences regarding four key topics: Focus on unique MR design challenges, abstraction regarding devices and ecosystems, level of detail and abstraction of content, and covered topics. Based on that,we contribute to the MR design research by providing three factors for perceived irrelevance and six main implications for design recommendations that are applicable in scientific and industry practice.
Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) is still a fragmented space to design for due to the rapidly evolving hardware, the interdisciplinarity of teams, and a lack of standards and best practices. We interviewed 26 professional AR/VR designers and developers to shed light on their tasks, approaches, tools, and challenges. Based on their work and the artifacts they generated, we found that AR/VR application creators fulfill four roles: concept developers, interaction designers, content authors, and technical developers. One person often incorporates multiple roles and faces a variety of challenges during the design process from the initial contextual analysis to the deployment. From analysis of their tool sets, methods, and artifacts, we describe critical key challenges. Finally, we discuss the importance of prototyping for the communication in AR/VR development teams and highlight design implications for future tools to create a more usable AR/VR tool chain.
Using Visual and Auditory Cues to Locate Out-of-View Objects in Head-Mounted Augmented Reality
(2021)
Low-Cost In-Hand Slippage Detection and Avoidance for Robust Robotic Grasping with Compliant Fingers
(2021)
When users in virtual reality cannot physically walk and self-motions are instead only visually simulated, spatial updating is often impaired. In this paper, we report on a study that investigated if HeadJoystick, an embodied leaning-based flying interface, could improve performance in a 3D navigational search task that relies on maintaining situational awareness and spatial updating in VR. We compared it to Gamepad, a standard flying interface. For both interfaces, participants were seated on a swivel chair and controlled simulated rotations by physically rotating. They either leaned (forward/backward, right/left, up/down) or used the Gamepad thumbsticks for simulated translation. In a gamified 3D navigational search task, participants had to find eight balls within 5 min. Those balls were hidden amongst 16 randomly positioned boxes in a dark environment devoid of any landmarks. Compared to the Gamepad, participants collected more balls using the HeadJoystick. It also minimized the distance travelled, motion sickness, and mental task demand. Moreover, the HeadJoystick was rated better in terms of ease of use, controllability, learnability, overall usability, and self-motion perception. However, participants rated HeadJoystick could be more physically fatiguing after a long use. Overall, participants felt more engaged with HeadJoystick, enjoyed it more, and preferred it. Together, this provides evidence that leaning-based interfaces like HeadJoystick can provide an affordable and effective alternative for flying in VR and potentially telepresence drones.
Contextual information is widely considered for NLP and knowledge discovery in life sciences since it highly influences the exact meaning of natural language. The scientific challenge is not only to extract such context data, but also to store this data for further query and discovery approaches. Classical approaches use RDF triple stores, which have serious limitations. Here, we propose a multiple step knowledge graph approach using labeled property graphs based on polyglot persistence systems to utilize context data for context mining, graph queries, knowledge discovery and extraction. We introduce the graph-theoretic foundation for a general context concept within semantic networks and show a proof of concept based on biomedical literature and text mining. Our test system contains a knowledge graph derived from the entirety of PubMed and SCAIView data and is enriched with text mining data and domain-specific language data using Biological Expression Language. Here, context is a more general concept than annotations. This dense graph has more than 71M nodes and 850M relationships. We discuss the impact of this novel approach with 27 real-world use cases represented by graph queries. Storing and querying a giant knowledge graph as a labeled property graph is still a technological challenge. Here, we demonstrate how our data model is able to support the understanding and interpretation of biomedical data. We present several real-world use cases that utilize our massive, generated knowledge graph derived from PubMed data and enriched with additional contextual data. Finally, we show a working example in context of biologically relevant information using SCAIView.
ProtSTonKGs: A Sophisticated Transformer Trained on Protein Sequences, Text, and Knowledge Graphs
(2022)
While most approaches individually exploit unstructured data from the biomedical literature or structured data from biomedical knowledge graphs, their union can better exploit the advantages of such approaches, ultimately improving representations of biology. Using multimodal transformers for such purposes can improve performance on context dependent classication tasks, as demonstrated by our previous model, the Sophisticated Transformer Trained on Biomedical Text and Knowledge Graphs (STonKGs). In this work, we introduce ProtSTonKGs, a transformer aimed at learning all-encompassing representations of protein-protein interactions. ProtSTonKGs presents an extension to our previous work by adding textual protein descriptions and amino acid sequences (i.e., structural information) to the text- and knowledge graph-based input sequence used in STonKGs. We benchmark ProtSTonKGs against STonKGs, resulting in improved F1 scores by up to 0.066 (i.e., from 0.204 to 0.270) in several tasks such as predicting protein interactions in several contexts. Our work demonstrates how multimodal transformers can be used to integrate heterogeneous sources of information, paving the foundation for future approaches that use multiple modalities for biomedical applications.
We describe a systematic approach for rendering time-varying simulation data produced by exa-scale simulations, using GPU workstations. The data sets we focus on use adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) to overcome memory bandwidth limitations by representing interesting regions in space with high detail. Particularly, our focus is on data sets where the AMR hierarchy is fixed and does not change over time. Our study is motivated by the NASA Exajet, a large computational fluid dynamics simulation of a civilian cargo aircraft that consists of 423 simulation time steps, each storing 2.5 GB of data per scalar field, amounting to a total of 4 TB. We present strategies for rendering this time series data set with smooth animation and at interactive rates using current generation GPUs. We start with an unoptimized baseline and step by step extend that to support fast streaming updates. Our approach demonstrates how to push current visualization workstations and modern visualization APIs to their limits to achieve interactive visualization of exa-scale time series data sets.
MOTIVATION
The majority of biomedical knowledge is stored in structured databases or as unstructured text in scientific publications. This vast amount of information has led to numerous machine learning-based biological applications using either text through natural language processing (NLP) or structured data through knowledge graph embedding models (KGEMs). However, representations based on a single modality are inherently limited.
RESULTS
To generate better representations of biological knowledge, we propose STonKGs, a Sophisticated Transformer trained on biomedical text and Knowledge Graphs (KGs). This multimodal Transformer uses combined input sequences of structured information from KGs and unstructured text data from biomedical literature to learn joint representations in a shared embedding space. First, we pre-trained STonKGs on a knowledge base assembled by the Integrated Network and Dynamical Reasoning Assembler (INDRA) consisting of millions of text-triple pairs extracted from biomedical literature by multiple NLP systems. Then, we benchmarked STonKGs against three baseline models trained on either one of the modalities (i.e., text or KG) across eight different classification tasks, each corresponding to a different biological application. Our results demonstrate that STonKGs outperforms both baselines, especially on the more challenging tasks with respect to the number of classes, improving upon the F1-score of the best baseline by up to 0.084 (i.e., from 0.881 to 0.965). Finally, our pre-trained model as well as the model architecture can be adapted to various other transfer learning applications.
AVAILABILITY
We make the source code and the Python package of STonKGs available at GitHub (https://github.com/stonkgs/stonkgs) and PyPI (https://pypi.org/project/stonkgs/). The pre-trained STonKGs models and the task-specific classification models are respectively available at https://huggingface.co/stonkgs/stonkgs-150k and https://zenodo.org/communities/stonkgs.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Current research in augmented, virtual, and mixed reality (XR) reveals a lack of tool support for designing and, in particular, prototyping XR applications. While recent tools research is often motivated by studying the requirements of non-technical designers and end-user developers, the perspective of industry practitioners is less well understood. In an interview study with 17 practitioners from different industry sectors working on professional XR projects, we establish the design practices in industry, from early project stages to the final product. To better understand XR design challenges, we characterize the different methods and tools used for prototyping and describe the role and use of key prototypes in the different projects. We extract common elements of XR prototyping, elaborating on the tools and materials used for prototyping and establishing different views on the notion of fidelity. Finally, we highlight key issues for future XR tools research.
Modern GPUs come with dedicated hardware to perform ray/triangle intersections and bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) traversal. While the primary use case for this hardware is photorealistic 3D computer graphics, with careful algorithm design scientists can also use this special-purpose hardware to accelerate general-purpose computations such as point containment queries. This article explains the principles behind these techniques and their application to vector field visualization of large simulation data using particle tracing.
BACKGROUND: Humans demonstrate many physiological changes in microgravity for which long-duration head down bed rest (HDBR) is a reliable analog. However, information on how HDBR affects sensory processing is lacking.
OBJECTIVE: We previously showed [25] that microgravity alters the weighting applied to visual cues in determining the perceptual upright (PU), an effect that lasts long after return. Does long-duration HDBR have comparable effects?
METHODS: We assessed static spatial orientation using the luminous line test (subjective visual vertical, SVV) and the oriented character recognition test (PU) before, during and after 21 days of 6° HDBR in 10 participants. Methods were essentially identical as previously used in orbit [25].
RESULTS: Overall, HDBR had no effect on the reliance on visual relative to body cues in determining the PU. However, when considering the three critical time points (pre-bed rest, end of bed rest, and 14 days post-bed rest) there was a significant decrease in reliance on visual relative to body cues, as found in microgravity. The ratio had an average time constant of 7.28 days and returned to pre-bed-rest levels within 14 days. The SVV was unaffected.
CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that bed rest can be a useful analog for the study of the perception of static self-orientation during long-term exposure to microgravity. More detailed work on the precise time course of our effects is needed in both bed rest and microgravity conditions.
The latest trends in inverse rendering techniques for reconstruction use neural networks to learn 3D representations as neural fields. NeRF-based techniques fit multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) to a set of training images to estimate a radiance field which can then be rendered from any virtual camera by means of volume rendering algorithms. Major drawbacks of these representations are the lack of well-defined surfaces and non-interactive rendering times, as wide and deep MLPs must be queried millions of times per single frame. These limitations have recently been singularly overcome, but managing to accomplish this simultaneously opens up new use cases. We present KiloNeuS, a new neural object representation that can be rendered in path-traced scenes at interactive frame rates. KiloNeuS enables the simulation of realistic light interactions between neural and classic primitives in shared scenes, and it demonstrably performs in real-time with plenty of room for future optimizations and extensions.
This paper explores the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in elite sports. We approach the topic from two perspectives. Firstly, we provide a literature based overview of AI success stories in areas other than sports. We identified multiple approaches in the area of Machine Perception, Machine Learning and Modeling, Planning and Optimization as well as Interaction and Intervention, holding a potential for improving training and competition. Secondly, we discover the present status of AI use in elite sports. Therefore, in addition to another literature review, we interviewed leading sports scientist, which are closely connected to the main national service institute for elite sports in their countries. The analysis of this literature review and the interviews show that the most activity is carried out in the methodical categories of signal and image processing. However, projects in the field of modeling & planning have become increasingly popular within the last years. Based on these two perspectives, we extract deficits, issues and opportunities and summarize them in six key challenges faced by the sports analytics community. These challenges include data collection, controllability of an AI by the practitioners and explainability of AI results.
Taste is a complex phenomenon that depends on the individual experience and is a matter of collective negotiation and mediation. On the contrary, it is uncommon to include taste and its many facets in everyday design, particularly online shopping for fresh food products. To realize this unused potential, we conducted two Co-Design workshops. Based on the participants’ results in the workshops, we prototyped and evaluated a click-dummy smart-phone app to explore consumers’ needs for digital taste depiction. We found that emphasizing the natural qualities of food products, external reviews, and personalizing features lead to a reflection on the individual taste experience. The self-reflection through our design enables consumers to develop their taste competencies and thus strengthen their autonomy in decision-making. Ultimately, exploring taste as a social experience adds to a broader understanding of taste beyond a sensory phenomenon.
The visual and auditory quality of computer-mediated stimuli for virtual and extended reality (VR/XR) is rapidly improving. Still, it remains challenging to provide a fully embodied sensation and awareness of objects surrounding, approaching, or touching us in a 3D environment, though it can greatly aid task performance in a 3D user interface. For example, feedback can provide warning signals for potential collisions (e.g., bumping into an obstacle while navigating) or pinpointing areas where one’s attention should be directed to (e.g., points of interest or danger). These events inform our motor behaviour and are often associated with perception mechanisms associated with our so-called peripersonal and extrapersonal space models that relate our body to object distance, direction, and contact point/impact. We will discuss these references spaces to explain the role of different cues in our motor action responses that underlie 3D interaction tasks. However, providing proximity and collision cues can be challenging. Various full-body vibration systems have been developed that stimulate body parts other than the hands, but can have limitations in their applicability and feasibility due to their cost and effort to operate, as well as hygienic considerations associated with e.g., Covid-19. Informed by results of a prior study using low-frequencies for collision feedback, in this paper we look at an unobtrusive way to provide spatial, proximal and collision cues. Specifically, we assess the potential of foot sole stimulation to provide cues about object direction and relative distance, as well as collision direction and force of impact. Results indicate that in particular vibration-based stimuli could be useful within the frame of peripersonal and extrapersonal space perception that support 3DUI tasks. Current results favor the feedback combination of continuous vibrotactor cues for proximity, and bass-shaker cues for body collision. Results show that users could rather easily judge the different cues at a reasonably high granularity. This granularity may be sufficient to support common navigation tasks in a 3DUI.
It is challenging to provide users with a haptic weight sensation of virtual objects in VR since current consumer VR controllers and software-based approaches such as pseudo-haptics cannot render appropriate haptic stimuli. To overcome these limitations, we developed a haptic VR controller named Triggermuscle that adjusts its trigger resistance according to the weight of a virtual object. Therefore, users need to adapt their index finger force to grab objects of different virtual weights. Dynamic and continuous adjustment is enabled by a spring mechanism inside the casing of an HTC Vive controller. In two user studies, we explored the effect on weight perception and found large differences between participants for sensing change in trigger resistance and thus for discriminating virtual weights. The variations were easily distinguished and associated with weight by some participants while others did not notice them at all. We discuss possible limitations, confounding factors, how to overcome them in future research and the pros and cons of this novel technology.
Vection underwater
(2022)
Wie KI Innere Führung lernt
(2022)
Dass sich künstliche Intelligenz (KI) weltweit ausgebreitet hat, ist eine Binsenwahrheit. Die rasche und unaufhaltsame Proliferation von KI der letzten zehn Jahre spricht für sich, und längst ziehen auch Gesetzgeber und Regulierungsbehörden nach, um KI und ihre Technikfolgen einzuhegen. Für Deutschland relevante Gestaltungsanforderungen haben die High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence der Europäischen Kommission (HLEG AI) und auf nationaler Ebene die Datenethikkommission der Bundesregierung (DEK) und die Enquetekommission Künstliche Intelligenz des Deutschen Bundestags (EKKI) geäußert.
Robust Identification and Segmentation of the Outer Skin Layers in Volumetric Fingerprint Data
(2022)
Despite the long history of fingerprint biometrics and its use to authenticate individuals, there are still some unsolved challenges with fingerprint acquisition and presentation attack detection (PAD). Currently available commercial fingerprint capture devices struggle with non-ideal skin conditions, including soft skin in infants. They are also susceptible to presentation attacks, which limits their applicability in unsupervised scenarios such as border control. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) could be a promising solution to these problems. In this work, we propose a digital signal processing chain for segmenting two complementary fingerprints from the same OCT fingertip scan: One fingerprint is captured as usual from the epidermis (“outer fingerprint”), whereas the other is taken from inside the skin, at the junction between the epidermis and the underlying dermis (“inner fingerprint”). The resulting 3D fingerprints are then converted to a conventional 2D grayscale representation from which minutiae points can be extracted using existing methods. Our approach is device-independent and has been proven to work with two different time domain OCT scanners. Using efficient GPGPU computing, it took less than a second to process an entire gigabyte of OCT data. To validate the results, we captured OCT fingerprints of 130 individual fingers and compared them with conventional 2D fingerprints of the same fingers. We found that both the outer and inner OCT fingerprints were backward compatible with conventional 2D fingerprints, with the inner fingerprint generally being less damaged and, therefore, more reliable.
The perceptual upright results from the multisensory integration of the directions indicated by vision and gravity as well as a prior assumption that upright is towards the head. The direction of gravity is signalled by multiple cues, the predominant of which are the otoliths of the vestibular system and somatosensory information from contact with the support surface. Here, we used neutral buoyancy to remove somatosensory information while retaining vestibular cues, thus "splitting the gravity vector" leaving only the vestibular component. In this way, neutral buoyancy can be used as a microgravity analogue. We assessed spatial orientation using the oriented character recognition test (OChaRT, which yields the perceptual upright, PU) under both neutrally buoyant and terrestrial conditions. The effect of visual cues to upright (the visual effect) was reduced under neutral buoyancy compared to on land but the influence of gravity was unaffected. We found no significant change in the relative weighting of vision, gravity, or body cues, in contrast to results found both in long-duration microgravity and during head-down bed rest. These results indicate a relatively minor role for somatosensation in determining the perceptual upright in the presence of vestibular cues. Short-duration neutral buoyancy is a weak analogue for microgravity exposure in terms of its perceptual consequences compared to long-duration head-down bed rest.
Neutral buoyancy has been used as an analog for microgravity from the earliest days of human spaceflight. Compared to other options on Earth, neutral buoyancy is relatively inexpensive and presents little danger to astronauts while simulating some aspects of microgravity. Neutral buoyancy removes somatosensory cues to the direction of gravity but leaves vestibular cues intact. Removal of both somatosensory and direction of gravity cues while floating in microgravity or using virtual reality to establish conflicts between them has been shown to affect the perception of distance traveled in response to visual motion (vection) and the perception of distance. Does removal of somatosensory cues alone by neutral buoyancy similarly impact these perceptions? During neutral buoyancy we found no significant difference in either perceived distance traveled nor perceived size relative to Earth-normal conditions. This contrasts with differences in linear vection reported between short- and long-duration microgravity and Earth-normal conditions. These results indicate that neutral buoyancy is not an effective analog for microgravity for these perceptual effects.
This research investigates the efficacy of multisensory cues for locating targets in Augmented Reality (AR). Sensory constraints can impair perception and attention in AR, leading to reduced performance due to factors such as conflicting visual cues or a restricted field of view. To address these limitations, the research proposes head-based multisensory guidance methods that leverage audio-tactile cues to direct users' attention towards target locations. The research findings demonstrate that this approach can effectively reduce the influence of sensory constraints, resulting in improved search performance in AR. Additionally, the thesis discusses the limitations of the proposed methods and provides recommendations for future research.
The increasing ubiquity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses significant political consequences. The rapid proliferation of AI over the past decade has prompted legislators and regulators to attempt to contain AI’s technological consequences. For Germany, relevant design requirements have been expressed by the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (HLEG AI), and, at the national level, by the German government’s Data Ethics Commission (DEK) as well as the German Bundestag’s Commission of Inquiry on Artificial Intelligence (EKKI).
Users should always play a central role in the development of (software) solutions. The human-centered design (HCD) process in the ISO 9241-210 standard proposes a procedure for systematically involving users. However, due to its abstraction level, the HCD process provides little guidance for how it should be implemented in practice. In this chapter, we propose three concrete practical methods that enable the reader to develop usable security and privacy (USP) solutions using the HCD process. This chapter equips the reader with the procedural knowledge and recommendations to: (1) derive mental models with regard to security and privacy, (2) analyze USP needs and privacy-related requirements, and (3) collect user characteristics on privacy and structure them by user group profiles and into privacy personas. Together, these approaches help to design measures for a user-friendly implementation of security and privacy measures based on a firm understanding of the key stakeholders.
This paper addresses the classification of Arabic text data in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a particular focus on Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Contradiction Detection (CD). Arabic is considered a resource-poor language, meaning that there are few data sets available, which leads to limited availability of NLP methods. To overcome this limitation, we create a dedicated data set from publicly available resources. Subsequently, transformer-based machine learning models are being trained and evaluated. We find that a language-specific model (AraBERT) performs competitively with state-of-the-art multilingual approaches, when we apply linguistically informed pre-training methods such as Named Entity Recognition (NER). To our knowledge, this is the first large-scale evaluation for this task in Arabic, as well as the first application of multi-task pre-training in this context.
Self-motion perception is a multi-sensory process that involves visual, vestibular, and other cues. When perception of self-motion is induced using only visual motion, vestibular cues indicate that the body remains stationary, which may bias an observer’s perception. When lowering the precision of the vestibular cue by for example, lying down or by adapting to microgravity, these biases may decrease, accompanied by a decrease in precision. To test this hypothesis, we used a move-to-target task in virtual reality. Astronauts and Earth-based controls were shown a target at a range of simulated distances. After the target disappeared, forward self-motion was induced by optic flow. Participants indicated when they thought they had arrived at the target’s previously seen location. Astronauts completed the task on Earth (supine and sitting upright) prior to space travel, early and late in space, and early and late after landing. Controls completed the experiment on Earth using a similar regime with a supine posture used to simulate being in space. While variability was similar across all conditions, the supine posture led to significantly higher gains (target distance/perceived travel distance) than the sitting posture for the astronauts pre-flight and early post-flight but not late post-flight. No difference was detected between the astronauts’ performance on Earth and onboard the ISS, indicating that judgments of traveled distance were largely unaffected by long-term exposure to microgravity. Overall, this constitutes mixed evidence as to whether non-visual cues to travel distance are integrated with relevant visual cues when self-motion is simulated using optic flow alone.
During robot-assisted therapy, a robot typically needs to be partially or fully controlled by therapists, for instance using a Wizard-of-Oz protocol; this makes therapeutic sessions tedious to conduct, as therapists cannot fully focus on the interaction with the person under therapy. In this work, we develop a learning-based behaviour model that can be used to increase the autonomy of a robot’s decision-making process. We investigate reinforcement learning as a model training technique and compare different reward functions that consider a user’s engagement and activity performance. We also analyse various strategies that aim to make the learning process more tractable, namely i) behaviour model training with a learned user model, ii) policy transfer between user groups, and iii) policy learning from expert feedback. We demonstrate that policy transfer can significantly speed up the policy learning process, although the reward function has an important effect on the actions that a robot can choose. Although the main focus of this paper is the personalisation pipeline itself, we further evaluate the learned behaviour models in a small-scale real-world feasibility study in which six users participated in a sequence learning game with an assistive robot. The results of this study seem to suggest that learning from guidance may result in the most adequate policies in terms of increasing the engagement and game performance of users, but a large-scale user study is needed to verify the validity of that observation.
Selection Performance and Reliability of Eye and Head Gaze Tracking Under Varying Light Conditions
(2024)
Due to their user-friendliness and reliability, biometric systems have taken a central role in everyday digital identity management for all kinds of private, financial and governmental applications with increasing security requirements. A central security aspect of unsupervised biometric authentication systems is the presentation attack detection (PAD) mechanism, which defines the robustness to fake or altered biometric features. Artifacts like photos, artificial fingers, face masks and fake iris contact lenses are a general security threat for all biometric modalities. The Biometric Evaluation Center of the Institute of Safety and Security Research (ISF) at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg has specialized in the development of a near-infrared (NIR)-based contact-less detection technology that can distinguish between human skin and most artifact materials. This technology is highly adaptable and has already been successfully integrated into fingerprint scanners, face recognition devices and hand vein scanners. In this work, we introduce a cutting-edge, miniaturized near-infrared presentation attack detection (NIR-PAD) device. It includes an innovative signal processing chain and an integrated distance measurement feature to boost both reliability and resilience. We detail the device’s modular configuration and conceptual decisions, highlighting its suitability as a versatile platform for sensor fusion and seamless integration into future biometric systems. This paper elucidates the technological foundations and conceptual framework of the NIR-PAD reference platform, alongside an exploration of its potential applications and prospective enhancements.
While humans can effortlessly pick a view from multiple streams, automatically choosing the best view is a challenge. Choosing the best view from multi-camera streams poses a problem regarding which objective metrics should be considered. Existing works on view selection lack consensus about which metrics should be considered to select the best view. The literature on view selection describes diverse possible metrics. And strategies such as information-theoretic, instructional design, or aesthetics-motivated fail to incorporate all approaches. In this work, we postulate a strategy incorporating information-theoretic and instructional design-based objective metrics to select the best view from a set of views. Traditionally, information-theoretic measures have been used to find the goodness of a view, such as in 3D rendering. We adapted a similar measure known as the viewpoint entropy for real-world 2D images. Additionally, we incorporated similarity penalization to get a more accurate measure of the entropy of a view, which is one of the metrics for the best view selection. Since the choice of the best view is domain-dependent, we chose demonstration-based training scenarios as our use case. The limitation of our chosen scenarios is that they do not include collaborative training and solely feature a single trainer. To incorporate instructional design considerations, we included the trainer’s body pose, face, face when instructing, and hands visibility as metrics. To incorporate domain knowledge we included predetermined regions’ visibility as another metric. All of those metrics are taken into account to produce a parameterized view recommendation approach for demonstration-based training. An online study using recorded multi-camera video streams from a simulation environment was used to validate those metrics. Furthermore, the responses from the online study were used to optimize the view recommendation performance with a normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG) value of 0.912, which shows good performance with respect to matching user choices.