Publications related to Adapting Virtual Embodiment through Reinforcement Learning

Reversible photo-electrochemical device for solar hydrogen and power generation

Sophia Haussener, Alexandre Dominique M. Cattry, Saurabh Yuvraj Tembhurne, Matthieu Jonin, Mahendra Patel

A reversible photo-electrochemical device operating under concentrated irradiation could offer a stand-alone solution for producing solar fuel (in photo-driven electrolysis mode) and power (in fuel cell mode). This strategy would present the advantage of h ...

2024

Biases in Information Selection and Processing: Survey Evidence from the Pandemic

Andreas Fuster

We conduct two survey experiments to study which information people choose to consume and how it affects their beliefs. In the first experiment, respondents choose between optimistic and pessimistic article headlines related to the COVID-19 pandemic and ar ...

2024

Customizing the human-avatar mapping based on EEG error related potentials during avatar-based interaction

Ronan Boulic, Ricardo Andres Chavarriaga Lozano, Bruno Herbelin, José del Rocio Millán Ruiz, Olaf Blanke, Fumiaki Iwane, Thibault Serge Mario Porssut

Objective. A key challenge of virtual reality (VR) applications is to maintain a reliable human-avatar mapping. Users may lose the sense of controlling (sense of agency), owning (sense of body ownership), or being located (sense of self-location) inside th ...

2024

Flood, farms and credit: The role of branch banking in the era of climate change

Pejman Abedifar, Seyed Javad Kashizadeh

Using Iran's unexpected flood in April 2019 as a natural experiment, we show that local branches bridge the time gap between the disaster and governmental aids by immediately increasing their lending for two months following the flood. Analyzing proprietar ...

Elsevier2024

In case of doubt, one follows one's self: the implicit guidance of the embodied self-avatar

Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Loën Boban

The sense of embodiment in virtual reality (VR) is commonly understood as the subjective experience that one's physical body is substituted by a virtual counterpart, and is typically achieved when the avatar's body, seen from a first-person view, moves lik ...

2024

A FEM modelling workflow to simulate THM effects in the rock around nuclear waste packages

Matthias Timothee Stanislas Wojnarowicz

High-level waste, stemming from nuclear electricity generation poses significant environmental and safety concerns. Currently, high-level wastes are stored in interim facilities needing constant monitoring and waiting for a definitive solution. Deep geolog ...

EPFL2024

Generalization and Personalization of Machine Learning for Multimodal Mobile Sensing in Everyday Life

Lakmal Buddika Meegahapola

A range of behavioral and contextual factors, including eating and drinking behavior, mood, social context, and other daily activities, can significantly impact an individual's quality of life and overall well-being. Therefore, inferring everyday life aspe ...

EPFL2024

Efficacy and safety of transcranial direct current stimulation to the ipsilesional motor cortex in subacute stroke (NETS): a multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial

Friedhelm Christoph Hummel

Background Each year, five million people are left disabled after stroke. Upper -extremity (UE) dysfunction is a leading problem. Neuroplasticity can be enhanced by non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) but evidence from large, randomized multicenter trial ...

Elsevier2024

Prompting Large Language Models to Power Educational Chatbots

Denis Gillet, Sandy Ingram, Juan Carlos Farah, Fanny Kim-Lan Lasne

The recent rise in both popularity and performance of large language models has garnered considerable interest regarding their applicability to education. Technologies like ChatGPT, which can engage in human-like dialog, have already disrupted educational ...

Springer2023

Harnessing Rule-Based Chatbots to Support Teaching Python Programming Best Practices

Denis Gillet, Sandy Ingram, Adrian Christian Holzer, Juan Carlos Farah

In recent years, the use of chatbots in education has been driven by advances in natural language processing and the increasing availability of digital education platforms. Although the added value of educational chatbots appears promising, researchers hav ...

Springer2023

Non-intrusive physiological parameters sensing for personalized human thermal comfort prediction

Alexandre Massoud Alahi, Dolaana Khovalyg, Mohamad Rida, Mohamed Ossama Ahmed Abdelfattah

Sensing and projecting an individual’s human thermal comfort in buildings is a complex but crucial task for transitioning toward human-centered indoor climate control. Non-intrusive collection of physiological and personal information from the human body, ...

2023

Reinforcement learning approach to control an inverted pendulum: A general framework for educational purposes

Jesus Sanchez Rodriguez

Machine learning is often cited as a new paradigm in control theory, but is also often viewed as empirical and less intuitive for students than classical model-based methods. This is particularly the case for reinforcement learning, an approach that does n ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2023

Saliency prediction in 360° architectural scenes: Performance and impact of daylight variations

Marilyne Andersen, Sabine Süsstrunk, Kynthia Chamilothori, Bahar Aydemir, Caroline Karmann, Seungryong Kim

Saliency models are image-based prediction models that estimate human visual attention. Such models, when applied to architectural spaces, could pave the way for design decisions where visual attention is taken into account. In this study, we tested the pe ...

2023

Modeling local thermal responses of individuals: Validation of advanced human thermo-physiology models

Dolaana Khovalyg, Mohamad Rida

Human thermo-physiology models (HTPM) are useful tools to assess dynamic and non-uniform human thermal states. However, they are developed based on the physiological data of an average person. In this paper, we present a detailed evaluation of two sophisti ...

2023

Survey experiments on economic expectations

Andreas Fuster

In this chapter, we discuss field experiments in surveys that are conducted with the purpose of learning about expectation formation and the link between expectations and behavior. We begin by reviewing the rationale for conducting experiments within surve ...

Academic Press2023

'connEcted caesarean section': creating a virtual link between MOthers and their infanTs to ImprOve maternal childbirth experieNce - study protocol for a PILOT trial (e-motion-pilot)

Sandra Maria Marcadent, Karine Lepigeon, Fiona Corbaz, David Desseauve

IntroductionOne-third of mothers rate their childbirth as traumatic. The prevalence of childbirth-related post-traumatic stress disorder (CB-PTSD) is 4.7%. Skin-to-skin contact is a protective factor against CB-PTSD. However, during a caesarean section (CS ...

BMJ PUBLISHING GROUP2023

Linguistic effects on news headline success: Evidence from thousands of online field experiments (Registered Report)

Robert West, Kristina Gligoric

What makes written text appealing? In this registered report, we study the linguistic characteristics of news headline success using a large-scale dataset of field experiments (A/B tests) conducted on the popular website comparing multiple headline variant ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2023

From finger animation to full-body embodiment of avatars with different morphologies and proportions

Mathias Guy Delahaye

VR (Virtual Reality) is a real-time simulation that creates the subjective illusion of being in a virtual world. This thesis explores how integrating the user's body and fingers can be achieved and beneficial for the user to experience VR. At the advent of ...

EPFL2023

Demonstration of a Plasmonic Nonlinear Pseudodiode

Olivier Martin, Karim Achouri, Andrei Kiselev, Sergejs Boroviks

We demonstrate a nonlinear plasmonic metasurface that exhibits strongly asymmetric second-harmonic generation: nonlinear scattering is efficient upon excitation in one direction, and it is substantially suppressed when the excitation direction is reversed, ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

Arbitrary Decisions are a Hidden Cost of Differentially Private Training

Bogdan Kulynych, Carmela González Troncoso

Mechanisms used in privacy-preserving machine learning often aim to guarantee differential privacy (DP) during model training. Practical DP-ensuring training methods use randomization when fitting model parameters to privacy-sensitive data (e.g., adding Ga ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2023