Max M. Louwerse

Evy van Weelden, Jos M. Prinsen, Caterina Ceccato et al.

Real-time adjustments to task difficulty during flight training are crucial for optimizing performance and managing pilot workload. This study evaluated the functionality of a pre-trained brain-computer interface (BCI) that adapts training difficulty based on real-time estimations of workload from brain signals. Specifically, an EEG-based neuro-adaptive training system was developed and tested in Virtual Reality (VR) flight simulations with military student pilots. The neuro-adaptive system was compared to a fixed sequence that progressively increased in difficulty, in terms of self-reported user engagement, workload, and simulator sickness (subjective measures), as well as flight performance (objective metric). Additionally, we explored the relationships between subjective workload and flight performance in the VR simulator for each condition. The experiments concluded with semi-structured interviews to elicit the pilots' experience with the neuro-adaptive prototype. Results revealed no significant differences between the adaptive and fixed sequence conditions in subjective measures or flight performance. In both conditions, flight performance decreased as subjective workload increased. The semi-structured interviews indicated that, upon briefing, the pilots preferred the neuro-adaptive VR training system over the system with a fixed sequence, although individual differences were observed in the perception of difficulty and the order of changes in difficulty. Even though this study shows performance does not change, BCI-based flight training systems hold the potential to provide a more personalized and varied training experience.

Vivek Datla, David Lin, Max Louwerse et al.

Semantic roles play an important role in extracting knowledge from text. Current unsupervised approaches utilize features from grammar structures, to induce semantic roles. The dependence on these grammars, however, makes it difficult to adapt to noisy and new languages. In this paper we develop a data-driven approach to identifying semantic roles, the approach is entirely unsupervised up to the point where rules need to be learned to identify the position the semantic role occurs. Specifically we develop a modified-ADIOS algorithm based on ADIOS Solan et al. (2005) to learn grammar structures, and use these grammar structures to learn the rules for identifying the semantic roles based on the context in which the grammar structures appeared. The results obtained are comparable with the current state-of-art models that are inherently dependent on human annotated data.