Third-party vocal intervention in the proboscis monkey (Nasalis larvatus)

Vocal intervention is a triadic social interaction, where a third party responds vocally to a conflict between group members, minimizing the costs of aggression in response to the intervention. Because there is little information on vocal third-party intervention in nonhuman mammals, we investigated whether adult male proboscis monkeys use the bray vocalization as a vocal third-party intervention signal to intervene in intragroup conflicts. First, we audio-recorded 1,811 vocalizations from 17 free-ranging proboscis monkey groups in the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary, analyzing 378 vocal responses of the adult male to agonistic vocal exchanges (shrieks) of group members. Second, we video- and audio-recorded five habituated groups in the Labuk Bay Proboscis Monkey Sanctuary investigating the context of these vocalizations and the conflict dyads evoking vocal support. We found that adult males of one-male/multifemale groups mainly uttered bray vocalizations, whereas females, immatures, and infants uttered shrieks in intragroup conflicts or in response to other animal species. The adult male uttered significantly more often brays after agonistic shrieks than expected based on the overall occurrence of brays. Brays ended 65% of agonistic conflicts, which were accompanied by vocalizations of the conflict partners and occurred more often after conflicts between females than between offspring. This suggests that the bray functions as a vocal third-party intervention signal for intragroup conflict resolution. We suggest that living in the high canopies of the tropical rainforest might restrict direct access to conflict partners and prevent physical intervention, favoring the evolution of the bray as a third-party vocal intervention signal.

A Novel Rollover Warning Approach for Commercial Vehicles Using Unscented Kalman Filter

Roll responses of the semitrailer and the tractor provide higher lead time and characterise the roll instability of the commercial vehicles subjected to directional manoeuvres at highway speeds. This paper proposes a novel rollover index based on the synthesized roll angles of the tractor and trailer. Owing to the poor measurability, the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) algorithm is used to estimate the roll angle of the track and trailer, respectively. Meanwhile, different weight coefficients are considered in the rollover index to eliminate the influence of mutual coupling between the tractor and the trailer and improve the accuracy of the warning. For the practical implementation of the algorithm, a two-stage rollover warning method triggered by the video and audio is finally proposed to reduce the possibilities of false warnings. Co-simulation is presented to prove the validity of the proposed rollover warning approach.

Multimodal User Feedback During Adaptive Robot-Human Presentations

Feedback is an essential part of all communication, and agents communicating with humans must be able to both give and receive feedback in order to ensure mutual understanding. In this paper, we analyse multimodal feedback given by humans towards a robot that is presenting a piece of art in a shared environment, similar to a museum setting. The data analysed contains both video and audio recordings of 28 participants, and the data has been richly annotated both in terms of multimodal cues (speech, gaze, head gestures, facial expressions, and body pose), as well as the polarity of any feedback (negative, positive, or neutral). We train statistical and machine learning models on the dataset, and find that random forest models and multinomial regression models perform well on predicting the polarity of the participants' reactions. An analysis of the different modalities shows that most information is found in the participants' speech and head gestures, while much less information is found in their facial expressions, body pose and gaze. An analysis of the timing of the feedback shows that most feedback is given when the robot makes pauses (and thereby invites feedback), but that the more exact timing of the feedback does not affect its meaning.

Introducing Language and Society

This accessible and entertaining textbook introduces students to both traditional and more contemporary approaches to sociolinguistics in a real-world context, addressing current social problems that students are likely to care about, such as racism, inequality, political conflict, belonging, and issues around gender and sexuality. Each chapter includes exercises, case studies and ideas for small-scale research projects, encouraging students to think critically about the different theories and approaches to language and society, and to interrogate their own beliefs about language and communication. The book gives students a grounding in the traditional concepts and techniques upon which sociolinguistics is built, while also introducing new developments from the last decade, such as translanguaging, multimodality, superdiversity, linguistic landscapes and language and digital media. Students will also have online access to more detailed examples, links to video and audio files, and more challenging exercises to strengthen their skills and confidence as sociolinguists.

Recording and Transcribing Interactions of Individuals Using Augmentative Communication Technologies

The purpose of this article is to provide the reader with tools and recommendations for collecting data and making microanalytic transcriptions of interaction involving people using Augmentative Communication Technologies (ACTs). This is of interest for clinicians, as well as anyone else engaged in video-based microanalysis of technology mediated interaction in other contexts. The information presented here has particular relevance to young researchers developing their own methodologies, and experienced scientists interested in social interaction research in ACTs or as well as other digital communication technologies. Tools and methods for recording social interactions to support microanalysis by making unobtrusive recordings of naturally occurring or task-driven social interactions while minimizing recording-related distractions which could alter the authenticity of the social interaction are discussed. Recommendations for the needed functionality of video and audio recording equipment are made with tips for how to capture actions that are important to the research question as opposed to capturing 'generally usable' video. In addition, tips for processing video and managing video data are outlined, including how to develop optimally functional naming conventions for stored videos, how and where to store video data (i. e. use of external hard drives, compressing videos for storage) and syncing multiple videos, offering different views of a single interaction (i. e. syncing footage of the overall interaction with footage of the device display). Finally, tools and strategies for transcription are discussed including a brief description of the role transcription plays in analysis, a suggested framework for how transcription might proceed through multiple passes, each focused on a different aspect of communication, transcription software options along with discussion of specific features that aide transcription. In addition, special issues that arise in transcribing interactions involving ACTs are addressed.

Literasi Media Melalui Video Podcast pada Kalangan Mahasiswa Yogyakarta

Video podcasts become one of the digital content included in a combination format, combined writing, video, and audio packed so that it becomes content distributed in digital format. The ease of accessibility of podcast video content makes it important to apply media literacy to remain critical of the message's various meanings in the content in the video podcast. This study aims to determine the level of media literacy through video podcasts among students of Communication Sciences Yogyakarta. The method used in this study is a descriptive quantitative method with the concept of measuring individual competence framework media literacy. Samples from this study were active students of Communication Sciences in 2019/2020 at Ahmad Dahlan University, Mercu Buana University Yogyakarta, and AMIKOM University Yogyakarta, with a total sample of 368 respondents. This study showed that the level of media literacy through video podcasts among students of Communication Science Yogyakarta is at a high level (advanced) with details of technical skills are in the advanced category of 80%, critical understanding ability at the advanced level of 86%. Communicative abilities are at the medium level of 59%. This shows that Yogyakarta communication students can use very high media, analyze excellent information, and participate and communicate actively through social media.

Development of skills to work with digital sound in the school informatics course

The development of digital competencies of students is currently one of the main pedagogical tasks. The solution of this task is possible by paying attention to issues related to the skills of students to create their own digital content, for example, multimedia, combining various types of information (text, graphics, video and audio). The article provides a brief analysis of the content of teaching issues related to the study of digital sound processing technologies in a school informatics course. Taking into account the relevance of this issue, a thematic module "Digital Sound" is proposed, the content of which does not require binding to specific software. When studying the module, the emphasis is on mastering specific technologies for processing sound information. The module can be implemented as an optional course for students in 7–9th grades and/or as an elective course for students in 10–11th grades. At the same time, particular blocks of the module can be used at various stages of teaching informatics at school

ARTIFICIAL LEARNING-BASED PROCTORING SOLUTION FOR REMOTE ONLINE ASSESSMENTS: “VPROCTOR”

Technological developments have paved the way for courses, trainings and assessments to be made online remotely in education and employment. In the meantime, over the years, the demand for online distance learning has increased rapidly. Eventually, it has been seen that this is a necessity and it has become widespread during the COVID-19 pandemic period. As can be seen in the example of massive online open courses, although remote learning is carried out online, perhaps the most important problem is how to evaluate the relevant courses safely and reliably. Thus, remote online proctoring is becoming an increasingly popular and needed issue. In this study, the issue of conducting the examination remotely online via internet-connected video and audio communication will be evaluated. Furthermore, the solution called vProctor was developed to contribute to the elimination of deficiencies in remote online proctoring using artificial learning. Overall, it has been observed that the proposed solution is managed to determine inappropriate behaviors like cheating in the online assessments.

Automated Event Detection and Classification in Soccer: The Potential of Using Multiple Modalities

Detecting events in videos is a complex task, and many different approaches, aimed at a large variety of use-cases, have been proposed in the literature. Most approaches, however, are unimodal and only consider the visual information in the videos. This paper presents and evaluates different approaches based on neural networks where we combine visual features with audio features to detect (spot) and classify events in soccer videos. We employ model fusion to combine different modalities such as video and audio, and test these combinations against different state-of-the-art models on the SoccerNet dataset. The results show that a multimodal approach is beneficial. We also analyze how the tolerance for delays in classification and spotting time, and the tolerance for prediction accuracy, influence the results. Our experiments show that using multiple modalities improves event detection performance for certain types of events.

Technologies for Multimodal Interaction in Extended Reality—A Scoping Review

When designing extended reality (XR) applications, it is important to consider multimodal interaction techniques, which employ several human senses simultaneously. Multimodal interaction can transform how people communicate remotely, practice for tasks, entertain themselves, process information visualizations, and make decisions based on the provided information. This scoping review summarized recent advances in multimodal interaction technologies for head-mounted display-based (HMD) XR systems. Our purpose was to provide a succinct, yet clear, insightful, and structured overview of emerging, underused multimodal technologies beyond standard video and audio for XR interaction, and to find research gaps. The review aimed to help XR practitioners to apply multimodal interaction techniques and interaction researchers to direct future efforts towards relevant issues on multimodal XR. We conclude with our perspective on promising research avenues for multimodal interaction technologies.