Alois Ferscha

Johannes Kepler University Linz | JKU · Institute of Pervasive Computing

This paper presents a novel approach for counting hand-performed activities using deep learning and inertial measurement units (IMUs). The particular challenge in this task is finding the correct window size for capturing activities with different durations. Traditionally, fixed window sizes have been used, which occasionally result in incorrectly...

Many studies on alpine skiing are limited to a few gates or collected data in controlled conditions. In contrast, it is more functional to have a sensor setup and a fast algorithm that can work in any situation, collect data, and distinguish alpine skiing activities for further analysis. This study aims to detect alpine skiing activities via smartp...

In this paper, we introduce a detection system for workflow in a manufacturing line using depth images to preserve the privacy of workers. A depth camera sensor is mounted on a ceiling with a top-down angle and pointed to workers below completing a workflow. The system was deployed in a real life industrial process where workers had to work on a me...

The following document presents a conceptual and technical framework for a multimodal cognitive HumanAI system for worker safety and accident prevention. The authors incorporate two common approaches to safety (Safety-I and Safety-II), focusing primarily on the implementation of the latter. The framework of the system, which is envisioned to serve...

Deep learning has proven to be very useful for the image understanding in efficient manners. Assembly of complex machines is very common in industries. The assembly of automated teller machines (ATM) is one of the examples. There exist deep learning models which monitor and control the assembly process. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no...

Industrial Safety deals with the physical integrity of humans, machines and the environment when they interact during production scenarios. Industrial Safety is subject to a rigorous certification process that leads to inflexible settings, in which all changes are forbidden. With the progressing introduction of smart robotics and smart machinery to...

One of the goals of the future manufacturing systems is autonomic and self-organized shop floors. This requires flexible manufacturing units in terms of their availability and ability so that extremely personalized products, even of lot size equal to one, can be produced. In this paper, we propose a framework, which focuses on grouping cohesion of...

Honor culture" is a societal norm that persuades people to fight for their honor. Contributing factors to the persistence of honor culture include institutional weakness, and environmental challenges in terms of resources. In this paper, an agent-based model of honor culture is reexamined and extended. The main purpose of the extension is to study...

One of the goals of the future manufacturing systems is autonomic and self-organized shop floors. This requires flexible manufacturing units in terms of their availability and ability so that extremely personalized products, even of lot size equal to one, can be produced. In this paper, we propose a framework, which focuses on grouping cohesion of...

A model of bystanders' effect on volunteering (in case of an observed crime or critical situation) is extended to incorporate the possibility of a sense of guilt (after nonintervention). Based on sound theoretical and experimental foundations, an existing model of the spread of unpopular norms is used to allow dispersion of an unpopular norm (a mil...

Evacuation modeling and simulation are usually used to explore different possibilities for evacuation, however, it is a real challenge to integrate different categories of characteristics in unified modeling space. In this paper, we propose an agent-based model of an evacuating crowd so that a comparative analysis of a different sets of parameters...

Development of crowd evacuation systems is a challenge due to involvement of complex interrelated aspects, diversity of involved individuals and/or environment, and lack of direct evidence. Evacuation modeling and simulation is used to analyze various possible outcomes as different scenarios unfold, typically when the complexity of scenario is high...

Due to the explicit and implicit facets of gaze-based interaction , eye tracking is a major area of interest within the field of cognitive industrial assistance systems. In this position paper, we describe a scenario which includes a wearable platform built around a mobile eye tracker, which can support and guide an industrial worker throughout the...

The eyes are a particularly interesting modality for cognitive industrial assistance systems, as gaze analysis can reveal cognition-and task-related aspects, while gaze interaction depicts a lightweight and fast method for hands-free machine control. In this paper, we present mobEYEle, a body-worn eye tracking platform that performs the entire comp...

In this position paper, we encourage the use of novel 3D gaze tracking possibilities in the field of gaze-based interaction. Smooth pursuit offers great benefits over other gaze interaction approaches, like the ability to work with uncalibrated eye trackers, but also has disadvantages like the produced visual clutter in more complex user interfaces...

With the availability of miniaturized low cost sensors and the general availability and easy applicability of algorithms for activity recognition, we investigate how various sensors can be deployed in a harsh environment, the industrial shop-floor. We review related work and provide an in-depth review of our own experiences were sensors wer used to...

Laparoscopic skills vary with experience and training of surgeons. The complexity of laparoscopic surgeries affects the cognitive resources of surgeons significantly and leads to many biliary injuries during surgeries. Assuming that experts are more focused, we investigated how the skill level of surgeons during live surgery is reflected through ey...

Manufacturing systems of the future need to have flexible resources and flexible routing to produce extremely personalized products, even of lot size equal to one. In this paper we have proposed a framework, which is designed to achieve this goal. Towards this we have integrated an established cultural evolution model to achieve desirable flexibili...

Best Paper Award

Laparoscopic surgery has revolutionised state of the art in surgical health care. However, its complexity puts a significant burden on the surgeon's cognitive resources resulting in major biliary injuries. With the increasing number of laparoscopic surgeries, it is crucial to identify surgeons' cognitive loads (CL) and levels of focus in real time...

The ubiquity of wearable sensors has contributed a lot in human activity recognition. Although activities of daily living have been studied over the past decades, there is a lack of such efforts on workers' activities in manufacturing industry. In this paper, we look at a simple yet frequent task for manufacturing, screwing, and investigate the abi...

In the recent revival of human labour in industry, and the subsequent push to optimally combine the strengths of man and machine in industrial processes, there is an increased need for methods allowing machines to understand and interpret the actions of their users. An important aspect of this is the understanding and evaluation of the progress of...

Companies are re-focusing and making use of human labor [4, 21] in order to create individualized lot-size-1 products and not produce the exact same mass product again and again. While human workers can produce with a least with the same quality as machines do, they are not that consistent, so it's better to combine strengths of both men and machin...

This paper motivates the employment of a cognitive headgear in the context of two concrete human-in-the-loop industrial use cases. However, the distinct design and implementation of such a headgear is strongly task-dependent and no one-fits-all solution exists. To overcome that, a computer-aided design process is proposed that allows the design of...

This paper presents an agent-based model of population desegregation and provides a thorough analysis of the social behavior leading to it, namely, the contact hypothesis. Based on the parameters of frequency and intensity of influence of group leaders on the population, the proposed model is constituted by two layers: 1) a physical layer of the po...

Manufacturing systems of the future need to have flexible resources and flexible routing to produce extremely personalized products, even of lot size equal to one. In this paper, we have proposed a framework, which is designed to achieve this goal. Towards this, we have integrated an established cultural evolution model to achieve desired flexibili...

Manufacturing systems of the future need to have flexible resources and flexible routing to produce extremely personalized products, even of lot size equal to one. In this paper, we have proposed a framework, which is designed to achieve this goal. Towards this, we have integrated an established cultural evolution model to achieve desired flexibili...

Future commercial products and product assemblies could greatly benefit from recent developments in machine learning , providing the foundation of cognitive products equipped with sensors and actuators and embedded into tangible objects operating in the real world. This paper identifies key challenges in the related fields and provides motivation f...

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is turning out to be one of the first impressive examples of Internet of Things (IoT). In IoV, the factors of connectivity and interaction/information dispersion are equally important as sensing/actuating, context-awareness, services provisioning, etc. However, most of the researches related to connectivity and interactio...

We propose the idea of a powerful mobile eye tracking platform that enables whole new ways of explicit and implicit human-machine interactions in complex industrial settings. The system is based on two hardware components (NVIDIA Jetson TX2, Pupil labs eye tracker) and a message-oriented framework for real-time processing [1]. The design is describ...

This workshop paper discusses the application of various sensors in an industrial assembly scenario, in which multiple sensors are deployed to enable the detailed monitoring of worker activity, task progress and also cognitive and mental states. The described and evaluated sensors include stationary (RGBD cameras, stereo vision depth sensors) and w...

Although, gaze-based interaction has been investigated since the 1980s and provides promising concepts to realize cognitive systems and support universal interaction within distributed environments, the main challenges, such as the Midas touch problem [16] or calibration are still frequent topics of research. In this work, Natural Pursuit Calibrati...

Cognitive systems are capable of human-like actions such as perception, learning, planning, reasoning, self- and context-awareness, interaction, and performing actions in unstructured environments. The authors present an implemented framework for an interactive cognitive system enabling human-centered, adaptive industrial assistance in cooperative,...

In coherence with the ongoing digitalization of production processes, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) technologies have evolved rapidly in industrial applications, providing abundant numbers of the versatile tracking and monitoring devices suitable to address complex challenges. This paper focuses on Activity Segmentation and Activity Identificati...

With the advancing digitalization of industrial production, the need for new man-machine interaction techniques, that go beyond traditional input and output systems, is arising. In this paper, we investigate the potential of gaze-only machine controls and its implications. In order to achieve that, a prototypical system is built upon a mobile eye t...

Due to digitalization, companies which are not able to automated production, e.g. due to the fact that the production batch size is rather small, they are increasingly challenged by being not able to train personal for their production processes. Reason vary but a highly recognized fact is that training material provided does not include informal k...

Recently, there has been increased interest in eye tracking and eye-based human-computer interaction research, as gaze reveals attention and intention information, making it highly interesting as an input modality for cognitive assistant systems. In this paper, we present how to apply gaze-awareness in an industrial environment to create such a cog...

Social aspects of connectivity and information dispersion are often ignored while weighing the potential of Internet of Things (IoT). Assuming a more commonly acceptable standardization of Big Data generated by Internet of Vehicles (IoV), the social dimensions enabling its fruitful usage; emerging as Social IoV (SIoV); remains a challenge. In this...

Social aspects of connectivity and information dispersion are often ignored while weighing the potential of Internet of Things (IoT). Assuming a more commonly acceptable standardization of Big Data generated by Internet of Vehicles (IoV), the social dimensions enabling its fruitful usage; emerging as Social IoV (SIoV); remains a challenge. In this...

In this paper, a demonstration of simulation modeling for a SIoV Recommendations System. An agent-based model of information sharing (for context-based recommendations) of a hypothetical population of smart vehicles is presented. Some important hypotheses are tested under reasonable connectivity and data constraints. We demonstrate how we model our...

This paper demonstrates how to model a simulation of Social Internet of Things (SIoV) based recommendation system. An agent-based model of information sharing (for context-based recommendations) of a hypothetical population of smart vehicles is presented. Some important hypotheses are tested under reasonable connectivity and data constraints. We de...

The eyes are an interesting modality for pervasive interactions, though their applicability for mobile scenarios is restricted by several issues so far. In this paper, we propose the idea of contour-guided gaze gestures, which overcome former constraints, like the need for calibration, by relying on unnatural and relative eye movements, as users tr...

CALL FOR PAPERS The principles of human-computer interaction have changed. After decades of thinking about how humans actively approach ICT systems, the focus is on thinking how ICT systems should approach humans. In fact, we need to go back in time when machines used to make humans attentive, like a light indicator signaling the status of a machi...

This paper presents an agent-based model of population desegregation and provides a thorough analysis of the social behavior leading to it, namely, the contact hypothesis. Based on the parameters of frequency and intensity of influence of group leaders on the population, the proposed model is constituted by two layers: 1) a physical layer of the po...

In addition to seamless connectedness and smartness, the objects in Internet of Things (IoT) are expected to have social capabilities. In literature, these objects are named as "social objects". In this paper, an intuitive paradigm of social interactions between these objects is argued and model. The purpose of the model is to analyze the impact of...

Recently, there has been increased interest in attention management, especially when considering people being surrounded by multiple IoT devices. Current research is focused on providing ambient or non-disturbing notifications to users particularly in a (smart-)home environment where already a multitude of IoT devices are deployed nowadays. In cont...

While the amount of applications being based on the Internet of Things is ever increasing, few consider proper - human cognition and attention aware - interaction between IoT and their users. In this paper, we demonstrate Gazor an IoT hardware and software platform which makes use of inherent human behavior to instruct a worker about an industrial...

Although, gaze-based interaction has been investigated since the 1980s and remains a promising concept to support universal interaction within distributed IoT environments, main challenges like the Midas touch problem [6] or calibration are still frequent topics of research. In this work we present Natural Pursuit Calibration, a comfortable, unobtr...

Laparoscopy and endoscopy have revolutionized the state of the art in surgical health care. Still, the associated higher complexity of the operating procedure leads to suboptimal or even erroneous surgical outcomes of minimal invasive surgery (MIS). Our work aims at evaluating and reducing MIS surgeons' cognitive load by observing their bio feature...

The eyes are gaining increasing interest within the HCI (human-computer interaction) community as they are a fast and accurate input modality. However, the applicability of mobile eye-based HCI so far is restricted by several issues, such as calibration or the Midas Touch Problem [5]. In this work we propose the idea of contour-guided gaze gestures...

With an increasing number of connected devices especially in the industrial section, there is a potential for a wearable system which assists workers in their tasks by controlling the surrounding devices remotely and visualizing their data. This poster presents a design process of a smart helmet with core elements such as a head up display for data...

Computing and communication technologies have advanced rapidly in the last decade. M&S has not yet fully realized the potential and opportunities afforded by technologies such as mobile and ubiquitous computing, big data, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and modern supercomputer architectures. This has kept M&S from achieving its fullest po...

With the introduction of operating rooms of the future context awareness has gained importance in the surgical environment. This paper organizes and reviews different approaches for recognition of context in surgery. Major electronic research databases were queried to obtain relevant publications submitted between the years 2010 and 2015. Three dif...