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Interaction is a dynamic process that evolves in real time. Participants interpret and orient themselves towards turns of speech based on expectations of relevance and social/conversational norms (that have been extensively studied in the field of Conversation analysis). A true challenge to Human Robot Interaction (HRI) is to develop a system capable of understanding and adapting to the changing context, where the meaning of a turn is construed based on the turns that have come before. In this work, we identify issues arising from the inadequate handling of the sequential flow within a corpus of in-the-wild HRIs in an open-world university library setting. The insights gained from this analysis can be used to guide the design of better systems capable of handling complex situations. We finish by surveying efforts to mitigate the identified problems from a natural language processing/machine dialogue management perspective., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The handling editor FF declared a past co-authorship with the author LT., (Copyright © 2024 Tisserand, Stephenson, Baldauf-Quilliatre, Lefort and Armetta.)

Cognitive abilities can vary widely. Some people excel in certain skills, others struggle. However, not all those who describe themselves as gifted are. One possible influence on self-estimates is the surrounding culture. Some cultures may amplify self-assurance and others cultivate humility. Past research has shown that people in different countries can be grouped into a set of consistent cultural clusters with similar values and tendencies, such as attitudes to masculinity or individualism. Here we explored whether such cultural dimensions might relate to the extent to which populations in 46 countries overestimate or underestimate their cognitive abilities in the domain of spatial navigation. Using the Sea Hero Quest navigation test and a large sample (N = 383,187) we found cultural clusters of countries tend to be similar in how they self-rate ability relative to their actual performance. Across the world population sampled, higher self-ratings were associated with better performance. However, at the national level, higher self-ratings as a nation were not associated with better performance as a nation. Germanic and Near East countries were found to be most overconfident in their abilities and Nordic countries to be most under-confident in their abilities. Gender stereotypes may play a role in mediating this pattern, with larger national positive attitudes to male stereotyped roles (Hofstede's masculinity dimension) associated with a greater overconfidence in performance at the national level. We also replicate, with higher precision than prior studies, evidence that older men tend to overestimate their navigation skill more than other groups. These findings give insight into how culture and demographics may impact self-estimates of our abilities., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

The major economic and health consequences of COVID-19 called for various protective measures and mass vaccination campaigns. A previsional model was used to predict the future impacts of various measure combinations on COVID-19 mortality over a 400-day period in France. Calibrated on previous national hospitalization and mortality data, an agent-based epidemiological model was used to predict individual and combined effects of booster doses, vaccination of refractory adults, and vaccination of children, according to infection severity, immunity waning, and graded non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Assuming a 1.5 hospitalization hazard ratio and rapid immunity waning, booster doses would reduce COVID-19-related deaths by 50-70% with intensive NPIs and 93% with moderate NPIs. Vaccination of initially-refractory adults or children ≥5 years would half the number of deaths whatever the infection severity or degree of immunity waning. Assuming a 1.5 hospitalization hazard ratio, rapid immunity waning, moderate NPIs and booster doses, vaccinating children ≥12 years, ≥5 years, and ≥6 months would result in 6212, 3084, and 3018 deaths, respectively (vs. 87,552, 64,002, and 48,954 deaths without booster, respectively). In the same conditions, deaths would be 2696 if all adults and children ≥12 years were vaccinated and 2606 if all adults and children ≥6 months were vaccinated (vs. 11,404 and 3624 without booster, respectively). The model dealt successfully with single measures or complex combinations. It can help choosing them according to future epidemic features, vaccination extensions, and population immune status.

The exposome recognizes that individuals are exposed simultaneously to a multitude of different environmental factors and takes a holistic approach to the discovery of etiological factors for disease. However, challenges arise when trying to quantify the health effects of complex exposure mixtures. Analytical challenges include dealing with high dimensionality, studying the combined effects of these exposures and their interactions, integrating causal pathways, and integrating high-throughput omics layers. To tackle these challenges, the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) held a data challenge event open to researchers from all over the world and from all expertises. Analysts had a chance to compete and apply state-of-the-art methods on a common partially simulated exposome dataset (based on real case data from the HELIX project) with multiple correlated exposure variables (P > 100 exposure variables) arising from general and personal environments at different time points, biological molecular data (multi-omics: DNA methylation, gene expression, proteins, metabolomics) and multiple clinical phenotypes in 1301 mother-child pairs. Most of the methods presented included feature selection or feature reduction to deal with the high dimensionality of the exposome dataset. Several approaches explicitly searched for combined effects of exposures and/or their interactions using linear index models or response surface methods, including Bayesian methods. Other methods dealt with the multi-omics dataset in mediation analyses using multiple-step approaches. Here we discuss features of the statistical models used and provide the data and codes used, so that analysts have examples of implementation and can learn how to use these methods. Overall, the exposome data challenge presented a unique opportunity for researchers from different disciplines to create and share state-of-the-art analytical methods, setting a new standard for open science in the exposome and environmental health field., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2022. Published by Elsevier Ltd.)

We discuss the influence upon the fields of robotics and AI of the manner one conceives the relationships between artificial agents' perception, cognition, and action. We shed some light upon a widespread paradigm we call the isolated perception paradigm that addresses perception as isolated from cognition and action. By mobilizing the resources of philosophy (phenomenology and epistemology) and cognitive sciences, and by drawing on recent approaches in AI, we explore what it could mean for robotics and AI to take distance from the isolated perception paradigm. We argue that such a renouncement opens interesting ways to explore the possibilities for designing artificial agents with intrinsic motivations and constitutive autonomy. We then propose Artificial Interactionism, our approach that escapes the isolated perception paradigm by drawing on the inversion of the interaction cycle. When the interaction cycle is inverted, input data are not percepts directly received from the environment, but outcomes of control loops. Perception is not received from sensors in isolation from cognition but is actively constructed by the cognitive architecture through interaction. We give an example implementation of artificial interactionism that demonstrates basic intrinsically motivated learning behavior in a dynamic simulated environment., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Guillermin and Georgeon.)

The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, enhanced by rapid spreads of variants, has caused a major international health crisis, with serious public health and economic consequences. An agent-based model was designed to simulate the evolution of the epidemic in France over 2021 and the first six months of 2022. The study compares the efficiencies of four theoretical vaccination campaigns (over 6, 9, 12, and 18 months), combined with various non-pharmaceutical interventions. In France, with the emergence of the Alpha variant, without vaccination and despite strict barrier measures, more than 600,000 deaths would be observed. An efficient vaccination campaign (i.e., total coverage of the French population) over six months would divide the death toll by 10. A vaccination campaign of 12, instead of 6, months would slightly increase the disease-related mortality (+6%) but require a 77% increase in ICU bed-days. A campaign over 18 months would increase the disease-related mortality by 17% and require a 244% increase in ICU bed-days. Thus, it seems mandatory to vaccinate the highest possible percentage of the population within 12, or better yet, 9 months. The race against the epidemic and virus variants is really a matter of vaccination strategy.

The production of facial expressions (FEs) is an important skill that allows children to share and adapt emotions with their relatives and peers during social interactions. These skills are impaired in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. However, the way in which typical children develop and master their production of FEs has still not been clearly assessed. This study aimed to explore factors that could influence the production of FEs in childhood such as age, gender, emotion subtype (sadness, anger, joy, and neutral), elicitation task (on request, imitation), area of recruitment (French Riviera and Parisian) and emotion multimodality. A total of one hundred fifty-seven children aged 6-11 years were enrolled in Nice and Paris, France. We asked them to produce FEs in two different tasks: imitation with an avatar model and production on request without a model. Results from a multivariate analysis revealed that: (1) children performed better with age. (2) Positive emotions were easier to produce than negative emotions. (3) Children produced better FE on request (as opposed to imitation); and (4) Riviera children performed better than Parisian children suggesting regional influences on emotion production. We conclude that facial emotion production is a complex developmental process influenced by several factors that needs to be acknowledged in future research.

Background: Gene expression is an inherently stochastic process, owing to its dynamic molecular nature. Protein amount distributions, which can be acquired by cytometry using a reporter gene, can inform about the mechanisms of the underlying microscopic molecular system., Results: By using different clones of chicken erythroid progenitor cells harboring different integration sites of a CMV-driven mCherry protein, we investigated the dynamical behavior of such distributions. We show that, on short term, clone distributions can be quickly regenerated from small population samples with a high accuracy. On longer term, on the contrary, we show variations manifested by correlated fluctuation in the Mean Fluorescence Intensity. In search for a possible cause of this correlation, we demonstrate that in response to small temperature variations cells are able to adjust their gene expression rate: a modest (2 °C) increase in external temperature induces a significant down regulation of mean expression values, with a reverse effect observed when the temperature is decreased. Using a two-state model of gene expression we further demonstrate that temperature acts by modifying the size of transcription bursts, while the burst frequency of the investigated promoter is less systematically affected., Conclusions: For the first time, we report that transcription burst size is a key parameter for gene expression that metazoan cells from homeotherm animals can modify in response to an external thermal stimulus.

Despite the stochastic noise that characterizes all cellular processes the cells are able to maintain and transmit to their daughter cells the stable level of gene expression. In order to better understand this phenomenon, we investigated the temporal dynamics of gene expression variation using a double reporter gene model. We compared cell clones with transgenes coding for highly stable mRNA and fluorescent proteins with clones expressing destabilized mRNA-s and proteins. Both types of clones displayed strong heterogeneity of reporter gene expression levels. However, cells expressing stable gene products produced daughter cells with similar level of reporter proteins, while in cell clones with short mRNA and protein half-lives the epigenetic memory of the gene expression level was completely suppressed. Computer simulations also confirmed the role of mRNA and protein stability in the conservation of constant gene expression levels over several cell generations. These data indicate that the conservation of a stable phenotype in a cellular lineage may largely depend on the slow turnover of mRNA-s and proteins.

Purpose: Organ motion due to patient breathing introduces a technical challenge for dosimetry and lung tumor treatment by hadron therapy. Accurate dose distribution estimation requires patient-specific information on tumor position, size, and shape as well as information regarding the material density and stopping power of the media along the beam path. A new 4D dosimetry method was developed, which can be coupled to any motion estimation method. As an illustration, the new method was implemented and tested with a biomechanical model and clinical data., Methods: First, an anatomical model of the lung and tumor was synthesized with deformable tetrahedral grids using computed tomography (CT) images. The CT attenuation values were estimated at the grid vertices. Respiratory motion was simulated biomechanically based on nonlinear finite element analysis. Contrary to classical image-based methods where motion is described using deformable image registration algorithms, the dose distribution was accumulated over tetrahedral meshes that are deformed using biomechanical modeling based on finite element analysis., Results: The new method preserves the mass of the objects during simulation with an error between 1.6 and 3.6%. The new method was compared to an existing dose calculation method demonstrating significant differences between the two approaches and overall superior performance using the new method., Conclusion: A unified model of 4D radiotherapy respiratory effects was developed where biomechanical simulations are coupled with dose calculations. Promising results demonstrate that this approach has significant potential for the treatment for moving tumors.