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Devices with oral interfaces are enabling new interesting interaction scenarios and ways of interaction in ambient intelligence settings. The use of several of such devices in the same environment opens up the possibility to compare the inputs gathered from each one of them and perform a more accurate recognition and processing of user speech. However, the combination of multiple devices presents coordination challenges, as the processing of one voice signal by different speech processing units may result in conflicting outputs and it is necessary to decide which is the most reliable source. This paper presents an approach to rank several sources of spoken input in multi-device environments in order to give preference to the input with the highest estimated quality. The voice signals received by the multiple devices are assessed in terms of their calculated acoustic quality and the reliability of the speech recognition hypotheses produced. After this assessment, each input is assigned a unique score that allows the audio sources to be ranked so as to pick the best to be processed by the system. In order to validate this approach, we have performed an evaluation using a corpus of 4608 audios recorded in a two-room intelligent environment with 24 microphones. The experimental results show that our ranking approach makes it possible to successfully orchestrate an increasing number of acoustic inputs, obtaining better recognition rates than considering a single input, both in clear and noisy settings. ; This research has received funding by the project DEP2015-70980-R of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 823907 ('Mental health monitoring through interactive conversations', MENHIR Project), as well as, received inputs from the COST Action IC1303 AAPELE

Throughout 2016 and emerging into 2017, we saw a global upheaval of liberal thinking. Through Brexit, Trump's America and Modi's India, freedom of movement across borders were increasingly under threat. Politics, and in particular the populist movements can be seen to be increasingly benefiting from social media as a way to get 'directly to the people'. It is in this context that we worked with contributors that were working in some of the invisible borders - borders between endangered languages, borders between life and death - alongside people building bridges; bridges of openness, bridges in creativity; bridges between visibility in AI and our voice. This book includes contributions from Mozilla, the AHRC and London

Approaches to the interagency coordination of research & development (R & D) policy adopted by the governments of five western European countries & the US are described & analyzed comparatively in terms of four variables: procedures, aims, distribution & sources of influence among participating agencies, & the frame of reference which orders governmental actions in R & D for coordination purposes. Differences stem from general features of policy formation within each system & changes over time in the conception & goals of "science policy." The inherent ambiguities of the coordination concept & the difficulties in defining the "perfect coordinated" system are primary obstacles in evaluating coordination formats both within & across systems. HA.

Open government initiatives, which include not only transparency but also participation and collaboration policies, have become a major administrative reform. As such, these initiatives are gaining cohesiveness in literature. President Obama supported open government through a range of policies including the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a multinational initiative. The OGP requires member organizations to develop open government national action plans, which are used as the basis for my analysis. To frame this paper, I use and expand upon David Heald's directions and varieties of transparency framework. A content analysis of the 62 commitments in the US Second Open Government National Action Plan was conducted. The analysis provides two findings of note: First, the traditional view of transparency was indeed the most prevalent in the policies proposed. In that respect, not much has changed, even with the OGP's emphasis on a range of approaches. Second, openness among and between agencies played a larger than expected role. While the OGP pushed an array of administrative reforms, the initiative had limited impact on the type of policies that were proposed and enacted. In sum, the OGP is an administrative reform that was launched with great fanfare, but limited influence in the US context. More research needs to be conducted to determine if the "open government reform" movement as a whole suffers from such problems in implementation.

CyberThèses is a platform for the archiving and dissemination of electronic theses and dissertations built on the use of structured document (initially SGML). An important step has been crossed with the evolution of the program towards XML and the evolution of the whole platform to open access. We now propose to the community a set of tools covering the production of XML document from traditional word processing formats, their indexation which the enrichment associated to structured document and their dissemination. The whole platform is available freely (GPL license) on a collaborative development web site (http://sourcesup.cru.fr/cybertheses). The benefits we aim from this transition are of different nature: - the political one: dissemination of the results of research shall be free and we do agree on that point with some larger initiatives' recommendations OAI, BOAI, NDLTD, etc., - the financial one: their won't be anymore economic barrier to the implementation of many ETD providers, - the practical one: we hope to enlarge the users and/or developers contributions to the CyberThèses program.

Die Veröffentlichung von Forschungsergebnissen ist und bleibt essenziell für die Wissenschaft. Doch das momentane Publikationssystem hat Probleme. Besonders die Kostenstrukturen behindern eine schnelle und weitreichende Verbreitung von Forschungsresultaten. Abonnements- bzw. Kaufpreise für Publikationen sind hoch – und schließen bestimmte Nutzergruppen aus. Open-Access-Publikationen könnten Abhilfe schaffen. Doch auch hier stellt sich die Frage: Wer zahlt? Die Autorinnen und Autoren? Deren Hochschulen bzw. Forschungseinrichtungen? Die Verlage? Dieses Thema ist Gegenstand der "Aviso"-Debatte.

Serious concerns about the way research is organized collectively are increasingly being raised. They include the escalating costs of research and lower research productivity, low public trust in researchers to report the truth, lack of diversity, poor community engagement, ethical concerns over research practices, and irreproducibility. Open science (OS) collaborations comprise of a set of practices including open access publication, open data sharing and the absence of restrictive intellectual property rights with which institutions, firms, governments and communities are experimenting in order to overcome these concerns. We gathered two groups of international representatives from a large variety of stakeholders to construct a toolkit to guide and facilitate data collection about OS and non-OS collaborations. Ultimately, the toolkit will be used to assess and study the impact of OS collaborations on research and innovation. The toolkit contains the following four elements: 1) an annual report form of quantitative data to be completed by OS partnership administrators; 2) a series of semi-structured interview guides of stakeholders; 3) a survey form of participants in OS collaborations; and 4) a set of other quantitative measures best collected by other organizations, such as research foundations and governmental or intergovernmental agencies. We opened our toolkit to community comment and input. We present the resulting toolkit for use by government and philanthropic grantors, institutions, researchers and community organizations with the aim of measuring the implementation and impact of OS partnership across these organizations. We invite these and other stakeholders to not only measure, but to share the resulting data so that social scientists and policy makers can analyse the data across projects.

NWO has requested CWTS to analyze the extent to which research funded by NWO is made openly accessible. In 2009, NWO introduced its first open access (OA) policy, stating that publications funded by NWO should be made openly accessible 'as soon as possible'. Following the Dutch OA ambitions presented by state secretary Sander Dekker in 2013, NWO turned its OA policy into a formal mandate in 2015. According to this mandate, all publications funded by NWO must be openly accessible at the time of publication, preferably through the gold OA route, although the green OA route is also supported. This mandate should make sure that NWO funded research meets the OA targets set by the Dutch government. According to these targets, of all publicly funded publications, 60% should be openly accessible in 2018 and 100% in 2020. To monitor NWO's progress in making the publications it funds openly accessible, this report presents statistics on the extent to which publications from the period 2015–2018 funded by NWO are openly accessible. Separate statistics are presented for publications funded by ZonMW and for publications of the national research institutes managed by NWO. Throughout the report, a distinction is made between gold, hybrid, bronze, and green OA. The report also discusses differences in citation impact between OA and non-OA publications.