Social Skills Training (SST) has been used for years to improve individuals' social skills toward building a better daily life. In SST carried out by humans, the social skills level is usually evaluated through a verbal interview conducted by the trainer. Although this evaluation is based on psychiatric knowledge and professional experience, its quality depends on the trainer's capabilities. Therefore, to standardize such evaluations, quantifiable metrics are required. To meet this need, the second edition of the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS-2) offers a viable solution because it has been extensively tested and standardized by empirical research works. This paper describes the development of an automated method to evaluate a person's social skills level based on SRS-2. We use multimodal features, including BERT-based features, and perform score estimation with a 0.76 Pearson correlation coefficient while using feature selection. In addition, we examine the linguistic aspects of BERT-based features through subjective evaluations. Consequently, the BERT-based features show a strong negative correlation with human subjective scores of fluency, appropriate word choice, and understandable speech structure.

The measurement of the 3-dimensional behavior of early reflections in a sound field has been an important issue in auditorium acoustics since the reflection profile has been found to be strongly correlated with the subjective responsiveness of a listener. In order to detect the incidence angle and relative amplitude of reflections, a 4-point microphone system has conventionally been used. A new measurement system is proposed in this paper, which has 5 microphones. Microphones are located on each four apex of a tetrahedron and at the center of gravity. Early reflections, including simultaneously incident reflections,which previous 4-point microphone system could not discriminate as individual wavefronts, were successfully found with the new system. In order to calculate accurate image source positions, it is necessary to determine the exact peak positions from measured impulse responses composed of highly deformed and overlapped impulse trains. For this purpose, a peak-detecting algorithm, which finds dominant peaks in the impulse response by an iteration method, is introduced. In this paper, the theoretical background and features of the 5-microphone system are described. Also, some results of experiments using this system are described.

Verification of responsive communication protocols is to determine whether they can recover to a normal state within a predetermined time, even when they enter an abnormal state due to any fault. In this paper, we propose a new verification method for responsive communication protocols using virtual system states, each of which represents several system states. Next, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the new method, we develop a verification tool based on the proposed method. Then we apply the tool to a broadcasting protocol and measure several metrics on the tool. The experimental results show that (1) the number of system states, (2) the amount of memory used by the tool, and (3) the execution time of the tool, can be drastically reduced.

The integration of both real-time systems and fault-tolerant systems has been emerged as one of the greatest challenges of this decade. It is called a responsive system, which has the objective to optimeze both timeliness and reliability. The performance measure in responsive systems is responsiveness that tells how probable a system executes correctly on time with faults occurred. While there have been some achievements in communication protocols and specification, we believe that scheduling problems in responsive systems are not understood deeply and sufficiently, yet. In this paper, we discuss the scheduling problem in responsive systems. At first, we investigate the issues in the scheduling and propose the precise definition of the responsiveness. We also suggest a scheduling algorithm called Responsive Earliest Deadline First (REDF) for preemptive aperiodic tasks in a uniprocessor system. We show that REDF is optimal to obtain the maximum responsiveness, and the time complexity is analyzed to be (N 2N). By illustrating a contradictory example, it is shown that REDF can be enhanced if a constraint on tasks is released.