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The Fearless Steps Apollo (FS-APOLLO) resource is a collection of over 150,000 hours of audio, associated meta-data, and supplemental technological toolkit intended to benefit the (i) speech processing technology, (ii) communication science, team-based psychology, and history, and (iii) education/STEM, preservation/archival communities. The FSAPOLLO initiative which started in 2014 has since resulted in the preservation of over 75,000 hours of NASA Apollo Missions audio. Systems created for this audio collection have led to the emergence of several new Speech and Language Technologies (SLT). This paper seeks to provide an overview of the latest advancements in the FS-Apollo effort and explore upcoming strategies in big-data deployment, outreach, and novel avenues of K-12 and STEM education facilitated through this resource. 

Our basic knowledge of downward positive lightning leaders is incomplete due to their rarity and limited ability of VHF mapping systems to image positive streamers. Here, using high‐speed optical records and wideband electric field and magnetic field derivative signatures, we examine in detail the development of a descending positive leader, which extended intermittently via alternating branching at altitudes of 4.2 to 1.9 km and involved luminosity transients separated by millisecond‐scale quiet intervals. We show that the transients (a) are mostly initiated in previously created but already decayed branches, at a distance of the order of 100 m above the branch lower extremity, (b) extend bidirectionally with negative charge moving up, (c) establish a temporary (1 ms or so) steady‐current connection to the negative part of the overall bidirectional leader tree, and (d) exhibit brightening accompanied by new breakdowns at the positive leader end. One of the transients unexpectedly resulted in a negative cloud‐to‐ground discharge. Both positive and negative ends of the transients extended at speeds of 10⁶–10⁷ m/s, while the overall positive leader extension speed was as low as 10³–10⁴ m/s. Wideband electric field signatures of the transients were similar to K‐changes, with their millisecond‐ and microsecond‐scale features being associated with the steady current and new breakdowns, respectively. For transients with both ends visible in our optical records, charge transfers and average currents were estimated to be typically a few hundreds of millicoulombs and some hundreds of amperes, respectively.

 

INTRODUCTION: CRSS-UTDallas initiated and oversaw the efforts to recover APOLLO mission communications by re-engineering the NASA SoundScriber playback system, and digitizing 30-channel analog audio tapes – with the entire Apollo-11, Apollo-13, and Gemini-8 missions during 2011-17 [1,6]. This vast data resource was made publicly available along with supplemental speech & language technologies meta-data based on CRSS pipeline diarization transcripts and conversational speaker time-stamps for Apollo team at NASA Mission Control Center, [2,4]. In 2021, renewed efforts over the past year have resulted in the digitization of an additional +50,000hrs of audio from Apollo 7,8,9,10,12 missions, and remaining A-13 tapes. Cumulative digitization efforts have enabled the development of the largest publicly available speech data resource with unprompted, real conversations recorded in naturalistic environments. Deployment of this massive corpus has inspired multiple collaborative initiatives such as Web resources ExploreApollo (https://app.exploreapollo.org) LanguageARC (https://languagearc.com/projects/21) [3]. ExploreApollo.org serves as the visualization and play-back tool, and LanguageARC the crowd source subject content tagging resource developed by UG/Grad. Students, intended as an educational resource for k-12 students, and STEM/Apollo enthusiasts. Significant algorithmic advancements have included advanced deep learning models that are now able to improve automatic transcript generation quality, and even extract high level knowledge such as ID labels of topics being spoken across different mission stages. Efficient transcript generation and topic extraction tools for this naturalistic audio have wide applications including content archival and retrieval, speaker indexing, education, group dynamics and team cohesion analysis. Some of these applications have been deployed in our online portals to provide a more immersive experience for students and researchers. Continued worldwide outreach in the form of the Fearless Steps Challenges has proven successful with the most recent Phase-4 of the Challenge series. This challenge has motivated research in low level tasks such as speaker diarization and high level tasks like topic identification. IMPACT: Distribution and visualization of the Apollo audio corpus through the above mentioned online portals and Fearless Steps Challenges have produced significant impact as a STEM education resource for K-12 students as well as a SLT development resource with real-world applications for research organizations globally. The speech technologies developed by CRSS-UTDallas using the Fearless Steps Apollo corpus have improved previous benchmarks on multiple tasks [1, 5]. The continued initiative will extend the current digitization efforts to include over 150,000 hours of audio recorded during all Apollo missions. ILLUSTRATION: We will demonstrate WebExploreApollo and LanguageARC online portals with newly digitized audio playback in addition to improved SLT baseline systems, the results from ASR and Topic Identification systems which will include research performed on the corpus conversational. Performance analysis visualizations will also be illustrated. We will also display results from the past challenges and their state-of-the-art system improvements. 

As robots are becoming more intelligent and more commonly used, it is critical for robots to behave ethically in human-robot interactions. However, there is a lack of agreement on a correct moral theory to guide human behavior, let alone robots. This paper introduces a robotic architecture that leverages cases drawn from different ethical frameworks to guide the ethical decision-making process and select the appropriate robotic action based on the specific situation. We also present an architecture implementation design used on a pill sorting task for older adults, where the robot needs to decide if it is appropriate to provide false encouragement so that the adults continue to be engaged in the training task. 

Abstract This review covers selected results of recent observations of lightning discharges performed across the entire electromagnetic spectrum (radiofrequency, optical, and energetic radiation) at the Lightning Observatory in Gainesville, Florida. The most important results include (a) characterization of the preliminary-breakdown, stepped-leader, and return-stroke processes in high-intensity (⩾50 kA) negative lightning discharges, (b) the first high-speed video images of bidirectional leader that made contact with the ground and produced a return stroke, (c) discovery of negative stepped leader branches colliding with the lateral surface of neighboring branches of the same leader, (d) new data on the occurrence context and properties of compact intracloud discharges, and (e) observation of a terrestrial gamma-ray flash that occurred during a bipolar cloud-to-ground lightning discharge. The results serve to improve our understanding of the physics of lightning with important implications for lightning modeling, lightning protection, and high-energy atmospheric physics studies. 

Ethical decision-making is difficult, certainly for robots let alone humans. If a robot's ethical decision-making process is going to be designed based on some approximation of how humans operate, then the assumption is that a good model of how humans make an ethical choice is readily available. Yet no single ethical framework seems sufficient to capture the diversity of human ethical decision making. Our work seeks to develop the computational underpinnings that will allow a robot to use multiple ethical frameworks that guide it towards doing the right thing. As a step towards this goal, we have collected data investigating how regular adults and ethics experts approach ethical decisions related to the use in a healthcare and game playing scenario. The decisions made by the former group is intended to represent an approximation of a folk morality approach to these dilemmas. On the other hand, experts were asked to judge what decision would result if a person was using one of several different types of ethical frameworks. The resulting data may reveal which features of the pill sorting and game playing scenarios contribute to similarities and differences between expert and non-expert responses. This type of approach to programming a robot may one day be able to rely on specific features of an interaction to determine which ethical framework to use in the robot's decision making. 

Controlling microbial proliferation in water systems, including wastewater, recreational water, and drinking water, is essential to societal health. Microbial inactivation through electrochemically generated reactive species (RS) mediated pathways provides an effective route toward this microbial control. Herein we provide an overview of recent progress toward electrocatalytic generation of RS and their application in water disinfection, with a focus on the selective production of RS, the microorganism interactions with RS (including both RS mechanisms of action and innate microorganism responses to RS), and practical implementation of electrochemically generated RS for microbial inactivation. The article is concluded with a perspective where the challenges and opportunities of RS‐based electrochemical disinfection of water are highlighted, along with possible future research directions.