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    Transition to Human-AI Work: Shifts in Routines' Dynamics and the Implications for Roles in Knowledge-Intensive Work
    (2024-01-03) Ruissalo, Joona; Department of Information and Service Management
    As solutions based on artificial intelligence grow pervasive in knowledge-work organizations, such cognitive technology is being applied both to automate and to augment work heretofore carried out predominantly by humans. This has profound socio-technical implications for the work practices in that new means of conducting associated routines are changing the knowledge workers’ involvement, transforming interaction between the human agents and information systems within the socio-technical system. Taking a processual approach to exploring how such deep transformation extends to the core of the knowledge workers’ work roles, an interpretive study examined the role transformation unfolding over two years at a financial-accounting company that was developing and implementing an artificial-intelligence system for its services. This processual study offers empirically grounded contributions in outlining how digital transformation changes routines and work roles in knowledge-intensive work.
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    The role of source signal similarity in distinguishing between different positions in a room
    (2023-08) McKenzie, Thomas; Meyer-Kahlen, Nils; Schlecht, Sebastian; Department of Information and Communications Engineering; Department of Art and Media; Fenton, Steve; Kearney, Gavin; Virtual Acoustics
    Typically, evaluation of spatial audio systems uses the same source signal for each condition in listening comparison tests (such as ABX and MUSHRA). However in an augmented reality scenario, it is unlikely that the exact same source signal would exist at the exact same position in space, both real and virtual: instead, a real source would be in one position in the room and a virtual source in a different position, both with different source signals. A perceptual study is presented on the effect of source signal similarity when distinguishing different positions in a room. Three source signal types (all speech) are investigated in a multiple stimulus paradigm: the same source signal for all conditions, the same speaker but a different sentence for each condition, and a different speaker and different sentence for each condition. Results show that the source signal similarity significantly impacts the similarity rating between different receiver positions in the same room, which suggests that spatial audio system fidelity requirements could vary depending on the source signal types used in the target application.
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    Source position interpolation of spatial room impulse responses
    (2023) McKenzie, Thomas; Schlecht, Sebastian J.; Department of Information and Communications Engineering; Department of Art and Media; Communication Acoustics: Spatial Sound and Psychoacoustics
    Measured spatial room impulse responses (SRIRs) are often used for realistic six degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) virtual reality applications, as they allow for the high quality capture and reproduction of a room’s acoustics. Dense sets of SRIR measurements are time consuming to acquire, especially for multiple source and receiver combinations, and so interpolation of sparse measurement sets is required. This paper presents a method for interpolating between higher-order Ambisonic SRIRs with a fixed receiver position but different sound source positions, using a previous methodology. The method is based on linear interpolation with spectral equalisation and RMS compensation, though direct sound, early reflections and late reverberation are processed individually. In a numerical comparison to a basic linear interpolation, the proposed method is shown to more smoothly fade between source positions in root-mean-square amplitude and direction-of-arrival metrics.
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    Inside The Quartet-A first-person virtual reality string quartet production
    (2023-05-13) Meyer-Kahlen, Nils; Piiroinen, Petra; Vishwanath, Gautam; Juntunen, Petri; Tiainen, Eero; Schlecht, Sebastian; Department of Information and Communications Engineering; Department of Art and Media; Virtual Acoustics; Meidän Festivaali; Department of Art and Media
    “Inside the Quartet” is a virtual reality experience that provides users with a first-person perspective of playing in a string quartet. The user can see and hear the music performance from the different players’ perspectives, experiencing how musicians communicate with gestures and eye contact from within the quartet. The VR experience shows recordings of the Kamus string quartet playing Sibelius’s string quartet in D-Minor op. 56 “Voces Intimae” in Ainola, Jean Sibelius’s home in Järvenpää, Finland. The audio production employed spot mics encoded to 5th-order Ambisonics, which were dynamically decoded to headphones during playback. The installation was shown at various music and VR festivals. Here, we describe the audio and video production, rendering workflow, and the challenges and future perspectives for similar VR experiences.
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    Investigating sound-field reproduction methods as perceived by bilateral hearing aid users and normal-hearing listeners
    (Acoustical Society of America, 2024-02-20) Fernandez, Janani; McCormack, Leo; Hyvärinen, Petteri; Kressner, Abigail Anne; Department of Information and Communications Engineering; Communication Acoustics: Spatial Sound and Psychoacoustics; Technical University of Denmark
    A perceptual study was conducted to investigate the perceived accuracy of two sound-field reproduction approaches when experienced by hearing-impaired (HI) and normal-hearing (NH) listeners. The methods under test were traditional signal-independent Ambisonics reproduction and a parametric signal-dependent alternative, which were both rendered at different Ambisonic orders. The experiment was repeated in two different rooms: (1) an anechoic chamber, where the audio was delivered over an array of 44 loudspeakers; (2) an acoustically-treated listening room with a comparable setup, which may be more easily constructed within clinical settings. Ten bilateral hearing aid users, with mild to moderate symmetric hearing loss, wearing their devices, and 15 NH listeners were asked to rate the methods based upon their perceived similarity to simulated reference conditions. In the majority of cases, the results indicate that the parametric reproduction method was rated as being more similar to the reference conditions than the signal-independent alternative. This trend is evident for both groups, although the variation in responses was notably wider for the HI group. Furthermore, generally similar trends were observed between the two listening environments for the parametric method. The signal-independent approach was instead rated as being more similar to the reference in the listening room.
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    Demo: UE Assisted Ambient Internet of Things in LTE Downlink, Energy Autonomous
    (2023-11-16) Liao, Jingyi; Koskinen, Kalle; Wang, Xiyu; Xie, Boxuan; Ruttik, Kalle; Jäntti, Riku; Phan-Huy, Dinh-Thuy; Department of Information and Communications Engineering; Communication Engineering; Department of Information and Communications Engineering; Orange
    Ambient power enabled Internet of Things a.k.a. Ambient IoT is a novel concept connecting battery-free energy autonomous devices to the Internet. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of using the channel estimator at the user equipment (UE) as a receiver for backscatter signals in LTE downlink. Our real-time demonstrator system consists of signal generator that mimics the operation of a base station (BS), a backscatter device (BD) modulating the incidence signal, and a software defined radio receiver that plays the role of the user equipment. The UE channel estimator and BD demodulation software is implemented with C++ and Python, respectively and made open source. Our results indicate that UE can demodulate the BD signal with bit error less than 10-3 when the downlink signal-to-noise ratio is larger than 10 dB when the pathloss between the BD and UE is less than 13 dB.
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    Automatic Classification of Neurological Voice Disorders Using Wavelet Scattering Features
    (Elsevier, 2024-02) Yagnavajjula, Madhu; Mittapalle, Kiran; Alku, Paavo; Rao, Krothapalli Sreenivasa; Mitra, Pabitra; Department of Information and Communications Engineering; Speech Communication Technology; Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
    Neurological voice disorders are caused by problems in the nervous system as it interacts with the larynx. In this paper, we propose to use wavelet scattering transform (WST)-based features in automatic classification of neurological voice disorders. As a part of WST, a speech signal is processed in stages with each stage consisting of three operations – convolution, modulus and averaging – to generate low-variance data representations that preserve discriminability across classes while minimizing differences within a class. The proposed WST-based features were extracted from speech signals of patients suffering from either spasmodic dysphonia (SD) or recurrent laryngeal nerve palsy (RLNP) and from speech signals of healthy speakers of the Saarbruecken voice disorder (SVD) database. Two machine learning algorithms (support vector machine (SVM) and feed forward neural network (NN)) were trained separately using the WST-based features, to perform two binary classification tasks (healthy vs. SD and healthy vs. RLNP) and one multi-class classification task (healthy vs. SD vs. RLNP). The results show that WST-based features outperformed state-of-the-art features in all three tasks. Furthermore, the best overall classification performance was achieved by the NN classifier trained using WST-based features.
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    Directional distribution of the pseudo intensity vector in anisotropic late reverberation
    (Acoustical Society of America, 2024-02-01) Meyer-Kahlen, Nils; Schlecht, Sebastian J.; Department of Information and Communications Engineering; Department of Art and Media; Virtual Acoustics
    The pseudo intensity vector (PIV) is often used to analyze the directional properties of spatial room impulse responses. In the early part of the response, it is capable of estimating the directions of individual reflections. However, thus far, its behaviour in the late field is unclear. Specifically, it is unknown whether anisotropy, i.e., a direction-dependent energy distribution, is captured by the directional estimates. In this study, a closed-form expression of the directional distribution of the pressure-normalized pseudo intensity vector contingent on a general stochastical model of anisotropic fields was analytically derived. This paper shows that the probability density function of this PIV is a multivariate Cauchy distribution, which does indeed depend on the energy distribution of the field, yet the directional distribution has very limited degrees of freedom. The derived distribution is compared to the results of Monte Carlo simulations and fields captured with a microphone array in a real room. These results facilitate better understanding of the behaviour of parametric spatial room impulse response methods and may enable improved directional estimators for anisotropic fields.
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    Examining Applicability of Uncanny Valley Hypothesis: A Large-Scale Study
    (2023-08-07) Liu, Yong; Tuunainen, Virpi Kristiina; Lin, Yanqing; Department of Information and Service Management; School Common, BIZ
    Despite a growing interest in applying the uncanny valley hypothesis (UVH) in IS studies, there is a paucity of knowledge on the applicability of UVH and its strength. By summarizing a set of attitudinal variables popularized in the extant IS literature on AI robots, this study examined the strength and applicability of UVH on a large, objectively chosen sample of 80 real-world robots face against these variables. We demonstrate that while robot anthropomorphism does affect users’ attitudes toward the robot, its effects do not necessarily follow a UV pattern, and it has a very limited explanatory power toward users’ attitudinal responses. In addition, robot anthropomorphism has a much stronger linear-like association with a perceived social presence than with the commonly used response variable of perceived likability. Our results offer insights into understanding the applicability and strength of the uncanny valley effect and the impacts of robot anthropomorphism on users’ perceptions.
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    Impact of standing waves on human auditory perception of low-frequency direction
    (2023-08-01) Nastasa, Madalina; Pulkki, Ville; Mäkivirta, Aki; Department of Information and Communications Engineering; Communication Acoustics: Spatial Sound and Psychoacoustics; Genelec Oy
    This paper studies the effect of room modal resonances on the localisation of very low-frequency sound sources. A subjective listening test is conducted with 20 participants in an anechoic chamber, where the listener must detect the direction of the sound source for pure sinusoids at 31.5, 50 and 80 Hz. A synthetic standing wave pattern modelling a room resonant effect is created with two additional sound sources located at the left and the right side of the listener. Results show that the perception of low-frequency direction is negatively impacted by the minimum pressure node of the standing wave, even when the standing wave has a relatively low level, whereas the maximum pressure node does not have as strong of an effect. The results of the experiment demonstrate that in the low-frequency spectrum, direction judgement is strongly impacted by room resonances. The localisation ability in this frequency range depends on the direction of the direct sound in comparison with the position of the standing wave, and the level difference between the direct sound and the standing wave.
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    Entrepreneurial Masculinity: A Fatherhood Perspective
    (SAGE Publications, 2024-01) Hytti, Ulla; Karhunen, Päivi; Radu-Lefebvre, Miruna; Center for Markets in Transition (CEMAT); University of Turku; Audencia Business School
    This article investigates how fatherhood (or the prospect thereof) shapes entrepreneurial masculinities. Drawing on constructivist grounded theory, we analyze 22 life story interviews with Finnish men technology founders and identify three entrepreneurial masculinities enacted by men to accommodate concurrent normative ideals at the intersection of work and family life. These entrepreneurial masculinities alternatively maintain, restructure, and resist entrepreneurial and parental hegemonic masculinities and are subject to generational and situational scripts. We contribute to the gender and entrepreneurship literature by revealing that the neoliberal new father discourse blurs hegemonic masculinities leading entrepreneurial masculinities to emerge as hybrid hegemonic masculinities.
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    Nonnegative Structured Kruskal Tensor Regression
    (2023) Wang, Xinjue; Ollila, Esa; Vorobyov, Sergiy A.; Department of Information and Communications Engineering; Esa Ollila Group; Sergiy Vorobyov Group; Department of Information and Communications Engineering
    Many contemporary data analysis problems use tensors (multidimensional arrays) as covariates. For example, regression or classification tasks may need to be performed on a set of image covariates sampled from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), or hyperspectral imaging (HSI). By en-forcing a low-rank constraint on the parameter tensor, tensor regression models effectively leverage the temporal and spatial structure of tensor covariates. In this paper, we study Kruskal tensor regression with sparsity and smoothness inducing regularization and non-negativity constraints. We solve the corresponding penalized nonnegative Kruskal tensor regression (KTR) problem using an efficient block-wise alternating minimization method. The efficiency of the proposed approach is illustrated via simulations.
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    Rethinking Integration: Challenging Oppressive Practices and Pointing to Ways Forward
    (2023) Department of Art and Media; Karimi, Zeinab; Ennser-Kananen, Johanna; Sadatizarrini, Sepideh; Petäjäniemi, Maria; Khalimzoda, Ilkhom; Masoud, Ameera
    What if we understood our social environment as regulating access to a variety of capitals? What if, as an academic community, we critically and routinely interrogated discourses of “society,” “community,” or “culture” in light of how they produce or maintain diff erence? What if we acknowledged the harm “integration” has caused, not as an “accident” but as an ideology doing the work it was designed to do? What if we had a space to grapple with these questions, and what if the ETMU book was providing such a space? With the goal of honoring experiences, activism, art, and scholarly work that stand against “integration,” this book invites the reader to rethink integration. As we grapple with complex questions around discourses and policies of “integration” that shape our professional and personal lives, this book may help to learn and think about these complexities in new ways. This book is written to celebrate ETMU’s 20-year anniversary.
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    Internet-based technologies, accounting processes, and management control systems
    (2024-02-15) Sinha, Vikash; Derichs, David; Malmi, Teemu; Department of Accounting; Smith, Julia A.; Healthcare Productivity Group
    This chapter explores how Internet-based Technologies (IBTs) affect accounting processes and Management Control Systems (MCS). It covers five potentially disruptive IBTs: Cloud Computing, Big Data & Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, and Blockchain. IBTs offer opportunities to enhance MCS through data-driven control. Data-driven control enables effective guidance of employees’ efforts by incorporating nonfinancial indicators (for example, customer sentiment) during goal setting. It also enables timely effort and goal adjustment by facilitating real-time monitoring and feedback, as well as effective goal congruence by facilitating transparent sharing of information amongst employees. Alternatively, IBT-enabled data-driven control presents several challenges for MCS, such as demotivation of employees due to ‘surveillance’ and/or tight algorithmic control over their activities. Data-driven control also poses other challenges, including issues with data governance, quality, and security, as well as biases and explainability-related issues with control models. Legal and ethical liability concerns also arise over autonomous task execution.
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    Spotting a Tree from a Pixel: A Creator’s Statement
    (Centre de recherches image texte langage, 2023-12-14) Yiu, Sheung; Department of Art and Media
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    AVID: A speech database for machine learning studies on vocal intensity
    (Elsevier, 2024-02) Alku, Paavo; Kodali, Manila; Laaksonen, Laura; Kadiri, Sudarsana; Department of Information and Communications Engineering; Speech Communication Technology; Huawei Technologies
    Vocal intensity, which is quantified typically with the sound pressure level (SPL), is a key feature of speech. To measure SPL from speech recordings, a standard calibration tone (with a reference SPL of 94 dB or 114 dB) needs to be recorded together with speech. However, most of the popular databases that are used in areas such as speech and speaker recognition have been recorded without calibration information by expressing speech on arbitrary amplitude scales. Therefore, information about vocal intensity of the recorded speech, including SPL, is lost. In the current study, we introduce a new open and calibrated speech/electroglottography (EGG) database named Aalto Vocal Intensity Database (AVID). AVID includes speech and EGG produced by 50 speakers (25 males, 25 females) who varied their vocal intensity in four categories (soft, normal, loud and very loud). Recordings were conducted using a constant mouth-to-microphone distance and by recording a calibration tone. The speech data was labelled sentence-wise using a total of 19 labels that support the utilisation of the data in machine learing (ML) -based studies of vocal intensity based on supervised learning. In order to demonstrate how the AVID data can be used to study vocal intensity, we investigated one multi-class classification task (classification of speech into soft, normal, loud and very loud intensity classes) and one regression task (prediction of SPL of speech). In both tasks, we deliberately warped the level of the input speech by normalising the signal to have its maximum amplitude equal to 1.0, that is, we simulated a scenario that is prevalent in current speech databases. The results show that using the spectrogram feature with the support vector machine classifier gave an accuracy of 82% in the multi-class classification of the vocal intensity category. In the prediction of SPL, using the spectrogram feature with the support vector regressor gave an mean absolute error of about 2 dB and a coefficient of determination of 92%. We welcome researchers interested in classification and regression problems to utilise AVID in the study of vocal intensity, and we hope that the current results could serve as baselines for future ML studies on the topic.
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    Sustainability competencies and skills in software engineering: an industry perspective
    (Elsevier Science Inc., 2024-05) Heldal, Rogardt; Nguyen, Ngoc-Thanh; Moreira, Ana; Lago, Patricia; Duboc, Leticia; Betz, Stefanie; Coroamă, Vlad C.; Penzenstadler, Birgit; Porras, Jari; Capilla, Rafael; Brooks, Ian; Oyedeji, Shola; Venters, Colin C.; Department of Information and Communications Engineering; Western Norway University of Applied Sciences; NOVA University Lisbon; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Ramon Llull University; University of Applied Sciences Furtwangen; Technical University of Berlin; Chalmers University of Technology; LUT University; University of the West of England; University of Huddersfield
    Context: Achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) demands a shift by industry, governments, society, and individuals to reach adequate levels of awareness and actions to address sustainability challenges. Software systems will play an important role in moving towards these targets. Sustainability skills are necessary to support the development of software systems and to provide sustainable IT-supported services for citizens. Gap: While there is a growing number of academic bodies including sustainability education in engineering and computer science curricula, there is not yet comprehensive research on the competencies and skills required by IT professionals to develop such systems. Research goal: This study aims to identify the industrial sustainability needs for education and training from software engineers’ perspective. For this, we answer the following questions: (1) what are the interests of organisations with an IT division with respect to sustainability? (2) what do organisations want to achieve with respect to sustainability, and how? and (3) what are the sustainability-related competencies and skills that organisations need to achieve their sustainability goals? Methodology: We conducted a qualitative study with interviews and focus groups with experts from twenty-eight organisations with an IT division from nine countries to understand their interests, goals, and achievements related to sustainability, and the skills and competencies needed to achieve their goals. Results: Our findings show that organisations are interested in sustainability, both idealistically and increasingly for core business reasons. They seek to improve the sustainability of software processes and products but encounter difficulties, like the trade-off between short-term financial profitability and long-term sustainability goals or an unclear understanding of sustainability concepts from a software engineering perspective. To fill these gaps, they have promoted in-house training courses, collaborated with universities, and sent employees to external training. The acquired competencies should support translating environmental and social benefits into economic ones and make sustainability an integral part of software development.
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    Auditory localisation of low-frequency sound sources
    (2023) Nastasa, Madalina; Pulkki, Ville; Mäkivirta, Aki; Department of Information and Communications Engineering; Communication Acoustics: Spatial Sound and Psychoacoustics; Genelec Oy
    It is generally thought that humans cannot detect the direction of sound in the very low-frequency spectrum, although some studies suggest that the sense of direction also exists at the lowest audible frequencies. In the current work, a 2AFC localisation experiment is conducted with 18 participants, where the listener must detect a change in the direction of pure tones and octave band filtered pink noise bursts in the frequency range of 31.5 to 100 Hz. The angular separations between the low-frequency sound events utilised in the test are 10, 20, 25, 35 and 45 degrees in the left azimuth plane. The results agree with those studies showing that humans can localise even the lowest audible frequencies. Changes in direction as small as 10 degrees can be reliably detected for pink noise bursts from 31.5 Hz and for pure tones from 63.5 Hz. The psychoacoustic experiment was conducted in an anechoic room with minor room resonances which caused a significant change in the directional judgement for the affected frequencies, demonstrating how strongly room resonances can interact with directional hearing in the low-frequency spectrum.
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    AUGURY: an interface for generating soundscapes inspired by ancient divination
    (2023-05-31) Duarte, Juan; Department of Art and Media; Ortiz, Miguel; Marquez-Borbon, Adnan
    This paper presents the development of a multichannel sound installation about atmospheric processes. This instrument is an example of taking inspiration from ancient cultures for NIME design, and of sensing weather to extend the perception of the performer, who also then becomes a listener of atmospheric processes. The interface channels dynamics found in the atmosphere: wind's force and direction, air quality, atmospheric pressure, and electromagnetism. These sources are translated into sound by mapping sensor data into a multichannel sonification composition. The paper outlines the artistic context and expands on its interaction overview.
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    Auralization of Measured Room Transitions in Virtual Reality
    (Audio Engineering Society, 2023-06-03) McKenzie, Thomas; Meyer-Kahlen, Nils; Hold, Christoph; Schlecht, Sebastian J.; Pulkki, Ville; Department of Art and Media; Virtual Acoustics; Department of Information and Communications Engineering; Communication Acoustics: Spatial Sound and Psychoacoustics; Department of Art and Media; Department of Information and Communications Engineering
    To auralize a room’s acoustics in six degrees-of-freedom virtual reality (VR), a dense set of spatial room impulse response (SRIR) measurements is required, so interpolating between a sparse set is desirable. This paper studies the auralization of room transitions by proposing a baseline interpolation method for higher-order Ambisonic SRIRs and evaluating it in VR. The presented method is simple yet applicable to coupled rooms and room transitions. It is based on linear interpolation with RMS compensation, although direct sound, early reflections, and late reverberation are processed separately, whereby the input direct sounds are first steered to the relative direction-of-arrival before summation and interpolated early reflections are directionally equalized. The proposed method is first evaluated numerically, which demonstrates its improvements over a basic linear interpolation. A listening test is then conducted in six degrees-of-freedom VR, to assess the density of SRIR measurements needed in order to plausibly auralize a room transition using the presented interpolation method. The results suggest that, given the tested scenario, a 50-cm to 1-m inter-measurement distance can be perceptually sufficient.