Social robots have been shown to help in language education for children. This can be good aid for immigrant children that need additional help to learn a second language their parents do not understand to attend school. We present the setup for a long-term study that is being carried out in blinded to aid immigrant children with poor skills in the Norwegian language to improve their vocabulary. This includes additional tools to help parents follow along and provide additional help at home. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Natural language interfaces; User studies; • Computer systems organization → Robotics.

In a case study, we transformed the existing learning program Language Shower, which is used in some Norwegian day-care centers in the Grorud district of Oslo municipality, into a digital solution using an app for smartphones or tablets with the option for further enhancement of the presentation by a NAO robot. The solution was tested in several iterations and multiple day-care centers over several weeks. Measurements of the children’s progress across learning sessions indicated a positive impact of the program using a robot as compared to the program without a robot. In situ observations and interviews with day-care center staff confirmed the solution’s many advantages, but also revealed some important areas for improvement. In particular, the speech recognition needs to be more flexible and robust, and special measures have to be in place to handle children speaking simultaneously.

This work discusses how to build online public services and feedback mechanisms such that they are usable and are actually used, while fulfilling the requirements for EU’s Web Accessibility Directive, security, and privacy. By means of an online survey among impaired users of the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration’s online services, it is analyzed which challenges these users experience with public services and feedback processes as of today, and how both can be designed for better and more inclusive online services.

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This article gives a technical overview of two open and free video compression systems, Dirac and Theora I, and evaluates the rate distortion performance and visual quality of these systems regarding lossy and lossless compression, as well as intra-frame and inter-frame coding. The evaluation shows that there is a substantial performance gap of Theora and Dirac when compared to H.264-and Motion JPEG2000-compliant reference systems. However, an algorithm subset of Dirac, Dirac Pro, achieves a performance comparable to that of Motion JPEG2000, and which can be less than one dB below the PSNR performance of H.264 with TV-size and HD video material. It is further shown that the reference implementations of the codecs of concern still have potential for efficiency improvements.